Posted 08-07-23
THE BIG SWITCH
By Christopher Leeson
Chapter 14
The Narrative of D.C. Callahan, continued
B.J. Waters and her girls spent a few minutes tossing stuff into suitcases before disappearing into parts unknown. With Martin and me left alone in the apartment, I volunteered to take the first watch. I didn’t want my partner playing Sir Galahad and staying up all night. I needed him in top form when the aliens showed up.
Before he hit the sack, he helped me rig a crude trap at the door, one that would put the Martians at a disadvantage while making one hell of a racket. But were we being too cocky? Couldn’t the clowns from space bring in a whole battalions of reinforcements? That thought left me wondering if the two of us shouldn’t run like hell, just the way that we’d advised B.J. and company to do? But my main problem was that if I amscrayed, I'd stay Sheila until they laid the sod o'er me. Rather than accept living a life like hers, I'd go down fighting!
Stakeout has always been one of my least favorite activities involved in P.I work. Mostly, a detective's life is not very dangerous; worse, it's hardly ever exciting. This setup was different, though. It would have been so much better if we could just call the cops. The trouble was, talking about aliens to the city bulls about thing they pretended not to believe in was the best way in the world to win an all-expense-paid vacation to the loony bin.
In my state of mind, I had no problem staying staying sharp while waiting for unwelcome visitors. But I started to feel like there was something wrong with me. Like, it suddenly occurred to me that Gavin Newsom, on the cover of Time Magazine, was a hot-looking guy? And, what was worse, if a sex-starved motorcycle gang had suddenly broken in on me just then, I felt all primed to mark it down as a lucky day!
Instead of torturing myself with such unwelcome fantasies, I tried to think of some way to find Schitz. In this capital, trying to find one girl dressed like a hooker was like searching for one certain straw straw in a straw stack. Flatbacking was the only growth industry the present administration had already sent to China.
Chances were that the aliens would have taken Schitz to one of their lairs. I had always thought that a space invasion would be like The War of the Worlds, but these aliens were going at it in a sneaky way. They probably had a large number of safe houses where they could hide their prisoners. They might even have taken the congressman out of the city. Things were looking pretty grim for both Schitz and for me.
I stuck out my watch until three and by then I couldn’t take much more. So I went to kick Martin out of bed. But, clumsy me, I stepped on something on the bedroom floor, tripped, and fell face-first across my pard's sleeping body.
"Aliens!" he started yelling.
I just barely ducked a roundhouse that would have dislocated my jaw. "Martin! Cut it out! It's me!"
"Wha--? S-Sheila?"
He stopped struggling and snapped on the lamp.
"What’dahya think you're doing?" he asked blearily.
"Hey, cool it, Pard! I'm just letting you know that it's your time to get on watch."
He grunted. "You didn't have to join me in bed if that’s all you wanted to say! It's not that you're not welcome, though."
"Don't get your hopes -- or anything else -- up, Buster. I just stumbled." I glanced down at the floor, wondering what had tripped me. I saw a high-heeled pump and there was also a black minidress in a pile beside it. That got me to thinking.
"Hey!" I exclaimed.
"What?"
"That outfit! It belonged to that alien who switched with B.J."
"So what?"
"Maybe she left a clue tangled up in her things, something to tell us where she and her gang hang out. Maybe that's where they've taken Schitz!"
"I've got you!" said Martin as he swung himself into a sitting position. "But it's not likely that she keeps business cards in her Wonder Bra."
"It's not her Wonder Bra that I most want to check out." I got down on my hands and knees to peer under the bed.
"What are you looking for?"
"I’m trying to find her purse," I said, "but I don't see it."
"You must be half asleep. A woman doesn't just drop her bag on the floor; she puts it in a safe place." He stood up, wearing nothing but a tank top tee and a pair of white boxers. In two shakes he had pulled a black plastic purse out of the top drawer of the dresser.
"Dump it out on the bed," I advised him eagerly.
When he did, we could see that the reticule held the ordinary sort of woman-stuff, along with a spork from some fast-food restaurant, a cafe napkin, and a lipstick-smudged tissue. But it also contained a couple rings of keys, one of which had a large brass twister, some kind of swipe-card, along with a plastic doohickey that I recognized as a fob-key of the type generally used for electronic security locks. Besides that, there was nothing except several small slips of printed paper.
"Wherever she's been, it must have a lot of locks," I observed as I checked out one of the key rings.
