Crooked Little Vein: A Novel

  “National Union of Lizard Lovers.”

  “I guess I could have worked that one out.”

  “And you call yourself a detective. Tell me about this case of yours.”

  “Promise not to laugh.”

  “No.”

  “Okay…I’ve been asked to find an old book that was apparently written by some of the Founders immediately after drafting the Constitution.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Apparently you weren’t supposed to. It was lost from a private collection back in the 1950s and the new holder of the collection wants it back.”

  “Tell me what this has to do with NULL.”

  I pulled the black handheld computer from my inside jacket pocket. “According to the very cold trail, NULL obtained it a couple of years ago while blackmailing a mayoral personage, and then traded it to a businessman in return for an infinite lease on that building.”

  “Not Rudy?” She laughed.

  “No idea.”

  “And you know Donald Trump owns a lot of property in SoHo, right?”

  “…naaah.”

  She leaned in, grinning. “Damn, this is interesting, though. Where did the book go next?”

  I opened the handheld and powered it up. The way she looked at it broke at least two Commandments. “That’s one of the new Sonys. You know how much those things cost?”

  “Um…no. I had a Palm when I was with Pinkerton.”

  She snatched it off me. The screen lit her eyes like lanterns. “It’s got a camera!”

  “Where?”

  “This lens in the hinge. You didn’t see it?”

  “I, ah…I just thought it was, you know, a high-tech hinge.”

  Trix smiled at me. “Tard.”

  Her black fingernail tapped smartly on the screen four times, and then she got out of her chair and crouched next to me. The screen swiveled on a pivot hidden in the hinge, so it was facing us. We appeared in a window on the screen.

  “Smile, Mike.” A flash went off in the hinge arrangement and a still photo of us resolved on the screen.

  In the picture, she’s looking at the lens and I’m looking at her.

  Trix got up, still clutching the machine. “So your leads are in here?” More tapping brought up the document, and she started paging through it using the Up and Down buttons on the little keyboard in the lower half of the thing.

  “This is the coolest thing,” she murmured.

  “The client gave it to me. It hooks into the net so he can email me updates. Not that I expect any. The trail’s all cold. All I can do is pick a point and start following it. Gather as much information as I can along the way.”

  “You’re not going to just jump to the end?”

  “My dad had a saying: ‘Don’t pet a lion until you’re damn sure the bastard won’t try and eat you.’ I want to know what people wanted this book for, and what kind of channels it’s being moved along.”

  “And that’s why you were at NULL.”

  “And now I know. The book is pervert currency.”

  “‘Pervert’ is a real pejorative, you know, Mike.”

  “Hey, I’m from Chicago. In Chicago, perverts are people who don’t finish their whiskey and actually sleep with their wives at night.”

  She gave me a look. “Don’t be too sure.”

  I laughed and polished off my vodka. “What, you want to be my guide to America’s deviant underworld?”

  Trix looked at me deadpan. “What’s the pay?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Sure I’m serious. You need education in the ways of the modern world or else you are frankly doomed. And I can expand my thesis into something killer. I mean, if you just follow the cold trail in here, you’re going to be traveling coast-to-coast.”

  I studied the bottom of my glass.

  “I am totally serious, Mike.”

  “You don’t even know me, Trix.”

  “Mike, you’ve had five drinks and you haven’t even hinted at trying to jump me. If even half of what you’ve told me about yourself is true, you should’ve turned into the world’s biggest asshole years ago. But you’re sweet and you’re funny and you don’t give up. You know how hard it is, finding someone in this town who’s still determined?

  “And on top of that, life gets interesting around you, I need to write a killer thesis so I can get out of here and do amazing things, and you really, really need some help here.”

  “This whole ‘you’re doomed, Mike’ thing isn’t doing wonders for me, you know…”

  “Come on, Mike. Let me be your guide to the underworld. Virgil to your Dante.”

  I really, really did not need to hear that line again.

  The bottom of my glass wasn’t getting any less empty.

