Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“We’re looking for Muppet,” I said, as the two cops had suggested.

The bouncer looked us over, distaste in his big stitched-up face. “Business or pleasure?”

“Strictly business.”

“Good. Turn around.” The bouncer patted me down professionally.

“Inside jacket pocket,” he growled. I held the right side of my jacket open for him.

“It’s a handheld computer,” I said. “Lift it out and check it.” He slid it out carefully, spun it in his hands until he found the release button, and opened it up.

“Huh. What does it do?”

“Email. Games.”

“Okay.” He handed it back to me and then checked Trix; no attempt to cop a feel. The guy had been trained properly, somewhere official. I wouldn’t push my luck with him.

Satisfied, he asked if we knew what Muppet looked like.

“No,” I said. “You already worked out we’re not local. We talk to him and we leave. That’s the whole deal.”

“Good. Far end of the bar, red hair, eyes like you never saw on a human being before. Buy a drink, no acting out, and I don’t got a problem with you being here.”

I thanked him and we headed to the bar. The guy the cops called Muppet was there, all right. Hair like red yarn, red eyebrows that you’d need a whip and a chair to put in their place, eyes that stood out of his face like someone had slipped boiled eggs into his sockets. Wearing a wifebeater so old and thin that you could see his ribs through it, so scrawny you could practically see his heart behind his ribs. Jogging pants covered in tiny little burn holes and stinking of dope, and shiny new running shoes.

We ordered drinks and watched him for a little bit. I wanted to get his measure. Every few minutes his pocket played the riff from “Axel F,” and he fished a cell phone out from it. It always came out with scraps of tissue stuck to it by velcro snot. He’d rattle off numbers in a reedy voice and then shove it back. Take a few deep pulls of beer. Repeat.

The fifth time the phone went back, I approached him. Muppet immediately fixed me with awesomely bloodshot eyes.

“You’re Muppet?” I said.

“Muppet,” he agreed.

“Cop,” he said.

“Private detective. There’s no trouble here. I’m looking to talk with Tim about buying something he recently came into possession of. Straight business deal, no cops, no angles.”

“Tell Muppet. Muppet tell him.”

“I get to talk directly to him tonight, you get a finder’s fee. My client authorized five grand.”

His red eyes wheeled about in his head. “Fifteen.”

“Ten.” Which was the number I was going to start with, before I got a look at him.

“Now.”

“When I’ve got what I want. I can’t get the cash out of the client otherwise.”

“Now.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Now.”

“Forget it,” I said, and turned away, collecting Trix’s hand in mine.

“Where you going?” Muppet whined.

“Cops,” I said. “I was keeping them out of it, dealing on the level. But if you’re going to be a prick about it, I’m going to talk to a couple of friends on the force. They’ll pick him up on a bogus charge and put him in a cell long enough for me to talk to him. My buddies will split eight grand, which leaves two for me as a little bonus. And when Tim asks exactly who fucked up to the extent that he’s spending a night in a cell with some AIDS-infested assrapist, I’ll tell him it was you. I’m dealing straight with you, but I’m not going to be fucked with.”

Muppet folded in on himself, scowling. “Muppet sad.”

“Have a nice night,” I said, and started walking.

“Okay,” he piped, pulling his phone.

“You’re funny when you try to be a hardass,” Trix whispered. I trod on her foot.

Christ,I want a gun,” I heard myself say.

The address Muppet gave us, after an interminable time on the phone where he explained the situation to Tim Cardinal in the style of fucking Sesame Street, appeared to be an abandoned water utility plant. Huge filthy pumps stood dead, there wasn’t a light on in the place, and it all felt like trouble.

“You think he’s maybe a touch paranoid?” Trix smiled.

We found the open door to the main building, as described by Muppet. There was a heavy flashlight laid on the floor waiting for us. I switched it on and lit up a place that looked like it’d been abandoned with two minutes’ notice. Mugs of coffee still on tables, overflowing with vivid green mold. In the messroom, fungus crawled off plates left midmeal, skewed cutlery half-buried in the moss. Here and there, coats still hung on hooks.

We had our instructions. We went down. Rusted metal staircases rung dissonantly. The wet stone floors deadened all the sound. Even our footsteps rang wrong.

Two levels down, we found the door we were looking for, an X roughly scratched into its steel. There was an odd light beyond. I went through first, shifting my grip down to the base of the flashlight so I could use it as a blackjack if necessary.

The door was an access point to a wide, wet, stinking tunnel. My attention was drawn to the floor. The light came from a couple of dozen shake-and-break green glowsticks tossed on the ground.

And I was looking at those instead of everything else.

Trix yelped.

I turned. There was a gun muzzle pushed into her eye.

A tall, thin man with bad skin and eyes like a doll’s was behind her, one arm around her throat, the other pressing a gun into her eye.

“The thing about cheap bullets,” he said, “is that they’ll shatter on the inside of her skull. I can shoot her through the brain and the bullet will not emerge out of the other side. My name’s Tim Cardinal. I understand you wanted to see me.”

