I woke up ten minutes later not dead but with a splitting headache that made me long for death, a deeply concerned elf staring down at me, my eyes still firmly planted in their sockets, and the ugly realization that my ex-wife had a tight grip on my wallet with her crooked talons until my actual mortal end and, given the black arts practiced by the shysters who represented her, likely all eternity after that.
At least my fedora was safely resting on my stomach. No doubt Mannix had retrieved if for me from amongst the hooves and cow shit.
“Did you drag me or my hat out first?” I gasped at the elf, who appeared to be much blurrier than I remembered. The room swam around him and I was pretty sure the sinisterly bright light in the ceiling behind his head was plotting against me.
“You, Mr. Crag,” the elf insisted.
“For future reference the order is fedora, trench coat, me,” I told him. “I don’t want to live in a world where I’m running around half-dressed.”
I’d been dragged into a bed somewhere away from the emergency room. Wherever I was, it was still home on the goddamn range. The ER was close enough that I heard the cattle lowing. The sounds of panic and death had been replaced by sounds of panic and cops. The local PD had brought with them their newly-ordained barnyard pro. I could hear the voice of Detective Dan Jenkins rising above the rest of the racket.
“Look at the size of those horns!” Jenkins was shouting. “That’s Igor Jones all right. Slap some cuffs on that bull and read it its rights.”
The werebull who was evidently not Igor Stradivarius, which Jenkins would have discovered for himself had he taken all of thirty seconds to question the survivors of the real Stradivarius’ rampage through the hospital, mooed violently. I heard something loud and made of glass shatter and a whole bunch of cops yelling in terror.
“You’re only making it worse for yourself, Jones,” Jenkins hollered over the fresh melee, his voice grown high-pitched with alarm. “You just added resisting arrest and goring an officer to the list of charges.”
My splitting headache had become a crushing pain, which meant that the hemispheres of my brain were fastening back together. I did my best to aid the healing process by tuning out the fresh headache that was Detective Daniel Jenkins.
Mannix and I were not alone in the hospital room. A Chinese girl doctor who looked all of thirteen and who gave my little pal a run for his money in the shrimp department stood on an orange crate next to my bed. She seemed surprised and frightened by the presence of her own stethoscope around her own neck, as if some villain unknown to her had draped her in a rubber snake. After much fumbling she found her ears with one end and failed completely to find my heart with the other.
She gave up on the stethoscope, attempted to put a tongue depressor in my eye, then gave up on both and went with something she’d seen on TV.
“How many fingers I holding up?” the doctor asked in perfect pidgin English which, along with her magnifying glass spectacles and buck teeth, would have been the pinnacle of hilarity in a 1950s sitcom.
I told her three. She had to check her own hand to see if it was of the same opinion. I realized at that moment that I’d rather take my chances with a bottle of Tylenol, I held up a finger of my own to let her know what I thought of her medical expertise, and I and my hat got the hell out of Dodge.
The world was a little wobbly, and the hospital, like my nebulous elf assistant, a lot fuzzier around the edges than I remembered. Mannix had to buttress my elbow from below to keep me upright.
“You need to lie down, Mr. Crag,” the elf insisted. “That nice doctor said you have a very bad concussion.”
“I would not trust that nice doctor to take my lo mein order, Mannix,” I informed him. “Besides, this is what I’ve been in training for all these years. I’ve spent an adult lifetime getting my body in peak condition to withstand nausea, vomiting, headaches and what I sincerely hope are optical illusions of swirling, interdimensional vortices that I’m currently seeing spinning all around this hallway. This is my Olympics, my Super Bowl, and my Academy Awards all rolled into one, Mannix. Now, just aim me for whichever of those twenty exit doors isn’t a mirage and I’ll be golden.”
It was the third from the left.
The other nineteen doors washed up and down in waves along kaleidoscopic walls, and when Mannix opened the one real one I felt a fresh blast of reeking city air that went a very small way toward clearing my pounding head.
“Wait,” I announced. “The dame with the busted legs. She was around the corner from the action. The cops might not have gotten to her yet. The TV was on in the room across from hers, but when I left she was preoccupied fooling around with her massive, fake honkers. Frankly, I can’t fault her for that. Run in and see if she missed the moon on TV. I’ve got a few more questions I’d like to ask her. Please do me this very large favor, Mannix, and while you’re gone I’m going to go lie down on one of the dozen bus stop benches I see spinning around over there several feet above the sidewalk.”
I ducked out the door as Mannix ducked back inside.
My legs managed to remain underneath me, which was a pleasant surprise. I walked, although like a toddler taking his first steps away from the liquor cabinet, and I kept right on walking through a dozen invisible benches until the solid one in the chewy caramel center smashed my shins.
