Huckleberry turned to the guy next to him. “Jesus, you call this a fucking battle?”
The guy never said anything. He was slumped over with a fist-sized hole where his eye socket had been.
“See what I mean?” Huckleberry said to nobody in particular. “Can’t even get a decent conversation. What happened to esprit de fucking corps? This fucking conflict is nowhere, man. I’m outta here.”
He crawled along the base of the wall until he came to a breach and slipped through it, and then into an alley. There was a tank blocking one end, so he headed east to where the river ran. A guy was busy tying up a motor launch. Huckleberry jumped aboard and nutted him, sending him over the side. He unhitched the rope and slung it into the bilge. He was just about to gun the motor when his cell phone rang. He struggled to tug it out of the pocket of his webbing jacket. The screen was grimed and he couldn’t see the number.
“Hello,” he said.
Just then an M16 opened up and a mortar round dropped onto the bank next to him. A shower of wet earth landed in the boat. He scrunched down.
“Shit,” he said. “How the fuck are you supposed to have a phone call with all this shit going on?”
The voice in the other end said something unintelligible.
“I’m sorry,” Huckleberry said, “I can’t hear you. Some asshole is firing a…”
A grenade landed in the launch. The boatman had thrown it. Huckleberry grabbed it and threw it back.
“Fuck off,” he said.
The boatman fucked off in a spectacular manner. Huckleberry jammed the phone against his ear.
“Hello?”
“Huckleberry, is that you?”
“Yeah. Who’s this? I can’t hear so good.”
“It’s Lee.”
“Goddamn, boy. What’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Fuckknowswhereistan.”
“Well, how soon can you get home? I’m onto something big. I need some backup.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Fuck yeah!”
“I’m on it, bro.”
***
The phenomenon known colloquially as “Sod’s Law,” or “Murphy’s Law,” which dictates that if something can possibly go wrong, it will, has a counterpart in the actual laws governing relativity theory and quantum mechanics which states that, within a timeframe of eternity, if it is possible for something to physically occur, then, sooner or later, it will. There is also some bizarre corollary law at work in the universe whereby certain things are so improbable that they become virtually inevitable. Which is what happened to Weeble.
Deli and Ritchie were high school sweethearts. Deli was chaste when they were married, and old Ritchie wasn’t exactly Lothario, and wasn’t too sure what to do on the first night. He had to make a couple of phone calls before he found out that the missionary position was not a point of view. They became teachers together. She taught the history of the civil rights movement, and he taught sociology. They decided to wait a few years and see a bit of the world before starting a family.
Their first overseas posting was a school in the jungles of Mexico. They loved it. The climate, the flowers and the trees…they even had a pet parrot called Liberty. When the offer of the job in Moscow came, they were reluctant at first. But the salary was more than three times what they were getting in Mexico, so they decided to be sensible. At first they hated it. The cold, the snow. The traffic. But gradually they got used to it, and they were saving money for the future, and they got a nice little apartment and made themselves as comfortable they could.
It was Ritchie’s idea to get the bird. He said it would brighten the place up, and make them feel more like they were back in Mexico and the jungle. So he ordered a Yellow Headed Amazon from www.endangeredspecies.com. They were going to call it Bell, but they ended up calling it Weeble. The reason that they ended up calling it Weeble was that it was either mentally defective or had some kind of speech impediment, because all it could say was weeble weeble. But they loved him anyway, and he became a kind of surrogate for the son they hoped to have one day.
Deli would have loved to have a dog, but the apartment was so small, and the nearest park so far away, that it wouldn’t have been fair. She actually said to Ritchie, “I just can’t see a dog in this little apartment.”
That’s why she was so surprised when she came home from work one day to find a dog the size of a small walrus with its head stuck in her fridge. She was even more surprised to see Ritchie lying on the floor with his head stuck in the oven. But the most surprising thing of all was the most vicious-looking man she had ever seen, with a face like a stepped-on salami, pointing a big nasty gun at her. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, but “Who are you and what do you want?” or “How did you get into our house?” or “Why does my husband have his head in the oven?” or “Why are you pointing that gun at me?” didn’t seem appropriate. So she just screamed. Really loud. Bolshoi took his head out of the fridge to see what was going on, but it wasn’t as interesting as the potato salad with anchovies, so he carried on.
“Weeble weeble,” Weeble commented from his cage over by the window.
Oleg walked up to Deli and smacked her across the face. Then he cursed. He cursed because he slapped her so hard that he’d knocked her out. He was going to have to wait for one of them to wake up to find out where the ball was.
They had believed the one who looked like the golfer when he told them what had happened. People with their cock and balls in Bolshoi’s mouth usually told the truth. The recording from the surveillance camera at the airport confirmed the story, and after that, finding out who the couple was and where they lived was a piece of pirozhki. But now he had to wait. And worst of all, there was nothing to drink. Herbal tea and Evian were not at the top of his shopping list. So he told Bolshoi to stay, and he went out to find a bottle.
