Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein (P.S.)

C ROOKED L ITTLE V EIN

W arren E llis

To Niki and Lili, for continuing to put up with me,
and to the memory of my father

Contents

I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a

I sat there for at least half an hour, just

An hour later, I walked into some freak bar on

By Sunday, Id moved into the Z Hotel, where the

Outside, I scrabbled for my cigarettes, still vaguely angry at

I wish I still had that photo.

I spent Monday and Tuesday buying clothes and luggage and

Through the airport without any further magnetism. I figured maybe

The Columbus airport was one of those places you forget

Come on over, said the guy on the phone, sounding

I parked outside the address, a well-kept place thatd had

Eight very large and very gay men filled the living

This is where we shoot salt water into your testicles,

Gary flicked on the showers, and I was doused in

Gary gave me a big blue towel, wrapped it around

I found that I had to kind of limbo into

If you think Im telling you about having sex with

I think its finally going down, Trix said.

Bob? Its Mike McGill.

At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was

Bob Ajax was waiting for us in the arrivals lounge

Bob refused to talk about it. Drove us to the

And to make up for being an asshole, I had

Bob picked us up outside our hotel, wearing his Same

Bob ate the entire damn thing, but was paralyzed afterward.

We drove back to the hotel in silence. Bob said

Trix came in. I got the concierge to call the

In the middle of the night, I said, You said

If they dont give us the book theyre going to

It was a long drive out under an unforgiving sun.

Down two flights of stairs, through some heavy doors, into

True to her word, Trix was out in the car,

We got a late flight out to Vegas. Trix watched

From a distance, the Strip looked like it was covered

I went back down to the front desk, bought a

As the sun went down, we left the hotel and

Trix and I gave the cops an edited version of

Theres a fucked-up shitpipe in the mens room, said the

Christ, I want a gun, I heard myself say.

Back in the car, Trix couldnt stop shaking. She tried

And then, with the board in the bed ripped out

We snuck out of the back of the hotel and

Leaning over Trix, I looked out at Los Angeles. An

Are edamame food?

I walked for an hour before I realized I no

The clock ticked around a couple of hours, and I

I decided to stay outside for a little while, and

I sat down in the guys football field of a

I walked quickly through the living room into the kitchen.

I drew the living room curtains, put my foot through

After some extended foraging through that stupidly huge house that

The ride into Beverly Hills was dark and hot. The

I moved around the carport, taking cover where I could,

I invented five new swearwords in six seconds.

Mr. McGill, came the voice. From the door.

What did you tell the cops to get them there

Of course, the first apartment we took together turned out

I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge. Making a smug huffing sound, it threw itself from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the hole in the wall where it had spent the last three months planning new ways to screw me around. Id tried nailing wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it and spat the wet pieces into my shoes. After that, I spiked bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it across the eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.

I dragged myself all the way awake, lurching forward in my office chair. The stink of rat urine steaming and festering in my mug stabbed me into unwelcome wakefulness, but Id rather have had coffee. I unstuck my backside from the sweaty leatherette of the chair, fought my way upright, and padded stiff-legged to the bathroom adjacent to my office. I knew that one of these days someone was going to burst into the office unannounced to find a naked private investigator taking a piss with the bathroom door open. There was a time where I cared about that sort of thing. Some time before I started living in my own office, I think.

My suit and shirt were piled on the plastic chair I use for clients. I stole it from a twenty-four-hour diner off Union Square, back in my professional drinking days. I picked up the shirt and sniffed it experimentally. It seemed to me that itd last another day before it had to be washed, although there was a nagging thought at the back of my mind that maybe it actually reeked and my sense of smell was shot. I held up the sleeve and examined the armpit. Slightly yellowish. But then, so was everything else in the office. No one would see it with the jacket on, anyway.

I rifled the jacket for cigarettes, harvested one, and went back to my chair. I swabbed some of the nicotine scum off the window behind the chair with the edge of my hand and peered down at my little piece of Manhattan street.

Gentrification had stopped dead several doors west of my spot overlooking Avenue B. You could actually see the line. That side of the line; Biafran cuisine, sparkling plastic secure window units, women called Imogen and Saffron, men called Josh and Morgan. My side of the line; crack whores, burned-out cars, bullets stuck in door frames, and men called Father-Eating Bastard. Its almost a point of honor to live near a crackhouse, like living in a pre-Rudy Zone, a piece of Old New York.

Across the street from me is the old building that the police sent tanks into, about five years back, to dislodge a community of squatters. The media never covered the guys in the crackhouse down the street a little way, hanging out of their windows, scabs dropping off their faces onto the heads of the rubberneckers down below, cheering the police on for getting those cheapass squatter motherfuckers off their block. You think the tanks ever came for the crackhouse? Did they hell.

I was new there, back then. All tingly with the notion of being a private detective in the big city. I was twenty-five, still all full of having been the child prodigy at the local desk of the main Pinkerton office in Chicago since I was twenty. But I was going to fly solo, do something less corporate and more real, make a difference in lives.

It started going wrong on the second day, when the signpainter inscribing my name on the office door made a mistake and took off before I noticed. To the world at large I am now MICHAEL MGIL PRIVATE INVEST GATOR . Its always the first line of a consultation. No, its McGill.

Some asshole scraped the I out of INVESTIGATOR with their keys six months ago. I simply cant be bothered to fix that one. For all the work I get, I may as well be an invest gator. Every two days, I actually go down to the pay phone on the corner to call my own phone and leave a message on the answering machine to make sure its all still working.

I dont have a secretary. Sometimes I flip on a phone voice-changer I got for five bucks on eBay and pretend to be my own secretary. It is very sad.

I blew stale-tasting cigarette smoke at the window-glass, looked down at people moving around the street, and debated what to do. I was fairly sure it was Saturday, so I didnt need to be there pretending I had a career. On the downside, I didnt have anywhere else to go. I could have coaxed my old laptop into life and gone on the Web to read about someone elses life, but I feared my email.