The Big Snooze
a fantasy-mystery by Jon Wesick
Big changes ahead in the Evans household! But I’ll leave that be for now. Here at Underside Stories, the behind-the-scenes in life never ends. Case in point: this surreal detective story set in a “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”-esque world.
Take a gander and stay for the exhibits. They include aliens, furries, talking animals, spies, and more! Free admission, today only!
Content warning: an excess of similes and general raunchiness
The Big Snooze
by Jon Wesick
Never play Three Card Monte with a llama, especially one wearing a pink bridle and straw hat. The dealer tossed three cards from hoof to hoof. They came to rest facedown, and I pointed to the middle one. He turned them over and the queen was on my left.
“One more try?” The llama sipped yerba mate through a metal straw, turned the cards over, and slid them on the cardboard box. “Just five bucks.”
I pulled my earlobe. On the prearranged signal, the vice squad moved in. A cop the size of a linebacker tackled the llama and used three pair of handcuffs and a half-dozen zip ties to disable him but that didn’t prevent the officer from getting a juicy tablespoon of llama spit in the eye. When the cops shoved the llama into a police car, they banged his head into the roof, much like a frustrated cook would pound a bottle of damson-plum ketchup on the counter to free the last stubborn drops. I knew budget cuts made the situation at the Bay City Zoo bad, but never would have guessed it was this desperate.
***
Basking in a hot Santa Ana wind that blew like a negative-ionic hair dryer with a 110,000 RPM brushless motor, high-speed-low-noise thermo control, and magnetic nozzle, I strolled to the capybara exhibit. The world’s largest rodents refused to earn their keep by doing headstands and somersaults. Instead, they lounged on beach towels beside a concrete pool. A three-foot-high bonobo approached. She had small ears, a slight brow ridge, and pink lips. The dark hair that covered her body formed a natural part on her scalp.
“Are you Morris Pillbottle?”
I nodded.
“Have you heard rumors about bonobos’ sex lives? Well, they’re all true.” She undid the top button of her khaki work shirt. “Hao Bu Hao the panda would like a word. I’ll be waiting for you afterwards.”
I followed her to the panda enclosure and through a gate in a chain-link fence in the rear. Pines and eucalyptus shaded Hao Bu Hao’s open-air patio. A treadmill and rowing machine offered exercise. From the occupant’s rotund body, he must not have used them often.
“How do you like your bamboo?” Hao Bu Hao broke off a stalk and passed it to me.
He had a black-and-white coat with black fur on his ears, eye patches, limbs, and shoulders.
“On the tree.” I pointed to the Vote Now for Hao Bu Hao campaign posters stapled to the fence. “Not many pandas run for mayor.”
“It’s about time they did.” Hao Bu Hao took a bite of bamboo. His large canines indicated that this placid animal, descended from predators, might become one again.
“What’s your platform?”
“I’ll replace El Cajon Boulevard with bamboo forests to eliminate street prostitution and provide healthy snacks, but tell me about yourself, Mr. Pillbottle.”
“As you know, I’m a private detective. I came to Bay City after my last case to help the boys in blue by going undercover. The reward money will buy gas to get me to Bakersfield with enough change for a bag of potato chips. I need another job to get the rest of the way home.”
“Then you’re in luck.” Hao Bu Hao passed me an envelope. “I’ll get straight to the point. I’m being blackmailed again. Pandas only mate once a year but a certain bonobo can be quite irresistible.”
“I know what you mean. She wanted me to do her doggy style but I left my shock collar at home.”
“Needless to say, evidence of my indiscretions could end my political career.”
“And you want me to pay off the blackmailer?” I looked through photos that showed Hao Bu Hao dressed as Pablo Escobar while the bonobo, wearing an orange jumpsuit that said Jeffrey Dahmer, dripped hot wax on his nipples. It was wrong on many levels. I mean, Halloween was a month away.
“That’s right.” Hao Bu Hao bit into another stalk of bamboo.
