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Everyone's favorite pandetective Ben Parada is back with a new case! All credit to my collaborator for the wonderful art to go along with this latest tale of panda noir; please remember to give the original some sugar here .

I woke up woozy not long after that bastard Chang put two shots into me. Nevermind that they'd been shots of Chengtu Charlie's Malt Bamboo Wine and that I'd paid Chang for them, in as much as any drink on my tab counts for paying anything; I felt as if some mook had put a pair of .38 slugs right between my eyes. I probably would have slept all day, but whoever was knocking on my door was louder and more annoying than Chengtu Charlie knocking on my skull. I straightened my tie, threw on some of Ban Ban's Eau d'Bambou, and answered.

Name's Ben Parada, and I'm a private snoop. Says so on the door, licensed and bonded, even if the license is to drive and the bond is the one keeping me out of the clink. Most people think that the "PI" is for "private investigator," and I've investigated my fair share of privates in my day. But when I blackmailed Billy the Froster to put the letters on it, I'd had "panda investigator" in mind. That's right, I'm a panda gumshoe, which is notable both for the panda part and the shoe part, as it's kind of hard to find a pair that fit and can support 250 pounds in style. Luckily, humans seem to be trying to outdo us pandas in the girth department these days, so it's never been easier to dig up a decent suit from a Salvation Army in the bad part of town.

It was a dame at the door. It's always a dame, but very rarely the sort of dame I'm into. Human dames are all right, I suppose, if you're into toothpicks you can snap just by looking at them, but give me a meaty babe with more black and white than a classic grindhouse theater any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

"You Ben Parada?" the dame asked. She was human, with red hair and jade eyes--both the sort that a human man would kill or at the very least wound for, and both the sort that weren't used to taking any funny business. Some dames dress when they come to my door, some dames don't; this dame would have looked like she was out for a hiking trip, if people carried .32 caliber mohaskas strapped to their inner thigh on hiking trips.

(That's what is says on the door,) I signed to her. More humans understand sign language as we monochrome bamboo-munchers are able to pull it off these days, more still in the Pandatown ghetto, but I still keep a beat-up old cell phone handy for the mooks that can't. We pandas can make a few sounds that only we can understand, but variations on "whuff" tend to strike humans as being aggressive growls more than anything. And everybody knows how trigger happy the humans get when they think a monochrome's growling at them, especially in Pandatown, especially after Panda Prohibition.

Luckily, the dame understood. "Name's Lacey Mauleon," she said. "I hear you specialize in panda cases."

I put my paws in my pockets and shrugged. (No shit,) I wanted to say, (did you think I was in the business of elephant trunks?) But I kept my paws to myself--they'd gotten me in plenty of trouble over the years, and that pose also made my own mohaska stick out from its shoulder holster. If the dame was thinking of causing any trouble, I wanted her to know that my good friends Smith and Wesson were backing me up with more powerful magnum slugs than Chang's private reserve.

"Of course you are," Lacey continued. "You can keep the smartass remarks to yourself. I've got a panda case for you, and I expect results."

(I'm happy to help, Miss Mauleon,) I signed, withdrawing my hands from their pinstriped refuges. (Let me guess? You need me to track down a panda for you. Some monochrome owe you money? Stalking you and not taking pepper spray for an answer?)

"Oh no, Mr. Parada," said Lacey, smirking. "I've already found the panda. He's with me right now, in fact."

(He's not your brother, is he?) I signed. (I know some guys, but getting pandas turned into humans or vice-versa ain't exactly my speciality).

We the monochrome denizens of Pandatown, who came to Oceanside seeking a better life, have been blasted by both barrels of discrimination and stereotyping as soon as we stepped out of zoos, but the last couple years there'd been a moral panic about us. Technology and sorcery--really the same goddamn thing if you boiled it down like a good reduction of bamboo stew--had made it possible for a panda to metamorphose into a human or--heaven forbid!--a human seeking to go monochrome. I didn't understand it myself; I liked what I was and had no hurry to change it. But plenty of monochromes disagreed; maybe they wanted the better life free of discrimination and the ghetto of Pandatown that a new form could bring them, or maybe they were just bushwhacked by the constant bombardment of humans as an ideal of beauty in the media. I was pretty sure the humans saw us pandas as somehow exotic or alluring, for their part, which was pretty awful when you thought about it, which I tried not to.

That's why the voters of Oceanside City--which don't, for the record, include pandas--added § 1137.20.8.24 to the City Code. We call it "Pandatown Prohibition," and it slaps some pretty nasty penalties on said metamorphosis or the attempt thereof, like you're trying to off somebody or rob a bank instead of changing how much body hair you have to tweeze. I guess I can't complain; panda gumshoes like me have seen quite the increase in cases as a result. But as much as I like being what I am, the idea that there are laws in place to keep it like that rubs me the wrong way with a razor blade.

"Not exactly," Lacey said with a smirk. "My sister." She pulled something from a knapsack and tossed it to the beat-up armchair I kept in the office more for naps than for clients.

It was a cheap stuffed novelty panda with big eyes and coloration that was five shades of all wrong. (I guess she must take after your father's side of the family,) I signed.

"Cute," smirked Lacey. "This showed up at my door two days ago. Turn it over."

I flipped the doll and, sure enough, there was a message in the off-white (and not the right kind of off-white either, like I said, it was a piece of crap and insulting to boot) fur of the toy panda's back: PLEASE HELP ME. -COLLEEN.

"My sister Colleen used to work as a volunteer in Pandatown," said Lacey. "In a bamboo soup kitchen. Said she wanted to do some good in the world. I said she should just give to the United Panda Fund and cut out the middleman, but she always did leap before she looked. I haven't heard from her in six weeks, and no one else has either. Hostel where she was staying isn't the sort of place that keeps records."

(You dust this for prints before you got your greasy mitts all over it?) I signed.

"Of course I did," Lacey snapped. "Do I look like an idiot to you? There's no fingerprints of any kind on it, no label to say where it was made, and no return address on the box. All I know is that it's a panda and Colleen was in Pandatown. That's why I'm here. You want to tell me I should take my business elsewhere?" She flashed an envelope that was thick with bills. "I pay in cash up front and when the job is done."

I licked my lips looking at then envelope and the fifty visible atop the stack. That would be plenty to split between Chang the bartender, Chang the bookie, and Chang the parole officer with a little left over for Chang the grocer and Chang the gunsmith (no relation). I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen cash up front, most likely because no one had ever given me any despite the fact that I always did a good job and despite the fact that I really didn't care. (You've got a deal) I signed.

"Great," said Lacey. She affixed her Jane Hancock to my standard expense form (my pawprint was already on every one in the stack) and took her carbon copy with a smile before tossing me the envelope. I opened it greedily, only to find that only the top bill was a fifty; the others were all singles. The dame had just bought me with an advance payment of $74. I should have been mad; hell, I should have been furious. But I had to admire the stone cold moxie it took to pull off a con like that with a straight face. I was starting to like this dame, against my better judgement.

