Skunk Hunt (39 page)

Just like me.

I think at that moment we were waiting
for a
deux ex machina
. Kendle
and I were stumped. Carl was unwilling to speak and risk exposing
his hand. Dog was undergoing a fit of unreasoning civility—at least
he wasn't biting anyone. And Monique looked as though she wanted to
put on some clothes. Yes, it was about time for someone to appear
or something to drop from the sky that would shake our numbnuts out
of the tree. If we waited long enough, we would follow the natural
order of things, like croak from old age. But something always
happens, because we're trapped behind the racetrack rabbit of time,
always trying to catch up. You can't resign from the race because
time always has you by the nose, the rabbit always circles around.
Anyway, this seems like a reasonable analogy, what with Dog here
and all.

Let's face it, though, some
deux ex
's verge on the miraculous.
Angels descending, old buried bombs blowing up underfoot, long-lost
relations popping up from the dead. And I'm sure you're expecting
my father to put in an appearance. But when the office door opened
again (again, no knock—this was a culture-free zone), we weren't
confronted by a corpse dangling rank strands of meat from its
bones, a skeletal finger pointed accusingly in my
direction.

I did a double-take—a pretty good pun under
the circumstances. Because standing there in the door, smirking at
all of us but mainly at me, was...me. He didn't just resemble me.
He was me to a T. Wait...strike that. His clothes looked like they
had come straight off the gold rack (meaning Kohls, not Goodwill),
his hair was neatly trimmed, and I like to think haughtiness had
always been a stranger to my face. Even his posture was
contemptuous, although I have a natural tendency to cringe before
anyone who doesn't slouch.

"Shit..." Carl said in a half-whisper,
glancing at Dog. "We got the wrong one. Couldn't you tell them
apart?" he added, as though his mutt could distinguish our
scents.

"What was he doing at the Neerson place?" Dog
said plaintively. He didn't sound like himself.

It seemed they had instantly distinguished
the Ace from the Joker. It was up to me to decide where I belonged
in the deck.

"You can thank Doubletalk for that,"
said the nattier me, stepping further into the room and casting
Monique an appreciative leer. "He thought I was double-crossing
him, so he got back by double-crossing me." Turning to Carl, he
amended this to, "
Us
."

"Were you, Todd?" Carl asked.

"Double-crossing my brother?"

So the Joker's name was Todd. I got the
creepy feeling his surname was more familiar. One of those
hyphenated monstrosities: Neerson-McPherson. The creepiness grew
creepier when he added:

"My own precious flesh and blood?"

I got the impression he wasn't just talking
about Jeremy. It was at this moment that I developed a tic that has
persisted to this day. I won't go into detail beyond saying it
involved my left nostril and made me look like Basil Rathbone
sneering at cinematic peasants.

"You're twins?" Kendle said. Like me, she had
dropped a few beats and was struggling to catch up. I doubted she
was thinking in terms of doubling her fun, but even as a remote
possibility it doubled my stress.

Todd had scarcely noted her presence. Maybe
he thought Kendle was a former pole dancer who had gone to seed and
was only fit to employ in the back rooms. In other words, someone
easily ignored. His dismissive frown closed the shutter on her, but
he was forced to peak through his mental blinds when she poked him
in the chest.

"Hey, nit-brain, I asked you a question."

I have to admit I admire people who
possess the ability to shove themselves down other peoples'
throats. Not from a distance, like the government, but
mano-a-mano
. I know this conflicts
with my earlier complaints about the bullies of my childhood. But
there's a difference between a young tough taking advantage of his
size and roughhousing for the truth. She was no sadist. I couldn't
imagine her waterboarding anyone...yours truly probably being an
exception, but all in the name of fun. She was risking her neck to
get the facts. I mean, Kendle was in a precarious situation. She
might be a cop, but she was most definitely outnumbered. She was an
overweight female Bogie, and at the moment I was sort of proud I
had slept with her. Her status had rubbed off on me.

