Crooked Little Vein (11 page)

F
rom
a distance, the Strip looked like it was covered in a dozen different colors of blossom on a wet spring morning.

Up close, the blanket of petals turned out to be a thick coating of discarded handbills from pimps and porn operations, stuck to the road by rainfall.

Reduced to a pulpy sludge by dirty rain, they dulled the footfalls. We squelched our way through
ANAL HOOK-ERS
and
PHONE DOMINATION
under the ugly gray dawn light, walking from the street up to the hotel I’d found us.

Down from the pyramid of the Luxor, the European castles, and some wetbrain’s idea of Paris, this was Vegas’s newest development. Trix got a look at it and punched me in the arm.

The Freedom was a hotel within an outsize copy of the statue of Jesus that stands outside Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Only in this version Jesus was dressed in an Uncle Sam suit.

“We’re staying in the hat,” I said, rubbing my arm.

“You’re a pervert,” she hissed.

“Oh, that’s good coming from you.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and stalked ahead of me.

“There will be no sex for you until we leave this place,” she said.

I stood there alone in the eerily silent streets of Las Vegas and listened to my penis cry.

The ground floor was vast. You could have fit my entire street into the place. Bellhops with name badges bearing the title
FREE MAN
scuttled up to us and attempted to steal our luggage. The place looked still half-built, the massive American flags covering scaffolding and holes in dividing walls. We were checked in smoothly, but my attention was drawn to a collection of tents some three hundred yards across the floor.

“Refugees,” the receptionist snarled. “They got off the boat in California and took a Greyhound straight here. Someone said they saw the hotel on TV and thought we wanted their tired and their hungry. Who knew other people even had TV?”

Trix leaned over the polished counter. “I want to kill you,” she whispered.

I grabbed her arm and guided her away, sweeping the keycards off the counter as I went. She tried to shake me off, but I sank my fingers into her upper arm and marched her to the elevators.

“That hurts.”

“Stop fucking around.”

“I can’t believe you brought me here.”

“I thought it’d be funny.”

“It turns my stomach.”

“These people just work here. They didn’t build it.”

“Did you hear her?”

“So she’s dumb. You want to kill people for being dumb?”

“Yes.”

The elevator doors opened with a little Yankee Doodle Dandy chime. I put Trix inside it. Abraham Lincoln leered down at us from the ceiling.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you’ve got America. You didn’t vote for the president, right?”

“Fuck no.”

“No. I bet she did. Half the people in America did. More than half the people in America believe in God. You don’t get to just ignore that. I know you like telling me about new stuff and showing me that there’s a whole other society in America and all that shit. So now I’m showing you: this is what the rest of the people have, okay?”

She looked up at Abe and shuddered. “This is horrible, Mike.”

“If I coped with having a bucket of salty water injected into my balls, you can cope with this.”

“You’re teaching me a lesson. Jesus.”

“Actually, I just thought it’d be funny. The lesson just came to me a minute ago. And don’t blaspheme. You’re riding an elevator up to Jesus’ hat.”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Have you got 666 tattooed on you someplace?”

“You may never get a chance to look for it again, Michael McGill.”

There was a plaster bas-relief of Jesus on the wall over the bed. The bed had a wooden slat down the middle that divided it in half. And the toilet played “Onward Christian Soldiers” when you lifted the lid.

“I think I can feel blisters forming on my brain,” said Trix, balled up and rocking slowly in the corner.

I
went back down to the front desk, bought a map, and arranged a car hire. I returned to the sound of Trix giggling.

“I found this in a drawer,” she said. She was waving around a piece of pink plastic that looked like a smaller version of one of those old-fashioned lemon-squeezing spikes, the kind you ream out the flesh of the fruit with. She flipped it around in her hand to show me the handle. The handle was a molded representation of a little baby with a halo.

“It’s a Baby Jesus buttplug,” she squealed.

“You’re kidding me.”

“It gets better.” She laughed. She opened a drawer in the room’s desk, and produced a wrapped condom from a small box therein. She unwrapped it, grinning. “Look,” she said, as it unfurled.

The reservoir tip had Jesus’ face on it.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Exactly! This drawer is full of Christian sex resources! I take back everything I said. I love it here.”

“Trix, I’m not exactly a churchgoing man, but there’s no way in Hell I’m going to ejaculate into Jesus’ head.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that.”

“Nor am I going to wear the little baby Jesus in my ass.”

“Spoilsport.”

A
s
the sun went down, we left the hotel and walked a while on the Strip. Dancing fountains and robot pirates for an hour, among the tourists and the beaten-looking locals and the pimps and losers handing out cards and flyers for sex and porn.

No one in Vegas ever looks like they’re having fun.

