by Eoin Colfer
“Look at the kid,” said the dragon. “He ain’t nothing but skin and bone. You telling me this specimen can even hump that volume of shit?”
“Sure he can,” argued Waxman. “I seen him move a stack of crates higher than his whole self.”
Squib thought he better get his speak in. “I can work,” he blurted. “Shovel shit for real, or whatever that might mean. Deliveries, collections. Hell, I can do foot massage if you need it, Mister Vern, sir.”
The boy opened his eyes to find two very different expressions trained on him. Waxman was grinning as though he was ahead in some competition or other, and Vern was scowling like the food on his plate was irritating him.
“‘Mister Vern, sir,’” repeated Waxman. “That’s more courtesy than you’re accustomed to, Highfire.”
“Sure is,” said the dragon. “But I ain’t interested in courtesy. Humans always start out courteous—then, before a fellow can even retract his balls, it’s all torches and spears.”
Squib was a mite confused over the retraction-of-balls section of that statement, but he reckoned he could let that go for the moment, though it pained him not to ask a question that was begging to be asked. “No torches and spears from me, sir,” he assured the dragon. “I’m a hustler, is what I am, from the day I was born. If you got a paid job for me, then that’s the job I’m doing.”
Waxman smiled sadly. Squib had seen that class of a smile before in the clinic when he was waiting for his momma’s shift to finish. Momma called that class of smile the BLT, for “Bad Luck Teeth.” Usually doctors pasted on that smile when they were about to hang a right into the terminal ward.
“It ain’t a paid job, exactly,” said the mogwai.
“Shit,” said Squib. “Am I dying?”
“We is all dying, boy,” said Waxman. “Even Lord Highfire here, but you is definitely further along the road.”
“Come on, Waxman,” objected Squib. “Don’t be fooling around. I been a good runner for you these past years.”
This was true, and so Waxman reluctantly relented. He had been hoping to spin out the telling a while more.
“Okay, son,” he said, “Vern gave you the dragon breath. A full dose. And that is fatal to humans, I kid thee not.”
Squib could not believe it. “You killed me for delivering vodka? I can’t believe it. My poor momma.”
At the mention of Squib’s momma, Waxman interjected with the “but.”
“But the effects can be ridden out if a fella has access to the antidote.”
“Yeah,” said Squib miserably, “and I bet the antidote is growing out of a goat’s ass on the top of Mount Everest and I gotta go there directly.”
“Not exactly,” said Waxman, opening one hand to reveal a small shining amber disk. “This here is one of Vern’s scales. He molts them all over the place. You need a fresh-dropped scale maybe twice a week for a few months.”
Squib took the disk. “And what? I just lay it on my forehead or something.”
“Oh, hell no,” said Waxman, straight-faced. “That right there is what we call a pessary, which means you gotta stick it where the sun most definitely do not shine.”
“Come on, Wax,” said Vern, “don’t toy with the kid.”
“You chew on it,” said Waxman. “Like tobacco. Until the color is gone. That should get her done.”
“And if I don’t chew on it?”
“Cramps initially,” said Waxman.
“And then a burning in your innards,” said Vern.
“Nausea,” added Waxman. “But you won’t mind that none, occupied as you’ll be with the burning.”
“Then you vomit up your lungs.”
Waxman disagreed. “Last guy shit out his lungs.”
“No, he shit out his shitpipe. Colon, you know. Lungs were up top.”
“You is the expert,” conceded Waxman. “Either way, everything comes out.”
“And then your heart explodes,” said Vern.
Squib stuffed the scale in his mouth and sucked it like a baby sucking a pacifier. It tasted bitter, but a fella could endure it, considering the alternative.
“You get the implications?” asked Waxman, while Squib worked on the scale. “You mess with Vern and you don’t get your scale. You bring the mob and you don’t get your scale. It’s a little insurance for Lord Highfire.”
Squib nodded. He got it. In his entire life he had never so completely gotten something.
“So, you take up my duties while I recharge. And then in three months I’m back and you’re clear.”
