Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“Look, I have had a really shitty night. I’ve gone along with this as long as I could, because it’s basically my punishment from God or something and I’ve learned to live with and accept it. But you are just blatantly making shit up now, and I’d like you to stop.”

Falconer squared his shoulders and gave me his contemptuous profile. “If you were a reader of the Companion—which is to say, if you were a proper detective, sir—you would know that Falconer invents nothing. The cases I pursue are simply too unusual and horrible to make it into the electronic media. But they are not hidden, sir, no. They are published. They are the stuff of mainstream consideration within our sainted trade. And they are not invented.”

He bullshitted on the subject for a while longer. Something still felt wrong. It wasn’t the usual weirdness index of my life. Something else. A bomb not dropped.

“…the police scientists confirmed that the placenta filling the gullet of the dead girl strapped to the bed once shared a womb with the live boy who nursed his testicular wounds. It had been cleverly preserved by a master criminal for precisely this purpose—choking the boy’s girlfriend to death. Said master criminal being the boy’s mother, of course.”

“Mr. Falconer?”

“One moment, young man. As I said, both parties bore the mark of a hypodermic syringe. My supposition was that the boy’s mother entered the house while he was engaged in coitus with the young lady. She assaulted them both with a hypodermic syringe charged with a substance that made them both more…pliant. She was restrained, and the placenta shoved into her mouth. She choked to death while the mother tied him into a hard wooden chair and rrrrutted with him until blood vessels under his scrotum burst against repeated violent contact with its edge. Crime and sex are inextricably linked, I have found.”

“I was wondering—”

“I’m sure you were. You’re a bright young man. She did indeed force her son to ejaculate into a plastic drip-feed bag such as is found in medical establishments, later to introduce his vigorous sperm into her bloodstream for the purpose of youth preservation. I suspect she bred him specifically for sexual entertainment and, in her twisted mind, the production of age-retarding chemicals. The girl was killed as instruction and punishment: you belong only to Mummy. The most fascinating detail, I believe, were the ligatures on his thighs—left, quite literally, by his mother’s apron strings. I considered meeting the woman, you know. A schoolboy’s uniform and some kind of cricket box to protect my precious scrotal treasures, and I would have been in like Flynn.”

“Why are you going to Los Angeles, Mr. Falconer?”

He broke into a beatific grin. “The game is afoot, my young colleague. I have learned of a sexual demimonde in Los Angeles.”

“No kidding.”

“Oh yes. But not the usual thing, no. These aren’t pissdrinkers or vomit-fellatio specialists, no no. I am talking of parties wherein persons possessed of certain diseases have young things from foreign climes shipped in for their filthy pleasures, and then take bets on which of them will die of the transmitted infections.”

“That’s horrible.”

“And one of these persons holds in false ownership a certain statuette, avian in appearance, hailing from Malta. My services have been engaged to retrieve the bird and—”

I fished my lighter out of my pocket and passed it to him. “Hold this for a second, would you?”

“Of course.”

He took the lighter. I punched him repeatedly in the face, and then told the flight attendants and surrounding passengers that I’d seen Falconer trying to set light to something in his shoes.

By the time we began to orbit LAX, Falconer’s face looked like bad steak. Everyone had had a go, even the old lady from five rows back, who tore up a plastic drinks tumbler and slashed him like she was a street fighter. I opened up a vomit bag and pulled it over his head. Trix slept through the whole thing.

Leaning over Trix, I looked out at Los Angeles. An orange bowl inverted over the city. From a distance, you wonder how anyone can live there.

Stop-start shuffling our way through LAX security into Arrivals, she spotted something and pointed to me. An Asian girl in a business suit behind the cattle-fencing human funnel that pours people out into the hall, holding a clipboard with TRIX +1 scrawled in marker on the top sheet.

Trix grabbed my hand and tugged me through the crowds to the girl. “I’m Trix Holmes, and this is my plus-one. Brom sent you?”

The girl showed us a row of bleached teeth. I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Well, hi. I’m Blair? Brom’s assistant? I’m to drive you out to the house? Follow me?”