An old colleague of mine from there once told me of his plan to return to Vegas and get rich. He was going to install slot-machine public toilets on the Strip. You’d have to put a coin in the slot and pull the lever to get into the toilet. And if the reels were not your friend? The door would stay locked. He envisioned great long lines of people dying for a piss and throwing handfuls of metal into the machine for the chance of taking a leak before their bladders exploded.

He works in advertising now.

We spent a while in a bar with the map—no escape from the ringing cacophony of the machines—and then headed back to the Freedom to pick up the car, a two-seater new-style MG that I liked the sound of. It was small and sharp, great for navigating through the Strip. Once we were off the Strip, though, parking-lot country unfolded before us, as far as the eye could see. We could have been back in Columbus, San Antone, or any other city.

It was dark when we found the address. A cheap-as-dirt area, a bungalow that was ten years old but looked ready to fall apart like a stack of cardboard in the rain. The lights were all on, and there were a bunch of cars parked around it, but it was weirdly quiet. It immediately felt wrong.

“I kind of wish I had a gun,” I said quietly.

“Why?” I made her nervous. Which was good.

“Something doesn’t ring right. I don’t know what. If I tell you to run, head straight back to the car, no argument. Okay?”

“Okay.”

We got out of the car. Something was bugging me. And I was also disturbed by wanting a gun twice in as many days.

It was getting darker.

There were voices behind the door, low and fast. I rang the door buzzer a couple of times. No one came out. I leaned on it.

A tall, florid-faced Latina with purple streaks in her hair and mascara streaks on her face ripped the door open.

“Are you the paramedics?” she shrieked.

“No. We’re here to see Alexis Perez.”

She went to slam the door. I put my foot in it.

“It’s very important.”

“No it’s not. She can’t see you.”

“Why not?”

She lost it. “Because I think she’s dying!”

I straight-armed the door open, knocking the woman down, and boiled through into the house. I just had to follow the voices.

There were four other Latinas in the kitchen and one on the floor, naked but for a bra, laying on her front and shaking violently. There were livid red pinholes on her backside. The four standing may as well have been laying down for all the use they were. They were terrified.

I shoved one out of the way, went down on one knee, and pushed the girl over into recovery position. There was foam on her lips and her eyes were rolling back into her head. She was making long, drawn-out creaking noises, her chest convulsing.

I looked up at them. “Who dialed 911?”

The one I knocked down stamped back into the room, big hands balled into fists. “I did, bitch.”

“Call them again. Her lungs are locking up. Anyone know if she has asthma or allergies?”

They shook their heads dumbly.

“Do any of
you
use inhalers?” Nothing. I rolled her all the way over into shock position, ripping off my jacket and balling it up to put under her feet.

It was then that I noticed she was a he.

Trix was at the kitchen sink. Anger shook in her voice. She said, “Who brought this shit in here?”

I got the jacket under the ladyboy’s feet and straightened up. There were large-bore needles in the sink, and canisters of something that looked like they belonged on a hardware store’s shelf.

Trix turned on them. “Come on. Which of you
retards
brought this shit in here and shot her up with it?”

“What’s going on, Trix?”

“It’s a pumping party, Mike. It’s a party where male-to-female transgendered people with
acute fucking body dysmorphia who can’t fucking read
”—she spat that into the face of the one who answered the door—“inject themselves with silicone to give themselves a more womanly shape.”

“Hey, look, she wanted it,” Purple-streaks said.

Trix slapped her, hard. “It’s
industrial-grade
silicone, you stupid fucking asshole! It’s caulk! It’s sealant! This is the shit you
waterproof bathtubs
with! They lubricate shit on
oil rigs
with this stuff!”

I looked down at the boy fighting for breath. “Oh my God.”

“Yeah,” Trix said. “It’s not sterile, it can come mixed with paraffin, and it can kill you in like half a dozen ways. It came up in a transgendered activism workshop I sat in on last summer. Pumping parties. Boys in dresses who want J-Lo’s butt.”

“What can we do?”

“She’s in toxic shock. And from the sound of her breathing, I bet you the stuff is migrating up into her lungs. It goes everywhere. How much,” she rounded on Purple-streaks again, “did you shoot into her?”

“Tonight, or in total?”

Trix got in her face. “He’s got a gun and I can own you with my bare fucking hands! How
much
?”

“Two thousand CCs each buttock. That was just tonight.”

The boy on the floor stopped breathing.

Trix and I both applied CPR, but it was no good. The lungs were full of industrial sealant. By the time the paramedics arrived, it was all over.

The one with the purple streaks sat on the floor by the sink, knees drawn up, saying nothing but “Oh, God, Alexis,” over and over again.

But Alexis was dead.

T
rix
and I gave the cops an edited version of our reason for being there. The attending officers from homicide were a couple of old bulls of the type that I’m always comfortable dealing with. Macabre as it may have seemed, I needed to get a look around the house, and I laid it out for them.

We got to talking, and they in turn laid things out for us.