But in Todd's eyes, Kendle had the status of
a jackhammer. Her poke to his sternum had sent a bruising wake-up
call to his inactive soul. He waited a moment, as though expecting
Carl to plug her on the spot and end all this fuss. Then he turned
to Dog.

"I think this session is over," said Dog,
reaching up to his mouth and removing his teeth. Instead of raw
gums, his yellow, chipped teeth were replaced by a pearly white
dental armory. Well shut my mouth, I told myself—and I did.

"Leaving character?" Todd said with skeptical
dourness.

"I preferred you in The Fantasticks, anyway,"
Carl said, shrugging.

Dog took off his straw hat and tossed it
across the room. It landed neatly on his boss's desk. "You're into
polyester?" he mocked.

I was being bombarded by identity
crises. Todd's appearance had made me wonder exactly who
I
was, and now my abductor was
tossing off his disguise.

"You're an actor?" I said.

"They cancelled the revival of L'il Abner at
the dinner playhouse," Dog said mournfully.

"When did you find out?" Carl asked.

"Two days ago," said Dog, who added
sheep-doggishly, "It takes me a while to get out of a role."

"That's a relief," Monique chimed in. "I hate
it when you play frugal with the toilet paper."

Well, that explained why it stank so much in
the van.

Monique had used the distraction of Todd's
arrival to slip on a sports jacket that had been hanging on a coat
rack. This allowed me to focus on her legs, which were quite nice.
No identity panic, here. She was what she was.

"But I was looking forward to playing
Stupefyin' Jones," she added.

Damn, another actor. I eyed the others
warily. The walls might collapse at any moment and I would find
myself in some off-Broadway dumpster for thespians and half-assed
musicals. Carl could be General Bullmoose, Kendle a plump
Appassionata von Climax, and Todd...I had to give some thought to
that one.

Kendle's radar was not set to detect wannabe
stars and starlets. She was still waiting for an answer from Todd.
Were we twins?

Was it possible someone had hired Todd as my
lookalike? If so, why? To convince someone else that he stood to
'inherit' the Brinks fortune? Possible, but not likely. But it was
just as unlikely that my flesh and blood would be regaling himself
in the puritanical fleshpots (that's what rich neighborhoods
are—the residents just don't know it) of River Road? And Todd
certainly had that righteous air of the rich about him, the
let-them-eat-cake, what-are-they-to-me, get-out-of-my-way attitude
towards the less fortunate and unmotivated masses. Carbon copies
have a tendency to smudge, and I was beginning to feel like a poor
imitation.

But not for long. As soon as he
realized Kendle was a cop, Todd began to melt. His postured unglued
and sagged, his head nodded to the side, his eyes went misty. It
would only take a glass of water tossed in his face for him to
dissolve. He didn't know what to do next. A very imperfect
deux ex machina
. If he bolted for the
door I doubted Kendle could catch him, but where would he go? It
seemed everyone in the room had Ferncrest on their radars. I was
certain that was where he lived. That would explain Carl's and
Dog's mistake.

I looked towards the door, waiting for
another entrance. A raw chorus line, the National Guard, anything
to shake us out of this stalemate. Would Kendle smack Todd out of
his stupor? If she could sleep with me, she was capable of
anything.

"Am I under arrest?" Todd squeaked, sounding
an awful lot like me.

"Should you be arrested?" Kendle smiled,
anticipating with relish the prospect of clamping handcuffs on him.
For some reason, I suddenly felt a little jealous.

Her response roused Todd into amicable
wariness. It was a good reaction, as though Kendle was no more
trouble than an overenthusiastic pet. All he had to do was make
sure his next step directed her away from his bag of secrets.

"We're not exactly twins," he said. "Like,
twins grow up together, right?"

"Not if they've been separated at birth,"
Kendle said, crowding him towards the wall. "You two could have
been part of a nature versus nurture experiment."

It was a startling idea that immediately
piqued my interest. Skunk had been arrested so many times that the
state might have stepped in and removed one of his children.
Gang-busting at the source, you might say. One twin grows up
bleachy clean, the other a slimy creature from the black lagoon.
Todd was smarmy, but River Road was no swamp. I began to feel
greasy and unweaned.

