The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m fine,” she says.

  “I wasn’t asking,” he tells her. “And you’ve been chasing the dragon—and just about every other goddamn thing—so long now that I seriously I doubt you know fine from a tomcat’s asshole.”

  There’s another silence then, and Ellison Nicodemo sits smoking her Chesterfield and gazing at the scabby, pulpy mess where her toenail used to be. The Signalman takes out his iPhone and sends a text. She doesn’t bother asking him what it was. He waits for the reply, then puts his phone away.

  “You haven’t even told me what this is all about,” she says.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be briefed when we get where we’re going.”

  “The least you could do right now—and I mean the very fucking least—is give me some sort of idea why I’m being dragged back into the fucking fray in the shape I’m in and after what happened in Atlanta. You can’t sit there and say you don’t at least owe me that courtesy.”

  The words come out hard and angry and bitter, even though that hadn’t actually been her intent. She was with the company plenty long enough to understand that he’s just doing his job, same as she just did her job. Ain’t nothing personal, chica. He didn’t have to come in here and finesse the stinking junkie. He could have had her picked up and hosed off and never had to get his hands dirty. But now that’s just so much more spilled milk under the bridge, so to speak. Fuck him and fuck Albany. She just wants to fix and go back to sleep and go back to pretending that she’s never lived any other life but the slow, sloppy death she’s living now.

  “All right,” he says. “Fair enough.” And the Signalman sets his beer can down on the floor, and he turns his head away, looking at the sunlight leaking in through those ugly chenille drapes, instead of looking at her. He rubs at his forehead like someone getting a headache. “You know, maybe if you had a TV that worked, or maybe the fucking internet, you wouldn’t be quite so surprised, me showing up like this. Between that cheddar-faced baboon playing president and the mess with the lunatic man-child in Pyongyang . . .” He trails off and lights another cigarette.

  “But this isn’t about North Korea and it also ain’t about Trump,” she says. “Whatever this is.”

  “No, it ain’t. But wouldn’t you think the world’s already got enough shit on its plate these days without the sorta shit this is about? I swear, I’d give my left nut to have Reagan back right now.”

  “Fuck,” says Ellison, “I’d give your left nut to have Nixon back right now.”

  “Look at you,” he laughs and glances at Ellison just long enough to spare her a half-hearted wink. “The Republican princess with the golden arm and the missing toenail. And they say the GOP has forsaken all integrity.”

  “Okay, so why are you here?”

  The Signalman takes a long pull on his Camel and, before he exhales, says, “Because she’s come back.” And then he puffs out a cloud of smoke to make any pint-sized dragon proud.

  “Because who’s come back?” Ellison asks him, but suddenly the tiny hairs on her arms and the back of her neck are prickling and rising to attention, good little soldiers, good as any horror novel cliché. She already knows the answer. In a bright, sick flash she realizes that she’s known it all along. Why else would Albany want her, after all this time and even in the shape she’s in? Why else would she ever matter again to anyone?

  “She’s come back,” the Signalman tells Ellison again, a little more emphatically than before. “I’m here on this beautiful morning, fucking up your shit and dragging you outta dope-fiend heaven, because Jehosheba Talog’s come back.”

  Ellison takes a deep breath, and she holds it a moment, like a swimmer hyperventilating, getting ready for a dive into cold water. “You’re sure?” she asks. “You’re absolutely sure it’s her?”

  “Kiddo, I wouldn’t be here if we weren’t.”

  “And what? They think maybe me wiping out that first time around, it was just a fluke, and, all evidence to the contrary, I’m still their ace in the hole? I’ll just blow my magic dog whistle and this time it’ll do the trick?”

  “Probably something like that, I suppose. What happened in Atlanta, wipeout or not, it seems to have bought us a few years. I guess they think you might be able to buy us a few more, and that’s plenty good enough for government work. You know, it’s been an awful long time now since we’ve actually won a war. Why, buying time, that’s the new V-Day.”

  Ellison coughs, then wipes her mouth and looks at the floor, at her dirty feet, at the missing toenail. “So a long shot at an extension on an overdue loan,” she says.

  “Like the man said,” the Signalman tells her, “it is what it is.”

