Crooked Little Vein (9 page)

B
ob
ate the entire damn thing, but was paralyzed afterward. After some cajoling, we arranged to briefly borrow a wheeled office chair from the restaurant’s back room, and trundled him out to the parking lot in it. He was still sucking scraps of flesh off the horn, and bellowing that he’d showed them, he’d showed them all. Oh, and that the chef was a whore.

“Fuck this,” I said. “Get the keys from him. I’ll drive. We’ll dump his crazy ass in front of the hotel and pay someone to move him or kill him or something.”

“This is how you treat your friends?”

“He’s a nutbag, Trix. Look at him.”

“Whooooores,” said Bob.

“There you go. Get the fucking keys.”

Trix patted him down and found the keys in his inside jacket pocket. “Thank God,” she groaned. “I wasn’t up for checking his pants.”

Bob studied her with one eye, oddly drunken. “Mike never had the pretty girls before. How does he get the pretty girls now? I’m a goddamn
Texan.”

“You always talk to your buddies’ girls like that?” she frowned, tossing me the keys.

I nearly dropped them.

“That’s how I get into trouble.” Bob teared up. “I’m so lonely.” And, just at the point where we softened, he added, “Whooooores.”

I opened up the rear door and tipped him into it.

“What about the chair?”

“Leave it here. They called that rump well done? If I’d poured my beer on it to wake it up it could’ve skated its way home in that damn chair. Get in.”

“Oooh. Masterful.”

“I’ll spank you right here in the parking lot.”

“Promises.”

“Just get in the car.”

As we pulled out of the parking lot, Bob seemed to pull out of his meat fugue a little. “Left at the lights. Something I want to show you.”

“Whores?”

“No. Roanoke.”

I looked for Trix’s take. She shrugged. “It’s what we came for.”

I took us left at the lights, and a handful more directions took us out of town. The dark came in hard. Trix looked up out of the window. “Stars,” she said. “You don’t see so many in New York. You don’t realize.”

“Kill the lights,” said Bob, “and pull over here.” We did, by a low wooden fence.

“Get out and look into the field.”

“What are we looking for, Bob?”

“You’ll see.”

The night air was warm. The fence surrounded a large field littered with sleeping cattle. We wandered to the fence, put our feet on it, and waited.

“You look tense,” Trix said. “Have a cigarette while we’re waiting for whatever we’re waiting for.”

“The lighter flame will screw up my night vision.”

“Huh,” she said, thoughtfully. “You’re a real detective, aren’t you?”

“What did you think I was?”

“A cute, crazy guy who just fell into a crappy job. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that you were, you know, a real detective. Knowing about things like night vision sounds like real detective stuff.”

“Well, at least I’m still cute.”

“I like funny-looking guys.”

“Oh, thanks.”

She giggled and hugged my arm. “You are just too easy to tease. Look. The cattle are waking up.”

They were. And starting to move. Scattering. There was motion in the middle of the herd. Something running. I squinted, leaning in.

There was a naked man among the cattle. Silver hair in the starlight. Deep lines in his face when he moved out of the shadows of cows. Thin and leanly muscled, he sprinted between the frightened cattle, zigzagging wildly.

He stopped sharply as one cow moved diagonally in front of him. And then sprang like a jungle cat, landing on top of the beast. There was something in his hand that sparkled in the starlight. Wire. He drew it between his fists and made a looping motion under the cow’s throat.

The naked old man garroted the cow with great industry, bringing it down. Hard muscles in his upper arms worked under gray skin. The cow twitched, shat itself, and died.

The old man clambered over the carcass and began to suckle at the dead beast’s udders. Then crouched, face shiny with corpse-milk under the stars, threw his head back and howled like a wolf into the night.

We silently returned to Bob.

“That’s Old Man Roanoke taking his nightly exercise,” Bob whispered. “G. Gordon Liddy gave him that garrote.”

W
e
drove back to the hotel in silence. Bob said he felt well enough to drive, so we stood there as he jammed himself back behind the wheel of the car and took off. We watched his car fishtail down the street and, a block and a half down, bury its front end in the door of a sports bar. Bob slumped out of the car door onto the street like a harpooned whale as the engine caught fire. Many large men came out of the bar with a surprising array of impromptu weaponry in hand.

“Fuck it,” I said, and went inside.

“I’m going to stay here a minute,” said Trix.

“You want to help him?”

“No, I want to see what they do to him. I’ll be up in a minute.”

There was someone waiting for me in the hotel room.

“So you think the Roanokes have it?” the White House chief of staff said, tying off in the armchair in front of an evangelist channel on the TV.

