Skunk Hunt (52 page)

The stranger reached the landing in a sweat.
He was about fifty pounds overweight and each ounce told on his
cardiovascular system. But when he turned to us, he smiled broadly.
And then he looked down and missed a few heartbeats, which seemed
pretty dangerous for a chronic non-member of Gold's Gym.

"You—" he began.

"We didn't!" Todd blurted.

"Only four came in."

"We found them like this." I narrowed my
eyes. "You've been watching my house?"

"Where's Carl?" said the man after skipping
another beat. I could foresee adding another corpse to my personal
morgue.

"On my bed," I said, cringing. That sounded
even worse than it was.

"Is he—"

"He thinks it's the Congreve brothers," Todd
said, pinning the theory on me with a hard punch in the shoulder.
Who did he think he was? Jeremy?

The man mulled this over, chewing the edge of
his grey moustache into a fine mulch. I thought he was mentally
pitting Joe Dog and Carl against me and Todd and could not conceive
of the result confronting him. It should be the feeble twins
stretched out, not the bad dudes of Shockhoe Slip. He decided we
must be telling the truth.

"They must have come through your back door."
He scowled at me for having such a permeable house. He had lowered
his voice. "Are they still here?"

"Uh...we don't know," Todd said.

"Oh shit," said the man.

I personally find it odd to hear swear
words coming out of the mouth of an older man in a business suit.
Skunk, Carl, Flint Dementis, the crew foremen renovating the houses
of Oregon Hill—yeah, the shit thesaurus was their primary
reference. But this was the kind of guy who called out 'garcon'
instead of 'hey you!' and probably even tucked a serviette in his
shirt at the restaurant instead of taking a handful of paper
napkins from McDonald's to save on toilet paper at home. He didn't
belong in my house in more ways than one. This was only a first
impression, but the old Oregon Hillers had a surprisingly refined
sense of the nation's class structure. We knew that anyone who wore
a tie (especially one that looked
pressed
) deserved our contempt. But we were
naturally reticent around them, too. Life hadn't kicked them in the
teeth—not yet. You had to respect Fate.

The stranger stuck out two fingers and began
reaching for Joe Dog's neck, then noted the hole in his forehead
and gave up on the idea of searching for a pulse. With a sweep of
my hand I graciously invited him into my bedroom to view Carl. His
breathing snapped into small gusts. He had to steady himself
against the wall. I guess it reflected poorly on my social app that
I thought he was overreacting. Pulling back into the hallway, he
saw the gun next to Joe Dog and threw us a suspicious glance. Todd
held up his hands for inspection, as though asking the man to check
him for gunpowder residue.

"I'm...sorry..." the man said.

"Apology accepted," Todd shrugged, lowering
his hands.

"I wasn't talking to you," the man
said, suddenly fierce. "I was apologizing to
them
."

I saw my own bafflement plagiarized on Todd's
face and wondered if I could sue him.

"So great," Todd said, "You knew them."

"I knew about them," said the man.

"Well, you know us, it looks like. So
mind telling us who
you
are?"

"Maybe I will, if we make it out of here
alive."

The man had a point. Learning his name would
be on a par with his apology to the dead if in the next few minutes
we became riddled corpses. He was catching his second wind, and
with it came his composure, along with an unlikely tendency to take
charge.

"Obviously, you two boys could make a run for
the door," said the stranger, reaching into his inside pocket and
pulling out a cell phone. "But that wouldn't be practical for
me."

While Todd and I patted down our ruffled
feathers ("boys..."), he opened his phone and began speaking. He
was alarmed by the answer from the other end.

"Police? Where?"

"Ugh," said Todd not-too-brightly. He had
tucked his open cell phone in his shirt pocket and had promptly
forgotten about it. He took it out and glanced at the display.
"She's hung up. She must have called...I didn't think she
would."

Which I supposed meant he assumed his great
love, whoever she was, had gladly thrown him to the lions. But
no...she had called the cops. Either she had some feelings for him,
after all, or she feared being held legally liable for abandoning
him to his fate.

The stranger took all this in, spoke into his
phone, listened, then stuffed it into his jacket and grabbed our
arms.

