Skunk Hunt (24 page)

"Put the chest down," said Carl, with the
bemused wrath of someone confronting a nematode too dense to heed
the obvious. "Put the chest down before Dog removes your legs."

"And eats them," Jeremy added like the cretin
he was...as if Carl intended to hand out shares.

For some reason I found myself looking fondly
at Monique. Speak about inappropriate responses. But I couldn't get
over this vision of the trash goddess, so perfect in her
pulchritude, as though the atmosphere around her was awash in
pheromones. Gonads fox fear every time. When Dog caught the
direction of my glance he came down a notch—from canine to
human.

"What'reyoulookingat?"

It was the work of a second to put
spaces between the words, and I realized jealousy (or the
territorial imperative) foxes fear
and
sex...
and
greed. Dog might not comprehend the intricacies of the
exchange rate, but could easily go rabid over a prize like Monique.
He might tolerate Carl plastering fingerprints all over her, but I
didn't have a meal ticket as compensation. I found myself switching
back to my primary emotion, a longing to save my neck. It was then
that it dawned on me that Carl was quite close, that Jeremy and
Barbara too were magnetically drawn in my direction. Money sucks
the life right out of a family. So does poverty, which makes you
wonder what the point is in the first place.

I mentally played out the timing of the
situation. Whoever was stuck on the hill would be coming up soon,
by foot. But would they reach me before Carl poked his gun barrel
between my eyes and carved out my mental faculties? How long would
he delayed by the wire in the latch once I put the chest down? A
minute? Two?

Carl made a sudden reach for me and I jerked
back. He managed to get a hand on the chest and it toppled forward
out of my arms. I heard a chunky crash, but stayed focused on
Carl's nickel-plated gun. Stupidly, I turned to run back into the
house, thinking the rotten floor would slow down any pursuer, when
a joint gasp of delight filtered through the roaring in my ears. I
wondered if the chest itself was more valuable than I realized, a
Louis Pick-a-Number antique. I lowered my eyes.

Oh man baby.

The latch wire had held, witness to the
durability of old ironmongery. It was the bottom of the chest that
I had heard crunching on the ground. The wood slats had splintered
open as the chest banged down and rolled over—exposing the false
bottom and its contents: rectangular chunks of $100 bills in light
blue shrink-wrap. Carl was reaching down for one of the bundles
when a voice caught our attention.

"Hey! Assholes! Hold it right there!
Police!"

CHAPTER 14

"Where's the rest?"

It was a perfectly reasonable question for
Detective Yvonne Kendle to ask after we determined each bundle held
$5,000, and there were only ten bundles tucked in the false bottom
of the chest. Fifty grand was nothing to sneeze at (unless you
converted it into something sneezable), but it was just a fraction
of what we had expected. Our eyes had bulged enough to justify a
winning scratch-off ticket, but not enough to claim the lotto
jackpot. And now that the law had walked off with even that, we'd
lost our ticket to leave the ranks of the wretched of the
earth.

I'm getting ahead of myself, which is unusual
for me. It's not that I'm a methodical person who accomplishes his
chores by beginning at the beginning and working his way to the
end. I could have just as well started in the middle. Or I could
have presented a tease, like in some movies, by giving you the
improbable ending first and then showing how I landed in the Oval
Office. (A plague kills off everyone else and I become President.)
But these two possibilities only now occurred to me, and I would
have to delete everything I've written and start over. And truly,
you just can't scrap the truth—not without a really good reason.
Let's face it, though, I began at the beginning because I'm not
smart enough to begin anywhere else. You can't screw up a timeline
without a straight one to start with.

Our fiasco in the clearing continued with
Kendle gasping her way up the hill and puckering her fat lips in
righteous machismo theatrics. So much for synopsis.

"
Bam
," said Dog, bunching his fist as he awaited
his next command from Carl.

"An adult bambino, right?" I said, ever
willing to defuse a bomb with infantile humor.

