Skunk Hunt (28 page)

I found myself dismissing the evidence
before my eyes and admitting other possibilities. And there was
only one other: Carl Ksnip. Dog must have accompanied him to my
house, in his usual role as rabid leash-buddy, and was somehow left
behind when Carl made a quick exit. Maybe Dog had sniffed out my
copies of Stuffed Muff and was searching for pictures of Monique
cheating on him with some photogenic stud. The girl who had
accompanied Carl and traded snubs with Barbara
had
looked familiar, but that was probably the
result of my limited peephole mentality.

All of which begged the question of how Carl
had come across the old photo of Skunk and Flint Dementis mugging
in front of the Virginia Electric Power Company hydroelectric plant
on Belle Isle.

I had seen the clue when I followed Kendle
through the door. After lying in bed for an hour, playing
biofeedback with my blood pressure and making sure the detective
had broken none of my bones, I drew on my pants and went
downstairs. The scarred coffee table next to the couch had been
cleared off to make way for the framed picture, in which Flint
looked more demented than ever, and Skunk every bit as wicked as he
had been. My imagination filled in blanks that may or may not have
existed, but it certainly appeared as though they were noting a
secret for the unseen cameraman.

The power plant had been shut down in 1964,
and from the decrepit state of the building behind the two men it
was obvious they weren't waiting for a tour guide to show them the
latest techniques in aquatic electricity. In fact, neither of them
looked all that young, although Skunk had always had an air of
risible age about him, while Flint always seemed to be celebrating
his thousandth birthday. I guessed Skunk, at least, was ten years
younger than when I had last seen him, if you discount the fact
that someone lying on a morgue slab has become pretty much ageless,
with no reference point to count back from.

I was suffering from post-coital trauma with
traces of hysteria. Thinking straight was the furthest thing from
my mind. Belle Isle was just down the hill and across the
pedestrian bridge. On foot, I could be at the power plant in
fifteen minutes. But the falling darkness put a crimp in any
impulse I might have to dash to the river and retrieve my prize.
Twisting my way around the fences and water courses would be
treacherous enough in daylight. At night I would be courting a
broken neck.

I decided to wait until morning.
Unfortunately, this left me with time to ponder unwanted options:
like calling Barbara and Jeremy to invite them along. That would
mean splitting whatever I found into three portions, and with
Jeremy around those portions were bound to be uneven--well, thirds
usually are. But mine were not the only eyes on the prize, and
there was a good chance I was being watched. In the right mood,
Jeremy could provide muscle against any adversary we might
encounter on the heavily-wooded island. Dog had flatfooted him
once. I doubted it would happen again.

Hovering over my head like a pesky
yellow jacket was the thought that Jeremy might
not
come. We had found money in the old house,
sure enough, but not in the amount promised. Not even close. And he
didn't know yet that it was the
wrong
money, from some Pacific no-place where
they probably still wore thongs, and I'm not talking lingerie. But
judging from his expression when I last saw him, Jeremy's attitude
had slumped into irate and lazy skepticism. He seemed to accept
that any money we found would end up in someone else's hands.
Events at the old house had proved the rule.

And Barbara? She could probably lay Dog flat
with a flash of breast and thigh, but you couldn't count on her
keeping a secret. Hell, maybe she was in cahoots with Carl. Maybe
he had promised her a partnership in the PFZ, in return for a
modest contribution of say half a million. She could be a star and
manager, every woman's dream.

It had to be Jeremy or no one. At least I
could say I had come up in the world. At least now I had a choice.
My sexual triumph, if such it was, had given birth to dotty
optimism. If I wanted, I could have a partner. Two partners, if I
included Kendle, who I was sure would be only too happy to join me
in the woods. She obviously was not 100% dedicated to the straight
and narrow or else she would have had qualms about compressing me
on my very own mattress. She might be open to other forms of
temptation.

