"You think he's visiting the scene of the crime?" I ventured. "Like, reliving the moment?"
"I never understood why they dreaded your father," said the older man. "Individually, Butch and Baptist Congreve are capable of anything. Together..."
Everything....
Marvin continued to visually troll through the thinning crowd of onlookers. It didn't take him long to get a strike.
"Contestant Number 2," said Marvin, pinning another man on his main screen.
I had never known the Congreves. The brothers were a soiled pair of soiled socks Skunk had met in prison. During the Brinks trial, the defense lawyers had broken their knuckles from all the finger pointing, stirring the facts into a thick fudge. No one who looked at my father would mistake him for an innocent patsy forced to act as a getaway driver for the primary goons. But the man on the screen with the improbable name of Baptist could have turned anyone else into an unwilling slave. Even here, inside a locked vehicle, I was tempted to throw up my hands and yell, "I give up! Take it all!" I certainly didn't like the way he turned away from the house and stared directly at the Transit.
"I think he suspects..." said Todd in a queasy voice.
"I think he knows," said the older man, his words stretched through tightened lips.
Marvin gave him a look, catching Todd and me in a visual vise. "Okay, Uncle Vern, how would he know?"
"Never mind. Just make sure his brother isn't on the other side."
"You mean behind us?" Marvin frantically played the joystick of his periscope. The next thing we knew, the screen was filled with the face of Butch Congreve. With some major dental work and plastic surgery, he would have almost looked human. The mere image of his yellow teeth left a smear on the lens. He couldn't have seen the periscope, hidden in the tinted canopy, but he knew it was there.
"What a ham," Todd said as Butch worked some fragments of what looked like raw squirrel out of his teeth. If he was as unnerved as I was, I don't think my brother was being flippant.
I found myself wondering at my wonder. The Congreves were not from Oregon Hill, but they were bred from similar stock. I had grown up surrounded by trolls like this for the first twenty years of my life. Those people had not changed—they had only been evicted. If one of my old neighbors suddenly appeared, he might look like this, unkempt, unshaved, undeodorized, with the cranial capacity of a rodent. How had the usual become unusual to me? I was now accustomed to college students, who could be every bit as disheveled, disagreeable and inebriated. But those students rarely...well, stank. I'm not saying they ranked hygiene among the higher virtues, but they were aware of bathtubs and showers—which was more than you could say for Butch, who would need a rake and hoe to loosen his topsoil. I swear I could smell him through the video feed. Eau de Skunk for sure, an unpatented brand.
"He won't do anything, Uncle Vern," Marvin said hopefully. "Not with all these cops around."
"Think again," Uncle Vern sighed as Butch began fumbling at the front of his baggy jeans.
"Do you see that?" Marvin gasped. "Do you see that?"
Of course we saw it—we had a front row seat. The bottom of the class structure, or maybe its complete collapse. We could hear the splash through the wall as Butch took a whizz against the side of the van. The students on the porches on this side of the street also had an unfettered view. They were pointing, laughing, shouting in amazed protest. Yet they seemed as disinclined as my old neighbors to summon the police from across the street, out of sight from the proceedings. They probably thought he was a homeless bum who had no choice in the matter—in which case, they should have observed a sympathetic silence. Besides, this unhygienic act of civil disobedience was not all that uncommon. I had seen plenty of students use Oregon Hill as an outdoor toilet, a nostalgic return to the old days. The only difference was in degree, with Butch using a parked vehicle instead of a bush to hide his business.
He took his time zipping up, dangling publicly as he appreciated his bladder's brushwork. He was a regular Jackson Pollock, totally immersed in his art. I sort of admired his panache.
Marvin was breathless with horror, unable to remove his eyes from the screen as Butch slowly, finally re-inserted his penis into his pants inch by inch by inch by inch by inch by inch by inch by inch.
"I guess now you believe all my 'exaggerations', as you put it," Uncle Vern said in a tone that was, given the circumstances, eerily complacent. "You, of all people, should have known better. Unless, of course, you're denser than I thought. Getting shot wasn't enough to convince you."