Ritchie woke up with a start and banged his head on the top of the oven. For a second he didn’t remember where he was or what had happened. Then it came flooding back. Panic overtook him. He backed out and saw Deli stretched out on the floor. He screamed her name. There was a weird whistling noise. He put his hand to his mouth and found the place where his teeth had been. He started to look around for his teeth. Bolshoi looked around the fridge door to see what was going on, but it couldn’t compete with the pickled herrings that he had just managed to open.
“Weeble weeble,” Weeble said.
Deli moaned and stirred. Ritchie abandoned his search for his missing dentistry and rushed to her side. He held her.
“What happened?” she said.
“That man must have hit you. The same one that hit me. He sucker-punched me when I wasn’t ready.”
“Is he gone?”
“Yes. But the dog is still here.”
“What shall we do?”
“I’ll go and get help.”
“No, don’t leave me. He might come back. And what about the dog?”
“I’ll give it some chocolate.”
“Will that make him our friend?”
“No. Chocolate kills dogs.”
“Er. Maybe we should think of something else.”
“Okay…I’ll get the baseball bat. I’ll knock the dog out, and we’ll grab Weeble and make a run for it.”
“You get the bat. I’ll get Weeble.”
Deli felt a little dizzy as she stood up, but she could make it. Slowly she walked over to the cage. She could hear slurping noises where Bolshoi had found a half-eaten tin of lentil soup. Painstakingly, she unhooked the door of the cage, reached in, and extended her hand to Weeble. Weeble obligingly hopped on and scrabbled up her arm until he was standing on her shoulder.
“Weeble weeble,” he said into her ear.
Ritchie emerged from the bedroom holding his Brownsville slugger. He’d had it since high school. He stepped into the kitchen as quietly as he could. His legs were shaking. Deli watched, breathless, as Ritchie sneaked up on the dog.
He raised the bat above his head. To get a clear shot, he had to wait until Bolshoi moved his head out of the fridge.
Oleg arrived outside with his bottle of vodka, to the realization that he had locked himself out. Bolshoi was a force of nature when it came to a dogfight but he wasn’t much cop at opening doors. He was going to have to kick the door in. He stepped back and swung his boot at the lock. The wood splintered and the door flew open and slammed against the wall. Then the inevitability of improbability law kicked in.
Bolshoi pulled his head out of the fridge to see who was kicking doors in this time. He wasn’t the tidiest of eaters, and there was a lentil on the top of his head. Ritchie started the bat on its trajectory down toward Bolshoi’s bonce. Weeble eyeballed the lentil. He swooped down from Deli’s shoulder, alighted upon Bolshoi’s head, and snaffled the lentil in his beak, precisely at the moment when Ritchie’s bat completed its vicious arc. Weeble never even got to swallow his lentil. He was splattered into beak stroganoff against the top of Bolshoi’s iron skull.
Bolshoi looked at Ritchie, seeming no less intimidating for having a dead parrot on his head.
Bolshoi was confused. He thought he should be killing someone, but Oleg had not told him to. He stuck his head back in the fridge. He was fairly certain there was a kipper wedged at the back.
“Weeble, Weeble,” Deli screamed as she ran up to Bolshoi and tried to drag his head out of the fridge. Oleg shot her through the forehead. He turned the gun on Ritchie.
Ritchie had always told himself, and Deli, that he wouldn’t want to live if anything ever happened to her. Nobody had been pointing a gun at him when he said it.
“Please,” he said. “Please, I don’t have any money.”
“I don’t want money. What happen to ball?”
“Ball. What ball?”
“Golf ball chernyy chelovek give you in airport.”
“Oh, him. He said he was…”
“Where is fucking ball?”
“I hit it into the water. I think I had my left leg too…”
“Which water?”
“At the Moscow Country Club. On the third hole.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Positive.”
Oleg whistled, turned, and walked out. Bolshoi trotted after him. He still had Weeble stuck to his head like some kind of Ascot hat in bad taste.
Ritchie’s legs gave out. He slid down the wall, breathing a huge sigh of relief.
Outside in the corridor, Oleg said, “Bolshoi. Davai.”
The lady who lived across the hall opened her door to see what all the snarling and screaming was about, but closed it when she saw a man with a face like a liver-and-bacon pizza holding a big gun and drinking from a bottle of vodka.
***
Captain Peerick looked up from his chaotic desk in his constricted cubicle at Convention Center Area Command. He threw down his pen in disgust. Nobody could fucking concentrate with all that racket going on. Hookers screeching, winos puking, victims crying, the deputy chief yelling at everybody as per usual. He pushed back his chair and headed to the coffee machine. As he reached the half-door and swung it open, he found his way blocked by a small white man and a large black woman.
“You Cap’n Peerick?” the lady said.
The captain nodded.
“We’re Black and White.”
“I can see that.”
“I mean he is Agent Black, and I am Agent White.”
“Oh, so Agent White is actually black, and Agent Black is actually white. Confusing. So which particular group of minstrels are you-all from?”
“BATFE,” Agent White said. “That’s the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to you, asshole.”
“G-Man, huh? Got any creds to back that up?”
