Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

I turned. There was a gun muzzle pushed into her eye.

A tall, thin man with bad skin and eyes like a doll’s was behind her, one arm around her throat, the other pressing a gun into her eye.

“The thing about cheap bullets,” he said, “is that they’ll shatter on the inside of her skull. I can shoot her through the brain and the bullet will not emerge out of the other side. My name’s Tim Cardinal. I understand you wanted to see me.”

Dead eyes. They didn’t reflect any light. Black and motionless. His smile was polite and without life.

“This was business,” I said.

His polite smile widened by a precise amount, as if he’d learned how to feign emotions in the mirror. “This is how I do business. I have no desire to kill her. But then, I have no desire to use toilets or eat food. They are simply things I have to do in order to live. So is this. You wanted to see me?”

“Trix, just relax,” I said. “We’re doing business here. He’s not going to have any reason to harm you.”

“You think he needs a reason?” she said.

Tim Cardinal laughed. It made me jump: it sounded like a gunshot in a small room. “Oh, I like you. Now. I won’t ask again. You wanted to see me?”

I put the flashlight beam square on his face. I wanted him to focus on me, not Trix.

“Alexis Perez received a book as payment from a client,” I said, in as loud and steady a voice as I could manage with Trix looking down a gun barrel. “I believe you took the book for yourself. It’s a rare antique. My client has hired and empowered me to purchase it from you for a significant fee. Under-the-table purchase, bank transfer, no records.”

“How do you do a bank transfer with no records?” Cardinal sneered.

“My client is very important. It’s not an issue. I’m here to give you a lot of money for a book that’s no good to you. There’s no need for any of this.”

“If the book is so very important to your very important client, how do I know it’s no good to me?”

“Are you intending to go into politics any time soon?”

He laughed again, a genuine snort of amusement. The tunnel still made it a flat and horrible noise. “No.”

“Then it’s no good to you.”

He considered. “This would be the old leatherbound thing that she got from the Texan?”

“Right.”

“And she told you I had it?”

“She’s dead. She died a few hours ago. Death by misadventure. Home-brew plastic surgery.”

“Oh,” he said. For a moment there, he almost looked concerned. And then, “So how do you know I have it? Who told you?”

“I’m a detective. I worked it out. Let go of her now.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you want me to. You’re not armed, are you?”

“No.” Damnit.

He threw the smile away, but there was light in his eyes for the first time. He was amused. He had all the power in the situation, and he knew it, and that was the only thing in the world that could make him register a pulse.

“I don’t have the book,” he said.

“Then we’ll be on our way. No hard feelings, no comeback. You won’t see us again.”

“But you have money, don’t you?”

“Not with me. Who has the book?”

“Ah. I have two things you want, then. What price do you set on that name and her life?”

“Screw the name. Let her go.”

Cardinal grinned. “I am finding this very interesting. I think I’m going to kill you both. Her first. Let you watch. Would that be nice?”

“I have access to four hundred thousand dollars,” I said.

“Where is it?”

“In a bank account. It’s yours if you let her go.”

Trix’s jaw dropped.

“And how do I get this money? Do we go into a bank together? I don’t think so.”

Shit. I thought furiously, trying to find a way to make this work.

“Mike,” Trix said in a small voice. “The handheld.”

“There’s a handheld computer in my inside jacket pocket,” I said. “It connects to the Internet. I can get to my account through it. I’m going to take it out, very slowly, okay?”

I opened my jacket wide and carefully extracted the device with two fingers. He watched me like a hawk the whole time. I snapped it open and began pressing buttons. The net connection coughed a bit—I was a little surprised it even worked, being two floors underground—but it got to the online banking thing. I was all fingers and thumbs, and I barely understood the fucking thing to begin with. I held it out.

“Trix is better with this thing than I am.”

He thought about this. I was visibly trembling. He liked it. Cardinal withdrew the gun from her eye and carefully placed it at the back of her head, at arm’s length. “Do it,” he said to her.

Trix took the handheld and began keying it, quickly and precisely. She cocked her head toward Cardinal. “What’s your account number?”

