Skunk Hunt (71 page)

"Well...when Michael approached me, and told
me his suspicions, I said something innocuous, like 'How can I
assist you?'"

"Try 'lame'," said Marvin.

"You were still recovering at home, but I
expected you to be up and about soon enough. A miracle of modern
surgical technique."

"Lame," said Todd.

"Michael talked you into tricking me," I said
pointedly.

"Not just you. We thought that Skunk must
have told one of you—or all of you—where a great deal of money
could be found. We didn't want to admit we were looking for a body.
You might have been spooked."

"Truly," I said.

"We had to bring your mother in on this
because she had always assumed Skunk had done away with Penrose and
she knew about the reward. She would have seen through any
lies."

A vague gargling sound from the back. This
was Todd. His very own mother had kept him in the dark. Sort of a
betrayal. Aw, poor guy.

"So we promised the Brinks money, then the
jewels—which I used on Marvin." Uncle Vern made a sound that did
not sound regretful.

"Payback," said Marvin lowly.

"I think the payback has already happened,"
Todd said.

"Right," I chimed in, immediately
reading him. "You were mixing up the bait so we couldn't pin you
down. What you didn't count on was everyone stabbing everyone else
in the back. But you set the tone. I think we all guessed there was
something fishy about the Brinks story. Nothing we could put our
finger on, except after I found out Dad had sunk all that money in
the West End…
Todd
."

"Hey, like I benefited! I had to go to a
private school, join the soccer club, look for a job…it was
hell!"

It sure sounded like hell to me, and I was
glad to have dodged it.

I said, "When I realized the Brinks money was
only a tease, I became more cautious."

"You were cautious from the very
beginning, but we didn't realize
how
cautious," Uncle Vern said. "But to cast myself in a better
light, I took my cue from Michael, who told his partner they were
looking for stolen jewels."

"Partner? Yvonne?"

"Why are you covering your eyes? Never mind.
Michael told Yvonne not to repeat the story about the jewels to
anyone, especially Jeremy."

"Or me," I said.

"Yes…his use of her seems to have gone beyond
the bounds of decency."

"Huh?" Todd exclaimed. "You mean—"

"So you've proved my point," I said quickly.
"We knew there were plenty of lies in the air, but we didn't know
what direction they were coming from. Don't you think that cost
Carl and Dog their lives?"

There. I said it. Again. Maybe Uncle Vern
hadn't pulled the trigger, but it probably would not have taken
much to convince one of Skunk's former players in the Glass Heads
to pull the trigger. Give them a twenty—hell, a quarter, as in
twenty-five cents—and they'd snuff anyone.

Uncle Vern yawned. Damn, whenever I tiptoed
around the subject he threatened to go catatonic.

"Sure you don't want me to take the
wheel?"

"Oh no, I'm fine, just barreling down the
road, no problem."

His three passengers exchanged glances of
deep apprehension.

"Keep him talking," Marvin prodded after a
long silence from his uncle.

"I'm sitting right here, in front of you,"
Uncle Vern said. "Besides, we're only ten miles from home."

"Isn't that in the 'most-accidents-happen'
range?" said Todd.

"Carl and Dog were a complete surprise,"
Uncle Vern said. "I hadn't counted on outside parties being brought
in. Two more splits..."

"We'd still end up millionaires," I said.

"A million will get you a dime in this world,
and I should know. I am the most excellent fence you'll ever meet,
and I'm still destitute."

"Uncle Vern..."

"What, Marvin? You think I exaggerate?"

"Well, that. You also sound
semi-conscious."

"Your sister brought in Carl and Dog because
she and Todd here felt the need for muscle. They were entering a
dangerous world, or thought they were. In fact, they imported the
danger needlessly. I know shady characters and they belong...they
belonged...how about a singalong?"

"Eyes on the road!" we all shouted as Uncle
Vern swerved onto the shoulder.

"Yes, yes," he said, more or less
correcting.

"Who do you think killed them?" I said.
If he had nothing to do with the deaths, we still might be in
hot-to-boiling water. Fear might succeed in keeping him awake.
Certainly,
we
weren't doing a
very good job. "If whoever shot them is still on the
loose—"

"Oh, I'm sure it was the Congreves. The
police haven't released the information yet, that's all."

