Sea No Evil, page 2
He was a good six feet, eight inches, but not pieced together in a lab like some gangly NBA player. This particular brick shithouse had the perfect, hulking proportions of a bronzed ape. His simple white shirt and pants were at least three sizes too small and threatened to pop every seam every time a muscle danced, which meant he probably spent a bundle on personal seamstresses because potato chip factories have fewer ripples. There were no shoes on his massive clodhopper feet, which I’m sure brought relief to a thousand Third World Avia child laborers slaving over vats of cheap, bubbling glue.
He first ran his fingers through his golden locks and only when he was finished grooming did a thumb like a canned ham with a fingerprint on it jerk in my direction.
“This him?” he snarled at Miss Ravelli.
I answered for her. “That depends on several variables, and I am unfortunately too sober at the moment to accurately run the numbers. So let’s just keep it simple and say that I am definitely not him, I have no interest in being him, but if I see him I’ll tell him you were looking for him.”
The behemoth looked confused, which seemed a hell of a lot more comfortable on him than that shirt with the exploding buttons he was squeezed into.
“It’s him,” Miss Ravelli informed the hulking beach bum. “Crag Banyon, I’d like you to meet Poseidon, the god of the sea.”
He had a grip like a dead uncle of mine who always tried to prove how tough he was by trying to break the bones in my six year old hand. Poseidon shook my hand all the way back over to the picnic table and shook me right back into the chair I’d just vacated.
“You tell him already?” Poseidon asked, dropping his massive bulk into the seat beside mine. Miss Ravelli shook her head.
“Save your breath,” I told them. “I don’t take god or ghost cases. If I ever make up a new business card, I’ll have that printed above my name and telephone number. In fact, I’ll have that printed up instead of my name and telephone number. Those two pains in the ass have always been more trouble than they’re worth.”
There was a crash, the deck shook underneath my pained ass, and all of a sudden I was staring close-up at one of Poseidon’s massive feet.
“You see that?” the god of the sea demanded.
“I assume you don’t mean that disturbing pedicure, your apparent spray tanning addiction or the fact that you shave your legs like a girl, and that you’re calling my attention to the ankle monitor.”
“Damn straight,” Poseidon said, wiggling his toes.
The metal and plastic monitor was as big around as a toilet seat, yet was still pressed in tight against his skin. Two little lights, red and green, decorated the side nearest me. The red light was dead, but the green blinked.
“Honey,” Miss Ravelli said quietly.
She touched the back of Poseidon’s hand and only then did it seem to click for him that sticking a foot on someone’s placemat might be okay for a Uruguayan rugby team and a zombie picnic but was not done in polite company, which she apparently mistakenly thought I was. He dropped the foot back to the deck and with the resulting thunder a few faces peeked out the back windows of the health bar to check for rain.
Poseidon crossed his massive arms over his barrel chest, sprang his last two buttons with his heavy sigh, and yielded the floor.
“Just give us one minute of your time, Mr. Banyon,” Miss Ravelli said. “You came all the way down here, what’s one more minute? We’ll pay you.”
She reached into her purse as she spoke and removed a single gold coin, which she slid past silent Poseidon and deposited next to one of the sea god’s buttons which had rolled to a stop in front of me. It looked like an old Spanish doubloon, probably salvaged from some wreck on the ocean’s floor. The dame was sending a message: there were plenty more sunken ships and tons more coins like that if I took the gig.
I slid the coin back her way, with Poseidon just sitting there between us like a waterlogged sumo watching the doubloon make the return trip.
“I don’t have very many principles,” I said, “which makes it real easy to keep track of the few I’ve got. First one: I don’t bribe.” (Sometimes I hate being such an upstanding son of a bitch.) “But if you want a shrink to unburden on, the train for downtown doesn’t leave for another twenty minutes so you can have me another ten. After that I plan on being as drunk as fast as this city’s fine public transit system permits.”
Miss Ravelli took a deep breath and let it all out.