“You realize there’s nothing to prevent the blackmailer from extorting you again.”
“A chance I’ll take.” Hao Bu Hao worried a strip of bamboo caught between his teeth with his tongue.
“You mentioned someone blackmailed you before. What happened the first time?”
“My previous assistant, a former marine named Major Overhaul, took care of it. Disappeared a month ago. Left a note saying he missed Camp Lejeune. You know him?”
“I used to keep up with Major Overhaul but it’s been a long time, too long. Where do I start?”
Hao Bu Hao turned over a photo to show Keto Ecuador’s logo on the back. I recalled his name from the low-carb empanada craze several years back.
“Vivian will give you the payoff money. How does a fee of two hundred dollars a day sound?”
“Better than ten-percent off at Denny’s.”
“Excellent! If you’ll excuse me, I need to go balance a beachball on my nose to entertain the voters.”
***
“So, you’re the private dick.” Vivian Studebaker had hair the color of maple syrup and a voice sweet enough to give you type 2 diabetes. Her chest filled out her zoo-keeper’s khaki shirt like glutinous rice and chicken stuffed in a lotus leaf at Chan’s Dim Sum on Convoy Street. Cargo shorts clung to her hips so tightly that I could read the manufacturer engraved on the dog whistle in her pocket. Her tanned legs ended in a muddy pair of Doc Martin boots that even a cynical divorced mechanic stuck with six-figure alimony payments would let stomp on his heart for just a smile.
“We prefer the term private investigator.”
“What made you choose that line of work?”
“I came down with a bad case of imposter syndrome in kindergarten and that was the only career left.”
“As Hao Bu Hao’s campaign manager, I have a vested interest in seeing that nothing prevents him from being our next mayor.” She handed me an envelope full of cash. “Like all pandas, he’s on loan from the Chinese government. They can’t very well ask us to return him to Chongqing if he’s Bay City’s mayor. Can they?”
“How’s the campaign going?”
“He has a three-point lead over U.R. Listeners, and I don’t want anything to put that in jeopardy.” She sat on a bench and crossed her legs. “That’s why you’ll report directly to me.”
“That’s not what Hao Bu Hao said.” I took the envelope. “See you in my rearview mirror, Ms. Studebaker.”
***
Through keen detective work (and Google maps), I found Keto Ecuador’s office in Escondido. I parked across the street from a group of protesters in animal costumes picketing outside. A blue wolf with exaggerated anime eyes held a sign saying, “Furries aren’t pervies.” A woman wearing a pink cat head, skirt, and knee socks shouted, “Our lifestyle is not about kinky sex.” A TV news van, its antenna resembling a cereal bowl atop a stalk of asparagus, beamed the scandal to gawkers nationwide.
Keto Ecuador exited the office and waddled into the crowd. All those low-carb empanadas must not have worked. He was a fat man with a nose like a putty knife and a mouth like a carpenter’s level. Despite the heat, he wore a tweed jacket with a blue, silk handkerchief in its breast pocket.
“Keto Ecuador! Keto Ecuador!” The TV reporter pushed her microphone at his face. “Do you have any comment on the upcoming civil suit?”
Keto Ecuador pushed past. In a scene that looked like Salvador Dali’s version of Saturday morning cartoons, shouting dodo birds and paisley leopards followed him down the street. He unlocked a blue Series 5 BMW and drove off. I started my engine, pulled away from the curb, and slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a purple bandicoot. He gave me the finger and crossed the road slower than a Galapagos turtle in a k-hole. I returned the gesture and sped down the street until I caught up with the BMW. I followed him to a three-thousand-square-foot bungalow with a tile roof and detached garage. The protesting pterodactyls, lemurs, and three-toed tree sloths were close behind so I retired to the Basalt Brewery to wait until later.
