Skunk Hunt (14 page)

Flint looked doubtful. The compartment looked
big enough to hold any number of articles a God-fearing mother
would frown upon—a hefty bundle of back issues from Penthouse, a
litany of sex toys, a lifetime's supply of blow. But when Barbara
turned an unwary ear in his direction, he succumbed with a nod. For
a war hero, he was pretty spineless.

Barbara lifted the tray, exposing a bottle of
amber liquid. I reached past her and removed the bottle of JB
Black. There was nothing underneath it.

"Okay, you've seen it," an agitated Flint
said breathlessly. "Put it back, quick! Before Mother sees!"

I didn't want to upset him and was lowering
the bottle into the chest when something caught my eye. I gaped at
the label, then held it up to Jeremy.

"So?" he said in an anguished voice. "I
agree, we'll need a drink after this."

"Check out the 'For Questions and Comments',"
I said.

Fuming, Jeremy snatched the bottle out of my
hand and read the bottom of the back label. His lip twitched, his
eyebrow twitched, and his hand joined the chorus of
contractions.

"Hey!" Flint protested. "That's 7 years
old!"

Flint took the bottle and gently lowered it
into the niche, then secured the tray on the chest rim.

"Flint?" Jeremy said.

"Mmmm?" said Flint, patting the tray, like a
baker planting a cherry on a cupcake.

"You have any visitors lately?"

"Naw," said Flint, cranking his old bones
into standing position. "Not even the boys come around
anymore."

I understood he meant the throngs of graffiti
artists who had plagued his property for over thirty years.
Generation after generation of young punks with spray cans, all
lumped under the same label. Flint almost sounded like he missed
them. Us. We don't always dislike our devils, especially when they
had been displaced by mindless weevils.

"No one came knocking?" Jeremy persisted. "No
one at all?"

"There was a real estate agent came by
yesterday, but he was a no count." Flint seemed vaguely distressed
by the memory. Or maybe he only now recalled what the day's date
was. His Savior must be tapping his Size 37AAs with impatience.

"Did he come inside?"

"Just for a minute," Flint said, not looking
at us, not even at Barbara. He must be jonesin' for that gun
barrel, I thought. I was tempted to remove the gun from the chest.
One year, one day, there was bound to be an accident with that
unsteady trigger finger of his. Flint's mother was definitely at
risk, sitting up there in the cerebral cockpit. I'd read somewhere
that the only thing left of Hemingway after he ate the big one was
his lower jaw. The old men in the sea of Papa's jellybean had been
spattered over the room, the messiest kind of Diaspora.

"And?" Jeremy said.

"Nothing. He said he'd been looking over
title chains for the area and he was offering me a free appraisal.
Complete malarkey. I kicked the bum out."

"He wasn't alone for a few minutes?" Jeremy
continued. "Did you get called away for anything?"

"Mother got all wound up," Flint shrugged. "I
had to drag her out of the room before she clobbered him."

"What's all this about?" Barbara interrupted.
"I don't have one iota clue what's going on here."

Jeremy gave her a patented Skunk 'shut yer
yap' look, and then turned to me. "That's it."

I nodded. Someone had switched bottles on
Flint. They even knew his brand, Jim Beam Black Label. But how
would he know how far down in the bottle the whiskey had gone? He
couldn't of course. What we saw had been unopened, the seal intact.
Maybe the visitor was counting on Flint's absent-mindedness to
smooth over the discrepancy.

"There's someone at the door."

We all four nearly fell into the chest at the
sound of the voice behind us.

"Savior take me!" Flint protested, slamming
the top down. "Don't sneak up like that, Mother!"

We found ourselves gaping down at a woman the
size and consistency of an unharvested pumpkin. She wore a faded
blue shift that hung down to her ankles, sort of like a child's
hospital gown. Threadbare slippers left over from the Long March
poked out, sparing us, I guess, the sight of her gnarly feet.

"Yes, Mother," Flint said, pulling himself
together. "There were people at the door. They came in. You can
still see, can't you?"

