The day started off like any other. I was in the office drinking away the minutes of my life and waiting for one of my debts to walk through the door finally settle itself the hard way; broken knees and cement shoes. On the plus side, I had bacon and eggs for breakfast. As far as I was concerned, this was as good as a day gets.
That's when she walked in. Legs that wouldn't stop and a body that was wondering where they went. She was trouble and she knew it. Her hair was tied back in a bun that made her look like a librarian that you'd beg to be shushed by. Too bad she came to talk.
She said "I need a job done. Something crazy. I hear you're the only private dick in town that doesn't care enough about living to do it that isn't already dead."
I said, "Yeah, I am, but only cause Murphy bit it last night." Poor Murphy, didn't even see that train coming. I told him to look up, but he just didn't listen.
She said "I bet you've heard by now the sexy's gone."
"The Sexy?"
"Yeah, the sexy. I'm sure you've seen it around. Probably through glass."
I said, "Look babe, what I do on my own time isn't any of your business."
"Fine," she said, "I've got a hundred big ones that's gonna make all your time my business."
I'm a sucker for a woman who knows how to haggle.
She said "I need you to bring the sexy back."
"Well where'd it go? You'd be the first person I'd ask about it."
"I'm paying you to find answers, not ask questions." she said. "You bring the sexy back and maybe I'll show you what it's for." If I wasn't interested before, I sure was now. The things she was doing with a conservatively cut business suit and a bad hairdo were lighting my boy parts on fire already. If she had the sexy... well.. I was almost hoping it wouldn't come to that. But only almost.
I took a drive around the city, but I could tell that if the sexy was here, it had gone bad. Wherever the sexy was, it wasn't here. I went down at the docks. If I had to get the sexy out of this city, I'd take it from there. You don't move that much sexy in your pants pocket. You wouldn't even try.
I started asking questions, cause I knew that people notice sexy when it comes through. If they didn't, it wouldn't be sexy. The longshoremen were short on answers, and I didn't have the Benjamins to loosen their lips. I didn't have the Clives or the Barrys either. The big Robertson brothers had raised their rates, and you can't outsource a lead pipe and three hundred pounds of Scottish sociopath.
I didn't find out anything about the sexy, I did find out the hard way that while outsourcing muscle doesn't work, a three hundred pound egyptian man with cricket bat can be imported at a reasonable rate. I came to in a dumpster with a headache I've never gotten from anything other than a bottle of Wild Turkey. I knew someone didn't want me asking around about the sexy. The sexy hadn't left. Someone had taken it, that's for damn sure now. The big guy from pyramid country told me that it wasn't done localy either. Someone from outside, and far outside at that, had taken our sexy. Damn the global village. I hopped the next boat to Morocco, cause if I was an Arab hijacking sexy, that's the first place i'd take it. You don't ship sexy on a boat if any longer than you have to. The sea hates sexy.
Sexy on a boat is like gunpowder in a fire. If you got that much sexy across the Atlantic you had a damn fine crew, a damn fine ship, and about a thousand lucky horeshoes stuck in a place that I don't even wanna talk about, and that's saying something. I once explained abortions to a kindergarten class. The next step was easy: look around Cassablanca for a good ship, good sailors, and a man that walked funny. I found the funny walking man first. Not horseshoes in em though; shrapnel. French Legionaire, but retired with a chunk of steel a foot long and point right where he wished it hadn't been. He said that he knew everything about the boats in this harbour, and after he told me what the seamen on boat from Norway did to keep warm at nights, i didn't want to question his credentials any more.
He said the boat I was looking for was the Hashishim Princess. Named after a lady that was addictive, mind altering, and would likely kill you with a knife if you were very, very lucky. Reminded me of my first wife. The princess had made port three weeks ago in a storm and unloaded that night. The crew had went ashore to drink away the troubles of the voyage, and most of them were still there. It was clear that they had had the sexy aboard, but where did it go? I went down to sober up some sailors with the back of my hand and see what they could tell me. Moroccan sailors are the toughest sons of bitches on the planet, and I found out the hard way that a backhand from a hard-boiled private eye is what they chase their whiskey with. I won't tell you what the hard way is, but it made me miss my Egyptian friend with the cricket bat.
