A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  “Convincing, no?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the wounds on her chest and neck were drawn in Halloween makeup. Maybe the deadness in the girl’s open eyes is just a remarkable piece of acting for such a young whore. Maybe the blood is from a decapitated chicken and that knife was carefully placed in your drugged-out fingers. Maybe a club that will take photographs of orgy sex for purposes of blackmail might also be in the business of staging horrific scenes of mayhem and murder just to up the ante.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Or maybe in a drug- and sex-fueled state of rage and lust you grabbed the first thing you could lay your hands on and stabbed that girl to death even as you finished inside her because that’s what you wanted to do, had always wanted to do, and the drugs had merely taken away your genteel reticence.”

  “Not that.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. But here’s the thing: the truth of the way it went down doesn’t really matter.”

  “It does to me.”

  “One morning I woke up and found one of my Swimmys still alive, doing happy figure eights in his little bowl. I looked at him and he swam into position to look at me and we were looking at each other. There was a strange equality in our stares. Like we understood each other. And we did; I cared just as much about him as he cared about me. Feel familiar? I reached my whole hand into the bowl and pulled Swimmy out and felt him squirm in my palm. I liked the feeling, like an itch I didn’t know I had was being scratched. I opened a gap in my fist and his little gold head squiggled out. He was a beautiful color. A rainbow danced on his golden surface. And there was a little plea in his eye. ‘Put me back. We’re friends.’ I gently brushed his head with my thumb and then rubbed a little harder and then squeezed his head with my thumb until the sweet pleading eye popped. Afterward I cried. I was young and I cried.”

  “Am I supposed to be touched?”

  “You’re not supposed to be anything other than what you are. Mr. Maambong and the Principal asked me to speed your development. I think the specific word they used, actually, was ‘evolution.’”

  He smiled, and in that smile I saw it all, not just the truth about the Chadwick Club, and who it belonged to, but the truth about what they had wanted from me all along. The revelation must have shown on my face.

  “What did you think?” said Tom Preston, laughing at my expression. “That they wanted you to stop raiding the minibar?”

  “And so you set me up to send me on my way.”

  “I only arranged the theater, you gave the performance.”

  “Well, fuck you and fuck them,” I said.

  “I’ll pass it on.”

  “Just so you know, if I do decide to evolve in the way they want, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “At least you’re catching on.”

  “So the Principal owns and operates the Chadwick Club.”

  “It’s one of her bases of power. Maambong’s operation is another. And she’s got a lobbying firm that plays as her cover and handles the transfers of money. Massive transfers. It’s quite a racket, perfect for this town, because it’s all about money, sex, and power.”

  “And that’s what you’re after, too? Money, sex, and power?”

  “That’s what everybody is after. But you and me, we’re not everybody. We two want all that, absolutely, but we want more.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Sure you do. One thing you want in addition is acceptance. That’s a weakness I’m here to stamp out. You think you have lines you won’t cross, but they’re not lines of conscience. Men like you and me, we are free of the burden of conscience. Which can only mean the lines are external. You care about the way they look at you. You let them draw your lines. And that’s why it doesn’t matter whether what happened in that room with that whore was real or not. The pictures are enough to change the way they look at you. With the pictures out there, you’ll never get acceptance. But why you care about their acceptance is beyond me. I mean, who the hell are they and what the hell do they know about us?”

  There was a touch of anger now in his voice. He looked out the window and his lips curled in a way so that the gap in his front teeth grew fearsome. I bent the bloody photograph and tucked it into my jacket pocket.

  “Take it,” he said, noticing. “Jack off to it in the middle of the night to keep yourself primed. Truth is, the only time they truly appreciate all that we are is when our guns are at their heads. The only time they look at us with the proper amount of respect is when our hands are around their throats. The only time they understand the true order of things is when their blood is gushing over our knives.”

  “Not my gun,” I said. “Not my hands.”

  “But it sure as hell was your hand on the knife. The fingerprints prove that. And let me tell you what you might not remember from your drugged-out odyssey. Watching the life drain from their sad little eyes while we stand over them, in all our glory, is the truest satisfaction we can achieve in this world. It’s better than money and power, better than sex. And when you blend it with sex like you did last night—oh man, it makes everything they want as pallid as soup.”

  I should have been horrified. I should have shrunk away as if from an alien creature with red scales and shark’s teeth, oozing goo all over the limousine’s leather. I had been given a glimpse of the bright, molten iron at the core of this man’s soul and it should have scorched my eyes. But all the should-haves disappeared in an abyss of my own. I understood Tom Preston, I was Tom Preston. What was dead in him was dead within me, what lived in him called to me with a seductive tongue.

  “Was it really chicken blood?” I said.

  He thought about it for a moment and then chuckled, yeah, he chuckled, and you know how I feel about chuckling. The son of a bitch chuckled. “This has been good. This has been refreshing. Who else could I confide in like this? Instead of threatening and fighting, we should be working together.”

  Ah, there it was. I tilted my head like he had started talking French.