Marvin gave Uncle Vern a warning glance that said a lot without saying anything.
"You were shot?" Todd asked the young man. "When? Where? Who?"
At the moment, though, we all had smellier fish to fry. Butch Congreve circled around the van and approached my house, creating a swath of incredulous looks and wrinkled noses.
"He got our license plate number as he passed," Uncle Vern observed.
"Did he write it down?" asked Marvin.
"Do you see him carrying a notepad?"
"Then he'll forget," Marvin asserted. "He doesn't look like he could remember where his nose is, let alone a license."
"I'm sure he remembers every cent of what's due him," said Uncle Vern, a bit more wary of Butch's mathematical ability. "Or what he thinks is due him."
Fuzzy logic. You had to love it. The money belonged to the companies and institutions who had hired Brinks to haul it. This wasn't a case of possession being nine-tenths of the law.
We returned our attention to Butch, standing a few feet back on the civilian side of the yellow police tape strung out to either side of my house. If I didn't know better, there was genuine bemusement under all that grit and grime. Baptist Congreve came back around the corner and joined him, exchanging twelve cubic yards of raw earth just by talking. Baptist shrugged, then Butch shrugged. Butch nodded towards the Transit and Baptist gave him a punch, as though to warn him against showing off—or showing their hand.
"What are they doing?" Uncle Vern thought out loud.
"Returning to the scene of the crime," said my idiot brother, as if a cliché snatched off the discount shelf at Trite-mart could answer all questions.
"Taunting the cops," said Marvin, who shopped at the same store.
"Why don't we get out and ask them?" I said. Really, all I wanted to do was dash into my house and pee. All this time in the van had accumulated liquid-wise, and I felt no inclination to squeeze myself into the small booth behind the driver's seat that I suspected hid a chemical toilet—at least, it smelled like artificial vomit.
Alarmed by my suggestion, Uncle Vern wiggled his gray eyebrows at me. "The police will take you into custody."
"I didn't shoot anyone."
"Two men killed in your house? You'll be taken in for questioning."
"I'll bet even the cops have a toilet in their station," I said, then bit my tongue.
"We have facilities here," Uncle Vern informed me.
"Ugh," said Marvin, confirming my dread of semi-public toilets.
"It's no worse than the toilets at the bus depot," Uncle Vern countered.
A trio of 'ugh's rose in response to this observation. It was obvious Uncle Vern hadn't taken a bus in a long, long time.
"Anyway, you can't leave without exposing us," said Uncle Vern. "The police will want to know why you sat here for hours and only came out to urinate. They'll be even more suspicious."
They certainly would, I thought. They would also have plenty of questions for Uncle Vern and Marvin, who did not seem thrilled by the idea of being questioned. Self-serving bastards.
"They're leaving," said Marvin, drawing our attention back to the screen. Sure enough, the Congreve brothers were sauntering away, trying to look inconspicuous and failing miserably. I was surprised they had hung around long enough to be spotted, had any of the cops been paying attention. These characters must be indelibly burned on John Law's municipal mind. Natural suspects.
> Uncle Vern thought the same thing. "It doesn't make sense, those two coming here like that."
"You think they didn't kill Carl and Dog?" I asked.
"They don't act as if they know what is going on."
"'Act' being the key word," Marvin sneered. "You expect them to do a song and dance? 'Hey, everybody, we did it! We're stars!'"
"They're not Einsteins, but they're not stupid," Uncle Vern insisted. Those bodies were covered when they brought them out. For all they know, you were the one on the gurney."
"Me and who else?" I said uneasily. "And who would want to kill me, anyway?"
"Are you kidding?" Todd snickered. I pulled my shoulder away from him.
"Do you want to kill me?" I asked.
"Don't you want to kill me?" he said.
He had a point.