(You will pay me my full fee when we're done here,) I signed. (That trick only works once.)

"Of course," Lacey said. "Think of it as a scented plastic lure on a hook"

(Only as long as we don't continue the metaphor to the point where I'm gutted on the bottom of the boat) I signed back. (Now let's get down to business.)

I took up the panda doll and, using one claw, I popped its cheap and haphazard stitching, revealing what it had been stuffed with. True to the toy's exterior cheapness, it was cheap on the inside too, with a motley mix of shredded used upholstery inside. The sort of stuff that would never pass muster with squeamish humans, yeah, but even I would think twice about giving something with that stuffing to my cub if I had one that I knew about. I dumped the whole thing out and tossed the deflated rag that was left back to Lacey, who had taken up a position on the corner of my desk.

"You just playing amateur surgeon for the fun of it?" she drawled. "Or are you the sort of guy that gets off on beating the stuffing out of pandas smaller than you?"

I picked through the shredded detritus. (Neither,) I signed. (I sympathize with the poor guy. I'll fill him up with Chengtu Charlie's Malt Bamboo Wine afterwards, which always works for me when I've had my stuffing beat out.) True to my intuition, which is never wrong until it is, there was part of a tag in the mix. I pulled it out and held it up to my desk lamp. (Can you read that?)

Lacey squinted. "Looks like Firefox Upholstery Inc," she read. "Address is here in Pandatown."

I nodded. Oceanside City humans and their English. Cantonese was so much more elegant if you had to read it. (Let me look it up on the computer.) Pulling my phone off its cradle, I placed it on an old text-to-speech synthesizer that I used for professional calls and dialed.

"This-Shu-Mian?" I typed, cringing at the voice that came out over the speaker, which would have sounded more at home in a disabled physicist's wheelchair.

"Who-is-asking?" was the reply with a similar but subtly different voice. "I-am-busy."

"You pal sounds like a real upstanding robot," said Lacey. "Do I need to buy you a quart of vintage motor oil to bribe him with?"

(You should know that robots only like the fresh stuff) I signed. Yes, it was official: I liked Lacey Mauleon's moxie. Not enough to give her a discount or to get around the fact that red hair brings to mind those snotty and hyperactive bastards the red pandas for me, mind you, but still. "I-need-to-know-anything-that-has-come-across-your-desk-about-Firefox-Upholstery-in-the-last-few-years."

Shu Mian, my "computer," was the classifieds editor at the Pandatown Pravda magazine. We monochromes are on the wrong side of the digital divide, so the Pravda, which is given away free on the strength of its ads for terrible products no one in their right mind should buy. He had his paws in all kinds of dirt, and I sent him a few bucks or a bottle of Chengtu Charlie's Private Reserve when I could in order to keep those selfsame paws greased enough that some information might just slip out.

"That-old-place?" Shu Mian's synthesized voice said. "It-was-closed-down-years-ago-but-they-never-sold-their-back-inventory. I-think-the-building-has-a-new-tenant-these-days. Let-me-check."

I turned to Lacey, about to sign what I was thinking, but she beat me to the punch: "You're thinking that whoever owns the building now is grinding up what's left of that ratty old back stock to make cheap stuffing for cheaper pandas."

Nodding, I signed (When it comes to cheap stuffing and cheaper pandas, I'm your guy. And Shu Mian is my guy; a human or even a panda he didn't know couldn't get the time of day out of him.)

A moment later, Shu Mian's synthesizer buzzed on the line in reply. "As-I-thought," it said, "I-ran-a-classified-advertisement-for-the-new-tenants-about-two-months-ago. They-were-looking-for-human-volunteers-to-help-them-reach-out-to-underserved-panda-neighborhoods."

"Sounds like just the sort of scented plastic lure on a hook Colleen would go in for," said Lacey. "She always was a sucker for that bleeding heart crap."

"Who-placed-the-ad?" I typed in response.

"The-ad-said-the-Charitable-Panda-Society-of-Firefox-Road," replied Shu Mian, "but-the-check-was-from-Sichuan-Novelty-Products. Chinese-company-that-does-a-lot-of-business-over-here-these-days." He added that the return address appeared to be from the old factory's location on Firefox Road.

"Thanks-Shu-Mian," I said electronically. "This-month's-envelope-will-have-a-little-extra-in-it."

"It-had-batter," was his response. "And-of-course-if-my-name-gets-mixed-up-in-this-I-will-deny-it-and-never-do-business-with-you-again-and-kill-you-in-roughly-that-order." His line clicked dead.

"Well, I'd say you have your work cut out for you investigating," said Lacey with a half-smile.

(We have our work cut out for us,) I signed back. (Remember, these people only accept humans, and even if I shaved I don't think I could pass.)

"So you need your client's help to crack your own case?" Lacey said, laughing sharply. "All right, but I'll have to take my hourly rate out of your cut."

(With any luck.) I signed back, (you won't even make it to one hour.)

It took about a week to work out the particulars to the Swiss Watch level they have to be for something like this. I slapped a bug on Lacey that I had swept from my office after that unpleasantness with the Panda Triad and dusted off my high-powered binoculars, carefully repurposed for use by a panda mook with pliers and a welding torch. She, bugged, would go to the Firefox Road address of the so-called Charitable Panda Society, and I'd listen and watch from a nearby rooftop. Once she got the dirt we needed to lay a trace to her sister, she'd get out of there and then we'd burst in like an unwelcome guest at a Beijing wedding party.

(You're sure about this?) I signed before taking my position. (If things get hotter than a Mexian-Indian restaurant in there, I won't be able to come very quickly.)

"Unlike my sister, I know that this place is trouble," said Lacey. "And unlike her, I'm going in armed and with backup. Don't worry about me. And if anything goes south, just remember: this was all my idea."

I nodded, but I couldn't help worrying the issue like a pair of cheap prayer beads as I climbed to the top of an abandoned fish sauce factory next door. Dames were usually trouble, and this one was even more so than usual, but she had a sharp tongue and was willing to get her mitts dirty--two things you don't often see among anybody, let alone dames. I wished my agency was profitable enough for me to afford a high-powered sniper rifle usable by pandas, or even a barrel extension for my usual mohaska, as I climbed. The place was boarded up, but I don't know why they bothered. Pandas are semi-arboreal after all.

"I'm here to volunteer for the Charitable Panda Society," I heard Lacey say over the bug. Holding up the spyglasses, I could see her through the window of the front door, talking to what looked like a normal secretary. The building looked rundown and industrial, like a five-dollar hooker--I could even see beat-up old furniture through a skylight in the adjoining warehouse. But the area around the so-called charitable society was cleaned up and looked much nicer than what lay behind, where ordinary people might be afraid to venture for fear of coming down with a serious case of bullet holes.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" said another voice, presumably the secretary. "Please, fill out this form."

I heard Lacey's pen scratching and then the rustling of paper. "Our director of human resources will call you in once we've run your information through our computer," the supposed secretary said. I immediately distrusted her; daggers hid in that saccharine voice.