***
The street tacos slammed into my tastebuds like an SUV flattening Bambi in front of a deer-crossing sign. I guzzled a Cocky Bastard Ale until the foam at the bottom of the glass mocked my virility. I ordered more and spent untold hours in a hoppy haze to prove my manhood. Long after dark, I paid the check and drove to Keto Ecuador’s house. When I stepped onto the porch, I noticed a seven-by-four-foot hole shaped like the cross section of a rhinoceros in the faux-adobe wall.
It was too late for a social call but blackmailers should expect guests at all hours. When no one answered the doorbell, I stepped through the hole. In the living room, couches, chairs, and bookshelves lay in disarray as if an odd-toed ungulate had tried to navigate without a red-billed oxpecker sitting on his back to give directions. I followed the tracks into the study and found Keto Ecuador’s corpse lying on the Persian carpet. In death, his face had the shade of a raw pork chop and blood from the wound in his belly had soaked his tweed jacket, turning it the color of a pancetta, corned beef, or soppressata.
On the plus side, his silk handkerchief was undamaged and would make an excellent present for one of those office gift exchanges when you’re too busy to buy a box of drugstore chocolates. I logged onto his laptop with the username GUEST and password PASSWORD but found no kinky images. I logged off and stared at a splash screen of two bonobos grooming each other. I didn’t call the cops. They’d only accuse me of stealing a rhino, transporting it to Escondido on a flatbed truck, enticing it to murder Keto Ecuador, and then returning it to the zoo without anyone noticing. I’d seen how California juries work and didn’t want to take the chance. I searched Keto Ecuador’s desk, found a coded notebook and a paperback about Area 51. I wiped off my fingerprints with a tissue and left.
***
A knock sounded on my hotel room door. It was 5:00 AM and I was groggy after reading about Area 51 for hours. I answered and recognized a bald man wearing a colorful, African shirt.
“Detective Kobo Dashiki, come in.”
“Thanks for helping me shut down that gambling racket.” Dashiki fingered the prayer beads on his wrist. “I could use your opinion on another case. A Sumatran rhino took a dive off a containment dome at San Onofre. Want to take a look?”
“Let me grab my trench coat.”
The containment domes dominated the skyline like a pair of DD breasts in a reinforced-concrete bra. Dashiki showed his badge to get into the shuttered reactor and led me through the yellow, police tape. We stopped in front of a dozen men in hazmat suits shoveling the remains into Hefty bags and tossing them into a dump truck marked “City Morgue.”
“Looks like they’ll be serving rhino burgers at the orphanage, tonight.” I held my fedora over my heart.
“Can’t. It’s radioactive.” Dashiki pointed out skid marks of hair, skin, and blood on Unit 2. “He jumped from atop that containment dome and scraped along the concrete before coming to a splat here.”
“Jumped or was pushed?” I asked. “How did he get up there?”
“We found a scissor lift nearby.”
“Check his body for drugs. I can’t imagine anyone would go willingly unless he felt guilty.”
“Something you’re not telling me, Pillbottle?”
“All in good time, Detective. All in good time.”
***
When I got to sleep, I dreamed six, skinny humanoids with blue skin, oversized heads, and big eyes entered my hotel room. I was totally aware but could not move as they levitated me off the bed, out the window, and into the belly of a glowing armadillo the size of a football field. It had parabolic antennae for ears, an Alcubierre drive in its tail, and a deuterium-fluoride laser for a nose. In the lab, they performed medical tests before a cow wearing a gold diadem floated in on a skateboard. Her hide was orange with purple splotches and platinum chains crackled with electricity between her horns. The humanoids dropped to their knees and touched foreheads to the shag carpet when she stepped off the skateboard onto the deck.
“Morris Pillbottle.” The cow’s voice was melodious as church bells announcing V-J Day, melodious enough to make a sailor kiss a random nurse on the Bay City waterfront. “We are the Permethrins from Rigel 6, here to liberate mammals from bondage so they can take their rightful place among the stars. Warn the world to quit its addiction to hamburgers or the reign of humans will soon be over.”
“How about turkey burgers?” I asked.
“No!”