Vern’s brow ridge shot up. “Three months, Wax? You total dick. Three years, you told me. I coulda lasted three months without cable. Shit, I can brew my own hooch if I have to.”
“Did I say years?” said Waxman, all innocence. “I meant months, Highfire. My sincere apologies.”
“You played me, Wax. It’s like you don’t even want me to kill this kid.”
“He’s a soul, Vern,” said Waxman, earnestly restating his philosophy. “We is all souls. You gotta get with that.”
“They’re gonna carve that souls lecture on your headstone,” said Vern, actually kicking the leg of Waxman’s bed. “And I don’t gotta do nothing because I’m the last dragon.”
“So you say,” said Waxman, “but it’s a big world and you ain’t took a squint around for a long time.”
“Taking a squint around, as you puts it, Wax, is liable to get a fella killed. Dragons learned that the hard way.”
Squib watched them go at it and realized that he could easily have made a dart for the door.
But I got dragon breath in my lungs. So there’s nowhere to run.
He figured he’d heard about dragon breath somewhere, read it in a book, maybe. Admittedly, it sounded like horseshit, but only if a guy didn’t believe in dragons. When there was a dragon standing in front of a person, it seemed to Squib like that person had no option but to believe in anything and everything.
“Okay,” he said, “I accept the job offer, like I even got a choice. What time I got to be here?”
Waxman broke off his arguing with Vern. “What time? I’d say nightfall. That okay with you, Highfire?”
Vern ran some numbers in his head. “At the earliest, Wax. I got to go into production, if you know what I’m saying.”
“I hear you, brother. What say we party down some? Have ourselves a send-off. Then you can leave the first deposit on site for the shoveler here.”
Squib was starting to get the picture.
Shit, he thought, and then said aloud, “Shit.”
Chapter 7
HOOKE WOKE UP THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FEELING LIKE HE’D come out the other end of the Rumble in the Jungle. Maybe this thought was prompted by the sight of his right hand wrapped up like a fighter’s mitt, not to mention the pounding in his skull, which felt like Ali was floating like a butterfly in there, throwing lightning jabs at his eye sockets.
Jesus God, Hooke wanted to say, but he was thwarted in his desire to break the second commandment by a mouth drier than the sand in a fire bucket, and so could barely manage to separate his lips.
What issued forth from those lips was not language so much as an animal growl, but it was enough to attract the attention of a nurse on the other side of the screen which separated him from the rest of the small ward.
The nurse was Elodie Moreau, who looked like she could sleep for a hundred years, given the opportunity.
Girl looks dog-rough, thought Hooke. Maybe I done picked the wrong woman to yearn for.
But then Elodie smiled at him and Hooke’s doubts were dispelled.
“Constable Hooke,” she said. “You all came back to us, thank the Lord.”
Hooke wasn’t dumb enough to read anything into the Lord being thanked; this was a platitude, pure and simple. But a lot of relationships were sparked off by trauma. Maybe this could be one of those.
Elodie trickled some water down his parched gullet, and when Hooke felt he’d been sufficiently l
ibated, he asked, “How long I been out?”
“All night,” she said, “and most of the morning. Snoring like a hog, too. I never heard such a racket.”
She’s testing my limits, thought Hooke. People get emboldened, kick a guy when he’s down.
“Careful there, Miss Nurse,” he said softly, but with an edge to it. “Even lawmen got feelings.”
Elodie stepped back. “Sorry, Constable. Guess my bedside manner could use a little work.”
“That depends on the bed,” said Hooke, and left it at that. Maybe next week, if this Carnahan storm passed by, he could drive around to Elodie’s shack for a proper thank-you.
“Any calls come in for me?” he asked now.
“Nothing came in, but I called Lori,” said Elodie.
Hooke grunted. Lori was the secretary he shared with Mayor Shine. Petit Bateau couldn’t fund an extra secretary, so the truth was that Hooke did most of his own dispatching and paperwork, but Lori manned the phone most weekday mornings.
