Skunk Hunt (38 page)

Running her hand through my prematurely
thinning hair (more nothing), Monique worked magic into my scalp
and sent a thrill of anticipation through me that was as much hope
as fear, but was mostly blind stupidity. I had to be stupid to
forget Dog at my shoulder. Carl might take amusement in watching
his employee fornicate, but Dog could only look on in rabid horror.
But I wasn't much for audiences. Monique sensed this and said:

"You guys leave. He's feeling hibidated." She
shifted position and produced an intentionally comical frown.
"Maybe..."

"Think he'll talk to you?" said Carl
standing.

"I'll squeeze it out of him," she answered,
giving me a hug that was actually quite friendly.

"I could grind it out of him, and a lot
faster," Dog observed from behind my right ear. I could feel the
grindstone in his voice, and began wondering if the sex option was
all that preferable, after all. If Dog was mad now, he would be
sweating blood (
my
blood) when
everything was said and done.

"If he's convinced Babyschmucks will become
his lifelong cream dream, he'll be more likely to give us the
details," Carl said.

From the way he spilled his plan in the light
of day, it was obvious he didn't think much of my intellect. I knew
that had been his intention from the beginning. He just figured I
was too much of a noodle to dodge the obvious. You can see my
dilemma. The obvious isn't always something you necessarily want to
dodge.

Dog must have made some kind of threatening
gesture behind my back, because Carl felt obliged to rein him
in.

"Behave," he admonished. "You know
Babyschmucks thinks the world of you. You know why? Because you're
so reasonable. This is all a joke. A job."

There were people on the street without
jokes or jobs, I thought. Incredible as it might seem, after all
this foreplay, my amorous inclinations were beginning to ebb. I
mean, my captors were really pouring it on. I was a dummy
deluxe
, and all Monique had to do was
pull my strings, aka yank my chain. It was beginning to look as if
it was my moral duty to deny myself the pleasure of her company, if
not to save my self-respect, at least to keep from drowning in
self-loathing.

If you're passive enough, physics takes over.
You find a center of gravity that isn't yourself. It can be an
organization (the Elks, a sewing bee, the Nazis), an ideology
(democracy, Feng Shui, the Nazis) or a person (a spouse, a lover, a
louse, Adolf Hitler). Once Skunk was rudely eliminated from my
life, I had nothing to focus on. I could have been something, like
a career criminal, if he had stuck around a bit longer. I could
have been a drunk (which is sort of a club, isn't it?). I could
have learned the ropes, especially the kind that go around your
neck. Come to think of it, I had still managed to end up in a
noose, but that was more by chance than intention. Up to this
moment, I had been a fragment loose in space. Not a renegade
planetoid, but a dimensionless blob floating in comfortable
aimlessness. But now I had to develop a flight plan, or at least a
direction. I had to be all that I could be—which meant doing all I
could do. Which didn't seem to be much.

"You don't need to leave the room," I
announced.

Carl, halfway to the door, paused. I couldn't
see Dog, but I suspected he hadn't moved.

"What, you want an audience?" Carl touched
his lip. "Don't tell me a mutt like you has something to show off.
Do you? Would it be worth filming? We could sell it to—"

"He ain't got that much," Dog barked with
rabid sarcasm. He had seen me in inaction.

"How would you know?" asked Carl.

It was then that I discovered that Dog was
possessed of, of all things, a prudish streak. To work for a man
like this in a place like this with a harem like this and still
maintain a sense of carnal decorum would have been laughable if I
hadn't had his naked girlfriend on my lap. That he had not told his
boss about his inadvertent bit of voyeurism was astonishing. It
wasn't his fault that he had been stuck in my closet when Kendle
threw me down on the bed.

"Yeah," said Monique. "If anyone knows—"

"That's right," said Carl, whose eager glance
drooped when Monique shrugged and said:

"He's all right."

Translated from the language of 'polite
reserve', this meant 'nothing special.' Overly pleased by this
response, Dog snorted—not with contempt of me, but for the fact the
subject had come up in the first place. A strangely objective man,
Dog. Even more strangely, this made him sympathetic. Like most of
us, he couldn't help but howl at the idiocies of Mankind, the other
white meat.