I talked my way out of the situation with my trademark cool attitude. Of course, by "out of the situation" I mean "into a knife fight with the captain." The only thing more amazing than the number of stab wounds on his face was the fact that he was still breathing. I guess when you have that many holes to breath through, it helps. Little did the good captain know that I grew up in the sixth of the worst five districts in New York. It was the sixth because the theives, murders, rapists, and pimps in the five worst didn't want anything to do with the sixth. They were scum, but they weren't stupid.
The captain went for his knife and I hit him with a chair. That seemed to work, so I hit him with a few more. That worked even better so I kept on doing that until he wasn't moving and we were out of chairs. Then i hit him with a few tables just to be safe. After that, the crew figured I was a guy that was worth talking to. They also made me their new captain and, and I'm still not entirely sure about this part, I think I'm married to three women and a goat in algeria. The women I'm not interested in, but it sounds like a good goat. I might have to go back and find out about that.
Most of the crew had kept their heads down when they were unloading the boat, but like any good sailor or a bad hangman they kept their ears open. They told me that the sexy had been taken to Zanzibar, and I bought my way onto the next camel train to the East African coast. They gave me a camel called Shirley. I never found out why they called her Shirley. She was uncomfortable, rode like a drunk porcupine, spit in my eye and as near as I can tell hated everything in the whole big wide world. Reminded me of my second wife, but she wasn't called Shirley either.
On the ferry to Zanzibar I got to reminisce about my time with the Egyptian man that liked cricket with a couple of his relatives. They all liked cricket too, and they all looked like him. At least, they looked like him from the floor and covered in my blood, which, oddly enough, is how I was introduced to the first member of their family. They threw me overboard to let me die at the bottom of the sea, which is generally how I know that I'm on the right track.
Reminded me of my third wife. I miss her the most.
I washed up on the Zanzibar shore and pretended to be sunbathing until I woke up. After that I had breakfast and a coffee at a seaside restaurant where the sun was warm, the air sweet, and the eggs cooked just how I like them. It's times like this that make me realize how shitty the rest of my life is, and I would have drank myself into into the bottom of the nearest bottle if I wasn't in an Islamic country and the nearest bottle was on the other side of the chanel.
If the locals spent as much time getting beaten with cricket bats as I did, they'd want to drink too. So if they didn't want to drink, thewy weren't getting beaten, and that meant that they had to be in on the whole thing. I asked the restaurant owner what he knew with the end of a broken ketchup bottle. He told me that the sexy I was looking for was being kept in the fortress at the top of the hill. Then he charged me seven twenty five for breakfast.
I tipped twenty percent, because I admire a man that has the gonads to gouge me for breakfast while I'm gouging him with broken glass.
My usual method for gaining entry into buildings I'm not supposed to be in involves kicking in a door, pulling my Colt 45, and shouting. If I'm really on my game that day, I do it in that order too. That plan works well for dingy hotel rooms where most of my business associates find themselves, but not for fortresses like the one in front of me. Also, my Colt was somewhere in the chanel between Africa and Zanzibar. That gun had been a gift to me from my mistress, and I always hoped to shoot her with it. I didn't feel guilty about that because she was always hoping that the peron i'd shoot with it would be myself. She said so in a Christmas Card. I'd cry over all the broken dreams later. First, there was some sexy I had to get back.
I decided to gain entry to the fortress using the one thing that an Arab door guard fears the most: getting hit in the back of the head with a big stick. Take it from someone that knows, the thing an Arab door guard fears the most is the exact same thing that an American door guard fears the most. Goes to show that we're not so different after all.
I hid out in the fortress for three days, hiding in the rafters and the cooling ducts. I watched the guard changes, made notes of who was coming and going, and read "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens. Dickens wasn't part of the plan, but the man sure knew how to write a page turner. I picked it up one day hiding in the library and i couldn't put it down. If I ever find myself in the Victorian era, remind me to track dickens down and thank him, because when I pulled out "the pickwick papers" on the fourth day to see if it had the same clever wit and compelling story, a secret passage opened up.