  She kept looking at me.

  No one had looked at me like I was a ticket to adventure before.

  “A hundred dollars a day, and I’ll cover travel and accommodation.”

  Trix’s mouth fell open.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Now I’m the one who’s serious.”

  “Fuck.”

  “A hundred bucks a day, seven days a week until we’re done. Could be a week, could be a month, could be two. Separate rooms, and we’re staying in good places. I’ve got a big expense account, and this is better than me just drinking it all.”

  She leaned back in her chair. “Wow. That is not exactly what I was expecting.”

  I felt like a prick for not giving her more than a hundred a day, to be honest. But then I also felt like a prick for buying the company of a smart pretty girl for a few weeks, so it all evened out.

  This was, in case you were wondering, literally the only smart move I made during this whole thing.

  Chapter 6

  I wish I still had that photo.

  Chapter 7

  I spent Monday and Tuesday buying clothes and luggage and deciding what to do about the gun. I was damned if I was going to drive across America, and besides, that’d mean I’d have to buy a car. But I knew that just wrapping my gun in the gun license and dropping it in a suitcase wasn’t going to play. So I ended up packing the license and putting the gun in my office safe.

  I considered the gun a professional tool. I’d fired it in anger twice in five years, but if I was honest, I’d have to tell you that I’d threatened people with it more than that.

  Plus, I pistol-whipped a tailor once to gain the trust of a disturbed white boy who believed he contained the soul of Huey P. Newton.

  So it didn’t feel good to lock up the gun. I knew there was no chance I was going to use it, but it took one option out of the toolbox.

  I also had the suspicion, based on nothing at all, that it might freak Trix out a bit.

  She met me outside the hotel around noon on Wednesday. The downtown ninjas were doing their level best to chat her up. Trix was showing them her arm tattoos. The cropped top she was wearing showed that they plainly continued on to her chest, and she was teasing them ruthlessly. Most of the ninja swords showed a 45-degree angle.

  I came out with my one bag, having decided to travel as lightly as I could. I saw Trix had a single bag, too, which made me smile. “All set, Trix?”

  “All ready.” She grinned. “You got the tickets?”

  I waved them. She turned to the nearest ninja, dipped her chin a bit, and turned big green eyes up at him. “Could we get a cab?”

  Four ninjas howled and leapt into Lexington Avenue, waving their swords about. A yellow cab swerved left and clipped one ninja, sending him flying ten feet back to splatter onto the rear of a limo. Another ninja stood and watched in shock, which meant he wasn’t going to ninja his way away from the cab, which took him like a mad bull’s horns and flipped him over the roof. The cab mounted the sidewalk and jammed on the brakes just as the fender bodyslammed ninja three. The cabbie leaned over and flung open the door, which opened hard on ninja four, batting him down. Scrawled in the dirt on the door were the letters WMD.
Inside was an immense black man with an X carved into his forehead. Trix and I were the last ones standing. He grinned like a kid at Christmas and yelled, “Where we going, tiny white people?”

  Trix and I looked at each other. And then she laughed. “This is just a perfect way to start, Mr. Shit Magnet.”

  I rolled with it and grabbed the bags. “Newark Airport.”

  The cab launched off the sidewalk like a cruise missile.

  It turned out the cab had two speeds; stop and golike-fuckinghell. The cabbie grappled with his machine like a sumo, wrestling the ballistic cab around corners, great thrusts to the steering wheel to keep the thing on target, slapping it around when it started to fishtail. “You guys look ready for trouble.” He laughed. “What’s your deal?”

  “We’re private detectives.” Trix grinned. “We’re off on a great adventure.”

  “Private eyes!” He thought this was terrific. He laughed out loud, coughed hard, and punched the steering wheel with a horrible yelp. “You on a case?”

  Trix was totally up for this. “Yeah. Some rich guy’s lost a spooky old book and we have to take it away from the weird fuckers who’re hiding it.”

