The Medium Snooze - Chapter 1

Chapter One : The strange case of Gerald Spindler.

The name is Pincher, Ernie Pincher. I’m a P.E. ,Private Earwig, kinda like a P.I. only more legs and less peripheral vision. I work for 30 aphids a day plus expenses.

Monday, 3rd July : My office is the 87th branch of the rhododendron bush, not the nicest part of the garden but the rent’s cheap, most of the leaves around here have been deserted since the new rose bushes went up over by the rockery. The garden is a big place and mean with it, we’d had a stroll by hedgehog incident just the week before and the slugs were still pretty nervous. Work was slow and I’d given Alice the rest of the day off, to be truthful I was getting kinda worried, I hadn’t had a new client in about a month, not since the case with Gerald Spindler and Alice hadn’t been paid in two weeks. Alice is a good kid, a real nice looking ladybird, not that I’m interested or nothin’ but I could tell she was getting anxious and ladybirds are pretty carnivorous, I wouldn’t want her getting hungry on me.

Gerald had been a spider who ran the Dew Drop Web, a cheap bar in the nasty part of the hedge. He’d had a couple of threats and when slug pellets started showing up in the web he figured someone was serious. Still I was surprised to get the call, spiders ain’t my usual clientele, these guys are mean and Gerald was no butterfly, it was only when he crawled onto my leaf that I started to understand. I didn’t spend much time in the Dew Drop so I only knew Gerald by reputation and what crawled into my office weren’t quite what I was expecting.

Gerald was old. I’m guessing, maybe, a year and a half and he weren’t no arachnid no more, if you get my drift.

“You Ernie Pincher ?”

“Yeah, you must be Gerald then. What’s the story with the six and a half legs ?”

“Get right to the point don’t you Pincher ? Why in my day I used to eat wisebugs like you for breakfast.”

“Well it’s good we’ve got this business off on the right footing. Drink ?”

Alice brought in the pond water coffee, but something told me Gerald wasn’t the pond water kinda guy. Call it P.E. instinct or just a inbred knowledge of insect nature, of course it could just have been the way he spat it out over my desk but who can tell ?

“What is this crap ? Hey, sweetheart, I ain’t no freakin’ caterpillar you know.”

“Baby Bio ?” I offered.

Alice just left. Kid seems to think it’s unprofessional to get hammered with the clients. “Hell it’s only liquid fertiliser” I tell her. “It’s not like it’s pesticide”.

At which point she usually just bends an antenna.

“Well, it’s not always pesticide.”

Anyway I was getting the details of the case from Gerald, it seems he’d lost the legs a couple of weeks before in an argument with a group of stag beetles. It seems these beetles were the muscle and someone was applying pressure on Gerald for protection grubs. He’d tried to handle it himself but got nowhere, tried the cops but it’s a big garden and there are only so many ants, I mean even with 4 million of them they can’t be everywhere.

“Besides, they ain’t really interested.” he grumbled “Wrong end of the hedge”.

So in desperation he’d come to me.

“All you need to do is find out who is behind it, then I can take care of the rest. I know a few guys with fangs, if you get my point.”

“Sure, whatever you say, it’ll be 30 aphids a day plus expenses.”

“No problem.” a large grin spread across that ugly mug “You sort this out before the end of the month and there may be a glow-worm in it for you.”

Sold. And that’s how I came to be working for Gerald Spindler.

To cut a long, dull story short, I got nowhere. I’d trawled the webs and slug traps around the hedge and there was definitely something going down, but no one was sayin’ nothin’. The spiders seemed to think that they could handle the situation and the slugs were just too scared to talk. I’d finally thought I might be getting some place with a Woodlouse called Tony. Tony owned a slug pit named Sydney’s Tub, Sydney had been the original owner, but as with a lot of slugs Sydney liked the juice a little too much. Syd and a bunch of his drinking buddies had been found face down, floating in Syd’s own tub. With no family or friends to speak of the tub had passed on to Syd’s head barman, Tony.

Woodlice ain’t the easiest of characters to talk to, very defensive. I’d start on a subject that Tony didn’t like and he’d just ball up, literally, but I was getting further with Tony than anyone else so I stayed on him, well at least until I got the news.

It was May 27th, I’d been on Gerald’s case for a little over three weeks and was getting nowhere. Slowly. The glow-worm bonus was looking a very faint prospect. It was then the seven ants marched onto my leaf. I’d been questioning Tony at his place late into the night and my head felt like a centipede tap group were paying it a visit, Alice was typing away, about seven decibels too loud.