Bone-chilling air-conditioning gave way to a sweat-and grime-laden wall of hot air as we got out onto the street. I actually took a step back from the force of it. Blair struck out across the street like a native guide, giving the finger to cabs and limos as she strode toward the short-stay parking lot. A neutral silver SUV bleeped hello to her keychain, and she left us to throw our bags into the trunk and clamber in.

“I’m going to have to leave you at the house? I’m running late for my vaginal tightening appointment?”

Trix frowned. “Honey, you’re twenty-one if you’re a day. There’s no way in hell your vagina needs anything of the sort. Besides, everyone’s a different size. It’s just nature.”

Blair turned around in her chair and looked Trix up and down as if considering a circus freak. “Yeah, well. You’re from New York.”

Trix looked at me like it was my fault and leaned back in the chair. It was a long drive. On and off freeways, wending up and down ramp roads. My attention would drift, and then I’d look back out the window and have no idea where we were. Blair wasn’t in the mood for a guided tour, and just shrugged her shoulders at every question. Her mind was obviously on the minutes ticking away toward her prized vaginal tuck.

An hour of this, and we pulled up in front of a blindingly white house perched on the edge of what looked like a cliff face, looking down on the valley of Los Angeles. I got out of the car first, eager to relieve my aching ass. The light was beautiful. I never realized, until I was there, exactly why the movie business settled out there. It wasn’t just getting out of New York and living an economic version of the Wild West. Up there, over the smog line, the light had a sharp clarity that would have made a painter cry. Somehow, though, I figured every artist in L.A. was probably down there under the orange, cutting up sheep and making funny boxes and calling that art instead.

I tried explaining the thought to Trix, but she told me about the acquaintance of hers down there who performed his art by breaking into abandoned hospitals and reenacted horrifying nineteenth-century medical procedures with morbidly obese mental patients and strippers covered in blood.

Blair let us into the house. The hallway looked like a four-star hotel lobby. Blair explained that Brom was tied up for much of the day, but wanted us to treat the house as ours until he got home. She gave us the once-over one more time, as if judging how much of Brom’s stuff we could steal, and then took off at a brusque speed, eager for stitches in her nether regions.

Once the door was shut, I made a show of looking around. “Your friend does okay for himself, huh?”

“Brom’s very successful. Takes on big corporate cases to fund pro bono civil-liberties cases. He used to be in New York, fighting Giuliani. Moved out here after 9/11.”

“Good friend of yours?”

“We dated a little bit, I guess. He’s a very good friend, yeah.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mike, we had this conversation. Are you going to be weird about this?”

“No, no. Just tired. It’s been a bad couple of days, you know?”

“You’re telling me.”

“You’re coping pretty well.”

She grinned and kissed me fast and hard. “Why shouldn’t I? You saved me.”

“Just remember that when your lawyer ex wants to do pro bono in your pants.”

“Beats paying rent. I’m joking. Quit looking like you just shit yourself.”

“I’m going to go exploring for food. If I’m not back in a couple of days, call the police. I may have gotten lost in this guy’s closet or something.”

Are edamame food?”

“Sure,” Trix called from the living room, about two miles away from me in the kitchen. “It’s a bean. You steam them and have them with rock salt.”

I replaced the bag of green things that had been left artfully on the counter and went back to grubbing around the cupboards in the vast brushed-steel kitchen. Piles of unopened packets and boxes of alien things that could possibly be food, and stacks of books about the Atkins and GI diets. I wasn’t totally convinced that Trix’s friend ever actually cooked in here. Nothing seemed to have been used, and things were arranged for aesthetic pleasure more than utility. This was a guy that ate out a lot.

Since Trix wasn’t in sight, I went through the drawers. A sheaf of bills in the first drawer, each one bearing a Post-it note saying that an assistant had paid it. The sheaf sat a little high, for the depth of the drawer. I pulled the sheaf out. The drawer had a false bottom, a DIY job held in by two clips. I popped the left-hand clip and lifted the thin wooden sheet up. There was a handgun, a new leather shoulder holster, and a slim box of ammunition underneath. The gun’s license documentation was laid underneath it.

I have some knowledge of guns from the Chicago days. I don’t particularly like them. That said, I’ve never met a lot of people in law enforcement or the investigative business who did. Cops tend to view them as tools. Detectives tend to see them either as insurance or, on many occasions, an excuse to be shot at. The guys who like guns are usually the ones found on slabs with ballistics geeks tweezering lumps of pulped metal out of their chests.

