Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“This is just lousy luck, though. It can’t happen to you all the time.”

“That’s the thing. It does. Every case I’ve had since I opened up business on my own. Never happened when I worked a desk. It’s something to do with my direct interaction with the world. I’m a shit magnet. I’m everything that never happened to anyone else.

“Here’s one. I was hired on a missing-persons gig. A sixty-five-year-old terminally ill man had walked out of the hospital and vanished. The family wanted me to find him. Turns out he’s joined an old people’s suicide club called Sinner’s Gate. Sick old people intending to kill themselves to escape indignity. Only Sinner’s Gate members believe they led bad lives and have no right to a painless exit.

“I found him in a shithole off the Bowery, in a room with a vacuum cleaner. You know what degloving is?”

She shook her head, nervous of the story.

“I walked in and he put his penis in the vacuum cleaner and switched it on. Ripped the entire skin off his penis instantly. That’s degloving. The pain and shock overloaded his nervous system, causing an immediate and massive heart attack that killed him stone dead on the spot.”

“Jesus Christ, Mike…”

“Big old fat naked dead guy flopped over a vacuum cleaner that was still chewing on his dick. This is my life, Trix.”

She looked at me. Direct eye contact, a little creasing of her mouth. I realized it was pity.

“Next round’s on me, Mike.”

She came back with doubles and sank back into her chair.

“So tell me,” I said, absently calculating how much more I should have, “what’s NULL stand for?”

“National Union of Lizard Lovers.”

“I guess I could have worked that one out.”

“And you call yourself a detective. Tell me about this case of yours.”

“Promise not to laugh.”

“No.”

“Okay…I’ve been asked to find an old book that was apparently written by some of the Founders immediately after drafting the Constitution.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Apparently you weren’t supposed to. It was lost from a private collection back in the 1950s and the new holder of the collection wants it back.”

“Tell me what this has to do with NULL.”

I pulled the black handheld computer from my inside jacket pocket. “According to the very cold trail, NULL obtained it a couple of years ago while blackmailing a mayoral personage, and then traded it to a businessman in return for an infinite lease on that building.”

“Not Rudy?” She laughed.

“No idea.”

“And you know Donald Trump owns a lot of property in SoHo, right?”

“…naaah.”

She leaned in, grinning. “Damn, this is interesting, though. Where did the book go next?”

I opened the handheld and powered it up. The way she looked at it broke at least two Commandments. “That’s one of the new Sonys. You know how much those things cost?”

“Um…no. I had a Palm when I was with Pinkerton.”

She snatched it off me. The screen lit her eyes like lanterns. “It’s got a camera!”

“Where?”

“This lens in the hinge. You didn’t see it?”

“I, ah… I just thought it was, you know, a high-tech hinge.”

Trix smiled at me. “Tard.”

Her black fingernail tapped smartly on the screen four times, and then she got out of her chair and crouched next to me. The screen swiveled on a pivot hidden in the hinge, so it was facing us. We appeared in a window on the screen.

“Smile, Mike.” A flash went off in the hinge arrangement and a still photo of us resolved on the screen.

In the picture, she’s looking at the lens and I’m looking at her.

Trix got up, still clutching the machine. “So your leads are in here?” More tapping brought up the document, and she started paging through it using the Up and Down buttons on the little keyboard in the lower half of the thing.

“This is the coolest thing,” she murmured.

“The client gave it to me. It hooks into the net so he can email me updates. Not that I expect any. The trail’s all cold. All I can do is pick a point and start following it. Gather as much information as I can along the way.”

“You’re not going to just jump to the end?”

“My dad had a saying: ‘Don’t pet a lion until you’re damn sure the bastard won’t try and eat you.’ I want to know what people wanted this book for, and what kind of channels it’s being moved along.”

“And that’s why you were at NULL.”

“And now I know. The book is pervert currency.”

“‘Pervert’ is a real pejorative, you know, Mike.”

“Hey, I’m from Chicago. In Chicago, perverts are people who don’t finish their whiskey and actually sleep with their wives at night.”

She gave me a look. “Don’t be too sure.”

I laughed and polished off my vodka. “What, you want to be my guide to America’s deviant underworld?”

Trix looked at me deadpan. “What’s the pay?”

“You’re serious.”

“Sure I’m serious. You need education in the ways of the modern world or else you are frankly doomed. And I can expand my thesis into something killer. I mean, if you just follow the cold trail in here, you’re going to be traveling coast-to-coast.”

I studied the bottom of my glass.

“I am totally serious, Mike.”

“You don’t even know me, Trix.”

“Mike, you’ve had five drinks and you haven’t even hinted at trying to jump me. If even half of what you’ve told me about yourself is true, you should’ve turned into the world’s biggest asshole years ago. But you’re sweet and you’re funny and you don’t give up. You know how hard it is, finding someone in this town who’s still determined ?

“And on top of that, life gets interesting around you, I need to write a killer thesis so I can get out of here and do amazing things, and you really, really need some help here.”

“This whole ‘you’re doomed, Mike’ thing isn’t doing wonders for me, you know…”

“Come on, Mike. Let me be your guide to the underworld. Virgil to your Dante.”

I really, really did not need to hear that line again.

The bottom of my glass wasn’t getting any less empty.

She kept looking at me.

No one had looked at me like I was a ticket to adventure before.

“A hundred dollars a day, and I’ll cover travel and accommodation.”

Trix’s mouth fell open.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Now I’m the one who’s serious.”

“Fuck.”

“A hundred bucks a day, seven days a week until we’re done. Could be a week, could be a month, could be two. Separate rooms, and we’re staying in good places. I’ve got a big expense account, and this is better than me just drinking it all.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Wow. That is not exactly what I was expecting.”

I felt like a prick for not giving her more than a hundred a day, to be honest. But then I also felt like a prick for buying the company of a smart pretty girl for a few weeks, so it all evened out.

This was, in case you were wondering, literally the only smart move I made during this whole thing.

Iwish I still had that photo.

Ispent Monday and Tuesday buying clothes and luggage and deciding what to do about the gun. I was damned if I was going to drive across America, and besides, that’d mean I’d have to buy a car. But I knew that just wrapping my gun in the gun license and dropping it in a suitcase wasn’t going to play. So I ended up packing the license and putting the gun in my office safe.

I considered the gun a professional tool. I’d fired it in anger twice in five years, but if I was honest, I’d have to tell you that I’d threatened people with it more than that.