  “They recruited us because we have talents they can’t muster on their own,” he said. “Then why are we taking orders from them? You can do things I can’t. I can do things you won’t. Together we can go further than they ever could. It wouldn’t take much of a scheme to pull the money, sex, and power from their tiny, tired hands. Think of how all the little senators will quake when we walk into a room.”

  “You want us to team up against Mr. Maambong and the Principal?”

  “They can’t handle what they’ve got. That fact that they need you and me here, now, proves it. But we don’t need anybody. Nothing can stop a psychopath who knows no bounds.”

  “You want to take over their business?”

  “For a start.”

  “And then?”

  “I want to take over the world.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you and every other asshole in this town.”

  26. Darwin’s Dream

  All this gab about blood and gore is making me hungry,” said the outlaw, rubbing his hands together. “How about you? What do you say to a bone-in rib eye, ribboned with fat, grilled to perfection over mesquite, served with a pile of Chateau potatoes and a plate of asparagus with hollandaise? Is that the ticket or what?”

  Before the magazine writer could respond, the outlaw yelled to the barkeep, “Ginsberg, two rib eyes, burnt, with the works, pronto, tonto. We’re famished here.”

  The barkeep, huddled with the two customers at the bar, looked up for a moment, shook his head as if at a clown, and then lowered his head back to the conversation.

  “He’s not moving so fast,” said the outlaw. “In fact, he’s not moving at all, the lazy bastard. But he has a point. I fear I might have oversold the menu. See the jars on either side of the meerkat on the counter? One is filled with pickled eggs, the other with pickled eyeballs of lamb. Both are about as tender as a thumb. Do you have a preference?”

  When she chose the
egg over the eyeball, the outlaw gave a shrug of disappointment before he rose from the table and dragged his leg to the bar. He stood next to the behemoth in the leather vest, spoke softly to the bartender. There was a bout of gruff laughter before he limped back to the table.

  “Don’t expect too much,” said the outlaw. “They’re so sour your cheeks will contract until the vessels burst. But on the positive side, you’ll stagger out of here looking like a model.

  “You’re wondering, perhaps, as we wait for our repast, how I responded to Tom Preston’s offer. You’re wondering if I linked arms with my brother Cain and marched ever forward toward the holy grail of money, sex, and power. I was sorely tempted. Yet while the offer certainly fit my proclivities, I could still figure the odds. We’d be battling not just Mr. Maambong and the Principal, but all the henchmen at their disposal. And even if that worked out, there’d be no telling when Tom Preston would turn around and go after me. I mean, that guy was a fucking psychopath.

  “But there was another, stronger reason to turn down his offer of a collaboration. My night at the Chadwick Club had made three things clear. First, Rufus Davenport hadn’t killed Scarlett Gould, though I suddenly strongly suspected who had. Second, I discovered that cocaine and Viagra mixed in a neat line is really quite sparkly. And finally, I knew now, without any doubt, what the Principal had wanted when she had talked to me about evolution, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting it.

  “What good is a triggerman who won’t pull the trigger; what good is a henchman who won’t hench?

  “Ahh, the eggs.”

  Ginsberg made his slow way from the bar to the table, carrying two mugs of beer and two plates, each topped by a pair of hard-boiled eggs, slimy and sickly purple. He slammed the mugs onto the table next to the others, then slammed the plates. The sharp scent of dirty socks swirled.

  “I know the beer is bad,” said the outlaw as Ginsberg returned to the bar, “but let’s not waste what’s left of our brilliant Scotch as we wash down these gelatinous balls of muck. Are you sure you don’t want the lamb eyes? The trailing tendrils sliding down the throat give a unique sensation, along with a piquant aftertaste. Too bad. Now the procedure for the eggs is quite precise; failure to adhere to the exact steps could be disastrous to your health as well as to the decor. Hold your nose, put the whole thing in your mouth at once like Cool Hand Luke, two quick chews, a fast swallow, and then a gush of the skunked beer before the full taste of Ginsberg’s pickling explodes. Like this.”

  She watched in horror and fascination as the outlaw followed his directions to the letter. While he chewed, his one eye bulged; when he swallowed, a tear rolled from beneath his patch. As the magazine writer gagged, the outlaw chugged the beer like he was in a fraternity house.

  “Whoa,” he said, slapping the table as he gasped for breath. “That’s abominable. Yow. I can’t imagine anything more disgusting. It’s like swallowing a sour aspic filled with shit. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll have another. Go ahead. It won’t bite back, at least it shouldn’t, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you found a beak inside.”

  If this was the outlaw’s idea of a test, she had already failed. The mere thought of putting one of those vile eggs in her mouth brought up an empty retch. She had no doubt that the end result of an attempt to eat such a thing would be a slick of vomit across the table. How quick would Ginsberg move to clean that? Not very, she was sure. She pushed the putrid thing away from her.

  But then she remembered her brother’s smile that summer night when she was seven and they were catching fireflies and he put the insects in a jar with a lid pocked through with holes, and how the jar spun with magic as he held it up against the stars. And she remembered the way he’d hugged her close during their mother’s funeral before he went up and spoke for them both in a choked voice because she was too broken apart to rise from her chair. And she remembered the sight of her brother’s body in the morgue, a sight that now plagued her whenever she closed her eyes.

