Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

“On what?”

“Extremes of self-inflicted human experience. It’s not everyone who subjects themselves to Godzilla bukkake, after all.”

She had a dirty laugh. Green eyes studied me from picture frames of intricate eyeliner and shadow. I was abstractly aware of wanting her to like me.

“Got anything about tantric ostrich date-rape in your thesis?”

Her eyes sparkled in the dark.

“Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee. You can tell me about the Godzilla fetishists and I’ll tell you the story.”

“Buy me vodka and you’ve got a deal.”

We took a cab to the Shark Bar, a block down from CBGB, where they skinned anyone who complained about cigarette smoke. The barman wore the scalp of a Straight Edge punk boy from San Jose as a hat. It was going yellow and crunchy around the edges despite frequent applications of handcream, but the lovingly tended brush of peroxide mohawk was as thick and lustrous as the fur of a pedigree cat.

Trix was twenty-three, lived in the Village, and had three girlfriends and two boyfriends. She was therefore the one who had my missing share of sex, as well as apparently four other people’s. She was a little defensive about that, possibly because she was talking to a straight guy with short hair in a suit with a sign floating about his head blaring NO GIRLFRIEND. “Polyamory doesn’t mean I’m a slut. It just means I have a lot of love to give and I want a lot of people in my life.”

She had problems with men. “Most guys are wired for one-way monogamy. You only sleep with them, but they jump someone else any time a chance to stay in practice raises its head. Plus, I’m very multiple.”

“As in…?”

“Multiple orgasms. I get off fast and often. Which means any guy fucking me feels like James Bond. Which means that they don’t want anyone else to feel like James Bond.”

“Or-gas-em. I’ve heard of those. Is that with other people?”

She laughed, which I liked. “So tell me what ‘the usual’ is.”

I groaned, checked my glass. Groaned again.

“Vodka later. Talk first. Dish, secret-agent man.”

“The usual is that…well, I met someone the other day who put it well. I’m a shit magnet.”

She arched a drawn eyebrow.

“There are eight bars around this block. I naturally find the one where the barman accessorizes with human headskin. I follow up one lead on this case and I find fifty people furiously masturbating over recut Japanese monster movies.” I told her the ostrich story, which had her rolled up with laughter.

“This is just lousy luck, though. It can’t happen to you all the time.”

“That’s the thing. It does. Every case I’ve had since I opened up business on my own. Never happened when I worked a desk. It’s something to do with my direct interaction with the world. I’m a shit magnet. I’m everything that never happened to anyone else.

“Here’s one. I was hired on a missing-persons gig. A sixty-five-year-old terminally ill man had walked out of the hospital and vanished. The family wanted me to find him. Turns out he’s joined an old people’s suicide club called Sinner’s Gate. Sick old people intending to kill themselves to escape indignity. Only Sinner’s Gate members believe they led bad lives and have no right to a painless exit.

“I found him in a shithole off the Bowery, in a room with a vacuum cleaner. You know what degloving is?”

She shook her head, nervous of the story.

“I walked in and he put his penis in the vacuum cleaner and switched it on. Ripped the entire skin off his penis instantly. That’s degloving. The pain and shock overloaded his nervous system, causing an immediate and massive heart attack that killed him stone dead on the spot.”

“Jesus Christ, Mike…”

“Big old fat naked dead guy flopped over a vacuum cleaner that was still chewing on his dick. This is my life, Trix.”

She looked at me. Direct eye contact, a little creasing of her mouth. I realized it was pity.

“Next round’s on me, Mike.”

She came back with doubles and sank back into her chair.

“So tell me,” I said, absently calculating how much more I should have, “what’s NULL stand for?”

“National Union of Lizard Lovers.”

“I guess I could have worked that one out.”

“And you call yourself a detective. Tell me about this case of yours.”

“Promise not to laugh.”

“No.”

“Okay…I’ve been asked to find an old book that was apparently written by some of the Founders immediately after drafting the Constitution.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Apparently you weren’t supposed to. It was lost from a private collection back in the 1950s and the new holder of the collection wants it back.”

“Tell me what this has to do with NULL.”

I pulled the black handheld computer from my inside jacket pocket. “According to the very cold trail, NULL obtained it a couple of years ago while blackmailing a mayoral personage, and then traded it to a businessman in return for an infinite lease on that building.”