The only bus that came by while I was sunning myself like a concussed turtle on the dirty public bench sped right by. It was pretty good from my debilitated standpoint that it was going 55 when it passed the bus stop, since I was in no condition to outrun the explosion that rocked the neighborhood down the street a minute later when it apparently dipped below the required speed and took out an auxiliary fire station and the corner Wendy’s. Hot and juicy chunks of hamburger and Engine No. 9 were still raining down throughout the neighborhood when Mannix returned from his mission.
I wasn’t sure if I was seeing a hallucination thanks to my concussion, so for a moment I embraced the pleasant hope that I wasn’t staring up at reality.
Lying flat on my back, surrounded by flaming hamburger buns, I was abruptly not staring up at a puffy white cloud that resembled a fuzzy goddamn duckie. The sun was obliterated by a very large shadow, and I was suddenly being drenched with drool pouring from the mouth of a slack-jawed bovine.
“Moo,” said the cow above my head.
I slowly swung my legs around and managed to haul myself to a sitting position, bringing myself eye-to-eye with the mobile milk factory.
The dame with the rack and the two busted gams had apparently pulled her eyes away from adjusting her knobs and had glanced at the moon on TV after all.
In the short time he’d been back inside the hospital, Mannix had lashed together a pair of gurneys on which rested a contented cow that had until very recently been a human-dingbat-obliviously-aspiring-dirty movie actress. In case the world didn’t know who she was when she wasn’t a cow, a pair of plaster casts encased its hind legs.
I noticed for the first time a pair of signatures on the left cast. Mannix had signed, along with a cheery “get well soon!” Igor Stradivarius had signed as well, using his own name. At no level of this caper was I dealing with Robert H. Goddard.
Mannix’s head popped up from behind the Guernsey’s gurneys.
“Miss Ivory is a cow now,” the elf announced, breathlessly and unnecessarily.
“Thanks to Miss Ivory’s cosmetic surgeon and daddy issues, she was pretty much one already,” I said.
Mannix was too excited from his little adventure to rebuke me.
“You were right, Mr. Crag. The police were busy with the cows around the corner. Miss Ivory was all alone. I didn’t think you’d want to go back inside since you and Mr. Policeman Dan don’t get along very well.”
“Yes, well observed, Mannix,” I replied, nodding sagely. “I do hate asshole Dan Jenkins, although how you figured it out I have no idea since I’m so good at keeping it under wraps.”
Mannix was too decent a guy to wade into the middle of my longstanding conflict with the asshole cop. I’d have liked to think it was because in his tiny little heart of hearts he agreed with me on the moron flatfoot’s all-around worthlessness, but I knew he was too good a guy to think ill of anybody, even his boss who thought ill of everybody. The elf merely ignored me and tipped his head in the direction of the bored bovine.
“So I thought I’d bring her to you to question,” he concluded, as if I’d said nothing, which was usually probably the best approach to take.
What Mannix had done wasn’t technically kidnapping. More like cattle rustling, for which there probably was no longer a statute on the books.
“The problem, Mannix, is that, as you rightly pointed out, she is currently a cow. There’s no transforming belt for her case. Believe me, I would have noticed during that peep show she was performing in the ER. According to were-animal rules she’ll remain a cow through the next full night until dawn tomorrow. So, there’s no real interrogating her unless I phrase all my questions so that ‘moo’ is the appropriate response.”
“Moo,” said the cow on the gurneys.
“Not very salutary,” I said.
“Moo,” the cow apologized.
“We can bring her back to the office,” Mannix suggested. “You can talk to her tomorrow morning when she’s a lady again.”
“I don’t generally like to talk to ladies in the morning. I usually keep my eyes closed and pretend to be asleep while they steal whatever’s in my wallet and leave. But what the hell. I’ve got a severe concussion that’s scrambled my brain, so I’ll just plead insanity. Toss a purple blanket on her and we’ll drag her on the subway.”
Mannix was a little miracle of forethought. He produced a couple of full-size blankets that he’d stashed underneath the gurneys and did his best to cover up the bored lady cow.
It was all I could do to stand upright, which was a condition with which I was used to dealing but which I generally reached under more pleasurable circumstances than a bull kick to the side of the head. I had to grip the side rail on one of the lashed-together gurneys to maintain my balance as Mannix shoved them, along with their cargo of proudly perched, moronically mooing and scarcely-concealed, busted-legged cow-dame, down the sidewalk.
A pervert waving a ten dollar bill stopped his car and asked for ten minutes alone with the cow and five bucks change. Mannix was more offended for Miss Ivory What’s-Her-Udders than I suspected she would be in human form, and the creepy bastard sped away angry after the elf informed him several times and in no uncertain terms how thoroughly naughty he and his suggestion were.
“It’s always nice to have a backup plan,” I warned Mannix. “If this P.I. gig doesn’t work out, at least we have the more dignified profession of livestock pimping to fall back on. In the meantime, when we get to the turnstiles you two are on your own.”