Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

I got that little see-saw feeling in my stomach when something I can’t put my finger on is wrong. Like knowing something’s waiting around the corner for me with big teeth and a hard-on. “How did you know I’m a detective?”

“You have the smell on you. The smell of Crime. I, too, am in the life. A consulting detective. Falconer’s the name. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Um… no.”

“But I was recently featured in The Investigator’s Companion.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“The Companion ? The monthly journal for detectives?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Aaah. That explains it. I am Falconer , boy! I am the world’s greatest consulting detective. I, sir, am the man who solved a crime by placing the deceased victim’s penis in my mouth.”

“You sucked the corpse off.”

“Don’t be so disgusting,” Falconer said. “No wonder you don’t read the Companion. You are plainly some kind of hired pervert. I simply needed to learn of the woman who had sex with him before he died. My early years as a male prostitute have gifted me with exceedingly sharp senses and a preternaturally strong tongue. By tasting the cadaver’s todger, I could tell not only that the woman used an extremely strong spermicide—which robbed me of the use of my lips for some moments—but also that the woman’s vagina had a uniquely horrible flavor. This led directly to a female user and dealer of amphetamine sulphate—which quite ruins the taste of a woman’s secretions—posing as a vagrant prostitute to entrap and murder the man.”

I accidentally on purpose kicked Trix in the ankle. She didn’t wake up. I hated her.

“Not the strangest crime I ever prosecuted, of course,” Falconer said, picking his nose. “Imagine the scene: A slender, flat-chested girl with a small bottom covered entirely in blood, and a very old man on the floor with no penis at all. And only I, the great consulting detective, possessed of supernatural skills honed by years as a professional lover of all mammals, could possibly solve this case. Anus dentata, would you believe.”

“A… what?”

“Anus dentata. Rare, but all too real. The old gentleman on the floor with no undercarriage preferred to take his pleasure through the tradesman’s entrance. However, the poor girl’s anal teeth would snap shut involuntarily upon local muscular stimulation. Severing and quite possibly devouring the bishop’s erection.”

“The bishop.”

“Oh, good God, yes. The girl, possessed of a boyish figure, had been wearing a school uniform that featured a trouser rather than a skirt. The unfortunate and unpenised man of God was attempting to wean himself off choirboys. It would be sad if, frankly, it were not so very funny. What sort of cases do you pursue?”

“Divorces. Ostrich abuse. Tantric bestiality.”

“Oh! A kindred spirit! A brother in the damp corridors of sexual invention and the romance of Crime! Did you hear about the Red Shoes Killer?”

“No.”

“Four crack whores found sticking out of a washing machine. Their feet had been lightly grated, and then they’d been forced to dance on a floorspace thinly dusted with finest cocaine. The killer, you see, was a lecturer in English Literature, both hedonistic and hebephrenic. Someone attempting, misguidedly, to empower childlike behavior through vice. The Red Shoes ! You remember it? ‘ “Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton!” ’ A fairy tale. Consider the scene again: blood leaking from tortured soles stung with cocaine, forcing motion? Blood-slicked feet, my brother detective—red shoes.”

“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.