Ken Arnold Books || Highhat Xcerpt

An Excerpt from High Hat
By Greg Mandel

Chapter 1

The first time I laid eyes on Angel Yolkmussel she was being kidnapped by the Amish mafia outside the club called The High Hat. In the Vatican, it's all about hats. I should know. I'm The Pope, and I wear the biggest hat in town.
I was wearing it that night, over on the Via Crescenzio, on the wrong side of the Holy City, just after midnight, taking my constitutional on the incognito like I do every night, just to make sure that there's no evil afoot. See, there's only so much an honest Joe can do in an official capacity, even if you happen to be the big pontiff. So I drop the holy muumuu, take off my phony specs, put on a cheap suit and a dark wig, slip out of my fishing shoes and into a pair of wingtips and presto! I'm A. Pope, Private Eye, and even in the high hat, nobody's the wiser. They see me with the mitre on and they think it's a gag. Sure it is. Only the joke's on them, 'cause I'm The Pope.
Protecting the weak and the innocent, that's my game, and I don't care how I do it, either, with a wafer or a heater, it's all the same to me. So it's trouble I'm looking for and trouble I get. Angel Yolkmussel made me plenty of it. But after all, that's my line of work.
So it happens that I'm on the prowl that night, jumping from joint to joint, but nothing's turning up. Just the usual drunken bishops and a few angels of the fallen variety rubbing the dust off the corner lamp posts. And then I see her. She's an angel all right, only she ain't the fallen type. This one's got wings. Just one look at her sends a flash flood through my pineal glands. She has the pale gold hair of a fairy princess and eyes as blue as Billie Holliday on a bender. She's the kind of dame that could get me to thinking twice about my day job, and from the moment I glue my glims on her I know she's in trouble.
She's being glommed by a couple of yeggs in black suits, broad-brimmed hats and beards with no mustaches. Amish mafiosos. Sure, I recognize them--the same gang that tried to blow me up just as I was dishing up the holy bubbly at High Mass a few months back. These aren't your peace-loving, muffin-making Amish, mind you. Not by a long shot. These are the Knudsens, a radical Canadian splinter group of hard-liners, neo-Mennonite-Amish, whose aim is to rid the world of electricity by any means necessary, including violence. And now here they are, shoving the lovely into their buggy at the end of a pitchfork, no doubt to whisk her away to their secret, unelectric hideaway and have their Mennonite way with her.
Just the sight of those bearded cheese squeezers gets my trigger finger to throbbing, but when I purvey the frail these palookas have nabbed, it's not my finger that throbs.
Now one thing about the Amish, of course, they don't do much driving--them being more inclined to the horse and buggy--and I've got my thinking cap on so I snag an apple from the fruit cart next to me, throw the proprietor a couple of clams and then I waltz over to the horse they've got toting their carriage and give him a bite of my Granny Smith. Now I know he's not going anywhere until I take the apple away.
"Hey there!" the mug with the reins yells at me. "Leave that nag alone!"
Instead I give Mr. Ed the whole apple, then walk over and stick the tip of my pointy hat up at Blondie in the back seat. "Hiya Beautiful," I burp. "What's the rumpus?"
But before she can answer, the Speed Racer of the buggy world pulls out a couple of quilting needles about as long as Pius IX's term in office and croaks, "Amble, Mack, before I sew up your puss like a crazy quilt!"
"Oh, pardon me." I tip my hat. "I'm from out of town. I was just looking for this here sixteenth chapel..." and I reach into my coat like I'm going for a map, but what I pull out instead is my roscoe, point it straight at the bearded beezer.
"Grab some air," I breeze, and he lets his hands up real slow, like a pair of helium balloons. "You, too, both of you," I say to the other two buggy boys. They both reach for heaven when I wave my cannon at them, including the beardo in back with Angel, who drops his pitchfork.
But the Amish mob, they don't scare so easy, and the first ape grows a smirk on his fuzzy mug and lays his beady peepers on me, mulling over my features like he's sizing up a rump roast.