  “Yeah, all right,” says Ellison Nicodemo, then stubs out her cigarette out on the edge of the Disneyland ashtray. “But I’m gonna need a few minutes.” And she thinks how amazing it is that her voice is hardly trembling at all.

  The Signalman wipes at his sweaty face with the white handkerchief, then takes out the silver pocket watch he always carries, the watch that earned him his nickname many long years ago. He checks the time, then puts the watch away again.

  “I can give you fifteen, but that’s it. And you might want to find a different shirt. LAPD is our escort to the airfield.”

  “Yeah,” she says and gets up and goes back to the bathroom. She shuts the door again, locks it again, and then she opens the toilet lid and pukes until there’s nothing in her left to puke, until she’s only dry-heaving. The Signalman leaves her alone to be sick in peace and clean up after, because that’s the only shred of dignity he has to offer her, the only stingy scraps of generosity. Today, that’s pretty much loaves and fishes.

  2.: Ballad of a Thinner Man

  (West Hollywood, June 1969)

  It would be a gross understatement to say that Maxie Honeycutt is a nervous man. Cat gets out of bed every morning, he checks his shoes for bugs, and not the creepy-crawly sort, but the sort he imagines the DOD and CIA and the goddamn FBI leave there while he sleeps. Cat sits down to breakfast, he’s digging in his box of Wheaties to be sure no one’s planted a microphone at the bottom. One day or another, he’ll be walking down Sunset Boulevard or Ventura and a car’s gonna backfire, and Mr. Maxie Honeycutt’s gonna shit himself, then drop dead from a coronary. This will happen, sure as pigs make little baby pigs, this or some other equally histrionic ending for the skinny little man his friends—such as they are—call Paranoid Jack. No one quite remembers why people started in calling him Jack, though the paranoid part is obvious to anybody who’s spent fifteen straight minutes in this cat’s company. So you’d think he’d do his best to steer clear of weird shit and questionable business ventures with nefarious individuals. You would, however, be wrong. For example, tonight Maxie’s in a booth at the Whiskey a Go Go, trying to be heard over shitty acid rock and a hundred stoned motherfuckers talking all at once. Across from him, Charlie Six Pack is rolling a joint, some primo shit just come in from Panama. Charlie Six Pack is a good example of the company Maxie Honeycutt keeps. Cat spent seven years up at Folsom for robbery and a concealed weapons charge. Says he didn’t do it, but what the fuck else would he say?

  Maxie leans across the table, not quite shouting, but it’s not like he can hear himself think over the noise. And he says, “I don’t give two shits and a crap what the damn thing’s worth, man, cause I ain’t gonna hold it, not for love nor money.”

  “Don’t be like that,” says Charlie Six Pack. “I thought you were my go-to guy, right? I thought we was tight, and you were the guy I could go to when I can’t go to anyone else, right?”

  “Well, no,” replies Maxie. “No, not this time. This time, you’ll just have to find someone else. I ain’t holding that thing. I don’t even like to look at it.”

  Now, what he’s talking about is the little jade figurine that Charlie Six Pack came back from Nevada with last week. There’s a brown paper bag on the table between them, and inside the bag is the figurine. The bag’s rolled closed an
d there are what appear to be grease stains on it, like maybe it held fried chicken or churros before it held the jade figurine. Charlie, he calls it an idol, claims it was carved by the Apaches or the Incans or some shit like that. For all Maxie knows, it was made last month in Tijuana or by some Buddha Head down on Magdalena Street. Whoever made the thing, that cat must have been having just about the nastiest magic carpet ride since Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself back in 1943. It’s almost big as Maxie’s fist, the thing in the bag, and when Charlie pulled it out and showed it to him, Maxie got this queasy, tight feeling in his gut and goose bumps up and down his arms.

  “Yo, man, don’t be like that,” says Charlie Six Pack, and he scowls fit for a Greek tragedy and lights the doobie. “Forty-eight hours, right? Hell, probably not even that long. Just until the Turk comes back from that thing in Catalina and I don’t gotta worry about my place getting tossed before I can make the handoff, okay? Pigs toss the place and find this, then nobody gets a payday.”

  “What the hell the pigs gonna want with it?” Maxie asks, eyeing the greasy paper bag even more warily than before. “You steal it?”

  “If I’d have stolen it, I’d have told you up front.”

