Crooked Little Vein

by Warren Ellis

  “But what you need to get, Mike, is that the Roanokes are not normal. I mean, this isn’t just ‘the very rich are not like you and me.’ There are stories.”

  “Uh-huh.” I busied myself with beer.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Oh, you just had to, didn’t you, Trix?”

  “I want to know. I couldn’t just leave that hanging in the air.”

  Bob snorted.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Well, one story says that’s how the Old Man was conceived. See, when guys are hanged by the neck, when their neck breaks they usually ejaculate. And apparently when the Old Man’s pop hanged himself, his mom scraped up his spooge and, well…shoved it up herself. So, you know, ‘hanging’…it just made me laugh, I’m sorry.”

  There was a clanking of cutlery on ceramics. The middle-aged couple sitting next to us had stopped eating, and were looking at Bob like they wanted to unload six-shooters in his face.

  “See?” Bob rasped, leaning over the table. “They’ve got friends fucking everywhere.”

  The doors to the kitchen banged open. The waitress emerged behind a long steel trolley, which she pushed with much pantomimed effort toward our table.

  On it was a horizontal section of a bull. As if someone had taken a steer, chainsawed the sides off, and chucked the middle part on an eight-foot-long steel platter on wheels.

  It still had a horn sticking out of it.

  It was served blue; cold, basically, just seared to seal it and slapped on the plate. If it had still had both sides, a good vet could’ve gotten it up on its feet in an hour or so.

  The waitress parked it at the end of the table, and gave Bob outsized, sawtoothed cutlery. “Message from chef,” she growled. “He said to tell you that if you don’t eat it all—again—he’s going to take you outside and kick your nuts up into your lungs.”

  Bob laughed nervously. “What does he mean, again? I was sick last time. And the time before that, I ate it all, and neither you nor he were working that night. I ordered the Special, I’ll eat the Special. Get me some steak sauce.”

  Trix and I must’ve been staring. Bob looked at us as he sawed off a chunk of microcooked steer and forked it onto his plate. It oozed clotted blood from the thick veins sticking out of the meat. “This is real Texas food,” Bob said. “This is what we eat. Great fucking country, Texas.”

  I thought Bob was going to start crying again as he chewed the raw meat.

  “Delicious,” he mewled.

  We sat there for five, ten minutes, silently watching Bob painfully shovel raw beef into his big, crushed face. Thankfully, our own food arrived at that point. A pound of meat on a flowery plate for Trix, and a huge chunk of rump for me. I turned it over with my fork. The skin was still on it. The skin’s brand was still intact. A big R.

  “Your fries,” the waitress announced. A metal pail of fries with what looked like a gallon of melted cheese poured on top.

  “I asked for the small portion,” Trix said.

  “That is the small portion,” the waitress said.

  Trix gave me a little smile. “I guess I know how they justify serving fries in a place that only serves stuff that came out of a cow.”

  “You got to eat it all,” Bob muttered stickily. “It’ll look bad for me otherwise.”

  Trix gave him her sweetest look. “Bob, I like you. I’m trying to make you feel comfortable. But, honestly, if you think I’m going to eat all this shit, you can just suck out my farts, okay?”

  The middle-aged couple got up to leave. Bob choked back a sob and went back to his hideous dinner.

  Trix met my eyes. “What? I’m only human, Mike. Though I might not stay that way if I eat all this. They’ll be pulling cholesterol out of my veins with a bulldozer.”

  “Quit moaning. My dinner’s still got the skin on it.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  I lifted up one cheek of my pan-fried ass to show her the brand.

  “R?”

  “Roanoke.” Bob coughed. “They’re in the cattle business, too. It’s a sign. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  He forked another squirting chunk of beef into his mouth, looked up at the ceiling fan, and started yelling as he chewed. “Look! I’m eating it, you bastards! I’m eating it all!”

  Bits of meat flew out of his mouth, hit the fan, and were evenly distributed all over the restaurant.

  Chapter 25

  Bob ate the entire damn thing, but was paralyzed afterward. After some cajoling, we arranged to briefly borrow a wheeled office chair from the restaurant’s back room, and trundled him out to the parking lot in it. He was still sucking scraps of flesh off the horn, and bellowing that he’d showed them, he’d showed them all. Oh, and that the chef was a whore.

  “Fuck this,” I said. “Get the keys from him. I’ll drive. We’ll dump his crazy ass in front of the hotel and pay someone to move him or kill him or something.”

  “This is how you treat your friends?”

  “He’s a nutbag, Trix. Look at him.”

  “Whooooores,” said Bob.

  “There you go. Get the fucking keys.”

  Trix patted him down and found the keys in his inside jacket pocket. “Thank God,” she groaned. “I wasn’t up for checking his pants.”

  Bob studied her with one eye, oddly drunken. “Mike never had the pretty girls before. How does he get the pretty girls now? I’m a goddamn Texan.”

  “You always talk to your buddies’ girls like that?” she frowned, tossing me the keys.

