Mr Big Gets Swapped Read online

  Mr. Big Gets Swapped

  By Eric Filler

  Mr. Big Gets Swapped

  About the Author

  Also Available from the Author

  More Gender Swap Fiction from Planet 99 Publishing

  In fifteen years of real estate development, Joe Custer had run into his share of obstacles: government officials, environmental protesters, and those irrational people who simply wanted to cling to their little plot of land until they got moved to a plot in the cemetery. In the end there was always a way to break those obstacles down. Sometimes it was a bribe or other times intimidation either through the legal system or extra-legal alternatives.

  Helena Monroe had turned out to be a more persistent opponent than the others. He hadn’t heard of her when he purchased the ten thousand acres near Nashville for his latest golf course. It was to be his twentieth course, the piece de resistance for his empire. He had already contracted a PGA champion to design the course and a top architect to design the attached resort. The top floor of the resort would be dedicated for his new permanent living quarters. Not so much a retirement as merely transferring his flag to make the new resort the center of his world. The office building in Nashville he had purchased was already being renovated to house Cavalry Investments.

  While the office building project was already underway, work on the golf course and resort was being held up by Helena Monroe. His best corporate spies had turned up little about her. She was forty-three years old, had grown up on a farm nearby until going to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for four years and then returning to the farm. Those were the established facts. There was only a picture of her from the university’s registrar. Monroe had been a plain, unremarkable girl with frizzy brown hair that covered most of her face. That such an ordinary creature could hold up his masterpiece was just another part of his irritation; it was like da Vinci being held up because some shopkeeper’s daughter wouldn’t deliver the supplies he needed.

  Joe had first sent a lawyer to her house with a check for five hundred thousand dollars. That was twice what the land was worth, a demonstration of how serious he was about obtaining the property. The woman had refused to even come to the door.

  When two other attempts to buy the land were similarly refused, Joe leaned on the county to invoke eminent domain to take the land. They would then of course sell the land to Cavalry Investments in due time. It would be a slower process, but one that he had used in other instances.

  Something bizarre had happened: the government flunky and deputy who’d gone to Monroe’s house had come back with the papers and money—and raving about monsters. They had been hospitalized in the psych ward for a week, where despite a heavy dose of drugs they had continued to rave about monsters with red eyes, fangs, and claws that had chased them away. Both men were still on disability leave and on high doses of antipsychotics.

  That had convinced the county to back out of the deal, despite the threats of Joe’s lawyers. No one in the county offices or sheriff department wanted to go anywhere near that house. They would rather pay a hundred thousand dollar cancellation fee than try again.

  Next Joe had hired a group of mercenaries to flush Monroe from the house. The mercenaries were a dozen men battle-hardened from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They had also done jobs in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia for various governments and corporations. They should have been more than a match for some frumpy middle-aged woman in Tennessee.

  They had gone in at night, when Monroe should have been asleep. Joe watched on a monitor in his office as the mercenaries moved in, keeping to the trees and brush to avoid being seen. They surrounded the dilapidated farmhouse and ramshackle barn without any sign of being spotted.

  “Are we go, sir?” the leader whispered into his radio.

  “Do it,” Joe said, a giddy thrill running through him at being in command of this elite team.

  “We’re go,” the leader announced over the radio. There had only been taps on the microphones to answer.

  Then on the screen Joe had watched all twelve of the men start to move with coordinated precision. This was something they had done plenty of times before. In a few minutes they would have Monroe in cuffs to drag to a storage container in a parking lot of one of Joe’s properties. A day or two in there with no food or water and Monroe would sign over the last piece of property Joe needed. Or if she wouldn’t, they would simply forge her signature and make her part of the cornerstone of the new resort.

  As Joe savored the thought of Monroe’s corpse being forever buried in his new resort, there was a flash on all twelve parts of the screen. And then...nothing. Static. “What’s going on? Where are they? Get them back!” he had shouted at an underling.

  But they were gone. The only sign of the mercenaries was a pair of pants caught on the tusk of a wild boar trapped by a hunter a few days later. Somehow, in the blink of an eye, Monroe had killed a dozen of the best, most expensive mercenaries in the world. Either that or she had somehow made a deal with them for them to disappear. Both options left him without that final parcel of land.

  His advisors had suggested just building around that parcel of land. They could make the new golf course so it wrapped around Monroe’s land. They could build walls high enough so no one at the resort could see her farm. They could choke off her access to roads, electricity, and sewage lines. In time she would move of her own free will. Or so the thinking went.

  Joe had listened to the arguments. It made sense since they had exhausted every other alternative. That damnable woman would be completely cut off from the rest of the world while he would have his piece de resistance.

  Yet he knew it wouldn’t be the same. Even if no one else could see it, he would know Monroe was there, her continued existence mocking him. Everything he could do with his money completely impotent in the face of her defiance. It would embolden others the next time he wanted a piece of property. The blood would be in the water and the sharks would start circling.