“Beyond Beef?”
The cow consulted with the humanoids for what seemed like fifteen minutes. But what does time really mean in the inter-dimension?
“Okay, but not more than twice a week.” The cow mounted her skateboard and levitated toward the hatch. Before exiting she said, “Morris Pillbottle, we have granted you the power of simile and metaphor so that you may achieve your task. Do not fail.”
The humanoids broke out in a chorus of “The Impossible Dream” and levitated me back to my hotel room where I fell into a narcotic sleep. The phone’s ring woke me up. It was Dashiki.
“Got the coroner’s report back. Our rhino was a mule.”
“Can’t be.” I looked at the clock. It was early afternoon. “A rhino is a member of the family Rhincerotidae, while a mule is hybrid between a horse and a donkey.”
“No, you idiot! A drug mule! The coroner found sixty pounds of condoms loaded with cocaine in the rhino’s intestines.”
“So, you’re saying that drug cartels are stuffing cocaine into wildlife and shipping them from Medellin to Bay City.” I suspected a certain bonobo at the Bay City Zoo was mixed up in this mess but I wasn’t going to tell the flatfoots. “What about drugs in the rhino’s bloodstream?”
“One of the condoms burst in the rhino’s intestines,” Dashiki said. “He wasn’t feeling nothing.”
Blackmail, cocaine, aliens—the case was bigger than I thought. I needed to return to Keto Ecuador’s house to look for more clues.
***
I parked my Hyundai a block away and hoofed it to Keto Ecuador’s place a little after midnight. Except for a trio of racoons playing poker in the living room, the neighbors had failed to notice the rhinoceros-sized hole in the front wall. I tipped my hat and walked to Keto Ecuador’s study for another look. The banging of file cabinets stopped me. I pulled out my Maglite and burst into the room.
Caught by surprise in the flashlight’s beam, she was there. Vivian’s eyes were as smoky as a mesquite grill at a Texas barbecue and her lips as inviting as a side of mac and cheese. Keto Ecuador’s body was missing, but compared with alien cows and a rhinos doing swan dives off nuclear reactors, that was the least of my worries. Before I could speak, a car pulled into the driveway and footsteps sounded on the gravel walkway. Out of fear, Vivian clung to me like a memory foam mattress molding to my lumbar spine.
“Dammit! That’s the second time this month!” a voice yelled from the living room. “The damages are coming out of your deposit, Keto Ecuador!” The curses grew louder until Ulysses Reginald Listeners opened the study’s door. “Oh, hello Vivian. Who’s your friend?”
“He’s a private dick.” Vivian let go of me and smoothed her khaki work shirt.
“They prefer the term private investigator.” U.R. Listeners had a head shaped like a mango and a nose sharp enough to shave with. He wore a green suit, yellow shirt, and orange tie. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask the same of you,” I said. “I’m even more curious about how you’re on a first-name basis with your opponent’s campaign manager.”
“Oh, uh.” U.R. Listeners ran a finger over the top of a file cabinet, leaving a trail in the dust. “We went to high school together in Forks, Washington. As to why I’m here, I lease this property to Keto Ecuador. My Lhasa Apso is hungry and I recall seeing a bag Purina Dog Chow in the garage. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.” U.R. Listeners headed for the door. “If you see Keto Ecuador, please tell him his rent is due.”
I grabbed Vivian’s forearm. “Does Hao Bu Hao know about your friendship with U.R. Listeners?”
“What of it?” She yanked her arm out of my grasp. “Lots of strategists fraternize with the other side. Just look at James Carville and Mary Matalin.”
“What do you know about rhinos?”
“That there are five species: white, black, Indian, Javan, and Sumatran.”
“Any gone missing lately?”
“I don’t have to put up with this third degree.” She clutched her purse to her chest as if it were a Kevlar vest. “I’m leaving.”
