Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

Plus, I pistol-whipped a tailor once to gain the trust of a disturbed white boy who believed he contained the soul of Huey P. Newton.

So it didn’t feel good to lock up the gun. I knew there was no chance I was going to use it, but it took one option out of the toolbox.

I also had the suspicion, based on nothing at all, that it might freak Trix out a bit.

She met me outside the hotel around noon on Wednesday. The downtown ninjas were doing their level best to chat her up. Trix was showing them her arm tattoos. The cropped top she was wearing showed that they plainly continued on to her chest, and she was teasing them ruthlessly. Most of the ninja swords showed a 45-degree angle.

I came out with my one bag, having decided to travel as lightly as I could. I saw Trix had a single bag, too, which made me smile. “All set, Trix?”

“All ready.” She grinned. “You got the tickets?”

I waved them. She turned to the nearest ninja, dipped her chin a bit, and turned big green eyes up at him. “Could we get a cab?”

Four ninjas howled and leapt into Lexington Avenue, waving their swords about. A yellow cab swerved left and clipped one ninja, sending him flying ten feet back to splatter onto the rear of a limo. Another ninja stood and watched in shock, which meant he wasn’t going to ninja his way away from the cab, which took him like a mad bull’s horns and flipped him over the roof. The cab mounted the sidewalk and jammed on the brakes just as the fender bodyslammed ninja three. The cabbie leaned over and flung open the door, which opened hard on ninja four, batting him down. Scrawled in the dirt on the door were the letters WMD. Inside was an immense black man with an X carved into his forehead. Trix and I were the last ones standing. He grinned like a kid at Christmas and yelled, “Where we going, tiny white people?”

Trix and I looked at each other. And then she laughed. “This is just a perfect way to start, Mr. Shit Magnet.”

I rolled with it and grabbed the bags. “Newark Airport.”

The cab launched off the sidewalk like a cruise missile.

It turned out the cab had two speeds; stop and golike-fuckinghell. The cabbie grappled with his machine like a sumo, wrestling the ballistic cab around corners, great thrusts to the steering wheel to keep the thing on target, slapping it around when it started to fishtail. “You guys look ready for trouble.” He laughed. “What’s your deal?”

“We’re private detectives.” Trix grinned. “We’re off on a great adventure.”

“Private eyes!” He thought this was terrific. He laughed out loud, coughed hard, and punched the steering wheel with a horrible yelp. “You on a case?”

Trix was totally up for this. “Yeah. Some rich guy’s lost a spooky old book and we have to take it away from the weird fuckers who’re hiding it.”

“Cool! Listen, you know any black private eyes?”

“Sure,” I said. “The agency I used to be with had a lot of black guys, a lot of Asian guys, you know?”

“Why ain’t they on the TV?”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

“Seriously, man. Every time I turn on the TV, it’s like Jones, Freelance Whitey. Because only middle-aged white guy detectives can fuck shit up, you know what I’m saying? And fucking Quincy, man. There ain’t nothing but white guys on that dude’s slab. What do they do with the black guys, burn ’em in piles round back?”

“Who’s Quincy?” said Trix.

As the cabbie stomped down on the accelerator, I swear I saw the view out the window start distorting.

“It don’t matter.” The cabbie smiled. “Helter Skelter come soon.”

“X’d from society.” Trix smiled knowingly.

“Hey! You one hot private eye!”

I made a whatthefuck face at Trix. “Charles Manson,” she said. “The X on his forehead. It’s a Manson thing. Showing their excision from mainstream society. Preparing for Helter Skelter, the race war between whites and blacks that the black people would win.”

“You know everything about goddamn Manson but you never heard of Quincy?”

“The thing about Helter Skelter, though, was that Manson considered African Americans to be inferior, and he and his Family would therefore rise from hiding after the war to take over from them. Manson hated black people.”

The cabbie laughed a big warm laugh. “Manson was a crazy motherfucker. That don’t mean Helter Skelter was a bad idea. I’m just telling his ass—he ain’t coming back to take over shit. And there’ll be some black private eyes on TV for damn sure.”

Trix laughed. I said, “You realize our cabbie is talking about killing us, right?”

The cabbie threw his head back and roared. “You get special dispensation for being cool private eyes. But I’m telling you: be careful out there. Not everyone’s as nice as me, you know? Helter Skelter coming. You can see it in everything, man. The weird shit on TV. All that crap on the Internet you hear about. You seen how weird the news is getting? Something’s coming, and ain’t everyone going to love a private eye when it all starts happening, you know what I’m saying? You guys want Departures, right?”

Yellow cab redshift to Newark Airport.

Throughthe airport without any further “magnetism.” I figured maybe I’d used up my quota for the day.

“I’ve never flown before,” said Trix, so I made sure she got the window seat. I bought business-class tickets to our first stop, Columbus, Ohio. I’d never been there, but I found myself savoring the normalcy of its name. Columbus, Ohio. It was somewhere from TV weather maps. It made Cleveland sound decadent.

Lots of people in prettily decorated bird-flu masks moved in twitchy flocks around the airport, darting away in migration patterns from anything that coughed.

We were greeted by the plastic grins of flight attendants as we mounted the plane, ushered to big comfortable seats, and given champagne. The grins widened as we finished the first glasses and reached greedily for seconds. Get the passengers smashed and they’ll slump quietly throughout the flight. We worked slowly through the second glasses during takeoff, which had Trix plastered to her window wide-eyed and squealing.

The plane banked easy, stepped over the cloud deck, and leveled for Columbus, an hour’s run.

An older guy in a short-sleeved shirt with bloodstains on the front sat in the aisle seat next to mine. He gave me a secret little smile. “You know,” he said. “You know. If you drink whiskey. And I don’t mean a lot of whiskey, just enough to keep the little engines in your head alive. If you drink a bunch of whiskey, you can piss in a cup before you go to sleep. And in the morning all the alcohol will have risen to the surface of the piss. And you can drink it off the top of the piss with a straw.”

“I’ll, um, I’ll certainly bear that one in mind.”

He made a happy noise and stuck out a big hand with caked blood all over the fingernails. “Excellent. I’m the pilot.”

Trix went white.

TheColumbus airport was one of those places you forget everything about within five minutes of leaving it. We got a cab from there to the hotel I’d booked over the Internet, a place outside the city proper.

Coming out of the airport, we saw a grimy road sign reading, WELCOME TO OHIO, THE BUCKEYE STATE.

Our cabbie had three faded pictures of burly women pasted to the dashboard. Someone had used a marker pen to draw crude knives sticking into their heads and chests. He whispered to himself as he drove, his little fists clenching on the steering wheel.

“What’s a buckeye?” Trix asked.