Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

Trix and I dropped the things into the nearest wastebasket. I looked back to see a team of cops lay into her with batons. “I’m white, you bastards!” she yelled, until one of them shot her with a Taser. The cops gathered around and silently watched her flop around on the floor like a fish out of water.

“Just another day out at the zoo,” Trix whispered. “Keep walking, Mike.”

Bob Ajax was waiting for us in the arrivals lounge at the San Antonio airport. Huge and fifty, with a grin like he’d just cheated God out of his savings.

“Mike Mc fucking Gill,” he bellowed. “Man, you’ve lost weight. New York City must be killing you.”

“Look at your goddamn stomach, man. You eat your last wife or something?”

“Bastard. And I see you’re hanging out with a better class of person these days.”

Trix read him in a second and gave him a sexy crooked smile. “Trix Holmes. Mike’s assistant.”

“Hell. I could use an assistant like you.”

“You couldn’t afford me, Bob.”

Bob laughed out loud. He’d always liked women who’d talk back to him just a little bit. “Girls with balls” were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. He’d heard of a place in Iceland where troublesome women were in fact drowned in a freezing bottomless well. Bob had once gotten inhumanly drunk and attempted to dig such a well outside the office in Chicago, using a stolen pneumatic drill and, in the final moments of his excavation, the head of a passing police officer. I helped him keep his job in the aftermath, and we’d been solid friends ever since.

Bob was still driving the same car: an immense, battered old Lincoln Continental that was held together by spit and a prayer. He slung our bags in a trunk already half-full with, in Bob’s words, “tools of the trade,” and then wrestled himself behind the wheel.

“One of those things looked like a harpoon, Bob. You do much whaling in San Antonio?”

“It’s a Persuader. Punches out door locks. Tool of the trade. You see the big black tube next to it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the harpoon gun. Not loaded. Need to buy more ’poons. Because, y’know, I’m not as young as I was, and some of these bastards can run fast.”

“You harpoon people?”

“A bit.”

The Lincoln coughed and rolled out of the airport parking lot. It was warm, and the air conditioning smelled like something small and furry was trapped inside it, so I settled for rolling down the window.

“Yeah, sorry,” Bob said, reading my face in the rearview mirror. “There’s a rat stuck in here someplace. Little fuck is waiting for me to show weakness. He don’t know Bob Ajax.”

“Rats do that. How long to the hotel?”

“Forty minutes. So tell me about this job.”

“Short version? Mad old rich guy in D.C. lost an antique book, hired me to recover it. The paper trail led us down here. The Roanoke family.”

“Well,” Bob said, “I didn’t want to talk about it too much on an open line. But this might be the end of the road for you.”

Trix leapt on that. “Open line?”

“Damn right,” Bob shrugged. “You don’t screw around where the Roanokes are concerned. The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharaohs and crazier’n a snake-fucking baby.”

Trix shot me a look. I didn’t react. I knew Bob. And sure enough, his eyes were flicking to the rearview mirror, watching us. His shoulders tensed up.

“They have the wrong kind of friends all over Texas, lady,” Bob growled. “People owe them. They understand the modern kind of power. They don’t stand on high and wait for people to bring tribute. They spend their money and make sure everyone owes them something. You think people like that ever have less than a thousand wiretaps running at any one time?”

Looking absently out the window, I reached down and across, found Trix’s hand, and gave it a single sharp squeeze.

“I guess you’re right,” Trix said.

“Damn right,” Bob said, visibly relaxing.

“How long to the hotel, again?” Trix sighed.

Blank highway broke up into factories, housing, parking lots, stores. It didn’t look much different from Columbus. The press of cars grew tighter. Not a human body to be seen on the streets, such as they were.

“Does nobody walk here, or what?”

“Ah, well, you’ve come here at an exciting time, Mike. There’s a surplus in the city budget this year, so you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna pour us some sidewalks!”

“No sidewalks,” Trix muttered. Trying out the phrase on her tongue.

“You East Coast types,” Bob smirked. “You’re like little weakass colonies on the edge of Real America, you know that?”

“Walking makes us weakass?” I laughed.

