The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

SCENE ONE: Daytime, Happy-Lucky Shopping Mall, “Good Town” (aka, Los Bonum’s affluent East Side).

“Drop it, scumbag!” Police Officer Flopsy Botchek popped out from behind a scantily-clad mannequin, her gun pointed at the suspected APIS terrorist in the ladies underwear store. He carried an assault rifle and had just taken a hostage, a tall, young brunette, who was the moment before hiding in one of the dressing rooms. “And let the girl go!”

“Philistine!” (APIS slang for cop.) “Drop your gun—or the girl gets it!”

The girl in question fainted then, letting go the rose-colored bandeau brassiere she’d just been trying on, but hadn’t yet clasped in back. Terrorist and cop stood silently, eyeing each other for several seconds. At last, Officer Botchek, with a scowl, flipped her gun around, held her hands up slowly.

“Okay—but release the girl.”

The terrorist shook his head: “Very stupid, Officer. Such unwise pity; it’s why the future belongs to APIS!” He raised the nose of his rifle toward the cop, in five seconds firing thirty bullets in her direction. Botchek, an unexpected do-or-die smile on her face, had dived behind the mannequin once more, and crouching there, fired over her shoulder at the terrorist with her semi-automatic pistol.

When at last the sound of gunfire had subsided, Officer Botchek stood slowly. Smoke and debris filled the store. The scantily-clad mannequin was now no more than two bullet-ridden legs. The dissimilarly topless hostage lay in a trembling heap at the same spot at which she’d dropped her bra. There wasn’t time to check if she was okay. He was getting away!

Running out of the ladies underwear store, Botchek flipped the radio transceiver box on her left shoulder: “Where’s that backup I asked for, Smalls!”

The voice of the referenced officer crackled back: “It’s on its way, but traffic this time of day—Oof! You’re to stay put until it arrives, Botch—you hear me? You are NOT to pursue the suspect alone!”

“There’s no way I’m letting him escape now!”

“Can’t be helped. You know the order comes straight from Commissioner Klunker. Too dangerous!”

“I LIVE for ‘dangerous’!”

“But think of the bystanders, Botch. The perp’s probably APIS!”

“All the more reason to catch him.”

“You know the Department policy on APIS—they’re most ruthless when cornered: At all costs, officers pursuant must avoid civilian casualties and unnecessary property damage. By waiting for backup, you’ll be . . .”

“Yeah-yeah, tell that to the rookies who haven’t filed the serial numbers off their glocks yet. I ALWAYS get my —!”

Before she could finish the thought, she was interrupted by the sound of more gunfire. She had just come to a mezzanine overlooking a lower floor in the shopping mall, with a glass elevator and two oppositely placed up and down escalators. The fleeing suspect had got hung up on a crowd of shoppers on the down escalator, trying to push his way through. This proving difficult, the fugitive had at last pointed his gun at the ceiling and fired off several rounds. Shrieks, bodies of bystanders hitting the floor.

Not hesitating an instant, Botchek, gun in hand, hopped her bubble-butt onto the railing of the down escalator. It’s worth mentioning her bubble-butt here, for it was famous all over the precinct, precisely as its exceptional shapeliness couldn’t be in any way belied by Flopsy’s wearing the standard unflattering cop’s uniform. Just so, seated as she was, it stuck out much more plumply than was in any way necessary for it to do, and gave off the peculiar impression that the woman officer—starting to slide down the slick plastic escalator railing in this way, and in her slide training her gun on the moving APIS target—was somehow built for just this sort of activity.

“Freeze!” and she fired. But she evidently wasn’t likewise built for sliding and shooting at the same time. She missed the terrorist, shattering the front display window of an electronics store.

The chase resumed on the ground floor of the shopping mall, the terrorist now no more than fifty yards ahead of the cop. Botchek had good reason to think she would overtake him. He was carrying a bigger gun than she, more unwieldy in a sprint; being in the lead meant he had also more pedestrian traffic to contend with; but most significantly, little Officer Flopsy was as fast a cop as ever Good Town PD boasted—and didn’t she know it! For within that tiny frame of hers was not merely “hidden in plain sight”, as it were, that fantastic rear-end, but two of the best developed hips ever not featured on a rabbit; and her legs, for that matter, though the woman was on the short side, were yet proportionally longer than they should have been, particularly given her tapering small arms and unattenuated torso. She shot thus like a bullet through the shopping mall, a “predator” after her “prey”, and for every second the chase went on, gaining a stride or two on him.

Assuredly, she should have caught him, but: On a revolving floor at one of the main entrances to the mall, a show for novelty cars was in progress. The terrorist fired his rifle wildly at the sexy car girls and suit-wearing spokespeople there; they scattered like confetti in a ticker-tape parade. He jumped into a red sportscar shaped like something from a very flashy future, its doors not opening out but up.

Again, the cop shouted “Freeze!” Again, not apparently waiting for the fugitive either to freeze or not to, Flopsy fired not a second later, putting a sizeable hole in an upraised door window of that futuristic car. Perhaps this added incentive gave rise to uncanny insight, but the fugitive suddenly alighted on the ignition. The space-age sportscar shot off in a screech of tires that echoed loud within the amphitheatrical architecture of the mall’s main entrance.

Officer Botchek climbed into the next nearest vehicle on the revolving show floor. It was a hulking military-grade ATV, sporting tank-treads in place of wheels and missile turrets in place of those fake rubber balls some trucks sport.

“Great!” she glanced sardonically over a mass of screens before her. “How do I drive this thing?”

“I don’t know how you steer,” Botchek’s head reared at the unexpected reply. It came from one of the sexy spokesmodels, who had hidden in the tank from the terrorist. “But if you want to start it—here are the keys!”

“Thanks!” Flopsy smiled to her unexpected helper, a waifish blonde. “But I don’t think you wanna be along for this ride, honey. Things are about to get NASTY!” One of her favorite lines, no wonder she saved it for high-stress situations.

As Officer Botchek started the vehicle, the model, needing no further encouragement, clambered her way out of the immense truck, flashing a good deal white panties behind her in the process.

Outside the Happy-Lucky Shopping Mall, the sun shone brightly. In every direction, weekend shoppers in their cars or SUVs clogged the parking lots and surrounding thoroughfares. Into this bright, warm, congested afternoon, a red hotrod—its doors sticking up into the air like the arms of a child just dismissed from school for summer holiday—suddenly burst, shiny red paint and sleek front-windshield glinting blinding in the bright day. Mall door-and-window glass shattered in many directions. Fifty seconds later, chugging along much more slowly, creating a much larger explosion of glass and whatnot, a tank appeared out the same entrance.

“I’ll never catch him,” Flopsy grinned grimly to herself, “unless I can cut him off!” True enough—the hotrod had the advantage of speed, but the tank could drive over parked cars.

Crunch-Crunch-Crunch!!!

She was making up the distance between them, but had reason to fear, when the hotrod eventually made it clear of the parking lot, she would lose it in an open race on the streets. But couldn’t this thing go any faster? She flipped the transceiver switch on her shoulder.

“Hey, Smalls, you underappreciated genius! I need a favor—and fast! I’m in a . . .” she looked around the immense “cockpit” of her tank, spotted a red display manual bolted by raisable steel arm to the opposite door. She read aloud the name of the vehicle as it was written on the front of this manual. “X-43 Sunburn Search & Destroyer.”

There was a second of silence from “Smalls”, and then, as if reluctantly, a replying crackle. “An X-43 SSD, huh? So, what do you wanna know?”

“If I can’t get it going faster, this APIS creep is gonna get away!”

“. . . You’re not even supposed to be chasing him . . .”

“I haven’t got time to wait for you to grow a pair, Smalls, so just gimme the info: How do I kick this thing into high gear?”

An audible sigh crackled its way over the transceiver. “Fine. Just a second. I’ll look it up.”

A woman screeched as she saw her car crushed beneath the awesome treads of the police officer’s tank. “That was close,” said Botchek, “a second later and I might have crushed the woman with the car.”

“Found it,” Smalls again. “There should be a computer screen to the right of the steering column, with the word ‘Suppositories’ on it.”

“See it!”

“According to this top-secret military website I just hacked, if you tap anywhere on that screen, you should see an icon labeled ‘Turbo’.”

“Yep!”

“Yeah. Tap that.”

Inconspicuous funnel-shaped pipes sticking out the back of the tank erupted in a gaseous green blaze. The tank shot forward at ten times its previous speed.

“WOOOAH!” shouted the overjoyed police officer, picking herself up (Botchek wasn’t wearing a safety-belt). “Smalls, I’ve said it before—you’re a genius!”

“More like ‘biggest idiot known to man’,” came the reply, “helping you disobey strict Department policy yet again.”

“You just wait and see, when I catch this guy, there’ll for sure be a promotion in it this time, for me AND you. No way I’m going to forget to mention your help in all this.”

“Please. Do. Forget. I seriously think I could lose my job . . .”

Botchek flipped off her transceiver, jerked the rocketing tank out of the mall parking lot and into the street. Many of the cars on the street had already pulled out of the way to avoid getting rammed into by the fleeing terrorist. But this didn’t stop the cop from crunching the doors in and snapping the side-mirrors off some of the more centrally situated of the traffic.

Such minor inconveniences couldn’t stop Flopsy.

“You ain’t gettin’ away that easy, Creep!” she murmured, her eyes squinting in on the faroff speeding-away hotrod.

The hotrod turned down the first narrow alley it came to, careening violently so as to miss an unexpected bread delivery truck with its blinkers on parked just inside the alley. It cleared the truck in time to avoid a full-on crash, but not in time to spare the hotrod the loss of its upraised driverside door. Botchek’s tank came to a roaring, juddering stop directly where that door landed, at the entrance to the alley.

“No way I’m getting this thing through THERE!” She glanced at the screens in front of her; one of them showed a GPS system tracking her pursuit. She checked the surrounding map. “He’ll be coming out again on East Riverside Way—And if his idea is to lose me in Bad Town” (aka, the city’s disreputable Far West Side), “that means he’ll be doubling back to cross the Fricassee Bridge!” She might still catch him!

She gunned her enormous vehicle into a reckless reverse, fired the turbo jets once more, and raced up the same street down which she’d just rocketed, only to veer violently onto the first by-street she came to that could accommodate her tank’s gratuitous mass. Doubtless so as to minimize the damage she caused to buildings, pedestrians, and cars with drivers in them, Botchek made a veritable road of the cars parked along the curb. She barely injured anyone and made it to East Riverside in time to catch the terrorist bearing down on the aforesaid bridge.

“Think you got away from me, did ya?” again her eyes hungrily searched the panel in front of her. “That’s more like it!” Her finger came to rest on a red button with the black-stenciled image of a launching missile on it. She paused: “They wouldn’t REALLY fully arm a military-grade vehicle displayed in a novelty auto-show at the mall—would they? Well, here’s hoping!” She crossed her fingers on one hand as, with the other, she jabbed the inviting red button.

FWOOOSH!!!

KA-BOOOOOOOOM!!!

“Oops. I admit I expected—Well, something smaller . . . not the WHOLE bridge . . !”

The bridge was now destroyed. Thankfully, no one was at the point of impact when the missile hit, not even the terrorist. The powerful missile had overshot its target (rather, no target had been selected for it before it was shot). The hotrod, however, driving much too fast to stop before the burning, gaping remains of the bridge, sped off the breast-wall and into the Los Bonum River.

“I. Always. Get. My. MAN!!!” Flopsy gritted her teeth, put the tank into turbo once more, and catapulted after the fleeing suspect, into the water.

A crowd had gathered round the pier on the opposite side of the river for a weekend regatta, featuring huge yachts and bikini models performing a choreographed routine on jetskis. The crowd watched in horror as first the nearby bridge exploded, then two suicidal vehicles plunged one after another into the river.

“Quick—somebody call a paramedic!” shouted one bikini model on a jetski, who had ridden up close to where the vehicles had submerged. “Eeek!” she emitted a second later as the terrorist sprang out at her, and not even giving the pretty lady an opportunity to ask him if he was okay, knocked her off the side of her own jetski. He thence revved the left handlebar of the jetski like a cool kid, after which he shot away, spitting up behind him a rude trail of white foam.

Botchek re-emerged not a second later.

“Hey! Whattaya think you’re doin’!” shouted the blonde in the polka-dot string-kini whose jetski Flopsy had climbed aboard.

“LBPD, ma’am—I need to commandeer your vehicle!”

“Like, no WAY!” the blonde protested, sticking her boobs out in that way only very offended women with really big boobs can do. “Where’s your badge!”

Flopsy patted her wet, firm hips and big butt, but couldn’t find it.

“Who do you think you are, anyway! I been practicin’ for this show for, like, weeks!”

