The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of Friendless and the Six-Toed Cat, Part 3 of 8

Strange happenings are afoot, from a secret volcano stronghold to the swamps of southern Florida.

Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, All the Time is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 3 of The Case of Friendless and the Six-Toed Cat. If you haven’t read Part 1 or Part 2 yet, check them out first.

Content Warnings: Mild Swearing, Alcohol Use, Tobacco Use, Nazis

TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 2, 1942
SS DEPARTMENT THREE BASE: ETNA
THE ISLAND OF SICILY

Werner von Werner tapped his pencil against his clipboard as he paced down the rows of chittering cages.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he hissed to no effect. The soldiers working nearby glared at him for a second, but when he looked at them they averted their eyes.

These SS men hated when he spoke English. He knew he was barely tolerated. One slip-up was the difference between life and death for him. It was only his patience and meticulousness that kept him breathing.

“Werner!” Johann called. Werner took a calming breath and then trotted to the old man's side.

“Ja, Doktor Metzger?” he asked. His German was much better than when he'd arrived.

“How is our progress?” he thought the old man asked.

“Very good, the last subjects should be loaded onto the planes by noon,” Werner hoped he said.

“Gut, gut,” Johann muttered. He wandered away, as Werner had learned was normal for him. He had to put up with the old man's eccentricities. Werner's patience and pliability is what had kept him alive thus far. And his ability to report on Johann's activities to their superiors without getting caught.

“Schneller!” Werner shouted at the working soldiers. They continued at their pace, pretending they could not hear him.

He had been a member of the SS Department Three for two years, and they still saw him as vermin, no matter his rank. It did not matter that he'd taken the same oaths they had. Nor that he'd been hand-picked for recruitment from university by an actual Mister Schmidt. Nor did it matter that his blood was pure, and untainted. What mattered was that he had been born on the wrong side of an ocean. He had been raised on the same streets as the Untermenchen, educated alongside them in the pitiful schools of an naive, crumbling nation.

He cursed his parents for this, cowards who'd tossed his birthright over the side of a refugee ship. Many Germans had endured the dark times after the last war. His parents could have, too, and he would have been born a brother to the SS, instead of despised by its men.

The hollowed volcano rang around him as hundreds of soldiers worked. Etna, the forge of Vulcan. Like that god, Johann had created miracles in this place. But his hammer was chemistry; his anvil, blood; his steel, flesh. He was crafting an aegis for the Fuhrer from the wet and wriggling things that made up the world.

The Brotherhood, the trench shark, the Vargulf, and then the kobold. Each was a miracle, each a stone in David's sling. They'd all been born in this mountain, crafted from this man's inspiration and the heat of the earth itself. Werner had stayed in college long enough to learn exactly how little he knew. It had taken four years of education for him to even begin to comprehend the depths of Johann Metzger's genius.

Werner could feel the engine that powered this place running deep beneath the stone floor. He didn't know how it worked either, just that it changed the heat of molten rock into enough electricity to power miracles. He could not wait until it was the midwife for Johann's next masterpiece.

The old doktor shuffled around, watching the great cavern gradually empty. He seemed lost in thought, a condition that Werner had been forced to report on more and more often. At first, the death of his wife had motivated him to create. His successes, Werner had been told, had been legendary. The trench sharks and Vargulf had been born of that fervor.

Werner had been recruited into Department Three as a mere pup, a layman only brought in to help interrogate English prisoners for the Brotherhood project. His first compelant had been a Bristol man, Captain Orlando Plum. He was a pilot, as disagreeable as they came. His heart was consumed with hate on behalf of those he'd lost during the Blitz, and he'd been indoctrinated with an irreconcilable aversion to the ideals of National Socialism.

Bit by bit, injection by injection and procedure by procedure, Werner watched Johann's genius at work. He watched Plum slip away inside himself, and a perfect soldier for the Reich emerge. Still, even with the knowledge of how to erase a man's mind like a chalkboard, Johann had become bored. He no longer performed surgeries himself, nor did he attend interrogations. The more Werner saw of the doktor's masterpieces, the more he wondered what else the man's mind held.

