Crooked Little Vein

Chapter 21

Bob Ajax was waiting for us in the arrivals lounge at the San Antonio airport. Huge and fifty, with a grin like he’d just cheated God out of his savings.

“Mike Mc fucking Gill,” he bellowed. “Man, you’ve lost weight. New York City must be killing you.”

“Look at your goddamn stomach, man. You eat your last wife or something?”

“Bastard. And I see you’re hanging out with a better class of person these days.”

Trix read him in a second and gave him a sexy crooked smile. “Trix Holmes. Mike’s assistant.”

“Hell. I could use an assistant like you.”

“You couldn’t afford me, Bob.”

Bob laughed out loud. He’d always liked women who’d talk back to him just a little bit. “Girls with balls” were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. He’d heard of a place in Iceland where troublesome women were in fact drowned in a freezing bottomless well. Bob had once gotten inhumanly drunk and attempted to dig such a well outside the office in Chicago, using a stolen pneumatic drill and, in the final moments of his excavation, the head of a passing police officer. I helped him keep his job in the aftermath, and we’d been solid friends ever since.

Bob was still driving the same car: an immense, battered old Lincoln Continental that was held together by spit and a prayer. He slung our bags in a trunk already half-full with, in Bob’s words, “tools of the trade,” and then wrestled himself behind the wheel.

“One of those things looked like a harpoon, Bob. You do much whaling in San Antonio?”

“It’s a Persuader. Punches out door locks. Tool of the trade. You see the big black tube next to it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the harpoon gun. Not loaded. Need to buy more ’poons. Because, y’know, I’m not as young as I was, and some of these bastards can run fast.”

“You harpoon people?”

“A bit.”

The Lincoln coughed and rolled out of the airport parking lot. It was warm, and the air conditioning smelled like something small and furry was trapped inside it, so I settled for rolling down the window.

“Yeah, sorry,” Bob said, reading my face in the rearview mirror. “There’s a rat stuck in here someplace. Little fuck is waiting for me to show weakness. He don’t know Bob Ajax.”

“Rats do that. How long to the hotel?”

“Forty minutes. So tell me about this job.”

“Short version? Mad old rich guy in D.C. lost an antique book, hired me to recover it. The paper trail led us down here. The Roanoke family.”

“Well,” Bob said, “I didn’t want to talk about it too much on an open line. But this might be the end of the road for you.”

Trix leapt on that. “Open line?”

“Damn right,” Bob shrugged. “You don’t screw around where the Roanokes are concerned. The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharaohs and crazier’n a snake-fucking baby.”

Trix shot me a look. I didn’t react. I knew Bob. And sure enough, his eyes were flicking to the rearview mirror, watching us. His shoulders tensed up.

“They have the wrong kind of friends all over Texas, lady,” Bob growled. “People owe them. They understand the modern kind of power. They don’t stand on high and wait for people to bring tribute. They spend their money and make sure everyone owes them something. You think people like that ever have less than a thousand wiretaps running at any one time?”

Looking absently out the window, I reached down and across, found Trix’s hand, and gave it a single sharp squeeze.

“I guess you’re right,” Trix said.

“Damn right,” Bob said, visibly relaxing.

“How long to the hotel, again?” Trix sighed.

Blank highway broke up into factories, housing, parking lots, stores. It didn’t look much different from Columbus. The press of cars grew tighter. Not a human body to be seen on the streets, such as they were.

“Does nobody walk here, or what?”

“Ah, well, you’ve come here at an exciting time, Mike. There’s a surplus in the city budget this year, so you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna pour us some sidewalks!”

“No sidewalks,” Trix muttered. Trying out the phrase on her tongue.

“You East Coast types,” Bob smirked. “You’re like little weakass colonies on the edge of Real America, you know that?”

“Walking makes us weakass?” I laughed.

“Fine for your cramped little towns like New York,” Bob proclaimed, sitting up taller in his seat. “But this is the big country, and we need big cars, and the space for ’em. This sidewalk thing, it just means we ain’t too proud to make things a little easier for our visiting cousins from Weakass Country. We’re big people like that.”

“You’re from fucking Minneapolis.”

“Texans are born, and Texans are grown, and they’re all Texans nonetheless. I fucking love it here.”

A few minutes later, he started crying, and had to pull over the car.

“They hate me,” he gasped between great painful heaving sobs, his big soft face contorted in agony. “God help me, Mike, they all fucking hate me like I was Hitler’s fartcatcher.”