  “Cool! Listen, you know any black private eyes?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The agency I used to be with had a lot of black guys, a lot of Asian guys, you know?”

  “Why ain’t they on the TV?”

  “Beats the shit out of me.”

  “Seriously, man. Every time I turn on the TV, it’s like Jones, Freelance Whitey. Because only middle-aged white guy detectives can fuck shit up, you know what I’m saying? And fucking Quincy, man. There ain’t nothing but white guys on that dude’s slab. What do they do with the black guys, burn ’em in piles round back?”

  “Who’s Quincy?” said Trix.

  As the cabbie stomped down on the accelerator, I swear I saw the view out the window start distorting.

  “It don’t matter.” The cabbie smiled. “Helter Skelter come soon.”

  “X’d from society.” Trix smiled knowingly.

  “Hey! You one hot private eye!”

  I made a whatthefuck face at Trix. “Charles Manson,” she said. “The X on his forehead. It’s a Manson thing. Showing their excision from mainstream society. Preparing for Helter Skelter, the race war between whites and blacks that the black people would win.”

  “You know everything about goddamn Manson but you never heard of Quincy?”

  “The thing about Helter Skelter, though, was that Manson considered African Americans to be inferior, and he and his Family would therefore rise from hiding after the war to take over from them. Manson hated black people.”

  The cabbie laughed a big warm laugh. “Manson was a crazy motherfucker. That don’t mean Helter Skelter was a bad idea. I’m just telling his ass—he ain’t coming back to take over shit. And there’ll be some black private eyes on TV for damn sure.”

  Trix laughed. I said, “You realize our cabbie is talking about killing us, right?”

  The cabbie threw his head back and roared. “You get special dispensation for being cool private eyes. But I’m telling you: be careful out there. Not everyone’s as nice as me, you know? Helter Skelter coming. You can see it in everything, man. The weird shit on TV. All that crap on the Internet you hear about. You seen how weird the news is getting? Something’s coming, and ain’t everyone going to love a private eye when it all starts happening, you know what I’m saying? You guys want Departures, right?”

  Yellow cab redshift to Newark Airport.

  Chapter 8

  Through the airport without any further “magnetism.” I figured maybe I’d used up my quota for the day.

  “I’ve never flown before,” said Trix, so I made sure she got the window seat. I bought business-class tickets to our first stop, Columbus, Ohio. I’d never been there, but I found myself savoring the normalcy of its name. Columbus, Ohio. It was somewhere from TV weather maps. It made Cleveland sound decadent.

  Lots of people in prettily decorated bird-flu masks moved in twitchy flocks around the airport, darting away in migration patterns from anything that coughed.

  We were greeted by the plastic grins of flight attendants as we mounted the plane, ushered to big comfortable seats, and given champagne. The grins widened as we finished the first glasses and reached greedily for seconds. Get the passengers smashed and they’ll slump quietly throughout the flight. We worked slowly through the second glasses during takeoff, which had Trix plastered to her window wide-eyed and squealing.

  The plane banked easy, stepped over the cloud deck, and leveled for Columbus, an hour’s run.

  An older guy in a short-sleeved shirt with bloodstains on the front sat in the aisle seat next to mine. He gave me a secret little smile. “You know,” he said. “You know. If you drink whiskey. And I don’t mean a lot of whiskey, just enough to keep the little engines in your head alive. If you drink a bunch of whiskey, you can piss in a cup before you go to sleep. And in the morning all the alcohol will have risen to the surface of the piss. And you can drink it off the top of the piss with a straw.”

  “I’ll, um, I’ll certainly bear that one in mind.”

  He made a happy noise and stuck out a big hand with caked blood all over the fingernails. “Excellent. I’m the pilot.”

  Trix went white.

  Chapter 9

  The Columbus airport was one of those places you forget everything about within five minutes of leaving it. We got a cab from there to the hotel I’d booked over the Internet, a place outside the city proper.

  Coming out of the airport, we saw a grimy road sign reading, WELCOME TO OHIO, THE BUCKEYE STATE.