“Fine for your cramped little towns like New York,” Bob proclaimed, sitting up taller in his seat. “But this is the big country, and we need big cars, and the space for ’em. This sidewalk thing, it just means we ain’t too proud to make things a little easier for our visiting cousins from Weakass Country. We’re big people like that.”

“You’re from fucking Minneapolis.”

“Texans are born, and Texans are grown, and they’re all Texans nonetheless. I fucking love it here.”

A few minutes later, he started crying, and had to pull over the car.

“They hate me,” he gasped between great painful heaving sobs, his big soft face contorted in agony. “God help me, Mike, they all fucking hate me like I was Hitler’s fartcatcher.”

Bob refused to talk about it. Drove us to the hotel in stony silence, told us he’d pick us up at eight for dinner, tore off at high speed.

The hotel was expensive, because I felt like it. And this time I had arranged for a single suite, rather than two rooms. Trix didn’t say a thing, as we entered the room. Just smiled and raided the minibar.

Shoes off and feet up and drinks and smiling at each other, and life was pretty good.

“So,” Trix said. “Your friend Bob.”

“He’s gone completely nuts.”

“That was my educated opinion, yeah. What happened?”

“You know as much as I do. Haven’t spoken to the guy in ages. He could be a little odd when he was drinking, but nothing like this. Bob was a hardass. That whole thing in the car, I have no idea where that came from. He’s gotten into trouble down here, I guess.” I sighed, stretched. “I don’t think I want to know what kind of trouble.”

“You want to go out?”

“Dinner’s in four hours.”

“C’mon, Mike. We can’t see America from hotel rooms.”

“Sure you can. Window’s right over there.”

“You know what I mean. C’mon. There’s all those weirdo Texans out there to gawp at.”

“For someone who plays Champion to Perverts as much as you do, you’re awfully dismissive of the great state of Texas.”

“Oh, give me a break. This is Jesusland. Red State. Ma Ferguson country.”

“Who?”

“Mike, you are a cultural void.”

“Probably. Who?”

“Ma Ferguson. Governor of Texas back in the 1920s. When someone tried to get Spanish taught in schools, you know what she said? ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it’s good enough for Texas!’ Mike, these are the people who want to put people like me in prison.”

I finished my drink. Smiled sweetly. “Miriam Amanda Ferguson, young lady. She ran as an anti-Klan candidate at a time when there were almost half a million Klan members in Texas. Pardoned two thousand prisoners.”

Trix frowned. “You’re kidding me.”

I jerked a thumb at the window. “1939, a civil rights leader gave a speech here in San Antonio, given legal coverage by the mayor. The Klan arranged a riot, and tried to kill the mayor. Not long after, the Klan were burned out of San Antonio and haven’t had a building here since. You know the mayor’s name?”

“You’re going to tell me. You’re enjoying this too much not to.”

“Mayor Maverick.”

I enjoyed the face she made.

“Couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?”

“What’s your point?”

“My point. Yes. My point is that people are the same all over. It’s not like you’re flying into a jungle when you go south. Texans, Minnesotans, Montanans, other ‘ans’ beginning with Ts and Ms—all the goddamn same, same mix of heroes and pricks, same old bunch of nice and nasty.”

“And this is your motivation for not wanting to go out for a walk? That it’s all the same out there?”

“Yep.”

“You’re a lazy bastard.”

“That, too. But your whole Us-and-Them Thing doesn’t work when it’s all Us.”

“But mostly you’re a lazy bastard.”

“Yep.”

“How the hell did you know that, anyway?”

“Way back when I was working at Pinkerton, I had to update an in-house dossier on the Klan. I used to be kind of thorough, and stuff sticks in my head. You know that in some places the Klan became general moral guardians and started flaying white men for getting divorces?”

“Is your head just filled with useless information?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. Okay.” I struggled up out of my chair. “Let’s go see the Alamo. Apparently it’s never been the same since Ozzy Osbourne pissed on it.”

“Ozzy Osbourne’s funny. He never really did that, right? It’s like the story about the bat.”

“Nope. Ozzy Osbourne pissed on the Alamo. But he wasn’t wearing a dress. However, I happen to know that he got the soft treatment. Two-hundred-buck fine for public intoxication. But he actually committed a crime called desecration of a venerated object, because the Alamo is officially a shrine. Should’ve gotten a year in prison.”