  And then a messenger had brought him a yellowed envelope. There was an equally yellowed sheet of paper inside. In spindly handwriting had been written, “Only a coward uses others to get what he wants.”

  There had been no signature, but he hadn’t needed one. He knew who it was: Helena Monroe. And he knew what he had to do: he had to go there, alone, and face the bitch down. If she still wouldn’t give in, then he would wring her fucking neck until she did.

  ***

  Joe rarely drove himself anymore, but he insisted on driving himself to Monroe’s farm. He didn’t bring a security detail either, though he had readily agreed to take a gun with him. The Beretta was tucked into his jacket where he could easily get to it when he needed it—like once he had Monroe’s signature on the contract and no longer needed her alive.

  After years of little driving, he didn’t go fast down the dirt road to Monroe’s farm. He leaned forward in his seat, keeping an eye out for any obstacles she might have rigged to kill him before he could get there. Coming at night had been his idea so he could take her by surprise. He hoped the bitch would be snug in her bed when he got there and pounded on the door.

  There were a lot of trees on either side of the road that along with the darkness made it impossible to see the house. He would have missed it if the navigation computer hadn’t told him he was near his destination. Then he saw a mailbox beside the road, just a simple silver box with no name on it. He cut his lights and slowed down even further as he turned into the driveway.

  He had seen the farm on video and in pictures, but those had failed to capture the foreboding nature of the place. The farmhouse might have once been white, but over the years it had turned gray with the darker gray shutters hanging at odd angles. The ro
of had been patched numerous times with different colored shingles of black, brown, and green. A couple hundred yards away, the barn loomed and beyond that was an old windmill not moving in the still air.

  Joe stopped halfway in the driveway and turned the engine off. As he’d hoped, there were no lights on anywhere. Whoever Monroe was, she hadn’t expected him. Or maybe that was what she wanted him to think. He patted the gun in his jacket and then got out, closing the door carefully to avoid making noise.

  He crept up the driveway, stopping every few feet to listen, but there were only crickets, bullfrogs, and the occasional hoot of an owl. He shivered at how lonely the place was; the nearest souls besides him and Monroe were his security detail a few miles back. Given what had happened to the mercenaries, he didn’t expect them to be quick to come to his rescue.

  He eased onto the first step to the porch and was glad that it didn’t creak ominously. He took another step and then another until he was on the porch. So far, so good. He padded across the porch to the front door. It was at least farther than the mercenaries had got.

  Joe opened the screen door to hammer on the front door as hard as he could only for it to creak open on its own. That gave him pause; he had seen enough horror movies to know such an invitation usually turned out badly. Was she waiting for him? And what trick would she use on him?

  A raspy voice to his right said, “You going to stand there all night or are you going to come in for a spell?”

  He turned, but in the moonlight he could only see a shadowy figure. “Ms. Monroe? Is that you?”

  “Well it sure as hell ain’t Greta Garbo,” she said.

  “Why don’t you quit playing games and turn a light on?”

  “Your boys turned my electricity off weeks ago.”

  “You don’t have a candle or something?”

  “Why should I waste it on you?”

  He reached into his jacket. The gun was right there, but he didn’t want to fire blindly, especially not before he got her to sign the contract. Instead, he took his phone out. He held it up, letting the glow of the screen illuminate the house.

  With everything that had happened, he had expected to find a withered crone with a hooked nose and perhaps a lot of scars. All he saw was a thin, middle-aged woman with her tangled, greasy hair pulled into a thick ponytail. When she smiled, he saw a full mouth of teeth only slightly crooked. “Not what you expected?”

  “I didn’t expect anything,” he said. He leaned against the doorframe to glare at her. “I think I’ve been more than fair with you, Ms. Monroe. I offered you far more than you could have ever hoped to get from this dump.”

  “I suppose to you this would seem like a dump. My family’s lived here seven generations. My great-great-great-great-grandpappy came out west with Davy Crockett. My great-great-great-grandpappy fought at Lookout Mountain.”

  “For the Confederates?”

  Monroe shrugged. “Our family was too poor to have slaves, but we didn’t have no love for the Union. Still don’t.”

  “History is fine, but you could buy a much nicer place with the money I offered.”

  “I can’t expect someone like you to understand. You was brought up in penthouses and such. All you care about is accumulating land. You don’t have no value of the land itself.”

  “There’s nothing special about this land.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because you’re in the way.”

  “Or maybe you’re in my way.”

  “I don’t see you developing this land at all. You’re just a squatter and it’s time you find somewhere else to squat.”

  “This land is mine. No one’s moving me unless I want to move.”

  Joe thought about reaching for the gun, but he forced himself to take a breath. “There has to be something you want besides this.”

  “Nothing your lawyers and accountants could give me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Tell me what it is and we might be able to work something out.”

  She stepped towards him, until her white nightgown brushed against him. She got on her toes to whisper into his ear, “I want to see what you got under those three-thousand-dollar trousers.”

  “What?”

  “When your man first came by, I did some research down at the library. Read all the magazine articles they had. You ain’t got no wife or kids, do you?”