“She miss me?” asked Hooke.
“Lori was wondering as to your whereabouts, so I told her you’d been bitten and was resting up here. Nothing much going on in the office. Lori says there was some ruckus downriver last night—some swamp rats dynamite-fishing, probably.”
Dynamite-fishing, thought Hooke. Shit, these people are making up their own narratives.
“I told Lori that you’d be out for another few days at least. Maybe a week.”
“A week? I don’t have no week to be laid up here.”
This was true. Hooke sensed that time was a commodity he didn’t have an abundance of in this case.
How he saw it was like this: Ivory dispatches him into the bayou to deal out some swamp justice to Willard Carnahan. This makes sense for Ivory as Hooke is his man on the water. But then the New Orleans boss decides to copper-fasten his hold on Regence by sending a spy to video Hooke doing the job Ivory dispatched him to do.
A tangled goddamn web, thought Hooke.
So now the whole situation had clusterfucked itself: Ivory’s spy was dead or messed up, and the boss knew that Hooke was both onto him and after him.
If it was Ivory, thought Hooke. ’Cause if it wasn’t him, I ain’t got a clue who to hunt.
He should have a clue, he knew that, but the venom hangover was clouding his brain. The situation was critical, but Hooke knew he’d better get it smoothed over. Ivory coming after him was interfering with his own plan to go after Ivory, which had always been his endgame.
“You got to lay up, Constable,” said Elodie, trying to sound firm. “We just took you off dialysis. The doctor wants to keep you in for observation in case the symptoms reoccur.”
Hooke sat up, with some considerable effort. “Just help me out of bed, Elodie. I got a call to make.”
“I ain’t even told you about the physical therapy,” objected Elodie. “You wanna lose the use of that entire arm? Because that’s what you’re fixing to do by making a call.”
“Put a pamphlet under my pillow,” said Hooke. “I can look after myself.”
Elodie made another attempt to dissuade Hooke. “You shouldn’t even be walking, Constable,” she said. “Not in your condition.”
Hooke swung his legs out of bed. “Honey, I led a patrol across Ramadi with a concussion, so I think I can make my way across the floor.”
Elodie flinched some at the endearment but swallowed it down. “You could go blind!”
“Well, in that case,” said Hooke, “I’ll most certainly go back to bed.”
The girl was certainly doing her best to save his life, he had to give her that. Even though she wasn’t exactly sweet on him, not as yet.
I’ll redouble my efforts. Maybe put her kid in hospital for a few weeks to give me a clear run at her. But right now, there is containment to be attempted with the king of New Orleans.
Thinking of Ivory soured Hooke’s mood a few notches, and he forgot his fondness for Elodie Moreau. “Lead me to my phone, woman,” he snapped, pulling a drip feed out of his arm. “I got to be about my business.”
Elodie had some sass in her and snapped right back, “Your phone is in the locker, Constable. A man who led a patrol across Ramadi oughta be able to navigate a few feet of linoleum.”
Hooke considered punching the nurse with his good hand, then reconsidered. This was a clinic, not a dark alley, and punching a nurse never looked good in print. Plus it might be that he would swing wild and land on his ass. So he smiled as sweetly as was possible for a man like him and said, “My apologies, Miz Moreau. I am a little testy today. Must be the poison in my system.”
“No need to apologize, Constable Hooke,” said Elodie, her flash of anger disappearing as quickly as it had arrived. “I’m a mite testy myself, so there’s a pair of us in it.”
Not yet, thought Hooke, but soon enough.
HOOKE STUMBLED INTO the dayroom with his phone, glowering at some good old boy with a gashed-up forehead until the man took his copy of Guns and Ammo and skedaddled.
Hooke sent a message to an old-fashioned pager number and ten minutes later got a call back from his handler. Regence would have preferred to have a sit-down with Ivory Conti himself in his retro Mafia hotel, but the boss ran his criminal enterprises the same way he’d run his financial-adviser office back in Wall Street, i.e., like a real business. If a street-level operative wanted a meeting with the top dog, it would take six months to find an opening in his calendar, and even then, it would probably end up being five minutes on FaceTime. So Hooke would have to content himself with a call.