He nodded absently. "Is there anything to tell us what doors those keys are supposed to open?"
"What are those papers?" I asked.
He held one of them up to the light. "They're coupons for some fast-food promotion. They say that you earn one for each Happy Meal you buy. After you've collected ten, you can turn them in for a burger-French fries-soft-drink meal. I'd say we’ve just iced a budget-conscious alien."
"I'm glad they’re into junk food and don't eat people, like the space guys on V did. Wait a second, Martin! She has several coupons from the same place. That has to mean that she’s been hanging around one particular neighborhood. The question is, why would she need to do that?"
"Maybe she has an apartment nearby," he suggested.
I shook my head. "A person hardly ever eats at a lowbrow cafe in his own neighborhood, not unless he really hates cooking or the landlord bans hotplates. I don't know how much an alien assassin take in, but I doubt that the type would stick with murder for hire if he weren't earning enough to afford a kitchenette apartment. Mostly, its people at their places of work who visit a local fast-food joint every day. It beats packing a bag lunch."
Martin looked up in mild surprise. "That's good figuring, doll! never supposed that you had a detective bone in your whole body!"
I flared. "Hey, you mug! You've got no right to say such a rotten –"
Oops! I ha no reason to punch out my best bud. He was talking about Sheila, not D.C.
"I mean it's not fair to jump to conclusions about a person. If either one of you gents had ever asked for my help in solving a case, you'd have been surprised."
"The truth is, we never got many cases where we needed to solve things. Anyway, you never joined in the shop talk with us."
"Well, I’m the shy type!" I said. "The fact is, I took the secretary job to learn the P.I. ropes before I hung out my own shingle. Thinking about crime detection really turns me on. I've read all the good writers and even written P.I. stories of my own."
I saw incredulity on Martin's face. "I didn't realize that you were into detective stories. All the books I saw you bring to the office were regency romances.”
“Um, well, a man doesn’t live by bread alone.”
“If you’re a writer, you and D.C. should have been best friends."
Drat! I had to be careful about telling too much of the truth. "Sames repel, opposites attract. You know that, Martin. His incredible literary skill made me afraid to talk about writing when he was around. Whenever a woman tries to go head to head with a man on the really important things, she can't help but to finished second best. Anyway, D.C was a powerful sexual animal. Sometimes I felt like his eyes were undressing me. It would get me so excited that I had to fight to hold myself back.”
“I thought that girls didn’t like that sort of thing.”
“Don't ever believe what a chick tells you!” I said. “We drive ourselves crazy thinking of ways to make men come on to us first just because we don’t want to make ourselves look like sluts coming on to them.”
“If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been advising D.C. to be on his best behavior around the ladies.”
“You didn't?! So that was why D.C. was always playing so hard to get!”
“I had an ulterior motive for stopping him from moving in on your to aggressively.
“What.”
“I was waiting to get the right signal from you. I was attracted myself and didn't want D.C. snatching you out of my reach.”
“Well, maybe it worked out for the best. D.C had qualities that no ordinary guy could match,” I said.
“Why's that?”
“Suave, debonair, powerful -- and women are suckers for older men.
His smile broadened. "Don’t write off us young guys. I feel suave, debonair, and powerful whenever I look at you. In fact, I can't stop looking at you since you showed up in the little black number. And, by the way, I think you look nice the way you're dressed now."
I punched him in the arm. "So a girl only needs to dress like a hooker to catch your attention, huh?"
He smiled but instead of pushing the envelope, he started reading the fine print on the coupons. "They come from a restaurant called the Carousel. I never heard of it. Maybe it's a mom and pop place and not part of any chain. The address and phone number is printed at the bottom."
“Maybe you’ll make a good detective yet,” I said.
Chapter 15
The Narrative of D.C. Callahan, continued
When we dialed the Carousel's number, we got a recording. It said that the cafe opened at seven in the morning and there would be a pancake special for $1.98. That sounded damned good, but the message didn't make any mention of the price of coffee. High-priced coffee is the scam that chow joints use to rip a man off once they hook him in with their cheap-meal specials. Anyway, Martin and I didn't have two dollars to spare between the pair of us.
"We'll have to hang around this place till morning," he said resignedly.
But standing still didn't sit so well with me. “If we scouted out the Carousel tonight, maybe we could zero in on some place nearby where the aliens are likely to hang out. So far, they seem to go for old warehouses and shut-down factories."