Werner realized that he could never match Johann's genius, or his achievements. His journey was to be the story-teller. Johann Metzger was going to change the world, and Werner von Werner would be by his side, chronicling his breakthroughs.

By the time the former Captain Plum had thawed out as Brüder Sechs, Werner had become Johann's longest-running assistant. He had grown to anticipate the doktor's needs and whims. He was meticulous. He was invisible when unneeded and omnipresent for anything that might arise. He kept notes on everything. No detail escaped his bloated clipboard.

Werner was assistant and slave and ward and keeper. He grew to be in awe of the doktor, while also ironing his shirts and combing his hair. He would remind Johann of meetings, of names, of the date. The everyday world was a bother to him, and, so Werner understood, since the death of his wife, his Cordula, the next breakthrough was all that mattered.

Even the ability to rewrite a human mind bored Johann. When his own son had grown anxious in his gilded cage, Johann rewrote him on a whim. His superiors were duly impressed and Johann's freedom to explore was granted.

He could create a new mind with a knife and a vial. He could mold a body with the same. The kobold became his next project, a marriage of both of his gifts. He had completed their work in just months and had grown beyond it in weeks.

When Johann's next inspiration struck, he demanded that the hundreds of kobold breeding pairs be moved out of their mountain. While the work continued, Johann would only explain a sliver of his dream: he would take the greatest thing crafted by nature, and make it his. He was above the constraints the world placed on men.

Johann Metzger no longer had to accept what was.

Werner had been given few details about the next project, but he understood its scope. Johann had a fleet at his disposal: scouts, submarine hunters, cargo haulers, even an industrial fishing ship larger than a factory. They were plying the waters of the Atlantic even now, hunting the raw materials he would need. The churning engine powering the base beneath them was one of few in the world. It alone cost more than digging out the entire mountain itself. The Reich understood the value of Johann's work.

A squad of soldiers trudged by pushing a cart stack high with cages.

“Soldiers!” Werner called after them. They pretended the squealing wheels and chittering kobolde were too loud and they hadn't heard him. They hated him. Heat welled up inside him. He had given everything for the Reich, and still it could never he enough. He could pluck out his eye and still they would doubt him. He trotted over to where they were struggling with the cart and blocked their way.

“Soldiers!” he shouted. They could not ignore him now. The small squad hauled back on the cart and slowed it before they ran him over.

“Yes, Feldwebel?” the double-chevroned Rottenführer asked.

“We will need one set aside to send to Berlin,” Werner told them. They looked at each other, then at their cargo. They were simple riflemen, mere instruments. They saw the kobold as curiosities at worst, horrors at best. They did not yet understand.

Werner ignored their sneers and examined their cargo.

Each cage contained a mewling kobold pup, a half-born weapon that had been taken apart and sewn back together before its eyes had opened. In this state, they were but larva, pure potential waiting to metamorphize. For now, they were all noisy, hungry, and pathetic.

Any of them would serve his purpose.

“This one,” he said, pointing to a random kennel. “It can go to Berlin.”

The little green thing squeaked as they carried its cage away from its littermates. There was a kubelwagen idling in the entrance chamber, waiting for its cargo. It was would be a long, bumpy ride to the coast, and a longer journey over the waves. Werner watched the terror in the kobold's beady black eyes. No matter the genius of its creator, it was still an animal. It did not realize it was the ambassador of its kind, a herald of the future. Werner was jealous of it, in his way.

It would be placed at the feet of the Fuhrer, along with other gifts from his many devotees. Werner knew the kobold would shine among these gifts. Some were ancient treasures, and others were captured officers or stolen artworks. Some were stranger: animals thought long-dead or soldiers trained in esoteric schools of warfare.

The kobold was more than just a gift, it was a sign. Its existence would show the Fuhrer more than simple words could: that the Reich did not have to accept this world as it was. He now had the power to remake it.

FRIDAY NIGHT, JULY 26, 1942
BARRON RIVER
EVERGLADES CITY, FLORIDA

“Rise and shine, buttercup!” a boisterous man shouted. Mick woke up with a jerk, feeling every bump in the road that the truck had pounded into his spine over the last few hours. An electric street light hummed, silhouetting the man.