“Not Rudy?” She laughed.

“No idea.”

“And you know Donald Trump owns a lot of property in SoHo, right?”

“…naaah.”

She leaned in, grinning. “Damn, this is interesting, though. Where did the book go next?”

I opened the handheld and powered it up. The way she looked at it broke at least two Commandments. “That’s one of the new Sonys. You know how much those things cost?”

“Um…no. I had a Palm when I was with Pinkerton.”

She snatched it off me. The screen lit her eyes like lanterns. “It’s got a camera!”

“Where?”

“This lens in the hinge. You didn’t see it?”

“I, ah… I just thought it was, you know, a high-tech hinge.”

Trix smiled at me. “Tard.”

Her black fingernail tapped smartly on the screen four times, and then she got out of her chair and crouched next to me. The screen swiveled on a pivot hidden in the hinge, so it was facing us. We appeared in a window on the screen.

“Smile, Mike.” A flash went off in the hinge arrangement and a still photo of us resolved on the screen.

In the picture, she’s looking at the lens and I’m looking at her.

Trix got up, still clutching the machine. “So your leads are in here?” More tapping brought up the document, and she started paging through it using the Up and Down buttons on the little keyboard in the lower half of the thing.

“This is the coolest thing,” she murmured.

“The client gave it to me. It hooks into the net so he can email me updates. Not that I expect any. The trail’s all cold. All I can do is pick a point and start following it. Gather as much information as I can along the way.”

“You’re not going to just jump to the end?”

“My dad had a saying: ‘Don’t pet a lion until you’re damn sure the bastard won’t try and eat you.’ I want to know what people wanted this book for, and what kind of channels it’s being moved along.”

“And that’s why you were at NULL.”

“And now I know. The book is pervert currency.”

“‘Pervert’ is a real pejorative, you know, Mike.”

“Hey, I’m from Chicago. In Chicago, perverts are people who don’t finish their whiskey and actually sleep with their wives at night.”

She gave me a look. “Don’t be too sure.”

I laughed and polished off my vodka. “What, you want to be my guide to America’s deviant underworld?”

Trix looked at me deadpan. “What’s the pay?”

“You’re serious.”

“Sure I’m serious. You need education in the ways of the modern world or else you are frankly doomed. And I can expand my thesis into something killer. I mean, if you just follow the cold trail in here, you’re going to be traveling coast-to-coast.”

I studied the bottom of my glass.

“I am totally serious, Mike.”

“You don’t even know me, Trix.”

“Mike, you’ve had five drinks and you haven’t even hinted at trying to jump me. If even half of what you’ve told me about yourself is true, you should’ve turned into the world’s biggest asshole years ago. But you’re sweet and you’re funny and you don’t give up. You know how hard it is, finding someone in this town who’s still determined?

“And on top of that, life gets interesting around you, I need to write a killer thesis so I can get out of here and do amazing things, and you really, really need some help here.”

“This whole ‘you’re doomed, Mike’ thing isn’t doing wonders for me, you know…”

“Come on, Mike. Let me be your guide to the underworld. Virgil to your Dante.”

I really, really did not need to hear that line again.

The bottom of my glass wasn’t getting any less empty.

She kept looking at me.

No one had looked at me like I was a ticket to adventure before.

“A hundred dollars a day, and I’ll cover travel and accommodation.”

Trix’s mouth fell open.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Now I’m the one who’s serious.”

“Fuck.”

“A hundred bucks a day, seven days a week until we’re done. Could be a week, could be a month, could be two. Separate rooms, and we’re staying in good places. I’ve got a big expense account, and this is better than me just drinking it all.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Wow. That is not exactly what I was expecting.”

I felt like a prick for not giving her more than a hundred a day, to be honest. But then I also felt like a prick for buying the company of a smart pretty girl for a few weeks, so it all evened out.

This was, in case you were wondering, literally the only smart move I made during this whole thing.

Chapter 6

I wish I still had that photo.

Chapter 7

I spent Monday and Tuesday buying clothes and luggage and deciding what to do about the gun. I was damned if I was going to drive across America, and besides, that’d mean I’d have to buy a car. But I knew that just wrapping my gun in the gun license and dropping it in a suitcase wasn’t going to play. So I ended up packing the license and putting the gun in my office safe.

