Crooked Little Vein: A Novel

  “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 on
ly 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.”

  Chapter 31

  Down two flights of stairs, through some heavy doors, into a bare concrete corridor lit by caged lamps hung from the walls, to a steel hatch that Junior spun the wheel of with practiced ease.

  “This is the den?”

  “Daddy doesn’t like it when I call it the bunker. Bad associations with the past, he says. So, well, whatever keeps the old man happy.”

  Inside was a dark, warm space from the 1950s. Baseball pennants pinned to rich wood-paneled walls, old globes and maps, Tiffany lamps, an antique radio, and a bar straight out of a Rat Pack musical.

  “Drink?” Junior said, walking over to the big mahogany desk at the far side of the room.

  “No, thanks. I’d like to get straight down to business, if I could.”

  “Businessman? That’s good. What’s your business, Mike?”

  “A book you possess. A, um, an alternate Constitution of the United States.”

  Behind the desk, he was opening its deep central drawer. “Ah,” he said, with rueful knowledge. “That old thing.”

  “I represent someone who wants that book very badly. I’m empowered to offer you ten million dollars for it. But the deal has to be struck today.”

  His eyes widened and his mouth shrank. “Today?”

  “Yes, sir. This is a matter of the utmost urgency to my client.”

  “That damned book.” He sat down heavily in the big leather chair behind the desk. “I tried reading it once. It was the strangest thing. I dropped it down on the desk, right here, to read it, and it was like my goddamn eyeballs were bugging out. I didn’t understand a word of the text but I couldn’t stop reading it. And Daddy wanted me to use that damned thing…” He trailed off, looking down into whatever was in the open drawer, out of my line of vision.

  “With your father, um, out of commission, I was hoping you could help me.”

  “I wasn’t ready to be president. I’m going to be. But I wasn’t ready then. And I’m not ready for this today.”

  “No offense, Mr. Roanoke, but you need to be ready for this. This is extremely important.”

  “Gimme…gimme a second,” he whi
spered. And withdrew an old gas mask, the full-face kind that has the airtank and compressor hanging from the thick pipe connected to the mouth of the mask. I noticed that the bottom of the tank had been sawed off, and stepped in to see what he was doing.

  In the deep drawer was a small mountain of cocaine. The only thing it was missing were gulls nesting in the crevices. Tony goddamn Montana would have quailed at the sight of it.

  Junior shoved the open end of the tank into the white pile and flipped on the compressor. Enough coke to kill a flock of young tyrannosaurs was sucked up into Junior’s head. He ripped off the mask and shrieked. Bloody residue dripped out of the tank and back onto the pile. Eyes bulging, he looked down at the smashed heap of marching powder. “My God! I see Jesus! I see His Face in these Satanic drugs! I am Saved! Glory Be!”

  He looked at my face and laughed. “Relax, sport. I’m just practicing. I’m going to be president one day. It’s important to get these things right.”

  “The book—”

  “Fuck the book. I’ve just had a religious conversion. Were you impressed?”

  “I kind of expected you to be a religious man, in any case,” I said, looking for something heavy.

  “Ringo says religion is a political tool,” he honked, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to claw through to his sinuses.

  “Who’s Ringo?”

  Junior wrenched open the left-hand drawer in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.

  “This is Ringo!” he exulted. “Ringo is my friend!” He clutched the scabby thing to a chest already pebble-dashed with cocaine, bloodclots, and snot.

  My back bumped into the door. “And…he says things, does he?”

  “Yeahhhhhh,” Junior sighed, stroking Ringo’s stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.

  “Okay. He speaks to you. That’s fine. However, I’d appreciate it if you could save the conversation in your head for later and address the matter at hand.”

  “Ringo could speak to you, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I gave a halfhearted wave in the direction of the stained object in Junior’s fist. “Hi, Ringo.”