Officer Botchek saw the other jetski-driving bikini models speeding to the splash site with angry faces, saw her perp shooting away by jetski. There was no time to lose. With a very serious look on her somewhat WASP-ish face, the good cop reached out and yanked the flimsy top off the full-chested blonde.

The defrocked woman shrieked, covered her boobs with her arms and hands. Botchek sat herself in the driverseat of the jetski and sped after the perp. As for the blonde, she conveniently fell into the river, too, the second her small recreational watercraft lurched into action.

Vigilante cop buzzed down the river after fleeing terrorist, under bridges, round yachts and fishing boats, towards the very heart of sprawling downtown Los Bonum. The APIS suspect had a good distance now on Flopsy, a fact she demonstrated she fully apprehended by how low she set herself on her seat, how close to the handlebars she lay her head, rendering herself as little an aerodynamic obstacle to the chase as possible. By almost wrecking on a trawler and after accidentally catapulting herself off a random out-of-water projection—which did look suspiciously like a ramp—Officer Botchek was able to get the fugitive again in her sight.

He had just rammed his stolen jetski into the pier of a restaurant along the river. In the crash, he rolled several yards away from the impact site and onto the pier, between the tables of fish-eating patrons and even toppling a fancily dressed headwaiter. No sooner had he ceased to roll, however, the suspect leapt to his feet and disappeared inside the restaurant. Scarcely a minute later, Botchek had executed a similarly impressively reckless dismount of her jetski—although in her case, it wasn’t a waiter that got it, but a clan of Asian tourists—had bolted somewhat unsteadily into the restaurant after “her man”!

He was already bolting out the other side of it; however, she could trace all his actions, thanks to the fact that the seafood place was one of those exceedingly high-ceilinged and glass-walled affairs, wherein from any one point in it any other point in it was easily espied. She could see too, docked out in front of the establishment, on a pedestrian mall there where sat a slew of quaint shops and an anachronistic brick-laid square, several colorful hot-air balloons.

“Outta my way!” she cried, pushing over a thin-moustached black man, who with a pompous smile was toting a spitting skillet of shrimp flambé.

Flopsy pulled out her wet glock and fired several rounds through the restaurant’s front windows; none hit its mark. While firing at him, biting her lip, she watched impotently on as her opponent cold-cocked a balloon driver, climbed into the basket of that man’s conveyance, and lifted away.

Thankfully, there was no shortage of balloons.

Once in the air herself, Flopsy struggled more with driving the craft than she had her previous tank. On the other hand, the APIS suspect suffered none of her beginner’s folly, or perhaps he had simply lucked out concerning the breeze. Not only had he managed to rise high above her into the sky, he’d managed too to soar off into the distance, over the tops of downtown buildings.

“Fly—Damn you—Fly!” Flospy continued to pull and release that one cord that hangs down, featured prominently in films with hot air balloons as plot devices.

When at last she had propelled the craft over the not distant skyscrapers, she found herself unfortunately no nearer the retreating scumbag. He was going at a three o’clock to her nine.

Just being that high up, though, and in a hot air balloon, of all things—got her apparently very excited! She couldn’t withhold a frightened smile as her eyes gazed down at the ant-like city traffic far below her. And what would the people in the nearby skyscrapers think, seeing a woman-cop in a hot air balloon floating right past their windows? “Marveling—at ME!” the stellar police enforcer whispered in awe at her own hijinx.

But soberly she seemed to shake these frivolous thoughts from her pretty head with, surprise-surprise!, a shake of her head (incidentally, she’d lost her cute little cop’s cap in the river, so her cute curly shoulder-length brown hair shook crazily as she did this, like the ears of a spaniel). She stared out at the increasingly shrinking outline of her perp’s balloon, all the while getting away. Again she drew her gun and fired several rounds at him to no effect. Then:

Buzzzzz!

POP!

“Shit!” Some downtown hobbyist had flown his drone into her dirigible. “O shit—O shit—O shit—O shit!”

Losing altitude fast, Flopsy steered for the rooftop of the nearest building.

“And action!” yelled the fat bald wrinkly old director man, in the black horn-rimmed spectacles and a big old-school megaphone.

“O—FUCK YES!!!” screamed the starlet, who had good enough reason to scream just that; presently, she squirted out the giantest orgasm of anybody’s existence.

“Jeez! I’ve never seen —” whispered the director’s flunky over the director’s shoulder. “THAT’s Cloe Clingy—Porno Monarch Number One! She’s never squirted for nobody before, never! What’s your secret, man!”

“Shut the fuck up,” breathed back the director. He was highly consumed, understandably, that moment with his art.

“If you make me cum again . . .” panted out the actress in a loving, screeching aside to her director—who, for his part, was more in love with an effect at this moment than with the long-honored conventions of the fourth wall, and so gestured to his multiple cameramen to keep shooting, “don’t you dare quit”, notwithstanding the woman had long since broken character. “Oooo! I’m’unna cum out my brains . . ! I swear! SHIT! O gyaaaaw!”

The director smiled to himself, satisfied. At long last, his tour de force, his breakthrough into the mainstream!

There was much commotion suddenly behind him.

“What the fuck—you better not—[Wheeze!]!” and many other such asides, echoed in different voices but with similar expressed sentiments but by other members of the cast or crew.

Out of nowhere—well, out of the sky, technically—but—shit!—right now? At the end of his film? His tour-de- . . .

Botchek leaped with a back-breaking death-defying grace from the basket of the hot air balloon down to the penthouse rooftop apartment, currently setting for an open-air porno scene.

“Nobody move!” she yipped out preposterously. She betrayed a blushing embarrassment: “Hello!”

Before her stood a well-muscled nude man with an enormous hard boner and a look on his face thoroughly less cognizant than any baby’s. Botchek wasn’t looking at his face, though, when suddenly overtaken with a fit of giggles.

“Whatch’you think yous doin’?”

“Huh?” Stifling her inexplicable mirth, the female officer turned round to see behind her an obvious gangster-thug in a fancy Italian suit and sunglasses.

“The boss gots a lot o’ dough ridin’ on’ this-here pi’ture, lady!”

“Are you crazy!” it was the director now. “I got the best shot of my career,” he gestured over his shoulder at the beautiful augmented starlet currently taking dicks from multiple directions, and for all that still somehow able to sound out the words: “I’M-YOURS-DADDY- GIVE-IT-TO-ME-I-SURRENDER!” (which were, incidentally, not in the script) while squirting out an unconscionable quantity of cum from her pussy; “. . . the best shot of my career, and now—thanks to you and your goddamn balloon—I’m down a cameraman! Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“LBPD, sir; afraid I’m going to have to . . .”

“But there’s no big-booty cops in this picture, is there?” he looked around. “Script-boy! Where’s the script-boy? Tell you what,” he again addressed the female cop. “If you can get yourself lubed up, ready to go, in five . . . ten . . .” he took a good long gander at the ass of the very wet cop. “Let’s say, fifteen minutes—you’re in. But you better hurry!” he turned back to the ensuing cinematic scene behind him. “Camera 2—Camera 2, I need you doing taint and balls! Camera 3, you’re tits now—you’re tits!”

The thug who’d addressed her before tapped her on the shoulder. “Yous really a porn actress—comin’ down heres in a freakin’ balloon?”

“Is that really an FIM-92 Stinger!” Flopsy’s eyes lit up like a little girl’s at Christmas.

The thug shrugged.

“What the hell you doing with an FIM-92 Stinger?” She cradled the totable anti-aircraft missile launcher lovingly in her arms. “You haven’t got a license for one o’ these, have you? I mean, do they even make licences for these?”

Again the thug shrugged. “You gosta acts the director.”

“Huh? What?” the elderly director looked irritated, distracted for a moment, and then all at once contemptuous, vain, at the same time, patronizingly affectionate: “You mean that gun? Why, but of course, my dear—cinema verite! We’re shooting an espionage porn—The Spy Who Shamed Me! That’s my star actress in the role of Pussy LaWhore! Now, hurry the hell up and get that big ass o’ yours lubed, already! Another thirty minutes and the union guys crap out on us!”

But Botchek was already shouldering that ridiculous Cold War-era technological dealer in magnificent nightmares over to the edge of the rooftop penthouse, already pointing it at the speck-like APIS suspect’s escaping hot-air balloon far off in the distance.

“It’s no good,” the thug again lay a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “He’s halfway to Bad Town, doll. You’ll never get him.”

Botchek smirked as she put her eye to the missile launcher’s site: “I ALWAYS get my man!”

SCENE TWO: Daytime, LBPD HQ, office of Commissioner Klunker.

“Bo-o-otchek!!!” the big black commissioner cried out, as though to make the polystyrene ceiling tiles shake for all his outrage.

“Yessir!” the drying off police officer, wrapped in a blanket and holding a coffee and with more buttons undone on her uniform blouse than police regulation usually allowed, answered in a sheepish tone.

“What in HELL were you thinkin’?”

She smiled ingratiatingly up at her big black boss: “Aw, c’mon, Chief, I almost —”

“Almost don’t count, Botch, when you’re firin’ off a goddamn rocket launcher!”

Flopsy gave her cup of coffee a wide-eyed chagrined look, took a timid sip.

“I got the Mayor breathin’ down my neck, the City Alderman runnin’ round tallyin’ up the cost o’ all your latest damage, and every journalist in the city waitin’ out there for me to give ’em some sort o’ goddamn explanation.” He gestured with his arm, over his desk, at his office door, whose window blinds were down. “Now, tell me: What can I say is gonna explain to those blood-suckers all this crazy-dumb shit you just did!”

“‘I always get my man,’ sir?” again the cute brunette cop tried her darnedest to smile winningly at the intimidating man over the desk from her.

“Get yo’ man! You di’n’t get shit! Blew a goddamn hole in the side of the Goldbrick Industries building downtown!”

“No one was hurt!”

“You damn lucky! They was doin’ some pest control, those floors you hit, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, was evacuated.” The commissioner flipped through the many files on his desk in a way to suggest he wasn’t looking at any of them. Now and then he made weird grunts, an affectation he had developed which brilliantly fooled unthinking people into believing he was deliberating deeply on any subject other than that one on which he inevitably was. “[GRUNT!] I need a drink!”

The commissioner pulled a bottle out of his desk drawer, unstoppered it, and before taking a pull, remembered Officer Botchek. He smiled unexpectedly at the still drying off officer.

“I’m guessin’ you need one o’ these ’bout as bad as I do!”

“No, I —” protested Flopsy shyly. The commissioner put a finger to his lips to shush her, poured a stiff four-fingers of the liquor into the police officer’s coffee. Her boss then “clinked” his flask noiselessly against the officer’s cup, took a big, long swig from the flask.

“Well, that settles it!” gasped the feeling-much-better-now Commissioner Klunker.

“Huh?” emitted the having-some-trouble-breathing-on-account-of-that- unusually-strong liquor Officer Botchek.

“Congratulations, Botch!” the commissioner patted her hard on the back. “You a goddamn hero!”

“[GASP!] Sir?”

“Take yo’ pick! Either yous that,” the commissioner paused to scratch his nose philosophically, “or ya just made LBPD look like the dumbest, least competent bunch o’ bone-hards as ever walked a beat. Now, you just finish yo’ coffee, dry yo’self, button yo’self, and figure on something to say—you’re due to meet the press.”

“You mean . . ?”

“That’s right! This city’s just done and gone and got itself its very own super-cop!”

Flopsy, breathless with delighted surprise, suddenly remembered her coffee. She drank it down. Next, she just stood there, smilingly blinking at the commissioner.

“You got somethin’ fo’ me?”

“Heh?” Flopsy shook her head; a glassy-sleepy look had just come over her. “N-No, sir.”

“You go on now, girl,” resumed the commissioner with a wink meant to communicate in a kindly way he was through with her. “I got a, er, private phone call to make.”

“Yessir,” Botchek stepped towards the door, seemed to lose her balance, steadied herself one hand on the doorknob. She giggled unexpectedly.

“What’s funny?”

“You said ‘bone-hard’!”

“[Grunt!] Yeah. Yous had a long day, Botch, just remember: it ain’t over.”

When the officer had left his office, the commissioner picked up his phone and dialed a number: “Yeah. Ruben? Tell me you got somebody in lockup right now we could slap a camo jumpsuit on and say is APIS . . .”

SCENE 3: Evening, the suburban home of Officer Botchek and her husband, living room.

“. . . It’s my pleasure to present to you-all,” the commissioner was saying on the TV, “the heroic officer whose efforts today SINGLE-HANDEDLY brought down a terrible agent of APIS, and did so without a single life being claimed by this terrorist, and that’s not for his not trying to bring down half the city with him. As most of you know by now, he destroyed a bridge; he blew a hole in a building downtown, scared a lot of good people. But at the end o’ the day, what he got to show for it? Nothin’! A little property damage, but not a SINGLE person killed. ’ You ask me, that’s sayin’ somethin’. It’s sayin’, this city don’t need to be terrified of no terrorist, not so long as officers like our very own Flopsy Botchek are out there servin’ and protectin’! Now, I’ve talked yo’ ears off long enough; I’m sure you’re all eager to see her for yo’selves and ask her your own questions. Without further to-do, here she is, the cop who always gets her man!”