A while later, long enough that I'd taken a nip of bamboo wine from my lucky flask to steady my nerves, I heard a door open and another female voice, this one with a husky edge of cigarettes. "We love the look of your application," the woman said. "We'd just like to conduct a quick on-site interview before we process you. Is that okay?"

"As the bossman said to his staff: works for me," Lacey replied. The silhouettes in the building began to move, and I caught a lucky break of a sort: the moved directly under the skylight. I had a clear look at Lacey and the other woman, whose back was to me.

What I saw, though, and she didn't, were the men approaching her from behind. (Look out!) I signed instinctively, forgetting that the bug was one-way and that sign language was silent as a fresh grave unless you were wearing finger cymbals.

I heard Lacey cry out and curse as the mooks took hold of her; one of them got a boot to the crown jewels for his trouble, but they were big and experienced. Gal had spunk, but even I would have had a hard time against those mooks. She was quietly frisked and relieved of her mohaska, after which the lady whispered something I couldn't quite make out to her mooks. He fished a syringe out of a pocket with one hand and jabbed it into Lacey's arm.

"Urgh…!" cried Lacey. "I'll tear your nards off and wear them as garters for that! I…"

The mooks released her suddenly, but Lacey wobbled drunkenly on her feet and made no attempt to escape.

You might be wondering why I wasn't already on the way down to rescue her gun blazing. Well, it was lightning fast for one, and I probably couldn't have gotten there in time to stop it anyhow. And the suddenness of it--the bamboo wine didn't help--sort of froze me in my place, Parada Glacier, while things unfolded below.

As Lacey's sailor talk trailed off, the boots on her feet were noticeably swelling, even from my Vantage point. They soon burst, and I saw her nails plowing through the floor as they turned into claws, leaving law marks that eerily matched dozens of similar sets. Lacey, in disbelief, held her hands up to her face, watching (as I did) them grow pads while their fingers thickened, furred. That same fur wildfired like an arson case all over her body, and I recognized the pattern immediately.

"What…is…happening…to…me?" Lacey cried in a choked voice. I already knew; she'd been given a shot of an illegal pandafication drug, maybe one of Chervena's fly-by-night nostrums.

I watched like the glaciers on Mount Useless as Lacey's hiking pants shredded like a bad tissue to reveal a monochrome and voluptuous caboose, all fur and curves where she'd been skin and bones before, as the gams below shortened and reshaped to match the Lacey on either side. The thick and powerful form of a lady panda was undeniably thickening and reshaping itself out of the athletic human frame she'd walked in my door with. Teeth shifted into bamboo-grinders and fangs as she cried out in agony; her oh-so-sensible shirt popped open below, where her breasts were giving way to fur and those curves to flat checkerboard plans fur. Lacey clawed at her ears as they grew and her freckle-speckled nose as it got black and wet in the course of sprouting out into a panda's muzzle.

"Rhhhg!" by the time Lacey was forced to stumble onto to all fours, she's lost the capacity for human speech. She spasmed as everything about her went from human scale to panda, with fur growing everywhere it wasn't, except for her head, where that red mane was withering away, sucked up into her scalp like noodles in front of a starving don. Moments later, it was done: there was a final squeal from the bug as it was crushed between Lacey's growing bulk and what was left of her clothes, but after a final paroxysm her garments fell away to reveal a newly-minted bear. A small rufus red dot of fur was visible between her eyes, the only indication that the monochrome dame was anything out of the ordinary.

She was stunningly gorgeous. That might have been one reason I was dumbstruck: go watch a beautiful woman emerge from what you thought was an unattractive beast sometime and see for yourself.

I finally snapped out of it when I saw the mooks jab her with some tranquilizer and began to drag her toward a truck at one of the loading docks, presumably stuffed with stuffing for more awful panda dolls. I climbed down as fast as I could, but the truck was already in motion when I hit the bricks. I let off a few rounds at it before realizing that I really didn't want to accidentally kill its passenger, leaving me to watch, helpless, as she rolled away at top speed. I probably would have burst into the factory myself if I hadn't been caught with an empty revolver just when a mook on the inside decided to give me a burst from his burp gun.

All told, it was not my finest hour: my client was gone, kidnapped, and I had no idea where to find her.

That set the stage for what I did next, which was either as noble as riding into battle on a white charger with armor mirror-polished or as dumb as doing sit-ups under parked cars. You might argue with my reasoning, but keep this in mind: my client was a pretty swell dame as human dames go, she'd paid in advance, I'd gotten her into the mess she was currently in, and she had a ton of moxie as a panda. You'll have to trust me on that last one if you're not a panda yourself.

I couldn't very well waltz in the same door that Lacey had; it was clear from the ads that they were looking for humans and the mooks had been well-armed. Even if I had opened the old arms locker and gone in with my Chicago typewriter hammering out a Dear John, there was just no way. So I decided to hit up my old pal Dr. Cal Chervena for one of his patented products. And when I say hit up, I mean it; the fat SOB had a black eye and was dangling upside down from his own balcony when he graciously agreed to meet my needs. I don't necessarily think Chervena's a bad guy, aside from the reputation he has for screwing with his assistants, but discretion backed up by the threat of violence has always been my watchword.

Chervena gave me two vials. One was the same stuff he'd given to an ex-client of mine, Xia Goodman or Da Xiong Mao depending on when you asked and how monochrome checkerboard she was feeling at the time. The other was most likely the same thing that had taken Lacey on her sudden journey from not-bad-for-a-human-dame to supermodel-by-panda-standards. Call it a disguise if you must; I called it a nasty taste in my mouth as I swallowed it.

I was suddenly terribly hot, like the time I'd visited Florida in the summer time, and suddenly somebody upstairs put me in a big vise and started to turn the screws as I felt an intense squeezing sensation. I guess I was, from a certain frame of mind--in the few ticks of the office clock it took to process the feeling, I'd shrunk by about a foot around the waist and about fifty pounds everywhere else. Hell of a weight loss pill, though panda gals don't care for thin and bony as much as big and chunky like a good can of bamboo soup. Good thing I was alone, because I was pretty quickly standing in a pool of my own pants; like an impotent beatnik, I didn't have the hip to keep things up. My shirt had been a really good fit despite being tailored for a human roughly my mass and girth; now I felt like a Boy Scout because the damn thing was a tent, with me lost in it.

While all that was going down, so was my fur: more or less all over, it got a little shorter and a little shorter like a pimp's junk when he thinks of his grandma. I felt a rush of blood and saw a rush of color peeking out from the monochrome that was my fur. You con probably figure that, by the time that somebody with the vice stopped squeezing, the fur was all gone except my head and my face. That Florida sensation drained away too, and suddenly I was colder than a Siberian nudist--how the hell humans stood being so naked was suddenly all the more mysterious. I wore clothes for affect and style, but I could see now whey they needed them. Everything sounded strange from naked ears lower than a Jamaican limbo pole, and toddling around on the circus parade stilts humans call legs didn't have any of the heft I'd come to expect from thick panda legs. And naturally, I suddenly only had five fingers to work with instead of six, flapping like pink spiders o the ends of wrists so spindly they looked like they might snap under the weight.