"Go!"

"But the Congreves—"

"If we can hear them, so can they."

What was it we were hearing? Jesus, sirens,
closing fast. The Congreve brothers would have bolted out the back
door by now. I wanted to look out my bedroom window to confirm
this, but there was no time. Besides, the stranger gave us a
surprisingly strong push and if we hadn't started working our legs
we would have fallen down the stairs.

I waited for the gunblast as we reached the
door. I must have been uncharacteristically optimistic, it being
generally agreed that you never hear the shot that kills you. We
tumbled into the street and looked both ways. The cops were
circling around on Laurel, Pine being a one-way street.

"My car!" Todd shouted.

That sounded good to me. His Jag could lay
rubber in Neutral.

"The van!" the stranger shouted, dashing out
behind us.

For an instant I thought he was talking about
Carl's white van directly across the street from my house. Then I
followed the finger he pointed past my nose. A dark blue
high-roofed Transit. I was getting tired of getting into strange
vans and began walking away.

"Your cars..." the stranger gasped, again out
of breath. "They're bugged. GPS."

"Aw shit," I moaned.

"He's lying," said Todd uncertainly. But the
sirens were circling the block. Both Robert's Rules of Order and
When to Know When You're Fucked dictated the end of debate. I had
been electronically tagged so often over the past few days that I
took the stranger's words at face value. I ran for the van. Todd
saw no option but to follow.

The van's rear door flew open as we
approached. A young man was signaling frantically for us to hurry,
pulling back as we tumbled inside. A tight fit was made
form-fitting when the plump stranger squeezed in behind us and drew
the door shut.

"Let's go!" Todd's demand became a shout in
the confined space.

"Let's not," said the stranger, forcing me
off a swivel seat and leaving me to crouch in the aisle. "What will
the police think if we suddenly take off?"

"What'll they think if we don't?" I countered
rhetorically, because the answer was under my nose. I was so
cramped that I was leaving a streak of nasal grease on a flat
screen in front of me. On it was a view of the street in front of
my house. I could only guess the camera was sitting on the van's
dashboard because we were closed off from the cab. A patrol car
flitted by—through the van panel we heard it pull up a few dozen
yards away. Another cruiser stopped at the intersection, blocking
traffic. No, we weren't going anywhere, driving or walking. After
all, if we piled out of the van and began sauntering away,
whistling idly as we gazed at the sky, we might look a little
conspicuous. Blowing smoke was the surest way of drawing a cop's
attention.

What was beginning to draw
my
attention was the extraordinary
hi-tech cockpit into which I had fallen. Video screens were bolted
to both sides of the bay, controlled by joysticks and a variety of
plug-ins. On a separate screen I could watch the cops cautiously
entering through my front door. It took me a moment to realize I
was seeing them from
inside
my
house.

"Hey!" I protested.

"You might want to keep your voice down," the
stranger advised. "This rig isn't completely sound-proof."

"You put a camera in my hallway!" I was
beside myself. Well yeah, Todd was crouched next to me, but I was
also pissed beyond repair. After repeating the mf word a few times,
I became absorbed by what I was seeing—which didn't make any
sense.

"There's sound on this thing," I observed,
hearing the cops thrash through my house. "You didn't hear any
gunshots? And you would've seen the Congreves on the stairs. That's
the only way up."

"We pulled up while Carl and Dog were going
inside," said the man. "It took us a few minutes to set up. My
nephew is still recovering..."

I looked past Todd at the young man at the
front of the cargo bay. I had noted his stiff movements when he
waved us into the van, but only now saw the rigid cast under his
shirt. He could have been a few years younger than me, but his face
was lined by discomfort, like someone just getting over an illness.
I wondered if he had fallen while installing cameras in the old
farmhouse or the abandoned plant on Belle Isle. Because, an instant
earlier, I had been knocked hard by the resounding realization that
these were my secret benefactors.

Or tormentors.