He shook his head. "No, that’s a bad idea. We could chase around all night without finding anything. It's a good bet that somebody who works at the Carousel is going to remember a redhead like the one you've described, especially if she ate there more than once. Besides, if we hunker down here and one of those space goons stumbles in, we might be able to beat Schitz's whereabouts out of him. Or her."
"Oh, so you're willing to hit a girl all of a sudden, huh?"
He gave me an incredulous look. "Do you really consider a body-switching monster to be a girl.”
“Body-switched monster? Isn’t that being a little harsh,” I replied.
“I like girls who are sweet on children and small animals, having a soft spot for alien invaders is carrying things too far.”
"I think it’s about time for me to go to bed,” I answered back. “It's after three."
"You do that, Sheila. I'll wake you up at nine."
"Six! I want to be at the Carousel when it opens."
He scowled. "That'll give you less than three hours to get your zees."
"I can take it! Hell, I once went without sleeping for forty-eight hours when I was --" I stifled myself. I'd been on the brink of saying, "When I was in Afghanistan."
"Was what?"
"Ah, when I was with the Girl Scouts. Surely you realize that chicks have to sweat blood if they expect to win all those merit badges!"
He grinned. "They sound like a really tough outfit."
"The Girl Scouts build women! If I had a daughter, I'd slap a Scout beret on her head and get here feeling at home in the deep woods. You can never have enough mean-as-hell cookie pushers!"
Martin’s expression turned serious. "You like kids then?"
"K-Kids?" That question threw me. Instead of answering, I mumbled, "It's time I hit the mattress in one of the other bedrooms," and then scooted away.
I went into Gina's room and flopped down on her mattress. I slept until the need for a bathroom trip woke me up. By the time I got back under the sheets, Mr. Sandman had taken it on the lam. It was only a little after 5:00 a.m. and I felt bummed out!
One thing that kept me from getting back into dreamland was that my mind was testing ground for sexy fantasies. I should have expected trouble when I bedded down in the perfumy air of a hooker’s room!
Lying there stone cold awake, I was getting randier by the minute! Those aliens hadn't been kidding about their extra-terrestrial sex-drive being contagious. For a while I tried counting buff guys while they leaped over a fence, but that only made things worse. Admitting defeat, I decided to get up and get dressed.
I shucked off B.J.'s male-sized tee shirt that I'd been using for pajamas began searching for day ware, hoping to find a sensible a pair of blue jeans and a plain cotton shirt. But everything left behind by Gina had been tailored for bad girls. Probably, she had taken away all her modest things when abandoning the pad.
But while I searched, I got the strangest sensation from my hands shuffling through the lingerie drawer. I'd always liked the feel of nylon, but it never had such a powerful effect on be before. The next thing I knew, I was pressing a laundry-room fresh chemise to my nose and breathing deeply of the scent.
Bemused, I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror. Wow! That tangled head of hair was making me look slovenly! I picked up a comb and tried to bring a little order to what looked like a fright wig. Easier said than done; by the time I finished teasing my way through the snarls, I was looking like some Italian actress in the role of being the main squeeze of a swordsman in an adventure movie. On the other hand, I’ve never had anything against cheap Italian adventure movies. Also, there was all that peach-smooth lusciousness without even a
staple to get in the way! My heart aflutter, I put my hands on Sheila's
glorious rack.
Jeepers! Her boobies were and incredibly sensitive handful! I could now guess why women wanted to retreat into the privacy of the ladies' room so often. All of a sudden, I was anxious not to let anyone see me the way I was.
Because the bedroom door had no lock, I braced a chair under its knob -- just like I used to do to keep my brother Jack out of our room while I was paging through the men's magazines he'd bought at a rummage sale. The women in those paintings were usually pictured in torn blouses and skirts ripped to the hip. I could envy those jungle headhunters and Nazi SS men who were privileged to give chase to them. I'd always resented that magazines like them hadn't been published for decades; they'd vanished from the racks in the 70's. My theory was that when the drugged-out hippies came in the front door loaded with lice and smelling of BO, America’s real men, holding their noses, ducked out the back exit. A pity. Without those red-blooded heroes spreading around their clear sense and sagely wisdom, the country had taken a deep dive into hell.