“Poseidon and I are married, although I mostly still use my maiden name. It makes it simpler for my charity work. You seemed not to know me which, Mr. Banyon, is actually a wonderful relief for a change. You see, I’m sort of a celebrity. I was a former Olympic swimmer. Silver medal in the Bongo Congo summer games. Should have been the gold, but that was the year the Russians entered that five thousand pound great white shark in a babushka in competition. I was one of only two swimmers that Olga Toothchenko didn’t eat. They changed the rules about allowing marine predators to compete after that, but her record stands so it doesn’t do me or No-Arms Sanchez any good. Flash forward six years. Poseidon and I met while I was swimming the English Channel to raise awareness for the Swimmer’s Ear Foundation. I’m international spokesperson. I was swimming, he was diverting currents, and we fell in love. The wedding coverage was all over ET, GMA, all the light entertainment news shows, two years ago. It’s so refreshing to meet someone who isn’t into the whole celebrity thing.”
Like everybody else who says they don’t like the celebrity thing, it was the dame’s lead story.
“My invitation must have got lost in the mail,” I said.
“Is the lady boring you?” Poseidon demanded. Even seated he towered over me, and he made an extra effort to add a few inches with a suddenly rigid spine.
Self-preservation is an instinct deeply ingrained in the human animal. Unfortunately in me it’s trumped by the dominant gene of being chronically annoyed with numskull deities who think they can push around everything that can’t shoot lightning from its fingertips or knock up a goat.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, she is,” I suicidally informed the god. “But I said I’d listen, so I am, and every interruption brings the one o’clock train closer.”
Poseidon didn’t seem to know what to do. As a god he was used to using only his impressive physique to bully around squid and starfish for millennia. Out of the ocean’s depths he seemed out of his element and unsure what to do when the simple glare that always terrified whole schools of minnow no longer cut it. Lucky for me it didn’t occur to him that he had mitts like snow shovels and could have taken my head like a sand dollar, crushed it to pennies and scattered the grains across the bay.
“Hon, it’s okay,” Miss Ravelli interjected, again with a delicate touch to the back of his massive hand. “Mr. Banyon is here to help.”
“Let’s set that falsehood aside for now,” I suggested. “What else you got? Start with that.” I aimed my chin to the floor where the ankle monitor softly beeped.
The sea god slumped back in his seat, and his wife continued.
“It comes off next Monday,” she said. “It’s a whole big hullabaloo that happened long before he and I met. Poseidon has been restricted to the sea ever since the Titanic sank. The Leprechaun Mafia owned a significant share of White Star Lines, and they were out a bundle when that ship went down. They had a whole bunch of pots of gold in the hold and they thought Poseidon sank it to retrieve the coins once the ship reached the bottom. He does a lot of salvage work. The leprechauns were out for blood.”
“Yeah, guess who took the fall?” Poseidon interjected. “Always Poseidon. Like I control ice. Yeah, it’s water technically, but -- duh? -- look at it. It’s frozen. Geesh. And I was all the way over in the Indian Ocean when it happened. I had a sawtooth eel and a couple of manta rays who backed me up.”
“That’s right, dear,” Miss Ravelli said.
He was warming to his subject, killing too much time. The wife saw me cast a bored eye at her watch. I gave her an it’s-your-dime shrug.
“I mean, it’s the same with underwater earthquakes. Everyone yells at me when there’s a tsunami, but -- hello? -- what do you think is under the water, more water? It’s land, geniuses. There’s giant plates shifting and volcanoes erupting all over the place. I don’t control any of that, despite what they say about me banging the ground. So don’t point your fingers at me if your island winds up underwater and your village gets swept away, take it up with Vulcan or my brother, Mr. Bigshot Zeus.”
“Yes, dear,” Miss Ravelli said.
She had repeated it three times while he was talking and this last time she raised her voice loud enough that he finally heard her. The god fell silent and she soothed the behemoth by massaging the back of his huge paw.