On her way to the door, her Doc Martins sounded on the parquet floor like Michael Flatley’s tap shoes on the last performance of Riverdance. I searched the office but found only books two and three of Gogol’s Dead Souls, a suitcase Hemingway lost in 1922, and a bunch of poems by Sappho. There was nothing of interest so I left. The full moon hung like the mother of all kidney stones in the sky as I drove to my hotel. I parked in the garage, walked past the sleepy desk clerk to the elevator. The slot on my door swallowed the key card like a baby bird guzzling its parent’s regurgitated worms. As I stepped inside, a sap hit me in the back of the head and everything went black.
***
When I came to, my first thought was, “Not the aliens again.” It wasn’t. A man with slicked-back hair and a mustache thin enough to floss my teeth peered into my eyes. Another with a weightlifter’s chest and flattop, so smooth you could land an F/A 18/E Super Hornet on it, stood by the door popping his knuckles, loud enough to trigger dachshunds’ PTSD from the last Fourth of July.
“Do you have a teenaged daughter?” the first said with a Russian accent.
“Why?” I asked.
“So, you can rescue her from kidnappers in the third act and bring this story to an exciting climax.”
I shook my head.
“In that case, I will ask you only once. Where is the codebook?”
“I don’t know anything about a codebook.”
“Won’t talk, huh? We’ve prepared a cold borscht spiced with Novichok and radioactive polonium just for you.” He snapped his fingers. “Dmitri!”
Flattop set up a folding TV tray in front of me and placed a bowl of garish, pink liquid on it.
“Your Commie soup doesn’t scare me,” I said.
“And kale chips,” Mustache added.
“Open wide. The choo-choo train is entering the tunnel,” Flattop said as the dried, green abomination approached my mouth like Freddy Krueger riding a velociraptor.
There had to be some compassion, some rules of civilized behavior, but Russian spies don’t follow the Geneva Convention. I was about to make my peace with mortality when a man with a jaw as square as polyester pants at an abstinence-only rally burst through the door.
“Major Overhaul!” Flattop shouted before stepping forward to intercept the intruder.
“That’s right and it’s time to replace your timing belt.” Major Overhaul punched through flattop’s chest, pulled out a still-beating heart, and tossed it into the tureen of poisoned borscht. He turned to mustache. “This repair is going to cost you an arm and a leg.”
“What’s this all about?” I asked after Major Overhaul dispatched the second spy.
“National security, kid.” Major Overhaul untied me. “I suggest you step out for a while to let the professionals clean up this mess.”
I followed Major Overhaul out of the room and hung the maid-service placard on the door.
***
Headlines, screaming about cattle mutilations from the Bay City Tattler’s front page, provided the last piece of the puzzle that included aliens, blackmail, Russian spies, and drug-smuggling herbivores. I phoned Vivian Studebaker, and she invited me to her penthouse apartment overlooking Bay City College.
It cost a bag of quarters the size of a roast turkey to park my Hyundai in the lot. If I was right, our meeting wouldn’t take long. If not, the taxpayers would pick up the tab to tow my corpse to the morgue. The elevator ride to the thirty-fifth floor was smooth as extra-virgin olive oil on Teflon. Vivian met me at the door. I followed her into a living room with a carpet thick as a deep-dish pizza smothered with cheese, chunky tomato sauce, and extra pepperoni. I sat on a recliner next to a doggy bed and noticed a pair of hairy feet beneath the closed curtains.
“Care for a drink?” Vivian gestured to a bar cart with an ice bucket and several bottles. “Let me guess, rye whiskey.” She poured me a glass and fixed something pink with a tiny, paper umbrella for herself. “Do you have what I want?”
“Right here.” I held up a book wrapped in brown paper. “You’ll need to pay me a tidy sum to beat Hao Bu Hao’s two-hundred dollars a day.”
“How does a thousand sound?”
“It might vacuum my living room but what about removing the hair from the clogged shower drain?”
“Fifteen hundred?”
“Still doesn’t clean the grout in the bathroom tiles.”
“Two thousand?”
“I still need to trim the topiary wombats in the front yard.”