I considered the gun a professional tool. I’d fired it in anger twice in five years, but if I was honest, I’d have to tell you that I’d threatened people with it more than that.

Plus, I pistol-whipped a tailor once to gain the trust of a disturbed white boy who believed he contained the soul of Huey P. Newton.

So it didn’t feel good to lock up the gun. I knew there was no chance I was going to use it, but it took one option out of the toolbox.

I also had the suspicion, based on nothing at all, that it might freak Trix out a bit.

She met me outside the hotel around noon on Wednesday. The downtown ninjas were doing their level best to chat her up. Trix was showing them her arm tattoos. The cropped top she was wearing showed that they plainly continued on to her chest, and she was teasing them ruthlessly. Most of the ninja swords showed a 45-degree angle.

I came out with my one bag, having decided to travel as lightly as I could. I saw Trix had a single bag, too, which made me smile. “All set, Trix?”

“All ready.” She grinned. “You got the tickets?”

I waved them. She turned to the nearest ninja, dipped her chin a bit, and turned big green eyes up at him. “Could we get a cab?”

Four ninjas howled and leapt into Lexington Avenue, waving their swords about. A yellow cab swerved left and clipped one ninja, sending him flying ten feet back to splatter onto the rear of a limo. Another ninja stood and watched in shock, which meant he wasn’t going to ninja his way away from the cab, which took him like a mad bull’s horns and flipped him over the roof. The cab mounted the sidewalk and jammed on the brakes just as the fender bodyslammed ninja three. The cabbie leaned over and flung open the door, which opened hard on ninja four, batting him down. Scrawled in the dirt on the door were the letters WMD. Inside was an immense black man with an X carved into his forehead. Trix and I were the last ones standing. He grinned like a kid at Christmas and yelled, “Where we going, tiny white people?”

Trix and I looked at each other. And then she laughed. “This is just a perfect way to start, Mr. Shit Magnet.”

I rolled with it and grabbed the bags. “Newark Airport.”

The cab launched off the sidewalk like a cruise missile.

It turned out the cab had two speeds; stop and golike-fuckinghell. The cabbie grappled with his machine like a sumo, wrestling the ballistic cab around corners, great thrusts to the steering wheel to keep the thing on target, slapping it around when it started to fishtail. “You guys look ready for trouble.” He laughed. “What’s your deal?”

“We’re private detectives.” Trix grinned. “We’re off on a great adventure.”

“Private eyes!” He thought this was terrific. He laughed out loud, coughed hard, and punched the steering wheel with a horrible yelp. “You on a case?”

Trix was totally up for this. “Yeah. Some rich guy’s lost a spooky old book and we have to take it away from the weird fuckers who’re hiding it.”

“Cool! Listen, you know any black private eyes?”

“Sure,” I said. “The agency I used to be with had a lot of black guys, a lot of Asian guys, you know?”

“Why ain’t they on the TV?”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

“Seriously, man. Every time I turn on the TV, it’s like Jones, Freelance Whitey. Because only middle-aged white guy detectives can fuck shit up, you know what I’m saying? And fucking Quincy, man. There ain’t nothing but white guys on that dude’s slab. What do they do with the black guys, burn ’em in piles round back?”

“Who’s Quincy?” said Trix.

As the cabbie stomped down on the accelerator, I swear I saw the view out the window start distorting.

“It don’t matter.” The cabbie smiled. “Helter Skelter come soon.”

“X’d from society.” Trix smiled knowingly.

“Hey! You one hot private eye!”

I made a whatthefuck face at Trix. “Charles Manson,” she said. “The X on his forehead. It’s a Manson thing. Showing their excision from mainstream society. Preparing for Helter Skelter, the race war between whites and blacks that the black people would win.”

“You know everything about goddamn Manson but you never heard of Quincy?”

“The thing about Helter Skelter, though, was that Manson considered African Americans to be inferior, and he and his Family would therefore rise from hiding after the war to take over from them. Manson hated black people.”

The cabbie laughed a big warm laugh. “Manson was a crazy motherfucker. That don’t mean Helter Skelter was a bad idea. I’m just telling his ass—he ain’t coming back to take over shit. And there’ll be some black private eyes on TV for damn sure.”