“Poseidon has missed every assembly on Olympus for the past hundred years. The rest of them have been fine with that, but the seas have been woefully underrepresented there for an entire century. Now that the monitor is finally coming off and Poseidon will finally be able to return to dry land, we’ve been getting all kinds of threats. We think someone doesn’t want him free and is trying to intimidate him.”
“We think that, do we?” I said. “What I was thinking is that he’s doing a pretty good job tricking the monitor right now. Not on land, still over water.”
Miss Ravelli nodded. “That’s why I asked you to meet us here instead of at your office. He’s only allowed in water or over it. For instance, boats are fine but beaches are off limits, and so on. This deck is over the water, so the monitor doesn’t go off. We couldn’t go inside or it would.”
“What would happen then?”
Poseidon morosely grabbed up his wife’s glass of brown sludge, took a swig, made a sour face, then shoved it back in front of her. He licked swill off his gleaming white teeth and made a point of ignoring us as he stared into the bay.
Miss Ravelli raised both palms. “Poof is what would happen, Mr. Banyon. Even gods die. If Poseidon goes on land before next Monday, he’s…finished.”
“Well he’s not finished because he’s not going on land,” Poseidon mocked. “I’m not an idiot, you know.” He tried to fold his arms emphatically across his barrel chest but was so angry that he momentarily forgot how. He worked it out on the third attempt.
Miss Ravelli’s lips thinned and her brow creased with silent worry.
“What kind of threats are you getting?” I asked.
“Strange calls in the middle of the night,” she said. “They don’t say anything, they just blow bubbles and then hang up. Then there’s this.”
She snapped open her purse and passed me a folded slip of paper.
It was an ad for sea monkeys from the back of a comic book. Everything in the ad’s header except “Own a BOWLFULL (sic) OF HAPPINESS!” had been covered up by a bunch of crooked letters that had been cut out from somewhere else and glued to the ad. Obviously somebody watched too many TV cop shows. The assembled letters said, “YOUR NEXT.” Crummy English aside, it was clearly a reference to the sea monkey family, and by extension the Poseidons. The eyes of the bowlful of previously happy sea bastards were crossed out with large black ink X’s. Red Crayola blood was dripping from cartoon wounds over all their bodies. Real nice. I love outsider art.
Back when I was with the cops I once worked what we at first thought was a runaway case. Some local woodcarver had chiseled himself a talking puppet that took off from his shop. Beats me why he made the thing. What the old pervert did with his wood was none of my business. Turns out the puppet had fallen under the influence of one of those talking crickets. You know the kind; always hanging around the stage doors of junior puppet shows, whispering into Punch and Judy’s ears or tickling Elmo. It’s a sick world. Eventually toothpicks and bags of sawdust were getting mailed back to the old woodcutter’s shop every hour. The elderly perv was going nuts. He didn’t have any dough to pay the six dollars ransom, and since the puppet wasn’t a real boy we had to treat it as simple theft and malicious destruction of property. We eventually caught the cricket creep, but by the time we got to his nest all that was left was the puppet’s nose. Last I heard, the old man had a nervous breakdown and was living inside a whale. The cricket bastard paid his fine and hopped out of court a free insect. Got stepped on by some fat lawyer on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. Crushed his little top hat and everything. Justice under the heel of a wingtip. I’ll take what I can get.
The point is, there’s a lot sicker going on in the world than a simple doctored sea monkey ad from the back pages of a Little Lulu funnybook. I think the dame knew that, but I could see there was something else. What’s more Miss Ravelli knew that I’d spotted the look of fearful hesitation on her face. She screwed up her courage.
“Last week someone left a sea horse head in our bed,” she blurted.
“That was probably just a joke,” Poseidon quickly interjected.
“It was no joke,” she snapped. She closed her eyes and pressed the fingertips of one hand to the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry, Mr. Banyon, but between all this, plus the octopus strike going into its third week and the whirlpool next door running all hours of the day and night, I haven’t been getting much sleep lately.”