Dead eyes. They didn’t reflect any light. Black and motionless. His smile was polite and without life.

“This was business,” I said.

His polite smile widened by a precise amount, as if he’d learned how to feign emotions in the mirror. “This is how I do business. I have no desire to kill her. But then, I have no desire to use toilets or eat food. They are simply things I have to do in order to live. So is this. You wanted to see me?”

“Trix, just relax,” I said. “We’re doing business here. He’s not going to have any reason to harm you.”

“You think he needs a reason?” she said.

Tim Cardinal laughed. It made me jump: it sounded like a gunshot in a small room. “Oh, I like you. Now. I won’t ask again. You wanted to see me?”

I put the flashlight beam square on his face. I wanted him to focus on me, not Trix.

“Alexis Perez received a book as payment from a client,” I said, in as loud and steady a voice as I could manage with Trix looking down a gun barrel. “I believe you took the book for yourself. It’s a rare antique. My client has hired and empowered me to purchase it from you for a significant fee. Under-the-table purchase, bank transfer, no records.”

“How do you do a bank transfer with no records?” Cardinal sneered.

“My client is very important. It’s not an issue. I’m here to give you a lot of money for a book that’s no good to you. There’s no need for any of this.”

“If the book is so very important to your very important client, how do I know it’s no good to me?”

“Are you intending to go into politics any time soon?”

He laughed again, a genuine snort of amusement. The tunnel still made it a flat and horrible noise. “No.”

“Then it’s no good to you.”

He considered. “This would be the old leatherbound thing that she got from the Texan?”

“Right.”

“And she told you I had it?”

“She’s dead. She died a few hours ago. Death by misadventure. Home-brew plastic surgery.”

“Oh,” he said. For a moment there, he almost looked concerned. And then, “So how do you know I have it? Who told you?”

“I’m a detective. I worked it out. Let go of her now.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you want me to. You’re not armed, are you?”

“No.” Damnit.

He threw the smile away, but there was light in his eyes for the first time. He was amused. He had all the power in the situation, and he knew it, and that was the only thing in the world that could make him register a pulse.

“I don’t have the book,” he said.

“Then we’ll be on our way. No hard feelings, no comeback. You won’t see us again.”

“But you have money, don’t you?”

“Not with me. Who has the book?”

“Ah. I have two things you want, then. What price do you set on that name and her life?”

“Screw the name. Let her go.”

Cardinal grinned. “I am finding this very interesting. I think I’m going to kill you both. Her first. Let you watch. Would that be nice?”

“I have access to four hundred thousand dollars,” I said.

“Where is it?”

“In a bank account. It’s yours if you let her go.”

Trix’s jaw dropped.

“And how do I get this money? Do we go into a bank together? I don’t think so.”

Shit. I thought furiously, trying to find a way to make this work.

“Mike,” Trix said in a small voice. “The handheld.”

“There’s a handheld computer in my inside jacket pocket,” I said. “It connects to the Internet. I can get to my account through it. I’m going to take it out, very slowly, okay?”

I opened my jacket wide and carefully extracted the device with two fingers. He watched me like a hawk the whole time. I snapped it open and began pressing buttons. The net connection coughed a bit—I was a little surprised it even worked, being two floors underground—but it got to the online banking thing. I was all fingers and thumbs, and I barely understood the fucking thing to begin with. I held it out.

“Trix is better with this thing than I am.”

He thought about this. I was visibly trembling. He liked it. Cardinal withdrew the gun from her eye and carefully placed it at the back of her head, at arm’s length. “Do it,” he said to her.

Trix took the handheld and began keying it, quickly and precisely. She cocked her head toward Cardinal. “What’s your account number?”

Amused, he gave her the number and codes, and she keyed them in with superb focus. Handed the device over her shoulder to him. “Check it.”

He took the device, and spent a few moments studying it. The light from the glowsticks was fading now, and his drawn features were lit coldly by the screen.

“Well, now,” he eventually said. “It appears that your bank account is empty and mine is full.”

“It’s nonreversible,” Trix said. “It’s marked as such at the bottom of the page there. You’ve got the money and we can’t take it away from you.”

Cardinal passed the handheld back over Trix’s shoulder.

“It has been a pleasure doing business with you both.” He fished in his coat pocket for something. The glow was almost dead, and I played my flashlight over him as he rummaged. He produced a matchbook.

“Before you arrived, I wrote the name and address of the entity I sold the book to on this. I prefer to be fully prepared for all eventualities, no matter how outlandish. So should you.”

The last of the glowsticks died. He tossed the matchbook on the ground. I put the flashlight on it. When I brought the beam back up to find Cardinal, he was gone. His footsteps stolen by the wet stone.

Backin the car, Trix couldn’t stop shaking. She tried a weak smile on me. “Suddenly, this isn’t so much fun.”