“Ah,” Roanoke said. “You would be McGill. Would you like to see my garrote, McGill?”
I decided not to mention that I’d already seen it in action. “I’m really just here to discuss a rare book that your family purchased a few years ago from a police officer in Ohio.”
He pulled the garrote out of his pants pocket. “This garrote,” he said, dangling it in front of his eyes like a stage hypnotist’s watch, “was fashioned from the guts of Sand Gooks.”
“Sand Gooks.”
“Oh yes. They hunt me. I have fought the Sand Gook for thirty years or more. They know my name. Their men are impotent with hate and their women smell like a baby’s graveyard.”
“Mr. Roanoke really should be in bed,” the male nurse said.
“I need that book.”
“Yes,” Roanoke croaked. “I know who you work for. Menlove! Did you check under their car?”
“I ran the broom under it and everything.”
“Good. The Sand Gook can cling to the chassis of a car and draw sustenance from the tailpipe. I know who you work for. They give succor to the Sand Gook.”
Trix couldn’t let that one slide. “You know, not only is that term totally offensive, but the current government is prosecuting a war in the Middle East that uses torture in the pursuit of securing oil interests just like yours.”
“You, sir, are a fool,” he told her. “Which is perhaps only to be expected from a man in a skirt. Their ‘war’ is a girl’s war. It has nothing to do with oil. It has everything to do with the awful preterhuman aspect of the Sand Gook. We cannot allow people who can become invisible to share a planet with us.”
Trix turned wide eyes to me. “Okay. I officially give up. Go to it.”
“Mr. Roanoke. You know who I work for. You understand that there will be repercussions if this interview is unsatisfactory. I’m empowered to offer you a significant sum in exchange for the book. Please. Let us get to business now.”
“That damn book. We could have had
I just had to. “A stone?”
“Yes. For killing a retarded child when your woman squats it out into the world. The skulls are soft. It’s like punching calf’s liver. I lost my stone. And so I have my children. I should have found a less defective wife. My sperm festered in her womb. I may as well have masturbated into a garbage can. Can you smell that?”
“Smell what?”
Roanoke was sniffing the air hard. The male nurse started rummaging in the zippered pouch on his hip, which rattled with pills and metal. “Mr. Roanoke occasionally suffers olfactory hallucinations. I did mention that this wasn’t a good time.”
Roanoke abruptly dropped to all fours. No one seemed to know how to handle this.
On his hands and knees, he pawed over the polished wooden floor to my crotch, which he sniffed like a dog.
“You,” he snarled, “have known the dusky terrorist pleasure of a Sand Gook woman.”
Only four times in my life has my hand literally itched to have a gun in it. This was number five.
“What was it like?” the old man asked, unzipping his jeans. “Was it good?” He pushed his gnarled hand inside his pants.
“Okay. That’s it,” said the male nurse.
“No,” he howled. “I need to know.” His hand was working.
The male nurse withdrew a hypodermic syringe from the hip bag, bit off its plastic lid, and jammed it into Roanoke’s neck. He flipped over in some kind of reaction seizure, brownish urine spraying from within his twitching fist.
“Thank Christ for that,” sighed Menlove, visibly unclenching. “Get him into bed. Mr. McGill, I’m sorry about this.”
“Not as sorry as I am. Wake him up.”
The male nurse snorted. “He’s not going to wake up for a few hours.”
“He’s going to wake up now.”
“Look, you’re not going to get your book,” Menlove said. “Leave it.”
“Let me put it this way. If I don’t get my book, there’s a chance that something seriously antithetical to your current state of health could happen in the next little while.”
“…what’s my current state of health?”
“Alive.”
His eyes narrowed.
“I’m not threatening you. What’s going on here is a little bigger than that, and I’m not entirely in control of it. I need him awake.”
Trix kicked the old man in the stomach. He just kind of puffed out some air. Trix kicked him a few more
