times.
“He’s not waking up, Trix.”
“Oh, I’m past that and into pure entertainment value now,” she said, prodding at his nose with the point of her boot. “What’re you going to do?”
I fished out my cigarettes. “I don’t know. I mean, he wants me to make the call if I don’t get the book. I can wait for him to call me, but I can’t tell him I have the book, because I can’t produce it. Which brings us back to square one. If the Roanokes don’t give up the book…”
“What happens, Mr. McGill?” Menlove asked, slipping his hand inside his jacket.
“People I don’t know and have no control over will do something extraordinarily horrible to this ranch and will never ever be prosecuted for it,” I told him.
“…you’re not telling me he was right about the Sand Gooks, are you?”
I lit up, watching his face work. “How long have you been working here?”
“Eight years. I wake up with a gun in my mouth every morning.”
“Yeah, well, you might want to think about doing that right now. If the old man’s out for the count—”
“He pass out again?” came a big, twanging voice. A man in his early fifties, short and trim in tennis whites, bounded into the hall from a rear entrance. “He didn’t do that thing with his pants first, did he? I’m real sorry if he did. I’m Jeff Roanoke Jr. Anything I can help you folks with?”
He flipped his tennis racquet from right to left so he could shake hands with me, a wide soft grip. His eyes locked on to mine for a couple of seconds, judging. He wasn’t stupid. He was letting me think I was stronger than him, and checking my reaction.
“Mike McGill. Good to meet you. I’m here on behalf of a client about a rare book we believe entered your possession a few years ago, purchased from a police officer in Ohio…?”
Roanoke’s oddly boyish, rubbery face stretched into an easy grin. “That old thing?”
“I’m empowered to offer you a significant sum to obtain it.”
“Well, hell, son, we should go to my den and talk about it. C’mon back.”
He stopped, on one foot, and looked back over his shoulder. “No girls.”
Trix rolled her eyes. “I’ll be in the car. With the engine running, Mike.”
Chapter 31
Down two flights of stairs, through some heavy doors, into a bare concrete corridor lit by caged lamps hung from the walls, to a steel hatch that Junior spun the wheel of with practiced ease.
“This is the den?”
“Daddy doesn’t like it when I call it the bunker. Bad associations with the past, he says. So, well, whatever keeps the old man happy.”
Inside was a dark, warm space from the 1950s. Baseball pennants pinned to rich wood-paneled walls, old globes and maps, Tiffany lamps, an antique radio, and a bar straight out of a Rat Pack musical.
“Drink?” Junior said, walking over to the big mahogany desk at the far side of the room.
“No, thanks. I’d like to get straight down to business, if I could.”
“Businessman? That’s good. What’s your business, Mike?”
“A book you possess. A, um, an alternate Constitution of the United States.”
Behind the desk, he was opening its deep central drawer. “Ah,” he said, with rueful knowledge. “That old thing.”
“I represent someone who wants that book very badly. I’m empowered to offer you ten million dollars for it. But the deal has to be struck today.”
His eyes widened and his mouth shrank. “Today?”
“Yes, sir. This is a matter of the utmost urgency to my client.”
“That damned book.” He sat down heavily in the big leather chair behind the desk. “I tried reading it once. It was the strangest thing. I dropped it down on the desk, right here, to read it, and it was like my goddamn eyeballs were bugging out. I didn’t understand a word of the text but I couldn’t stop reading it. And Daddy wanted me to use that damned thing…” He trailed off, looking down into whatever was in the open drawer, out of my line of vision.
“With your father, um, out of commission, I was hoping you could help me.”
“I wasn’t ready to be president. I’m
“No offense, Mr. Roanoke, but you need to be ready for this. This is extremely important.”
“Gimme…gimme a second,” he whispered. And withdrew an old gas mask, the full-face kind that has the airtank and compressor hanging from the thick pipe connected to the mouth of the mask. I noticed that the bottom of the tank had been sawed off, and stepped in to see what he was doing.
In the deep drawer was a small mountain of cocaine. The only thing it was missing were gulls nesting in the crevices. Tony goddamn Montana would have quailed at the sight of it.
Junior shoved the open end of the tank into the white pile and flipped on the compressor. Enough coke to kill a flock of young tyrannosaurs was sucked up into Junior’s head. He ripped off the mask and shrieked. Bloody residue
