Skunk Hunt (40 page)

"So you have some unanswered questions, too,"
Kendle smirked, laying a hand on me and guiding me out the door.
"That leaves us all in the dark."

To give life to the metaphor, she switched
off the office light as she followed me out of the office.

Or maybe it was just habit.

CHAPTER 20

"I know when people know stuff, and what I
saw back there was a bunch of dummies who didn't know anything,"
Kendle mulled through a mouthful of eggs.

She had raced through the midday traffic like
a bat out of hell. My first thought was that she was headed for my
place, more specifically my bedroom. She had participated in my
close shave, and I had heard (since I didn't know first-hand) that
moments like this were tailor-made for sexual arousal. I had begun
to mentally gird my loins. But we zipped past Oregon Hill without
pausing and crossed Lee Bridge to Southside. Were we going to her
place, then? My vision of her living conditions resembled something
like an insectarium, with fleas and bedbugs the dominant life
forms. I could already feel the crabs crawling through my scrotum.
True, my own house was no improvement, but at least I was familiar
with the wildlife.

But it was a different instinct that gnawed
at my rescuer. She roared into the parking lot at Joe's Inn and
scarcely took time to stop before charging out of the van. I
thought she had a lead on a drug deal she wanted to bust in the
worst way, but when she barged into the restaurant she grabbed the
nearest waitress and demanded:

"The buffet still open?"

"For about ten more minutes," the frightened
girl responded.

"Could you make that twenty? Huh? Twenty
more?"

Fearing for her neck, the waitress nodded
vigorously, although I doubted she had any say in the matter. In
her shoes I would have agreed to leave the buffet open the livelong
day.

In ten minutes Kendle managed to fill a plate
and empty it and go back for more. In twenty minutes, while I was
still laboring on my first self-serve, she had heaped up her third,
chivying out the last eggs and waffles before the staff began
lifting the pans out of the steam table.

Watching me dither with my cream of wheat,
Kendle pointed her fork across the table at me.

"You need to be more proactive," she
said.

"I don't have much of an appetite right now,"
I answered.

"Not eat more. I mean about events. Your
life."

"I've followed the clues."

"Clues?" she said quickly.

I had forgotten she didn't know about the
cameras, the microphones, the invisible voice. I made a proactive
choice by not telling her about them.

"I mean things I've heard, rumors, that sort
of thing."

"Uh-huh," she mumbled around her sausage
link. The way she gnawed was distressingly familiar. "Like
something Skunk told you?"

"He never said anything to me about the
Brinks job," I told her semi-truthfully. I remembered his scruffy
face leaning down and mixing beer-breath with some comments about
having made some poor lifestyle choices. He did not regret the
robbery, though—just getting caught. Which was ever the case, and
which is what I supposed he meant by wrong turns.

"He never peeped one word about the
money?"

For the first time ever, I thought back on
possible clues from the devil's own mouth. You might think that
odd. I mean, the better part of a million dollars had apparently
zipped from being to nothingness. But before that cryptic letter
from the dead Skunk had shown up, I had categorized the stolen
money with all the other unattainable goals in life, like winning
the Presidency or bedding a movie star. OK, I had daydreamed once
about J Lo, but I was beyond that now, I knew my place, I was
perfectly stupefied in my own little comfort zone. And that zone
excluded the Brinks loot, which had no doubt been spent or
otherwise eliminated. Dad had given me a hint, true enough. But it
had been so farfetched I didn't give it any credence.

Now I was beginning to wonder….

"You're too passive," Kendle critiqued
through another mouthful of yellow mush.

"I can't help it," I said. "I think that's my
natural state."

"So I noticed. What are you, a goldfish?"

A fish out of water, for sure. "Give me a
moment."

"For what?" Kendle asked.

"To think."

"Really?"

But seeing that I really was thinking—if you
can actually see such a thing—she laid off the sarcasm and focused
on her plate. The slamming of silverware on china didn't help my
thought process, but I was able to tune out the noise as I
time-traveled into the past.

