Crooked Little Vein

On reflection, I decided that this would be easier than, say, having warm salty water shot into my dadpaste factory. I could handle this. Junior was obviously a coke fiend and a congenital shitbrain. Why not humor him? It seemed to me to be the simplest path.

“I’d be happy to. But on the understanding that we start dealing like men after this, yes?”

Junior held the skinny mutilated horror out at arm’s length toward me. “Press his fucking stomach!”

I moved forward and pushed two fingers into the thing’s gut. A voicebox ground into life with a hideous low rasp. Like an eighty-year-old chainsmoking hooker who hadn’t yet slipped in her teeth.

“Women are best when they can’t talk any more,” it said.

I flinched back, but Junior grabbed my wrist. Tendons stood out in his arm, and his knuckles whitened. He was using all his strength. And it wasn’t all that.

“Morrrrre,” he growled.

I pressed the stomach again.

“Where’s my dinner, bitch?”

And:

“God says queers are special firewood.”

“That’s enough,” I said.

“I said fucking more,” Junior said.

I twisted my arm around and he squealed as his wrist bent, but he refused to let go. I put the base of my left hand into his nose and turned it into a bathmat.

He reeled backward, clutching the toy, his fingers twisted into it. It kept rasping: “Americans are born, not made.” “Stupid people just like stuff simple.” “If they can’t see you drinking, you’re not an alcoholic.”

Junior dragged himself into the seat behind the desk. “You’re doomed now, you stupid fuck. I’m gonna be the president one day. Daddy says. He says presidents are people like us.”

Ringo said: “Fuck America and get rich like astronauts.”

“Oh, God,” Junior groaned. “Where’s my Womb Thing?”

He scrabbled in the desk for a moment and produced a glass screw-top jar filled with a thick, clotted yellow fluid. Junior unzipped a badly discolored little penis and began to jerk off into the jar with the maniacal fury of an ugly ape in humping season.

I snatched up one of the big Tiffany lamps, flipped it around in my hand, and brought the edge of its heavy base down in his lap.

He screamed and jerked forward, inadvertently head-butting his desk.

I gave him a few minutes. In the course of my work, I’ve had occasion to hit people before. I can tell when I’ve hit them too hard, because they always puke. I can tell when they wake up, and I can tell when they’re faking it. Junior woke up after a couple of minutes, but was playing dead.

I stepped over to his bar, unstopped a bottle of vodka, and poured it over his head. He was good, I’ll give him that. Barely fluttered an eyelash.

Flicking my lighter, however, miraculously brought him back to life.

“Mr. Roanoke. I left my sense of humor in Columbus, Ohio. You and your father are shitbags of quite epic proportions. But I have no wish to see you dead. Unless I get that book now, the people whom you failed to remove from office will destroy this place, with you in it. I need the book now. Or else you will discover not only that you can live through having your head set on fire, but that death by bombing actually hurts more.”

His eyes were very wide, and he wasn’t blinking. “I don’t have it.”

I slapped him. “Why are you fucking with me?”

“I don’t have it. I had to give it to someone. Daddy doesn’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“I made her sign a receipt. So she wouldn’t…she knew things about me. I had to make her not talk. She said she had the video locked somewhere safe, and that someone would go and get it if she disappeared. And I didn’t have any money.”

“You? Didn’t have any

money?”

He looked sad. “Some things are very expensive.”

“Show me the receipt.”

“It’s in the desk.”

“If I think you’re pulling anything but a piece of paper out of there, I’m going to ignite your head.”

With my lighter held within his halo of vodka fumes, he slowly withdrew an envelope. It looked like he’d been doodling on the back of it at some point. On closer inspection, it appeared that he’d been practicing his alphabet.

I popped the envelope. The sheet of paper inside had been typed, thank God.

“You gave the book to a prostitute, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’ll be glad to know that there’s apparently precedent for that. Last known address?”

“Right there. It checks out. My family has friends there who keep tabs on her for me.”

I folded the paper, put it into my jacket, tossed the envelope at him. “I have to talk someone out of turning your house into Baghdad, now.”

I got up and walked to the door. Behind me, a rasping voice said, “Break America’s heart before it breaks yours.” I didn’t look back.

Chapter 32

True to her word, Trix was out in the car, and the engine was running. Since I was clearly not carrying a book, Trix was freaking out a little bit.

“Quit strolling and get in the fucking car!”

Two seconds after I got in, the car took off like a fighter plane. She’d obviously been talking to the driver, who was perspiring heavily.

“Mike, what happened? Are they going to do it?”