Skunk Hunt (54 page)

"They're not Einsteins, but they're not
stupid," Uncle Vern insisted. Those bodies were covered when they
brought them out. For all they know, you were the one on the
gurney."

"Me and who else?" I said uneasily. "And who
would want to kill me, anyway?"

"Are you kidding?" Todd snickered. I pulled
my shoulder away from him.

"Do you want to kill me?" I asked.

"Don't you want to kill
me
?" he said.

He had a point.

Uncle Vern had descended into a grim funk. If
I didn't know better—and I didn't know anything—he was grieving
over the fate of Carl and Joe Dog. Shedding a tear for my former
kidnappers was the furthest thing from my mind, even if it meant I
no longer had access to the divine Monique. For your own mental
health, it is sometimes necessary for acquaintances—even intimate
ones—to disappear from your life. This disappearance was
inconvenient in the extreme, but there's no doubt that, if not for
the Congreve brothers, I would have been breathing easier for
it.

"There were only two things that scared the
Congreves," said Uncle Vern, shrugging his gloom to one side. "That
was Skunk and the state tobacco ban."

"They banned smoking in prison?" I said
pensively, reflexively reaching into my shirt pocket.

"Not in here, you don't," Uncle Vern
remonstrated as I pulled out my cigarettes. I glanced to the side
and saw Todd sheepishly repocketing his Marlboros. I did the
same.

Uncle Vern continued: "The Congreves would
have never killed the Brinks guards, although attempted murder was
one of the charges brought against them."

"You're sure of that?" I asked. "They took a
shot at us out on Patterson."

"Did they hit anyone?"

"No."

"Did you even see the shooter? No?"

"No..." I said slowly, wondering why he
sounded as if he already knew all of this. "So you tell me, now,
where did all that money come from if it wasn't Brinks? Between the
pump house and old farm you forked over $70,000. That's an awful
lot for a tease."

"I didn't think much of the idea, but we had
to keep up your interest..." Uncle Vern said.

"You succeeded," I admitted, wondering who
exactly was in charge here. It was hard imagining the putz in front
calling the shots, and even harder imagining Uncle Vern submitting
to him. There was a sternness about the older man that conjured up
Mother Teresa hiding a machete under a scapular. No excuses, no
nonsense, or maybe I'm mistaking nonsense without the excuses,
which probably sounds the same. Marvin had not talked much, but
what I had heard so far could not instill fear in an ant, let alone
a tough-minded uncle.

"So you're telling me that money came out of
your own pocket?" I persisted.

Uncle Vern invested an unwarranted amount of
thought in his response, so much so that a response was completely
lacking. I don't mind the silent treatment. I've doled it out
myself on any number of occasions. But if we were going to fritter
away our afternoon, we could at least do something useful. Like
performing an equitable exchange of information, for instance. When
Uncle Vern caught me giving him a sour milk look, he cast over me
to Marvin.

"How much do I tell him?"

"Hey," Todd protested. "There's an 'us'
here."

"Six of one..." Uncle Vern shrugged. And at
one point I had thought he might be a nice guy.

"Your call," said Marvin.

To my surprise, Uncle Vern seemed relieved,
and it quickly became apparent that his call was no call. After
three hours of bone-crunching crouching in the back of a
surveillance van, we would not be very far ahead in the info
department. We watched the police put the final touches on their
crime scene mummy wrap—and if anything belonged in a tomb at this
point, it was my house. The detectives and uniforms began drifting
away. It became obvious that our hosts were itching to depart.

"You want us to get out?" Todd asked.

"Why not?" said Uncle Vern. "You're
home."

But even he could see the dilemma. If I
got out and a cop spotted me I would be snatched up, and if Todd
got out alone they would think they were snatching
me
.

"I don't suppose you boys would know how to
keep a secret?" Vern said in a self-addressed murmur we couldn't
help but overhear in our limited confines. Looking away from the
screens, he added, more directly, "You stand to lose millions if
Marvin and I are taken in."

"Millions," said Todd. "You said
'millions'."

Sharp as a tack, my twin idiot.