CHAPTER 24

I was feeling pretty icky, rubbing shoulders
with Todd, watching the rubberneckers gather around my house, and
listening to the cops' tense laughter over the tinny speakers in
the van. They had just found two corpses. What was there to laugh
about? The strangers had planted two cameras inside, one in the
hall and one looking down the length of the house: living room,
dining room, kitchen. It must have been placed near the living room
ceiling, and in reality, the view ended at the junk pile in the
dining room. But it was enough to inform the eyedroppers of who was
coming and who was going.

"We don't watch 24/7 the man explained
apologetically. "These are wireless. The range is limited."

But they provided me with all the evidence I
needed that cops were even bigger pigs than me. They sifted through
the same trash they had sifted through when Skunk became Public
Dead Enemy Number 1, not to mention all the times before. I could
see them gnawing at the dining room heap, and the noise told me
they were following similar SOP throughout the rest of my house.
Well, they had never found bodies in my house before, but I still
thought they were going to extremes. The detectives had not even
arrived yet, so I could only guess at what they thought they were
accomplishing.

We settled in for a long wait. Todd and I
crunched down and sat between the two swivel seats bolted to a
track that allowed the strangers to slide out and give us a little
more room. Someone farted, adding to the merriment. It wasn't me, I
swear.

The Transit was speckled with exterior
cameras, which must have been well hidden. I had not had a good
look before diving inside, but people on the street did not see
anything unusual—including the cop who took down the van's license
plate, as well as the plates of every other vehicle on the block.
There must have been no outstanding warrants on the van, or else we
would have been tagged and towed, the four of us being tossed in
the back like rotten beans. I watched for any inordinate interest
the police might take in Todd's Jag. But except for a few glances
from passersby (probably marveling that such a spiffy car could
hold so much garbage), the attention paid to it was
unexceptional.

While we watched the police deal with my
pesky corpse infestation, I took occasional stabs at learning more
about my benefactors. I shouldn't have been surprised by their
reticence. They had spent a week avoiding me mano-a-mano,
preferring instead to set up improbable remote link-ups in
improbable places. If they had any decency they would melt in
abject humiliation, now that I knew about the cameras they had
planted in my house.

"If you hadn't followed us in I would never
have known you were out here," I said as I watched a cop pull a
rusty waffle maker out of the dining room pile.

"It seemed to me that you two were walking
into a trap," the older man said. "I couldn't let all my plans end
in a bloodbath."

I allowed a touch of teleology to enter my
thinking. "You're giving us the Brinks money?" I ventured.

"The Brinks money," the man scoffed. "No, I
don't have a clue where it's hidden." He looked over my shoulder at
Todd. "I suspect half of it is tied up on River Road."

"Thanks for being able to tell us apart,"
Todd grimaced, shifting a leg that had fallen asleep.

"But..." I began. Like all theoretical Final
Causes, mine had justifiably crashed and burned. It was Carl who
had said the money had disappeared into Todd's house. I assumed the
bar owner had been telling the truth—as he saw it. But not being
someone who was accustomed to dealing with money, I had neglected
to consider other possibilities. Maybe the Ferncrest house had not
been paid in a lump sum. If there was a mortgage, the remaining
money could have been invested in the market. If Carl believed
there had been a hefty return on the investment, that would explain
his deception. He must have thought Todd and I were conspiring to
hide the money and had returned to Oregon Hill for a more thorough
search while I was busy yapping with my brother. Only someone else
had been looking, too.

Maybe it was time for me to move out of
Oregon Hill. First, though, I would have to find a buyer for my
house. Watching cops shuffle in and out, then bringing out the
bodies (through the front door, no less—thanks for the discretion),
I began to see my humble abode for the flea pit it really was. My
rotting porch, my spiderweb-encrusted windows and my crooked
lintels would lead the evening news. Every local station was
represented. I grew nauseous watching them pan their cameras while
reporters mucky with makeup mugged their self-righteous horror.
Viewers would see my house on TV and say, "Of course they found
bodies in there; what else would you expect?" Imagine the brochures
I might tuck in a display box in my front yard: "Historic urban
sump, built in 1899, charming fixer-upper, leaks limited to kitchen
sink and second floor ceiling, but no basement to worry about;
former residence of notorious Brinks robber Skunk McPherson; center
stage for murder, mayhem and overabundant onanism; ghosts on
demand."