Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

CROOKED LITTLE VEIN

By

WarrenEllis

Copyright (c) 2007 byWarren Ellis

Synopsis:

Burned-out private detective and self-styled shitmagnet Michael McGill needed a wake-up call to jump-start his dead career. Whathe got was a virtual cattle prod to the crotch, in the form of an impossible assignmentdelivered directly from the president's heroin-addict chief of staff. Itseems the Constitution of the United States has some skeletons in its closet:the Founding Fathers doubted that the document would be able to stave off humannature indefinitely, so they devised a backup Constitution to deploy at thefirst sign of crisis. In the government's eyes, that time is now, asAmerica is overgrown with perverts who spend more time surfing the Web forfetish porn than they do reading a newspaper. They want to use this"Secret Constitution" to drive the country back to a time whencivility, God, and mom's homemade apple pie were all that mattered.

The only problem is , no onecan seem to find it...

So who better to track it down than a private dick who's so down-and-out that he's coming up theother side, a shamus whose only skill is stumbling into every depravedsituation imaginable?

With no lead to speak of, and no knowledge of theunderground world in which the Constitution has traveled, McGill embarks on across-country odyssey of America's darkest, dankest underbelly. Along theway, his white-bread sensibilities are treated to a smorgasbord of depravitythat runs the gamut of human imagination. The filth mounts; it is clear thatthis isn't the kind of life, liberty, or happiness that Thomas Jeffersonthought Americans would enjoy in the twenty-first century.

But what McGill learns as he closes in on the realConstitution is that freedom takes many forms, the most important of which maybe the fight against the "good old days." Like Vonnegut, Orwell,and Huxley before him, Warren Ellis deftly exposes the hypocrisy of the"moral majority" by giving us a glimpse at the monstrous outcomethat their overzealous policies would achieve.

CONTENTS:

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

I dragged myself all the way awake, lurching forwardin my office chair. The stink of rat urine steaming and festering in my mugstabbed me into unwelcome wakefulness, but I'd rather have had coffee. Iunstuck my backside from the sweaty leatherette of the chair, fought my wayupright, and padded stiff-legged to the bathroom adjacent to my office. I knewthat one of these days someone was going to burst into the office unannouncedto 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 Istarted living in my own office, I think.

My suit and shirt were piled on the plastic chair Iuse 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 itexperimentally. It seemed to me that it'd last another day before it hadto be washed, although there was a nagging thought at the back of my mind thatmaybe it actually reeked and my sense of smell wasshot. I held up the sleeve and examined the armpit. Slightlyyellowish. But then, so was everything else in the office. No one wouldsee it with the jacket on, anyway.

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

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

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

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

It started going wrong on the second day, when thesignpainter inscribing my name on the office door made a mistake and took offbefore I noticed. To the world at large I am now MICHAEL MGIL PRIVATE INVESTGATOR. It's always the first line of a consultation. "No,it's McGill."

Some asshole scraped the I out of INVESTIGATOR with their keys six months ago. I simply can't bebothered to fix that one. For all the work I get, I may as well be an investgator. Every two days, I actually go down to the pay phone on the corner tocall my own phone and leave a message on the answering machine to make sureit's all still working.

I don't have a secretary. Sometimes I flip on aphone voice-changer I got for five bucks on eBay and pretend to be my ownsecretary. It is very sad.

I blew stale-tasting cigarette smoke at thewindow-glass, looked down at people moving around the street, and debated whatto do. I was fairly sure it was Saturday, so I didn't need to be therepretending I had a career. On the downside, I didn't have anywhere elseto go. I could have coaxed my old laptop into life and gone on the Web to readabout someone else's life, but I feared my email.

Maybe, I thought, it was time to leave the office, goout into the sunlight, and give the hell up.

Kids were playing in the street, which isn'tsomething I ever saw often from my window. I considered, and watched, reachingfor my coffee mug by reflex as I idly chased trains of thought around my head.

It occurs to me now that if I hadn't seen theman in black on the far side of the street at that exact second, I wouldprobably still be brushing my teeth with bleach.

But I did. The absolutestereotypical man in black, with the shades and the earpiece and the stoneface.

And another, down the street.

I leaned over. A third was outside the door to mybuilding.

And they were all looking up at my window.

"Well, you always knew this could happen,"I told myself, because there was no one else around to give me a hard time.

A black car pulled up under my window. My office isfive stories up. Takes me six minutes, in my shatteredcondition, to ascend the stairs to my door. Call it three for someone inbasic human condition. I had exactly that long to get dressed and think ofsomething clever.

But I wasted another terrified thirty seconds watchingthe car disgorge three more people who headed directly into my building.