“Where the hell are we?” Mick groaned, squinting. The man was shorter than Mick, balding, familiar. He asked: “Keaton?”

“Everglades City,” the man said, “And no.”

He stepped back from the tailgate and picked at his forehead with his fingernails. Mick almost gagged when the man's skin peeled up and over the top of his head. A thick mane of reddish-brown hair tumbled out, curling around his ears. He balled up the shed scalp like an old newspaper and tossed it into the truck. It unfurled between Mickey's feet, flopping open like a flesh-colored pancake.

“James Robert Wayne,” the man said before Mick could come up with something clever to say. He was tan as leather had crow's feet deep enough to pool shadows. “Mouthful, ain't it? Jim Bob, for short.”

“Gator Wayne,” Mick grunted.

“Well, that's eerie,” Gator said.

“I was on the Empress,” Mick told him. Gator was a member of the Muddy Water Gang, one of Quijano Corbeau's boys.

“That was a mess, wasn't it?” Gator said wistfully.

“I'm Malloy. Mickey.”

“I know who you are.” Gator said. Mick shoved himself up and took another tack.

“What was that, six hours?” Mick asked. He stood, popping every joint he could feel and a few that had fallen asleep. The crick in his neck had a crick in it.

“Try eight, big boy,” Gator said. “Your outfit's under the potatoes.”

Mick could finally see all the crates stacked around, no longer corners in the dark. There were vegetables, canned, raw, and dried, and that incessant rattling the whole trip had turned out to be jars of South Carolina peaches. One long crate the size of a footlocker was post-marked from Idaho. He dug his fingers under its lid and wrenched it open. All he saw was potatoes, and they eyed him right back.

“Under that,” Gator sighed, rolling his eyes. Gator's shadow shifted, allowing the streetlight outside to filter in. Mick caught sight of a hidden latch, and once he flicked it the layer of spuds lifted right out of the crate. A black canvas duffel waited for him beneath. He hefted it, feeling a familiar, dangerous weight within.

“You ready?” Gator asked.

“For what?”

“We're headed to our rendezvous with Agent Papa. The long way.”

“And what's the long way?”

“East. Well, southeast.”

“East of here is swamp.”

“And a lot of it. The Everglades. Only angels are following us. Come on.”

Mick lurched out of the truck and landed on warped wood. Brown water sloshed a foot below. Gator had backed up to a short dock that extended out over dark water. A lone light pole splashed a glowing pool around them.

“You get motion sickness?” Gator wondered. He stepped aside so Mick could see their ride.

“Oh, good God,” Mick said. There was a flat-bottomed fan boat bobbing in the water tied to the dock. Its giant propeller was rusted, and the cage around it dented but sturdy. A cartoon lizard graced its hull, clutching a machete. Mick looked from the beat-up boat to its haggard owner and asked: “How’d you end up here?”

“Oh, our boy Keaton pulled me out of jail, told me I could work for him to shave some years off,” Gator explained.

“That's a classic,” Mickey grunted. Avoiding time in the slammer is what had gotten Mick mixed up with the Office all those years back. Gator nodded, then lit a cigarette. Mick could smell menthol. He kicked a pebble off the dock and listened to it plunk into the water.

Corbeau's TNT heist from Lobo Losa is what caused Mick to end up in the Big Easy. That's where he stumbled upon the whole Elysian Empress thing and ultimately resulted in his joining the Office. If not for Corbeau, things would be a lot different for him. He probably wouldn't have been happy, not by a long shot, but he'd had be blissfully ignorant of what was happening in his country.

“Still dreaming?” Gator asked, snapping Mick out of it.

“Just finding my bearings,” Mick said. Everglades City was hardly a city. There were a few buildings, none lit, and a couple slips out into the water, none that would holding anything larger than a matchbox.

“Find ‘em on the water,” Gator said, pointing down the dock. He jumped onto the tailgate behind Mick and began rummaging through crates, so Mickey left him to it.

Mick always found fan boats to be strange contraptions. They consisted of a flat-bottomed hull with a few bench seats positioned in front of an engine block and propeller large enough to drag a Flying Fortress through the sky. This one looked about as seaworthy as a garage door with a fighter plane strapped to its rear. A small dark figure lurked in the shadows aboard the strange vessel, watching Mick approach. The ominous click of a thumb easing back the hammer of a pistol echoed across the buggy water.