The commissioner stepped away from the podium; the camera zoomed in on the smiling, flushed face of Officer Botchek.

“OMG!” cried a teen with brown twin pony-tails; she had on a pair of red shorts-overalls and was seated cross-legged on the big beige couch, a plate of chocolate birthday cake in her hands. “Daddy, aren’t you, like, just SO proud—that’s our Flopsy!”

“You bet your little tushy I’m proud,” the man seated next to the teen slapped her butt good naturedly to which the teen pretended a moment to be upset, and then coaxingly fed her “daddy” a bite of cake from her plate.

The man was in his fifties, but he might have been taken for younger on account of how youthful his face was, soft, baby-like skin, free of wrinkles. He was also noticeably very short; that is to say, one could spot this even when, as now, he was sitting down, for his feet barely reached the expensive carpet. He was also bald. This unprepossessing man was Nerval Ramensky, the city’s assistant district attorney and the significantly older husband of Flopsy Botchek.

“But, shh, honey,” and Mr. Ramensky talked around the swallow of the cake in his mouth. “I wanna hear!” He turned up the volume with the remote.

“How’d you do it, Officer Botchek!” Several reporters shoved microphones at the officer’s pretty face:

“Weren’t you scared, Officer Botchek!”

“What’s next for you, Officer Botchek!”

“We don’t have to watch this part,” Flopsy, seated in a stripped-down version of her uniform (the same slightly hip-hugging officer’s pants, the white tank top she routinely wore under her uniform shirt), not to mention her underarm holster and glock, reached over to try to take the remote from her husband’s hand.

“No, you don’t!” Chuckling, Nerval pulled the remote away, but with a leery eye at his wife’s holstered firearm, which had brushed up against him in their exchange. “None of your false modesty, Flops—I wanna see this!”

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” This question came from the teen boy, chestnut-colored hair, ball-cap, sitting in the big leather recliner next to the couch. He had a rather sullen expression on his face as he spoke, but his question was all the same not petulant.

The Flopsy on TV looked flustered, and indeed for several seconds together she said nothing at all to the questions just asked her. At long last she giggled in a manner that must have struck anyone watching as not especially professional, steadied herself a little by the podium. Then, demurely clearing her throat, or simply hiccuping—it was hard to say which—she said, “Sorry, wha-was the quesh—. . .—un?”

The Flopsy not on TV squirmed on the couch, avoided her family’s quizzical gazes.

“Why you so . . . giggly, honey?” asked Nerval.

His wife shrugged, “Just. Really, you know—relieved!”

“Well,” the husband took this answer to heart, “we’re all just ‘really relieved’, too! I can’t believe you brought down a renegade APIS terrorist all by yourself!”

“Thanks. Can we turn it off now?”

“No way,” the daughter chimed in. “I wanna watch the whole thing so I can tell all my friends at school! You’re such, like, an awesome strong woman role-model, Flopsy!”

“Who’s nexsht?” came then the slurred question of the TV Flopsy. “Yeah-uuuuuuuh-you!” she nodded very friendly to a reporter, whose question couldn’t be heard by the at-home audience. “Tha’sh-right! A bra and (hic) panties store!” She slid her arms around on the podium, trying to settle on a pose.

“Officer Botchek—What are your plans now?” the same reporter who’d asked her what she was going to do next rephrased his question, as it had yet to be answered.

“O!” quite abruptly the police officer threw her hands up in the air and let out something between a moan and a whoop. “Mm. ’Scoos me. Firsht—I’m’unna-m’unna go shtraight home, shee my fambily, tell all ’em how much I luvvum . . .”

“Aw!” the teen in pony-tails tilted her head affectionately. “That’s sweet!”

“. . . Then I’m’unna go out an’ get reeeeeally drunk!”

“Dude!” the male teen laughed at this unexpected answer.

“Honey? Really?”

The at-home Flopsy clutched her forehead: “I-I just meant I needed to let off some steam.”

“And —” the confusion in her husband’s eyes swiftly dissipated. “And what’s wrong with that? Not like you didn’t earn the right to have a little fun! Hell, if you like, I’ll go out and get really drunk with you. The kids just turned eighteen, right? They’re adults! Anyway, they don’t need their father here to put them to bed, even if it is a school night.”

“No-no, that won’t be necessary, Nerv. I mean—I don’t feel like it anymore. Truth is, I have a headache.”

“Hardly surprising, after that crazy chase you were telling us about—sounds like something out of a movie!”

And Nerval obligingly switched off the TV.

“Aw!” the teen in pony-tails pouted in a playful way. Flopsy sighed, smiled, and stood up.

“Believe me, the rest of it’s . . .” The others waited, but the off-duty cop showed no sign she meant to finish the thought.

“Good night, Dad,” said the teen in the cap, standing up, as well.

“You’re off to bed early, Daniel,” Nerval observed.

“Marching band practice in the morning.”

“Daniel,” Nerval held his son up with that one tone of voice parents use with their kids to let them know they’re not excused yet. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Daniel looked, blushing at Flopsy.

“Uh, heheh,” he chuckled, though there was zero amusement to be read by his expression. “G-Goodnight, Flopsy.”

“Danny—call me ‘mom’!”

“Yeah—I . . .” while Daniel fumbled for words, the teen with the pony-tails hopped off the couch and interrupted:

“Well, I for one have NO problem calling the woman who saved our city from a terrible old terrorist that—G’night, MOM!”

“Goodnight, Lucy!” Little Lucy stood on tiptoe to give the cop a kiss on the forehead.

“And goodnight to you, too, Dad!” Leaning over, Lucy gave her father a peck on the head.

“Don’t be up all night on your phone!” warned the father.

“I won’t!”

“I’m serious,” and likely as he was the only one still seated, Nerval stood up, too. “I’m gonna check on you in an hour, I better not find . . .”

“Da-yad!—double-standard much?”

“Excuse me?”

“Didn’t you just, like, say me and Danny are adults now—we don’t need our daddy tucking us in every night?”

Flopsy got a visible kick out of this high-spirited girl’s challenge of her short little dad.

“You know she’s right, dear.”

“No,” Nerval shook his head. “It’s not a double-standard. It’s only a surface hypocrisy, or . . . but . . .”

“I’m serious, Dad!” and even though she was beaming with a smile and practically hopping up and down in her cute red shorts-overalls, it did seem perhaps she was. “Me and Danny are eighteen since last Sunday! When are you gonna stop treatin’ us like babies.”

The father must have found it very difficult to argue with her, particularly as she looked so exceptionally adorable that evening; for that matter, like most lawyers, in domestic affairs he probably found all appeals to logic—even the most sophistical—equally persuasive. However, he didn’t acquiesce at once, and father and daughter continued to argue, though more and more playfully. In the meantime, Daniel got a chance to air in a quick whispered aside to Flopsy the words he’d had so much trouble getting out before his sister interrupted him.

“Just wanted you to know—I-I think it’s really cool, what you did for the city,” these few words accounted for all his little message, but they worked on warming up Flopsy. She was not quite ten years older than the young man, but it might be imagined, what with his perennially sullen expression, she had come to assume he resented her marrying his dad.

Flopsy reached out and gave the boy—who despite his father’s DNA was taller than either his twin sister or she was—a vice-like and spontaneous hug. This caught the boy aback, and he blushed quite a good deal worse.

“Uh. Honey, heheh,” It was Nerval again.

“Yeah?” Flopsy yawned—she had the look of one who needed presently either a strong drink or a warm bed to pass out in.

“. . . thought I told you before, I don’t like you, uh, huggin’ the kids—or me, really—when you’re . . .” he trailed off significantly.

Flopsy smirked derisively at her spouse: “And I’ve told you before: A real cop always wears her piece.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Nerval was evidently stuck between the conviction he had a valid point to make and the feeling, by making it, he might be ruining the celebratory vibe of the night, “do you have to . . . around the house?”

“Seventy-five percent of all gun-deaths take place at home,” Flopsy observed.

“Yeah,” Nerval shook his head, “but haven’t I told you a hundred times, those are mostly self-inflicted, you know, suicides—or they’re accidental; which is precisely . . .”

“Dad,” it was Lucy. “Puh-lease don’t argue!”

“Someone’s got to protect this family,” Flopsy maintained, and she turned to Daniel, winking: “Right, Danny?”

“I don’t believe in guns,” Daniel said, much to his dad’s obvious satisfaction.

“You don’t believe in ’em? Hm. Well, that’s easily solved,” Flopsy pulled her glock out to show the teen.

“O honey, no,” Mike groaned.

“See! When I was your age,” Flopsy went on cocking the glock and doing all those speedy gun-owner tricks, releasing the bullet clip, reloading it, releasing it again, cocking the gun again, etc., presumably to show off how comfortable she was with the weapon, “my dad was taking me out every week to the shooting range. You’re going to have to learn how to fire one of these babies eventually, Danny.”

“No, he’s NOT!” interjected quite firmly here the assistant district attorney. “If he doesn’t want to fire guns, he certainly doesn’t have to!”

For his part, Daniel looked only as outwardly-sullen as before he had said those nice words to his step-mom, leading one to suspect he used that expression as a defensive shield behind which to hide his real emotions.

“He’s eighteen, Mike. When’s he ever gonna learn how to stand his ground? I mean, who’s gonna do that for him when he moves away?”

Nerval smiled bemusedly at this strange, and yet somehow typical, example of his wife’s logic: “I don’t get what you’re saying. I don’t have a gun. I’ve never had a gun. He’s been safe up till now.”

“Well, anyway, ever since you married me . . .”

“Hold up—What are you getting at? You think I can’t defend my own family?”

“There’s no reason to talk about this.”

“No-no, I want to hear what you think. You don’t think I could protect my family if I had to—do you?”

“You’re sweet . . .” Flopsy looked to the kids for some help, particularly little Lucy, who didn’t hesitate to come to her role-model’s aid.

“Dad—Lighten up!” Lucy put a joshing arm round her short father’s shoulders. “What are you—some macho-man, all of a sudden?” this humor where his manhood was concerned, unlike any of that playful type she’d offered her father earlier that evening, to all outward evidence did not strike the man as adorable.

“I assure you,” Nerval now spoke as much to his children as to Flopsy, though he was looking at his wife. “I am as much a real man as any of these guys you’ve got on the force.”

“Let’s drop it, huh?” Flopsy massaged her temples.

“You don’t—You don’t think I’m manly!”

“There’s other things besides manliness . . .”

“She’s right!” this time it was the two kids at once supporting the woman. Only Lucy divagated: “Aren’t you the one always saying women can do anything men can do, Dad?—well, what’s WRONG then with Flopsy—I mean ‘MOM’—being our protector, or whatever, like she says? Didn’t she save the whole city today? Geez, Dad! Don’t tell me that you’re one of these gender-traditional cavemen who believe only men can wear the pants . . .”

Something of his daughter’s sophistry must have struck a reluctant chord in the man: “My daughter the lawyer!” he pronounced proudly at last. “You’re right. You’re all of you right. I guess,” and he spoke directly to Flopsy again, “seeing you on TV, the hero—heheh—it made that ‘gender-traditional’, caveman part of my nature jealous, that’s all.”

“I knew it!” triumphantly called out Lucy; she hugged her father. Then, not letting a tendentious moment slip her by, she ran to her step-mom and gave her an even bigger hug, notably notwithstanding the woman’s wearing a firearm. And as she was giving this hug, probably the result of that tiny devil that lives in every woman, young or old, but which thrives for reasons unknowable on sowing discord, particularly in the most petty and banal ways imaginable, she added: “And besides: I’m sure Mom married you for a WAY better reason than any dumb-old ‘manliness’, didn’t you, Mom?”

If Flopsy had simply replied, as let us suppose the young girl had anticipated she would, by citing one or more of Nerval’s arguably marginally acceptable other characteristics—his youthfulness, for instance, his adequate sense of humor, how he rarely spat when he talked—in lieu of that maligned one, his masculinity, all might have been saved. However, rather oddly, Flopsy responded to the question not dissimilarly enough to how she’d responded to the first questions put to her by the reporters, that is, she said absolutely nothing for far too long. Nerval doubtless ascribed to this pause motives mischievous, or even contemptuous, but, if so, he was wrong about this.

Flopsy had just noted the time by the huge clock on the mantle—9:30.

“Yeah,” Nerval smiled with spiteful self-pity—“Money!”

This preemptory response of her husband finally recalled Flopsy’s wandering attentions: “You think I married you for—WHAT!”