The appearance of Todd had blasted a hole in
my personal history. It had been disconcerting enough when I
thought Jeremy had a twin brother. Like Flint Dementis had said, it
was amazing what you could do with computers these days. Someone
had gone to the trouble of blurring out my head and replacing it
with Jeremy's. Who and why? Were they just playing with my head?
They could have disguised Todd's presence by blurring him out
completely. Better yet, not shown me the picture at all. How could
they have known I had not seen it before and would have spotted the
trick?

The Brinks robbery had been over a decade
ago, yet the unknown manipulator had stretched back years earlier
to torment me. Which suggested a connection.

I was sorry, now, that my time at the
PFZ had been cut short. Todd and Carl might have filled me in on
the invisible obvious. They might even be the ones behind the A/V
shows I had been subjected to. Being an actor, Dog might have a
talent for mimicry. Could he do John Wayne?
Watch out for the rattlers, Pilgrim.

"Getting anywhere?" Kendle's voice went
profound, like when the narrator quotes God in a biblical
documentary.

"Truly, it's confusing," I admitted.

"Either you have the perfect poker face, or
you're a complete dummy."

With encouragement like this, I could fall
off a cliff. "You don't know the whole story."

"I figured that." Pushing back her plate, she
eyed me with wary cheer, like a favorite bottle of soda pop that
she suspected had been shaken while hot. "Looks to me you need some
Miracle Gro." She slouched down in her seat, grunting. A moment
later something rough and hot touched my groin. I looked down and
found she had removed one of her cowboy boots and was massaging me.
This was the second time today my crotch had received
miraculously-unwanted attention.

"Cut it out," I said with a brusqueness born
of pain. A rather sharp toenail had pricked my scrotum.

"Your loss," Kendle shrugged, sitting up
straight.

In spite of her gauche behavior, I was
tempted to tell her everything, up to and including Skunk's seeming
release from the ultimate jailhouse. The inscrutability of my
situation was growing less scrutable by the second and I would have
appreciated the input of someone who had more than half a brain to
their name. But old prejudices are hard to shake. I knew that, just
because she was a woman and no rose by any name, she was probably
logic-free.

And she was a cop. Trusting her would be like
throwing away my genetic inheritance.

But what exactly did that inheritance consist
of? I was the son of Andrew (aka Skunk) and Elizabeth McPherson,
right? Yet the sudden appearance of Jeremy when we were kids
indicated a certain amount of shuffling outside the family tree.
That ol' double helix under the harvest moon could produce some
whimsical combinations. That I shared none of Skunk's physical (or
mental) traits had occasioned some nasty remarks from neighborhood
kids who anywhere else would have been too young to see any
difference. Then again, I had seen no resemblance between myself
and my poor mother. Had the stork dropped me in the wrong cabbage
patch?

I mean, if Todd Neerson really was my twin,
why wasn't I living on River Road? The next question being,
naturally, if Todd was my twin, what was he doing on River Road in
the first place?

"I smell wood burning."

Kendle was not being helpful. In fact, she
was a positive detriment to clear thinking. She began bobbing up
and down in her seat like a kid with bloated kidneys. I would have
smacked her. Then she would have shot me. End of story.

"Jeremy," I said abruptly.

Kendle stopped her bobbing and looked at me
closely. "What about him?"

"He's the key," I said. "He must be."

He had dropped out of the blue like some
preheated meal, complete with wardrobe, cavities and rotten
personality. He had to have been somewhere before he was introduced
to Barbara and me. Could that somewhere have been River Road? Could
his real name be Neerson?

It's hard to find a child who can keep a
secret, but Jeremy was a rare treasure. Even at our youngest and
most gullible, we didn't buy his stories about being Elvis' love
child, or a KGB agent on the lam, or the result of an experiment by
aliens—although I thought the last one had potential. If you
listened to him, you might conclude he was No One from Nowhere. But
there he was, Someone in the Flesh, a real menace to the race, or
at least to his siblings. It was just like Skunk to introduce a
smaller version of his own nasty self to our menagerie. Without any
explanation, I might add. Just "Here's your new brother". It was
like tossing an alligator into a pond and telling the fish to give
him a warm welcome. Where had he come from before he appeared on
Oregon Hill?