Amused, he gave her the number and codes, and she keyed them in with superb focus. Handed the device over her shoulder to him. “Check it.”

He took the device, and spent a few moments studying it. The light from the glowsticks was fading now, and his drawn features were lit coldly by the screen.

“Well, now,” he eventually said. “It appears that your bank account is empty and mine is full.”

“It’s nonreversible,” Trix said. “It’s marked as such at the bottom of the page there. You’ve got the money and we can’t take it away from you.”

Cardinal passed the handheld back over Trix’s shoulder.

“It has been a pleasure doing business with you both.” He fished in his coat pocket for something. The glow was almost dead, and I played my flashlight over him as he rummaged. He produced a matchbook.

“Before you arrived, I wrote the name and address of the entity I sold the book to on this. I prefer to be fully prepared for all eventualities, no matter how outlandish. So should you.”

The last of the glowsticks died. He tossed the matchbook on the ground. I put the flashlight on it. When I brought the beam back up to find Cardinal, he was gone. His footsteps stolen by the wet stone.

Back in the car, Trix couldn’t stop shaking. She tried a weak smile on me. “Suddenly, this isn’t so much fun.”

“I told you I hate Las Vegas,” I said, cranking the ignition.

“Hold on a second,” she said. “You just gave someone four hundred thousand dollars to save my life.”

Because I’m an asshole, I said, “Well, it wasn’t my four hundred grand.”

“Yes, it was. If we don’t get the book, that payment is all you’re ever going to see from this job. And you just blew it all. For me.”

“Let’s be honest. I only would’ve drunk it. And I put you in that situation in the first place.”

She laughed, and it was more like a rattle. “I think it was the first time you didn’t ask me to stay in the car.”

“See? My fault.” I threw the gearshift and pulled away. “And now I have to figure how to get us to L.A. with no money.”

“There was more than four hundred in the account. I shunted the change into my own account before I sent the four hundred to his.”

I thought about this. “Well, that was probably what I owed you, anyway.”

“So? I’m your partner. We’ll use it to get the job done.”

“That’s your money, Trix.”

“It’s not my money, just like it wasn’t yours. Right?”

“Shouldn’t you be in shock or something?” I said.

That brought her all the way back. She punched me in the arm, and then slumped back in her seat. “Jesus, what a night. I’m never coming back here again. You said something about L.A.?”

I blew out stale air. “Yeah. That prick sold the book to a law firm in Los Angeles, would you believe.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“I know a lawyer in L.A. In fact, I bet we could stay with him. Which is just as well, as I highly doubt we can afford swanky hotels now.”

“What can we afford?”

She grinned. “You ever skipped out of a hotel without paying before?”

And then, with the board in the bed ripped out and a pair of panties dangling off Jesus’ face, she kissed me, warm and tender and long like she’d never kissed me before, and whispered, “You saved my life. You gave up on the book and the job and the money to save my life. I could fall in love with you.”

I’ve said I love you when I’ve meant it, and I’ve said I love you when it was the right thing to say, and I’ve said I love you when saying anything else would have hurt someone without reason. And I couldn’t say a word, there in the dark.

We snuck out of the back of the hotel and caught a bus to the airport, where Trix bought a couple of coach tickets to LAX. She took the cell phone to call her friend, apparently getting nothing but the answering machine. She’d turned away from me and muttered what seemed like an absurdly detailed message into the phone.

After that, it was down to an hour of waiting, leaning on each other in the hard plastic departure-lounge chairs, tired and stressed and silent. I put one eye on a nearby TV, which was showing choppy, pixelated footage from the war in the Middle East. Blood on the road. Bumpy handheld camerawork. An American soldier who was maybe twenty, crying, screaming at what I guess was his commanding officer. The sound was turned down, so all you got was this kid dressed as a soldier with blood all over his uniform shrieking silently.

A fat guy lumbered past with one of those little suitcases on wheels. The case didn’t seem to be big enough to contain one pair of the underpants that guy must’ve needed. On the case was slapped a glossy plastic sticker demanding that I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. Looking at the shocky commander not knowing what to say to the screaming soldier, I came to the decision that I’d start that just as soon as I saw our troops supporting our troops. It didn’t do much for my mood.