“You tell me.” It was true; Nerval Ramensky was wealthy. It was probably true, as well, that he had always half-suspected he, a widower and father of teenage children, would never have landed so beautiful, not to say, young a spouse as Flopsy, had he been any less assuredly wealthy than he was.

“Stop it!” his daughter again.

“Yeah—do,” added Flopsy, again massaging her temples. “You’re really ruinin’ my mood.”

Nerval sighed. “Um. I’m sorry, Flops. Everybody. Tonight should be a celebration. Tell you what—why don’t I order us some sushi?”

“Axshully . . . I just remembered. I promised some of the boys I’d meet them for drinks at Biff’s, 9:00. It’s already past that.”

“Didn’t you say,” it was Daniel again, again impossible to say what he was feeling, thinking behind that facade of unimaginative teen sullenness he wore: “you had a headache?”

“Just one drink,” Flopsy explained, but not deigning the teen boy a look his way, with that subtlest of feminine tricks well intimating she was annoyed at him for holding her accountable to her earlier statement. “I only ever intended to get the one. And it’s not for me, I mean, I’d rather not go out at all. But they made me promise. You see, it’s sort of like a going away party, ’cause of now I’ve been promoted to detective. You’re welcome to come, too, Nerv, if you WANna . . .”

“No,” Nerval smiled; he pulled off what was a remarkably believable self-effacing laugh, under the circumstances: “That’s okay. I know how these work parties go. I’d only be in the way. You have a good time, though, honey, and don’t worry, I won’t wait up for you.”

“No need for you to wait up, macho-man,” Flopsy stooped to deliver her own remarkably convincing loving peck on her husband’s cheek. “I’ll be home before you turn out the light!”

SCENE FOUR: Nighttime, Biff’s Blue Bar, downtown Los Bonum.

Loud nondescript rock music filled the bar, making it virtually impossible to discern any clear talking, only a constant murmur punctuated from time to time by a burst of laughter.

Flopsy sat in the place of honor, at the bar, friends in blue all around her. She wore, besides a pointed cone party hat, a pretty expression in her eyes and a big unmistakably drunk smile. A paunchy fellow off-work cop leaned in close to her, his hand on her shoulder, whispered into her ear. For a moment she listened intently, then an outburst from an off-work cop down the bar from her elicited a raucous outburst from herself and all around her. As the outburst subsided, she whispered into the paunchy man’s ear, lay her hand on his, which was still on her shoulder. Shots were presented, and a chant broke out among her fellows as she and three others, including the paunchy man, downed the shot-glasses’ contents. A sound like of several people articulating “OH-HO!” at the same time, but with different timing, and all very loudly broke momentarily through the nauseatingly noisy music and constant, laughing murmur. A full-uniformed male cop was then shoved into Flopsy’s view. She didn’t look to recognize him. By his side, a full-uniformed female cop chewed gum, smiled on occasion, seemed mildly put off by something; both were remarkable for their relative good looks, the male cop a guy who worked out, the female voluptuous, wearing too much make-up. Flopsy looked confusedly, laughing, at her comrades on either side of her. Finally, the male cop pronounced the following words, which uncharacteristically cut through the din: “Officer Botchek—on behalf of all the men in blue, LBPD, thirty-third precinct—you have the right to remain . . . SEXY!” In a flash, he had torn his shirt and pants off, gyrating his manhood into Flopsy’s more intimate vicinity. She covered her mouth in sloppy blushing smiling surprise. A second later, the full-uniformed female cop had lost her outfit, too, to the screaming delight of all the men at the bar, and the stripper’s own strangely delighted bemusement. One of Flopsy’s coworkers—the same paunchy cop who had earlier whispered into her ear—got “motorboated” by (i.e., got his face shaked into by the tits of) the female stripper. Seeing this, and laughing her affirmation for how wonderful it all was, Flopsy did the same with her own very small breasts and to the male stripper; however, she did not, like the female stripper, take her tits out first to do it. The male stripper, a good sport, pretended to be gobsmacked by Flopsy’s silly gesture.

SCENE FIVE: Late night, Flopsy’s house.

In the otherwise dark house, a light was on in the bathroom. There followed the sound of someone pissing into a toilet. After a pause, Flopsy’s husband Nerval stood a dark silhouette in the bright parallelogram of the bathroom door. He flipped a switch, and off went the bathroom light.

Laying his head onto the pillow of his bed, he squinted. The nearby clock flashed 3:00. He sighed, closed his eyes. Then, he opened them again—the sound of loud whispering and intermittent laughter at the front door.

“Shhhhh!” shushed noisily a woman’s voice, so he could hear her clearly in the bedroom. “Or you’ll, like, ’unna wake the hubby . . .” Then he heard an unplaceable sound, followed by his wife’s trying largely unsuccessfully to stifle a burst of laughter.

Nerval winced. He vacillated a moment between rising and staying in bed. At last he got up.

Standing just the other side of the frontdoor, Nerval listened as the giggling stopped. There was a moan, a clunk, what was too obviously two people slobberily kissing.

“Honey!” Flopsy wiped her smeared wet lipstick, surprised to see her husband so suddenly at the door. “Unger’s jes’ . . . um, walkin’ me ’ome.”

“Hiya, Nerv! Can’t be too careful this late at night, huh!” Unger’s sensitive eyes betrayed his shame.

“C’mon, Flops,” Nerval sighed. “Let’s get you to bed.”

“G’night . . . my protector!” Flopsy winked flirtatiously at Unger over her shoulder.

“Whatta-I-do?” she asked her husband as he climbed into bed again.

“Forget it,” he said. She was undressing in the light of the window.

“Aw—I di’n’t hurt your (hic) feelies . . . did I?” in Flopsy’s words was detectable an indifference to any response her husband might make; it seemed to be taking her all her paired will and concentration to get her pants off.

“I said, forget —,” but Flopsy had ceased to regard him at all.

A moment later she had collapsed on the bed (she had managed only to get her pants down to her ankles) and commenced a noisy snoring. Nerval got up and finished for her undressing his wife, pulling the covers over her when he was done: “You won’t remember any of this in the morning, anyway. You never do.”

SCENE SIX: Morning, main departmental office outside the interrogation room, LBPD HQ.

Detective Flopsy Botchek—looking sharp in a new cute brown skirt-suit that showed off stellarly her posterior qualities—strutted into work just after the hour and a full day’s recuperation.

“Hey, Flopsy! Good luck today!”

Flopsy slapped hard across the face the on-duty officer who’d just cupped her lovely ass delicately with his palm.

“You EVER touch me again like that, I’ll have your badge for sexual harassment, you hear me?”

“Yeah-yeah, sure, I just thought . . .”

Detective Botchek shuffled off in a huff.

Her new partner, Marty O’Manly, awaited her at her new desk: “What was that about?”

“Pig needs to learn to keep his hands to himself!”

“Wow—Really! Unger . . ? He’s a good cop, never figured him for a . . . But I’m not saying—I mean, you DON’T have to take that sort of thing! Um. I know!—report him! Tell you what, it might be strange—I’ll report him for you, no reason you women should carry all the burden of reporting things. . .”

“Let’s just drop it.”

“Sure, if you’re okay with that—Anyway, I got some news I’m sure will cheer you up. You know the guy you chased, the one who got away—”

“He DIDn’t get away . . . He only bought himself a little time, O’Manly. Remember that!”

“All right.”

“Well—gimme the news, already!”

“Touchy-touchy,” he showed her a photo. “The surveillance footage from the underwear store he shot up got us a picture of our perp. Smalls ran it through a face-recognition program he created—say what you will, that Smalls’s a genius!”

“Smalls, the dispatch-man—a genius! Tell me, if he’s such a genius, why hasn’t he made a billion dollars yet inventing the next big app craze-sensation?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Truth be told, we didn’t have much luck with the face-recognition—the image is too blurry. I just thought it was kind of cool he created the program himself. But just to be sure—this IS your perp, isn’t it?” Flopsy examined a different photo O’Manly handed her.

“Definitely! I’d recognize him in a line-up of a million. But where’d you find this?”

“Didn’t. You could say it was a gift from the Feds. But I’ll get to that. Your perp’s name is Malthus—Percival Malthus. The photo was taken of him for ID purposes at his last place of employment, a software company up the coast. He developed code; to all appearances, a real boring guy, logged a lot of hours on video games in his spare time, ate a lot of bran. Then, two years ago, he up and leaves, no explanation, no forwarding address—nothin’. Falls completely off the radar. Six months later, out of the blue, the guy reappears.”

“Let me guess, this is where the Feds come in.”

“Bingo. He shows up in connection to a case they were building against THIS guy.” Her partner handed her way another photo.

“I’ve seen this face before. Isn’t he from Bad Town? I remember . . . They profiled him on TV!—super-rich, powerful, runs all those nightclubs?”

“Yep! That’s Darwin Lamarck.”

“What do the Feds want with HIM?”

“They wouldn’t say. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure out why they sent us the photo. My only guess is it’s on account of that program Smalls created, which uses federal databases among others to back-check against our perp’s face. When he ran the photo, it must have been detected by one or another federal agent or agency.”

“Do you think, whatever the case the Feds are building against Lamarck is, it’s APIS-related?”

“Possibly. But then, like you said, he’s Bad Town royalty, isn’t he? The Feds could want him for any number of other charges—racketeering, trafficking, tax evasion . . . You know, there was even a rumor going around a while back he’s THE Sake Sayonara!”

“Who?”

“Sake Sayonara?—the anonymous creator of the cryptocurrency Digidollars.”

“Cryptocollars—What are those?”

“You should really read the news more, Botch,” O’Manly shrugged, smirked. “Anyway, the real question is, does HE know the whereabouts of our guy Malthus?”

“Obviously. But we can’t just go to his super-huge mansion and ask him, can we?”

“No; if he knows where Malthus is, he’ll never tell us, and if he doesn’t, he’s got nothing to tell us. And what’s worse is, with all his wealth, it’ll be hard to get him to play ball by the usual methods; his lawyers are guaranteed to make our jobs difficult.”

“God-DAMNIT!” Flopsy slammed her cute little fist against the window of an adjacent office (they’d been walking around in their conversation, as is normal—to the coffee machine, a filing cabinet, that kitten poster), shaking the black blinds the other side of it.

“What is it?”

“I was THIS CLOSE to getting him!”

“Yeah. But don’t beat yourself up over it. Hell, at least you got one of them.”

“One of who?”

O’Manly smirked again his handsome, condescending smirk, which also communicated he wasn’t very intelligent: “YOU know . . .”

Flopsy continued to give her new partner a troublingly confused look.

“. . . That APIS guy you did catch! The same you had that press conference about the other day? Chief said he was an accomplice. Sure looked APIS, too—right down to the black ski mask and gray camo jumpsuit. By comparison, this Malthus guy should be working freelance! O come on —” he smiled more disingenuously this time, like a little boy who suspects his mom’s playing a prank on him, not believing his partner really didn’t remember: “I’m talking about the guy you caught during your little chase.”

“There was nothing ‘little’ about that chase!” Flopsy spoke up defensively; however, she hadn’t dropped the confused look.

Shaking his head as if to clear it of unnecessary questions: “All I know is, there’s no way WE’re getting any leads from him.”

“Who—Wait! How come?”

“I really can’t believe you don’t know this—I mean, I figured you, the super-cop, would have checked up on all this already.”

“Humor me!”

“Like all confirmed APIS perps, the guy you caught’s military property now. Chief had to give him up at once to one of those detention centers on an island where they can torture people without it being against the Constitution.”

“Riiiiight . . .”

“Chief told me, if military uncovers anything about your man Malthus during their interrogation, they’ve promised to relay it to us through him. Until then, the best leads we got are this Lamarck connection and our current suspect.”

Flopsy thought this information over, a look not so much confused as almost blank on her face.

“Well,” O’Manly checked his watch, “our suspect isn’t going to interrogate himself.”

“Suspect?”

“Jimminy Hobbes? Jesus!—I did email you a briefing. Did you read any of it?”

“Of course!” Flopsy had been previously in danger of looking permanently perplexed; she now solved this by fixing on a more deliberate facial expression. “Just remind me: what’s his connection to our perp, again?”

“An old roommate. But here’s the thing. When Malthus disappeared two years ago, he cut ties with everybody he knew. But not with this guy. We’ve got surveillance footage of the two of them on the street together—another gift from my ‘in’.”

“Remind me to send him a holiday fruit basket. Who was it, by the way, your ‘in’ with the Feds—don’t tell me!—Bailey Barnum?”

“Nice try,” the male cop was serious. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve heard of Barnum. I wouldn’t expect you to know how things actually get done around here, your first day as detective.”