  “No—”

  “That’s good,” she ran a rough hand over his cheek. “You want me to sign those papers, all you got to do is lie with me tonight.”

  “Lie with you? As in sex?”

  “You have done it, haven’t you?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “But not with one as ugly as me, right?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You don’t have to, Mr. Big. I know someone of your money has his pick of the litter. Way I figure it, this is the only chance I got. You want my land, don’t you? This is the price. That and the money you’re offering. We’ll just call this part sealing the deal.”

  “That’s not how this is done.”

  “You’d rather have some fellas machine gun me in my bed than fuck me?”

  “They weren’t—”

  “Oh, no, course not. They’d just drag me away and beat me with rubber hoses and such til I gave you what I wanted.” Her hand brushed his cheek again. “You can hit me with a hose if you want, lover.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Then you won’t get this land. Even if you build around it, it’ll always be here, mocking you—the one time Mr. Big couldn’t get what he wanted because he was too chicken shit to whore himself out for one night.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You don’t like getting your hands dirty. I know. It’s not your hands I’m interested in,” she said with a wink. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  “You hoping to get knocked up and charge me for child support?”

  “That’s very unlikely. I had a hysterectomy thirty-five years ago after an accident. I couldn’t get pregnant if I wanted to.”

  “My people didn’t say anything about that.”

  “My mom had the doctors change the records so no one would find out. It was easy in those days. We didn’t have any fancy computers to worry about.”

  “I thought you said it was thirty-five years ago?”

  “We’re not exactly on the cutting edge here,” she said. To his surprise she hiked up the hem of her nightgown, exposing thin legs surprisingly free of hair, a crotch covered by white cotton panties, and a concave stomach with a nasty pink scar running up from the lower abdomen. “You see it?”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth.”

  She let the nightgown drop. “You want me to go to the hospital for an X-ray or ultrasound?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to fuck you just to get this shitty farm.” He reached into his jacket to pull out the pistol. As the head of the security detail had taught him, he flicked the safety off. “Sign the papers or I’ll give you a few new scars.”

  She smirked at his threat. “I bet you practiced that line a few times, didn’t you?”

  “No. Now, what’s it going to be?”

  “You must be a very little man if you’d rather shoot me than let me see that other gun you’re packing.”

  “You practice that a few times?” he said.

  “It’s obvious, really. A man who has to get what he wants by a gun isn’t much of a man.”

  Joe’s skin suddenly felt warm and clammy as though someone had turned the thermostat up to a hundred degrees. He had to wipe his forehead with the sleeve of the hand holding the cell phone to keep sweat from dripping into his eyes. “I’ll do it. Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Why can’t we be friends instead?” she cooed. She got down on her knees, but there was a smug grin on her face. “That’s all I wanted.”

  “I don’t want...anything. Just...just your land,” he said. While his skin was clammy,
his throat had turned bone dry.

  “You’ll get it. When we’re done,” she said. Before he could stop her, she had unzipped his pants. “Where’s your little friend? Is he shy? Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  “Stop that!” he whined. “Or I...I’ll shoot!”

  “I hope something shoots,” she said. She stuck her index finger inside his boxers to tickle the head of his cock. “There he is. He’s just a little shy, isn’t he?”

  “Stop it! I’m not joking!”

  “You poor, poor boy,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m sure the other boys teased you about this whenever you had to shower, didn’t they?”

  “No they didn’t,” he said, his voice cracking. It sounded higher as he added, “It’s not small. It’s not!”

  “I see why you don’t have a wife or children. No woman could pretend to be satisfied by this.”

  “Stop mocking me!” he screeched. He pulled the trigger on the gun. The weapon made a sound like a firecracker popping, but Monroe didn’t so much as flinch. He held the gun up to see an orange tip on the end of it. “What happened?”

  Monroe got to her feet; she stood over him by several inches now. She smirked down at him. “You silly boy. Did you think anyone would give you a real gun?”

  “It was too real.” He pulled the trigger again and again, but still it wouldn’t do anything. “No fair!”

  “Such a naughty, naughty little man,” Monroe said, shaking her head. She snatched the pistol from his hand to toss into the living room. Then she seized him by the ear. “Come along, young man.”

  She yanked him away from the door, pain burning in his ear. He flailed at her with scrawny, hairless hands. “Let me go! You can’t do this! I’ll tell my daddy! He’s rich!”

  “You silly boy, your daddy has been dead for years.”

  Joe knew that, but he had still blurted the words out anyway. He continued flailing impotently as she dragged him into the bathroom. He gasped to see himself in the mirror. It wasn’t himself as he had looked before he had come to Monroe’s house but how he had looked at about twelve years old with peach fuzz on his cheeks and a mop of shaggy brown hair. Instead of the dark bespoke suit he’d worn to the farm, he wore a dark blue blazer with the logo of St. James the Lesser Academy on it. His pubescent face flushed red as Monroe leaned close to him, grinning nastily.