“A million bucks,” I said, wrinkling my nose as an odor wafted across the yard, like a cat had died somewhere nearby.
“That’s what it says. Really, it’s ridiculous. We thought it must be kids, some sort of a stupid neighborhood prank.”
Maybe. But then why would Danya want a private eye?
“Mind if I keep this?” I asked. “I’ll keep it safe.”
“Go ahead. Anyway, we couldn’t come up with a thousand, much less a million—not that there’s any reason to.”
Couldn’t come up with a grand? At sixty dollars an hour, I was an expense these girls couldn’t afford.
I put the note in a pocket. Before I could ask anything more, something clicked in my head. I’d tossed Ignacio against a trash can at the side of the house. A not-unexpected bit of garbage smell there, which is what garbage cans are known for, so what was this miasma drifting across the yard, coming, it seemed like, from the garage? Moldering grass? What grass? The lawn was two inches of brown dry ruff. Run a mower over it and you’d raise a cloud of dust and blow a few ants into the air.
The single-bay garage had one of those ancient one-piece panel doors, held down by a padlock. No other way in.
“Got a key for the lock?” I asked, rapping on the scaly lift-up door, though I might have been able to bust it off its hinges with a modest kick. Near the door, the smell was stronger.
“Danya and I are just renting this place. We’re not using the garage. Anything in there belongs to the lady we’re renting from. Mrs. Johnson. Thelma.”
“Uh-huh. That’s not what I asked, kiddo.”
“Well, some keys are in the kitchen. Hanging on a hook by the back door. Maybe one of them will open it.”
I went back inside, found keys on a ring, came back and found the one for the padlock. As I opened it, screws pulled out of the wood and the hasp fell out. The frame was gouged where a crowbar had popped it out. The marks looked recent. Someone had carefully torn the lock out then shoved it back in place to hide what they’d done. Not good. I grabbed a handle and hauled the door up on twanging springs.
The funky smell got worse. Ten times worse. Twenty.
“Omigod,” Shanna said, taking a step back.
The interior of the garage was dark. I went in first. Shanna came in on my heels. My eyes were still adjusting to the dimness when she let out a thin shriek and stood staring up at rapper Jo-X, shirtless, eyes the color of curdled skim milk, blind. He was hanging against the back wall with a rope around the rafters and under his armpits, black tongue lolling, one nasty-looking bullet hole in his forehead, another in his chest.
And . . . funky, putrescent, having achieved in death the apt and essential condition of every gangsta rapper in the country.
And here I was, back in the thick of it.
Ma was gonna fire me. Out of a job, I was gonna end up in a crappy little trailer park in Dubuque.
Shit.
CHAPTER FOUR
“NO, NO, NO,” Shanna cried from a few feet behind me. “That . . . that just isn’t possible.”
Impossible or not, there he was: Jonnie Xenon, Jo-X, in the . . . okay, I was going to say in the flesh, but that would’ve been gross, given his degree of decomposition in that warm garage, and, of course, the feasting flies. So, there he was . . . in person. Sort of.
According to all the hip, teen magazines—which I didn’t read and thought ought to be burned, First Amendment or no, in a last-ditch effort to save what’s left of our society—Jonnie Xenon’s real name was Aaron Louden Butler. In print he was Jonnie-X, but pronunciation made it Jonnie-Z, which had then become Jo-X in print—still pronounced Jo-Z—because it worked, unlike B-Ob. He had “54” tattooed on both sides of his neck in Gothic print and on a shaved patch on the back of his head—54 being the atomic number for xenon. To his deep-thinking fans, this suggested a cool scientific bent that lent him some cachet. He had spiderwebs tattooed from the corners of his eyes to his ears. A spider in each web was actually a tiny swastika. At last count he had twenty-eight facial piercings in his eyebrows, nose, and lips. And, of course, his tongue, which was pierced by twin spikes . . . which now caught the light and glinted obscenely in the garage.
He had grungy blond hair four inches below his shoulders, wild blue eyes, thin as a whip, and could stick his spiked tongue out a measured—and reported—three and a half inches, which may have accounted for some of his popularity. Onstage, he would tear his shirt off and drive hordes of “Generation Y” girls mad with his thrice-pierced belly button, sunken chest, washboard abs, narrow hips, and unique blend of hip-hop style and toxic lyrics that gave the rest of the gangsta rapper population pause. He was a “bad boy” who gave off palpable criminal vibes, adored by some two million fans, ninety-seven percent of whom were female. By age eighteen, he was a millionaire. Now, at twenty-four, he was worth a reputed thirty-two million dollars—an overt and self-proclaimed user of “recreational” drugs, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, a living, breathing example of why reasonable limits should be put on free speech. You can’t shout “fire” in a movie theater, so why are you allowed to “bang yo ho like a drum roll, yo, an’ if the ho whole you gotta get down go down go, go, go, y’know?”
Un-freakin’-believable. I didn’t know why lightning hadn’t struck the diseased son of a bitch years ago.
But now it had, in the form of fast-moving hunks of lead. Two fast-moving hunks, either of which looked fatal. Now Jo-X was dead, and I figured two million fathers would be suspects
