"Cut it out," he said, amused and irritated at the same time. She yelped when he plucked the gun out of her hand. "This is serious business here." He looked down at the gun. "Hey, this is real! Hey, it's loaded! You could've shot yourself by accident!"
"She'd need a harpoon," I said.
"Why didn't you tell me you were packing heat?" Jeremy asked, mystified.
Yvonne didn't answer. Instead, she kept flapping away at her side, where I guessed something besides a holster had been hidden. Jeremy edged away from her as she lifted the side of her jogging blouse and slapped at her hip. She was having some kind of fit, that was for sure, and my brother thought it might be contagious. Her bosom heaved, flew up and retracted violently, throwing her back on the cushion.
"Cm'on, you moron," she muttered, keeping one eye on Jeremy. He had no intention of turning her own gun on her, but I was beginning to work on the idea.
"Girl, if it's that bad, take it outside," my mother said, all sympathy.
But Yvonne's malaise had nothing to do with an unknown virus or food poisoning. I caught a glimpse of a small rectangular box strapped at her waistline.
"She's communicating!" I shouted.
Todd studied her antics with a casual air. "I think you mean she's wired." Then he got a good look at the box and shot up. "Oh shit!"
The front door opened. In the entrance stood a man who seemed utterly surprised to find it unlocked. He wasn't the only one.
More surprising—to all of us, if not to the man himself—was that it was Jeremy standing there. He held up a badge and said:
"Police."
CHAPTER 28
The cornerstone of any decent conspiracy must be founded on locked doors. Only a moron—or a roomful of morons—would ignore this basic precondition. But instead of lashing out at each other, with everyone accusing everyone else of being the aforementioned moron, we sat (or stood) in dumbfounded (moronic) amazement. I mean, really...he was the spitting image...double douche bag deluxe.
The differences were surface, sort of like a Todd copy, one impeccably dressed and the other impeccably slobbish. The new Jeremy did a quick mental riff, each note of acknowledgement producing a little burst of song from his eyes. He knew us, that was abysmally obvious. And not just our names and addresses. This was someone who had peeked into our closets and introduced himself to our skeletons. It was the creepiest feeling I'd ever experienced, outside of meeting Todd--yet I knew I wasn't half as creeped-out as Jeremy, stretched backwards on the couch and gawping like a grouper facing its image in a mirror. Like the territorial fish, his first impulse was to attack anything that looked like him—a perfectly understandable reaction, I thought. He would have done so now, only he had fallen back on Yvonne's lap and she was holding him down. When he threatened to break free of her grasp, she clamped a hand on his crotch.
"Keep trying and see what happens," she said in a voice filled with affectionate menace.
Jeremy didn't want to see what would happen next. None of us did, really. Except me. He put his horror on hold and met the eyes of the newcomer with muted logic. "Who the fuck are you?"
"If I said Jeremy McPherson, would that send you over the edge?" It was exactly the kind of sadistic thing Jeremy would have said if the situation were reversed and he had a brain. I was immediately on alert. This wasn't Jeremy, of course. This was Jeremy Plus. A menace to all Mankind and adjoining dimensions.
The metaphors of the day cry out for gross exaggeration.
The new and improved Jeremy did not wear a police uniform. Nor did he flaunt a gun. His existence alone disarmed us.
Nor was he a quick draw on explanations. He was so preoccupied with smirking that we turned to Mom for answers.
Anyone who had known her for five minutes easily saw through the bourgeois sham, but the three sons who were present (okay, four) witnessed a catastrophic collapse not only of pretense but of personality, too. She was devolving before our eyes, leaving an unholy mess of fumbled assumptions and rotting certainties. Even the nastiest of people (which didn't include Mom, believe it or not) develop a concrete halo of faith in their world view. Both her current world and the world she had left behind shattered the instant Jeremy Plus opened the door. I recognized her speechlessness. This was the mother I was accustomed to, standing silent before a raging Skunk who would not have heard her even had she chosen to open her mouth.
Okay, no answers there. Our heads swiveled back to the door.
