by Josh Cook
“I could.”
“Keep going till you’re exhausted. Or have some brilliant idea. What’s Lola up to?”
“Internet … at home.”
“She give you a summary of that particular monstrosity?” Trike gestured at the folder.
“No, but she said this. Hold on … wrote it down. She said, ‘The person responsible for this should hang, either at The Hague or the Louvre.”
Trike raised an eyebrow. Quickly slapped a nicotine patch on his arm. “Fantastic. Well, Max, keep on doing what you’re doing. Lola will keep doing what she’s doing. I’m going to listen to the radio while I figure this out. Wet my whistle with whichever of those notebooks you think is most useful.”
Max handed him the one on top.
“Was it really the one on top?” Trike asked.
“Not sure any are useful. Figured I’d be … efficient.”
Trike took the notebook and went into his office. Scanned his memory for reports of companies and/or individuals losing exorbitant sums of money in the weeks before the disappearance. He glanced at the notebook and then tossed it onto the desk. He sat down, leaned back in his chair, put his feet up, and reached back to turn the radio on.
The void.
Trike froze. He knew exactly where his radio was supposed to be. He knew where everything important in his life was supposed to be. He turned around slowly. With horror. Gone. His radio.
“Max!” he shouted.
“What?” Max shouted back.
“What the fuck?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where the fuck is my radio?”
“If you don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Max?” Trike shouted, exasperation sneaking into his voice.
Max threw the door open. “What?”
“Who the fuck stole my radio?”
“I don’t know. Is there a note?”
“A note. Yes. I’ll see if there is a note.”
“Ladies and gentlemen … the miraculous intellect of Trike Augustine.”
Trike checked the spot where his radio should have been. There was a note. He grabbed it and sat down. A violent perplexity contorted his face.
“It says, ‘I’ve stolen your radio like I took the key to the tower. Get off The Joyce Case before it’s too late.’ ”
“Gonna insult the reference?”
“No. I mean, references this bad are more perversions than references, but that’s not the point.”
“What is?”
“How did they know to steal my radio?”
Max shrugged. “Surveillance.”
“But why?”
Max shrugged again. “I don’t know … You break into places for fun.”
“Practice, Max. Practice.”
Trike was quiet for a moment. “Have you heard of anybody else working on the case?”
Max shook his head. “Nope.”
“You’d think with a reward that big, even as it shrinks, shamuses amateur and professional would be crawling on the case like ants in your nightmares.”
“True.”
“And Horn-Rims told me the police really aren’t trying to solve it. In fact, ‘someone has been systematically removing every honest cop from The Joyce Case,’ so that, at least from the police perspective, no one but me has a chance to solve the case.”
“Wait. You—talked—to Horn-Rims.”
“Stay focused, Max. The Lady on the Corner told me Joyce is getting revenge on someone. Someone stole my radio. Which is annoying with remarkable precision.”
“What are you getting at?” Max said suspiciously.
Trike took his feet off the desk. Leaned forward and put his head in his hands.
“What if Joyce is trying to get revenge on me?”
Max’s jaw dropped. His eyes went wide. He slowly walked across the room and sat down in one of the client chairs.
“Max,” Trike said. He reached under his desk and grabbed a tallboy from the mini-fridge. “I need a moment,” he cracked the beer, “and then I need a plan.”
THE PIPE WAS NECESSARY AND THE WEDNESDAY JOG
Trike’s face rested on the kitchen table. He had the long-party hangover. Ache in the back. Dense fog in the brain. Disavowal of life. Pulsing absence of vitality. The structure of his thoughts disintegrating like books in the rain.
There are two solutions to the long-party hangover; pin your ears back, grab a glass, and get drunk again or pop a couple of low-octane painkillers and go to sleep. And Trike wasn’t getting to sleep. Too much bullshit in his head. And getting drunk didn’t appeal, either.
The reason was initially obscure. An iceberg in the distance. It took awhile for Trike to identify it. He had not considered the case from this state of mind. Perhaps it was the right one.
He was forced to grab the biggest objects bobbing in the sewage of his thoughts and pin them down with great acts of violence. Connect facts with dynamite. Argue points with sledgehammers. Remember events with steel chairs.
And the largest turd in the flow was the fact that Joyce was seeking revenge on Trike. If the goal of revenge was frustration, Trike had to admit, the technique was a runaway success. But what kind of revenge is frustration?
Trike picked his face off the kitchen table. In a second and distinct motion, he raised the rest of him up from the chair. He dragged himself to the living room, where he picked up his pipe off the coffee table. He didn’t have the energy to keep his thoughts on the inside. He stalked about the house talking his brain out. The pipe was necessary.
“Perhaps there is no emotion in human experience more thoroughly understood than desire for revenge. Though its inherent escalation can lead to radically irrational-appearing action, the process is perfectly logical. No matter how distasteful the violence might be to our other sensibilities, we understand why someone murders an entire family to avenge the murder of a single brother. To deter potential future harmful actions, we demonstrate exponential retaliation to harmful actions.