I elbowed a small child in the face so that Trix could get a window seat, and she fell asleep while I was still apologizing to its obese, dirt-streaked mother. When the flight attendant came to intercede, I told her the mother was yelling at me in Iraqi, and she and her poison spawn were frogmarched off the plane.

I sat next to Trix, and a musty-smelling middle-aged man with a hawk’s profile arranged himself in the aisle seat next to me. His houndstooth suit had been secondhand when God was a boy, and what I first took for badly maintained spats turned out, on closer inspection, to be cut-down gray gym socks arranged over battered black Chelsea boots.

After takeoff, Trix went off to sleep, a trick I was learning to resent if not despise her for.

The man next to me looked down his nose at me and took a long, pipe-clearing sniff. “You look weary. A traveling man?”

“You could say that. New York, Columbus, San Antonio, Vegas. On to L.A.”

He wriggled with pleasure at the prospect. “What a crooked little vein you travel. All the way to the heart of America. The red, steaming valves of Los Angeles. A fine place for a detective to be headed.”

I got that little see-saw feeling in my stomach when something I can’t put my finger on is wrong. Like knowing something’s waiting around the corner for me with big teeth and a hard-on. “How did you know I’m a detective?”

“You have the smell on you. The smell of Crime. I, too, am in the life. A consulting detective. Falconer’s the name. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Um… no.”

“But I was recently featured in The Investigator’s Companion.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“The Companion? The monthly journal for detectives?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Aaah. That explains it. I am Falconer, boy! I am the world’s greatest consulting detective. I, sir, am the man who solved a crime by placing the deceased victim’s penis in my mouth.”

“You sucked the corpse off.”

“Don’t be so disgusting,” Falconer said. “No wonder you don’t read the Companion. You are plainly some kind of hired pervert. I simply needed to learn of the woman who had sex with him before he died. My early years as a male prostitute have gifted me with exceedingly sharp senses and a preternaturally strong tongue. By tasting the cadaver’s todger, I could tell not only that the woman used an extremely strong spermicide—which robbed me of the use of my lips for some moments—but also that the woman’s vagina had a uniquely horrible flavor. This led directly to a female user and dealer of amphetamine sulphate—which quite ruins the taste of a woman’s secretions—posing as a vagrant prostitute to entrap and murder the man.”

I accidentally on purpose kicked Trix in the ankle. She didn’t wake up. I hated her.

“Not the strangest crime I ever prosecuted, of course,” Falconer said, picking his nose. “Imagine the scene: A slender, flat-chested girl with a small bottom covered entirely in blood, and a very old man on the floor with no penis at all. And only I, the great consulting detective, possessed of supernatural skills honed by years as a professional lover of all mammals, could possibly solve this case. Anus dentata, would you believe.”

“A… what?”

“Anus dentata. Rare, but all too real. The old gentleman on the floor with no undercarriage preferred to take his pleasure through the tradesman’s entrance. However, the poor girl’s anal teeth would snap shut involuntarily upon local muscular stimulation. Severing and quite possibly devouring the bishop’s erection.”

“The bishop.”

“Oh, good God, yes. The girl, possessed of a boyish figure, had been wearing a school uniform that featured a trouser rather than a skirt. The unfortunate and unpenised man of God was attempting to wean himself off choirboys. It would be sad if, frankly, it were not so very funny. What sort of cases do you pursue?”

“Divorces. Ostrich abuse. Tantric bestiality.”

“Oh! A kindred spirit! A brother in the damp corridors of sexual invention and the romance of Crime! Did you hear about the Red Shoes Killer?”

“No.”

“Four crack whores found sticking out of a washing machine. Their feet had been lightly grated, and then they’d been forced to dance on a floorspace thinly dusted with finest cocaine. The killer, you see, was a lecturer in English Literature, both hedonistic and hebephrenic. Someone attempting, misguidedly, to empower childlike behavior through vice. The Red Shoes! You remember it? ‘ “Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton!” ’ A fairy tale. Consider the scene again: blood leaking from tortured soles stung with cocaine, forcing motion? Blood-slicked feet, my brother detective—red shoes.”