“Yes, for my thesis. Also because I think he’s going to just be a genuinely interesting guy. Does he know why we’re coming?”
I put my hand on my jacket. It seemed heavy. It wanted me to stay right where I was. Stay there, lay down, drink some more, develop some kind of horrific paralysis that prevented me from ever leaving. That required nurses to look after me. Lots of them. With elaborate eye makeup.
I picked up my jacket.
“Yeah, I told him. Figured I may as well be up-front about it. He didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”
“Can’t argue with that. Are we going?”
I had a rental car waiting outside. It had stained baby clothes and a crack pipe on the backseat. I put my hand inside a plastic bag I found in the glove compartment and carefully lifted them out, dumping it all into a FedEx dropbox outside the hotel lobby. A FedEx employee once tried to steal my breakfast. I hold grudges for decades. Frankly, if I didn’t hold grudges, I’d have nothing to play with on Christmas Day.
Trix had gotten the handheld to connect to the Web and produce a road map from the hotel to the location of the man on the phone. I pulled the rental car out of the lot and started following the red line from here to there. Within ten minutes, we were off the highway and barreling up and down leafy suburban hills fringed by big-porched houses stabbed by flagpoles from which bedraggled Stars and Stripes bled.
Trix took it all in like she was riding across the face of the moon. “People really have flags?”
“Sure.”
“Now that’s weird.”
“Yeah, but you’re from New York.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“People in New York are either New Yorkers, or they’re Spanish, or Italian, or Irish, or whatever. Who the hell moves to Williamsburg and says, Hey, I’m an
“Well, what about you?”
“Well, I’m from Chicago.”
Trix snorted.
We nosed out of flag country into parking-lot territory. The standard-issue skyscraper-shape cityscape of Columbus resolved into view, off in the distance. Bland and generic as it was, I wanted to be there. But we had to follow the red line into the tangle of housing out there. To see the man who’d been traded the book for a night of “physical adventurism.”
Chapter 11
I parked outside the address, a well-kept place that’d had the front yard cemented over into parking spaces. This was a guy who had a lot of friends. His neighbor had an old Impala rotting in the yard next door. It looked like God had shat in it—the roof punched in, the interior filled with earth and weeds. A brown sneaker poked out of the bottom of the dirt in the doorless passenger side. The sneaker looked worryingly full.
My guy’s door chime was blandly anonymous. We waited out there for a couple of minutes, not talking. I was on the verge of giving up when I heard heavy footsteps inside the house. The door flew open and there was a large mahogany man wearing a purple towel standing there, grinning widely.
“You’re the guy who called earlier?”
“Yeah. I’m Mike, this is Trix.”
“Yeah? Very cool eye art there, miss. C’mon in. Bit of a rush here.”
The air inside was warm and salty. The place was pin-clean and retrotasteful, like someone had embalmed my grandmother’s house in 1976. He walked ahead of us, muscles moving under his skin like cats under a satin bedsheet. He was heavily built, and the weird artificial-looking mahogany brought out his muscle definition. He brought us into an old lady’s living room, laid a spare towel over the sofa, and sat, inviting us into big armchairs that smelled of old potpourri. He gave that big open grin again, big white teeth gleaming in his shaven mahogany head.
“I’m Gary. You got to excuse my look, I just got back from a bodybuilding show. No time to shower.”
He pressed his fingertip into his forearm and drew a line down it, exposing white skin.
“Body stain. Brings out the shape under the lights. I compete.”
“Did you win?” Trix smiled.
“Ah, second place. Three hundred bucks. I do it for the extra cash, and three hundred’s better than a kick in the ass, right? I got this great trainer, English guy, but he’s pissed at me because I don’t stay in the gym all damn day. He’s got this picture he carries around with him from when he competed himself. Him in first place, some other guy in second, Arnold Schwarzenegger in third. He says to me, ‘I got first and lived on nothing but fresh pussy for the next two years. Arnie got third and lived in the gym and worked his guts out. And now he’s the governor of California and I’m training you, you arsehole.’”
I don’t know what was wrong with me. I just wasn’t in the mood to make friends. Stupid, really. I was sick of it already, or sick of myself, or all that tangled up together.
“I just want to know where the book is.”
Gary grinned that big happy fucking stupid grin, teeth like Scrabble tiles glued into a coffee table. “Sure, I know. Sounds like you guys are on a real weird gig. What is that book, anyway? I mean, the guy told me it was valuable. I did okay out of it—made enough cash to fix up the house and the yard and had a few parties, you know? I’m interested now.”
