Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“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.”

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 whispered. 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.”

“No,” Junior intoned, unsmiling. “You have to press his stomach.”

“Why?”

“You have to. You can’t leave until you’ve pressed his stomach.”

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.

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?”

I took out my cell phone and dialed all those fives. Counted off two rings. And let it ring.

On the fifteenth ring, the chief of staff answered the phone. “I said two rings, McGill.”

“They don’t have the book.” I was forcing myself to speak slowly. “I have in my possession a receipt for the book, which I believe to be genuine.”

“Oh, you believe it, do you?”

“You hired me for my skills. Try listening.”

“…I think I liked you better before you started acting like you grew a pair, McGill.”

“Jeff Roanoke Jr. gave the book to a prostitute in exchange for her continued silence regarding services rendered for what I presume was an extended period of time. He’s also maintained enough sporadic surveillance on her to give a credible assurance that she remains in the location given on the receipt document. He was not in a position to lie convincingly to me.”