Like the rest of us, Kendle stopped short
when she saw the money on the ground. You never feel a suspected
treasure actually exists until it falls on your head.

I was ready with an excuse:

"Thank God you're here," I told Kendle.
"We've been looking all over for this money so we can return it to
its rightful owner."

A half dozen pairs peeped at me in
spectacular disbelief. Maybe it would have been better to say,
"Oops, look what we've found."

"Antique hunting?" Kendle said with a
quizzical snarl.

That was good, too.

Other reactions varied. Jeremy and Dog gave
me the thousand-yard dog meat stare. Barbara and Monique pulled
their comely faces into attractive pouts, as if I had just
cancelled Christmas. While Carl remained imperturbably poker-faced.
He was used to dealing with the law. The best way to handle cops
was to smooth his plumpness into a perfect blank, as though this
was his usual reaction to either pleasure and despair (two sides of
the same wooden nickel). In fact, this was probably how he looked
when he was asleep.

Since my ability to deal with people was
malformed the instant I laid eyes on Skunk in the maternity ward, I
could only gawk dismally at my skeptical audience. I was even more
nonplussed when Kendle brushed up against Jeremy. It seemed
furtively amorous, until they sprang apart.

In the end, I was consoled by the fact that
none of them could come up with a better lie.

We counted out the money and Kendle jokingly
made out a receipt. Carl held Dog back with a verbal command when
the detective walked away with it all. Then Carl departed with his
little entourage and Jeremy plugged me with his fists.

"You told that cop we'd be here, didn't
you?"

Seeing as I was the only one who hadn't said
anything to anyone about the money, I took great exception to his
complaint. After mingling some protests and denials with my shouts
of pain, I pointed out the obvious:

"That cop saved our necks. Why don't you
punch Sweet Tooth? She's the one who told Carl."

This had obviously crossed Jeremy's mind, but
it seemed she was more or less Carl's property. Carl might sic a
whole pack of Dogs on him if he bruised his recurring revenue.

The whole thing stank of deflation,
anti-climax, and set-up. I returned to the house and stood under
the mute camera. The voice had nothing to say, the red eye stayed
dark, and my desire to rip the device out of the ceiling gave way
to indolence, once I saw the difficulty involved.

Three hours later I was back selling popcorn,
listening to the phony Tyrannosaurus ream me out for being a dummy.
Rex was full of himself: big, strong, and sure as hell no mute. His
roar drummed my inadequacies into my ears and I had to fight the
urge to shove popcorn down the throats of senior citizens, just to
prove I wasn't extinct.

Barbara was to blame. On that I had no doubt.
She had blabbed to Monique, Monique had tossed the tidbit to Carl,
and the result was an ambush. But I couldn't shake the suspicion
something else was at work here. Jeremy had thought so, too,
especially after I filled him in on my conversation with the
mystery voice after he had gone back outside.

"Why is this guy jerking us off?" he
complained as we drove back to Richmond. "There's nothing straight
up. All these games. And you don't have any idea who's behind
it?"

"Skunk..." Barbara murmured.

"Cut it out!" Jeremy snapped, turning hard
onto Iron Bridge Road. "Mute saw him laid out on the slab. Right,
Mute?"

"Yeah..." I said.

"And that didn't
sound
like Skunk in the old house, did it? Get a
grip, Sweet Tooth, before I do it for you."

"Do what for me?" Barbara inquired, shrinking
in the passenger seat.

"Or I'll do what else, that's what." Jeremy
chucked spittle when he talked. He needed a bib, he was so irate.
"We had fifty grand in our hands!"

"We didn't actually touch it," Barbara
said.

"And it was pissed away because of your
big mouth." Jeremy took his eyes off the road to emphasize the
shaking of his head. "I'll bet that was all that was left.
God-
damn
, I bet there's
nothing else. The bag is empty."

I tended to agree. The voice had gone to a
lot of trouble setting up the old house, enough to film an episode
from a reality show. Why bother unless the prize was the whole hog?
Only a sadist would ask more from us. And yet, I wished for another
chance. And by now Barbara would have learned to keep her mouth
shut.