“C’mon!” Flopsy brushed aside his compliment, but in truth she was flattered (she showed this by leaving her mouth open after saying “C’mon!” and looking at him with those desperate, moony eyes women get when they suspect, but can’t be sure, that they’ve just received a compliment that means the world to them). “You forget I’ve worked this precinct three years now.”

“But you’re wrong about it’s being Barnum (he only handles the Border). My ‘in’ this time was one Agent Gooly Falswell. Good guy all in all—kind’a’ weird, but, you know, he helped us out with confirming the identity of our perp, so —,” O’Manly shrugged; “I don’t hate him.”

The two entered the interrogation room where, at a green collapsible table, sat the suspect.

“Mr. Hobbes?” Flopsy began. “I’m Detective Flopsy Botchek and this is my partner, Detective O’Manly. Do you know why we’ve brought you in here today?”

“I know I didn’t do nothin’.”

“We never said you did.”

“What kind of name is ‘Flopsy’?” Mr. Hobbes suddenly asked. “You some kind’a’ bunny or shit?”

O’Manly took this as his cue to be “bad cop”: “Now, you listen up, punk!” Grabbing the punk by the front of the shirt, O’Manly leaned in really close to his face. “This could be easy, or this could be hard. We’re looking for your friend. You gonna help us find him?”

“Depends on who you lookin’ for.”

Botchek slid across the table the photo her partner had gotten from the Feds.

“Aw—my boy Percy! What he done?”

“That terrorist attack the other day downtown—you hear about it?” O’Manly had released the man’s shirt.

“Yeah, it’s all over the news. But Percy ain’t no terrorist.”

“Why’re you so sure?” Flopsy leaned in over the table pensively.

“Why you so sure he is?”

“Here’s a surveillance still from one of the shops he attacked,” she slid that across the table as well. “Look like your friend?”

“That shit’s too blurry, I can’t tell.”

“Trust me—it’s him,” Flopsy said, annoyed. “I was there. I saw him with my own eyes.”

“That’s just he said-she said. How do I know what you saw?”

Flopsy was about to say something but O’Manly interjected: “You said ‘he said-she said’—Does that mean you’ve spoken to Malthus recently, since the attack?”

“Naw, man—that’s just metaphor. I mean, who’m I supposed to believe, her or what I know about the guy myself?”

“Well,” O’Manly seemed mildly irritated, too, now. “Tell us where we can find him. If he’s not the guy—no problem, we’ll let him go.”

Mr. Hobbes shrugged. “Don’t know where he is.”

“I don’t believe you,” Flopsy stared the man down.

“What I care ’ you believe me or not?”

“You’re GONNA tell me where Malthus is—you hear me!”

“What—you think you got some magic powers, make people say things they don’t know?”

“I’ll show you magic powers!” Detective Botchek grabbed the suspect by the hair and slammed his face into the green table.

“Strictly against protocol!” her partner barked out to all appearance’ before he could consider the wisdom of doing so in front of the suspect. The moment before, he had been resting with his chin in his palm, leaning back against the wall, so that Flopsy’s abrupt recourse to violence had knocked him almost off his feet, certainly left him swaying in his stand.

Mr. Hobbes sprayed out blood from his mouth and nose: “I-I don’t know shit—I tell ya! You wanna find Malthus, go check with Mr. Lamarck—he’s the one’ld know, if anybody!”

“Why would HE know?” Detective Botchek had not observed her partner since abusing the suspect, continued to stare the bleeding man in the eyes.

“He knows where everybody in the Operation is. He’s —” the man paused as if searching for the word. “He’s, you know, the big boss!”

“The Operation—what operation?”

“I swear—that’s all I know! Malthus wouldn’t tell me no more, and I wasn’t dumb enough to ask him to.”

“And yet you’re so sure he’s not a terrorist . . ?”

“Yeah—I mean, I hear the word ‘operation’ I don’t instantly think: ‘terrorist’. Shit—I thought it was, I don’t know, like a business deal. You know, drugs or some shit like that.”

“Is Lamarck—Does he deal in drugs?”

“Man—Why don’t you ask HIM?”

SLAM! went the suspect’s face into the table again.

“Botch-EK!” hissed O’Manly to his partner; again she ignored him.

“Is Lamarck a drug dealer?”

“Y-Yeah,” the suspect was now not only bleeding but crying as well. “Not like—he’s not like big time. You know, I think it’s more o’ like a on the side for him.”

“What do you mean, ‘on the side’?”

“He don’t deal in variety, like your regular dealer, and he definitely ain’t no kingpin. He just deals a little o’ that party shit, and that’s it. I think—you know he owns a bunch o’ strip-clubs . . .”

“Yeah, so?”

“. . . The one he’s at most, where anyone goes ’ you wanna find him, is The Fixxx, with three ‘x’s, real classy place . . .” The suspect had ceased to cry but not to bleed; evidently he wasn’t unused to having his face smashed in, for he recovered from the emotional bruising of the last he’d received remarkably quickly. “I don’t blame him. If I had my own titty bar . . .”

“Thanks,” Flopsy smiled at the suspect, a mischievous, self-satisfied smile. She turned that smile to her partner. “C’mon, we got what we needed!”

SCENE SEVEN: Nighttime, Bad Town, the Fixxx.

A ravishing redhaired seductress, in a flashy-shiny mini-dress, with slits and holes cut into it so as to render the skimpy thing only the more impossibly revealing, leaned in close to her drink at the bar. If it weren’t for an out-of-place, rather WASP-ish face, one would have thought the woman shared little resemblance to hard-as-nails, much-too-driven Detective Flopsy Botchek. Pretending to sip from her mojito, the incognita whispered into a microphone concealed in the bust of her dress:

“Where the hell’s O’Manly?”

“He’s on his way,” the familiar voice of Smalls crackled through to her ear, by a tiny transceiver concealed under her big red wig. “In the meantime, anything I can do for you, hot stuff?”

“‘Hot stuff’!” Botchek smiled.

“I call ’em like I sees ’em!”

“This is ALL for the job, Smalls!”

“Maybe, but that partner of yours is one lucky guy—hubba-hubba!”

“Just because we’re going undercover as a ‘kinky couple’ does NOT mean we are one.”

“Still—being your pretend kinky husband beats hanging out in a parking lot in a windowless van, any day.”

“You got your surveillance to keep you . . . occupied. How’s the view on the camera?”

“You mind leaning back just a tad, I’ll check.”

Botchek looked around pensively, then, as though she were adjusting her hair, leaned back.

“Ooooo yeeeeeah! The view—and you can quote me on this—‘BONE-worthy’!”

Botchek laughed; the camera was located in one of two dangling stone earrings she wore: “Enjoy the view while you can—it’s the closest you’re ever going to get to the real thing. . .”

“So long as I got one hand free this is close enough for me!”

“Gross!”

“Hey!” Her partner O’Manly took the stool next to hers.

“Finally! I been sitting here, talking into my boobs, for almost ten minutes—I swear the girls who work here must think I’m either drunk or crazy.”

“Or hallucinating,” O’Manly smiled.

“What’s that supposed to . . .—O because . . ?” she looked down at her plunging, yet almost entirely flat, dress front. Flopsy cast the proverbial “shade” on her partner for so thoughtless and uninspired a joke at her cute little boobs’ expense.

She resumed: “But what took you so long?

“Sorry. Trouble with one of my mics—but I’m all set now.”

“Here, I’ll get you a drink,” she flagged down the girl behind the bar: “He’ll take a scotch and soda, and another o’ these for me!”

The bartendress—dressed in fishnets, a thong, and nothing else but two blue cone-shaped pasties on her remarkably fat, round, bobbly boobies—took the undercover cop’s empty glass and left.

“How many is that you’ve had so far?” wondered O’Manly aloud.

Flopsy smiled her mischievous smile back at him: “Just one. But we’re undercover—aren’t we? We gotta enjoy ourselves, or they’ll guess we’re not here to have fun.”

“Right. Speaking of having fun—you look . . . WOW! I’m sorry about that dumb ‘hallucinating’ comment I made; you really do look—just —”

“Not you, too!” she interrupted him. She spoke as one might to someone who’s come down with a flu, after an epidemic at the office. “I got enough of that sort of talk from Smalls and the boys back at the precinct.”

“You wore THAT to the precinct!”

“Why change twice?”

“But—I mean, that’s not what I mean . . .” the woman behind the bar returned just then with their drinks (the bar was pretty dead at the current early hour), and the cop cut himself off before he’d said anything. But when she had left, he gestured down with his eyes and made a weak motion with his hand at the skirt of Flopsy’s mini-dress, which showed off so much redundant thigh and bubble-butt cheek below the hem, the more seemingly especially now she was sitting, yielding a gracious little bit of overhang on the edge of a plush-topped bar-stool with no back to it; it all seemed an amazingly persuasive portable advertisement for a public groping. “I mean, I don’t think you had to dress up quite so . .. you know, for our first undercover assignment together.”

“But we’re s’posed to be a ‘kinky couple’, aren’t we?” and she gave her partner a look so teasing, executed in such a way (glancing the second after at the sexy sue behind the bar), it was impossible to say whether she were only teasing him thus to act the part, or for other more obscure reasons.

“Of course—but I wonder if we wouldn’t have been more convincing if you’d agreed to go plain clothes, like I suggested; haven’t you ever noticed that the most sexually experimental people, they just look like everybody else, sort of ‘hiding in plain sight’? Anyway, a woman looking like you do, coming to a place like this, might raise a few red flags . . .”

“You sure you’re not worried, looking like I do, I might raise YOURS?” Her partner stammered and blushed (for the record, he’d meant she might get kicked out by the establishment as a suspected prostitute). “And what’s wrong with this place? You heard what’s-his-name, Jobbes—it’s classy!”

“Funny!”

“O—You worry too much!” Flopsy took a big drink from her new mojito. “And you’d think I dressed like this way on purpose ’cause, like, I wan’ned to—you’ll see. You’ll see when I get results, I know wha’ I’m doin’!”

Whatever exactly she meant by this, Flopsy was incidentally wrong as concerned her partner’s suspecting her motives in selecting her current undercover costume. In truth, O’Manly had been only impressed by what he took as just another example of the super-cop’s supreme dedication to her job. It never occurred to him until she suggested it that Botchek, like a majority of women, might just like to dress up slutty for its own sake, relished essentially any excuse to do so.

“C’mon!” Flopsy tottered as she stood up fast from the bar stool, and for a moment O’Manly thought he’d have to catch her from falling; but when he didn’t have to, he chalked his first impression up to his paranoia (“I’m just nervous—she’s right—gotta calm down!”). She said: “Not used to heels—but sure match the outfit!—Wha’chya think?”

Was she deliberately taunting him, the way she looked over her shoulder like that, inviting him to stare, obviously, not merely at her heels (she had opted that night for an irrational six inches), but the length of her fine, firm and bare leg (her calf pulled taut all for to hold itself erect in that delicious shoe), till it met the smiling side-dimple of her just as near as bare ass?

He struggled to find a response, but she didn’t give him the chance, tugged him off the stool.

“Where we goin’?”

“Silly—I’m’unna order us a dance!”

Was she slurring her speech? O’Manly couldn’t be sure. The music in the place was loud; too, she might be putting on an act . . .

What really struck him, though, was that bewitchingly vibrant glow of her face—a look she was giving him so at once devil-may-care and hard-bent-determined, it was impossible to say whether she were brilliant or mentally insane—or were these the same thing, in Botchek’s case? Whatever she was, she aroused him unspeakably, her body striking him of those of all womankind the most explicitly designed for lovemaking. The day before he would have said she wasn’t even his type. He went for blondes with big tits and taller (to be fair, Flopsy was almost a foot shorter than the guy who’d been his high school’s star fullback); he had never been an “ass man”. But it wasn’t her ass itself, he thought vaguely, but only what SHE did with it! Indeed, they’d only been working together three days, and O’Manly already felt some retrospective sympathy for poor Unger, who couldn’t keep his hands to himself . . . This woman sure HAD something . . !

But the question remained unanswered in O’Manly’s brain—Was she a good cop? Her partner did on occasion have his doubts, for instance, in the interrogation room two days before, when she had beaten the suspect Jimminy Hobbes to get information, which arguably could have been gotten very easily without the abuse.

“Hey, darlin’,” after pulling O’Manly away from the bar and toward the stage with the nominal dancing girl on it, Flopsy had made her way alone up to the stage. “Wanna give my (heehee) husband a dance?”

The woman scoped the place out. She was of that sort of almond-skinned and hazel-eyed beauty with an amazing capacity for what in most should appear mutually exclusive states of being, but in her spoke up in exactly the same language—boredom and arousal. That is, she seemed less to dance, than to “laze” on the pole behind her, and this “lazing” was, all the same, no less erotic, and potently, than something more flaunting, precisely as, unlike some women’s flaunting, there was detectable in it nothing the least bit acted at the same time it WAS aroused, or at least it would be impossible by any known science to ever absolutely prove it wasn’t, for how could the woman herself say it wasn’t?; she couldn’t.