  Our cabbie had three faded pictures of burly women pasted to the dashboard. Someone had used a marker pen to draw crude knives sticking into their heads and chests. He whispered to himself as he drove, his little fists clenching on the steering wheel.

  “What’s a buckeye?” Trix asked.

  “State symbol kinda thing,” the cabbie ground out.

  “Yeah, but what’s a buckeye?”

  He pinned us with red little eyes through the rearview mirror.

  “It’s a poison nut.”

  Trix gave me a wry little smile. “That makes sense.”

  The hotel was a concrete island. Surrounded by highways on all sides. You couldn’t walk anywhere from it. The cab dumped us at the front door. The driver was shivering with tension by this point, hissing constantly under his breath, getting close to explosion. I paid the guy a tip. He suddenly glared at Trix and lost it, yelling at the top of his lungs: “They bleed for a week and don’t fucking die!”

  The cab tore off. I looked at Trix, who just shrugged. “Can’t argue with that,” she said.

  Check-in was unremarkable, and within ten minutes we had our big apartment-style rooms four floors up, complete with exotic widescreen views of the parking lot.

  I flicked on the TV for noise while Trix settled in to her room. Some mumbling defective in a cowboy hat was doing a radio talkshow that was inexplicably being televised live. The gig appeared to consist of several perky underachieving assistants doing all the talking while the old guy took his hat off, put it back on, and wondered what the microphone in front of him was for.

  There was blood in the toilet, which didn’t bother me as much as it probably should have. I flushed a few times, but it seemed to me that the bottom of the bowl had some kind of wound through which blood continually seeped. There were weird cracks and ripples in the enamel down there. If you squinted through the refraction of the water, the sequence of little lines looked a bit like a hand. I floated some toilet paper over the top and decided to leave it alone.

  Trix banged on the door, and sauntered in eating an apple. “It’s like housesitting your old-fashioned aunt’s place, these rooms.” She looked around my room, spotted the little plastic Scotch bottles already drained. “Are you okay, Mike?”

  “Fine.”

  I’d fished the handheld out of my ba
g already; passed it to Trix. “You want to check out our Columbus lead?”

  “Ooh, yeah. Gimme.”

  She spilled into a chair like a rag doll, holding the apple between her teeth as she clicked the machine open and started thumbing the keyboard.

  When she said, “Oh, this is going to be fun,” I ordered a full-sized bottle of whiskey from room service.

  Chapter 10

  Come on over,” said the guy on the phone, sounding disturbingly reasonable.

  “See?” said Trix, finishing some elaborate eye makeup in the bathroom mirror. The toilet bubbled and hissed behind her. “Physical adventurism doesn’t make you an instant freak.”

  “Did you read this file? Did you read what these people do to themselves? It’s a freakshow.”

  “It’s an interest. I’m looking forward to meeting the guy.”

  “For your thesis, right?”

  Trix bounced out of the bathroom. Leather boots, flouncy lacy skirt thing, tight top. I decided not to look at her for long.

  “Yes, for my thesis. Also because I think he’s going to just be a genuinely interesting guy. Does he know why we’re coming?”

  I put my hand on my jacket. It seemed heavy. It wanted me to stay right where I was. Stay there, lay down, drink some more, develop some kind of horrific paralysis that prevented me from ever leaving. That required nurses to look after me. Lots of them. With elaborate eye makeup.

  I picked up my jacket.

  “Yeah, I told him. Figured I may as well be up-front about it. He didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “Can’t argue with that. Are we going?”

  I had a rental car waiting outside. It had stained baby clothes and a crack pipe on the backseat. I put my hand inside a plastic bag I found in the glove compartment and carefully lifted them out, dumping it all into a FedEx dropbox outside the hotel lobby. A FedEx employee once tried to steal my breakfast. I hold grudges for decades. Frankly, if I didn’t hold grudges, I’d have nothing to play with on Christmas Day.