I dwelled on all this as the evening
sitcoms scrolled past my blind side, a six-pack of Buds disappeared
one by one from my coffee table, and incinerated cigarettes piled
up at my elbow. It was an evening of sumptuous contemplation, when
my mind alternately raced and strolled along paths to the future.
I'd never really planned my future. Actually, the future was just
something that flicked out of sight the instant it was spotted. I
was permanently huddled between if-or-when and
if-
and
-when. Money is the
great focuser. You plan how to get it, then how to use it—but only
after you decide if you want it in the first place. I came to the
startling conclusion that I was pretty satisfied with the way
things were. It wasn't very exciting, but that was fine. I don't
like space/time convulsions, although I had to admit that my
convulsions with Kendle had proved relaxing in the long run—and a
single afternoon is a long run, so far as I was concerned. The
prospect of illicitly inheriting a grand sum posed a problem I was
not all that comfortable with. I wasn't as greedy as the next guy,
which some people would say proved my lack of ambition, but I
didn't see it as a disease. As I sat there, with the television
flashing for attention and growing slightly more inebriated (both
me
and
the TV, it seemed) by
the minute, I began to see a way out. I would do what I had always
done: absolutely nothing.

Anyone with sense can tell you inertia is the
great enemy of the let's-get-it-done crowd, without whom we'd still
be whatever it was we were before, and apparently no one wants
that. The engine of history was rumbling, the Check Engine Light
could not be ignored. I would not be allowed to sit complacently on
my ass, or my laurels, or even on my ratty couch. I was suddenly
blinded by the light, not of enlightenment, as the preachers say,
but by a real light shining through my front window. I spent a few
moments being deer-struck, my logical corollaries running from
lynch mobs to mobsters, before a loud knocking on the pane told me
I had been spotted and reamed. Imagine me running out the back
door. Imagine me ducking under the blanket I kept by the couch for
those nights I was too lazy to make my way to one or another
bedroom. Imagine me dismissing the stranger with a shrug and
blithely turning my back on him. Imagine anything but me going to
the door and opening it. I could be greeted by a hail of bullets,
or a chorus line of cops or—

"Mute, you idiot! I can't find my key! Let me
in!"

Or Barbara.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"What?" she shouted through the glass.

Resigned and relieved, I stood and went to
the door.

"What's wrong with you? Are you drunk?"
Barbara flustered into the house, flapping loose purple sleeves on
a flimsy jacket about as practical as Kleenex against the night
chill. She looked gift-wrapped. Her heels chipped slivers out of
the wooden floor. She belonged on a leash. Like any brat born in
the Audio/Visual Era, she drifted towards the sound of the
television. We're like goldfish, feeding ourselves to death on
Hartz Artificial Images.

"What are you watching?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, looking at the
screen. "Don't you?"

"I don't have much free time for late
night."

"I'll bet," I said. I was only making
conversation, but she shot me a dark look. "What are you doing
here?" Now that the kit-kat was out of the bag, I continued,
"Shouldn't you be at work?"

"I told Carl I twisted my ankle," she said.
"It's one of the occupational hazards of a chanteuse."

The word she wanted was 'danseuse', but I let
it slide. "Those poles are dangerous," I observed. "Do they grease
them?"

Barbara wielded her yellow, oversized
flashlight like a club. Thinking it was a mock attack, I ducked
halfheartedly, then discovered it was the real thing and just
missed getting clobbered by a scarce inch.

"Hey!" I protested.

"That'll teach you to keep your comments to
yourself."

Yes, it certainly did, grateful that I had
not added that a sprained ankle shouldn't stop her from
lap-dancing.

"You took off work to be here?" I asked,
easing back onto the couch, out of arm's reach.

"I overheard Carl and Dog talking..."

Oh shit, I thought. Dog had probably
given his owner a blow-by-blow account of my flesh-on-fat encounter
with Kendle. Good for a laugh, sure, but it might also put into
their minds that I was earning uncredited brownie points with the
police. I waited for my sister to lower the boom, as in: You
criticize me for my lifestyle, and then you sleep with
that
?