In those brief sentences Flint's attitude
swung between abject dread and unsuppressed antagonism. All these
years, his mother had been sneaking around unobserved. It was a
state of affairs perfectly understandable in the current ephemeral
environment, with college kids hooking up and unhooking at the
speed of light. They wouldn't know a neighbor from a hole in the
wall. But this had once been a community so tightly knit that you
couldn't shit in your pants without the whole neighborhood bursting
out in raucous laughter. Maybe I was staring at the real reason
Flint's marriage fell apart, why those other women fled. They were
running away not from him, but from the gnome under his roof. The
ear-sex rumor was just one of those charming urban myths.
Maybe.

And a mean little gnome she was. She was
snarling. Even without teeth, she looked capable of biting off our
kneecaps. Her arms were draped to either side. I fully expected her
to raise her hands and pronounce a hex.

"Twenty years ago I got a neighbor to
videotape her," said Flint. "I got her quoted as saying when she
was really old, she wouldn't behave like those snappers you see in
the nursing home. So what happens when I show her the tape now? She
asks who's that old bitch on the television."

"I'm not talking about them," Mrs.
Dementis snapped from inside her hundred-year-old carcass. "There's
someone at the door
now
. I saw
her come up the sidewalk."

Her
? Oh
shit....

There was a loud knock from the front of the
house.

"I bet it's her," I said lowly.

"Her who?" Flint whispered.

"What's-her-fat-ass who's been following me,"
I said. The tension brought out my rude streak. "A cop."

Nothing so roused the sluggish Oregon Hill
genes like the proximity of the law. Leaving behind the awful
miracle of Mrs. Dementis, we crept into the living room, like a
quartet of mice alerted to the menacing shuffle of the family
cat.

"Open up in there!" the visitor yelled,
confirming that it was indeed Sergeant Yvonne Kendle of the
Richmond Police. "Cm'on, I don't have all day!"

Flint began to draw back.

"Where are you going?" Jeremy said in a
whisper.

"I'm gonna a get my gun."

"Shoot a
cop
?" my brother asked frantically.

"No, it's April 1—" Flint began.

"Get your skinny ass back here!" Jeremy
commanded.

Flint scowled at him. It was his home, after
all. If he wanted to poke a gun barrel into his own mouth (in
celebration of life, of all things) that was his business.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Barbara
moaned lowly.

"No!" Jeremy and I hissed in unison. "Don't
let her do it!"

"I hear you in there!" Sergeant Kendle
shouted from the porch. "This is the police. You open up, or
I'll..."

This was a set-up that in the past Jeremy
would have been quick to exploit. That in this case the sucker was
a cop shouldn't have made any difference. 'Or what?' was an
attitude built into his bones and sinews—I won't say 'brain', since
I didn't think that a particularly vital piece of Jeremy's anatomy.
But when I glanced over at him, hunched near the door, his lips
locked against any comeback, I realized jailtime had been harder on
him than he admitted. He had learned not to tease cops, especially
when there was so much money at risk.

But it was a situation that cried out for a
retort. From what I had seen of Kendle at the Science Museum, she
didn't have much potential as a battering ram. Her tub of lard
would have spattered against even Flint's thin door.

"I said open up!" she commanded, then
coughed. Hell, she couldn't shout without almost collapsing. I
swallowed my rejoinder. An unconscious cop on the porch could be as
damaging as a splintered doorframe. Anyway, I couldn't think of a
rejoinder. I'm Mute, after all.

"She can't hear us," Barbara said.

"I heard that!" Kendle huffed from
outside.

"I hate letting one of them in without a
fight," Flint said. "A man's home is his berm."

"What did you have in mind?" Jeremy asked.
"You want to call in an air strike?"

"That's not a half bad notion," Flint
nodded.

"I think," I muttered, "we'd better just get
it over with." As I reached for the doorknob, I expected one of
them to try and stop me. But no one did. For the moment, we were
possessed by an uncommon amount of common sense.

CHAPTER 10

"Took you long enough," Yvonne Kendle
complained as she labored through the door like a camel dragging a
pyramid—but her burden was her own unhealthy carcass. "For a moment
I thought I might have to kick the door in."