  “Then what do the pigs want with it?”

  Charlie Six Pack sucks in a lungful of Panama red, and he squints at Maxie through the haze. “Pigs don’t want shit with it,” says Charlie, and he blows smoke from his nostrils like a Chinese dragon. “I’m just saying, is all. Why take chances?”

  “Well, I don’t like it,” Maxie Honeycutt tells him.

  “I ain’t asking you to like it, man.”

  “What’s the Turk even want with something like that?”

  “Jesus, Jack, what the Turk does and does not want ain’t none of my business, and it sure as hell ain’t none of your business. One night, maybe two at the outside, you get five percent of my cut, just for babysitting a paper bag. And don’t tell me you can’t use the bread. I know you, and I know better.”

  “Ain’t the bag that bothers me,” says Maxie, Mr. Paranoid Jack himself, he who swears it was aliens working with the Mafia, the Bilderberg Group, and the RAND Corporation had John F. and Bobby Kennedy killed. Same cat will talk for hours about how fluoridated water, filtered cigarettes, and artificial sweeteners are an Illuminati plot aimed at pacifying the masses. Point being, the cat is given to flights of fancy.

  “Man, you’re one for the books,” says Charlie Six Pack. “Why don’t you just simmer down and stop freaking out on me.” He takes another toke, shakes his head, then offers the joint to Maxie. Now, normally Maxie’s fine getting high with the likes of Charlie Six Pack, but right at this particular moment, well, he’s thinking he’s better off trying to keep a clear head. So he says no thank you, and he asks again where the thing in the bag came from. Not that he actually wants to know, mind you, or thinks he’ll get any sort of an honest answer, but Maxie figures he keeps this up long enough, Charlie’s bound to grow discouraged and go looking for someone else to hassle.

  “I told you,” says Charlie, “Indians made it. You ever heard of the Donner Party, those folks got lost in the mountains and had to eat each other to keep from freezing to death?”

  “Yeah, man,” Maxie replies, “I’ve heard of the freaking Donner Party. Who the fuck hasn’t heard of the freaking Donner Party?” And he sits back in the booth and takes an unfiltered Pall Mall from the half-empty pack in his shirt pocket.

  “Okay, well, so the dude from whom I acquired this little objet d’art,” and Charlie nods at the paper bag, “this dude’s a professor out in Salt Lake City, this Mormon dude—Brigham Young University—and he claims the doodad there belonged to one of the survivors of the Donner Party, one of those didn’t get eaten, but did the cannibalizing. Professor, he tells me that this guy—”

  “What was his name?”

  “What’s who’s name? The Mormon dude?”

  “No, man. The Donner Party cat.”

  “Fuck if I know,” says Charlie Six Pack, and he takes another hit. “Who cares what the guy’s name was, man? Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Maxie Honeycutt, he taps his Pall Mall on the back of his left hand, then lights it. He shrugs and stares at this chick at the bar, because he thinks she looks a lot like Grace Slick and he’s got a serious hard-on for Grace Slick, even if he can’t stand fucking hippie music.

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” he says.

  Right then, Charlie Six Pack snaps his fingers real loud and Maxie jumps. “Now I remember,” says Charlie Six Pack. “Dude’s name was Breen. Patrick Breen.”

  “Who’s name was Patrick Breen? The professor?”

  “No, man, the cannibal. Way that guy at Brigham Young told it, Breen said he found the thing”—and Charlie nods at the greasy paper bag again—“up there in the mountains, and it was the doodad here told Breen that if they ate the dead people, if they could get over being all squeamish and shit, maybe they wouldn’t all starve and freeze to death hundreds of miles from civilization and no hope of rescue till spring. Some kind of Indian fetish or heathen idol or some shit, I don’t know, right, and desperate people, well, you figure they were all just looking for some excuse not to let that meat go to waste. So, great, fine, blame it on voices from this doodad. Rationalization, man.” And Charlie Six Pack taps at his forehead.

  “So, how’d this professor get his hands on it?”

  “No idea, man. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

  “And what’s the Turk want with something like that?” Maxie asks again.

  “Look, ain’t the Turk who wants it. It’s this cat down in Australia, right? So, you gonna hold onto it for me or what? You do it, I’ll cut you in for seven percent.”