Despite myself, I felt bad for the dame. Hell, I even felt bad for her moose-of-the-sea husband, who didn’t seem to have a clue how to comfort her and so just slouched there feeling sorry for the both of them. But rules are rules and when it came to getting mixed up with gods I was more atheistic than Christopher Hitchens and Karl Marx wrapped up in one, which they were after their zombies stumbled into that voodoo cursed particle accelerator last summer.
“You should go to the cops,” I said.
“I’ve been to see them,” she insisted. “The detective I spoke with about all this was as stupid and pigheaded a man as I’ve ever met. People like him are the reason why I left dry land and went to live in the sea. And you, of course, dear,” she said to Poseidon.
“Huhn?” asked the genius lump of barefooted testosterone sitting beside her.
“Detective Dan Jenkins isn’t the only cop in town,” I informed her.
She seemed surprised. “How did you know it was him?”
“Because you pretty much just recited the first two lines of the eulogy I have written for him and tucked away in the back of my desk drawer behind a celebratory bottle of Jack Daniels for when that glorious day finally arrives,” I said. “Look, the only thing I can tell you is that you probably don’t have to worry. You’ve got until Monday with that thing on your ankle? My advice is forget whoever is hassling you and just wait it out. If you still want to make waves once it’s off, follow up on that note glued to the ad. It came from a newspaper, not a magazine. The letters are dull, not glossy, and it looks like cheap paper. I’d even venture to say it came from here in town. That looks like the Gazette New Roman font the local rag uses in its masthead. As far as the decapitated sea horse, if someone managed to get inside your undersea palace to plant it, question the help. That includes staff you think you can trust. Hell, I’ll throw the two of you in there as suspects, since I have no idea what your motives might be vis-à-vis one another.” I heard the whistle of an approaching train, and I stood. “And that, Mr. and Mrs. God of the Seven Deadly Seas is the mating call of my worried bartender who is praying that my wallet hasn’t stumbled into a more reputable saloon and discovered the existence of clean floors and non-watery cocktails at surprisingly affordable prices.”
Poseidon didn’t even look at me. The wife’s face was the very picture of grim acceptance as I turned to go.
A single pivot on one heel and I was turned right back in their direction.
“On the other hand, a thousand bucks if I catch your guy in the next five minutes,” I announced.
They both glanced up at me. Or, rather, she did. Still hunched in his seat, Poseidon and I were finally eye to eye. Tan lids narrowed over blue orbs.
“What?” the pair of them asked in unison.
“Times a-wastin’,” I said, snapping my fingers to hustle business along. “A thousand bucks if I have your guy in hand in five minutes. American. I don’t deal in doubloons or fish heads. Convert whatever currency you’ve got at the local bank. Deal?”
The wife quickly answered yes, and as reluctant as he was to trust anyone with a mortal lifespan and an IQ higher than the shallow end of the kiddie pool, the big, dumb sea god joined the party a split-second after his old lady’s okay.
I strode past them over to the stairs Poseidon had taken up from the water. I took the steps at a trot and spun around to the dock that cut across the rear deck of the health bar. The dolphins acked up a storm as I hustled past them, and above me Poseidon and his wife watched as I hustled past their ankles toward the cluster of docks that were packed into the far end of the bay.
The crew of the fishing boat was nowhere to be seen. I heard some voices from the belly of their ship, and a remote-operated crane swung seemingly of its own volition on the main deck. There was only one person left out in the open in the whole area.
My back had been to him, and he’d been standing to Miss Ravelli’s left and probably out of her line of site. The only one of our party who’d had a full-on, panoramic, 3D view of the silent spectator throughout our entire meeting was Poseidon, and the sea god had paid as much attention to him as gods do pretty much anything ranked below nymph on the Cambridge U. Scale of bangable supernatural creatures.
The guy I’d seen earlier still stood on the dock in his parka. I’d figured before that the coat was an odd choice for June, but it was cool near the shore thanks to the crazy ocean weather and the overcast day. Plus what do I know from fashion? Parkas in summer might’ve replaced crotches pulled down to the knees and underwear hanging out with the trendy moron set. I hadn’t given the guy a second thought.