“Oh, God.”

“That’s good, Mr. McGill. Very good. We didn’t know that. As you’re probably aware, my president can’t run for office again, unless we. Ha ha. Unless we change the Constitution. Can you imagine if Junior Roanoke had gotten to Washington? If he’d filled a room with the lawmakers, the great and the good, stood there at his lectern, opened the book and slammed it down? The Founders didn’t imagine a time of radio and television. Politics was done in real time, with physical crowds. Just showing the people the pages on television, or reading them on radio, won’t work. People have to be in the presence of the book, for its acoustic effect to work. If he’d ever been able to address serious audiences, the outcome would have been terrible. I don’t think the Roanokes fully understand what they have.”

I flopped into a chair. “What do you want?”

“I’ve gotten you an appointment with the Roanoke family for tomorrow morning at eleven. If they have the book, you’re empowered to make them an offer of ten million dollars for it, contingent upon their permanent silence concerning its existence.”

“I see.”

“If they refuse, you’re to use your cell phone to call 555 555-5555. Let it ring twice, and hang up.”

“That’s not a real number. 555 is the fake area code Hollywood movies use.”

“We gave it to them. It works for us. Ring twice, then hang up.”

“What happens then?”

“A fuel-air bomb of some description, I believe,” he said, injecting himself with something brown and lumpy. “It’ll look like the gasoline reservoir under their ranch went up, they tell me. Eleven o’clock, then. Good hunting, Mr. McGill.”

He stood up to leave, shakily. “Oh, and don’t worry, I haven’t taken heroin in your hotel room. I have a cage of genetically modified green monkies that express anticancer pharmaceuticals in their feces. Once a day, I have to inject dilute monkey turds. But it’s better than dying, yes?”

“I’d have to think about that.”

“Mmm. I imagine you would.”

At the door, he stopped again.

“One more thing, Mr. McGill. The girl.”

“Is none of your business. You’re just the client. You don’t get a say in how I do my job or who I spend time with.”

“Aren’t we scrappy these days, Mr. McGill?”

“I’ve not been in the best mood lately, for some reason.”

“You don’t enjoy your work, Mike. It is very sad. The girl, Mike, is a crazed omnisexual vaginalist with a string of lovers from genders they don’t even have names for yet. She’ll break your heart, Mike. Take my advice. Get your own room, put your pants on backward, and wear boxing gloves. It’s good for you. Trust me. I’m the White House chief of staff.”

He drifted out the door like a handful of black feathers cast on a winter’s breeze.

T
rix
came in. “I got the concierge to call the police. But the police beat Bob up, too.”

I was drinking. I have two drinking faces, I’ve been told. The Social Drinking face, and the I Need to Drink Until the Front of My Brain Dies face.

“What’s wrong?”

“We have an appointment with the Roanokes tomorrow at eleven.”

“How did that happen?”

“My client was here. He told me things.”

“He arranged it? Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

I summoned a smile from somewhere. “Sure.”

“You want to come to bed?”

No. I wanted to get really fucking drunk and then stab myself repeatedly.

“Nah. We’re out of condoms. Forgot to buy any.”

She sat on the arm of my chair. “What makes you think we need any?”

“Not without condoms, Trix.”

“True. I don’t know where you’ve been. But not what I meant.” She rubbed her palm over the back of my hand. “I have hands. You have hands. You and me: it doesn’t always have to be about vanilla humping, Mike.”

“I like vanilla humping.”

“Come here. I’m going to rewire your vanilla little brain with my bare hands.”

I
n
the middle of the night, I said, “You said you were my girl. To Bob. You said he shouldn’t talk like that to his buddies’ girls.”

“I did.”

“Are you my girl?”

“Do you want me to be?”

“Do you want to be?”

“Why would you want me to be your girl?”

“Because you’re smarter than I am. Because you see things I don’t. Because you make me feel good just by looking at me. Because you fit right in my arms.”

“Are you going to start singing?”

“And because sometimes I want to strangle you.”

“That can be hot.”

“I’m going to strangle you right now.”

“You can’t lift your arms.”

“…shit.”

“I’ve never been monogamous in my life, Mike.”

“I know.”

“I can’t do it.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“But you want me to be your girl.”

“If you want to be.”

“I like girls, too.”

“I don’t want to watch or anything.”

“I thought two girls was every man’s dream.”

“You’re my dream.”

“I don’t believe you said that.”

“I’m never going to admit I did, so get over it.”

She laughed, low in her throat.

“How’s this going to work, Mike?”

“There’s only one thing I want. For as long as we last. Because I’m a depressing realist.”