They knew Alexis was a hooker. His/her pimp was well known to them. Tim Cardinal, Teflon Tim, from whom all useful charges slid. He was a common-or-garden pimp with extraordinary luck. You get old bulls like these two talking about the ones who got away and it’s like asking your grandfather about the war. Trix and I were lucky we had nowhere to be.

After a while, and the potted history of Teflon Tim and the five murders he’d wriggled out of, the pair agreed that we could do a quick sweep of the house for the book. The case was as clear-cut as it got, we weren’t going to mess with the investigation, and they got a favor in New York City owed them in the future. Connections and under-the-desk favors count for a lot.

Alexis didn’t have a lot of stuff, and it was a small place. After an hour, we were certain that the book wasn’t there.

“This thing’s valuable, right?” said one of the detectives.

“Kind of,” I said. “Very old. A collector would pay top dollar.”

“Well, you know who’s got it, then. Teflon Tim.”

“You think?”

“Sure. He’s not dumb. Talks like a lawyer. And for a pimp, he’s not an absolute fucking prick, you know? I bet he took the book in return for paying her rent for six months or something.”

“Yeah,” said the other. “Freeing up the cash for her to pay her buddy to shoot her ass full of caulk.”

“That makes a disgusting kind of sense,” I said. “So where do I find Teflon Tim?”

T
here’s
a fucked-up shitpipe in the men’s room,” said the bouncer as we slid through the knifemarked door into the bar. The place stank of weed and puke and shit. Two ceiling lights out of every three had been smashed out, jagged glass glinting in the fixtures.

“We’re looking for Muppet,” I said, as the two cops had suggested.

The bouncer looked us over, distaste in his big stitched-up face. “Business or pleasure?”

“Strictly business.”

“Good. Turn around.” The bouncer patted me down professionally.

“Inside jacket pocket,” he growled. I held the right side of my jacket open for him.

“It’s a handheld computer,” I said. “Lift it out and check it.” He slid it out carefully, spun it in his hands until he found the release button, and opened it up.

“Huh. What does it do?”

“Email. Games.”

“Okay.” He handed it back to me and then checked Trix; no attempt to cop a feel. The guy had been trained properly, somewhere official. I wouldn’t push my luck with him.

Satisfied, he asked if we knew what Muppet looked like.

“No,” I said. “You already worked out we’re not local. We talk to him and we leave. That’s the whole deal.”

“Good. Far end of the bar, red hair, eyes like you never saw on a human being before. Buy a drink, no acting out, and I don’t got a problem with you being here.”

I thanked him and we headed to the bar. The guy the cops called Muppet was there, all right. Hair like red yarn, red eyebrows that you’d need a whip and a chair to put in their place, eyes that stood out of his face like someone had slipped boiled eggs into his sockets. Wearing a wifebeater so old and thin that you could see his ribs through it, so scrawny you could practically see his heart behind his ribs. Jogging pants covered in tiny little burn holes and stinking of dope, and shiny new running shoes.

We ordered drinks and watched him for a little bit. I wanted to get his measure. Every few minutes his pocket played the riff from “Axel F,” and he fished a cell phone out from it. It always came out with scraps of tissue stuck to it by velcro snot. He’d rattle off numbers in a reedy voice and then shove it back. Take a few deep pulls of beer. Repeat.

The fifth time the phone went back, I approached him. Muppet immediately fixed me with awesomely bloodshot eyes.

“You’re Muppet?” I said.

“Muppet,” he agreed.

“Cop,” he said.

“Private detective. There’s no trouble here. I’m looking to talk with Tim about buying something he recently came into possession of. Straight business deal, no cops, no angles.”

“Tell Muppet. Muppet tell him.”

“I get to talk directly to him tonight, you get a finder’s fee. My client authorized five grand.”

His red eyes wheeled about in his head. “Fifteen.”

“Ten.” Which was the number I was going to start with, before I got a look at him.

“Now.”

“When I’ve got what I want. I can’t get the cash out of the client otherwise.”

“Now.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Now.”

“Forget it,” I said, and turned away, collecting Trix’s hand in mine.

“Where you going?” Muppet whined.

“Cops,” I said. “I was keeping them out of it, dealing on the level. But if you’re going to be a prick about it, I’m going to talk to a couple of friends on the force. They’ll pick him up on a bogus charge and put him in a cell long enough for me to talk to him. My buddies will split eight grand, which leaves two for me as a little bonus. And when Tim asks exactly who fucked up to the extent that he’s spending a night in a cell with some AIDS-infested assrapist, I’ll tell him it was you. I’m dealing straight with you, but I’m not going to be fucked with.”

Muppet folded in on himself, scowling. “Muppet sad.”

“Have a nice night,” I said, and started walking.

“Okay,” he piped, pulling his phone.

“You’re funny when you try to be a hardass,” Trix whispered. I trod on her foot.