I might have hurled a little bit after seeing what I'd done to myself in the mirror. You might find that overreacting, but imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a cocker spaniel: no matter how much you like dogs, it's a good bet you don't want to be one (though Dr. Chervena might have an elixir for that too, come to think).

After scaring up some clothes that fit through my man Russell down at the Pandatown Salvation Army and trying out speaking with lips and vocal cords with a few friends on the phone, I went down to the Charitable Panda Society.

"I'm here to volunteer for the Charitable Panda Society," I said, my hands twitching in their pockets as they instinctively formed the signs.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" said the secretary, whose wide smile was offset by dead eyes. "Please, fill out this form."

Fine motor control wasn't exactly my strong suit even with my own paws, let alone the nasty fleshspiders my disguise had saddled me with. Luckily for me, bad penmanship was pretty widespread in an age when everyone can just text.

"Our director of human resources will call you in once we've run your information through our computer," said the secretary upon receiving my chicken scratches, the daggers that saccharine voice sharp enough to murder five Caesars before lunch.

"We love the look of your application." A husky woman who sounded like she didn't just smoke a pack a day but ate a pack a day entered some time later, waving my illegible scrawl. "We'd just like to conduct a quick on-site interview before we process you. Is that okay?"

"Of course," I said. They'd used the exact same lines as when Lacey had been in there earlier, as if reading from a script.

Things departed rather radically from the script once we got in the back and the first thing that happened was a mook slamming a gun butt into my pasty and squishy (well, more so than normal, anyhow) middle. I'd expected a dose of that pandafication serum to return me to my usual dashing self, followed by a quick but sharp action where I would tear the mooks' lungs out with my well-practiced claws while leaving one alive to interrogate.

"Do you think we're idiots, Parada?" the woman snapped. "That Chervena wan't being watched by our boys at every hour of every day?"

"None of the above," I wheezed.

"What should we do with him, boss?" a mook said. "Take care of him right here?"

"No," said Cigarettey Betty. "We don't want to attract any attention. Take him to the factory in the next truck and there won't be anyone around for miles we don't own."

They tied me up in pitiful little knots that I would have torn apart quicker than an Eagle Scout if I had my usual strength and coordination and flung me into the back of a van loaded with surplus foam and mattress parts--to be fair to the kidnappers, one of the better and softer vans into which I'd ever been thrown. I kept a mental count of how long we drove; it must have been well outside of Pandatown and the rest of the city. I'd gone in near lunchtime; it was dusk when we arrived and the mooks hauled me out.

We'd stopped by a big brick building, another old factory from back when this part of the US of A made anything other than spoiled brats and craft beer. Through the windows, I could see row upon row of pandas working on an assembly line, each of them stitching stuffed versions of themselves or filling them with secondhand fluff. Cancerlungs McFadden was waiting for me inside as her mooks dragged me; I wondered at the mechanics of how she'd beaten me there until I realized she'd probably been driving the van.

"So that's your game, is it?" I said. "Turning people into pandas just to put them to work making cheap-ass junk? Seems like a lot of trouble to go through when there's plenty of other things from China with thumbs that will do the work for less."

"Oh, Mr. Parada, what a ridiculously short-sighted and laughable idea that is." Coffin Nail Nelly laughed harshly. "Don't you see? Pandatown Prohibition means that we now own these people. If it ever got out that they had been pandas in violation of the law…well, there'd be a scandal to end all scandals! Extortion is the name of the game, Parada. The stuffed pandas are just to help cover our overhead costs."

"At least one of them's gotten word out."

"You mean Colleen Mauleon? That is a loose end that needs to be tied up, isn't it." Tobacco Tess approached me. "Remember, we own you now too, Parada. You could lose your license for this."

"Good thing I never bothered to get one."

"Listen, I'm a reasonable woman. Tell me where the stuffed panda is, and we'll keep you on retainer. Some panda muscle could be very useful to us, after all, and you'd be getting paid by your own blackmailers for the occasional freelance work. We've got enough dirt to keep you honest and the prices reasonable. What do you say?"

"What about the dame?" I said. "And her sister?"

"Oh, goddamn it, Parada, are you afraid of success?" barked Emphysema Ellie. "I'm offering you a contract worth maybe twenty thousand dollars a year at your going rate, starting today. Is it a deal or isn't it?" She held out a tobacco-stained hand.

I took it and shook vigorously. She smiled for a moment before her expression changed to one of abject fear at seeing my wrists unbound. I took her by the wrist and swung her like a roundhouse haymaker into her own mook, who dropped his piece at he shock. It went off, with the rat-a-tat of his Chicago typewriter making the other mook turn tail and flee. No wonder they wanted to hire me if that was the caliber of mook they had to work with.

"Never tie up a panda with bamboo hemp," I said with a wink. "You can't take the panda out of the man any more than you can take the man out of the panda. To drive the point home, I kicked her and her mook friend until they passed out for lack of anything better to do.

Taking up the fallen Chicago typewriter, I racked the bolt to make sure there was a .45 slug in the chamber. I could hear a commotion on the other side of the door which told me I might be in for a firefight after all; I kicked the door down before the mooks on the other side could get themselves organized.

Lacey stood there, in her new and improved panda form. There was blood on her claws and a couple of mooks who were lucky scars were good street cred in the clink. From the look of the panda-size manacles swinging from her wrist and ankle, she'd jimmied the locks with the needle she'd been sewing with.

(Ben?) she signed.

"Lacey?" I said.

It was a bit weird to hear us using the others' usual mode of communication, and even more so when we embraced in the heat of the moment. But then again, I suppose weird has been the watchword for most of my cases so far.

A few hours later, the mooks had been given a thorough tying up, the blackmail evidence dumped on a bonfire that was rapidly consuming the factory, and the stash of Chervena's drugs was in our hands. I handed the antidote out to anyone who wanted it, though a few of the newly minted pandas turned me down. I emptied the van of fuzz and told them I'd drop them wherever they wanted to go. Lacey, still a panda, approached me, still a human.

"You know," I said, "you're a pretty dynamite dame even by my usual low standards for dynamite and dames."

(And you're not so bad yourself, as far as detectives go,) signed Lacey. (We might very well have saved each others' lives back there, and I know for a fact you saved my sister's. Thank you.)

"You know…you could stay," I said, taking her paws in my hands. "You make a hell of a panda."

(You could stay too,) signed Lacey from within my grasp. (You make a hell of a human.)

We looked into each others' eyes. "Could you do it?" I said softly.

(Could you?)

I like to think that we made the grown-up decision there, in that moment. It was right…but it also felt wrong. No matter how sweet it was, whichever way we decided to swing, in the back of our minds one of us would always miss what we had been before and know we were living a lie.

"I'll see you around, Lacey," I said, tasting the bitter dregs of Chervena's panda elixir.

(No, you won't,) she signed, doing the same with one of the antidotes I'd liberated. (I'll be seeing you.)