"'Millions,'" I repeated. My little theory
bubbled to life. So they hadn't paid cash for the house. Whatever
was left over after the downpayment had been invested in the
market. Maybe in one of those retard funds that made billions
before they went bust. But who had managed the fund? Not Todd,
whose ignorance was a plain as his face.

"I thought the Brinks robbery only netted—"
Todd began.

"Forget Brinks," said Marvin, so unheard up
to now that hearing him was a snip short of a miracle. "We're
talking about the trust fund Skunk set up for you."

Tongue-tied, Todd and I awaited further
explanation. But Uncle Vern, having seen squeezing through to the
cab was impracticable, had already opened the van's back panel. We
heard him offer a friendly greeting to someone outside and darted
our eyes to the screens. We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw
he was speaking not to cops but to a pair of students who were too
busy being cool to be concerned about an old duffer popping out of
what they had assumed was an unoccupied Transit. Indifference is
the great American gift to the world.

Actions speak louder, and it was apparent
Uncle Vern didn't want to let go of us, not quite yet.

"Where are we going?" I called up front as I
heard the cab door open. Uncle Vern slid open a panel and twisted
around in the driver seat. "Jeremy," he said to Marvin

"Why him?" Marvin asked, twitching on his
stool. He had told us he had been shot, but not if they had taken
the bullet out. Maybe it was still inside him, squirming around,
nipping at vital organs. I could only hope.

I was almost thinking of him like a brother.
And speaking of brothers...I echoed Marvin's question, adding a
practical, "I don't see how you can find him. He doesn't stay in
one place. For all I know, he's vanished."

"Not entirely," Marvin said smugly. He
removed his hand from the joystick and began pummeling the keyboard
next to it. My house disappeared from the primary screen, to be
replaced by a map of the city and its environs. Marvin ran his
cursor over several pulsating icons. Each time the white arrow
touched one a label was prompted. He moved the cursor over Oregon
Hill and tapped a blinking symbol located at my address. A pair of
letters popped up.

"Who's 'IB'?" Todd asked.

"Us," Marvin said abstractedly as he centered
his coordinates.

It was hard to squeeze those initials out of
Marvin and Vernon. Impossible, actually. Were they aliases?

As Uncle Vern pulled out, the IB began moving
as well. Marvin scrolled up the screen to another pulsing light and
clicked. A moment later a woman-robot said: "Turn right."

"That's pretty nifty," I declared, genuinely
impressed. I scooted into Uncle Vern's vacated stool and leaned
over for a better look at the target. The label said 'DT'.

"Who's..." I felt my eyes dribbling out,
along with my brain. "Doubletalk! Don't tell me...GPS..."

It was then that I woke up and realized
everything that had happened that day had been part of a really
vivid dream.

That's a lie, of course. But wouldn't it have
been nice? I could have started a new day, without being kidnapped
or burglarized or having geosynchronous science thrust in my nose,
down my mouth, and up my ass, leaving unwanted Post-It Notes
scattered through every phase of my life. I would not have
confronted dead bodies on my second floor, or been confronted by an
unpalatable twin. I did not need to be reminded that I was a leaf
in the wind, a really strong wind, and wherever I fetched up was
bound to be unpleasant. But leaves have natural inbuilt rudders.
They know where they're going: down. OK, I knew that much, at
least. Down, down, down.....

The Jeremy signal was emitted from
Southside, a few miles down Route 1. It was an area I was familiar
with, not through personal experience, but from awareness that many
of my former neighbors had ended up in what was essentially a
foreign country. Spreading south from the edge of the old city of
Manchester, if you didn't speak Spanish you were essentially an
outcast. The scattered neighborhoods were poor, dusty, and highly
spiced. It was hard to imagine my old neighbor Dalton Bowen chowing
down on habanero chili and jovially yelling
Vete y la chingada!
at his new neighbors, but the
last I heard that was part and parcel of his current environment,
because rents were cheap and it was a place where only the muggers
bothered you, not the cops. Thus it was with so many other former
Oregon Hillers, evicted indirectly by the tender hands of college
students. Actually, I half wondered if Dalton and the others didn't
fit right in.
Hasta la
vista
!