“Ernie Pincher ?”

“I really got to get my name put on the door, yeah, I’m Pincher.”

“We’d like you” (tappitty tap)

“to accompany us to the hill.” (tap tap tap)

“Sgt. Arthur 3487” (tap tap tappitty)

“would like a word.” (tappitty tappitty tap tap)

Ugh. I suddenly remembered why I hated dealing with the law. Seven ants, all flatfoots called Andy, completing each others sentences. Sgt. 3487 ? I was trying to remember if I knew him.... 3487 ? 3487 ? The girls of the tap group started a really big number.

“What did I do this time ?”

“Sgt. Arthur…” (tap tap tappitty)

“…3487 will deal with…” (tappitty tap tap)

“…the details…” (tap tappitty tap)

“…Let’s go” (tap tap tap)

It was useless to object, besides there was only likely to be one of Sgt. 3487 and that meant questions only coming from one direction. So I opened the drawer in my desk.

“No…” (tap)

“…weapons please…” (tappitty)

“…Mr. Pincher…” (tap tappitty)

I lifted the bottle of Bio up to the nearest Andy and smiled weakly. He just twitched an antenna. I took a large swig and then another for the girls, they seemed happier and stopped dancing but I figured they were probably just taking a coffee break so I dropped the bottle into my pocket.

“Lead the way boys. Alice I’ll be out for the rest of the morning.”

It suddenly struck me who 3487 was.

“Uh, better make that the rest of the day.”

The ant hill by the compost heap is probably the busiest place in the garden. Four million ants and various insect, creepy crawly, bug felons all living together in a hill a foot above the ground and, according to some, up to six or seven under. Of course all that about seven feet underground was just crazy talk, spread around to put the fear of DDT into local thugs, still I’ve never actually seen the bottom of it. Walking through the passageways into the main sorting area was making the dancing girls in my head restless again, a quick shot of Bio kept them amused.
Arthur 3487 was sat behind a large acorn desk that took up most of the space in his small, 2nd floor office, he had an even more mean look on his face than usual which was actually quite an achievement as ants tend to look fairly bad tempered to start with. 3487 had been a rookie Sgt. when I had started out as a P.E. and had slowly been moving up the ranks. Of course he was born a Sgt. but he had started off as Sgt. 7989 and was progressing well. He’d made his name as a tough guy, the kind of ant you expect to see tearing up a patch of rain-forest. The fact that he was here in the garden just seemed to piss him off.

“Aaahhh... Pincher. I’m kinda surprised we don’t see a lot more of you down here.”

“I’m very particular about the company I keep.”

It was a classy comeback line, one I’d been waiting to use for a while, but probably not a wise move in the circumstances.

“You’re a funny ‘wig Pincher, what’s your involvement with Gerald Spindler ?”

“He’s my dancing partner, we practice the Rumba by the rose bushes every 2nd Tuesday, what’s it to you ?”

I figured he was trying to pin me as one of Gerald’s lackeys, who knows maybe Gerald had figured out who was causing his problem and had sent a few of the boys round. I certainly wasn’t going to get mixed up in no ant/spider war here.

“Gerald Spindler was found in his web this morning at 5am. Or to be more precise several parts of Gerald Spindler were found in several different parts of his web. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about this would you Pincher ?”

I hadn’t expected this.

“No, why are you asking me ?”

“You’ve been seen in Spindler’s company and hanging around one or two of the more questionable bars. Earwigs and spiders don’t usually make very good drinking buddies.”

“What can I say ? I’m a real friendly kind of guy. Any leads ?”

“Certainly nothing I’d divulge to a no class grub like you Pincher.”

He obviously had nothing, ants only get really abusive when cornered. After that it was the usual “Don’t leave the garden.” speech, backed up with the “we have several thousand eyes watching you.” Line.

I swung by Gerald’s on the way home, ants all over the place , you’d have thought there was a jam doughnut in there.

As I saw it I had two choices. I could investigate whoever had off’d Gerald as a matter of professional pride or I could cut my losses and jack the case. I was already 70 aphids out of pocket and I never really liked the guy, hell, it wasn’t even my local, besides I wasn’t exactly drowning in leads. So that was it, I put the case behind me and carried on. Trouble was it seemed to be common knowledge that Gerald had hired me and my reputation was starting to look like a moth in a lawn mower.