Monique was used to rough talk and offered a cute smile, as if Kendle had called her Sweetheart.
"Well they look the same don't they? But I won't say they're exactly the same. One's all hot to trot, but this one's..." She nodded at me. "Well, he's a little shy."
I was still on Carl's hot seat and I felt short before Kendle's gaze. It disconcerted me to think she wasn't certain which one of us she was looking at. I angled my neck to give her a good look at the hickey she had given me. It was a risky maneuver. She might not recognize her teethmarks and mistake them for Monique's.
"I don't know where the money is," I said woefully. "They don't know where the money is. No one knows where the money is."
Todd and Carl were quick off the mark, unifying their declaration of innocence in a joint statement: "What money?"
"What are you implying?" Carl added darkly.
"Yeah," said Todd, who began to say more, then decided that was enough.
Monique did not help their cause when she rolled her eyes and began rummaging around Carl's desk, presumably for a cigarette. I took out my pack and offered her one. She scowled at the brand and the would-be benefactor. She wasn't in the best of moods. The eye-roll suggested she did not think Kendle was as stupid as her boss thought, and that we were all pretty much up the creek. She was very much the type of girl who accepted the inevitable without a lot of fuss or gamesmanship, an attitude honed by years of sliding up and down a pole like an idiot.
Kendle was as much at an impasse as the rest of us. I wasn't screaming bloody murder, so she had no reason to arrest Carl and Dog. Monique might have been in violation of certain moral and hygienic ordinances, but taking her in would be an overt act of envy. Todd only looked like me, and there was no law against that, not yet at least. That left me, the Oops Man, the only authorized member of the McPherson/Brinks bloodline. And now that she had lusted my body, Kendle had a legitimate claim to my health and well-being. She couldn't go away empty-handed without losing a few pounds off her face. So she would leave with me. She gave me a come-hither cock of her finger.
I wasn't entirely opposed to the idea. Being a live dog was preferable to being a dead duck. There was a lot of potential for an unpleasant afternoon in that office. My unanswered questions about Todd and the mysterious contract with Carl could wait in the queue with the meaning of life and the creation of the universe, not to mention the ever-intriguing conundrums of why crabs walk backwards and why the sky is blue, two childhood inquiries that Skunk had never answered. Hell, he hadn't even known basic anatomy, like why he was such an asshole.
Relieved that my erection had subsided, I stood and walked over to my alleged savior. I got a good close-up of Todd, who was so much like me he would have bled if I had popped the zit on my nose. He didn't look away, but he avoided my eyes. Neither one of us much liked what we saw.
"Wait!" Carl shuffled forward in a curiously lowlife manner, with bogus ingratiation. "We were just talking with..." His face slacked into a jumble of flaccid skin. The creep had forgotten my name! I would have granted him a senior moment if he hadn't been so stupid. He might get all the girls, but he was still scrounging the dumpster for a brain.
"Mute," said Dog in a donnish voice.
Carl shot him a scowl, as if Dog was the dummy for giving away the fact that they knew my nickname and that I was the unintended victim of the kidnapping. Carl was either dumber or smarter than I had figured. But the situation had changed. Now that I was in their grasp, they realized I had some answers of my own, even if I didn't know it.
"So you have some unanswered questions, too," Kendle smirked, laying a hand on me and guiding me out the door. "That leaves us all in the dark."
To give life to the metaphor, she switched off the office light as she followed me out of the office.
Or maybe it was just habit.
CHAPTER 20
"I know when people know stuff, and what I saw back there was a bunch of dummies who didn't know anything," Kendle mulled through a mouthful of eggs.
She had raced through the midday traffic like a bat out of hell. My first thought was that she was headed for my place, more specifically my bedroom. She had participated in my close shave, and I had heard (since I didn't know first-hand) that moments like this were tailor-made for sexual arousal. I had begun to mentally gird my loins. But we zipped past Oregon Hill without pausing and crossed Lee Bridge to Southside. Were we going to her place, then? My vision of her living conditions resembled something like an insectarium, with fleas and bedbugs the dominant life forms. I could already feel the crabs crawling through my scrotum. True, my own house was no improvement, but at least I was familiar with the wildlife.