But my gruesome sex life had apparently not
come up, at least not within Barbara's hearing. It turned out Dog
was a surprisingly keen observer of the human world outside his
kennel.

"Dog told Carl he got in the house and saw a
picture of Skunk at the old power station," Barbara said. She
glanced around nervously. "Don't you lock up the house when you
leave?"

"I leave everything wide open," I lied. It
was beginning to seem like my house was a sieve. I once had to
evict a family of opossums from the sink cabinet. There were doors
here that I couldn't imagine. They were like drill holes into my
psyche, betraying the vacuous interior. It was sort of like going
out into public without your pants, and discovering you aren't
dreaming.

"You don't really leave the door open?"
Barbara gasped. I would have gotten the same reaction if I had told
her I spent my weekends skydiving or had become a vegetarian. One
of those dumb lies that are feasible among feasible people.

"I was joking," I told her.

She saw the photograph, which I had carried
to the coffee table, and picked it up. "This must be it."

"Yeah..."

"I've never seen it before," she continued.
"Where did you get it?"

"Someone left it here."

"Jesus, Mute, you mean someone else has
gotten in here?" She gave me a critical look. Nothing confirms a
woman's belief in male stupidity like a brother.

"Dog didn't leave it behind, obviously," I
said. "Why would he give us a leg up on him?" When the joke went
uncaught, I continued, "Maybe it was the same guy who left the clue
in Flint Dementis' trunk."

"You mean someone with a skeleton key?" She
nodded at this perfectly reasonable suggestion, as if B&E was a
common hobby in her crowd.

"Or a credit card," I shrugged, acknowledging
that my locks weren't top of the line. "Why are you here? What's
with the flashlight?"

"We're going to Belle Isle."

So Barbara understood the clue. I was forced
to chalk up a point in her favor, but I didn't like the timing. "We
can go tomorrow morning. It's too dark—"

"We can't wait," my sister stopped me. "Dog
and Carl are going out there as soon as the sun comes up."

"Why does that bother you?" I asked. "You're
the one who told them about the farm house."

"I didn't know about the old house until we
got there," she corrected me. "I didn't know how sneaky Carl could
be, following us that way. You don't really think I want them to
have the money, do you?"

"It crossed my mind," I said.

"Well un-cross it," she shot back. "Carl
isn't nothing but a warthog. He's fat and he's covered with
warts."

Since there was only one way she could know
about the warts, I gave her a meaningful scowl. She flushed the
scowl down her mental toilet and continued:

"Worst of all, he's greedy. He could pay his
taxes, he just doesn't believe in them. He says you don't pay for
what you don't believe in."

"He'd pay to stay out of jail," I said.

"I guess, but someone that cheap will try
anything to get out of it. The taxes, I mean. He goes on and on
about it, that he's living the American Dream in the American Way.
Here, look at this." Barbara pulled her pants down over her right
hip, exposing a small red, white and blue tattoo. "He made me get
this so his customers know he's a real patriot. All of us girls
have one."

I could imagine the patrons giving a rousing
salute on seeing the flag on naked girls wrapped like pita bread
around a pole.

"Carl says America is suffering from creeping
socialism," Barbara continued. "He wants people to keep what they
earn. Hah! That's a joke. Look how much he earns on our backs."

There wasn't a whole lot of ambiguity in that
last statement. I pretended a thick black curtain had fallen over
the scene and repeated my argument against going out to the island
at this late hour.

"You're not chicken, are you?" she
demanded.

"I'm prudent," I said.

"What's that mean?"

I clucked.

"Well forget it, mister," she said, grabbing
the top of my T-shirt. "You're coming with me."

"Why not get Jeremy?" I asked, trying to pull
away.

Barbara shrank back, and I thought of the
witch when Dorothy doused her. Speaking my brother's name was like
dumping a bucket of icy river water over her head.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "We'll be walking in
the woods at night, maybe with a sack of cash that half the world
wants and the other half doesn't know about. We'll want some kind
of protection, even if it's half-assed."