Pretty soon, I drifted back to the lingerie drawer. There was an itsy bitsy two-piece baby doll on the top. It was the kind of thing that I’d frequently imagined Sheila wearing. Suddenly I realized that I had a rare opportunity to make a dream come through. The next thing I knew, I was stepping into that sable pair of skimpy briefs and sliding that little top down over my head. I at once checked myself in the mirror told and decided that the outfit looked absolutely perfect on Sheila. Then I went exploring the closet and rummaged around until I found a pair of vinyl pumps. Once those five-inch heels on my feet, I needed to hang onto the dresser to keep from falling over. Having finally gotten my balance, I struck a sassy pin-up pose and checked myself out in the mirror.
Not bad.
But don't get the wrong idea about me. I wasn't doing anything sick. In my own mind, I was simply dressing up a king-sized version of a Margot Robbie Barbie doll.
It was a game that turned out to be addicting. It wasn't long before I had changed into a white, lace-paneled, Lycra bustier sprinkled with petite red hearts. Again, I liked what I saw. What a babe Sheila was! Or, rather, had been.
It was a funny situation – the girl I saw reflected was me, but she also wasn't me. I couldn't help but fantasize throwing myself over my own shoulder and sweeping myself away for a little fun in the sack!
"Sheila, I think I love you!" I heard myself saying. I had the impulse to get a gander at the full length image of my naughty secretary, from the top of her head down to her high heels, I backed away from the mirror. Unfortunately, while stepping without looking, I caught one of those heels on an electrical cord and the lamp was jerked off the nightstand. It thudded to the linoleum with a bump and the next thing I knew, Martin was pounding on the door like a Prohibition agent.
Though I'd wedged a chair under the knob, its legs were braced on a slippery throw rug that went sliding as soon as Martin applied his shoulder to the door. With the chair falling away, the door flew open. Before I could shout "Get lost!" Martin was standing there clutching a mahoska in his mitt.
He tried not to look like he was scoping me out, but this wasn't my first rodeo. He said, “Sorry I barged in. What made that noise?"
"Nothing!" I told him shakily. "I -- I just knocked over a lamp!"
"Oh. I see. Have you been sleeping all right?"
I wanted to duck under the covers to hide, but I decided to brazen it out. "I was out for a couple hours," I told him.
"That’s not good. You ought to try for a little more shut-eye; we have a big, bad day ahead of us." He was trying to sound nonchalant, but his his glance was scorching me.
"Yeah," I agreed, my throat tight. I felt like socking him. You'd think that he would have had the grace to turn his back.
"You don't have to get involved in this mess," Martin said. "In fact, I wish you'd find someplace to hide until things get sane again."
“But by that time that happens you could be dead!” I reminded him.
He shrugged. “Them’s the breaks. I haven't had too many chances to be the hero. This seems like a good place to start.”
“What kind of talk is that? My life isn’t any more important than yours!" I declared.
"Of course it is! You're a girl!"
"Don't rub it in! I mean, people overrate sex." Oops, I should say the word sex around a single man who didn't have a girlfriend. So, I quickly said, "Remember that old song, Martin? 'All you really need is heart'? Well, brother, I'm full of heart!"
He grinned. “I’ve been noticing that there are plenty of hearts on that rig you’re wearing.”
“Don’t make a joke of everything!” I said coolly.
"Well, I'll say something serious then. I really do want you to get away to a safe place."
"I don't think that's such a good idea," I said.
"But I do, and that overrules what you're thinking!"
I crossed my arms and held my chin high. "What is this? Are you supposing that you're smarter than me?"
Martin sighed. "You're plenty smart, Sheila, but you don't know everything. Like, I wouldn't pick you out of a crowd to do brain surgery on my Aunt Rosie. You’ve got no detective seasoning! We're up against a mob that would give even Elliot Ness the heebie-jeebies. That’s a megaton of danger ahead of us and I don’t want to lose you not that I've discovered how great you are.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I don't know how you did it, but somehow, since yesterday, you’ve remade yourself from a four to a ten.”
"I have not! I’m exactly the same as I've always been.” I looked down at my barely dressed body. "You don't see the real me; you only see what I'm wearing."
“What you're wearing is fine, but if you insist on hanging around, I wouldn't mind joining you for breakfast at the Carousel Cafe. Since we’ve that pack of coupons, we’ll be able to chow down in good style.”
I really hoped the big ape was only talking about food, but I wasn’t so sure!
TO BE CONTINUED...