But it was a different instinct that gnawed at my rescuer. She roared into the parking lot at Joe's Inn and scarcely took time to stop before charging out of the van. I thought she had a lead on a drug deal she wanted to bust in the worst way, but when she barged into the restaurant she grabbed the nearest waitress and demanded:
"The buffet still open?"
"For about ten more minutes," the frightened girl responded.
"Could you make that twenty? Huh? Twenty more?"
Fearing for her neck, the waitress nodded vigorously, although I doubted she had any say in the matter. In her shoes I would have agreed to leave the buffet open the livelong day.
In ten minutes Kendle managed to fill a plate and empty it and go back for more. In twenty minutes, while I was still laboring on my first self-serve, she had heaped up her third, chivying out the last eggs and waffles before the staff began lifting the pans out of the steam table.
Watching me dither with my cream of wheat, Kendle pointed her fork across the table at me.
"You need to be more proactive," she said.
"I don't have much of an appetite right now," I answered.
"Not eat more. I mean about events. Your life."
"I've followed the clues."
"Clues?" she said quickly.
I had forgotten she didn't know about the cameras, the microphones, the invisible voice. I made a proactive choice by not telling her about them.
"I mean things I've heard, rumors, that sort of thing."
"Uh-huh," she mumbled around her sausage link. The way she gnawed was distressingly familiar. "Like something Skunk told you?"
"He never said anything to me about the Brinks job," I told her semi-truthfully. I remembered his scruffy face leaning down and mixing beer-breath with some comments about having made some poor lifestyle choices. He did not regret the robbery, though—just getting caught. Which was ever the case, and which is what I supposed he meant by wrong turns.
"He never peeped one word about the money?"
For the first time ever, I thought back on possible clues from the devil's own mouth. You might think that odd. I mean, the better part of a million dollars had apparently zipped from being to nothingness. But before that cryptic letter from the dead Skunk had shown up, I had categorized the stolen money with all the other unattainable goals in life, like winning the Presidency or bedding a movie star. OK, I had daydreamed once about J Lo, but I was beyond that now, I knew my place, I was perfectly stupefied in my own little comfort zone. And that zone excluded the Brinks loot, which had no doubt been spent or otherwise eliminated. Dad had given me a hint, true enough. But it had been so farfetched I didn't give it any credence.
Now I was beginning to wonder….
"You're too passive," Kendle critiqued through another mouthful of yellow mush.
"I can't help it," I said. "I think that's my natural state."
"So I noticed. What are you, a goldfish?"
A fish out of water, for sure. "Give me a moment."
"For what?" Kendle asked.
"To think."
"Really?"
But seeing that I really was thinking—if you can actually see such a thing—she laid off the sarcasm and focused on her plate. The slamming of silverware on china didn't help my thought process, but I was able to tune out the
noise as I time-traveled into the past.
The appearance of Todd had blasted a hole in my personal history. It had been disconcerting enough when I thought Jeremy had a twin brother. Like Flint Dementis had said, it was amazing what you could do with computers these days. Someone had gone to the trouble of blurring out my head and replacing it with Jeremy's. Who and why? Were they just playing with my head? They could have disguised Todd's presence by blurring him out completely. Better yet, not shown me the picture at all. How could they have known I had not seen it before and would have spotted the trick?
The Brinks robbery had been over a decade ago, yet the unknown manipulator had stretched back years earlier to torment me. Which suggested a connection.
I was sorry, now, that my time at the PFZ had been cut short. Todd and Carl might have filled me in on the invisible obvious. They might even be the ones behind the A/V shows I had been subjected to. Being an actor, Dog might have a talent for mimicry. Could he do John Wayne? Watch out for the rattlers, Pilgrim.
"Getting anywhere?" Kendle's voice went profound, like when the narrator quotes God in a biblical documentary.
"Truly, it's confusing," I admitted.
"Either you have the perfect poker face, or you're a complete dummy."
With encouragement like this, I could fall off a cliff. "You don't know the whole story."