"You saying you don't want to get it on
with Babyschmucks here?" Carl pursued, pornographic to the end. "In
January you couldn't get enough. You haven't
turned
, have you?" He eyed me like a gaudy float
from Mardis Gras.

The office door flew open. This was the
second unsolicited interruption, and Carl didn't bother looking
before he spoke.

"What, another twit who doesn't know how to
knock? And by 'twit', I mean..." His voice drifted off when he saw
the newcomer was not one of his girls. Not hardly.

"O...kay..." said Sergeant Yvonne Kendle
lowly as she stared at me with a naked girl on my lap.

CHAPTER 19

I don't know why she had that look on her
face. She recognized Dog from the farm, but her back had been
turned when he burst out of my bedroom closet and by the time she
glanced around he was out the door. I told her it had been a
stranger, which nonplussed her to the point of indifference. She
seemed to think strangers (or strangeness) was endemic to my house.
And it couldn't be jealously. I mean, it wasn't like we were going
steady. I hadn't pledged my troth or any other part of my anatomy.
And Monique wasn't strictly naked. Legally defined naked, true—when
she jumped off my lap, a rather vital pasty drifted to the floor
like an uncrumpled fifty-dollar bill. I don't think I had loosened
it, but you can never tell with men.

Kendle was starting to go cockeyed, her ears
rolling out the red carpet for an explanation. Then she saw the gun
on the desk and her hand drifted towards her waist—wherever that
was.

"No need," Carl assured her. "I was just
showing Todd here our armory."

"Yeah?" said Kendle, though she was looking
at Monique, who was quite a sight as she leaned down for the
pastie, displaying some of the serpentine litheness of her stage
profession. I wondered if Kendle was lining up a painful schedule
of diet and exercise along with her field of fire, a normal enough
reaction to physical perfection. I always imagine a tough regimen
of weights and aerobics while hunched over my chips during NFL
halftime.

"You mind stepping away from the desk, sir?"
said Kendle, re-focusing on the real threat. Because she had to
shout over the Russian music, which was reaching a climax, she
sounded more threatening than she needed to. Or maybe she hit just
the right chord. Carl jumped away from the desk as though it was a
gargantuan hot potato. Personally, I wished she paid more attention
to Dog. There was no telling how he would react.

After a quick glance down for any unsightly
evidence that I had been in the lap of luxury, I stood and held out
my arms. When it looked like she might draw down on me, I lowered
them and sat back down.

"They..." I began.

"Kidnapped you?"

I was suddenly and inexplicably unsure
of how my day had gone. Sure, Carl and Dog had kidnapped me. But I
didn't understand what they had kidnapped me
for
. They hadn't asked me about the money from
the pump house. They hadn't mentioned Barbara or Jeremy. They
seemed to think I had broken some sort of agreement of which I was
completely unaware. And I was really befuddled by this 'Todd'
business. Who the hell was he, and had he signed a contract? If
that was the case, they were SOL. My name was Mud.

"Pretty cushy," said Kendle, who then winced,
as if sorry about her choice of words.

I scooted a little to the side to display the
uncushioned chair I was seated on.

"Yeah, you've had it rough. Catch and
snatch."

Carl let go with a guffaw. This was his kind
of humor. Meantime, Monique had retreated to a corner of the office
to discreetly replace her dainty heart pasty, as if that really
completed her wardrobe. The room was chock-full of hypocrisy and
meaningless gestures. That included Dog, whose inaction hid the
fact that he wanted to rip someone's head off. We were all watching
Kendle closely, as though to adjust reality to her taste.

I felt myself falling in with the unplanned
conspiracy. There was no reason for me to be embarrassed. Hell, I
was the injured party here. But I was also a victim of ignorance.
Something told me to back off from a direct plea to be rescued.
Escorting me off the premises in one piece was all the help I
wanted. Kendle would want to grill me once we were out the door,
but at least I could answer without witnesses pouncing on my
lies.

I stood up awkwardly.

"What's wrong with you?" Kendle demanded.

