Skunk Hunt (55 page)

Uncle Vern let out an oath that was,
verbatim, as mild as they come, but text isn't everything and it
sounded unprintable.

"Why would he move now?" he demanded of
Marvin.

"Maybe the Congreves found him," the young
man theorized.

"Then he wouldn't be moving anywhere." Uncle
Vern pulled off the road and turned around in his seat. "Which way
is he headed?"

"South," I said, beating Marvin to the punch
as I watched DT blink across the screen. "And pretty fast, too.
Maybe he's being chased."

"Yes, but by whom?"

"The freaking Congreve brothers, Uncle Vern,"
said a flustered Marvin, as if Vernon had gone prematurely goofy.
"Who else?"

"Why, dear nephew, he could be
following
us
."

"How would he know..." Marvin took a page out
of the goof book and planted it on his nubbly face. "No, Uncle
Vern, absolutely not."

"I thought you regularly swept this van for
unwanted electronic devices," Uncle Vern said. He had a pompous
streak that irritated the hell out of me. He continued: "You
assured me—"

"You think we've been bugged?" There was a
frantic tweak in Marvin's voice. "Who would plant a GPS on a
surveillance van?"

"Anyone who wanted to keep track of our
whereabouts, I presume."

Todd, who was still without a seat or stool,
was cracking up on the floor. A big difference between us. I wasn't
laughing. But he might not be laughing, either, if he had spent the
last week having his ass geosychronized to death.

"He's stopped moving," Marvin announced
smugly. "Now we've got him. He's just a couple miles up the
road."

Uncle Vern pulled back onto Route 1 South. We
had gone about a quarter of a mile when Marvin moaned.

"He's moving again?" Uncle Vern said. I
looked at the screen and saw the Doubletalk label ticking ahead.
Uncle Vern drove into a minimart parking lot. A minute later, the
flashing Jeremy indicator stopped, too.

"I think we have our answer," Uncle Vern
fumed.

"Coincidence," Marvin insisted, at which
point I began laughing, too.

This did not sit well with either Vernon or
Marvin, who seemed inclined to chuck us out the van door. I didn't
know if we were here through their sufferance or sheer chance, but
a cocked snoot seemed in order and Todd and I gave it to them with
our raucous chittering.

"This is no laughing matter, you idiots,"
Uncle Vern said in a tight voice. "Barbara is safe for the moment,
but Jeremy is out in the open. I tried calling but he doesn't
answer. He doesn't know the Congreve brothers are after him."

"Why would they be after him?" Todd asked,
interrupting his mirth.

We got our answer the next instant—when the
rear window's opaque glass shattered.

The Congreve brothers weren't after
Jeremy.

CHAPTER 25

You, who have seen and read so many
chase scenes throughout the years...I guess you're jaded by now.
Cars rocketing, space ships slamming asteroids, elves fleeing from
giants.... How was it the ancient Greeks got by without at least
one major bumper-jumper? Or maybe the old classics survived
because, if they wanted a race, they
had
a race. With first-hand experience, there was
no need to read about it, or have actors perform pallid imitations
on stage. Real life or death chases ended with a sword thrust and
somebody's intestinal goo splattered over those scenic hills and
dales. No explosions, no grinding engine parts, no dangling off
skyscrapers. Just yuck.

My point being the heart of the chase is pure
Keystone, a modern invention re-invented from the old silents,
where action was king. Modern chases are already old, and CGI is
getting old fast. But when the devil's on your ass, you find
yourself funneled down the same channel of clichés. A million
people have had guns held on them, and I bet most of them thought:
"Hey, this is different."

Being chased by a pair of armed maniacs was
certainly new to me. I lassoed my sphincter to my throat, praying
my terror would not be compounded by embarrassment. As Uncle Vern
burned rubber out of the lot, I noticed Todd's eyes doing a
jitterbug.

"Anyone hit?" Vern shouted at the windshield,
too busy to turn around and look.

Marvin was convinced he had been drilled
through and through. He being the only one among us who had ever
been actually shot, we took him at his word. He only stopped his
moaning after a cursory inspection revealed an excess of
imagination. Uncle Vern began swearing at him.