After Skunk's death, Jeremy had dropped off
my radar. If he had spent the first years of his life on River
Road, it was possible he had returned there. He wanted the silver
spoon back, or his share of it. His share of....

The Brinks money?

"Stop looking so gooey," Kendle snapped. "If
you know something, spill it."

The temptation to tip my glass of ice water
in her direction was as fleeting as it was farcical. I needed to
slip her leash, not break it, one method drawing more notice than
the other. I realized now that I was still a prisoner, and there
was not all that much to choose between jailers.

"OK, let me tell you what I see," said
Kendle, leaning back.

"Can we go outside? I can't smoke in
here."

"You can't smoke in my van, either," she
said.

"We can talk on the sidewalk." I needed to
think, and I do my best thinking—practically my only thinking—with
a cigarette in my mouth. We all have crutches. Mine just happens to
shrivel my lungs.

"You didn't know you had a twin," Kendle said
flatly.

"Well..."

"Maybe I'm wasting my time. A guy who doesn't
know who his family is doesn't know much of anything."

Under different circumstances, I could have
supplied a whole library of historic figures with notable gaps in
their mental scrapbooks but, just when I needed to, I couldn't skim
a single example off the top of my head. This resulted in a cranial
gap that was perfectly visible on my face. Needless to say, Kendle
wasn't impressed.

"Okay, try this on for size," she continued.
"Old Skunk had family connections you didn't know about. In fact,
maybe he had a second family, out there in Poshland, paid for and
supported by—"

"No way," I interrupted boldly. "Even the
Brinks money couldn't have bought that house—not his share of it,
at least."

Kendle jumped on this. "What house?"

"The one you were just talking about. In
'Poshland'."

"What was that address?" she said.

"You should know. You saw me being
kidnapped."

"I was busy with the GPS," she said with a
snotty grin. I was being reminded that every step I took was being
observed.

As if to keep pace with an unparalleled
morning of unannounced departures and arrivals, the afternoon
stirred up an unexpected newcomer. When Jeremy hove into Joe's Inn
and dumped himself in the doubleback booth next to Kendle, I was a
couple of stops short of astonishment. When he grabbed Kendle
breast and gave her a wet smooch, though, I ran the red.

But Kendle was just as flabbergasted and
dismayed as I was. Some people take on a radishy hue when taken by
surprise. In fact, they look pretty ugly, like an electrocuted
piece of dullness. But Kendle’s lackluster complexion flushed
attractively, giving her the glow of a little girl bounding out of
her pink-walled nursery.

Looks being naturally deceptive, the little
girl gave Jeremy a nasty sock in the arm. Having experienced many
of those myself, I winced. I winced again when Jeremy shrugged off
the hit and gave her breast another tweak. I was on the verge of
saying something, or nothing, when the waitress came over and
glared down at my brother.

"This is a family restaurant, sir."

"So? I'm trying to start a family."

"Can I get you something?" the waitress
persisted. She was not wearing a cheesy uniform but a simple pair
of jeans and blouse. I could tell she was family oriented.

"Sorry, not into threesomes," my idiot
brother said, giving her a leer that suggested a threesome was
exactly what he had in mind.

"On the
menu
," the waitress persisted, intent on
rearranging Jeremy's priorities from sex to food.

"Then I'll have what she had." Jeremy nodded
at Kendle's plate and its slimy remains.

"She had the buffet, and the buffet is
closed."

Jeremy huffed with frustration, as if the
girl was more nag than waitress. To assert her status, she plopped
a menu in front of him. Jeremy took out a cigarette and she
gasped.

"You can't do that here!"

"You can't smoke, you can't play
titty...what
can
you
do?"

"You can eat, sir."

An obvious opening. I think I'll skip the
following five minutes of dubious tit for tat. Jeremy had regressed
to his old self, declaiming the most idiotic things as though they
were the height of contemporary intellectual badinage—though,
considering our times, it probably was. It's hard to find a
conversation that doesn't begin with 'f' and end with 'k'.