Otherwise she had straight-cut bangs and straight, jet-black hair, which came to a sort of point at the cheeks and seemed especially easy for her to toss in front of her face, as she was kicking and writhing about and only as befits one of her profession; but she did seem to have a special preference for hiding her face behind her hair. She wore a garter, shiny green booty-shorts, and a matching bustier, which incidentally did nothing at all to conceal, but merely pushed from below into greater naked prominence, two enormous naked boobs. The astute reader, like Detective Flopsy, might have broken a case wide open at such glaring tip-offs. In fact, the Fixxx specialized in the exhibition of women of specifically the especially bosomy variety.

“Sure,” the dancer shrugged. “No one else here.” There was in fact no end of people—people whose express purpose on this earth was not to shake their bodies and contrive masterful ways of removing their clothing—moving about the establishment, mostly in the corners, along the walls, away from the stage, in and out of back rooms, in and out of the building, in general. However, none of them was Darwin Lamarck. “This your husband?”

Flopsy nodded and then winked at O’Manly, who gave his partner such a grateful “What did I do to deserve such riches!” look, she broke out laughing.

The dancer began her slow, surrendering dance before O’Manly. Laying her hands on his legs, she switched off bouncing her boobs up and down and swinging her ass side to side. Then, she flipped her hair out of her face and rotated in a turgid, volatile corkscrew, her butt twitching like a dreaming dog in O’Manly’s lap.

The music in the place was electronic, fast, almost to the point of coercive idiocy (think, middle school); the dancer was oblivious to it. Her dance came from within her, and yet it was somehow the more alluringly suggestible, its languorous passion, because it refused to set time to an outside beat. At first, O’Manly was too bowled over by the boobs of the slut in his lap to consider his partner or what the two of them and the stripper were even supposed to be doing at this bar that evening. It was as though, in the moment, a man, he believed his duty first and foremost at a tit-bar to see tits. He was in fact so well immersed in his undercover role, he even had a chub in his pants by this point. But he did presently remember Detective Botchek’s being across the table from him, watching him, and he grew self-aware. It was when he looked her way that he was wont to recall that ugly scene in the interrogation room, to question—though for wholly different reasons—his partner’s qualifications.

It wasn’t that his partner was DOING anything questionable; certainly, she hadn’t reached out and slammed the stripper’s face into the table yet, that was nice.

But something about Flopsy led O’Manly to question, for a time, if she, by chance, weren’t entirely responsible. Because she looked almost as though she were hypnotized!—hypnotized by that gyring sphynx in his lap. As a workaday cop, and now detective, O’Manly had of course been to hundreds upon hundreds of strip-joints. He had had a few lap-dances. He had interviewed or booked thousands upon thousands of exceptional hookers. He knew a few had a heart of gold. He was, in short, long familiar with the lives of sex workers, as well as with the typical reactions they provoked, generally from men. He’d seen men lose everything to ladies of easy virtue, their livelihoods, their families, their subscriptions to reputable bi-monthly news magazines. But he had seen them, for all their sometimes unmasculine fawning admiration while in the thrall to eros, never look anything like how his partner looked right now.

She was leaned back a little in the booth, the other side of the table from him, reclining, almost in homage of the same “lazing” sensuality the dancer commanded in spades. Her look was enrapt, her eyes seemingly stuck on the dancer. But what was weirder than where she pointed them, was what her eyes held, as it were, inside them—for those were not the eyes of a cop O’Manly saw; nor were they, strictly speaking, the eyes of his partner. That is to say, his partner seemed to have effectively erased herself from her eyes; she seemed no longer to be the woman watching, but to have become the woman she watched—and this is effectively what he meant when he considered her “hypnotized”, that she had swapped her will out for that of another. All this to say, while it did cause him some concern about his partner’s professional legitimacy, it also excited him terribly—he didn’t know what might happen that evening, but his hopes, like his worries, were beginning to outstrip his wildest expectations.

“You’re cute,” the dancer breathed at him, the words pronounced not so much, strangely, as a compliment, but as an indifferent observation.

Flopsy began to move, slow, in keeping with her will being—if her partner’s estimation was correct—synonymous with that of the slow dancer. The dancer faced the “husband”, her hand resting dispassionately on the back of his head, as her belly swayed tangibly enough to threaten his drink on the table—back and forth, but all in a way to make her boobs bounce as light as can be off the top of his head. Flopsy, reaching over the table with the wiry grace of a lemur, lay her hand on the stripper’s butt, a part of the butt-cheek, to be more exact, which revealed itself a bit of pudge despite her tight green shorts. The detective did little more than touch the woman here, but an evident effect it did have on the dancer; she who had only been performing her trademark move, “boob-bounce-off-the-sitting-man’s-head”, that same look in her eye as easily evincing eroticism as the most inveterate apathy, when—for whatever reason—the unexpected touch of Flopsy’s hand elicited a sudden loosening up (she could hardly have been said to be “uptight” before that) and a swift turning of her head by the dancer.

The look in the dancer’s eye did not change; it’s possible, for women of a certain stamp, this look is the end-point of all emotional expression, being as it is so democratic—that most feminine of governing principles—amenable to motherhood, whoredom or endless slogging service of any other sort. But her expression did change, though subtly. She stuck her bottom lip out more and seemed strangely almost sad. Never ceasing in her dance, the stripper reached the hand that was not on O’Manly’s head out toward the outstretching Flopsy. Her hand itself danced, as its fingers came to brush against Flopsy’s cheek, to tweeze Flopsy’s chin, never fully stopping but always slow-slow-slow, to grab Flopsy’s hand, to squeeze it and push it all the harder into her ass, as if to say—“It’s yours; but you gotta OWN it!”

“Less getta private room . . .” Flopsy whispered to the dancer.

“I’ll be right back,” the dancer shuffled away.

“What are you doing!” O’Manly hissed to his partner. In reply or because she couldn’t help herself, Flopsy gasped in a way hard to describe; then, less controllably, she giggled, her eyes trained on the retreating stripper.

O’Manly felt too excited to feel too disappointed at the discovery he felt then inclined to make, that, in short, his partner was a nymphomaniac. In his present state of mind—or perhaps “out of it”—he wondered: “Is anything so wrong with her, in particular, being a nymphomaniac?”

“Look—quick!” Flopsy pointed furtively to a door lit by a single bright light. O’Manly, confused, looked. The door did seem to be important; it was red and, as already mentioned, lit by a light.

“Lamarck’s there—I KNOW it!” and Flopsy’s expression grew at once suffused again; her eyelids sagging, she practically purred: “But if we wanna lock on HIS movements . . . Mmmm, less start by watching HERS!” She stood to greet the just returning dancer.

O’Manly did not quite conceive the plan his partner was concocting; rather, it comforted him a great deal she apparently was concocting any. In case it’s not obvious, Detective O’Manly was one of those “either-or” types of masculine ho-hums, who only takes charge himself when he sees none about him already persuasively doing so. He felt, of course, a pang of guilt for having the moment before suspected his partner was just a slut, and not a cop, too.

Before reaching the private room, Flopsy again whispered to O’Manly: “Look!” The red door was opened from within to admit a man. She recognized the man doing the admitting—“Lamarck!”

“And him . . !”

“Who’s he?”

“That’s my ‘in’, that’s Falswell!”

“Do you guys still want the private dance, or what?”

O’Manly looked questioningly at his partner: Did they?

“You go,” Flopsy smiled first at O’Manly, then at the stripper. “Only be a sec. Jus’ gonna powder my nose . . .”

Yes!, O’Manly thought with a mollified nod to his departing partner: Flopsy’s a good cop—a super-cop! He was ready to believe all the hype now; he’d been a tough sell at first, and for good enough reason—for he was a good cop, too, and her methods WERE unorthodox. But he no longer doubted . . !

Flopsy passed into the hall to the bathrooms, and as soon as she had reached the part of it where she was no longer visible to anyone in the rest of the bar, she pulled herself against the wall. She looked both extraordinarily nervous—breathing in a way to calm her nerves—as well as excited—she couldn’t suppress a timid smile.

“Smalls!” she whispered into her chest.

“Just a moment, I . . .” she heard amid the crackle an unusual clunk and then: “Uh!—Uh!—Uh!—Uh!”

Flopsy squinted from how loud the man had screamed through the mic into her ear.

“That’s better,” Smalls resumed. “Jesus, Botch—that thing with that dancer you just did with the boobs and the butt and your hand and your butt—Woooh!”

“Ya’ got my back, Smalls?”

“Anytime you want, hot stuff!”

“And the camera—still works?”

A groan: “You have to ask?”

Botchek stifled a nervous giggle.

“But what’s this about? I admit I got a little, er, distracted a while back. You got something?”

“Behind that door,” she turned her ear towards it, the better for Smalls to see—“Positive ID on Lamarck. Goin’ in for a closer look.”

There was silence on the other side. Finally, Smalls spoke up and for once in a non-jokey tone, “Why not let O’Manly handle this one, Botch? If they catch ya’ snoopin’ around . . . I’m just sayin’, Lamarck hasn’t got a reputation as a softy.”

“Don’ worry, Smalls. ’ I get caught, I’ll jes’ give ’em my best dumb bimbo—y’know, like: ‘This the bathroom (teehee)?’”

“That only works in the movies.”

“Really? Works on ya’ guys at the precinct all the time!”

“Whattayamean?”

She adopted the bimbo voice again, which, not to belabor a point, wasn’t all that dissimilar from her regular voice: “ ‘Can one o’ ya’ guys, like, cover my shift this Friday—pretty please! I promise I’ll, like, totally make it UP . . .’”

“Heheh—You’re one of a kind, Botch! But if, as usual, I can’t talk you out of putting your life on the line for your job—I hate to say this—you better cut your mic and camera before moving in. If Lamarck is as big-time as he’s made out to be, I wouldn’t be surprised he’s got his private office rigged up with the latest in surveillance jammers, the F-5000. Thing with those is, not only do they knock out any active gear you’re wearing, they produce a high-pitched screeching sound, too, alerting everyone in a half mile radius that someone’s wired.”

“Gosh!”

“I’ll give you five minutes dead air time, Botch—If I don’t hear back from you in five minutes, I’ll assume the worst and send in the backup. Good luck!”

Flopsy dutifully switched off the remote transceiver with what looked little more than a soft brush of her bust-line; she then did the same to the camera by twisting the dangling stone in her right ear-ring.

It was impossible to hide any approach she made to the red door—the light above it meant it was more observable from anywhere in the place than virtually any other spot, with the exception of the stage. But business was picking up in the Fixxx. Flopsy had only to hope all would overlook yet another slutty-dressed ambulator in the offing. That as ever unexpected smile playing at her lip, Detective Botchek stepped close to the red door. She leaned in to it and listened.

“. . . so we got a deal or what?”

“The whole Operation’s in danger, Lamarck. You’re latest flub up has put all our plans in jeopardy. Your guy was only supposed to create a minor stir, something to gin up a little anti-immigrant fever and calls for toughening up our military.”

“I haven’t heard much else, in the wake of the ‘attack’. Haven’t you got what you wanted?”

“Yeah, but it’s come at the price of more scrutiny. LBPD—those idiots who are so notoriously stupid they can’t see how corruption is their sole inspiration—they’re looking for you!”

“Technically, you said they were looking for Malthus. But, at any rate, aren’t I the one who told you to feed them the photos and information about him? In fact, I’ve been expecting them to stop in. I wonder, what could be taking them . . ?”

“I don’t get it. Why do it; what’s your game, Lamarck?”

“It’s not that complicated, but if you haven’t figured it out, I’ll spare you the revelation—for your own protection, of course. The ignorant are innocent.”

“True enough. All I need to know is whether you’re thinking of going it alone; are you?”

“Mr. Falswell, our relations with your Agency are as assured as ever. My associates and I have nothing to gain by cutting ties.”

“And don’t I know it! You’re nothing without me, Lamarck. I advise you remember that.”

“And I advise you remember the offer I just made you. Deal or no deal?”

“. . . Deal.”

Flopsy leaned into the door a teensy bit more—It was unlocked. She peeked in.

“Gotcha!” Flopsy whispered to herself, her smile widening. With barely a sound, she pulled her skirt up, withdrew the small gun she had concealed very cleverly in her butt-crack.

“Very good,” Darwin Lamarck was just saying to his guest. “I trust we’ll see you at this weekend’s retreat . . .”

“Freeze!” Flopsy stumbled into the room (damn heels!).

“And what a pretty undercover detective we have interrupting us this evening!” Mr. Lamarck smiled pleasantly at Flopsy.

