Crooked Little Vein

Chapter 56

What did you tell the cops to get them there so fast?”

“I told them someone armed was robbing Frank Islip’s safe.”

“Oh my God. And they’re walking into—”

“Into a distinctly criminal sex party apparently attended by the White House chief of staff.”

Trix just looked at me, mouth open and eyes wide. I knew I was grinning. I couldn’t help it. I knew that if I could get through the last ten minutes, her reaction alone would make it all worth it. And, my God, it did. And I wasn’t done yet.

“It’s going to be interesting when the press arrive, don’t you think?”

“You didn’t. You couldn’t. There’s no way you could arrange that.”

“See, I met a very interesting guy this morning. You’d like him, actually. Zack Pickles. He works in porno, but he does it to raise money for what he’s really interested in. Which is moving a certain kind of information around. He called the press for me. But what gave me the really good idea was you.”

“What did I do?”

“You uploaded photos from the handheld to your hosting site, didn’t you? I poked around the handheld a bit, and saw how it worked. Email attachments. Like the photos my ex and her partner send to me. Just stick ’em to an email and off they go. That’s what made me think of it.”

“What did you do?”

The elevator pinged, and we got out. Of course, Brom was long gone, so we just walked up the exit ramp to the street outside.

“Well, I had to give the bastard the book. There was no way around that. But his big idea of doing the Freedom Train thing, getting people inside town halls and exposing them to the damn thing—and I tell you, that book is weird—it was only ever going to work if people didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. It’s right there in the book, on the first page. Someone wrote instructions for use of the book. And the chief of staff obviously wasn’t going to have people warned beforehand. That wasn’t the plan.”

We got to the street. I stopped, looked up at the night, and drew a long breath.

“Mike, if you don’t tell me what you did and I mean stat I’m going to rip off your junk and—”

“I photographed the book with the handheld, Trix. The whole thing is only ten pages. I photographed every page and uploaded the photos to Zack Pickles’s secure hosting site. Those photos are going to be all over the Internet in the next ten minutes. Because everyone’s been telling me that the Internet and everything on it is the mainstream now.”

Oh, yes, it was time for a cigarette. And this one was most definitely the Cigarette of Victory. I lit it and threw the rest of the pack down a drain.

“It’s no good to the White House when everyone knows exactly what it is and exactly what it does. No one’s going to go near it. Hell, the White House won’t even bother taking it out. It becomes a curio, a weird antique, a discussion point for constitutional scholars and poli-sci majors. It’s… defused. And I still got paid, and they can’t pull the money back. We win. We beyond win. We are made of win. My God, it’s full of win. And so on.”

Trix threw her arms around me and kissed me, and I felt stress unpin the muscles in my back for the first time in a day.

“My God, it’s full of win?”

“There’s no way in hell you haven’t seen 2001, Trix, so don’t even—”

“Yes.” She smiled. “I’ve seen it. I just… I really didn’t think you were going to do anything but hand the thing over and take the money.”

“Yeah, I know. You know why you thought that? Because I decided to make it hard for you to trust me. Now, here’s how it’s going to be.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Dear God. Is this your special Patriarchy voice?”

“Yes, it is, and you are just a girl, so you will be quiet and listen while I tell you how it’s going to be. You know how hard it was for you to trust me today? That’s how hard it is for me to trust you with the whole sex-fiend thing. But I am a man, and therefore capable of change and compromise. So here’s the deal. You can sleep with any woman you want—”

Trix thumped me in the chest, laughing in disbelief. “You total pig bastard!”

“—let me finish. You can sleep with any woman you want. You can sleep with hairy-nippled women, you can sleep with skinhead women in combat boots who smoke unfiltered French cigarettes, you can sleep with women who inject their nether regions with warm salty water. And as for everything else…”

I stopped. I stroked her cheek.

“…as for everything else. Just come home at night, would you? Do what you like, do what you have to. Just come home to me at night. Because I love you.”