Description
Everyone's favorite pandetective Ben Parada is back with a new case! All credit to my collaborator for the wonderful art to go along with this latest tale of panda noir; please remember to give the original some sugar here .

I woke up woozy not long after that bastard Chang put two shots into me. Nevermind that they'd been shots of Chengtu Charlie's Malt Bamboo Wine and that I'd paid Chang for them, in as much as any drink on my tab counts for paying anything; I felt as if some mook had put a pair of .38 slugs right between my eyes. I probably would have slept all day, but whoever was knocking on my door was louder and more annoying than Chengtu Charlie knocking on my skull. I straightened my tie, threw on some of Ban Ban's Eau d'Bambou, and answered.

Name's Ben Parada, and I'm a private snoop. Says so on the door, licensed and bonded, even if the license is to drive and the bond is the one keeping me out of the clink. Most people think that the "PI" is for "private investigator," and I've investigated my fair share of privates in my day. But when I blackmailed Billy the Froster to put the letters on it, I'd had "panda investigator" in mind. That's right, I'm a panda gumshoe, which is notable both for the panda part and the shoe part, as it's kind of hard to find a pair that fit and can support 250 pounds in style. Luckily, humans seem to be trying to outdo us pandas in the girth department these days, so it's never been easier to dig up a decent suit from a Salvation Army in the bad part of town.

It was a dame at the door. It's always a dame, but very rarely the sort of dame I'm into. Human dames are all right, I suppose, if you're into toothpicks you can snap just by looking at them, but give me a meaty babe with more black and white than a classic grindhouse theater any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

"You Ben Parada?" the dame asked. She was human, with red hair and jade eyes--both the sort that a human man would kill or at the very least wound for, and both the sort that weren't used to taking any funny business. Some dames dress when they come to my door, some dames don't; this dame would have looked like she was out for a hiking trip, if people carried .32 caliber mohaskas strapped to their inner thigh on hiking trips.

(That's what is says on the door,) I signed to her. More humans understand sign language as we monochrome bamboo-munchers are able to pull it off these days, more still in the Pandatown ghetto, but I still keep a beat-up old cell phone handy for the mooks that can't. We pandas can make a few sounds that only we can understand, but variations on "whuff" tend to strike humans as being aggressive growls more than anything. And everybody knows how trigger happy the humans get when they think a monochrome's growling at them, especially in Pandatown, especially after Panda Prohibition.

Luckily, the dame understood. "Name's Lacey Mauleon," she said. "I hear you specialize in panda cases."

I put my paws in my pockets and shrugged. (No shit,) I wanted to say, (did you think I was in the business of elephant trunks?) But I kept my paws to myself--they'd gotten me in plenty of trouble over the years, and that pose also made my own mohaska stick out from its shoulder holster. If the dame was thinking of causing any trouble, I wanted her to know that my good friends Smith and Wesson were backing me up with more powerful magnum slugs than Chang's private reserve.

"Of course you are," Lacey continued. "You can keep the smartass remarks to yourself. I've got a panda case for you, and I expect results."

(I'm happy to help, Miss Mauleon,) I signed, withdrawing my hands from their pinstriped refuges. (Let me guess? You need me to track down a panda for you. Some monochrome owe you money? Stalking you and not taking pepper spray for an answer?)

"Oh no, Mr. Parada," said Lacey, smirking. "I've already found the panda. He's with me right now, in fact."

(He's not your brother, is he?) I signed. (I know some guys, but getting pandas turned into humans or vice-versa ain't exactly my speciality).

We the monochrome denizens of Pandatown, who came to Oceanside seeking a better life, have been blasted by both barrels of discrimination and stereotyping as soon as we stepped out of zoos, but the last couple years there'd been a moral panic about us. Technology and sorcery--really the same goddamn thing if you boiled it down like a good reduction of bamboo stew--had made it possible for a panda to metamorphose into a human or--heaven forbid!--a human seeking to go monochrome. I didn't understand it myself; I liked what I was and had no hurry to change it. But plenty of monochromes disagreed; maybe they wanted the better life free of discrimination and the ghetto of Pandatown that a new form could bring them, or maybe they were just bushwhacked by the constant bombardment of humans as an ideal of beauty in the media. I was pretty sure the humans saw us pandas as somehow exotic or alluring, for their part, which was pretty awful when you thought about it, which I tried not to.

That's why the voters of Oceanside City--which don't, for the record, include pandas--added § 1137.20.8.24 to the City Code. We call it "Pandatown Prohibition," and it slaps some pretty nasty penalties on said metamorphosis or the attempt thereof, like you're trying to off somebody or rob a bank instead of changing how much body hair you have to tweeze. I guess I can't complain; panda gumshoes like me have seen quite the increase in cases as a result. But as much as I like being what I am, the idea that there are laws in place to keep it like that rubs me the wrong way with a razor blade.

"Not exactly," Lacey said with a smirk. "My sister." She pulled something from a knapsack and tossed it to the beat-up armchair I kept in the office more for naps than for clients.

It was a cheap stuffed novelty panda with big eyes and coloration that was five shades of all wrong. (I guess she must take after your father's side of the family,) I signed.

"Cute," smirked Lacey. "This showed up at my door two days ago. Turn it over."

I flipped the doll and, sure enough, there was a message in the off-white (and not the right kind of off-white either, like I said, it was a piece of crap and insulting to boot) fur of the toy panda's back: PLEASE HELP ME. -COLLEEN.

"My sister Colleen used to work as a volunteer in Pandatown," said Lacey. "In a bamboo soup kitchen. Said she wanted to do some good in the world. I said she should just give to the United Panda Fund and cut out the middleman, but she always did leap before she looked. I haven't heard from her in six weeks, and no one else has either. Hostel where she was staying isn't the sort of place that keeps records."

(You dust this for prints before you got your greasy mitts all over it?) I signed.

"Of course I did," Lacey snapped. "Do I look like an idiot to you? There's no fingerprints of any kind on it, no label to say where it was made, and no return address on the box. All I know is that it's a panda and Colleen was in Pandatown. That's why I'm here. You want to tell me I should take my business elsewhere?" She flashed an envelope that was thick with bills. "I pay in cash up front and when the job is done."

I licked my lips looking at then envelope and the fifty visible atop the stack. That would be plenty to split between Chang the bartender, Chang the bookie, and Chang the parole officer with a little left over for Chang the grocer and Chang the gunsmith (no relation). I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen cash up front, most likely because no one had ever given me any despite the fact that I always did a good job and despite the fact that I really didn't care. (You've got a deal) I signed.

"Great," said Lacey. She affixed her Jane Hancock to my standard expense form (my pawprint was already on every one in the stack) and took her carbon copy with a smile before tossing me the envelope. I opened it greedily, only to find that only the top bill was a fifty; the others were all singles. The dame had just bought me with an advance payment of $74. I should have been mad; hell, I should have been furious. But I had to admire the stone cold moxie it took to pull off a con like that with a straight face. I was starting to like this dame, against my better judgement.