Uncle Vern had descended into a grim funk. If I didn't know better—and I didn't know anything—he was grieving over the fate of Carl and Joe Dog. Shedding a tear for my former kidnappers was the furthest thing from my mind, even if it meant I no longer had access to the divine Monique. For your own mental health, it is sometimes necessary for acquaintances—even intimate ones—to disappear from your life. This disappearance was inconvenient in the extreme, but there's no doubt that, if not for the Congreve brothers, I would have been breathing easier for it.
"There were only two things that scared the Congreves," said Uncle Vern, shrugging his gloom to one side. "That was Skunk and the state tobacco ban."
"They banned smoking in prison?" I said pensively, reflexively reaching into my shirt pocket.
"Not in here, you don't," Uncle Vern remonstrated as I pulled out my cigarettes. I glanced to the side and saw Todd sheepishly repocketing his Marlboros. I did the same.
Uncle Vern continued: "The Congreves would have never killed the Brinks guards, although attempted murder was one of the charges brought against them."
"You're sure of that?" I asked. "They took a shot at us out on Patterson."
"Did they hit anyone?"
"No."
"Did you even see the shooter? No?"
"No..." I said slowly, wondering why he sounded as if he already knew all of this. "So you tell me, now, where did all that money come from if it wasn't Brinks? Between the pump house and old farm you forked over $70,000. That's an awful lot for a tease."
"I didn't think much of the idea, but we had to keep up your interest..." Uncle Vern said.
"You succeeded," I admitted, wondering who exactly was in charge here. It was hard imagining the putz in front calling the shots, and even harder imagining Uncle Vern submitting to him. There was a sternness about the older man that conjured up Mother Teresa hiding a machete under a scapular. No excuses, no nonsense, or maybe I'm mistaking nonsense without the excuses, which probably sounds the same. Marvin had not talked much, but what I had heard so far could not instill fear in an ant, let alone a tough-minded uncle.
"So you're telling me that money came out of your own pocket?" I persisted.
Uncle Vern invested an unwarranted amount of thought in his response, so much so that a response was completely lacking. I don't mind the silent treatment. I've doled it out myself on any number of occasions. But if we were going to fritter away our afternoon, we could at least do something useful. Like performing an equitable exchange of information, for instance. When Uncle Vern caught me giving him a sour milk look, he cast over me to Marvin.
"How much do I tell him?"
"Hey," Todd protested. "There's an 'us' here."
"Six of one..." Uncle Vern shrugged. And at one point I had thought he might be a nice guy.
"Your call," said Marvin.
To my surprise, Uncle Vern seemed relieved, and it quickly became apparent that his call was no call. After three hours of bone-crunching crouching in the back of a surveillance van, we would not be very far ahead in the info department. We watched the police put the final touches on their crime scene mummy wrap—and if anything belonged in a tomb at this point, it was my house. The detectives and uniforms began drifting away. It became obvious that our hosts were itching to depart.
"You want us to get out?" Todd asked.
"Why not?" said Uncle Vern. "You're home."
But even he could see the dilemma. If I got out and a cop spotted me I would be snatched up, and if Todd got out alone they would think they were snatching me.
"I don't suppose you boys would know how to keep a secret?" Vern said in a self-addressed murmur we couldn't help but overhear in our limited confines. Looking away from the screens, he added, more directly, "You stand to lose millions if Marvin and I are taken in."
"Millions," said Todd. "You said 'millions'."
Sharp as a tack, my twin idiot.
"'Millions,'" I repeated. My little theory bubbled to life. So they hadn't paid cash for the house. Whatever was left over after the downpayment had been invested in the market. Maybe in one of those retard funds that made billions before they went bust. But who had managed the fund? Not Todd, whose ignorance was a plain as his face.
"I thought the Brinks robbery only netted—" Todd began.
"Forget Brinks," said Marvin, so unheard up to now that hearing him was a snip short of a miracle. "We're talking about the trust fund Skunk set up for you."
