Crooked Little Vein

She grinned. “You ever skipped out of a hotel without paying before?”

Chapter 41

And then, with the board in the bed ripped out and a pair of panties dangling off Jesus’ face, she kissed me, warm and tender and long like she’d never kissed me before, and whispered, “You saved my life. You gave up on the book and the job and the money to save my life. I could fall in love with you.”

I’ve said I love you when I’ve meant it, and I’ve said I love you when it was the right thing to say, and I’ve said I love you when saying anything else would have hurt someone without reason. And I couldn’t say a word, there in the dark.

Chapter 42

We snuck out of the back of the hotel and caught a bus to the airport, where Trix bought a couple of coach tickets to LAX. She took the cell phone to call her friend, apparently getting nothing but the answering machine. She’d turned away from me and muttered what seemed like an absurdly detailed message into the phone.

After that, it was down to an hour of waiting, leaning on each other in the hard plastic departure-lounge chairs, tired and stressed and silent. I put one eye on a nearby TV, which was showing choppy, pixelated footage from the war in the Middle East. Blood on the road. Bumpy handheld camerawork. An American soldier who was maybe twenty, crying, screaming at what I guess was his commanding officer. The sound was turned down, so all you got was this kid dressed as a soldier with blood all over his uniform shrieking silently.

A fat guy lumbered past with one of those little suitcases on wheels. The case didn’t seem to be big enough to contain one pair of the underpants that guy must’ve needed. On the case was slapped a glossy plastic sticker demanding that I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. Looking at the shocky commander not knowing what to say to the screaming soldier, I came to the decision that I’d start that just as soon as I saw our troops supporting our troops. It didn’t do much for my mood.

I elbowed a small child in the face so that Trix could get a window seat, and she fell asleep while I was still apologizing to its obese, dirt-streaked mother. When the flight attendant came to intercede, I told her the mother was yelling at me in Iraqi, and she and her poison spawn were frogmarched off the plane.

I sat next to Trix, and a musty-smelling middle-aged man with a hawk’s profile arranged himself in the aisle seat next to me. His houndstooth suit had been secondhand when God was a boy, and what I first took for badly maintained spats turned out, on closer inspection, to be cut-down gray gym socks arranged over battered black Chelsea boots.

After takeoff, Trix went off to sleep, a trick I was learning to resent if not despise her for.

The man next to me looked down his nose at me and took a long, pipe-clearing sniff. “You look weary. A traveling man?”

“You could say that. New York, Columbus, San Antonio, Vegas. On to L.A.”

He wriggled with pleasure at the prospect. “What a crooked little vein you travel. All the way to the heart of America. The red, steaming valves of Los Angeles. A fine place for a detective to be headed.”

I got that little see-saw feeling in my stomach when something I can’t put my finger on is wrong. Like knowing something’s waiting around the corner for me with big teeth and a hard-on. “How did you know I’m a detective?”

“You have the smell on you. The smell of Crime. I, too, am in the life. A consulting detective. Falconer’s the name. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Um…no.”

“But I was recently featured in The Investigator’s Companion.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“The Companion? The monthly journal for detectives?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Aaah. That explains it. I am Falconer, boy! I am the world’s greatest consulting detective. I, sir, am the man who solved a crime by placing the deceased victim’s penis in my mouth.”

“You sucked the corpse off.”

“Don’t be so disgusting,” Falconer said. “No wonder you don’t read the Companion. You are plainly some kind of hired pervert. I simply needed to learn of the woman who had sex with him before he died. My early years as a male prostitute have gifted me with exceedingly sharp senses and a preternaturally strong tongue. By tasting the cadaver’s todger, I could tell not only that the woman used an extremely strong spermicide —which robbed me of the use of my lips for some moments—but also that the woman’s vagina had a uniquely horrible flavor. This led directly to a female user and dealer of amphetamine sulphate—which quite ruins the taste of a woman’s secretions—posing as a vagrant prostitute to entrap and murder the man.”

I accidentally on purpose kicked Trix in the ankle. She didn’t wake up. I hated her.

“Not the strangest crime I ever prosecuted, of course,” Falconer said, picking his nose. “Imagine the scene: A slender, flat-chested girl with a small bottom covered entirely in blood, and a very old man on the floor with no penis at all. And only I, the great consulting detective, possessed of supernatural skills honed by years as a professional lover of all mammals, could possibly solve this case. Anus dentata, would you believe.”

“A…what?”

“Anus dentata. Rare, but all too real. The old gentleman on the floor with no undercarriage preferred to take his pleasure through the tradesman’s entrance. However, the poor girl’s anal teeth would snap shut involuntarily upon local muscular stimulation. Severing and quite possibly devouring the bishop’s erection.”

“The bishop.”

“Oh, good God, yes. The girl, possessed of a boyish figure, had been wearing a school uniform that featured a trouser rather than a skirt. The unfortunate and unpenised man of God was attempting to wean himself off