We would have laughed, but she was too
inherently dangerous. We stared at her like an unwanted stray.
Oversized comfort sweats gave her the appearance of a semi-deflated
dirigible with only just enough helium left to drag the ground
without crashing. She wore colossal sneakers and pounded into the
room like someone in snowshoes. She seemed to have been to a
hairdresser, but the bottom layer of her do was matted by sweat
that lay across her head in wet strands, leaving the hair up top to
waggle in isolation. Her face was almost red to bursting.

"Who's the tub of lard?" came a crackly voice
from the back of the room. Mother Dementis shuffled into the living
room. From what I could see through the wrinkles, her eyes were
sharp and unclouded.

"Police," said Kendle. She fumbled at her
waist and found the pouch attached to her jogging belt. It took her
a moment to unzip the pouch and produce identification. We leaned
forward like schoolkids cribbing answers from a careless teacher.
Yep, a badge.

"That what they call a 'potsy'?" Flint
asked.

"Only in New York City and other third world
countries," said Kendle.

"Well," said Flint with grim but
irrepressible courtesy, "What can I do you for?"

"Mind if I sit?" Kendle asked.

"You can march your overstuffed butt
out the door," Mother Dementis said with the kind of staccato
asperity only the old, the really old, are capable of. With one
foot in the grave—
two
feet, if
you went strictly by appearances—she did not give a damn for social
forms.

Kendle was unimpressed. The lady of the house
saw her eying the couch and tried to block her path, but as the
heavy cloud approached she wisely reversed direction. As the couch
moaned, we drifted to various perches in a semi-circle around her,
Jeremy taking the easy chair, Barbara planting herself genteelly on
the arm. Flint wasn't inclined to sit. When I politely stood aside
for his mother to take the chair I had sat in earlier, she showed
me her gums. I took this for a negative and sat. No one was prone
to join Kendle on the couch. There wasn't any room left,
anyway.

Kendle seemed neither dissatisfied nor
pleased to be the center of attention. She tucked a few handfuls of
excess adipose into the rare vacant folds of her outfit, ignoring
the groaning couch frame beneath her. Then she slapped her thighs
and looked up at us.

"So?"

Our expressions varied, but added up to a
collective 'so what?' I shot a glance at Barbara to see if her
acting was as good, or bad, as mine. Under all that mascara, she
looked like a clown whose monkey had died. Mrs. Dementis appeared
ready to repeat her demand to give Kendle the bum's rush, but her
Archimedean sense informed her that would require one hell of a
lever and she backed off. I couldn't get over Mother Dementis'
being here. It wasn't her existence I questioned—Flint had to have
come from somewhere. But all my life she had been right under my
nose, practically, and I hadn't known it. The most annoying
mysteries are the ones that slip past unnoticed. When I turned
again to Kendle, I found her staring straight at me. She had a
chubby brow (I'd never seen one before) and there was a trench
running from her crown downwards through her septum. She was
annoyed that my attention was so quickly sidetracked onto
irrelevant paths. I wanted to explain that I have Attention Deficit
Disorder. Not officially. People without health insurance can only
afford self-diagnoses.

"You want to tell me where the money is?"
Kendle said. She lifted her hand when Jeremy began to answer. "And
don't say, 'What money'."

"What money?" said Mrs. Dementis. Her
wrinkles folded into a scowl directed at her son. "You been holding
out on me?"

"Of course not, Mother," said Flint. "How can
you think such a thing?"

"I can think all sorts of things," she
answered.

"So can I," Kendle interrupted. "Right now,
I'm thinking what a crappy show you're putting on. If this was
Broadway I'd get up and leave. I'd demand my money back and shoot
the actors. Cm'on, I've been on this file too long already. Hand
over the stolen property and you'll get off with being accessories.
It's not like you were involved personally with the Brinks job. You
won't get more than...well, I'm no judge, but it can't be more than
a few years."

"You're popping smoke." Flint got technical.
"Where's your warrant?"

"I could get one, easy." Kendle either
shrugged or shifted position. It was hard to say which. "I can
email the judge and he can use an electronic signature pad to sign
the warrant. I've got my e-machine and printer in the van, all
charged up. Just have to print it out."