“However, if frustration is the intended effect of the revenge, then, assuming the exponential response, calculating back to the original event, we find an offense that would not warrant revenge at all. But if frustration is not the point, what is?
“At its core, revenge is a message. A message to its target and to the wider world that might observe it. To the target, the message is essentially tautological, ‘I am getting revenge for’ the previous harm. To the wider world, the message is essentially prescriptive, ‘This is what happens when someone harms me.’
“Joyce is sending me a message.
“About something I did.
“I have no idea what he is trying to tell me.”
With the jolt of a somnambulist, Trike found himself on the near-empty second floor of his house in front of the bookcase holding eighty-four blank-on-the-inside notebooks. He believed that every case would be the one he finally wrote down and sold for the money Lola needed, but, after writing the title on the cover, barrenness swept over his brain like a breeze across the prairie. Facing the notebooks, Trike started remembering everyone who might want to get revenge on him, eliminating those who were definitely unable to act as Joyce had.
He stalked his way back to the sink.
Trike harmed criminals for a living. And could be a real asshole. There was no limit to potential revengers. The process seized.
“I need to induce direct communication. If he knows me well enough to steal my radio, then he must know the inherent risks of bodily attack, the small amount of value I place on most other objects in my life, and my ability to disassociate fear from my decision-making process. Why hasn’t he gone after Lola?”
Trike’s city ceased.
“He doesn’t know I love Lola.”
Trike put his hands on the sink. He imagined scenarios that would tell Joyce about Lola while giving him the opportunity to act on the new knowledge. Fifty-three seconds later, the invitation to the Annual Municipal Fancy-Dress Ball sitting in the
office recycling bin occurred to him.
Followed by a hollow certainty.
“Mayor will blab my attendance to anyone who will listen. No security. Lots of exits. Two into back alleys. Opportunity for chaos, like pulling the fire alarm, to cover things. Dress up as EMTs or something. Even a shitty kidnapping could work. And should the kidnappers get nasty, Lola would get nasty right back at them. Once they take her, they’ll have to send a message of some kind. Decode message. Collect remaining reward.”
Trike clapped his hands together.
“A plan. A motherfucking plan. Just got to tell Lola without Joyce knowing it’s a plan, which means I should probably stop talking out loud. But if the place is bugged, Joyce knows about Lola now, even if he also knows about the Ball Plan, and I’m too tired and, something else, to keep my mouth closed. So I’ve got to tell her the plan and convince her to agree to it,” Trike checked his watch, “on her motherfucking morning jog.”
He cursed at the sink.
And there was still no way he would get to sleep.
Trike sat on the couch and turned on CNN with picture-in-picture of the most reliable local news. There was a mound of local, regional, and national newspapers by the couch. He read them while absorbing the information on TV. An event in the world could always become the fact in a case.
In that way, Trike passed the time.
Then he changed into his jogging outfit. Maroon sweatpants tied up with shoelaces because the elastic was no longer elastic. A souvenir T-shirt from a Greenpeace fund-raiser that happened before he was born. A Chicago Bears Super Bowl Shuffle sweatshirt with the hood cut off.
He drove to Lola’s place and sat down on the front steps. He muttered, “This means that entire ranges of divergent intelligences—the most brilliant to the most imbecilic—would share the same action, rendering the entire exercise of establishing the opponent’s intelligence as a technique in discerning action completely and utterly pointless,” while he waited for her. She bounded out the door three minutes and twenty seconds later. Stopped short when she saw him.
“Jesus Christ, Trike, you could fucking call first and let me know.”
“Let you know what? That I wasn’t going to skip our Wednesday jog again? I feel bad enough missing the last few weeks.”
Trike stood up. Stretched and ran in place. Lola hopped down the stairs, shrugging.
“All right,” she said, “let’s go.”
Lola started jogging. To most, Lola started running. Trike caught up. Their conversation was cadenced by Trike’s breathlessness mixed with grunts of pain and ennui.
“I have a plan for The Joyce Case,” Trike started.
“Are you sure we’re under surveillance?”
“Because I’d put myself through this on a hunch.”
“Okay, what’s the plan?”
“I need you to go to the Ball with me and get kidnapped by Joyce.”
Lola sped up.
“Fuck. God. Damn. Doughnuts. You. Gofaster.”
“Is this a problem? Is it too fast for the great Trike Augustine?”
Trike caught his breath after the acceleration. “Joyce is trying to get revenge on me. I’m a hard guy to get revenge on. In terms of the surveillance we can safely assume has been conducted, I’m a high-functioning sociopath, an emotionless detecting machine, who assuages the endless agony of his irreparable disconnect from the emotions of human society through binge drinking and public displays of social disregard.”
“Yeah, they’re way off-base.”
“You can jog. And be sarcastic?”
“You of all people should not be surprised by multitasking.”
“Point taken.” Trike secured enough oxygen for the next statement. “Through your attendance at the Ball as my date, I can both show him that I, at the very least, have feelings for you, and give him an opportunity to act on that information.”
“Awfully chauvinistic, don’t you think?”
“No.”