  I nearly dropped them.

  “That’s how I get into trouble.” Bob teared up. “I’m so lonely.” And, just at the point where we softened, he added, “Whooooores.”

  I opened up the rear door and tipped him into it.

  “What about the chair?”

  “Leave it here. They called that rump well done? If I’d poured my beer on it to wake it up it could’ve skated its way home in that damn chair. Get in.”

  “Oooh. Masterful.”

  “I’ll spank you right here in the parking lot.”

  “Promises.”

  “Just get in the car.”

  As we pulled out of the parking lot, Bob seemed to pull out of his meat fugue a little. “Left at the lights. Something I want to show you.”

  “Whores?”

  “No. Roanoke.”

  I looked for Trix’s take. She shrugged. “It’s what we came for.”

  I took us left at the lights, and a handful more directions took us out of town. The dark came in hard. Trix looked up out of the window. “Stars,” she said. “You don’t see so many in New York. You don’t realize.”

  “Kill the lights,” said Bob, “and pull over here.” We did, by a low wooden fence.

  “Get out and look into the field.”

  “What are we looking for, Bob?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The night air was warm. The fence surrounded a large field littered with sleeping cattle. We wandered to the fence, put our feet on it, and waited.

  “You look tense,” Trix said. “Have a cigarette while we’re waiting for whatever we’re waiting for.”

  “The lighter flame will screw up my night vision.”

  “Huh,” she said, thoughtfully. “You’re a real detective, aren’t you?”

  “What did you think I was?”

  “A cute, crazy guy who just fell into a crappy job. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that you were, you know, a real detective. Knowing about things like night vision sounds like real detective stuff.”

  “Well, at least I’m still cute.”

  “I like funny-looking guys.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  She giggled and hugged my arm. “You are just too easy to tease. Look. The cattle are waking up.”

  They were. And starting to move. Scattering. There was motion in the middle of the herd. Something running. I squinted, leaning in.

  There was a naked man among the ca
ttle. Silver hair in the starlight. Deep lines in his face when he moved out of the shadows of cows. Thin and leanly muscled, he sprinted between the frightened cattle, zigzagging wildly.

  He stopped sharply as one cow moved diagonally in front of him. And then sprang like a jungle cat, landing on top of the beast. There was something in his hand that sparkled in the starlight. Wire. He drew it between his fists and made a looping motion under the cow’s throat.

  The naked old man garroted the cow with great industry, bringing it down. Hard muscles in his upper arms worked under gray skin. The cow twitched, shat itself, and died.

  The old man clambered over the carcass and began to suckle at the dead beast’s udders. Then crouched, face shiny with corpse-milk under the stars, threw his head back and howled like a wolf into the night.

  We silently returned to Bob.

  “That’s Old Man Roanoke taking his nightly exercise,” Bob whispered. “G. Gordon Liddy gave him that garrote.”

  Chapter 26

  We drove back to the hotel in silence. Bob said he felt well enough to drive, so we stood there as he jammed himself back behind the wheel of the car and took off. We watched his car fishtail down the street and, a block and a half down, bury its front end in the door of a sports bar. Bob slumped out of the car door onto the street like a harpooned whale as the engine caught fire. Many large men came out of the bar with a surprising array of impromptu weaponry in hand.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and went inside.

  “I’m going to stay here a minute,” said Trix.

  “You want to help him?”

  “No, I want to see what they do to him. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  There was someone waiting for me in the hotel room.

  “So you think the Roanokes have it?” the White House chief of staff said, tying off in the armchair in front of an evangelist channel on the TV.

  “Oh, God.”

  “That’s good, Mr. McGill. Very good. We didn’t know that. As you’re probably aware, my president can’t run for office again, unless we. Ha ha. Unless we change the Constitution. Can you imagine if Junior Roanoke had gotten to Washington? If he’d filled a room with the lawmakers, the great and the good, stood there at his lectern, opened the book and slammed it down? The Founders didn’t imagine a time of radio and television. Politics was done in real time, with physical crowds. Just showing the people the pages on television, or reading them on radio, won’t work. People have to be in the presence of the book, for its acoustic effect to work. If he’d ever been able to address serious audiences, the outcome would have been terrible. I don’t think the Roanokes fully understand what they have.”

  I flopped into a chair. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve gotten you an appointment with the Roanoke family for tomorrow morning at eleven. If they have the book, you’re empowered to make them an offer of ten million dollars for it, contingent upon their permanent silence concerning its existence.”

  “I see.”

  “If they refuse, you’re to use your cell phone to call 555 555-5555. Let it ring twice, and hang up.”

  “That’s not a real number. 555 is the fake area code Hollywood movies use.”

  “We gave it to them. It works for us. Ring twice, then hang up.”

  “What happens then?”

  “A fuel-air bomb of some description, I believe,” he said, injecting himself with something brown and lumpy. “It’ll look like the gasoline reservoir under their ranch went up, they tell me. Eleven o’clock, then. Good hunting, Mr. McGill.”