"I figured that." Pushing back her plate, she eyed me with wary cheer, like a favorite bottle of soda pop that she suspected had been shaken while hot. "Looks to me you need some Miracle Gro." She slouched down in her seat, grunting. A moment later something rough and hot touched my groin. I looked down and found she had removed one of her cowboy boots and was massaging me. This was the second time today my crotch had received miraculously-unwanted attention.
"Cut it out," I said with a brusqueness born of pain. A rather sharp toenail had pricked my scrotum.
"Your loss," Kendle shrugged, sitting up straight.
In spite of her gauche behavior, I was tempted to tell her everything, up to and including Skunk's seeming release from the ultimate jailhouse. The inscrutability of my situation was growing less scrutable by the second and I would have appreciated the input of someone who had more than half a brain to their name. But old prejudices are hard to shake. I knew that, just because she was a woman and no rose by any name, she was probably logic-free.
And she was a cop. Trusting her would be like throwing away my genetic inheritance.
But what exactly did that inheritance consist of? I was the son of Andrew (aka Skunk) and Elizabeth McPherson, right? Yet the sudden appearance of Jeremy when we were kids indicated a certain amount of shuffling outside the family tree. That ol' double helix under the harvest moon could produce some whimsical combinations. That I shared none of Skunk's physical (or mental) traits had occasioned some nasty remarks from neighborhood kids who anywhere else would have been too young to see any difference. Then again, I had seen no resemblance between myself and my poor mother. Had the stork dropped me in the wrong cabbage patch?
I mean, if Todd Neerson really was my twin, why wasn't I living on River Road? The next question being, naturally, if Todd was my twin, what was he doing on River Road in the first place?
"I smell wood burning."
Kendle was not being helpful. In fact, she was a positive detriment to clear thinking. She began bobbing up and down in her seat like a kid with bloated kidneys. I would have smacked her. Then she would have shot me. End of story.
"Jeremy," I said abruptly.
Kendle stopped her bobbing and looked at me closely. "What about him?"
"He's the key," I said. "He must be."
He had dropped out of the blue like some preheated meal, complete with wardrobe, cavities and rotten personality. He had to have been somewhere before he was introduced to Barbara and me. Could that somewhere have been River Road? Could his real name be Neerson?
It's hard to find a child who can keep a secret, but Jeremy was a rare treasure. Even at our youngest and most gullible, we didn't buy his stories about being Elvis' love child, or a KGB agent on the lam, or the result of an experiment by aliens—although I thought the last one had potential. If you listened to him, you might conclude he was No One from Nowhere. But there he was, Someone in the Flesh, a real menace to the race, or at least to his siblings. It was just like Skunk to introduce a smaller version of his own nasty self to our menagerie. Without any explanation, I might add. Just "Here's your new brother". It was like tossing an alligator into a pond and telling the fish to give him a warm welcome. Where had he come from before he appeared on Oregon Hill?
After Skunk's death, Jeremy had dropped off my radar. If he had spent the first years of his life on River Road, it was possible he had returned there. He wanted the silver spoon back, or his share of it. His share of....
The Brinks money?
"Stop looking so gooey," Kendle snapped. "If you know something, spill it."
The temptation to tip my glass of ice water in her direction was as fleeting as it was farcical. I needed to slip her leash, not break it, one method drawing more notice than the other. I realized now that I was still a prisoner, and there was not all that much to choose between jailers.
"OK, let me tell you what I see," said Kendle, leaning back.
"Can we go outside? I can't smoke in here."
"You can't smoke in my van, either," she said.
"We can talk on the sidewalk." I needed to think, and I do my best thinking—practically my only thinking—with a cigarette in my mouth. We all have crutches. Mine just happens to shrivel my lungs.
"You didn't know you had a twin," Kendle said flatly.
"Well..."
"Maybe I'm wasting my time. A guy who doesn't know who his family is doesn't know much of anything."
Under different circumstances, I could have supplied a whole library of historic figures with notable gaps in their mental scrapbooks but, just when I needed to, I couldn't skim a single example off the top of my head. This resulted in a cranial gap that was perfectly visible on my face. Needless to say, Kendle wasn't impressed.
"Okay, try this on for size," she continued. "Old Skunk had family connections you didn't know about. In fact, maybe he had a second family, out there in Poshland, paid for and supported by—"
"No way," I interrupted boldly. "Even the Brinks money couldn't have bought that house—not his share of it, at least."