  He still lay there, pale and punctured with buckshot, dead and unavenged, as she protected her overpriced brunches, her tepid nights of Netflix and chill, her pieces of fluff that filled the pages of the vapid press. He lay there on that metal slab with half his face obliterated while she deigned not to mar her breath with pickling juice. She had sworn she would do everything necessary to find her brother the justice the system had denied him, but what she really meant was she would do anything so long as it wouldn’t upset her fragile little tummy. She had come looking for a henchman and now, face-to-face with exactly what she had sought, she was unwilling to pay the price, any price, because he wasn’t the right kind of henchman.

  Her weakness made her sicker than the egg ever could. She was acting exactly like the coward she had feared herself to be. And that realization steeled her determination. She held her nose, popped a slime-ridden ovoid in her mouth, chewed twice, swallowed, and then drowned the thing with gulps of beer that washed it straight into her stomach like a hissing chunk of hot steel. And in so doing, she felt suddenly different, stronger, larger in a way, as if written on the egg had been the words “Eat me.” She opened her mouth to prove it was down and let out a deep belch, tasting the pickled thing again.

  And verily it was good.

  “I’m just grateful only air came up,” said the outlaw. “Ginsberg’s eggs have been known to cause ejectments of all kinds. But now I know you’re desperate enough to swallow a Ginsberg-pickled egg, which is something. I suppose a dead brother will obliterate even the most commonsense lines, hmm? Not unlike what the Principal wanted to obliterate within me.”

  Here’s some physics for you. When stars form in the utter emptiness of the universe, the fusion going on at their brilliant centers turns hydrogen into all manner of element. We are children of these huge burning monsters, creatures formed of the dust churned from the fire at their hearts. Stars burn on and on, for billions of years, creating heat and life and ever more elements, until they create, finally, iron. And once that happens, once iron finally appears, these stars are doomed. Iron cannot fuse into another element, iron is a cancer at the core, a star killer.

  There was the molten iron of murder in the depths of Tom Preston’s soul and it glowed ever so brightly, but ultimately, I had no doubt, it would destroy him. There was the same molten iron in Jesse Duchamp, and he had shown me the toll of allowing it to form and glow. When the Principal spoke of evolution, she was speaking about me embracing that murderous element, but no Hyena, not Tom Preston, not Mr. Maambong, not the goddamned Principal was going to punch my ticket to New Orleans.

  Yet that didn’t mean I was doomed to failure in the Hyena universe. In fact, my night at the Chadwick Club and my meeting with Tom Preston had given an entirely new impetus to my time in Washington. Maybe the very stink of the place had infected my liver, but suddenly I had an ambition grander than the mere squelching of an investigation. Tom Preston wanted me to make a move with him, and I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Tom Preston, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t time to make a move.

  “Jungle Dog, LLC, is registered in the Cayman Islands,” said Alberto Menendez. “Information about it is quite thin. The funds to pay taxes on its properties in this country are paid from an account held by CIBC Caymans. CIBC discloses very little about its account holders and nothing about the individuals or organizations behind the corporate veil. Your friend Riley, however, is quite relentless. She was able to find an attorney in Miami who handled a real estate issue for the Jungle Dog company, a Ms. Secada.”

  “I assume there’s a reason you asked me to meet you here at this overpriced coffeehouse,” I said. We were just off K Street, with its tall, ritzy buildings, and swarms of parasites sucking their sustenance from the body politic. Parasites like me.

  “They make quite a fine brew here,” said Alberto.

  “Nicely bitter, yes.”

  “I thought you would like it. It is as if you and it were made for each other. But also, from thi
s window, there is a capital view of that building right there.”

  “And that building has some relevance to Jungle Dog, I assume.”

  “Indeed,” said Menendez. “I happened to contact Ms. Secada down in Miami. She was not interested in being of help—she was almost rude, imagine that—but when I mentioned we had a serious criminal issue with the Georgetown property where this so-called Chadwick Club of yours met, she referred me to a real estate lawyer in the District, a Mr. Cooper.”

  “And he’s in that building across the street?”

  “No,” said Menendez. “He is in Georgetown. Now when I contacted Mr. Cooper, he was remarkably unhelpful. Even after I mentioned the potentially serious criminal issue, he still refused to meet with me. It wasn’t until I had a friend of mine in the police department give him a call and ask some embarrassing questions about the Chadwick Club that he immediately rang me back up.”

  “It is nice to have friends in the police department.”

  “I was told to meet someone named Portofoy in that building right across the street. My appointment is for fifteen minutes from now. It was this Portofoy who referred the real estate cases to Ms. Secada and Mr. Cooper. I’ve been asking around. Portofoy, it turns out, is not a corporate lawyer as one would expect.”

  “Portofoy is a lobbyist,” I said.

  “Very good. But not just a lobbyist, a lobbyist’s lobbyist, the head of a small shop with a great deal of power. When one of the more traditional firms has trouble making headway on a crucial issue, they go to Portofoy. And the fees are quite extravagant.”

  “Do you have a photograph?”

  Menendez showed me an image on his phone. A beefy figure in a pin-striped suit, short, squat, thinning hair, well bejowled.