  He stood up to leave, shakily. “Oh, and don’t worry, I haven’t taken heroin in your hotel room. I have a cage of genetically modified green monkies that express anticancer pharmaceuticals in their feces. Once a day, I have to inject dilute monkey turds. But it’s better than dying, yes?”

  “I’d have to think about that.”

  “Mmm. I imagine you would.”

  At the door, he stopped again.

  “One more thing, Mr. McGill. The girl.”

  “Is none of your business. You’re just the client. You don’t get a say in how I do my job or who I spend time with.”

  “Aren’t we scrappy these days, Mr. McGill?”

  “I’ve not been in the best mood lately, for some reason.”

  “You don’t enjoy your work, Mike. It is very sad. The girl, Mike, is a crazed omnisexual vaginalist with a string of lovers from genders they don’t even have names for yet. She’ll break your heart, Mike. Take my advice. Get your own room, put your pants on backward, and wear boxing gloves. It’s good for you. Trust me. I’m the White House chief of staff.”

  He drifted out the door like a handful of black feathers cast on a winter’s breeze.

  Chapter 27

  Trix came in. “I got the concierge to call the police. But the police beat Bob up, too.”

  I was drinking. I have two drinking faces, I’ve been told. The Social Drinking face, and the I Need to Drink Until the Front of My Brain Dies face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We have an appointment with the Roanokes tomorrow at eleven.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “My client was here. He told me things.”

  “He arranged it? Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  I summoned a smile from somewhere. “Sure.”

  “You want to come to bed?”

  No. I wanted to get really fucking drunk and then stab myself repeatedly.

  “Nah. We’re out of condoms. Forgot to buy any.”

  She sat on the arm of my chair. “What makes you think we need any?”

  “Not without condoms, Trix.”

  “True. I don’t know where you’ve been. But not what I meant.” She rubbed her palm over the back of my hand. “I have hands. You have hands. You and me: it doesn’t always have to be about vanilla humping, Mike.”

  “I like vanilla humping.”

  “Come here. I’m going to rewire your vanilla little brain with my bare hands.”

  Chapter 28

  In the middle of the night, I said, “You said you were my girl. To Bob. You said he shouldn’t talk like that to his buddies’ girls.”

  “I did.”

  “Are you my girl?”

  “Do you want me to be?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “Why would you want me to be your girl?”

  “Because you’re smarter than I am. Because you see things I don’t. Because you make me feel good just by looking at me. Because you fit right in my arms.”

  “Are you going to start singing?”

  “And because sometimes I want to strangle you.”

  “That can be hot.”

  “I’m going to strangle you right now.”

  “You can’t lift your arms.”

  “…shit.”

  “I’ve never been monogamous in my life, Mike.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “But you want me to be your girl.”

  “If you want to be.”

  “I like girls, too.”

  “I don’t want to watch or anything.”

  “I thought two girls was every man’s dream.”

  “You’re my dream.”

  “I don’t believe you said that.”

  “I’m never going to admit I did, so get over it.”

  She laughed, low in her throat.

  “How’s this going to work, Mike?”

  “There’s only one thing I want. For as long as we last. Because I’m a depressing realist.”

  She tensed against me a little. “And what’s that?”

  “Other guys, I’m always going to have a problem with.”

  “That could be a problem.”

  “Yeah. And I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. But the only thing I really want?”

  “Yeah?”

  “No matter what
you do? Come home with me at the end of the night.”

  And then she kissed me.

  Chapter 29

  If they don’t give us the book they’re going to blow up the ranch?”

  “Still want to come?”

  Okay, so maybe telling her that was a mistake. I’d arranged for a chauffeured car to take me to and from the Roanoke ranch outside town, and had suggested to Trix that maybe she wanted to stay at the hotel while I worked.

  “Yes I do! I’m not letting you go into that on your own!”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious! Jesus! They want to blow the place up if the Roanokes don’t hand over the book? Wouldn’t that blow up the book, too?”

  “I’m figuring they worked that out and that they know something we don’t. Maybe it’s in a vault or something. Anyway, I don’t think this counts as adventure.”

  She grabbed me by the back of the hair as I tried to put my pants on.

  “I’m coming.”

  “Yes yes okay fuck ow okay yes.”

  “Good.” She went off to find her boots, muttering.

  Came back. “Mike. They wouldn’t really…”

  “The guy sat in that chair and injected monkey shit into his arm, Trix.”

  “Yeah. Getting boots now.”

  I counted off five seconds.

  “He did what?”

  “Don’t be judgmental, Trix.”

  Chapter 30

  It was a long drive out under an unforgiving sun. Even with the A/C cranked up in the rear of the car, I was regretting putting on the jacket and tie.

  Trix was in boots, a short skirt, and a vest-top, showing off both sleeves of tattoos. “You think I’m covering up for the fucking Roanokes? I’m going to take a dump in their oven.”

  “Hell, I don’t care. I need to look professional, you can look any way you like.”