Free Banana Hammock by Jack Kilborn Page A

third base with a dead guy last night, all because of your husband. Pay me, or find some other schmuck to do your dirty work.”
    “You did what with a dead guy?”
    “Don’t believe me? You want to talk to him?”
    I held my cell phone over the ear. Then I realized I was acting a bit hysterical. Maybe I was still asleep, and this was just a dream.
    I felt my backside, wondering if the pain in my ass was truly from sitting on my keys, or from something that was
still up there…
    I stuck my hand inside my pants, reaching down the plumber’s crack…
    It’s a dream, it has to be a dream…
    A pigeon waddled over, pecked up the ear, and ran off. My fingers crept closer…
    “Mr. McGlade?”
    A dream, all a dream, just a harmless dream…
    And then I touched the severed end of something that shouldn’t be there. Something that felt like a Pepperidge Farm County Style Breakfast Sausage Link.
    “Please!” I cried out. “If there’s any decency left in this cruel world, let this be a dream!”
    Chapter 11
    It was a dream. I woke up in bed next to an empty bottle of tequila. Blessedly, there was no head of lettuce between my legs. And the puddle of puke on my pillow didn’t contain anything resembling human flesh. I did a nose check and an ass check, and they were both free and clear.
    So much for drinking away the nightmares.
    I rolled out of bed, padded to the can, showered, dressed in a slightly less dirty suit than yesterday, and visited the local convenience store for a coffee, Danish, and some Advil. That should have been my tip off I’d been dreaming—paying eighteen bucks for those three items. I forked over the real-life money—twenty-six bucks—then called Mrs. Drawbridge and demanded quadruple my rate. She reluctantly agreed, and mentioned her husband was in bed, still asleep. I decided to stakeout her house and tail him. And this time, I’d be taking some sophisticated equipment.
    I returned to the condo and entered my Crime Lab. It was actually an extra bedroom that I converted into a crime lab by stocking it with spy stuff and writing
Crime Lab
on the door. The modern private detective had to stay current with modern gadgetry, so I bought all of the latest high-tech stuff. Phone tappers. Listening devices. Infra red things. A remote control tank with a miniature video camera hooked up to the turret. Cell phone jammers. A set of brass knuckles with a microchip inside that played Pat Benatar when I socked somebody. All the essentials.
    I popped the SanDisk memory card out of the tank and plugged it into my computer, to check the footage I’d recorded during my practice run. The video was a little choppy, but more than acceptable.
    The first scene was of a dog in Grant Park, urinating.
    Cut to the same dog, pooping.
    Cut to another dog, pooping.
    Cut to the first dog, eating the second dog’s poop.
    Cut to a third dog, trying to hump the first dog, who was still munching on the poop.
    Cut to the poop, which didn’t look like it warranted being eaten.
    Cut to some gangbanger punk, running off with my tank.
    Cut to me explaining to the cop why I fired my gun in a populated area, and then me getting arrested.
    With some editing, and the right soundtrack, the footage could be the backbone of a really good documentary about urban crime, and the amusing social lives of dogs.
    I opened up a fresh SanDisk card, put that in the tank, and loaded everything into in a gym bag, along with a digital camera that could shoot night-vision, a Bionic Ear listening cannon, and a little wind-up nun that shot sparks out of her eyes. Thusly equipped, I high-tailed it over to the long term garage, jumped in my stakeout car—an inconspicuous green Chevy El Camino with yellow racing stripes on the hood—and drove to Jim Drawbridge’s house.
    The key to any successful stakeout is three-fold: Food, tunes, and a pot to piss in. The food should consist of chips and snack cakes. Sugar and carbohydrates jack up the insulin level,