“Y'all came to get me, remember?” Mick asked the obscured man. The shadow stood, allowing a trace of moonlight to illuminate his face. He was rail-thin, with a ruddy complexion and sharp, indigenous features.

“You are less ugly than your photo,” the Indian grunted.

“They say the camera adds ten pounds of broken noses and scar tissue,” Mick told him. He held out a hand as the other man jumped out of the boat and strode up the dock. “Mickey Malloy.”

“Charlie Cypress,” he said. His hand was rough and skeletal; his grip was iron. He was a hair shorter than Mick, with a long black braid running down his back. He was dressed for Florida swamp weather, in an unbuttoned field jacket with trousers that had been hacked off a couple inches above the knee. The knife his kept sheathed at the small of his back looked mean enough to skin a shark.

“I don't recognize your name, did you run with Corbeau, too? I had no idea there were so many of you Muddy Water boys still this side of the sod,” Mick said. Cypress' eyes narrowed.

“I'm not some criminal,” he snapped.

“Hey, me neither,” Mick said.

“Doc!” Gator shouted from the truck. Cypress shoved past Mick to help Gator ease a couple big boxes out of the truck. Gator saw Mick meandering and had some orders for him, too: “Just standing around, Malloy? Help our other passenger onto the boat. We spin out in five.”

“Other passenger?” Mick muttered. He'd been alone in back there with the crates. As if on cue, the cab door creaked open.

“Michael?” an old woman called out.

“You brought Marge?” he grunted, peeved and confused all at once.

“The krauts know her face, now. Couldn't leave her to fend for herself, could we?” Gator asked.

“Send her back to Baltimore, then,” Mick fumed. He stalked past the pair of gladesmen and gave Marge a hand exiting the truck. The steps were higher than she liked and it took a determined minute to extricate herself, even leaning on Mick.

“I'm sorry about all this, Marge,” he told her.

“Sorry? You leave me cooped up behind that filthy old desk for years and now you want to cut me out of a free trip to Key West on the Office's dime? Think again, buddy.” She shook a thermos in Mick's face as she scolded him, and Mick could smell fresh coffee. Quiet tunes were purring out of the truck's radio, and a couple paper wrappers had been balled up and left in a pile of sandwich crumbs in the middle of the bench seat.

“You know I was crammed in the back between potato crates?” he asked, pointing at the back of the truck.

“Mosquitoes down here are the size of half-dollars,” she said, conveniently ignoring Mick's complaint. He grunted and walked away, swatting at the buzzing around his ears.

The odd pair from the Office had gotten the fan-boat loaded up and were waiting on them. Mick let Marge catch up, then held her hand as she stepped off the dock into the flat bottom of the boat.

“You'll need these,” Gator told her, holding out a pair of black rubberized ear muffs. She thanked him and found a seat, across from Mick with the pile of crates between them, all marked as various vegetables. Cypress had hinged one open, revealing a complex electronic doodad covered in dials and buttons. He pulled a spool of wire out ending in a strange mechanism the size of a beer bottle.

“What's that?” he asked Cypress.

The thin man lowered the cable into the murky water.

“It's a hydrophone,” he said, as if that should be enough. Mick snorted, he got enough of the egghead dismissive attitude at the Office's bureau HQ in Baltimore, he didn't need it in the field. Cypress, for his part, seemed to understand Mick's frustration. Once he'd finished taping the wire into place so it stayed beneath the surface, he popped up and sat on the bench across from Mick, adjusting the dials on the device as he spoke: “It lets me project sounds underwater. Many animals respond to signals outside the normal range of human hearing. Some of them respond in very predictable ways.”

“You're catching animals?” Marge wondered. She lifted the open lid on one of the crates, revealing a pair of large empty cages.

“Of course not, I study these animals in the wild.”

“So when Gator called you Doc...” Mick said.

“Charles Cypress, Doctor of Ecology, Harvard class of 'thirty-three.”

“Nice bona fides.”