(You will pay me my full fee when we're done here,) I signed. (That trick only works once.)

"Of course," Lacey said. "Think of it as a scented plastic lure on a hook"

(Only as long as we don't continue the metaphor to the point where I'm gutted on the bottom of the boat) I signed back. (Now let's get down to business.)

I took up the panda doll and, using one claw, I popped its cheap and haphazard stitching, revealing what it had been stuffed with. True to the toy's exterior cheapness, it was cheap on the inside too, with a motley mix of shredded used upholstery inside. The sort of stuff that would never pass muster with squeamish humans, yeah, but even I would think twice about giving something with that stuffing to my cub if I had one that I knew about. I dumped the whole thing out and tossed the deflated rag that was left back to Lacey, who had taken up a position on the corner of my desk.

"You just playing amateur surgeon for the fun of it?" she drawled. "Or are you the sort of guy that gets off on beating the stuffing out of pandas smaller than you?"

I picked through the shredded detritus. (Neither,) I signed. (I sympathize with the poor guy. I'll fill him up with Chengtu Charlie's Malt Bamboo Wine afterwards, which always works for me when I've had my stuffing beat out.) True to my intuition, which is never wrong until it is, there was part of a tag in the mix. I pulled it out and held it up to my desk lamp. (Can you read that?)

Lacey squinted. "Looks like Firefox Upholstery Inc," she read. "Address is here in Pandatown."

I nodded. Oceanside City humans and their English. Cantonese was so much more elegant if you had to read it. (Let me look it up on the computer.) Pulling my phone off its cradle, I placed it on an old text-to-speech synthesizer that I used for professional calls and dialed.

"This-Shu-Mian?" I typed, cringing at the voice that came out over the speaker, which would have sounded more at home in a disabled physicist's wheelchair.

"Who-is-asking?" was the reply with a similar but subtly different voice. "I-am-busy."

"You pal sounds like a real upstanding robot," said Lacey. "Do I need to buy you a quart of vintage motor oil to bribe him with?"

(You should know that robots only like the fresh stuff) I signed. Yes, it was official: I liked Lacey Mauleon's moxie. Not enough to give her a discount or to get around the fact that red hair brings to mind those snotty and hyperactive bastards the red pandas for me, mind you, but still. "I-need-to-know-anything-that-has-come-across-your-desk-about-Firefox-Upholstery-in-the-last-few-years."

Shu Mian, my "computer," was the classifieds editor at the Pandatown Pravda magazine. We monochromes are on the wrong side of the digital divide, so the Pravda, which is given away free on the strength of its ads for terrible products no one in their right mind should buy. He had his paws in all kinds of dirt, and I sent him a few bucks or a bottle of Chengtu Charlie's Private Reserve when I could in order to keep those selfsame paws greased enough that some information might just slip out.

"That-old-place?" Shu Mian's synthesized voice said. "It-was-closed-down-years-ago-but-they-never-sold-their-back-inventory. I-think-the-building-has-a-new-tenant-these-days. Let-me-check."

I turned to Lacey, about to sign what I was thinking, but she beat me to the punch: "You're thinking that whoever owns the building now is grinding up what's left of that ratty old back stock to make cheap stuffing for cheaper pandas."

Nodding, I signed (When it comes to cheap stuffing and cheaper pandas, I'm your guy. And Shu Mian is my guy; a human or even a panda he didn't know couldn't get the time of day out of him.)

A moment later, Shu Mian's synthesizer buzzed on the line in reply. "As-I-thought," it said, "I-ran-a-classified-advertisement-for-the-new-tenants-about-two-months-ago. They-were-looking-for-human-volunteers-to-help-them-reach-out-to-underserved-panda-neighborhoods."

"Sounds like just the sort of scented plastic lure on a hook Colleen would go in for," said Lacey. "She always was a sucker for that bleeding heart crap."

"Who-placed-the-ad?" I typed in response.

"The-ad-said-the-Charitable-Panda-Society-of-Firefox-Road," replied Shu Mian, "but-the-check-was-from-Sichuan-Novelty-Products. Chinese-company-that-does-a-lot-of-business-over-here-these-days." He added that the return address appeared to be from the old factory's location on Firefox Road.

"Thanks-Shu-Mian," I said electronically. "This-month's-envelope-will-have-a-little-extra-in-it."

"It-had-batter," was his response. "And-of-course-if-my-name-gets-mixed-up-in-this-I-will-deny-it-and-never-do-business-with-you-again-and-kill-you-in-roughly-that-order." His line clicked dead.

"Well, I'd say you have your work cut out for you investigating," said Lacey with a half-smile.

(We have our work cut out for us,) I signed back. (Remember, these people only accept humans, and even if I shaved I don't think I could pass.)

"So you need your client's help to crack your own case?" Lacey said, laughing sharply. "All right, but I'll have to take my hourly rate out of your cut."

(With any luck.) I signed back, (you won't even make it to one hour.)

It took about a week to work out the particulars to the Swiss Watch level they have to be for something like this. I slapped a bug on Lacey that I had swept from my office after that unpleasantness with the Panda Triad and dusted off my high-powered binoculars, carefully repurposed for use by a panda mook with pliers and a welding torch. She, bugged, would go to the Firefox Road address of the so-called Charitable Panda Society, and I'd listen and watch from a nearby rooftop. Once she got the dirt we needed to lay a trace to her sister, she'd get out of there and then we'd burst in like an unwelcome guest at a Beijing wedding party.

(You're sure about this?) I signed before taking my position. (If things get hotter than a Mexian-Indian restaurant in there, I won't be able to come very quickly.)

"Unlike my sister, I know that this place is trouble," said Lacey. "And unlike her, I'm going in armed and with backup. Don't worry about me. And if anything goes south, just remember: this was all my idea."

I nodded, but I couldn't help worrying the issue like a pair of cheap prayer beads as I climbed to the top of an abandoned fish sauce factory next door. Dames were usually trouble, and this one was even more so than usual, but she had a sharp tongue and was willing to get her mitts dirty--two things you don't often see among anybody, let alone dames. I wished my agency was profitable enough for me to afford a high-powered sniper rifle usable by pandas, or even a barrel extension for my usual mohaska, as I climbed. The place was boarded up, but I don't know why they bothered. Pandas are semi-arboreal after all.

"I'm here to volunteer for the Charitable Panda Society," I heard Lacey say over the bug. Holding up the spyglasses, I could see her through the window of the front door, talking to what looked like a normal secretary. The building looked rundown and industrial, like a five-dollar hooker--I could even see beat-up old furniture through a skylight in the adjoining warehouse. But the area around the so-called charitable society was cleaned up and looked much nicer than what lay behind, where ordinary people might be afraid to venture for fear of coming down with a serious case of bullet holes.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" said another voice, presumably the secretary. "Please, fill out this form."

I heard Lacey's pen scratching and then the rustling of paper. "Our director of human resources will call you in once we've run your information through our computer," the supposed secretary said. I immediately distrusted her; daggers hid in that saccharine voice.