Tongue-tied, Todd and I awaited further explanation. But Uncle Vern, having seen squeezing through to the cab was impracticable, had already opened the van's back panel. We heard him offer a friendly greeting to someone outside and darted our eyes to the screens. We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw he was speaking not to cops but to a pair of students who were too busy being cool to be concerned about an old duffer popping out of what they had assumed was an unoccupied Transit. Indifference is the great American gift to the world.
Actions speak louder, and it was apparent Uncle Vern didn't want to let go of us, not quite yet.
"Where are we going?" I called up front as I heard the cab door open. Uncle Vern slid open a panel and twisted around in the driver seat. "Jeremy," he said to Marvin
"Why him?" Marvin asked, twitching on his stool. He had told us he had been shot, but not if they had taken the bullet out. Maybe it was still inside him, squirming around, nipping at vital organs. I could only hope.
I was almost thinking of him like a brother. And speaking of brothers...I echoed Marvin's question, adding a practical, "I don't see how you can find him. He doesn't stay in one place. For all I know, he's vanished."
"Not entirely," Marvin said smugly. He removed his hand from the joystick and began pummeling the keyboard next to it. My house disappeared from the primary screen, to be replaced by a map of the city and its environs. Marvin ran his cursor over several pulsating icons. Each time the white arrow touched one a label was prompted. He moved the cursor over Oregon Hill and tapped a blinking symbol located at my address. A pair of letters popped up.
"Who's 'IB'?" Todd asked.
"Us," Marvin said abstractedly as he centered his coordinates.
It was hard to squeeze those initials out of Marvin and Vernon. Impossible, actually. Were they aliases?
As Uncle Vern pulled out, the IB began moving as well. Marvin scrolled up the screen to another pulsing light and clicked. A moment later a woman-robot said: "Turn right."
"That's pretty nifty," I declared, genuinely impressed. I scooted into Uncle Vern's vacated stool and leaned over for a better look at the target. The label said 'DT'.
"Who's..." I felt my eyes dribbling out, along with my brain. "Doubletalk! Don't tell me...GPS..."
It was then that I woke up and realized everything that had happened that day had been part of a really vivid dream.
That's a lie, of course. But wouldn't it have been nice? I could have started a new day, without being kidnapped or burglarized or having geosynchronous science thrust in my nose, down my mouth, and up my ass, leaving unwanted Post-It Notes scattered through every phase of my life. I would not have confronted dead bodies on my second floor, or been con
fronted by an unpalatable twin. I did not need to be reminded that I was a leaf in the wind, a really strong wind, and wherever I fetched up was bound to be unpleasant. But leaves have natural inbuilt rudders. They know where they're going: down. OK, I knew that much, at least. Down, down, down.....
The Jeremy signal was emitted from Southside, a few miles down Route 1. It was an area I was familiar with, not through personal experience, but from awareness that many of my former neighbors had ended up in what was essentially a foreign country. Spreading south from the edge of the old city of Manchester, if you didn't speak Spanish you were essentially an outcast. The scattered neighborhoods were poor, dusty, and highly spiced. It was hard to imagine my old neighbor Dalton Bowen chowing down on habanero chili and jovially yelling Vete y la chingada! at his new neighbors, but the last I heard that was part and parcel of his current environment, because rents were cheap and it was a place where only the muggers bothered you, not the cops. Thus it was with so many other former Oregon Hillers, evicted indirectly by the tender hands of college students. Actually, I half wondered if Dalton and the others didn't fit right in. Hasta la vista!
Was that where Jeremy had ended up after his release from Powhatan? It made sense. He wouldn't have much cash, even less in the way legally applicable job skills, and he would know at least some of the people surrounding him—meaning he could re-establish the old criminal connections. I felt sorry for Dalton, now that I knew the gun he had given Doubletalk was filled with blanks. Payback would be hell, especially when the Devil was right next door.
"Did you bug Barbara's car, too?" I asked, searching the screen for an ST label.
"Your sister is incommunicado," answered Uncle Vern from the driver's seat. "I don't think she would want me to give you the details."
"You spoke with her?"
Skunk Hunt Page 39
