by Joey Slinger
“Must’ve taken me about eight seconds,” Toole said, not bragging — more like he thought it was funny it took him so long. “I was drinking my tea in bed, when who comes on the clock radio but our esteemed mayor in an absolute state — an absolute state — about a noble dog that had been murdered in the courageous performance of its duty. Then the news came on and said the only thing apparently missing as a result of the break-and-entry at the junkyard where the dog got shot was a wrecked car. Believe it or not, a wrecked Porsche. Yellow.” With his car key he scraped a couple of flecks of paint off the wreck. “Now I am always interested in crimes that are of special interest to the mayor, and what do I find when I search the records a little bit? I find that the wreck was reported stolen before it was a wreck. And then it turned back up. And then it got stolen again! Almost,” Toole said, “like something strange was going on. Does it sound like that to you?”
Nina stared at the ground.
“I also discovered,” he continued, “that it is registered to, and was repeatedly stolen from the parking spot of, a woman named Junetta Solito, whose address is —” he clutched his forehead as if he was going to faint “— whose address is the same one your deceased brother Frank gave as a fowarding address when he got out of prison! And the second time it was stolen it ended up in a ravine beside the Parkway. And,” Toole said, “when I drop around here to see if maybe you can help me understand these things, what do I find in front of your house?” He gave the wreck a couple of raps with his knuckles. “The strangest thing of all.”
He raised his eyebrows as if he was interested in hearing what she had to say about all this, but he wasn’t really, because he carried on before she got a chance to let him know that she wasn’t going to say a word.
“I find it interesting,” the cop said, “fascinating even, from an investigative point of view, that a cheap-shit asshole conman like Frank Carson was on such close personal terms with a woman of such considerable means — the owner of one of the most expensive apartments in the city, for instance, and a five hundred thousand dollar Porsche Carrera GT. And that shortly after he meets his grisly end, no sign can be found of the 1.18 million dollars he stole in a put-up job at the main downtown branch of the Great Big One National Bank. Then,” Toole said, “not long after that, the automobile in question begins leading an extremely adventurous life, ending up —” he gave the wreck a little kick with the toe of his shoe “— ending up in hardly better condition than your brother. And I can only speculate that somehow he informed you that the money was stashed in the car. But I’m presuming your first search turned up squat. Then you thought of something you’d overlooked.” He spread his arms and looked surprised to see the sliced-up rubber all over the sidewalk. “I’m presuming the tires. And was the money in those tires? Wait, don’t tell me! I’ve worked the thing out this far, let me see if I can take it right through to the end.
“In the meantime,” he said, “let me advise you of your rights. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to try to get away with the money. You have the right to try to stay beyond my reach if you do try to run away with it. And you have the right to hand it over to me no questions asked.
“I’ll give you —” he was still holding up the fingers he’d counted out her rights on “— some time to make up your mind.”
He walked across to the blue convertible. As he was about to climb in, he looked back and pointed at the wreck. “SuEz,” he said, “has got to be the only part of town where something like that on the sidewalk is an improvement.”
“What do you mean we shot the dog?” D.S. wasn’t at his sharpest. He’d only gotten to sleep about an hour after they finally decided that one thing was for sure — there was not 1.18 million in those tires. There was nothing in them, times four.
Sergeant Toole’s car wasn’t out of sight when Nina steamed into the living room where D.S. was snoring on the busted old couch because he’d been too tired to go and climb into one of the cars along the street, where he usually slept. She kicked his foot and shouted, “You fuckin’ moron.”
And now he was denying it. “It’s on the fuckin’ radio,” she yelled.
“What’s on the fuckin’ radio?”
“That you shot the fuckin’ junkyard dog.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The Elwells are mad as fuckin’ hell. That cop’s been here.”
“You’re fuckin’ nuts.”
“The Elwells have animal cruelty issues. And the cop heard the mayor and came around and saw the wreck on the front walk.”
D.S. pulled a pillow over his face. “This is too much,” he groaned.
“You’re too much.” Nina turned to leave. “None of this would be going on if you hadn’t shot that dog!”
“Jesus!” D.S. yelled. This was it as far as he was concerned. This was the limit. He couldn’t stand it one second more. He threw off the pillow and got really sarcastic. “We shot the dog? Yeah? Yeah? What with? I mean what fuckin’ with? Do we have a gun? Did we have a gun? Have we ever had a gun? Where do I keep this gun? Up my fuckin’ ass? So what did I shoot the dog with?” He pointed his finger at Nina and wiggled his thumb. “My finger? Blam, blam, blam! And it fell down dead?” He made like he was blowing smoke out of the barrel of a gun.
Nina stopped in the doorway. “So what happened then?” Her voice was very low.
D.S. didn’t say anything.
“Was there a dog? Did something happen to it?”
D.S. drooped his head. Because the first thing the dog did, after it lurched at Ed Oataway, was lie down, open its jaws even wider, and give its head a shake.
“It’s yawning,” Ed said. He couldn’t believe it.
“It’s a fuckin’ killer,” D.S. said. “It wants us to drop our guard.”
“No. It’s just real old and real tired.”