"I'm a little stiff."

"Oh right, you took a beating." A brief
stare-down ensued as Kendle sneered at Monique. Instead of wilting
under the policewoman's gaze, the pole
artiste
raised herself to full height, hands on
hips, as though to say, "You wish." I had always thought naked
immorality caved in when confronted by its fully clothed opposite.
Instead, Monique seemed ready to whip off her pasty hearts to show
her adversary who was really in charge here. Kendle opted for the
better part of valor and changed the subject.

"The bottom line is that I saw you being
forced into a van by these two gentlemen."

Dog, who I could now see, jumped at the
designation. He probably felt insulted. No one would ever catch him
in a tux.

"You saw all this?" Carl said, failing to
hide his surprise.

"You were staked out on Ferncrest?" I said,
equally put out. How had she known I would be there?

"No, I put a GPS on your car and followed
you."

"I'm sure you had a warrant for that," Carl
observed.

I stared into a bleak technological future.
My car was so bugged it was beginning to sprout antennae—I mean, in
addition to the one for the radio, which years ago had been so
nicely braided by a local kid that I hadn't bothered straightening
it. What exactly had I removed from the undercarriage? I didn't
think it was the transmission, or I would never have made it to
River Road.

Kendle brushed Carl's comment aside like a
girl who bought her own birthday gifts and didn't care who knew. It
didn't matter if she had a warrant or not, and none of us was
saintly enough to dispute the issue. Carl might play the role of a
pulchritudinous David versus a prudish Goliath, but he backed off
before a rogue cop who was as shady with the law as Carl was with
women.

"You want to turn that crap off?" Kendle said
as Khachaturian's music scooped up a million syrupy clichés and
dumped them onto our eardrums. As music it was overbearingly
beautiful. Converted into a novel, it would have been pure
Harlequin. Assuming the pose of the offended aficionado, Carl
stepped over to the wall and switched off the stereo. Both Dog and
Monique seemed relieved. Carl sneered at the swine who disdained
his pearls. Personally, I liked Khachaturian, but I disliked
shouting over him to be heard. Making me a pig, too, I guess.

"So you know where it is?" said Kendle after
giving our ears a moment to recover.

Dumb looks are my specialty, and I gave her a
plump one.

"Did she squeeze it out of you?" she
continued, eyeing Monique narrowly like a competitor at a
fresh-juice tournament. Making me the lemon.

"There's nothing to squeeze," I
complained.

"Got that right," said Dog. From the look of
him, two cents was all he had, and now he had spent it.

"You'd rather tell her than me, is that it?"
She had not taken her eyes off Monique, and Monique continued to
respond with statuesque pride. There was a certain lack of
professional humility. If it hadn't been so embarrassing, it would
have been something to behold. And yes, I was embarrassed,
excruciatingly so. Yeah, I was the victim, but I was also the one
caught with a naked girl on his lap by the girl who had been naked
in my bed the day before. It was one of those awkward moments that
I find impossible to live down, and which accumulate in nightly
bruxism that is slowly wearing down my molars to stubs.

"There's nothing to tell," I said
plaintively.

"They wouldn't have gone to all this trouble
for anything but the Brinks money."

I happened to be looking at Carl at that
moment. It wasn't his gun that worried me. I doubted he wanted to
add gunslinger to his list of dubious achievements. But any signal
to Dog to evict the intruder could result in some serious mayhem
They would be within their rights, I thought. Kendle had as much as
admitted that she didn't have any warrants up her sleeve.

What I saw on his face bothered and
perplexed me more than anything else that had happened that
afternoon. He looked relieved. The policewoman had asked the wrong
question, was on the wrong track. I was stumped. If not Brinks,
what was the
right
question?
Why had I been kidnapped?

Kendle was sharp enough to catch the look,
but cool enough to keep her jaw in place. But she couldn't hide her
doubt. She was wondering if she had misinterpreted this miserable
scene. Was it really possible that I been brought here for fun and
games? If so, she could still take out her frustration by arresting
us for being a public disgrace (it happens all the time in
Richmond). But as transporters of stolen loot, she was still left
with bupkis.