“You know what they called me there?” Cypress asked. He turned one last dial and punched a button. Vibrations hummed through the boat's metal hull, oozing up Mickey's spine. Within seconds, the water around them boiled as black shapes worked their way to the surface. The whole lagoon was suddenly packed with full-size alligators, staring at them with cold yellow eyes, hissing, barking, rattling. Cypress grinned and said, “They called me crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy, all the time.”

“They probably called you a lot of things,” Gator pointed out. He hefted a spotlight the size of a garbage can up off the deck and ratchet-strapped it into a cradle to the right of his captain's chair.

“That they did,” Cypress muttered.

“'Crazy' is how we all got here,” Mick told him. A few alligators grunted in the moonlight, still watching.

Gator heaved a second spotlight into a matching cradle, strapped it in tight, then ran a cable from each into a bruiser of a battery. The terminal sparked and the lights hummed, but no beams came out. The lens on the lights looked dark purple or even black to Mickey.

“Hey, speak for yourself,” Gator said. He plopped back into his chair and picked up a bulky helmet off the deck. It was covered in knobs and gizmos and had black goggles that made him look like a Buck Rogers extra that got rejected for being too outlandish. It had to weigh twenty pounds, not counting the battery, which was the size of a suitcase. He buckled the insane gadget under his chin and leaned back in his seat, saying: “Ain't no one ever tried to call me crazy.”

“Can you even see, James?” Marge asked him.

“Oh, yes ma'am, clear as day,” he said. “These here black lights project ultra-violet beams, and the helmet lets me see 'em. Even if the moon sneaks behind a cloud, we'll be fine.”

“If you say so,” Marge said. She warily eyed the blindered boat captain and the congregated reptiles circling the small vessel. Some of them were large enough to flip it over if they got a mind to.

Gator took a long drag on his cigarette, then plucked the butt from his lips and made as if to flick it into the swamp. Cypress cleared his throat. Instead of launching it, Gator quietly field-stripped it and pocketed the paper and filter.

“Malloy, you got something under your seat. Don't use it 'til I say so, and for the love of God, don't shoot those 'gators. Or this one,” Gator told him.

"Office guys and stashing things under seats," Mick grunted. "It doesn't all have to be so dramatic."

He reached under the bench and found a BAR machine gun and a couple box magazines. He laid the big gun across his lap, making sure there was round chambered and that it was in good, working order.

“Ten-four. So what's this I hear about Key West?”

“You really didn't read those files, did you?” Gator asked.

“I skimmed.”

“I read them,” Marge piped in.

“You got to read the files, Malloy,” Cypress added.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mick grunted.

“Operation Friendless' stateside base of operations is down there,” Gator explained. “They split their time between the Keys and Cuba. We're going to track them down somewhere near Key Largo, after they pick up the cargo.”

“And that's where the ambush will be,” Mick said.

“That's what Keaton thinks will happen. They tell us where to meet, and the krauts'll be there, too.”

“We got a few surprises for them,” Cypress said. He was leaning over the side of the boat, scratching the scaly nose of a particularly friendly twelve-footer.

“What we don't got is time to play kick the can. The doc's got our escort, Malloy's got our guns, I got our eyes. That means it's time to go, folks,” Gator said. “Put on your ears, this is going to get hurricane loud.”

The four of them clamped their ear muffs onto their heads, and Gator started the engine. It coughed louder than shotgun. Even deafened, the propeller was loud enough to scrub all thoughts other than Nazis and alligators from Mickey's mind. The fan boat eased away from the dock, then Gator laid into the throttle, so loud that Mick could have sworn that his earmuffs had been ripped off his head. He was pressed back into the his seat. The engine howled behind him, wind ripped at his jowls. Lights flicked on all over sleeping Everglades City, but they shrank away as quick as they'd appeared.

The fan boat was flying, skipping across grass and 'gator-back and even water sometimes, spending half the time in mid-air, threatening to unstomach whatever the last meal Mick had managed to snag was, then hitting the surface in a desperate attempt to bounce his jaw off his knees.

To Mick's right, Marge was screaming. No, not screaming, laughing. Her usually bunned gray hair was whipping wild in the wind. She had both hands in the air and was having the time of her life.

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Story by Bonnie Baldwin. Art by Bruce Conners.