A while later, long enough that I'd taken a nip of bamboo wine from my lucky flask to steady my nerves, I heard a door open and another female voice, this one with a husky edge of cigarettes. "We love the look of your application," the woman said. "We'd just like to conduct a quick on-site interview before we process you. Is that okay?"

"As the bossman said to his staff: works for me," Lacey replied. The silhouettes in the building began to move, and I caught a lucky break of a sort: the moved directly under the skylight. I had a clear look at Lacey and the other woman, whose back was to me.

What I saw, though, and she didn't, were the men approaching her from behind. (Look out!) I signed instinctively, forgetting that the bug was one-way and that sign language was silent as a fresh grave unless you were wearing finger cymbals.

I heard Lacey cry out and curse as the mooks took hold of her; one of them got a boot to the crown jewels for his trouble, but they were big and experienced. Gal had spunk, but even I would have had a hard time against those mooks. She was quietly frisked and relieved of her mohaska, after which the lady whispered something I couldn't quite make out to her mooks. He fished a syringe out of a pocket with one hand and jabbed it into Lacey's arm.

"Urgh…!" cried Lacey. "I'll tear your nards off and wear them as garters for that! I…"

The mooks released her suddenly, but Lacey wobbled drunkenly on her feet and made no attempt to escape.

You might be wondering why I wasn't already on the way down to rescue her gun blazing. Well, it was lightning fast for one, and I probably couldn't have gotten there in time to stop it anyhow. And the suddenness of it--the bamboo wine didn't help--sort of froze me in my place, Parada Glacier, while things unfolded below.

As Lacey's sailor talk trailed off, the boots on her feet were noticeably swelling, even from my Vantage point. They soon burst, and I saw her nails plowing through the floor as they turned into claws, leaving law marks that eerily matched dozens of similar sets. Lacey, in disbelief, held her hands up to her face, watching (as I did) them grow pads while their fingers thickened, furred. That same fur wildfired like an arson case all over her body, and I recognized the pattern immediately.

"What…is…happening…to…me?" Lacey cried in a choked voice. I already knew; she'd been given a shot of an illegal pandafication drug, maybe one of Chervena's fly-by-night nostrums.

I watched like the glaciers on Mount Useless as Lacey's hiking pants shredded like a bad tissue to reveal a monochrome and voluptuous caboose, all fur and curves where she'd been skin and bones before, as the gams below shortened and reshaped to match the Lacey on either side. The thick and powerful form of a lady panda was undeniably thickening and reshaping itself out of the athletic human frame she'd walked in my door with. Teeth shifted into bamboo-grinders and fangs as she cried out in agony; her oh-so-sensible shirt popped open below, where her breasts were giving way to fur and those curves to flat checkerboard plans fur. Lacey clawed at her ears as they grew and her freckle-speckled nose as it got black and wet in the course of sprouting out into a panda's muzzle.

"Rhhhg!" by the time Lacey was forced to stumble onto to all fours, she's lost the capacity for human speech. She spasmed as everything about her went from human scale to panda, with fur growing everywhere it wasn't, except for her head, where that red mane was withering away, sucked up into her scalp like noodles in front of a starving don. Moments later, it was done: there was a final squeal from the bug as it was crushed between Lacey's growing bulk and what was left of her clothes, but after a final paroxysm her garments fell away to reveal a newly-minted bear. A small rufus red dot of fur was visible between her eyes, the only indication that the monochrome dame was anything out of the ordinary.

She was stunningly gorgeous. That might have been one reason I was dumbstruck: go watch a beautiful woman emerge from what you thought was an unattractive beast sometime and see for yourself.

I finally snapped out of it when I saw the mooks jab her with some tranquilizer and began to drag her toward a truck at one of the loading docks, presumably stuffed with stuffing for more awful panda dolls. I climbed down as fast as I could, but the truck was already in motion when I hit the bricks. I let off a few rounds at it before realizing that I really didn't want to accidentally kill its passenger, leaving me to watch, helpless, as she rolled away at top speed. I probably would have burst into the factory myself if I hadn't been caught with an empty revolver just when a mook on the inside decided to give me a burst from his burp gun.

All told, it was not my finest hour: my client was gone, kidnapped, and I had no idea where to find her.

That set the stage for what I did next, which was either as noble as riding into battle on a white charger with armor mirror-polished or as dumb as doing sit-ups under parked cars. You might argue with my reasoning, but keep this in mind: my client was a pretty swell dame as human dames go, she'd paid in advance, I'd gotten her into the mess she was currently in, and she had a ton of moxie as a panda. You'll have to trust me on that last one if you're not a panda yourself.

I couldn't very well waltz in the same door that Lacey had; it was clear from the ads that they were looking for humans and the mooks had been well-armed. Even if I had opened the old arms locker and gone in with my Chicago typewriter hammering out a Dear John, there was just no way. So I decided to hit up my old pal Dr. Cal Chervena for one of his patented products. And when I say hit up, I mean it; the fat SOB had a black eye and was dangling upside down from his own balcony when he graciously agreed to meet my needs. I don't necessarily think Chervena's a bad guy, aside from the reputation he has for screwing with his assistants, but discretion backed up by the threat of violence has always been my watchword.

Chervena gave me two vials. One was the same stuff he'd given to an ex-client of mine, Xia Goodman or Da Xiong Mao depending on when you asked and how monochrome checkerboard she was feeling at the time. The other was most likely the same thing that had taken Lacey on her sudden journey from not-bad-for-a-human-dame to supermodel-by-panda-standards. Call it a disguise if you must; I called it a nasty taste in my mouth as I swallowed it.

I was suddenly terribly hot, like the time I'd visited Florida in the summer time, and suddenly somebody upstairs put me in a big vise and started to turn the screws as I felt an intense squeezing sensation. I guess I was, from a certain frame of mind--in the few ticks of the office clock it took to process the feeling, I'd shrunk by about a foot around the waist and about fifty pounds everywhere else. Hell of a weight loss pill, though panda gals don't care for thin and bony as much as big and chunky like a good can of bamboo soup. Good thing I was alone, because I was pretty quickly standing in a pool of my own pants; like an impotent beatnik, I didn't have the hip to keep things up. My shirt had been a really good fit despite being tailored for a human roughly my mass and girth; now I felt like a Boy Scout because the damn thing was a tent, with me lost in it.

While all that was going down, so was my fur: more or less all over, it got a little shorter and a little shorter like a pimp's junk when he thinks of his grandma. I felt a rush of blood and saw a rush of color peeking out from the monochrome that was my fur. You con probably figure that, by the time that somebody with the vice stopped squeezing, the fur was all gone except my head and my face. That Florida sensation drained away too, and suddenly I was colder than a Siberian nudist--how the hell humans stood being so naked was suddenly all the more mysterious. I wore clothes for affect and style, but I could see now whey they needed them. Everything sounded strange from naked ears lower than a Jamaican limbo pole, and toddling around on the circus parade stilts humans call legs didn't have any of the heft I'd come to expect from thick panda legs. And naturally, I suddenly only had five fingers to work with instead of six, flapping like pink spiders o the ends of wrists so spindly they looked like they might snap under the weight.