That being said, being as Hooke was one of Ivory’s pet cops, he would at least merit a grade-A flunky, the Rolls-Royce of bodyguards: the twin.
The single twin.
Tragic story. See, there had been two twins until recently, which was the accepted norm by definition, until one became the first casualty of Ivory’s land grab, gunned down outside an inner-city community center by a teenage hit girl.
And then there was one: a big African Creole bruiser by the name of Rossano Roque. Rossano was way into his martial arts. He could chop down a tree with his hands, so they said. Picked up the name Grasshopper in fifth grade after that old show Kung Fu, then sawed it off to G-Hop when he grew up some. And G-Hop it was to this day. Only Ivory called the big man Rossano.
“What’s the big emergency, cop?” asked G-Hop. “I got business needs attending.”
This was reassuring. Rossano was his usual pissed-off self, so nothing out of the ordinary.
“Relax, Roque,” said Hooke, trying to sound all casual, like he wasn’t laid up with snake bite.
“You wanna tell me what we’re doing here, Regence? If the Feds are up on me, then this don’t look good for either of us.”
“Up on me,” thought Hooke, sneering. Someone’s been watching The Wire.
“If the Federales were up on you, I’d know, and shortly after, you’d know,” said Hooke. “You ain’t even on their list, small fish like you.”
G-Hop snuffled down the phone, and Hooke could imagine his face, looking all pissed off. It was typical of these slingers: They all wanted liberty and notoriety. Difficult to have it both ways.
“Good,” he said. “That’s the way I like it, Hooke. Anonymity, you understand?”
“Smart move, kid. Stay low-profile. Those old Mafia guys were assholes. All bling and celebrity trim, right? Showboating is why they got their collars felt. I like your way better: low-profile. Nothing special about Rossano Roque.”
Roque exhaled noisily. “You know, Hooke, I can’t figure the angles on you baiting me. You’re crooked, we own you. So why the back-and-forth today all of a sudden?”
Hooke decided to come clean on his condition. “Maybe it’s residual venom got me acting all crazy. Nurse said it might happen.”
“You got bit?” said Roque.
“Yeah, I got snake-bit. Stupid, right, a man of my experience? But it happens. I just wanted to assure you that in spite of my incapacitati
on, the job Mister Conti entrusted to me is done. Maybe you already know that?”
“I know now. You got me on the phone for that? You couldn’t have sent an emoji? Thumbs-up or some shit?”
“Sometimes communication breaks down,” said Hooke. “Then people forget their roles and chaos can’t be far behind. Am I right?” Hooke was listening close. Thing was, he was talking complete gibberish unless a person had the code, the code being that Ivory sent a watcher. And if that was the case, then no doubt his head of security had set it up.
But G-Hop sounded mystified. “What the hell, Hooke? I think that venom is all up in your system because you are talking total crap. The only one forgetting their role is you, frankly. I am the boss and you are my dog. A clever dog, granted. An America’s Got Talent level of dog, but a dog nonetheless. So, I got your message: The job is done. And Mister Conti is grateful, which will be reflected in your envelope. Can we leave it at that? Can we not elaborate around civilians where there could be lasers bouncing off the window? So long as Mister Conti is clear of this shit, he don’t wanna hear about it. Are you feeling me, Hooke?”
G-Hop was making a lot of sense. His boss, Ivory, knew more than most how evidence of any sort had a way of making it on to the Internet. Many of his banker friends from back on Wall Street had been sunk by cell phone video or recovered emails.
Maybe I was wrong, Hooke thought. Maybe Ivory ain’t my guy.
Then again, it was more likely that Roque would make day-to-day decisions like getting some dirt on Hooke to keep him loyal.
“So you didn’t send no kid to video me doing the deed?” he asked.
“No, I goddamned didn’t,” shouted Roque. Then he realized the implication of this question. “Are you telling me that a kid shot video?”