"You might be right," I said.

"You might be wrong," Todd said.

"I might be stardust," Uncle Vern sang.

"It might be
you
," I said.

That opened his eyes a bit. "You can just
remove that suspicion from your rapidly diminishing excuse for a
brain."

Wow,
ad
hominem
. You would have thought he was mistaking me
for Marvin. Personal attacks are usually the last resort of the
guilty, who have run out of plausible alibis and can think of
nothing better to do than to verbally stomp their opponents. In
this case, though, I had to grant him a higher handicap. He was too
woozy to conjure up reasonable motives. It was a good thing the
increasing number of drivers around us didn't know his condition.
Sure, we share the road with all sorts of undesirables and
undependables. Drunks, felons fleeing from the scene, dipsomaniacs,
maniacs of all kinds, people high on elevated egos, prescription
and non-prescription drug abusers, people with Alzheimers who
didn't know they have Alzheimers, or people with Alzheimers past
knowing they have Alzheimers...people you wouldn't want to meet on
a sidewalk, let alone the high-speed lanes. But what would our
fellow roadies think of us? We had just spent the pre-dawn hours
digging up a corpse, the murderer of whom had in all likelihood had
also once shared this road—with Dr. Whacko in the trunk. It had
happened almost two decades ago, but I felt the lingering cachet of
death. Or maybe it was just road kill.

Todd raised a protest when Uncle Vern turned
onto the Downtown Expressway. "This isn't the way home!"

"Yes it is," I said.

"I wasn't thinking," Uncle Vern confessed.
"Of course, I'll drive you to the West End as soon as we drop Mute
off."

"You're parked at my place, remember?" I
reminded my idiot reflection. "How can you forget a Jaguar?"

"Before you say anything else, it looks like
you'll be able to afford your own now," my reflection shot
back.

"I wouldn't sink my hard-won money into
four wheels," I said with a superior air. The height of white
trashitude was to buy a Caddy while the house fell down. I was
consistent, at least. Both my house
and
my car were heap-ready.

"Ever figure out how your car got back home?"
Todd asked, veering away from the subtext.

"Oh, that was Dog," said Uncle Vern,
confirming my suspicion. "We saw him pull up in the Impala while we
were staked outside. I think the intent was to strand you at Todd's
so he and Carl could rummage around inside your house
uninterrupted. They never considered the possibility that Todd
would give you a lift."

"It almost came to that," I said. "Me not
getting a lift—"

At which point Uncle Vern almost slammed into
a toll booth. He made a last-second swerve into the Cash Only lane
and braked beside the booth. The attendant stared at him. Seeing
the van coming at her, she had begun to review her past. She needed
a few moments to rev back to the present. Uncle Vern handed her a
dollar. As she returned his change, he gave her a hard look.

"Don't I know you?"

"I hope not, sir," she replied, quickly
tossing fifty cents into the bucket. The barrier rose, but Uncle
Vern stayed put.

"Aren't you one of my nieces?"

Marvin leaned forward for a look into the
booth. "Hey, Deb! I didn't know you worked here. Don't you
recognize Uncle Vern?"

"Yeah," she grimaced.

"You finished packing for the big trip? I've
been too busy to talk to your mother."

"I'm not going. I don't speak Spanish."

"Portuguese, numb-brain," said Marvin.

Car horns farted behind us.

"You want to move on, Uncle Vern? Oh, and
enjoy your new home. I'm staying here, where everyone who doesn't
want to kill me lives."

"Oh Deb, that was a slight miscalculation,"
Uncle Vern joshed. "You don't really think I would have hit your
booth, do you?"

Todd and I nodded silently at each other.

Uncle Vern was nonplussed. "You really need
to come along with us, Deb. Expand your horizons. Meet new
people."

"I meet new people every second. Now would
you please move, Uncle Vern? These folks have to get to work."

"The only legitimate emergency is
diarrhea," Uncle Vern espoused, and with this soggy
avuncular
bon mot
sped away
for the nearest ramp—the same exit where Skunk had given me my most
painful driving lesson.