“No? Then how come the woman is getting kidnapped?”
“He already knows Max is my partner, so if he wanted to attack through Max, he would have, and, you know, just because the plan leverages the rampant chauvinism of society does not mean the plan itself is chauvinistic.”
“So I’ve got to put myself in a dress, with makeup, deal with my mother about this—and you know how my mother is like about shit like this—so I can get kidnapped, which will tip my dad off that something is weird, don’t forget—”
“Never do.”
Lola sped up.
She continued, “All so you can get a message from Joyce, a message that may or may not be of any use whatsoever. And that’s before we think about the other risks in getting myself kidnapped.”
“This isn’t half as crazy as the stuff Max did at the Bureau. This is private detecting. Fuckin’ A, Lola, half the point of being a PI is getting to play dress-up.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to wear heels when you do.”
“I don’t have to,” Trike barely got out.
“How is Joyce going to find out you’re taking me to the Ball?”
“The Mayor sees all the RSVPs. He’ll pass it on. Even if that bald bitch doesn’t pass it on directly, it’ll make the gossip rounds. I could even ask you in the office. We know that’s being watched. We’ll do a planning session. Even if you don’t actually get kidnapped, we still learn something.”
They jogged in silence for a minute. As much silence as Trike’s lungs allowed.
“Take me to Paris.”
“What?” Trike said, stumbling.
“When you solve the case, use some of your money to take me to Paris. For a month.”
“Paris? Why Paris?” Trike gasped. “Given the unstable nature of our finances, are you sure that’s a prudent use of the money?”
Lola sped up again. “Do you really have enough oxygen to negotiate?”
“Jesus. Faster. You. Go. Okay. Okay. Paris from my portion of the reward money.”
Lola slowed down to a pace distantly related to reasonable.
“You know what the worst part of the situation is,” she said.
“What?”
“Wednesday is my long day.”
“Wednesday is your long day?”
“And if you want to preserve the illusion of this jog …”
Trike did not have enough air for an appropriate curse.
“You’re going to have to jog the whole route.”
“This is revenge, isn’t it?”
“Figured I’d join the club.”
“I thought revenge was a dish best served. Cold.”
“Sometimes it’s best served sweaty and cramped,” Lola snickered. “You picked a helluva week to quit smoking.”
AWKWARD, ANXIOUS, AND OUT-OF-PLACE
“After I drop you off,” Lola said to Janice, “I’m going to pick them up and we’re going to go through all the specifics.”
“That’s all well and good,” Janice said, “but is there anything is this plan to help you with your electricity bill?”
“No.”
“And you have, what, two weeks to pay your bill?”
“Not quite. I have two weeks to make a minimum payment and if I don’t make that, they’re going to shut off my power.”
“Can you make the minimum payment?” Janice asked.
Lola shrugged. “Maybe. It’ll just depend on what my other expenses are two weeks from now. But I do have the bike set up, so if the power goes out for a little while, it won’t be a disaster.”
“How can having your power turned off not be a disaster?” Janice demanded.
“My landlord said to just get him whatever I could, whenever I could, and my gas bill wasn’t nearly as bad—”
“Because you’re willing to live in a fucking icebox,” Janice said.
“Because I’m willing to wear the sweaters I’ve made, but yeah. So, I’ll have a roof over my head, a stove, hot water, my phone, and my laptop—”
/> “I know this is where you remind me and yourself that most of the humans in the world live quite nicely on even less than that, but, still, Lola, I mean, you’re going to be without electricity. In America. I mean, how’re you going to dry your hair?”
Lola sighed. “Well, you’re not wrong, and my mom would lose her shit if she found out, but, well, this is the life I’ve chosen.”
“The glamorous life of the research assistant to a supercomputer surrounded by a fleshy casing of barely functioning human being.”
“I like how you put ‘glamorous’ in there and almost kept your sarcasm on the inside.”
“We all have our talents. And I wasn’t being completely sarcastic. I still think you could solve your money problem by just selling your memoir.”
“I’m not writing a memoir.”
“Well, you’re writing something about your life with Trike. I’ve seen the journal in your apartment.”
“Yeah, well, I am writing something about my life with Trike, but it’s not a memoir.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t tried to sell it.”
“Oh, speaking of money you don’t have,” Janice transitioned, “what are you going to do about a dress?”
Lola shrugged. “I’m going to hit Vicki’s Vintage first. She usually has funky stuff. And she lets me pay over time. If there’s nothing there, then it’s Second Time Around and Goodwill.”
“Did you explain how long it can take to find a dress for one of these things?”
“Trike doesn’t care what I wear. And it’s not like we have any scheduling flexibility.”
“You’re sure this isn’t just some convoluted way to get you to go to the Ball with him?” Janice asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Lola replied. “He might be a genius with everything else, but when it comes to anything involving me, he has the sophistication and imagination of a twelve-year-old.”
“I’m sure his imaginative capabilities reach well into the mid-teens,” Janice said, wagging her eyebrows and phantom elbowing Lola in the ribs.
“What was that? Was that supposed to be dirty?”