She tensed against me a little. “And what’s that?”

“Other guys, I’m always going to have a problem with.”

“That could be a problem.”

“Yeah. And I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. But the only thing I really want?”

“Yeah?”

“No matter what you do? Come home with me at the end of the night.”

And then she kissed me.

I
f
they don’t give us the book they’re going to
blow up the ranch
?”

“Still want to come?”

Okay, so maybe telling her that was a mistake. I’d arranged for a chauffeured car to take me to and from the Roanoke ranch outside town, and had suggested to Trix that maybe she wanted to stay at the hotel while I worked.

“Yes I do! I’m not letting you go into that on your own!”

“Are you serious?”

“Of
course
I’m serious! Jesus! They want to blow the place up if the Roanokes don’t hand over the book? Wouldn’t that blow up the book, too?”

“I’m figuring they worked that out and that they know something we don’t. Maybe it’s in a vault or something. Anyway, I don’t think this counts as adventure.”

She grabbed me by the back of the hair as I tried to put my pants on.

“I’m coming.”

“Yes yes okay fuck ow okay yes.”

“Good.” She went off to find her boots, muttering.

Came back. “Mike. They wouldn’t
really
…”

“The guy sat in that chair and injected monkey shit into his arm, Trix.”

“Yeah. Getting boots now.”

I counted off five seconds.

“He did
what
?”

“Don’t be judgmental, Trix.”

I
t
was a long drive out under an unforgiving sun. Even with the A/C cranked up in the rear of the car, I was regretting putting on the jacket and tie.

Trix was in boots, a short skirt, and a vest-top, showing off both sleeves of tattoos. “You think I’m covering up for the fucking Roanokes? I’m going to take a dump in their oven.”

“Hell, I don’t care. I need to look professional, you can look any way you like.”

“I like you in suits. You should get a new one, though. That one’s a bit frayed.”

“Oh, that’s not wear and tear. That’s where the rat would eat at it.”

“The rat.”

“The super-rat in my office. One time I put tinfoil on the floor outside his rat hole and hooked it up to a car battery. When he walked out on it, he should’ve lit up like a murderer on Old Sparky. But he stood up on his hind legs like Tony Montana in
Scarface,
you know? ‘I can take your fucking bullets.’ Soaked up every volt in the battery, jumped up on my desk and had sex with my sandwich until it dissolved. I hate that rat.”

“Sometimes I wonder how close to hospitalization or suicide you really were before I met you.”

“Three…maybe four hours.”

The Roanoke ranch came into view. It gleamed under the sun. The whole complex was painted a brilliant bone white. As we pulled into the driveway, I noticed half of a cow’s skeleton poking out of the lawn, jutting the way you see them sticking out of desert sand in Westerns.

A little farther down, there was a human skeleton sticking out of the ground in the same way. With a buzzard perched on it.

As we drove past, I craned to get a better look. The skeleton had been painted white. It could well have been fake. The buzzard, however, was real, and had had its feet wired onto one of the ribs. It had long since given up on escape, and just sat there with its head hanging like a depressed child’s.

“You see what kind of people they are?” Trix said. “I’m going to flay this guy. You do your job, I’m not going to get in the way of that. But I’m going to just demolish this guy. It’s like being driven into Hell knowing you can totally beat Satan’s ass.”

It took ten minutes to traverse the driveway into the ranch’s courtyard. It was weirdly silent. As we got out of the car, a tall guy who reeked of bodyguard came out of the main house, looked around very professionally, and walked quickly toward us.

He put out his hand. “I’m John Menlove, head of security for the Roanoke family. You’re Michael McGill and assistant, correct?” He put just enough force into the wide, careful handshake to measure my strength. I gave him about half a pound less pressure than I had, on reflex. I don’t care if you’re shaking over a contract, shaking with a bar drunk or shaking hands with your grandpa—you never, ever let someone know how strong you are.

“Please come inside. We have a security procedure to complete before I can introduce you to Mr. Roanoke. He’s extremely protective of his family’s safety, as I’m sure you can understand.”

We were taken out of the sun into the main residence’s cavernous, galleried hallway. A female security agent was produced, and she and Menlove patted Trix and me down, ran fingers through our hair, and requested to see our teeth. Trix was looking around the place as best she could, rolling her eyes from side to side—and then coughed out, “Holy
shit
!”

“What?”

“Please regulate your language in here, ma’am,” the female security agent said.

“Eat me. Mike, look at the goddamn galleries!”

Running alongside the staircase, and across the landing gallery, was a long row of mounted, stuffed animal heads. Nothing special, you see that a lot—I don’t want to sound jaded, but Old Rich Guys all went to the same fucking interior decorator or something—and my eyes just skipped over them. “What about them?”