Three days spent hiding in ducts and clinging to the roof could have been avoided if I had just read dickens in chronological order. Momma never gives you the pieces of advice that you really need. Always, "don't run with scissors," never, "read Dickens chronologically and don't marry a stripper." If I had spent more time running with scissors, maybe I never would have needed the advice about the stripper and wouldn't be cutting a fourth alimony cheque every other week. Thanks for nothing, mom.
I went down the passage pried by pickwick papers, and I could feel myself becoming more sassy with every step I descended. I knew that the sexy was down here, and there was a lot of it. I started to wish that I hadn't eaten my big stick while hiding in the rafters, because there were more door guards that needed to face their deepest fears at the bottom of the passage. Luckily for me, the guards been too near the sexy for too long and were fatally fly. Those two poor souls were too busy getting down with their bad selves to notice me coming in, leaving with the sexy, or taking their shoes and pants. I had been wearing these clothes for an Atlantic crossing, a three week camel treck, two vicious beatings, three nights in a vent, and a swim through the Zanzibar strait. You'd steal pants and wear another man's underwear in that situation too, so don't judge me. I didn't have the time to sneak in the way I came; I saw what happened with a sexy overdose and I knew i had to bring this sexy back before i wound up like my comatose, pantsless friends at the bottom of those stairs. With little time and less muscle at my back, I did what I always do in that situation: I started the library on fire and jumped out the window.
I had plenty of time to appologize to the ghost of Charles Dickens for torching his fine work while I fell. It was a three-hundred foot plummet into the salty, smelly, seaweed-infested strait of Zanzibar. And these pants were brand new. What had started off as such a good day was quickly going down hill. I dragged the sexy ashore, and made my way back to the port, to catch the next boat home. I told you the sea hates sexy, and I was carrying more sexy with me than you would ever see in your life, even if you did nothing but watch baywatch without the commercials all day for a year. I knew that I had a lot of sexy with me because I haven't had that many indecent proposals from sailors since I went in drag at a clam shack in the case of the Barrett's Privateers. Just because I usually let the gang of five on my right hand loosen lips for me doesn't mean I don't clean up well. Besides, the big robertson boys weren't available that weekend either. Goons and low-cut, off-the-shoulder gowns aside, there was going to be trouble on the high seas.
Somewhere around the Horn of Africa the sea roared up in front of us like an unholy representation of the devil himself. the waves were ten stories tall and filled with sharks. It reminded me of all four of my ex wives at once, plus a couple of elemenrary school teachers and the Shirley the camel. As waves and sharks washed over the bow, I began having some trouble staying cool, so I lit up a smoke to take the edge off. Good thing I did, because when the ship was ripped in two five minutes later I took it as well as a sock full of quarters to the jaw. That sounds bad, but it's how my old man used to say hello. Every time I feel the sting of a half pound of change across my face it feels like home. I fell into the sea like a pro, and I was, considering that this was the third time I had done it this month. I was starting to feel like this job wasn't worth the pay.
I felt like a hooker at a Scotsman convention. All i could do was Robert. Bob for short. Thankfully I kept my pack of Marlboros dry so the week I spent clinging to a plank in the middle of the atlantic was spent like a cucumber, as in cool as a. I got picked up by a Chinese merchant ship on the eighth day and they brought me home. I didn't ask what a Chinese merchant ship was doing in the Atlantic, and they didn't feel like talking about it much. All i know is that they made me swim the last mile to shore. They wouldn't tell me why they didn't make port, but one of them kept saying something about Shirley.
Whoever Shirley is, I'm going to have to find her and marry her.
I walked out of the harbour and to the nearest payphone. Someone had left a quarter in the change return. Jackpot. I called my client and she answered on the second ring. Something about her voice told me that she still had her hair in a bun, and her torso was still trying to catch up with her legs.
she said "did you find the sexy?"
"Damn straight, sugar" I replied. "It's somewhere in the gulf stream and should wash up on the shores of Portugal in about a year. Go look for it there. I'll send you my bill. If you have any questions about my expenses, I'll be in the bottom of a bottle of rye. Before you ask, yes, they do charge seven twenty five for breakfast in Zanzibar. No, twenty percent isn't unreasonable, given the circumstances."
"One more thing," i said, cutting her off what I knew was a clever comeback about the Gulfstream, "is your name Shirley?"
"No."
"Then have a nice life, kid" and hung up.