  “I don’t want to go getting messed up in some sort of heavy Apache hoodoo horseshit,” Maxie Honeycutt tells him, and he takes a long pull on his Pall Mall, then checks his watch like maybe he’s got somewhere better to be when he most certainly does not. “I don’t like the look of the thing.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” sighs a thoroughly exasperated Charlie Six Pack. He licks a thumb and forefinger and pinches out the joint, then stashes it in a snuff tin. “I always knew you were crazy, man, crazy fucking Paranoid Jack, loonier than a run-over dog, but I didn’t ever take you for the superstitious sort. Didn’t finger you for the sorta guy’s gonna let a spook story get in between him and easy money, leaving me fucking hanging in the wind like this.”

  “It ain’t nothing personal, Charlie.”

  “Sure it ain’t,” Charlie tells Maxie, and the cat makes no effort whatsoever to hide his displeasure. “But don’t think word ain’t gonna get back to the Turk how you had a chance to lend a hand and didn’t do diddly squat, all right?”

  “Sounds fair,” says Maxie Honeycutt, though he doesn’t think it sounds fair at all, the off chance he might find himself in Dutch with the Turk just because he doesn’t want to play nursemaid to Charlie Six Pack’s little green gargoyle.

  “What time you got?” Charlie wants to know. “I have to make some calls, man, try to find someone ain’t such a goddamn pussy.”

  “My watch says it’s seven fifteen,” Maxie tells him, “but it’s running a little slow, because of all NASA’s excess electromagnetism or something.”

  “You and your fucking watch,” snorts Charlie Six Pack, and he takes his greasy brown paper bag and leaves Maxie Honeycutt alone in the booth. And Maxie, he tries hard to feel relieved. He sits there chain smoking Pall Malls and staring at that girl who doesn’t look even half as much like Grace Slick as he at first glance thought she did. He’ll have a few beers, stick around for the band, then head back to Silver Lake and the two-room rattrap he calls home. And round about dawn, cat’s gonna wake up from the worst bad dream he’s had since he was a kid. He’s gonna wake up and find he’s pissed the sheets. He’ll turn on the radio real damn loud and sit by the kitchenette window, smoking and drinking from a warm bottle of Wild Irish Rose while he
watches the sun come up. He’ll sit there trying hard not to think about Charlie Six Pack’s ugly fucking doodad or blizzards or a raw January wind howling like a banshee through high mountain passes.

  3.: Saint Joan(ah) Redux

  (Atlanta, regarding January 12, 2011)

  The way I heard it, Ms. Esmé Symes was born Esther Simon, the youngest daughter of an evangelical minister who spoke in tongues, handled rattlesnakes, and drank strychnine from Ball mason jars. There are two or three different stories floating around about why she up and left that pissant backwater Florida town, but they all come back around to her daddy not keeping his hands to himself. Might be she killed him. Might be her momma killed him. Might be the man only lost his ministry to the scandal and slunk off into the Everglades to drink away whatever was left of his miserable, sorry life. Whichever, Esther became Esmé and spent some time with a traveling show, reading palms and tarot cards, telling rubes what they’d want to hear about their futures, instead of telling them what she really saw. Oh, I’m not saying I believe she was a bona fide psychic or clairvoyant or whatever. But that lady, she most definitely made a living convincing people she was, and, to tell the God’s honest truth, if I’m gonna deny there’s anything to all this sixth-sense folderol, well, then I’m left with the mystery of how exactly it was she led two detectives from APD Homicide to that empty warehouse between Spring Street and West Peachtree.

  Of course, it wasn’t the first time she’d helped the police. There was that kid who’d gone missing out in Stone Mountain, two years earlier, and there was the Decatur woman who’d been raped, murdered, dismembered, and buried in her own backyard. Remember her? Well, Esmé found both of them, so when she made the call about the warehouse, we sat up and listened. Now, if she’d been upfront and warned us what she thought we were going to find in there, I like to think someone would have had the good sense to hang up on her. Tell her to go fuck herself. But apparently full disclosure was not that woman’s style. And looking back, the whole day seems sorta like walking into an ambush, climbing the three flights of stairs up to that long fucking hall, and then, she’d told us, go all the way down to the end. That’s where we’d find what we were looking for. Down at the end of the hall.