"Hope my Jag's still got tires," Todd said
dolefully, still thinking that Oregon Hill was it's old self. Uncle
Vern was so sleepy he had shifted out of character, into a nasty
adolescent mode that tripled his moral risk as a driver. Begging a
ride out of me might be distasteful for Todd, but it was better
than hitting 80 mph without a paddle.

"I don't know," I said to Todd. "It depends
on if Dog melted my hubcaps." A reference to a quaint local custom
of stealing cars and driving full-thrust while braking. We called
it 'doing the cha-cha'.

"Hey, I wasn't asking for a ride," Todd
snapped counterproductively.

"Of course not," Uncle Vern swooned.
"
I'm
giving you a
ride."

Marvin was in the middle of a gaping yawn.
"Oh shit," he moaned after closing his mouth.

"Actually, I'm thinking of getting off with
Mute," Todd said. "You know, catch up with old times."

"You two don't have any old times."

"I thought if I showed him my DNA, he'd show
me his."

A perfect opening for Marvin, but he was too
exhausted to take advantage of it.

"Fine, fine," said Uncle Vern, pulling up in
front of my house. "Oh look, crime scene tape. You'll have to cross
the line. Oh look, a police lock on the door. You'll have to break
in."

"Whatever," said Todd nervously.

"Be it upon your heads," Uncle Vern slurred.
"Deb will talk, Todd will talk, Mute will un-mute. It's downloaded
in the stars. We'll all become Glass Heads and share a jail cell in
purgatory."

"Vern?" I said.

"What?"

"Why don't you and Marvin crash at my place.
It's better than...uh...crashing."

"You're too kind. But I have to keep track of
Michael. Marvin planted a microdot gizmo on him...somewhere about
his person."

GPS heaven. Or hell. Maybe they were all
geosynchronous addicts.

"You don't trust him? But you said—"

"Does a mouse trust an aardvark?"

"Hey, Vern, you won't be tracking anyone."
Todd drew our attention to Marvin, whose face was absorbing
alphabetic impressions from his keyboard as he snored away.

"Out like a light," Todd added unnecessarily
before sliding open his panel. "Adios."

I was out of the van, too, holding the
passenger door open as I entreated Uncle Vern one last time to
accede to the demands of nature.

"I have a mattress—"

"Bedbugs I don't adore," Uncle Vern chanted.
"Please close the door and let me go."

A funny line from the man—one of the men—who
had more or less kidnapped me.

"You don't trust Michael that much, to risk
wrecking—"

"Door," Uncle Vern said.

I slammed the door shut and offered a prayer
to the god of chariots that he made it home without demolishing
himself and assorted others.

So.

This was the moment.

Todd and I had shared a minute or two alone
before in the last couple of days. But this was the first time we
faced each other without a great irresolution hanging over our
heads. Plenty of gaps, for sure—but now I was fairly certain he had
not been bizzy-beeing my death at the hands of nefarious
conspirators. I couldn't be 100% positive, of course. But how sure
can you be, Mr. Bourgeois Homesteader, that your lovey-dovey isn't
planting the seeds of your destruction up your fertile wazoo? Think
about that before questioning my qualified trust.

I looked at him. There wasn't much to see,
because it was me, of whom my opinion is...well, I think I've made
that clear.

Todd must have had a better opinion of
himself, because he looked at me with what I thought might be
grudging admiration.

"It's not so bad around here," he said.

"Huh?"

"Well, look..."

My God, he had eyes and he could see. The
neighborhood students were rousing themselves for a day of classes
(taken or skipped) and other mandatory sophomoronisms: going to the
river, blathering about movies and other content-free media,
starting a day's drunk-fest. They were already stirring, hanging
off stoups, strolling nearly naked down the sidewalk; hawking up
sputum from chain-smoked evenings, weaving uncertainly in the
dawn's early light. And for all that, there was something fresh
about them. I won't say redeeming, beyond which they were in
spades. But they had their own little hopes, and that sort of thing
can be mildly contagious. I began to wonder if the day had not been
such a philosophical loss, after all.