“So what the fuck do we do?”
“Load the wreck and get the fuck out of here.”
When he heard this, D.S. sagged with relief and yawned so deeply, his whole body shuddered. “See,” Ed said, “it’s catching.” And they were both in the truck, with Ed backing out, when D.S. felt something.
“What?” Ed said.
“What?” Nina said.
D.S. stared at his knees on the couch. “Like a bump.”
“A bump?”
D.S. kept staring at his knees.
“A bump?”
D.S. mumbled something.
“What?” Nina said.
Then he said something that wasn’t quite as much of a mumble.
“You ran over it?” Nina said it as if she wanted to make sure that’s what she actually heard.
“I guess it got up from where it was the last time we noticed it, lay down under the truck and went to sleep.”
“You ran over the junkyard dog?”
“It was an accident.”
“It was an accident,” she said. “Good! Good! That will calm everybody down. Vicious thieves didn’t shoot the hero dog. They ran over it instead. Accidentally. I’m sure the cop will come right back and say he’s sorry he bothered us.”
“What about the Elwells?”
“D.S.,” Nina said. “Get some rest, okay? Your brain is overworked. It needs to take some time off.”
D.S. looked at the ceiling, wondering just what the hell she meant by that. It wasn’t like her to give him a lot of sympathy. Except he didn’t wonder about it for very long, because hardly a minute went by before he was snoring again. And hardly another minute went by before she was back in the doorway yelling at him.
“Where’s the spare tire?” she was yelling.
“What?” D.S. mumbled. “What? What?”
“The spare tire for the Porsche,” Nina said. “I never saw it. Did you?”
Twenty-Seven
Jarmeel Tolbert got terribly upset when his followers started to burn down the churches of other religions. He had more or less expected that being in space and getting
probed would have made everybody calm and peaceful and enthusiastic about doing good work in the community, the way it had with him. He wouldn’t have believed anybody who might have predicted a religion of violence would spring from it.
By the time the total got to nine, something else was upsetting him. The police were starting to notice a pattern to the fires and to some other things that were going on. Not all the churches burned right down. The first did, that big Presbyterian one in South Chester, and so did a couple of the Baptists, but a lot of the fires were put out before doing much damage — there were sprinklers, or somebody saw the flames and phoned in an alarm. The Inter-Church Dialogue Crew, which was the committee that handled the burnings, went all the way downtown one night to set the Catholic cathedral on fire, but they couldn’t get anything to catch at all. Some of them took this as a sign from on high, or even higher, to steer clear of Catholic churches until they heard otherwise.
The police determined that in every instance arson was involved or attempted. At the cathedral, combustible materials along with posters from Jarmeel’s church were discovered lying around the singed vestry door. There was a great deal of pressure on the police chief and the mayor to do something.
Compounding the problem was that the Inter-Church Dialogue Crew believed in leaving behind a statement of who they were and what they were up to, otherwise what was the point? They chose to do this symbolically, and the symbol they came up with showed an alien space ship flying through the sky, and below that a naked person bent over with a probe that to the non-initiated looked quite a bit like a mechanical duck approaching the naked person’s rear end. A halo over the spaceship signified the close relationship between the aliens and God. However, people who didn’t grasp the symbolism thought it looked like a bigoted pervert had drawn something dirty on the floor near where the fires had been set or on a wall outside. This would have driven the police chief to get personally involved in solving these crimes, if he wasn’t already appalled by the halo, which was an affront to his profoundly Christian beliefs, and by the mechanical duck, which offended the most cherished community standards.
Jarmeel was also touched personally. From the outset, several of his followers had made critical remarks about his qualifications to lead the religion he had founded, based on the haziness of his recollection of having been probed. They whispered that in his case it might have been more of a spiritual experience. But it wasn’t until they noticed how nervous he was about the fires that they no longer mostly made these comments behind his back.
They demanded a trial by fire. Jarmeel would come with them the next time they went to burn down an enemy church and do the actual deed himself while they stood around bearing witness and going “Hoooom, hoooom.” Jarmeel thought this was an awful idea, and not just because there was a chance he might get caught. It was awful because he would get caught for sure. His fingerprints would be all over everything, and they’d be instantly identifiable. In the army he’d been fingerprinted when he got clearance to handle the classified materials such as brake fluid that the aliens probed out of him. And he’d been fingerprinted when he got arrested before the court-martial. It would take the police two minutes to track him down.
And there would go his welfare cheque.
How would he be able to feed his three children who had been abandoned by their mothers and left with him?
The thing about true religious believers is that when it comes to their leader, they don’t take no for an answer, so he had no choice. He had to disappear completely. And not alone, either. He took his kids with him. To get around this obstacle, his followers not only left the mechanical duck symbol at the next fire they set, they tacked dozens of copies of a message around the scene that read, “My name is Jarmeel Tolbert and I am the Blessed Founder of Nearer My God. It was my destiny to burn down this vile place where the defilers of God’s interstellar love fulfill their obscene desires.” There was a lot more along that line, but this was all the arson squad needed to get on his case. His followers were eager to get their hands on him, too, and Jarmeel was more worried about them, because unlike the police, they were completely deranged.