I smiled at this gun. It was a Ruger Super Blackhawk, .44 Magnum. I met the famous detective Jay Armes at an investigators’ conference once. He had hooks for hands—his original hands had been blown off by a box of railroad torpedoes when he was a kid, and legend had it that he’d gotten a pistol built into one of the hooks—frightening hair, and a jacket that hurt my eyes. He’d been shot at by a .44, and he said that the joke about the Super Blackhawk, back in the fifties when it was first launched, was that it was a great gun for holding up trains. You just fired the gun at the train and it stopped. It’s a huge, heavy piece of blued metal, a six-shot revolver—not an I-need-a-gun-to-protect-my-property kind of gun. The long barrel, the great big bullets, and the sheer weight of the thing damping off the recoil makes the Super Blackhawk an extraordinarily accurate, one-shot-stopper of a gun. Even if that huge damn bullet somehow doesn’t kill you, the rocket force of the impact kicks you clean off your feet. These days, it’s mostly used as a hunter’s handgun. Though God knows what you’d hunt with it. Anything smaller than a rhino would probably splatter like God himself reached down from the clouds and punched it in the head.

This was a guy who wanted a nice big retro-style gun. A six-shooter, no less. With a shoulder holster, even, that still reeked of new leather and creaked when I pressed on it. I bet he put it on and posed with it in the mirror every now and then. Someone should have told him that Travis Bickle was from New York and Dirty Harry was from San Francisco and neither of them would have been caught dead in Los Angeles.

I replaced the sheet carefully.

The fridge was the size of a car. I found some fruit in the bottom bin, and piled bananas, clementines, apples, and passion fruit on a plate, grabbing a knife and a couple of spoons before walking it through to Trix.

Trix was in front of the widescreen TV, watching a local news report about a blind man who’d been arrested for raping his guide dog.

I laid the fruit next to her. “Sometimes I almost understand why that old bastard wants to use the book on America,” I smiled.

Trix picked up a clementine and started skinning it without looking away from the screen. “I don’t even get how he’s going to do it. Read it out on TV?”

“Apparently he can’t do that. You have to be in the actual presence of the book, to get the subsonic effect or something. They’ll take it from town to town, like the Freedom Train in the seventies. Big public gatherings. Putting the reset button to all you weirdos one crowd at a time.”

Trix flipped a segment of clementine into her mouth. “Will that work?”

“He seems to think so. I mean, unless this is all one big costly joke at my expense.”

“You have to admit that’s possible.”

“Yeah. No. I don’t think so. Not this time. He really believes it. And, you know, he might be crazy, but he’s not stupid.”

Trix chewed and considered. “I don’t think you should give him the book.”

“Why not?”

“Okay. Assume this isn’t totally nuts and this book can somehow affect people’s brains. Is it right that the government should be able to reset people’s personalities to some two-hundred-year-old notion of ‘morality’?”

I sliced off some apple. “Because people should be free to rape their own guide dogs any time they like?”

“Aside from the fact that there are many, many working bestiality relationships in America today—”

“You’re kidding me.”

“There was a TV documentary about it last year.”

“That’s not exactly anyone’s idea of a mainstream society, Trix.”

“Says who? It’s on national TV and it’s not mainstream? This is the mainstream. This is how life is.”

“You’re going to sit there and defend dogfucking as a lifestyle choice?”

“Why do I have to defend it? Why not just accept that such relationships exist and then ensure that abuse isn’t taking place?”

“Fucking a dog isn’t abusing a dog?”

“Why not find out first, before condemning it? Adult animals crossbreed all the time. When I was a kid, my rabbit and my guinea pig were shafting each other senseless every season. It’s not like we’re talking about pre-sexual beings.”

“Trix, you are seriously defending people who fuck animals here.”

“I’m saying there’s more going on in the modern psyche than can be defined by some Puritan notion of the way life should be. Hell, in the last couple of weeks I’ve done things to you that are still illegal in some states. The pace of change in the way we live isn’t limited to the number of consumer products available, Mike. Hell, look at the way porn’s changed.”

“I know. I saw a TV show with the guy who invented anal sex.”