This hi-tech business was getting me down.
First the computer messages, then the remote camera, culminating in
Carl's wicked GPS.

"McPherson!"

I snapped out of my racking reverie to find
myself staring at Mr. Toney, my supervisor, whose sole job seemed
to be to make sure I showed up and to count kernels in the back
room, tasks he performed with insensate indifference because this
was, after all, a government position. So far as I could tell, his
parents had not bothered giving him a first name, and he worked on
the assumption no one else had one, either.

Being one of those numb souls who only
reluctantly admits visitors to his mental space, my mind turnstiled
reluctantly. "Uh..." I said.

"Call for you in the office," said Toney. He
appeared more intrigued than put out. Having fingered me as someone
who neither received nor made phone calls, his curiosity was
roused.

"Can you take a message?" I said.

I was asking him to be my secretary. Rather
than being offended, Toney was impressed by my reluctance to leave
my post. His world scheme was almost as limited as my own, and this
was a major event.

"The next show isn't for half an hour," he
said amiably.

"Who is it?"

"How should I know?" Toney asked, finally
showing a trace of irritation. "Some guy."

It was obvious this representative of state
government did not care if we sold popcorn-tainted butter to the
general public. Toney behaved as though I would be doing a service
for humanity's arteries by stepping away for a few minutes.

I scattered some kids away from the
Tyrannosaurus as I found the shortest way to Toney's office. He
followed me in, giving me an odd look. Maybe I wasn't such a great
humanitarian, after all.

"Line Two," said Toney, dishing his hand
towards the phone on his desk.

I stared at the phone, then at Toney. He
didn't get the message.

"I put him on hold," he said. "Pick up the
receiver and punch the line that's blinking."

How much of a technological nitwit did he
think I was? OK, multi-line phones were about the limit of my
expertise, but the way Toney talked you'd think I would have a hard
time peeling a banana. If there was a moron in the room, it was
him, going all blank when I hinted a desire for privacy. Except
Toney knew exactly what he was doing. He was the other kind of
moron.

But I would have been reluctant to answer the
phone even if I had been alone. All the craziness of the past week
had churned my lobes into a mishmash. 'Who-what-where' had become
'duh-duh-duh'. I needed someone to clear my trachea and check my
pupils while yelling "What is your name?" in a loud and reasonable
voice.

The phone line light blinked impatiently, a
real irritant. I took up the receiver and cautiously pressed the
button.

"Hello?" I said.

No one answered. This suited me fine, and I
was about to hang up when I heard someone shuffling around at the
other end.

"Hello?" I repeated.

"Fucking glasses," came a voice, followed by
a long pause.

The chill of suspense, the shock of
recognition and the sinking sensation of being caught utterly
flatfooted spinned me down and out. I nearly dropped the phone. I
held the receiver away from my ear for a moment and saw Toney
quizzing me with a glance.

I brought the receiver back up and
listened.

"
You and your
fucking glasses
," said...Skunk.

Yeah, impossible. And that very impossibility
was a clue, if only I could visualize past the riot of clowns in my
head. I listened hard. There was movement, a click and whir more
electronic than human—and I don't have to imagine humans clicking
and whirring. I see it all the time. It's called 'work'.

It didn't take much cerebral locomotion to
realize I was listening to a tape of my father. But when the
silence persisted, I also realized I needed to play along.

"What glasses are you talking about?" I
said.

Whoever was jockeying the tape was finding it
difficult to pinpoint what he wanted to play. I heard a
non-recorded grunt, then:

"
It's still
there, all of it
."

Click
.

Whir
.

The producer of this little show was
searching for the next snippet. He didn't want me to hear the
entire recording. If I ever get around to reading War and Peace I
don't want the abridged version—even if that means I'll never get
around to reading War and Peace. It was the same here. Skunk was
being edited, heavily, and I couldn't begin to guess at what was
being clipped.