by Warren Ellis
Chapter 43
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.”
Chapter 44
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 u
p 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.”
“I kind of doubt that. But, you know, some women can’t get off vaginally. Some women can’t get off without a bit of the rough stuff. Porn doesn’t invent that. It reflects what’s going on in the world. And some bad easy-listening music and ten minutes of vanilla missionary doesn’t do it for everybody. Using that book in the middle of any major city would be consigning thousands of people to hell every time.”
I stabbed my last slice of apple. “So you’re saying me finding the book would make the transcontinental pervert community very unhappy, and that they would conceivably be forced to unlearn all their special pervert tricks.”
“Mike, you’re talking about lobotomizing people. Think about it: what would that book do to me?”
“You wouldn’t want to make me ejaculate into the Baby Jesus’ head anymore.”
“Two hundred years ago, the female orgasm was mostly theoretical. Hell, a hundred years ago, the male psyche didn’t have a problem with selling women. We barely got educated. Career aspirations, forget it. The 1950s looked like fucking Babylon compared to 1776. Everything that makes me me, Mike, would be wiped away. Gimme the knife.”
“With that look in your eye? I don’t think I want you to have the knife.”
“What, you’re afraid I’m going to put it up your ass and call it romance? Gimme the fucking knife.”
I watched as she pushed the apples and oranges onto a nearby coffee table, unzipped the bananas onto the plate, sliced them, cut the passion fruit, and squeezed the pulp all over them. She started eating the mess with one of the spoons, watching the TV.
There were no ashtrays visible in the place, so I decided to press some clementine peel into service and lit up. “You don’t think maybe they just want to make America a less freakier place?”
Trix eyed me, crunching a passion fruit seed. “Three thousand years ago stable homosexual relationships were mainstream in many societies all over the world. Don’t you think the current administration would consider that kind of freaky?”
“Three thousand years ago people painted themselves blue and hunted their own food with sticks. Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot, Trix.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that maybe, just maybe, America would get along fine without people who fuck dogs.”
“So you’re equating stable homosexual relationships with dogfucking.”
“Actually, no. You are. So why don’t you put down your studenty bullshit for one minute and talk to me like an adult?”
“Oh, fuck you, Mike. Maybe it’s a bigger subject than two people can deal with over breakfast, okay?”
“Well, guess what. It is down to two people. Sometimes that’s the way it breaks. And it can be down to one person if you like.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You can go home any time you like.” Goddamn moron that I was.
“So you can hand over this thing with a clear conscience?”
“Oh, so you’re Jiminy fucking Cricket now. No. So I can just get the job done with the minimum amount of distraction and then go home myself. You may not have noticed, but I am not having fun here, Trix. This job started out weird and it’s gotten scary. I want it to be over now. Either I don’t find the book, in which case I’m going to assume this is the end of the line, or I find the book, in which case I hand it the hell over, get paid, go home, and forget the whole thing ever happened.”
She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You want to forget it all happened.”
“Yeah,” I said, like a goddamn moron, “yeah, I do.”
“Uh-huh. You know, I was wondering how this’d start to go wrong. I didn’t really think it’d begin with me daring to have an opinion.”
“What?”
“You want to forget it all happened? That starts with me, Mike. Look at you. Did you even realize you stood up? Your chin sticking out like a sulky child? Your fists all balled up?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Sure you did. And, you know, if you really think handing over anything that could even possibly affect people’s minds to the bastard in the White House is a good idea—or if you care so little about people that you really don’t give a shit whether it’s a good idea or not—then maybe it’s just as well I’m getting a good look at you now. Give me the handheld.”
“What for?”
“I want to take some pictures and upload them to my photo-hosting site.”
Why the hell not. I took it out of my jacket and dropped it on the carpet by her.
“Do what you like, Trix. If you really, honestly think I was talking about us, when the whole conversation had been about the job…then fuck it. I’ll get my stuff and find a hotel. And you can do what you like. This is a stupid argument. You’re talking yourself around in circles and I just want to get done with this job that has scared the shit out of me and go back to some semblance of a life. With you, if you can get past the fact that it’s you I care about and not the endless parade of assholes, freaks, and crapsacks I meet every day. Without you, if you really believe my lack of love for the animal-humping community is a good enough reason to throw us away. I’m going out for a walk. You do what you like.”
Chapter 45
I walked for an hour before I realized I no longer remembered what I was so pissed about. By w
hich point I was totally lost and had no idea how to get back to the house.
So I lit up a cigarette (and I knew I was smoking too much), slowed down, and just strolled for a while, to see where the broad sunlit streets led me. Every now and then I stopped at a corner and looked around for a cab, reminding myself each time that I wasn’t in New York and that this wasn’t a civilized city.
Occasionally, a private car would go by, and I’d see faces pressed to the windows, staring at me like I was an alien. It eventually hit me that I was the only pedestrian I’d seen the whole time I was pounding the sidewalk, and that I stood out like a cheerleader in Riker’s.
I just walked. After a while, houses gave way to low, broad industrial units. I stopped on a corner to light another cigarette, just because I really was in that kind of a mood. It took me a moment to register someone yelling at me. I was about to yell back that smoking was still allowed outdoors when I realized the guy doing the shouting, standing at the entrance to the nearest industrial building, was waving an unlit cigarette. He was stocky, midthirties, glasses, and a Star Wars T-shirt that looked like it’d been printed when the first one came out. He was scratching at his short brown hair like a little monkey that’d been kept in a cage too long. I wandered over.
“Please tell me you’ve got a light,” he said in a strangled voice. “My lighter died and I swear no one in the entire building smokes anymore.”
I flicked my lighter and cupped the flame for him. He sucked at his smoke like a dehydrated kid putting a straw to a lake. None of the smoke came back out of him, as if his body had just absorbed the entire load. “Thanks, man. I was dying. People always said these things would kill me.”
“No problem.”
He stuck out a stubby-fingered hand. “Zack. Zack Pickles.”
“Mike McGill.” I nodded at the building. “This your business?”