Agent White pulled back her coat. A gold shield-shaped badge topped by an eagle, with ATF and Special Agent in gold letters on a blue background, glinted. It looked like what it represented. It couldn’t have looked more powerful if it had had “Don’t Fuck With Me” printed on it.
Peerick was impressed, but he tried not to show it. “And what about you, hotshot?” he said to Agent Black.
“DHS, phlegm wad, and if ya wanna pull my pisser, go right ahead.”
“Okay, okay. So, special agents, how may I serve my country on this fine Nevada morning?”
“You can start by stopping being such a smart-mouth before we run your sorry ass in for obstruction of justice.”
“Bit off your range, ain’t ya, pard?”
“Coast-to-coast is our range, cowboy. You gonna cooperate, or what?”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. What’s up?”
“You got somewhere quieter we can talk? It’s like a fuckin’ 50 Cent concert in here,” said Agent Black.
“You ain’t wrong there. Let’s go across the street and get coffee. The coffee in here is shit anyway.”
They sat in a booth the farthest they could get from the nearest occupied one, and waited until the waiter left before speaking.
“Guess we kinda got off on the wrong foot back there, fellas,” Peerick said. “So what can I do for ya?”
“No sweat. Forget it. Listen, we’re investigating the golfer that got blown away last week.”
“Yeah. Unusual. Golf courses aren’t exactly your typical homicide location. Guy musta been tampering with his score card or somethin’.”
“Yeah, well, the thing is, there was an identical shooting incident in New Orleans, coupla days back.”
“So what? You thinking you got some kinda serial whack job here? The fuckin’ fairway killer?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Black said. “The stiffs were associated. This guy that got waxed here, De Villiers Brooke, operated outta Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was an independent contractor for the Nuclear Program. The kiddy that got smoked in the Big Easy, Elmo Yorke, was a naturalized US citizen, originally from Ukraine. Turns out he spent a few years at Oak Ridge. Also transpires he was in Vegas the day Brooke got greased. The other day, a lab tech at Y-12 is conducting a random security inventory. Discovers that some polonium is missing.”
“Polonium? Sounds like some kinda wiener shit you buy at a Polack deli.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t wanna put any a this crap on your rye bread. Polonium, in this case polonium-210, is a radioactive isotope. It’s poisonous.”
“How poisonous?”
“How does 250,000 times as poisonous as cyanide grab you?”
Peerick whistled.
“Yeah, this shit makes arsenic look like 7-Up. Anyone exposed to even the minutest quantity for more than a couple of minutes will be dead in less than forty-eight hours. And it ain’t a pleasant way to go.”
“So how much went missing?”
“A tiny amount. Smaller than a gnat’s cock. But enough to be deadly in the wrong hands.”
“So you think the two croaked golfers had something to do with the disappearance?”
“It looks that way. And there’s something else.”
“Shit, this is getting interesting.”
“These two jokers got wasted long-range, sniper-style. We got ballistics reports on both hits. In both cases the slugs came from the same piece. And the range was the same. Close to fifteen hundred yards.”
“Jesus Christ almighty.”
“Exactly. Ain’t but a handful of people in the damn country who could make that shot twice in a row.”
“Hell, guys, somethin’ stinks in the woodpile here, no doubt about it. How can I help?”
White finally spoke. “We need a list of anyone who might have associated with De Villiers Brooke or Elmo Yorke in the last couple of weeks.”
Heinrich—Heinie to his friends, “asshole” to his enemies—Peerick was a good cop in every connotation of the word. It didn’t take him long to find out that not only was one Monsoon Parker, known larcenist, associated with Elmo Yorke, but that he had accompanied him to New Orleans the day before the sharpshooter gave him a terminal intra
cranial hemorrhage from close to a mile away. He duly communicated this information to Agents Black and White, who were presently in New Orleans.
Despite the reputation that New Orleans rightly enjoys for its laid-back lifestyle, Agents Black and White had not succumbed to its charm, nor been tempted by its attractions to slacken the diligence of their investigation. They had quickly discovered that shortly prior to parting company with the back of his skull and half of its contents, Elmo Yorke had been the houseguest of a certain Michael Montcalm Robinson, locally known as Lord Lundi. They had also discovered that, despite his prominent position in the community, Lundi had not been seen for several days, and the local people, in particular the colored community, seemed reluctant in the extreme to talk about him.
His chauffeur perhaps summed up the best the mood of the populace when he told Agents Black and White: “Nobody down here know where that nigger done went, and ain’t nobody gon’ tell ya iffen they did.”
But even though no one was talking, the word was on the streets, and when Agents Black and White let it be known that there might be some change attached to a definite lead on Lundi, the calls started coming in. One was particularly interesting. It came from Atlas Page.
***
Asia had insisted that he get out of the house. Things were still tight, but the atmosphere was not quite as strained. It was as if they were starting to flow in the same direction again, and the silent scream that seemed ever present in the room was growing quieter. Conversation was becoming easier and more natural, and she did not flinch when he touched her. In fact, when he left the house she gave him a peck on the cheek, and a smile that was really a smile. It was a start.
The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Page 16