Kendle's suggestion swept over Todd's head
and out the door, although Dog's appreciative bark told me the
reference was perfectly comprehensible to anyone with a smattering
of pop psychology. With an uncertain smile, Todd tried to squeeze
past the policewoman.

"It was a perfectly civil question," said
Kendle, giving him another poke in the chest. The bruises would
show tomorrow morning.

"Twins," said Monique, tired of waiting for
Todd to answer. She had grown bored. I had the impression she
wanted to burnish her toenails.

Kendle turned to the pole dancer. I won't say
her expression was malevolent, but when she said, "What did you
say, whorebitch?" it was hard to put another interpretation on
it.

Monique was used to rough talk and offered a
cute smile, as if Kendle had called her Sweetheart.

"Well they look the same don't they?
But I won't say they're
exactly
the same. One's all hot to trot, but this one's..." She
nodded at me. "Well, he's a little shy."

I was still on Carl's hot seat and I felt
short before Kendle's gaze. It disconcerted me to think she wasn't
certain which one of us she was looking at. I angled my neck to
give her a good look at the hickey she had given me. It was a risky
maneuver. She might not recognize her teethmarks and mistake them
for Monique's.

"I don't know where the money is," I said
woefully. "They don't know where the money is. No one knows where
the money is."

Todd and Carl were quick off the mark,
unifying their declaration of innocence in a joint statement: "What
money?"

"What are you implying?" Carl added
darkly.

"Yeah," said Todd, who began to say more,
then decided that was enough.

Monique did not help their cause when she
rolled her eyes and began rummaging around Carl's desk, presumably
for a cigarette. I took out my pack and offered her one. She
scowled at the brand and the would-be benefactor. She wasn't in the
best of moods. The eye-roll suggested she did not think Kendle was
as stupid as her boss thought, and that we were all pretty much up
the creek. She was very much the type of girl who accepted the
inevitable without a lot of fuss or gamesmanship, an attitude honed
by years of sliding up and down a pole like an idiot.

Kendle was as much at an impasse as the rest
of us. I wasn't screaming bloody murder, so she had no reason to
arrest Carl and Dog. Monique might have been in violation of
certain moral and hygienic ordinances, but taking her in would be
an overt act of envy. Todd only looked like me, and there was no
law against that, not yet at least. That left me, the Oops Man, the
only authorized member of the McPherson/Brinks bloodline. And now
that she had lusted my body, Kendle had a legitimate claim to my
health and well-being. She couldn't go away empty-handed without
losing a few pounds off her face. So she would leave with me. She
gave me a come-hither cock of her finger.

I wasn't entirely opposed to the idea. Being
a live dog was preferable to being a dead duck. There was a lot of
potential for an unpleasant afternoon in that office. My unanswered
questions about Todd and the mysterious contract with Carl could
wait in the queue with the meaning of life and the creation of the
universe, not to mention the ever-intriguing conundrums of why
crabs walk backwards and why the sky is blue, two childhood
inquiries that Skunk had never answered. Hell, he hadn't even known
basic anatomy, like why he was such an asshole.

Relieved that my erection had subsided, I
stood and walked over to my alleged savior. I got a good close-up
of Todd, who was so much like me he would have bled if I had popped
the zit on my nose. He didn't look away, but he avoided my eyes.
Neither one of us much liked what we saw.

"Wait!" Carl shuffled forward in a curiously
lowlife manner, with bogus ingratiation. "We were just talking
with..." His face slacked into a jumble of flaccid skin. The creep
had forgotten my name! I would have granted him a senior moment if
he hadn't been so stupid. He might get all the girls, but he was
still scrounging the dumpster for a brain.

"Mute," said Dog in a donnish voice.

Carl shot him a scowl, as if Dog was the
dummy for giving away the fact that they knew my nickname and that
I was the unintended victim of the kidnapping. Carl was either
dumber or smarter than I had figured. But the situation had
changed. Now that I was in their grasp, they realized I had some
answers of my own, even if I didn't know it.