"Do you mind, I'm
focusing
!" Marvin shot back, recovering quickly
from his faux wound. I thought he was using some fussy contemporary
patois until I realized he was maneuvering the periscope camera to
focus on our pursuers.

I had forgotten how tasteless Nature
had been when it formed the Congreve brothers. Strolling outside my
house, they had looked little different from my old neighbors, with
the contextual students making them look like zombies out of the
Time Tunnel. But when Marvin zoomed in on them behind us I had a
scientific epiphany:
Homo
neanderthalensis
were not extinct. Not only that, not
all of them had bothered merging their genes with the prevailing
species. These numbskulls truly had numb skulls. You could hit them
with a sledge hammer and be forced to buy a replacement from
Lowe's.

They were careering after us in a giant
bolus of metal, and for a moment I wondered if they had stolen my
fat assed Impala. But this was puke green instead of puke blue, an
old Grand Prix that had impaled a dozen hapless imports, its dents
and dings festering with rust. It was a late 70's model, but with
enough lead additive, its V8 could chow down almost any other car
on the road. Hell, others cars
were
the lead additive.

"They're not very smart," said Marvin. I
figured he was taking visual measurements of their heads.

"They don't have to be," said Todd as he
searched for a handhold.

"They should have shot out a tire," Marvin
reasoned, sounding a lot calmer than he had when he thought he was
shot. I wondered if he had attention deficit disorder. Even
imminent death couldn't occupy his mind for more than two seconds.
"If they had done that, we'd be toast by now."

We gave a thrashing shout when the Grand Prix
gave the van a rear-end bash.

"Looks like they're doing pretty well
so far," Todd complained as he grabbed a stanchion and pulled
himself to a seated position. I bet he felt helpless down there on
the floor. Served him right for being me. Hackers don't know the
first thing about
real
identity theft.

"How can they be so stupid!" Marvin cried out
as his hand twitched on the joystick, sending the periscope camera
in a twirl, giving us a sweeping vista of Southside that reminded
me of the Omnimax's vomit-inducing panoramas. "If they kill us we
can't tell them anything!"

"Maybe they already know," I said
tightly.

"They don't want you telling
anyone
else
," Todd
added.

"And I'm getting the feeling that I'm the
last to know," I plugged.

"Second to last," Todd amended.

We were becoming a regular tag team of
malicious despair.

"No, no," said Marvin, steadying the camera
lens on our pursuers, filling the monitor with what looked like two
ugly fish in a bowl. "That doesn't make sense. I know stupid when I
see it. Your father was a prize."

Maybe he was the one who had lured us into
this mess with phony-if-convincing letters. So convincing that I
still wasn't convinced Skunk was truly dead. If I had an
unsuspected twin, maybe Skunk did, too, and that was who I had seen
slabbed out at the morgue.

It only then dawned on me that this Marvin
creep knew all the dirty McPherson secrets—like if Skunk came from
the 2-fers basket at Family Dollar. But even worse, he knew
(because the letter had mentioned it) that I was an unredeemable
jerk-off when I was an adolescent. (We'll leave my current status
blank, OK?) Masturbation can be inferred in any red-blooded male,
but the details in the letter were damning. I had obviously not
been as discreet as I thought I had been. Who else but Skunk would
know about the pink dump cup so carefully hidden in a plastic
shopping bag which was itself stashed in my closet? I washed it out
at least once a week, so that at least some of the time (not often,
granted) it could be converted back into a normal drinking cup.
Skunk had somehow found out about it and had placed it at the
disposal of these cretins. But these did not look like the type of
people Skunk would know under any circumstances. Neither Marvin nor
his uncle had the smug air of cops or the peculiar mincing approach
of ex-cons on the make, the only two social groups with whom Skunk
interacted off the Hill....

But I'm being negligent. All the while these
things were tossing through my mind, we were racing down Route 1,
running red lights to attract cops who magically refused to appear.
For a while it seemed to me Uncle Vern was reasonably nifty at
dodging the predators behind us. But after a sideswipe and near
tipover I realized he had not graduated stunt driving 101 but from
the plain old School of Fear. Judging from the stench of urine, he
was either puddling in his seat, or the chemical toilet had barfed
up its contents.