Was that where Jeremy had ended up after his
release from Powhatan? It made sense. He wouldn't have much cash,
even less in the way legally applicable job skills, and he would
know at least some of the people surrounding him—meaning he could
re-establish the old criminal connections. I felt sorry for Dalton,
now that I knew the gun he had given Doubletalk was filled with
blanks. Payback would be hell, especially when the Devil was right
next door.

"Did you bug Barbara's car, too?" I asked,
searching the screen for an ST label.

"Your sister is incommunicado," answered
Uncle Vern from the driver's seat. "I don't think she would want me
to give you the details."

"You spoke with her?"

"She had dropped out of sight and I was
concerned," Uncle Vern said. He paused when something chimed on his
dashboard. He tapped the brake as he approached a curve on Lee
Bridge. Sure enough, a patrol car was squatting on the bicycle
path.

"You have a fuzz buster?"

Marvin snorted. "It's the least illegal thing
in this crate."

A kid's exaggeration, prompting me to take a
closer look at him. Yeah, he was a kid. A twenty-something extended
adolescent. Age-wise we were about the same, but I got the
impression of gross immaturity on a par with Todd's. True, I had
never been granted the privilege of being shot, so I couldn't claim
physical suffering as an aid to maturity. But I had been poor all
my life, and it is generally conceded that poverty puts you on the
fast track to post-pubescence. My education was spotty, and I'm
sadly lacking in the street-wise department—never possessed the
genius to know at a glance who it was yanking my chain, and I can't
begin to tell you the local connections. Want crack or an illegal
streetsweeper? Don't come to me. A joint would have to fall in my
lap before I knew where to find one. But I think you get my drift.
By virtue of being poor I had a better grasp on the realities of
life. Of course, the upper 1% would call me an idiot, but they're
talking through their PGA Grand Tour visor hats.

And yet...this surveillance van must have
cost a fortune. Even if it was tax deductible for some godawful
reason, it represented substantial seed money. Marvin had grown up
in the garden of Posh, where all the cucumbers are gold and even
weeds were greenbacks. This was probably through the beneficence of
Uncle Vern, who had that shiny look of someone who paid others to
groom him and could afford to fund a geeky nephew's extravagant
techo-tastes. Marvin was in possession of the kind of knowledge
only money could buy and I was slightly nauseous with envy, and
extremely nauseated by the idea I was really dumb. The only way to
compete was to tear my share of the national treasure out of the
nation and chalk up a reasonable education. It dawned on me at that
moment that I wasn't a loser. In order to be a loser you had to
lose something, and I had never had anything to lose. But somehow,
somewhere, I must be somebody. I went giddy with hope.

Which did nothing to resolve my confusion.
What part did Jeremy have in all this? Why were Uncle Vern and his
mini-oaf going to the trouble of tracking him down? Jeremy had
received a note from the ersatz Skunk, but while that might place
him in the picture, that didn't make him the artist ('con'
appended). Still, we all knew bits and pieces that the others were
ignorant of. Even Barbara had had her share in the three-part
password. What would make Jeremy's piece more important than
mine...or Todd's?

Every time I risked a glance in my twin's
direction I caught him risking a glance back. The police once had a
program in which they videotaped drunks soon after their arrest,
forcing them to watch themselves after they had sobered up. Their
embarrassment at seeing themselves squirting invective and urine in
equal proportions convinced more than one to go on the wagon. But
the court put a stop to the practice, declaring it cruel and
unusual. And I could see why. It's an invincible right for us to
hide our dark side—from ourselves, most of all. Todd wasn't me, I
wasn't Todd, but only a skinny minute divided our identities. Would
I have behaved like him if the roles were reversed? I couldn't say
'yes' without risking the thought that I, too, would have missed a
lifetime of opportunities.

"I —" he began.

"Shut up," I said.

"I was just going to say that," Todd
griped.

"What I learned about brotherly love I
learned in this van," Marvin chuckled meanly without taking his
eyes from the screen. He gave a startled jump. "He's moving!"