"So..." Marvin, not as overwhelmed by twin twins as the rest of us, winced as he drew himself up, the wound my father had given him still tugging at his torso. "You arresting us, or what? Where's your backup?"
I had the distinct feeling he was feeding him a line.
"Arrest you? Sure, I'll arrest you. Or maybe I'll take a pass, with blood being thicker than the law and all that." We couldn't credit our eyes or ears, and this double douche was laughing in our stupefied faces. "I've already got what I came for, twenty years worth of jewelry heists buried in the Bartow drive-in. I could dig it up and return it to the owners. If the stores are out of business, I can return them to the descendants, the equitable owners, the trustees, whoever—no questions asked."
Already boggled beyond belief, I reeled. "Jewelry?"
"Like you don't know."
He was grating my nerves, just like the real Jeremy, and my tongue escaped. "Just like you don't know the exact space where to dig."
He gave me a 'huh?' look.
"Drive-ins are pretty big. What are you looking at? An acre? Two? You don't know the aisle row or space number, do you? No, you don't."
Lifting a superior nose to the air, I caught Todd giving me a thumbs up. Shit. I had withheld the vital tidbit on the off chance that someone might take it into his head to hold a gun to my head. If so, I could laugh raucously and declaim: "Go ahead, kill me. Then the secret dies with me, ha-ha-ha."
Well, maybe I would skip the laugh. But it was a nice little ace in the hole to balance against a potential hole in my head.
I had zapped the douche double right between the eyes. He gave me a look saturated with loathing, as if I was a stage extra who had stepped on his best line. "But you did tell us. I heard..." As proof, he held up the electronic twin of the device strapped to Yvonne's waist. But when he glanced down to his left, to where Yvonne retained her grip on Jeremy's balls, he noted a possible glitch. "Jesus, Yvonne, no wonder they threw you off the force. Now I know why the signal kept breaking up. You can't even wear a transmitter without burying it in Crisco."
Wounded vanity broke Yvonne's attention. She let go of Jeremy's jewelry box and clasped her hands to her neck, as if the douche had slashed her jugular. That was all my brother needed. He shot up off the couch. Before the douche could jump or jerk, Jeremy clocked him on the chin. Being a ringer, he knew about the newcomer's glass jaw. The douche went down, his eyes rolling up neatly in miniature toilet rolls.
"You've killed him!" Quivering with dismay, Yvonne rolled off the couch and crawled heavily across the carpet, sort of like a soft boulder falling uphill. Her performance raised more than one eyebrow, with Jeremy's notching up over his brow and falling off the back of his head. Who was the aggrieved lover here? Jeremy? Jeremy Douche? I certainly wouldn't include myself among the cast-offs. If Todd knew that I had lumbered in the sack with Yvonne, the guffaws would have stretched from here to Uranus. Pride is funny that way. It doesn't stop you from doing stupid things. Just from admitting them.
Jeremy accepted the sight of his girl's smothering concern for his twin with as much grace as he was capable of—he didn't kick her in the wide target. But he was tempted.
Uncle Vern's patience had finally given way, his anger measured on a string of questions. "Mrs. McPherson-Marteen? We seem to have a few moments to ourselves. Are you capable of giving us an explanation?"
Just like Marvin, I thought. He spoke as though holding up a card, only this time the cue was being fed to Mom. I might be gullible, but for the last week I had been
gobbling down Berlitz lessons on International Gobbledygook.
When the douche went down, my mother had given a little jump, not exactly of joy, but maybe with a bit of hope, as if an agonizing dilemma had shown itself vulnerable to a solution. I doubt if she wanted him dead, but permanent brain damage might save her from opening a can of worms—something we would have forced her to eat, if we could have found a can of worms.
"You didn't tell—"
Uncle Vern cut her off with a raised finger.
A couple of things struck me about the way Uncle Vern addressed Mom. The hyphenated name was an annoyance, naturally. An unwieldy weight had been tagged onto the McPherson product, like a beloved brand acquired by a company that knew nothing about what it was buying. You don't want a cheese mogul snapping up your cigarette manufacturer, right? Your tobacco might become tainted by cheddar, yuck of ages. That Winny might have squirted his whey into the mighty Skunk lineage made me weak at the knees. But Uncle Marvin's familiarity with my mother was even more unsettling. Instead of using her first name, he had chosen formality. Johnny knows he's up shit creek when his parents call out, "Jonathan Thurston Getty, what have you been up to?"