"That thing must eat a gallon of gas by the
minute," Todd observed hopefully. "We can just keep going until he
tanks."

"Uhmmm," said Uncle Vern, a succinct summary
on our own reserve.

"So at least we won't be doing this all
night," I said. I should have stayed mute.

"Dumb, dumb, dumb, just like your father,"
Marvin sneered. Maybe the tension was making him nastier than
usual.

"I'm getting a little ticked off with you
trashing Skunk so much," I said.

"Yeah," Todd agreed.

"Shut up," I said. "Why should you care? You
didn't even know him."

"Ha!" said Marvin.

Uncle Vern must have sensed an upcoming
outrage from his nephew and made a warning noise. Or maybe he was
warning us to brace for another collision.

No...it was his nephew.

I was just about to ask Uncle Vern if he had
a gun in this rig when Todd said:

"You have a gun on this rig?"

"I don't think we should start shooting,"
said our driver, his uncertainty compounded by a sharp swerve
around some idiot going the speed limit.

"Hello," said Todd. "The shooting's already
started."

I agreed. "A couple rounds in their
windshield would shake their ass off our ass." Graphic poesy from
the terrified.

Marvin slid open a metal drawer and pulled
out a gun.

"Who wants to do the honors?"

Todd and I exchanged bug-eyes, a glance that
fully conveyed our inexperience with firearms.

"Then I guess it'll be me," Marvin sighed,
not all that reluctantly. He glanced up at the shattered rear
window. "We already have a firing port."

"Marvin!" Uncle Vern shouted.

"You know how to use that thing?" I asked
uneasily as Marvin signaled for me to lean forward so he could
squeeze past.

"Sure," he said. "I killed your father with
it."

"Marvin!" For a civilized kind of guy, Uncle
Vern was doing a lot of shouting. It was my preconception that
civilized people are sedate, almost comatose. That there are so
many dead civilizations pretty much says it all.

"I was a hero!" Marvin exclaimed. "The
Times
Dispatch
made of
Correspondent of the Day, and I didn't even write to
them!"

He was at an odd angle. It was easy to pluck
the gun out his hand.

"Hey!" Marvin shouted, falling back into his
swivel seat. "Give me that back!"

His actions belied his demand. He cringed, as
though I was getting ready to plug him on the spot. Todd was just
as fearful, seeing that if I missed Marvin I would probably hit
him. Hmmm....

But I wasn't even aiming the gun. It
was sideways in my hand at a useless angle that threatened the
camera console but none of the passengers. Obviously, Marvin and my
brother were focused on what I
should
do, instead of what I intended to
do.

"What's going on back there?" Uncle Vern
demanded.

"I'm thinking of shooting your nephew and my
brother," I said. Okay, I enjoyed the moment. But the stark fear of
my announced targets made me queasy. I'm not used to being
believed. Well, I'm not used to saying anything worth believing.
These chumps really thought I would blast them. The sensation was
so unsettling that I moved to toss the gun out the back window.

"No you aren't," said Marvin.

"It's better than me shooting you."

"Not by much. You show those apes that we're
unarmed, we won't have any chance left."

I edged up a few inches for a cautious look
at the Grand Prix. The Congreve brothers saw me peeking and flung
gestures out the window.

"They're pretty rude," I observed. My back
was drilled by a 'no kidding' silence. "I could throw the gun and
bust their windshield."

"I don't think that would impress them," said
Todd.

"They might even be relieved," Marvin
added.

"Twits!" Uncle Vern shouted from the front of
the van. "We're about to be killed, and all you can think to do is
act like twits!"

It was true. Who would have thought that
three individuals, raised in distinct spheres, would have coalesced
into a clot of twits in the back of a van being chased in the
direction of Antarctica? The odds leaned heavily against this
particular coincidence. Yet here we were: three twits. Four, if you
included the driver. Adding in the brothers behind me, there were a
half dozen twits in the space of few dozen square yards.
Synchronicity at its starkest. Ol' Carl Jung must have been
chuckling in his grave.