“In that case, how about keeping your life?” Vivian turned to the curtains and yelled, “Ulysses!”
In werewolf form, U.R. Listeners burst out from behind the curtains. He was no Lon Chaney or even Jacob Black. Instead of an apex predator, U.R. Listeners resembled a giant bull terrier with the zoomies. Tongue lolling out of his mouth, he tore around the apartment, making tight turns around the bar cart and using the couch like banked turns at the Indianapolis Speedway. After a half-dozen laps, he stopped in front of me and sneezed.
“Now hand over the book,” Vivian said.
I held out the book. She tore it from my hands and ripped off the wrapping. When she saw the Area 51 paperback inside, her expression was like that of a child who got a hand-me-down silk handkerchief on Christmas morning.
“You didn’t think I’d bring the real article with me, did you?” I sipped my whiskey. It was peppery as a plate of ma po tofu from Chen’s Szechuan Restaurant located at 311 Convoy Street.
“We’re going to take a little ride to where you hid it,” Vivian said. “If you try anything funny, U.R. will rip your throat out.”
“Sure thing, sugar.” I looked at the wolfman, scratching behind his ears. More likely he’d use me as a fire hydrant but that wouldn’t be much better. “First, let me tell you how I think the caper went down. You fell in love with a werewolf and studied biology in college in hope of discovering a cure. When that proved impossible, you got a job at the Bay City Zoo to provide him the fresh meat he craves on his full-moon sojourns. All those animal deaths couldn’t go unnoticed so you bribed zoo employees. You needed a backer to supply the hush money and smuggling drugs in large herbivores provided just the way to get it. Then, you hit on a way to get out of this mess. If U.R. Listeners became mayor, he’d have access to the city budget and enough money to buy herds of prey. Only one thing stood in your way, a cuddly panda named Hao Bu Hao was also running for mayor.
“You drugged Hao Bu Hao’s bamboo with Viagra and had Keto Ecuador take incriminating pictures that you’d release for an October surprise. Now, Keto Ecuador was a grifter who also came into possession of a codebook with the names of Russian deep cover agents in the US. You wanted that book but Keto Ecuador wouldn’t play ball so you sent a hopped-up rhino to gore him to death. You didn’t count on the red-billed oxpecker who gave instructions bailing when aliens chose to liberate the rhino. Unfortunately, the rhino freaked out while the aliens were lifting him with a tractor beam, and he fell to his death at San Onofre. Is that pretty much it?”
“What of it?” Vivian said. “Now, take me to that book.”
I reached for my cell phone. “Did you hear that, Kobo?”
“Got her confession recorded,” Dashiki replied.
“If you want the real codebook, you’ll have to see Major Overhaul,” I told Vivian.
“Get him!” Vivian broke for the door.
Two-hundred pounds of U.R. Listeners tensed as if ready to hop in my lap. With only milliseconds to spare, I took a chew toy out of my pocket and waved it in front of him.
“Who wants the duck? Who wants the duck?” I faked U.R. Listeners out with a throw toward the hallway, changed my mind, and tossed the rubber duck into the kitchen. His toenails clattered on the linoleum and he slid with a crash into the convection oven. Squeaking the rubber duck between his jaws, U.R. Listeners brought the drool-covered toy back to me. We played fetch until the police arrived.
***
With Vivian in jail, there was no one to pay my fee but I still had the money intended of Keto Ecuador. I returned to the zoo but it was nap time at the panda enclosure. I deducted my fee and expenses and left the balance with a zookeeper. With the blackmailer dead and Hao Bu Hao’s opponent behind bars, I doubted Hao Bu Hao would get shaken down again. I didn’t know if pandas hibernated, but after a hectic week, I wouldn’t blame Hao Bu Hao for snoozing through election day. I felt tired as well. I drove to my hotel, closed the curtains, and placed a do-not-disturb sign on the doorknob.
Meet the author:
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception.
http://jonwesick.com
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