Uncle Vern knew Mom pretty well, and a bit of reverse engineering told me she knew what he knew. Which meant she had known about the mental torture I had been put through over the last few weeks. What else are mothers for?
While Mom pulled herself together—or apart, it was hard to tell which—I scooted past the combined blobs of Yvonne and Jeremy Douche and picked up the badge from the floor.
Radcliffe Detective Agency
"We Find the Plus in Minus"
Insurance Claims Our Specialty
Michael Schwinn, Junior Associate
Fully Licensed and Bonded
My new-found brother, Jeremy's twin, was named Michael Schwinn, a two-wheeled name for a doubletalking slimeball. Coming across as a cop was like a pile of shit claiming to be an honored member of the Fecal Club. Why bother? He could have admitted he was a detective working for an insurance company and we wouldn't have thought any better of him.
Yvonne shoveled Michael's head onto her lap, not so much a femme fatale as a femme avalanche, squeezing great tears out of her bulbous eyes as she checked him for signs of life. I didn't realize crotch-groping was part of the CPR package.
She, too, had misrepresented herself as a policewoman. Impersonating an officer must be a new fad among the low and unmighty.
"Hey," said ever-grammatically incorrect Jeremy. "He got gum on his shoe."
I would have thought this uncharacteristically clever of him, except when I leaned over to look, I saw dirty pink wads on his sole.
Jeremy gave Yvonne an unkind nudge. "What, you can't tell us apart?"
"Michael Schwinn," I announced, turning around and holding up the I'D in Mom's direction. "Ring any bells?"
She shook her head stiffly.
"Hey, didn't anyone hear what I said?" Marvin complained loudly.
"I didn't hear you say anything," Todd said and glanced at me, as if I was the other half of a speaker system. "You?"
I shrugged. Marvin might have said something, but either none of us had heard, or the words had sloughed off into our collective short-term memory bin.
"We should haul ass!" Marvin shouted. "We don't know who's going to show up next. Maybe the cops. Maybe triplets!"
Good point. Our secret staging area was becoming a community ensemble.
"But go where?" I said. "I don't think my house would be any safer." I turned to Uncle Vern. "How about yours?"
He easily stared me down. That avuncular elder statesman look gets me every time.
"What about West Virginia?" he said.
Driving on narrow mountain roads in the middle of the night for fun and profit was not my idea of profitable fun. Ever see the 'Wages of Fear'? "If you're thinking of digging it up..." I hesitated. What exactly was it?
"Yes?" Uncle Vern prodded, inferring that he had a ready answer, no matter what my objection was. I could have told him my brain was at the cleaners, but I had to remain in the realm of the semi-probable.
"You won't be able to find the place in the dark," I said. "We're talking about West Virginia here. They've probably never heard of streetlights. Maybe not even electricity."
"What are you talking about?" Marvin whined. "They have an eighty-mile-an-hour speed limit."
The high-tide mark of civilization, to be sure. But disparaging my hillbilly ancestors was second nature to me and I couldn't stop the flow of negatives. "Do you know what those things are like up there?"
"What 'things'?" Todd asked.
"You know...the people. You start wandering around in the dark in one of their fields...that's when they hunt, you know. After the sun goes down. And they'll tear you limb from limb and eat—"
"Eat it raw!" Todd snickered red-neckedly. Well, he shared the genes. Neanderthal humor was in his blood.
"We can discuss our options on the road," said Uncle Vern, lifting himself off his chair. "But Marvin is right. We need to move along."
"What about them?" said Jeremy, frowning down at the gelatinous pile at his feet. Michael's eyes fluttered open, which seemed evidence enough that all his brain damage had been incurred before Jeremy socked him. Yvonne's prognosis was summed up in the sudden stoppage of tears, which were sponged up in a sour expression in which I could see no sign of relief. Maybe she had been robbed of the performance she had planned in case Michael croaked. Then she saw Jeremy holding her own gun on her and her face curdled.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I was thinking of blowing your brains out, Chumpcakes."