“You’re trying to bore me into a coma so you don’t have to go out, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Let me tell you about the rogue Judas tribe of Native Americans, the Potowatomi, who sided with the French and the British before coming to Texas—”

“Fine, fine, I’ll watch some television—”

“But you know? If you look closely at the front of the Alamo, the top-right area, you can see where the numbers 666 have become visible on the brick since Ozzy pissed on the building. But you want to watch television. That’s fine. It’ll keep.”

Trix hit me with lots of things.

And to make up for being an asshole, I had to buy her some clothes.

We were going out to dinner, and she was worried about Bob. More worried than I was, I realize now, or perhaps just more sensitive to his touch of crazy. I think I just wanted to keep thinking of him as Teflon Bob. So she didn’t want to wear anything that might stand out in what she felt was an essentially conservative town. Didn’t want to make Bob uncomfortable. And I, apparently, needed to be punished for trying to educate her.

Not that I was doing anything of the sort. I was just being an asshole. So we shopped for clothes.

Shopping for clothes is a Boyfriend Thing. You stand around and look blankly at a bunch of pieces of fabric and you look at the price tags and you wonder how something that’d barely cover your right nut can cost the price of a kidney and you watch the shop assistants check you out and wonder what you’re doing with her because she’s cute and you’re kind of funny-looking and she tries clothes on and you look at her ass in a dozen different items that all look exactly the same and let’s face it you’re just looking at her ass anyway and it all blurs together and then someone sticks a vacuum cleaner in your wallet and vacuums out all the cash and you leave the store with one bag that’s so small that mice couldn’t fuck in it. Repeat a dozen times or until the front of your brain dies.

Point being: it’s a Boyfriend Thing. And it’s not just you, the Boy, who thinks so. Every shop assistant on the way will assume you’re the Boyfriend.

Especially with the laughing and the teasing and the hugging and the kissing and the holding of hands. And the carrying of bags. Very Boyfriend Thing.

The United States government bought Trix quite a lot of clothes.

I hope it’s clear that I was really, really trying not to be weird about the way things were. All the time, I was telling myself, just enjoy it for what it is, don’t be weird, don’t get all screwed up over something it isn’t. The usual mantra when you’re with someone who you’re not really with and desperately want to be.

Have you noticed how telling yourself all that shit never actually helps?

Aob picked us up outside our hotel, wearing his Same Old Bob face, not a hint of his earlier breakdown. I decided not to push it, and Trix read me. She was wearing tight black things: still very much her, but covering her tattoos, and had traded her boots for kitten heels. “You know he’s going to be looking to see what anyone thinks of him,” she’d said to me. “Why make it hard for him? It’s not like I’m swapping my brain for a Stepford Wife’s. You need his help, right? So let’s not give him anything to freak out over.”

For my part, I was just hoping for a quiet night.

The steakhouse was called Ma’s Place.

“Take it easy,” Trix whispered as I tensed up. “Just a coincidence.”

“It’s a sign from God that he’s going to shit on my dinner.”

“No such thing as God. You relax, too. I don’t want to have to manage two freaked-out men tonight.”

“I’ll have the Special.” Bob grinned at the waitress, spreading out in his chair.

“You sure?” said the waitress, eyeing him dubiously. With one eye, as the other was under an eyepatch. I saw Trix looking at the tattoo on the waitress’s forearm, which, in blotchy bluish letters, read SKEETER.

“Hell, yes.” Bob laughed. The Texas in his accent got stronger. “Been a busy day, and a man needs steak.”

“If you’re sure,” she muttered, and turned to Trix and me. We were still working our way through the menu. “Any vegetarian options?” Trix asked. “I don’t eat a lot of meat.”

“This is a steakhouse, ma’am,” the waitress hissed. “If it don’t come off a cow, we don’t sell it.”

“There’s a ladies’ option,” Bob said, trying to be helpful.

Trix caught a swearword in her mouth before it came out. Swallowed it and gave up a “that’ll be fine. Medium? With a salad?”

“No salad. Cows only shit salad, ma’am.”

Trix laughed. “Okay. The small portion of fries, then. Mike?”

“Jesus.” I scanned the menu hopelessly. It was all dish names, rather than useful descriptions. “Um…Rump steak? Well done. Some fries?”