Kendle jumped on this. "What house?"
"The one you were just talking about. In 'Poshland'."
"What was that address?" she said.
"You should know. You saw me being kidnapped."
"I was busy with the GPS," she said with a snotty grin. I was being reminded that every step I took was being observed.
As if to keep pace with an unparalleled morning of unannounced departures and arrivals, the afternoon stirred up an unexpected newcomer. When Jeremy hove into Joe's Inn and dumped himself in the doubleback booth next to Kendle, I was a couple of stops short of astonishment. When he grabbed Kendle breast and gave her a wet smooch, though, I ran the red.
But Kendle was just as flabbergasted and dismayed as I was. Some people take on a radishy hue when taken by surprise. In fact, they look pretty ugly, like an electrocuted piece of dullness. But Kendle’s lackluster complexion flushed attractively, giving her the glow of a little girl bounding out of her pink-walled nursery.
Looks being naturally deceptive, the little girl gave Jeremy a nasty sock in the arm. Having experienced many of those myself, I winced. I winced again when Jeremy shrugged off the hit and gave her breast another tweak. I was on the verge of saying something, or nothing, when the waitress came over and glared down at my brother.
"This is a family restaurant, sir."
"So? I'm trying to start a family."
"Can I get you something?" the waitress persisted. She was not wearing a cheesy uniform but a simple pair of jeans and blouse. I could tell she was family oriented.
"Sor
ry, not into threesomes," my idiot brother said, giving her a leer that suggested a threesome was exactly what he had in mind.
"On the menu," the waitress persisted, intent on rearranging Jeremy's priorities from sex to food.
"Then I'll have what she had." Jeremy nodded at Kendle's plate and its slimy remains.
"She had the buffet, and the buffet is closed."
Jeremy huffed with frustration, as if the girl was more nag than waitress. To assert her status, she plopped a menu in front of him. Jeremy took out a cigarette and she gasped.
"You can't do that here!"
"You can't smoke, you can't play titty...what can you do?"
"You can eat, sir."
An obvious opening. I think I'll skip the following five minutes of dubious tit for tat. Jeremy had regressed to his old self, declaiming the most idiotic things as though they were the height of contemporary intellectual badinage—though, considering our times, it probably was. It's hard to find a conversation that doesn't begin with 'f' and end with 'k'.
Five minutes later we were outside. Kendle had said nothing within that time frame except, "Let's get the fuck out of here," thereby resting my case. She was pretty stupefied by Jeremy's arrival. He was acting like a blind man, frequently laying his hand on her breast to make sure it was really her. He only stopped when she threatened to break his jaw.
"And you would deserve it, Doubletalk," I emphasized.
"Doubletalk?" Kendle said. "That's Jeremy's nickname? You really grew up calling your brother that?"
Jeremy dropped his face into abject misery, demonstrating the horrid childhood he had been subjected to. I could only hope his adulthood was equally rotten. But whatever sympathy he had won from Kendle (precious little, was my guess) was tossed out the window when she asked him how he had found her.
"GPS, of course," he said.
"You bugged my van!"
"Sure."
He said this with such vacant innocence that Kendle immediately saw demanding an explanation would be hopeless. People were bugging each other left and right. The electronic version was the civilized extension. I would have laughed if I hadn't been reeling. I couldn't say if I found Kendle repulsive or merely disgusting. That she had something going on with my brother was not beyond belief, but certainly beyond palpability. I felt the little I'd had for breakfast stirring in jealous rage, forming a nice greasy ball that would be useful if I barfed. We all want what someone else has. I had been struggling to find a way to get Kendle out of my hair, and now that Jeremy was running a hand through her oily locks I wanted proof of her fidelity—evidence which obviously wasn't coming my way. More important was the question of how long they had been a couple, and what kind of conspiracy they had been brewing between them. They had acted like strangers at the abandoned farmhouse. Had that been their first meeting? Had they exchanged phone numbers without my noticing? This display of familiarity on Jeremy's part suggested they had known each other for some time. On the other hand, Yvonne had wasted no time bringing me to sack.
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