He was standing up behind a desk, a big cup of liquor in his hand.

“Don’ any ’ you move!” she waved her small gun to indicate each of the three people presently in the office with her. She must have felt a little off kilter after her stumble, or so any would conclude who saw how wildly she carried off this simple gesture of waving her gun.

“Do you know who I am?” groused Falswell, looking from Flopsy to Lamarck to Flopsy. “Who does she think she is? A cop? Do you have a warrant, to come snooping in here?”

“It’s all right, Falswell, detective—Everybody,” placidly spoke the billionaire bar owner. “You see, no one’s moving; there’s no need to shoot. Now, tell me, What can I do for you this evening? Was there something else you and your partner desired of my establishment, I mean, other than to fuck one of my dancers?” As he said this, and despite his claim that no one was moving, Lamarck’s arms, which had raised automatically at the sight of the gun, lowered slowly back down to the desk.

“Save it, Lamarck!” commanded Flopsy. Her right eyelid was twitching. She pointed her small gun at the third figure in the room: “Percival Malthus, you’re underdressed!”

“Underdressed?” Falswell found everything about this interruption very peculiar. “What is she, Darwin, some kind of joke—is this one of your dancers pretending . . ? I demand to know what’s going on!”

“Under ’rest! Under ’rest!” Flopsy corrected herself. She had begun to sweat a lot more than usual.

In a corner of Lamarck’s office, “hiding in plain sight”, as it were, sat the very perp she was after.

Malthus raised his hands and obligingly got up from his seat. Flopsy paused a moment, either blanking on what to do next or on how to do it. Then, a huge cloud of white smoke less filled the room than materialized instantaneously everywhere in it. She coughed. Without thinking, she fired a shot into the asphyxiating cloud surrounding her. The crush of a body falling into hers took her to the floor and made her drop her small gun.

Someone grabbed her by the head, tried to pull her up, but only tore her wig off.

The mix of so intense opposing impressions, victory and defeat, must have left Flopsy on the floor of the smoke-filled office, winded in more ways than one. She climbed unsteadily to her knees and crawled out of the room. There was surprisingly less commotion in the bar than anyone might have expected who had just seen and heard all that had occurred in the room behind the red door. But the music in the place was very loud, and it is always hard to persuade discretionary bystanders to pay attention even to blaring events in their periphery when on their laps dance the naked tits or bums of beautiful sluts.

Her three suspects nowhere to be seen, Flopsy staggered to center stage.

“Yeah, baby—take it off!” The annoying man who shouted this into her crotch, grabbing her ass while he was about it, received a prompt kick in the face. His womanish shrieking brought the music and dancing to a stop; what seemed a nation turned its lonely eyes to Flopsy.

“Ev’body freeze! I’m (PANT!) LBB-PD—You’re ALL under ’rest! Or—Wait!—like . . . ’ least wan’ned fer—fer ques-shuns!”

Just as the crowd had remained fairly calm in the wake of the gunshot and commotion in the office of the red door, so, too, now in the wake of Flopsy’s slurry announcement, they all lost their shit. Shouting it was a raid, everyone ran for the main door out.

“Oops,” said Flopsy. She ran to the private rooms in the back.

“O—jeeezus! I didn’t know you could do that with tits!”

“O’Manly!” Botchek barked into the private room. “Your gun—NOW!”

The kneeling stripper with the almond skin currently performing her same trademark move (only this time to the sitting man’s other head), looked bemusedly, if only slightly less bored, at the instigator of the crude interruption.

“What happened to your hair?” asked the stripper. The alluring red tresses of the sex-pot had gotten swapped out magically for the frizzy brown ones of a workaday woman.

O’Manly was up the second he heard his partner’s voice, though notably his pants weren’t, the stripper on top of them.

“Here!” and he tossed his partner the gun. Despite the urgency of her task at hand, Flopsy was waylaid by the sight of O’Manly’s dangling manhood; she made an unprintable sound with her lips to convey what must have been her disappointment at finding out how tiny it was.

Gun in hand, back in the bar, Flopsy fired several shots in the air, doubtless in hopes of calming the chaos. Sadly, in doing so, she only further fueled the general panic.

Escaping patrons blocked the only discernible exit. She pumped three rounds into a front-facing window; it shattered. Performing a daring, if teetering, vault out of it, she landed in a somersault in the parking lot. The lot proved, if anything, in greater chaos than the bar, cars blocking each other in as every driver tried simultaneously to leave the scene of the postulated bust. Not helping at all were a number of plainclothes policemen—the aforementioned backup—issuing arrests right and left and in general just adding to the sense of panicked confusion.

Perhaps it was an effect of the fresh air, her sudden leap-and-roll, or all the adrenaline-inducing events of the last five minutes, but Flopsy, by her bleary nodding gaze, seemed to be seeing all around her in triples! As best they could her eyes fixed on a distant point.

“Forget it, Botch,” Smalls remarked (he had been standing just outside the entrance, waiting for a gap in the people exiting, so he might get in). Flopsy, gun raised, one eye closed, only presumably hesitated over which of the escaping black limos to shoot first.

“ ’S Lamarck! I know ’ is!”

“You’ll never hit him now—too far. We’re better off checking inside—Someone might be hurt; I heard gunshots . . .” Probably observing his words had no impact on the unsteady detective, Smalls sighed, lay a hand on Flopsy’s sexy little shoulder: “It’s Bad Town, Botch. Let him go.”

Botchek sneered defiantly as she fired one, two, three times: “I allays ge’ m’man!”

SCENE EIGHT: Daytime, LBPD HQ, office of Commissioner Klunker.

“O’Manleeeee!”

“I’m reeeeeal sorry, sir.”

The commissioner turned to Botchek, still in her slut-dress of the night before. All three in the commissioner’s office looked exhausted, the detectives because they had gotten no sleep, and the commissioner because alcoholism drained him of any redundant energy. But then again, alcohol as often as not gave it back to him, too.

“Here, have a drink,” he handed Flopsy the liquor he was holding. “Yous a detective now; you earned yo’self the right to drink straight from the flask.”

“Uh,” Flopsy looked at the flask timidly.

“And YOU!” he returned to O’Manly. “You call yo’self a cop! What were you thinkin! Your partner’s out there shootin’ the whole goddamn titty joint to a bunch o’ gapin’ holes, while you gettin’ yo’ balls sucked on by some hustlin’ floozy!”

“Sorry, sir—It’ll never happen again, sir!”

“Yo’ damn right it’ll never happen again. Yo’ OFF the Malthus case!”

Detectives O’Manly and Botchek were both understandably upset at this news, but Botchek noticeably more so.

“But sir—you can’t—not now—we got a lead!”

“I don’t care ’ you got a map to his goddamn man-cave—you off the mother-flippin’ case! Hear me!”

“Buy why!” Botchek’s face flushed red; her eyes glistened; she had basically the same distraught look and tone of a teen girl refused her phone privileges. “ ’S not fair. I—I—No one was killed. There was barely even any property damage this time . . .”

“A blowed-up limo,” grumbled Klunker. “That don’t count?”

“But . . . What’s that compared to getting a vicious terrorist off the streets, sir? It’s not like you think: Lamarck—Smalfish—they’re in cahoots!”

“Naw—it’s like this —” Who can say what it was, whether he had more respect for the female officer or just liked her better, but his tone always softened when he spoke to Botchek, whereas, even when he had no reason to be angry with him, his tone was fairly curt with O’Manly: “That limo you gone an’ shot ’n’ it flipped over—that warn’t Lamarck’s limo, like you been guessin’ all along it was.”

“It warn’t? Then, whose?”

“I just got news from the man hisself before you two arrived—that limo belonged to Gooly Falswell.”

“What!”

“Thankfully, he wasn’t killed. There is gonna has to be a little what they call reconstruction surgery on his face on account he lost his nose in the resulting explosion. Now, that ain’t nothin’ to sniff at, but it ain’t the end o’ the world, neither. In fact, Falswell been real understandin’ ’bout the whole mix-up. If I was you I’d send him ‘get well soon’ cards out yo’ asses and start ’pologizin’ those same sorry asses off to him. You do know if he wanted to, he could have either of you both fired? I already ’pologized on behalf of the entire Department. Least I could do, seein’ he ain’t even askin’ the Department to pay for his medical, says mistakes bound to happen sometimes in the line o’ duty—mighty reasonable, you ask me . . .”

“But-But,” Botchek pleaded, “I-I saw him, sir—H-He was taking a BRIBE, sir! He was fleeing arrest!”

“Got proof?”

“I, er . . ., I would’a, but I turned off surveillance . . .”

“Aw, hell, Botch—being vigilante’s fine every once in a ways, but everything’s got a time and place. Yeah, he’s crooked; fact is, Feds KNOW he’s crooked; from what I’m told, they only keeping him on for his Underworld connections. Now, maybe what I’s told is bullshit; maybe they keepin’ him on to save face ’n’ avoid scandal. Point is—it ain’t up to you and it ain’t up to me to know. It’s like this, Botch: You’ll never catch yo’ perp going after crooked feds. Look all what it’s got ya’ thus far. Because o’ last night, Feds is tellin’ us, from now on, we gotta stay out of Bad Town altogether.”

“You’re not going to listen to them, sir?”

“Like hell I ain’t! [Grunt!] I want to keep my job, just like anybody. And that means, starting today, unless he crosses over into Good Town, Lamarck’s off limits, too. ’N’ just to reiterate, you’re both off the Malthus investigation, pure and simple.”

“Maybe for you, Chief, but not . . .”

“That’s IT! You’re dismissed.”

Flopsy unconsciously took a step towards the door, paused abruptly. “But sir . . .”

“Dismissed!”

Looking like she was about to start bawling her eyes out, Flopsy ran out of the commissioner’s office, setting the blinds on the door’s window a-rattle as she slammed the door behind her.

“Why you still here?”

“With all due respect, sir,” O’Manly began. “I’ve been thinking, maybe it was a mistake, promoting Botchek to detective. She’s kind of a . . . live wire, sir.”

“No shit! But what choice did I have, after that last little disaster she orchestrated? My promotin’ her was the only thing saved this Department’s reputation.”

“I thought she was promoted because of that APIS guy she caught—the one you told the news stations was a top man?”

“Guy’s a child molester. [Grunt!] We dressed him up in an APIS jumpsuit, told him we’d let his brother off—also arrested for diddlin’ kids—he confess to an accomplice of APIS charge. It’s a good thing he agreed, too, ’cause otherwise, I could’a’ spinned it anyway I wanted, Botch’s chase o’ the other day would’a’ looked the holy mother of a wild goose.”

“So that’s why she didn’t . . !”

Without knocking, Detective Botchek re-entered the office. The chief gave O’Manly a significant look that read “We keep this between you and me!”

“I’ve come to a decision, sir,” Botchek’s eyes were a little red, but no longer looked about to cry.

“I’m listenin’.”

“I’m going on a temporary leave of absence!”

“You pregnant?”

“No sir.”

“[Grunt!] When and for how long?”

“Starting now, sir! I don’t know how long.”

“Indefinite . . .” He laughed. “Fine! [Grunt!] You’ve been working too hard as is, Botch. All right, yous dismissed, ’n’ I mean it this time, the two o’ ya’.”

On their way out, O’Manly pulled Flopsy aside: “You don’t have to do this! I mean, you say you’re the one always gets your man—then why, when he gets away from you, you turn around and quit? Botch, you don’t need a vacation, you just need to go back to doing what you’re good at. You’re a super-cop, sure, but detective work just isn’t your thing. It’s too boring—gathering clues, undercover work, um, what’s that one word? Reconna-something? Anyway, I’ll have you know I was talkin’ to the Chief back there, just him and me. We both thought it’d be a great idea if you went back to working your old beat. And I bet, you did that, you could still hunt for Malthus. I mean, you’d have to do it on the DL, but . . .” O’Manly grew aware his interlocutor wasn’t listening to him. She stared off into the distance—“Man, she must be wiped out!” he thought. Her eyes were really glassy. He looked a little guilty trying to pressure her right that second about what amounted to accepting a voluntary “demotion”. But then, maybe, he remembered that little noise she had made with her lips, the night before, when his pants were down . . .

“I got it! Go ahead and take the leave of absence, but when you come back . . . Um. Botch? Botch?”

“You’re wrong, O’Manly,” although she hadn’t ceased to stare off into space, she revealed in answering him she had heard at least some of what he said. “I’m not taking a leave of absence so I can quit the case; I’m taking it so I can get back on it! I’m gonna catch Malthus, if I have to go undercover at every strip-bar in Bad Town to do it!”

O’Manly was stunned: “You’re crazy!”

“Why—because I give a damn?”