"Where would that get you?" she demanded, meeting his eye.
"Nowhere much," Jeremy admitted. "So just come along with us and I'll save myself the jail time."
"Go where?"
Michael groaned as he pushed himself into a seating position. I fully expected Yvonne to cradle his bruised head in her arms, but instead of a tender embrace, he received a sharp, "Get up, will you?"
I suppose that was part of her charm, or the only part of her charm. She was unpredictable. Men like that. Most men. Michael put a hand up in her face and pushed her out of her crouch. She fell back on the floor with a soft crunch. Now, that was charming.
"We're going on our honeymoon," said Jeremy with a sly grin. "West Virginia. Home to the stars."
His joke was more accurate than he knew. I realized with a fearful sigh that the trip to the mountains was unavoidable—and the place we were headed to was a stone's throw from Green Bank Observatory, where scientists search the cosmos for intelligent lifeforms.
They wouldn't find any tonight.
CHAPTER 29
"Your father was a skunk in more ways than one," Uncle Vern said over his shoulder as he took the ramp off I-64 onto Route 250. We had passed Charlottesville and Staunton and were entering (I assumed—I'd never been here myself) the cavernous narrows of a hazardous landscape. I wasn't the only one to think the straightforward hundred miles of interstate had been wasted. Marvin had urged his uncle to tell me the whole story, or at least enough to make sense. Every time he threatened to give his own version of events, Uncle Vern would cut him off.
"Everything you know you heard from me, and you'll scramble it mercilessly."
So now, Uncle Mentally Challenged was choosing this dark, twisting road to twist around in the driver's seat and spit out the tangled truth. There wasn't a brain in the lot.
But it wasn't as if the trip thus far was totally unenlightening. Before leaving Richmond's FM range, Uncle Vern had switched on the local news. It was preceded by A Moment in Science, which discussed a new computer program that created works of art free of human imperfections, real masterpieces.
"Finally!" Marvin exclaimed with relief.
The murders in my bedroom were reported breathlessly by some twit of a girl who was probably as cute as a button, although with radio you never knew. This was followed by
the story of a wild high speed chase south of Richmond along Jeff Davis Highway. Two men had been arrested for reckless cornholing or some such thing. But no connection was made between them and the murders. This was worth a few puzzled murmurs from the van's cargo bay, including my own technocratic: "They don't tell you everything, not at first."
"At least the Congreve assholes are in the lockup," Marvin said. "That's one less pair of guns."
This didn't stop him from keeping his eye glued to the headlights of Yvonne's van in the rearview mirror. Michael's dramatic entry at the unsafe house had upset him as much as the rest of us, which I thought out of proportion to his vital interests. It wasn't as though he had had a douche twin show up on the doorstep. A couple of sharp exchanges with his uncle suggested ol' Vern had kept him ignorant of some important factualities. He was hoping to learn as much during this ride as I did.
Mom and Jeremy were in the back seat of Yvonne's van, Michael and Yvonne were in the front. I didn't think Doubletalk was holding the gun on his beloved. She had balked as a matter of form. I could tell both she and Michael were as eager to hot foot it to the boonies as everyone else, excluding your narrator. I was stuck in Uncle Vern's surveillance van. Marvin remained in the cargo bay so he could watch the rear screen. Rather than let the front passenger seat go to waste, Todd and I squabbled over which one of us should ride up front with Uncle Vern. And yeah, it was a little like arguing with myself. That should have made it easier, but try holding a reasonable discussion with your echo. I finally won when Uncle Vern let out a truly aching fart and Todd conceded the position.
I was sorry Mom wasn't in the van with us. She was the one I really wanted to grill. But when Jeremy discovered his inner gentleman and held Yvonne’s van door open, he had to place a hand on her head to prevent her from banging it on the roof, like a cop guiding a suspect into a cruiser. Michael's arrival had knocked her way off course, and she probably would not be able to tell which end was up for some time to come.
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