Trix grabbed my head and turned it in the direction of that which was vexing her most. “There. Look.”

“…well, that can’t be real.”

“Mike, the guy has a dolphin head stuffed and mounted on his wall.”

“There’s no way that’s real.”

“Mike, this bastard cut Flipper’s head off and put it on the wall.”

“Maybe Flipper had it coming.”

“Mike.”

“How the hell do you remember Flipper, anyway? Flipper was caught in a tuna net before you were born.”

“I saw reruns as a kid. And you take that back about the tuna net.
Look
up there. My God, I think that’s a kitten head next to it.”

Menlove was looking uncomfortable. “Perhaps we can go through to the living room.”

“No, no, give us a minute here. I know that’s a moose, but, next to it there…would you know if that’s a white tiger?”

“It might be. Mr. Roanoke will be free to speak to you in just a few moments.”

“And that there. That’s a seal, isn’t it?”

“Oh my God, Mike. Roanoke has a seal head on his wall.”

In fact, the longer we looked, the more animals we identified, and none of them really belonged on a polished wooden base and hanging on a wall. Even the moose. Because it turned out it was a reindeer. And someone had applied rouge to its nose.

“Yes. That was me. My daughter was naughty. I told her that I had killed Rudolph and mounted him in my gallery, and so there would be no Christmas.”

Old Man Roanoke, tall and lean and lined and surprisingly easy to recognize with all his clothes on. Flanked on one side by a security agent, and on the other by a male nurse. He was in blue jeans and a work shirt, which is another weird quirk of Rich Old Men. Just one of the guys here. Blue jeans and a work shirt, salt of the earth, working man like yourself. Like they’re somehow uncomfortable about being rich enough to sleep in a bed made of vaginas being pulled around the town at night by a fleet of gold-covered midgets.

I don’t go into situations like this in the best of moods in any case. But I found myself becoming unusually irritated. Trix, God help her, was practically vibrating with rage just simply by being there.

The male nurse cleared his throat. “I’m uncomfortable with this interview at this time of the day. So, please, let’s get on with it. Mr. Roanoke is in something of a delicate medical balance.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re ill?”

He grinned the way lizards should grin; slow and lazy, like a lizard early on a cold morning. “I have Roanoke’s Disease.”

“You’d think you would have seen that coming,” Trix said.

Roanoke scanned Trix quickly and then shot Menlove a filthy look. “There’s a girl in here, Mr. Menlove.”

“We’ve checked her out, sir. She actually has a very small penis. Like a baby boy’s. Undescended testes.”

“Okay. Good. Like your agent there. Seems to be an awful lot of that about. Must be the water the poor people have to drink. They do drink water, don’t they?”

Menlove straightened, moved behind me. “I hear they can’t afford water, sir, and drink something called Mountain Dew.” Leaned in and hissed in my ear, “Just roll with it, please. This is my life. This is how I have to live. Help me out.”

I stepped to Trix, gave her hand a quick sharp squeeze. She flicked her eyes to mine, read me, and shrugged.

“Ah,” Roanoke said. “You would be McGill. Would you like to see my garrote, McGill?”

I decided not to mention that I’d already seen it in action. “I’m really just here to discuss a rare book that your family purchased a few years ago from a police officer in Ohio.”

He pulled the garrote out of his pants pocket. “This garrote,” he said, dangling it in front of his eyes like a stage hypnotist’s watch, “was fashioned from the guts of Sand Gooks.”

“Sand Gooks.”

“Oh yes. They hunt me. I have fought the Sand Gook for thirty years or more. They know my name. Their men are impotent with hate and their women smell like a baby’s graveyard.”

“Mr. Roanoke really should be in bed,” the male nurse said.

“I need that book.”

“Yes,” Roanoke croaked. “I know who you work for. Menlove! Did you check under their car?”

“I ran the broom under it and everything.”

“Good. The Sand Gook can cling to the chassis of a car and draw sustenance from the tailpipe. I know who you work for. They give succor to the Sand Gook.”

Trix couldn’t let that one slide. “You know, not only is that term totally offensive, but the current government is prosecuting a war in the Middle East that uses torture in the pursuit of securing oil interests just like yours.”

“You, sir, are a fool,” he told her. “Which is perhaps only to be expected from a man in a skirt. Their ‘war’ is a girl’s war. It has nothing to do with oil. It has everything to do with the awful preterhuman aspect of the Sand Gook. We cannot allow people who can become invisible to share a planet with us.”