“No, obviously because you’re going against Chief’s orders, not to mention what you’re suggesting is probably against the law—I mean, I don’t know how far you intend to go, but there are a lot of limits to the rights of civilian law enforcers, limits that you as a detective—or even better, a police officer—just wouldn’t have to worry about.”

“You’re one to talk about following orders and not breaking the law. That little tug-and-suck with the dancer last night your idea of good detective work?”

“Look—I’m no angel, but I know how to do my job, and-and I’m a good detective, too! At the end of the day, you just—you gotta follow orders, Botch, it’s as simple as that!”

“What I expected you to say! Follow orders, let the perp escape, it’s all okay, so long as your tiny dick gets wrapped inside a big set of melons, ’m I right?”

“If need be —” O’Manly cringed visibly at this affirmation of his plausible worst fear, that she indeed thought his dick “tiny”, “b-but this isn’t a one-person show, Botch. It’s a team effort, and why I don’t think you’re cut out for being a detective. You got to know how to work on a team.”

“My methods may be unorthodox, but at least I get results!”

He looked honestly confused: “Blowing up Falswell is ‘results’?”

“I KNEW you’d bring that up. That’s just like you! Asshole!”

She almost stormed off then, but he stood in her way, and whether it was severe fatigue or the shot of hard-stuff she’d had in the commish’s office had left her unsteady, his merely stepping in front of her was enough on its own to hinder her immediate getting away. “Botch, can’t you see? This isn’t about me—it’s about you. I just don’t want to see you get hurt. It’s for your own good. If anything happened to you . . .”

She looked up at him sullenly: “ ’S simple: You either help me or you ’ outta my way.”

“I . . . Sorry—you’re on your own, Botch!” . . .

She smiled derisively at him, then stumbled out of the office.

SCENE NINE: Afternoon, kitchen, Botchek’s beautiful suburban home.

“That sounds like an awful idea, honey,” Nerval said, a bottle of beer in his hand. He had sucked his lips in before talking, in that one way people do when they hope to break bad news to those especially inapt to handle the receiving of bad news. His wife merely smiled very becomingly back at him.

Flopsy’s smile has been mentioned several times in passing, particularly, her mischievous smirk. But these fleeting glimpses have failed to render her smile in its temporal fullness. Perhaps how wide and uncharacteristically flat her upper lip was, how plump and uncharacteristically narrowly stuck out her lower lip, had something to do with how the two lips together gave the girl dimples without her having to smile. Such an expressive mouth conveyed that she contemplated things, made mischief her default mode; maybe contemplation, when observed from without, always resembles mischief, or maybe it takes a contemplative person’s being a peculiarly attractive woman. At any rate, though thoroughly piquing, her smile wasn’t of all seasons; for instance, it never was kindly, and whether or not this was a result of the woman’s character, or merely a side-effect of possessing such an inherently mischievous smile, who knows? It was always—mischievous or no—an essentially heartless smile, which of course did nothing to mitigate its becomingness.

Although her husband was relieved by the smile, he didn’t for a second (he knew her well) mistake it for one indicating a concession to his point of view; he knew it all too well as her patronizing smile.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Flops?” He asked this question upon realizing that telling her in explicit terms just how awful he thought her plan, as she had outlined it to him, was would in no way discourage her from following it through.

“Don’t you start with me, too!”

“I’m just worried about you; and . . . you’re sure what you’re suggesting isn’t against the law?”

“You sound just like O’Manly.”

“Did you ever stop to consider if he’s right?”

“I don’t care if he’s right!” petulantly. “I always get my man!”

“. . . I know you like saying that, honey. And I know I can’t stop you if you’re mind’s made up—I wouldn’t want to. I’m on your side. I just want to know you’re going to be careful. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t know . . .”

“You’re sweet,” these words, which echoed those same she had spoken the night after her big promotion, recalled to his mind the argument they’d had that night, and so struck him, despite their benignant appearance, as in one way or another insulting his masculinity. He dropped his eyes and rapped his knuckles on the wood countertop. “Of course I’ll be careful,” she kissed him on the nose. “There’s something else . . .”

“O . . ?”

“I can’t pursue my perp as ‘Flopsy Botchek’ anymore. He and his boss will be on the lookout for me, after the media attention I got from the big chase. If either of them finds out I’m snooping around, he could come after you and the kids.”

“What are you suggesting?”

She took a deep breath: “I’m going to have to go ‘deep cover’.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’ll need an alias, a fake driver’s license, a Bad Town apartment.”

“[sigh.] All right.”

She added hastily, as if impatiently: “I mean, of course, I’ll need YOU to get all those things for me.”

“Yes. Yes—I figured that—I have a connection through the DA’s office—Consider it done.”

“And . . .”

“O god, there’s more? Wait—Don’t tell me—you’re going to need some sort of ungodly, huge guns!”

She smiled, “You COULD say that, yes.”

“Hrm! What is it—not a bazooka?”

“Two!”

He groaned so pathetically it was almost a joke. It made her laugh.

“Nerv-honey, if I’m going to get close to my perp, I’m going to HAVE to gain access to his boss’s inner-circle, all the while disguising myself in such a way he will never recognize me in a million years.”

“I’m not following. Where’s this guy’s boss—Who is he?”

“He’s . . . a businessman of sorts. Anyway, he’s most often at one or the other of these little places he owns in Bad Town . . .”

“Little places? What do you mean, like restaurants, laundromats?”

“They serve drinks . . .” she stalled.

“Ah! He owns bars.”

“Yeah. Um. Only, the waitresses who work at these bars, they all have one, er, TWO things in common. Heee! They all of them have the same, certain . . . hm, assets.”

“What? You need new clothes?”

“No. I understand they provide those for you—that is, the few of them they require you to wear.”

Something similar to the reality of what she was suggesting must have finally hit home to Nerval: “O Jesus fucking Christ—Flopsy—my wife—what are you DOING! Are you ACTUALLY thinking of going undercover as a-a . . !”

“You think I’m looking forward to it?”

“ABSOLUTELY NOT—You’re not doing it! No!” waving arms desperately. “NO! No wife of mine . . . The mother of my children . . !”

“Step-mother. But calm down—You want the kids to hear?”

He grew quiet, which proved surprisingly worse for both of them, for then he positively glared at Flopsy, and by looking singularly helpless under his glare, she made him, in turn, look sad. Her expression at this impasse was interesting: it implied she wondered if really she hadn’t crossed a line in their relationship, if really he wouldn’t go so far as to break things off between them—she looked oddly of an instant actually afraid of the short guy. One second more of that glare and perhaps she would have even given up her stupid plan . . . But then, just like that, his look of anger turned to one of hopelessness: “It doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You’re going through with this regardless, aren’t you?”

She nodded, suddenly much more obviously confident in herself than she had been but the moment before. “Either help me or get out of my way!”

She had said the same words to her partner, but when she said them to Nerval, her husband, it came with an obvious unpleasant bonus of having to watch his heart break; she added, more pleadingly: “I gotta do this, Nerv! Please. Understand.”

“Okay . . . I—I understand . . .”

“Wonderful! Then that brings me back to that last thing I mentioned,” she twirled her finger coyly into the countertop, swinging her hips behind her in much the same jerky way she did her lovely finger: “you know, that last thing I said I’m going to need you to get me . . ?”

“The ‘two bazookas’?”

With a coy bite of her bottom lip, Flopsy nodded.

Nerval’s ire flared up again: “What—What on earth! What are you suggesting! What kind of example is that for the kids, if they’re mom . . ?”

“The best kind!” she interrupted. “Years from now, don’t you think they’ll look back with pride on their stepmom who did EVERYTHING she could to catch her perp! Who went after the bad guy NO MATTER what! Besides, honey, I promise—once I catch my guy, I’ll get ’em back small again, just like you like ’em!” She indicated her chest to bring home the point.

SCENE TEN: A doctor’s waiting room.

“If you’re ready, Mrs. Botchek, Dr. Nippers will see you now.”

“Don’t worry!” Flopsy squeezed Nerval’s hand assuringly. “Everything’s gonna be fine!”

“I know. I’m not worried. Honey—Good luck,” by how all in all supportively he managed to say the words, Nerval Ramensky showed how much, at heart, he adored his wife, even when he disagreed completely with every aspect of her current plan.

Flopsy looked over her shoulder anxiously at the attending nurse, much the same nervous smile on her face as she’d worn that night of The Fixxx undercover effort, when she was about to snoop outside the red door. She gave her husband one last big hug and a desperate quick little peck on the forehead. Then, she turned and followed the nurse out of the waiting room.

As he sat down again to wait, an extraordinarily plain-looking woman with ridiculously fake yet practicable boobs (particularly about how she carried them, as though at last she had something to carry) walked into a doctor’s office. Nerval tried well to distract himself with a magazine.

“Mrs. Fluffer—How lovely to see you. Did you have an appointment with Dr. Nipper today?”

“No,” said the very plain woman. “I just took the bandages off, and the doctor said if I liked I could stop by and he’d take a look at them just to see if they’re, you know, settling right and everything.”

“Certainly. Feel free to have a seat and wait. It’ll be a little bit. The doctor’s just gone into surgery, but you know how quick these operations go these days. I swear, it’s a miracle. When the doctor did mine—let’s see, this was back almost . . . What? Twenty years ago? O! Where does the time go! ANYway, back then the operation took several hours and the bandages stayed on for several months afterwards!”

The patient shook her head in polite disbelief.

“But tell me—how are yours working out? As good as you hoped?”

“O MUCH better!” the patient blushed with pride. “There is one little problem, though.”

“O?”

“It’s my husband. He never wanted me to get them, but I insisted—ever since I was a little girl it was my dream to have really weirdly big boobs, but he just wouldn’t understand. He said no way. And he was real pig-headed about it too, that got to me. I mean, it’s MY body. So ANYway, eventually I decided—you know what, it IS my body, like everybody else on the internet keeps telling me it is, and I’ll get them if I WANT to.”

“And good for you, dear—You did the right thing!”

“I know I did. And at first it all was working out fine. Just like I wanted; he was real dead set against ’em, until he saw that I’d gone and done it anyway, and then he grew—I don’t know I’d say he LIKED what I did, even after, but he did seem for a while to have gotten fairly used to them.”

“I hear the same story ALL the time—down to crossing of the ‘i’s and dotting the ‘t’s, dear. It’s what I tell the women who come in here worried about what their husbands will think; I say: ‘Just wait till you have ’em, they’ll come around to it—they always do!’”

“You said the same to me.”

“Of course, I did, dear. Because it’s true.”

“I’m sure it is, in most cases.”

“You’re right about that. Of course, it’s not true in ALL cases, just the majority.”

“And—I don’t know—maybe it will turn out to be true in ours too.”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, dear.”

“Only . . . Well, not two weeks ago, me and my husband’re out to eat at this pizza place, and I keep getting all these looks—YOU know the kind of looks I mean . . .”

“O I know the kind you mean!”

“ANYway, so he doesn’t say anything, my husband, until we’re in the car, driving home, and then, all at once, it comes out, and he’s on and on about how I have to get ’em taken down!”

“O no!”

“I know, right? So I tell him he’s being ridiculous, because of course he is. I only got ’em put in, haven’t even taken the bandages off, and already he’s talking . . !”

The nurse shook her head commiseratively. “My first husband was the same way.”

“Was he? What did you do?”

“Well, I put up with it for a week or two—his slut-shaming or whatever you want to call it; I just thought of it as selfish behavior—but then, one day—y’know, it was like you, the first day my bandages came off, and well, I probably shouldn’t say this, it’s a bit of office gossip, but I came in, just like you, to see Dr. Nippers for a follow-up, and, well, one thing led to another and he convinced me not to go back to my husband. I started work in the office the next day, and I’ve never gone back.”

“Don’t you EVER regret it . . ?”

“Honey, if you knew how Dr. Nippers, er, ‘performs’ . . .” she gave the woman a very suggestive shake of her pinky. “. . . You wouldn’t be asking me that question.”

“O!” the patient had suddenly become much more obviously invested in the conversation. “Is he really . . ? er, that is . . . Heehee . . .”

“Well, you just be a good little patient and wait your turn and I’m sure Dr. Nippers will answer any questions you have for him,” and then she added in a much lower voice, but not so low as to spare poor Nerval from hearing every word, “And I mean ANY questions—including but not limited to (hm-hm-hm), what he has in the (hm-hm-hm!) department.”

“Excuse me, nurse,” Nerval, putting aside the magazine and coming to a fidgety stand, “tell me: is it too late to . . . Is it possible I might . . .”

“Mr. Botchek,” no friendliness or intimacy in her tone with this customer’s husband, “will you KINDLY have a seat. Your wife, I assure you, is fine, and will be out very shortly. Just leave everything to Dr. Nippers. He is—as our commercials boast—‘the best for breasts in the tri-city area!’ Your wife’s, Mr. Botchek, are in the very best hands imaginable!”