"You don't know what you're stickin' your nose in, friend. We're the Knudsens, and bustin' up our game means trouble for you!"
And that's when I flash him a shot of my pearlies and reach over and slap him one on the side of his ear with the barrel of the shooter. Of course, that's careless of me, using my gat for such things. It could easily blast off, but then you could see where it would be his hard luck, not mine. So while this monkey's mending his waxbag I relieve him and his pal of their quilting needles and pitchfork. Then, with the muzzle of my .38 nuzzling his puzzler, I reach up and grab the dame by her wrist and pull her out of the back seat of the buggy and into my arms while she's moaning about how grateful she is.
That's when I bust in. "Save the confetti for later, dollface," I say. Then I turn to the pretzel benders in the black hats and growl, "All right you Amish slugs, put an egg in your shoe and beat it!"
And then the driver gives Seabiscuit a whipping. "Hyeah!" he hollers, like he's starring in a noodle western, but before they go the quilter on the passenger side leans out at me and leers, "Better watch out, High Hat, she can take care of herself, that one, if you get my drift...."
Angel's face blazes up like a beet and she whirls around, festoons an uppercut flush on the mug's fuzzy kisser, sends him sprawling back on the seat with ketchup creeping out of his lips. As the buggy pulls out, the monkey, still holding his split lip, yelps, "You haven't seen the last of us, High Hat!" And then the buggy is clomping down the street, around the corner and gone.
"That's some haymaker, baby," I say to Angel.
"Like he said, I can take care of myself, mister," she says, making a fist.
And with that I give her a tug and we're on the run, me pulling and her doing her best to keep up, which isn't too tough, even for a dame in designer shoes. See, I'm an old geezer, especially for this type of job.
Fifty-two years old, that's how old I am, but it's not the years so much as the mileage that counts, and I've got plenty of both, mostly on account of that lousy Knudsen clan. They've been trying to blow me up--The Pope, that is--for the past two years. They almost sent me to Kingdom Come the last time, and all I got out of it was a metal plate in my head that keeps my brains from scrambling, and that's just the start of my troubles. The doc tells me that my heart's broken, my rectum's wrecked, my colon's swollen and my liver's dead. I guess I'm running on my duodenum. Be that as it may, it doesn't slow me down too much to do my pontificating, but as for fighting crime, well, that's a young man's racket. Still, I've got knuckles and know-how, and if that's not enough my roscoe comes in handy from time to time.
We're hoofing it pretty good down the Via Crescenzio when Angel peters out at Peter's Inn, the plushest flop in the city. The poor kid must be winded, I'm thinking, scared out of her wits besides, so we stop for a wheeze on the hotel terrace, only it's me that's doing the wheezing.
Finally my windbags catch some air and I straighten up, and that's when I see that this gorgeous wren isn't winded at all. She's just standing there giving me the ogle, and let me tell you it's a look that sends a craving through my body for a double dose of my favorite fixative! Not that I mind, mind you. It gives me a chance to goggle her back, not to mention her front with all its natural attributes, and a niftier set of attributes I haven't seen since before the blitz.
She's wearing a white satin dress the way a ripe banana wears its peel, accentuating soft curves and ample mammalaries of the sort I gave up for Lent back before I got my beanie. I take a tempting peep down the delicate decolletage of her gossamer gown, where it dips into the honeycomb between her creamy creampuffs, but just before I recant my vows a voice thunders down out of my high hat, leaks through my toupee and ricochets around inside my coconut. "Hey," it hollers, "you're The Pope!"
And not a moment too soon, either, because Angel's cheeks have come down with a quick case of the flushes.
"Hey, mister," she says, all syrupy, "you saved my life!" And then she ankles over and gloms her crimson kisser to my lips, feeds me about 10,000 volts of high octane wowjuice.