Trix turned wide eyes to me. “Okay. I officially give up. Go to it.”

“Mr. Roanoke. You know who I work for. You understand that there will be repercussions if this interview is unsatisfactory. I’m empowered to offer you a significant sum in exchange for the book. Please. Let us get to business now.”

“That damn book. We could have had
control
, if we’d used that book. The Middle East would be glass and I wouldn’t be negotiating with damn Russians to buy missiles to protect my property. But the boy wouldn’t use it. Promise me something, Mr. McGill. If you ever meet a real woman, instead of cavorting with tattooed hermaphrodites, keep a stone in your pocket.”

I just had to. “A stone?”

“Yes. For killing a retarded child when your woman squats it out into the world. The skulls are soft. It’s like punching calf’s liver. I lost my stone. And so I have my children. I should have found a less defective wife. My sperm festered in her womb. I may as well have masturbated into a garbage can. Can you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

Roanoke was sniffing the air hard. The male nurse started rummaging in the zippered pouch on his hip, which rattled with pills and metal. “Mr. Roanoke occasionally suffers olfactory hallucinations. I did mention that this wasn’t a good time.”

Roanoke abruptly dropped to all fours. No one seemed to know how to handle this.

On his hands and knees, he pawed over the polished wooden floor to my crotch, which he sniffed like a dog.

“You,” he snarled, “have known the dusky terrorist pleasure of a Sand Gook woman.”

Only four times in my life has my hand literally itched to have a gun in it. This was number five.

“What was it like?” the old man asked, unzipping his jeans. “Was it good?” He pushed his gnarled hand inside his pants.

“Okay. That’s it,” said the male nurse.

“No,” he howled. “I need to know.” His hand was working.

The male nurse withdrew a hypodermic syringe from the hip bag, bit off its plastic lid, and jammed it into Roanoke’s neck. He flipped over in some kind of reaction seizure, brownish urine spraying from within his twitching fist.

“Thank Christ for that,” sighed Menlove, visibly unclenching. “Get him into bed. Mr. McGill, I’m sorry about this.”

“Not as sorry as I am. Wake him up.”

The male nurse snorted. “He’s not going to wake up for a few hours.”

“He’s going to wake up now.”

“Look, you’re not going to get your book,” Menlove said. “Leave it.”

“Let me put it this way. If I don’t get my book, there’s a chance that something seriously antithetical to your current state of health could happen in the next little while.”

“…what’s my current state of health?”

“Alive.”

His eyes narrowed.

“I’m not threatening you. What’s going on here is a little bigger than that, and I’m not entirely in control of it. I need him awake.”

Trix kicked the old man in the stomach. He just kind of puffed out some air. Trix kicked him a few more times.

“He’s not waking up, Trix.”

“Oh, I’m past that and into pure entertainment value now,” she said, prodding at his nose with the point of her boot. “What’re you going to do?”

I fished out my cigarettes. “I don’t know. I mean, he wants me to make the call if I don’t get the book. I can wait for him to call me, but I can’t tell him I have the book, because I can’t produce it. Which brings us back to square one. If the Roanokes don’t give up the book…”

“What happens, Mr. McGill?” Menlove asked, slipping his hand inside his jacket.

“People I don’t know and have no control over will do something extraordinarily horrible to this ranch and will never ever be prosecuted for it,” I told him.

“…you’re not telling me he was right about the Sand Gooks, are you?”

I lit up, watching his face work. “How long have you been working here?”

“Eight years. I wake up with a gun in my mouth every morning.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to think about doing that right now. If the old man’s out for the count—”

“He pass out again?” came a big, twanging voice. A man in his early fifties, short and trim in tennis whites, bounded into the hall from a rear entrance. “He didn’t do that thing with his pants first, did he? I’m real sorry if he did. I’m Jeff Roanoke Jr. Anything I can help you folks with?”

He flipped his tennis racquet from right to left so he could shake hands with me, a wide soft grip. His eyes locked on to mine for a couple of seconds, judging. He wasn’t stupid. He was letting me think I was stronger than him, and checking my reaction.

“Mike McGill. Good to meet you. I’m here on behalf of a client about a rare book we believe entered your possession a few years ago, purchased from a police officer in Ohio…?”

Roanoke’s oddly boyish, rubbery face stretched into an easy grin. “That old thing?”

“I’m empowered to offer you a significant sum to obtain it.”

“Well, hell, son, we should go to my den and talk about it. C’mon back.”

He stopped, on one foot, and looked back over his shoulder. “No girls.”

Trix rolled her eyes. “I’ll be in the car. With the engine running, Mike.”