But his situation wasn’t the result of anything he’d done. As far as he was concerned, his liberty, life, and family were jeopardized only because Nina had got him involved when she started raising money to fix some swimming pool or other.
On the other hand, her brother had gotten hold of 1.18 million dollars and then died tragically. Jarmeel had also heard that in order to fix this swimming pool, Nina was leading a big crusade to find that money.
That’s when a word popped into Jarmeel’s simmering brain. The word was “apparently.” Because what if it wasn’t true that she hadn’t found the money? What if the truth was that she apparently hadn’t found it? What if now she was only pretending to search for it? What if this was because she had already found it?
Fuck her.
There were people who needed some of that cash immediately. And who was to say exactly how much they would need? Jarmeel was not a greedy man. It was just that the danger to his life and the lives of his children led him to calculate that 1.18 million was easily how much it could cost to get them somewhere safe and look after them very well when they got there.
As for getting his hands on it, Jarmeel was prepared to do whatever it took. After stashing his children in a secret location, he started to sneak around keeping his eye on Nina. He wore a disguise when he did this, but that wasn’t so much to keep Nina from realizing what he was up to. It was so the members of his former religion wouldn’t spot him and do whatever they believed their religion compelled them to do, such as lead him back to the fold. When he thought about that, his hair would break out in a sweat.
Twenty-Eight
When Krystal Beach saw her ex-husband Rocky Beach’s dick on the floor of her ConGlom Couriers van, she laughed because she realized there had been a horrible accident — she had no idea what. And that she had been — she had no idea how — involved in it. It was the sort of laughter that would result when staggering confusion got mixed together with the feeling that is the biochemical equivalent of being aboard an airplane full of clowns when it crashed into a fireworks warehouse. It was kind of a nervous laughter.
Her previous ex-husband Bonallo didn’t know this when he heard it. He took it to mean Krystal had turned cruel and hard-hearted.
She’d heard that Beach wanted to reconcile with her, but she’d had no idea that in order to do this he’d started stalking her, and that when she was climbing aboard her van after making a delivery on the downtown side of the river, he saw his big chance. Unzipping his fly, he had run toward her, waggling his manhood yearningly. Without looking, without even realizing he was in the vicinity, she’d given the sliding door a firm shove that caused it, just as he got there, to slice across like the blade of a horizontal guillotine. Entirely unaware of his anguish, she had driven away.
When Bonallo saw this happen, his heart went out to Beach. Until that moment he had been too focused on his own romantic quest to notice that Beach was also stalking Krystal in the hopes of reconciling. The minute he saw Beach run waggling toward her van, he realized they shared a powerful common purpose. Never had he felt closer to another human being. It was as he knelt on the ground trying to comfort the dying Beach that Krystal came roaring back, slid the door open and flicked the dick out beside them with the toe of her sneaker. And roared off again. What Bonallo would remember more than anything was her hideous laughter. Never before could he have imagined Krystal making such an evil sound or inflicting such a fatal injury, not just on a fellow human being, but on her immediate past husband.
It turned out not to be totally fatal. At the hospital, the doctors stitched Beach’s dick back on as good as new, or almost anyway. When he peed, it came out at a ninety-degree angle to the left, so he had to stand sideways to the receptacle. In crowded men’s rooms this led to incidents that required him to do a lot of explaining. The imp
ortant thing, though, was that the bond Bonallo and Beach formed led them to agree that nothing could be more perfect than both of them reconciling with Krystal. So they began stalking her as a team and were more than prepared to devote all their energies to this, because they were both on welfare and didn’t have anything else to do.
Krystal Beach had a hard time getting used to the idea that these things actually happened to her, but something else involving her was going on that she didn’t know about even slightly, and it was really strange.
When Kevin Olorgasele moved out of Nina’s cellar because it was so disgusting, he didn’t move too far. He wanted to be able to keep his eye on the White House’s agent in the Fort Knox gold deal, so he sized up the van she pretended to drive for a courier service and parked in front of her house every night. One of the things Kevin was taught early in his career with his country’s Finance Ministry was how to break into any kind of vehicle without leaving a mark, an approach that was considerably different than the one he’d employed before that, which was smashing a window with a rock. Her van was clean inside, and dry, and smelled one hundred per cent better than his last hiding place.
But he would never have chosen it if he knew how security-conscious ConGlom Courier Services was. The company wanted to make sure its drivers didn’t use the vans for their own sidelines after hours and had secretly equipped them with satellite sensors that showed where they were every minute. They could also detect unauthorized changes in the gross weight. That was why ConGlom inspectors were staking out Krystal’s van the next night and saw a black man climb into it with some blankets. He opened the rear door so easily, they were certain he had to be using Krystal’s own key.
After a couple of hours during which they witnessed no further developments, they drew their guns and used their master key to unlock the van. The man inside came at them hollering and scrambled past in such a windmilling flurry that they hardly got off more than a dozen shots before he disappeared into the darkness. When the security inspectors and the police reviewed the incident, everybody was disappointed that there were no signs of blood to show he had at least been wounded and would have provided a trail they could follow.