Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

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.

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.

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 bag 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.

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.

Trix had gotten the handheld to connect to the Web and produce a road map from the hotel to the location of the man on the phone. I pulled the rental car out of the lot and started following the red line from here to there. Within ten minutes, we were off the highway and barreling up and down leafy suburban hills fringed by big-porched houses stabbed by flagpoles from which bedraggled Stars and Stripes bled.

Trix took it all in like she was riding across the face of the moon. “People really have flags?”

“Sure.”

“Now that’s weird.”

“Yeah, but you’re from New York.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“People in New York are either New Yorkers, or they’re Spanish, or Italian, or Irish, or whatever. Who the hell moves to Williamsburg and says, Hey, I’m an American? Hell, even after 9/11, if you wanted to tell someone they were being a good guy, people were saying, ‘You’re a hell of a New Yorker, buddy.’”

“Well, what about you?”

“Well, I’m from Chicago.”

Trix snorted.

We nosed out of flag country into parking-lot territory. The standard-issue skyscraper-shape cityscape of Columbus resolved into view, off in the distance. Bland and generic as it was, I wanted to be there. But we had to follow the red line into the tangle of housing out there. To see the man who’d been traded the book for a night of “physical adventurism.”

I parked outside the address, a well-kept place that’d had the front yard cemented over into parking spaces. This was a guy who had a lot of friends. His neighbor had an old Impala rotting in the yard next door. It looked like God had shat in it—the roof punched in, the interior filled with earth and weeds. A brown sneaker poked out of the bottom of the dirt in the doorless passenger side. The sneaker looked worryingly full.

My guy’s door chime was blandly anonymous. We waited out there for a couple of minutes, not talking. I was on the verge of giving up when I heard heavy footsteps inside the house. The door flew open and there was a large mahogany man wearing a purple towel standing there, grinning widely.

“You’re the guy who called earlier?”

“Yeah. I’m Mike, this is Trix.”

“Yeah? Very cool eye art there, miss. C’mon in. Bit of a rush here.”

The air inside was warm and salty. The place was pin-clean and retrotasteful, like someone had embalmed my grandmother’s house in 1976. He walked ahead of us, muscles moving under his skin like cats under a satin bedsheet. He was heavily built, and the weird artificial-looking mahogany brought out his muscle definition. He brought us into an old lady’s living room, laid a spare towel over the sofa, and sat, inviting us into big armchairs that smelled of old potpourri. He gave that big open grin again, big white teeth gleaming in his shaven mahogany head.

“I’m Gary. You got to excuse my look, I just got back from a bodybuilding show. No time to shower.”

He pressed his fingertip into his forearm and drew a line down it, exposing white skin.

“Body stain. Brings out the shape under the lights. I compete.”

“Did you win?” Trix smiled.

“Ah, second place. Three hundred bucks. I do it for the extra cash, and three hundred’s better than a kick in the ass, right? I got this great trainer, English guy, but he’s pissed at me because I don’t stay in the gym all damn day. He’s got this picture he carries around with him from when he competed himself. Him in first place, some other guy in second, Arnold Schwarzenegger in third. He says to me, ‘I got first and lived on nothing but fresh pussy for the next two years. Arnie got third and lived in the gym and worked his guts out. And now he’s the governor of California and I’m training you, you arsehole.’”

I don’t know what was wrong with me. I just wasn’t in the mood to make friends. Stupid, really. I was sick of it already, or sick of myself, or all that tangled up together.

“I just want to know where the book is.”

Gary grinned that big happy fucking stupid grin, teeth like Scrabble tiles glued into a coffee table. “Sure, I know. Sounds like you guys are on a real weird gig. What is that book, anyway? I mean, the guy told me it was valuable. I did okay out of it—made enough cash to fix up the house and the yard and had a few parties, you know? I’m interested now.”

“It was stolen from important people, a long time ago. Where is it?”

“Well, it ain’t here. Sold it, like I said.”

“Who to?”

“I got a receipt someplace. Damn sure it’s not worth the paper it’s written on, though, right?” Wide friendly grin. Every time his face gaped open I wanted to break a chair in it.

“Just give me the fucking name.”

“Mike,” Trix hissed.

The grin shut down like someone threw a switch. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

“You know what? I just started this case and I’m already sick of uppity perverts. The name.”

Gary stood up. He didn’t have much height, but he was wide and solid. “Oh, is that what I am? Well, here’s the deal, private eye. I’ll give you the name. After you’ve partied with me and my friends a little. Or you can take a walk. Or I can kick your scrawny ass clean from here to the airport and you can fly back to where the weenie vanilla straight boys hide.”

The doorbell rang.

“That’s my friends,” Gary said. “They’re bringing the needles.”

Big evil grin.

Eight very large and very gay men filled the living room.

“This is Mike and Trix,” said Gary, glowering at me. “Mike wants to have an experience with us.”

The tallest man in the room, an Aryan blond in a sprayed-on white T-shirt and bicycle shorts, appraised me without love and then traded looks with Gary. “He’s gonna wash first, right?”

“Oh, we’re not going to party with Mike. I just want to shoot him up a little, and then he’s gonna head back to his hotel.”

“Me, too,” said Trix. “I mean, I want to play, too.”

“You know what we’re talking about, right?” Gary said.

“Sure I do. There’s some guys in Boston who throw parties and put the photos up on their Web site.”

“That’s Eugene,” a little redhead guy in black jeans hooted. “I love that guy. Visited him last summer. He took me whale-watching out on Boston Harbor.”

“Isn’t he cool?” said Trix. “I saw all his photos. Always wanted to try this. I figured that if you infused my labia, it’ll feel a little like having balls, you know?”

Feeling vaguely betrayed, I found Gary’s eyes and threw my best possible Murderous Gaze into them.

“I’m armed, you know.”

“No, you’re not.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’m a cop. I can spot a guy carrying from thirty feet.”

How badly did I want this job? I could’ve just walked away from it there and then. Go back to New York, take a partial fee on the case. Hell, take no fee at all, chalk it up to more hideous experience. What fee was worth all this shit?

Trix was watching me. She looked sad. She gave me a little smile, but that was sad, too.

I sat down hard in the chair and dug my fingers into the arms.

“You’re not injecting salt water into my testicles and that’s that.”

This is where we shoot salt water into your testicles,” said Gary.

He’d converted a big room in the back of the house into a huge walk-in shower room, with sound speakers recessed high in the walls.