I might have hurled a little bit after seeing what I'd done to myself in the mirror. You might find that overreacting, but imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a cocker spaniel: no matter how much you like dogs, it's a good bet you don't want to be one (though Dr. Chervena might have an elixir for that too, come to think).

After scaring up some clothes that fit through my man Russell down at the Pandatown Salvation Army and trying out speaking with lips and vocal cords with a few friends on the phone, I went down to the Charitable Panda Society.

"I'm here to volunteer for the Charitable Panda Society," I said, my hands twitching in their pockets as they instinctively formed the signs.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" said the secretary, whose wide smile was offset by dead eyes. "Please, fill out this form."

Fine motor control wasn't exactly my strong suit even with my own paws, let alone the nasty fleshspiders my disguise had saddled me with. Luckily for me, bad penmanship was pretty widespread in an age when everyone can just text.

"Our director of human resources will call you in once we've run your information through our computer," said the secretary upon receiving my chicken scratches, the daggers that saccharine voice sharp enough to murder five Caesars before lunch.

"We love the look of your application." A husky woman who sounded like she didn't just smoke a pack a day but ate a pack a day entered some time later, waving my illegible scrawl. "We'd just like to conduct a quick on-site interview before we process you. Is that okay?"

"Of course," I said. They'd used the exact same lines as when Lacey had been in there earlier, as if reading from a script.

Things departed rather radically from the script once we got in the back and the first thing that happened was a mook slamming a gun butt into my pasty and squishy (well, more so than normal, anyhow) middle. I'd expected a dose of that pandafication serum to return me to my usual dashing self, followed by a quick but sharp action where I would tear the mooks' lungs out with my well-practiced claws while leaving one alive to interrogate.

"Do you think we're idiots, Parada?" the woman snapped. "That Chervena wan't being watched by our boys at every hour of every day?"

"None of the above," I wheezed.

"What should we do with him, boss?" a mook said. "Take care of him right here?"

"No," said Cigarettey Betty. "We don't want to attract any attention. Take him to the factory in the next truck and there won't be anyone around for miles we don't own."

They tied me up in pitiful little knots that I would have torn apart quicker than an Eagle Scout if I had my usual strength and coordination and flung me into the back of a van loaded with surplus foam and mattress parts--to be fair to the kidnappers, one of the better and softer vans into which I'd ever been thrown. I kept a mental count of how long we drove; it must have been well outside of Pandatown and the rest of the city. I'd gone in near lunchtime; it was dusk when we arrived and the mooks hauled me out.

We'd stopped by a big brick building, another old factory from back when this part of the US of A made anything other than spoiled brats and craft beer. Through the windows, I could see row upon row of pandas working on an assembly line, each of them stitching stuffed versions of themselves or filling them with secondhand fluff. Cancerlungs McFadden was waiting for me inside as her mooks dragged me; I wondered at the mechanics of how she'd beaten me there until I realized she'd probably been driving the van.

"So that's your game, is it?" I said. "Turning people into pandas just to put them to work making cheap-ass junk? Seems like a lot of trouble to go through when there's plenty of other things from China with thumbs that will do the work for less."

"Oh, Mr. Parada, what a ridiculously short-sighted and laughable idea that is." Coffin Nail Nelly laughed harshly. "Don't you see? Pandatown Prohibition means that we now own these people. If it ever got out that they had been pandas in violation of the law…well, there'd be a scandal to end all scandals! Extortion is the name of the game, Parada. The stuffed pandas are just to help cover our overhead costs."

"At least one of them's gotten word out."

"You mean Colleen Mauleon? That is a loose end that needs to be tied up, isn't it." Tobacco Tess approached me. "Remember, we own you now too, Parada. You could lose your license for this."

"Good thing I never bothered to get one."

"Listen, I'm a reasonable woman. Tell me where the stuffed panda is, and we'll keep you on retainer. Some panda muscle could be very useful to us, after all, and you'd be getting paid by your own blackmailers for the occasional freelance work. We've got enough dirt to keep you honest and the prices reasonable. What do you say?"

"What about the dame?" I said. "And her sister?"

"Oh, goddamn it, Parada, are you afraid of success?" barked Emphysema Ellie. "I'm offering you a contract worth maybe twenty thousand dollars a year at your going rate, starting today. Is it a deal or isn't it?" She held out a tobacco-stained hand.

I took it and shook vigorously. She smiled for a moment before her expression changed to one of abject fear at seeing my wrists unbound. I took her by the wrist and swung her like a roundhouse haymaker into her own mook, who dropped his piece at he shock. It went off, with the rat-a-tat of his Chicago typewriter making the other mook turn tail and flee. No wonder they wanted to hire me if that was the caliber of mook they had to work with.

"Never tie up a panda with bamboo hemp," I said with a wink. "You can't take the panda out of the man any more than you can take the man out of the panda. To drive the point home, I kicked her and her mook friend until they passed out for lack of anything better to do.

Taking up the fallen Chicago typewriter, I racked the bolt to make sure there was a .45 slug in the chamber. I could hear a commotion on the other side of the door which told me I might be in for a firefight after all; I kicked the door down before the mooks on the other side could get themselves organized.

Lacey stood there, in her new and improved panda form. There was blood on her claws and a couple of mooks who were lucky scars were good street cred in the clink. From the look of the panda-size manacles swinging from her wrist and ankle, she'd jimmied the locks with the needle she'd been sewing with.

(Ben?) she signed.

"Lacey?" I said.

It was a bit weird to hear us using the others' usual mode of communication, and even more so when we embraced in the heat of the moment. But then again, I suppose weird has been the watchword for most of my cases so far.

A few hours later, the mooks had been given a thorough tying up, the blackmail evidence dumped on a bonfire that was rapidly consuming the factory, and the stash of Chervena's drugs was in our hands. I handed the antidote out to anyone who wanted it, though a few of the newly minted pandas turned me down. I emptied the van of fuzz and told them I'd drop them wherever they wanted to go. Lacey, still a panda, approached me, still a human.

"You know," I said, "you're a pretty dynamite dame even by my usual low standards for dynamite and dames."

(And you're not so bad yourself, as far as detectives go,) signed Lacey. (We might very well have saved each others' lives back there, and I know for a fact you saved my sister's. Thank you.)

"You know…you could stay," I said, taking her paws in my hands. "You make a hell of a panda."

(You could stay too,) signed Lacey from within my grasp. (You make a hell of a human.)

We looked into each others' eyes. "Could you do it?" I said softly.

(Could you?)

I like to think that we made the grown-up decision there, in that moment. It was right…but it also felt wrong. No matter how sweet it was, whichever way we decided to swing, in the back of our minds one of us would always miss what we had been before and know we were living a lie.

"I'll see you around, Lacey," I said, tasting the bitter dregs of Chervena's panda elixir.

(No, you won't,) she signed, doing the same with one of the antidotes I'd liberated. (I'll be seeing you.)