Sea No Evil, page 3
The bottom of the parka was fringed with some kind of dark, shredded material that I couldn’t quite make out from a distance. A pair of spindly, tan legs ran from the weird fringe of the parka to a pair of cheap Wal-Mart flip-flops.
The coat’s hood was up, and within the circle of white fringe a pair of dark sunglasses stared out like a couple of beady bug’s eyes.
Any moron would have seen that he was trying to get Poseidon’s attention. Any moron, that is, save the moron whose attention he’d been trying to get.
Two steps brought me up to the pier on which the stranger loitered, and his head snapped around when he saw me heading straight for him.
“Okay, pal, let’s you and me have a little thousand buck chat, shall we?” I called.
“Him,” the Parka Man grunted, frantically shaking his head inside his fringed hood and pointing behind me to the godly lummox on the deck. “Him. Me want him.”
“Hey, buddy, I want a tropical island retirement hut parked smack-dab on the same beach where the native babes wash their grass unmentionables, and a thousand smackers will buy me a real good set of dirty old man binoculars.”
Beats me what was eating the guy, but something I said seemed to rattle his cage. Or maybe he just hated the sound of my voice, which put him in the same company as my ex-wife who listed that as number twenty-eight in the enumerated grounds on her divorce petition, right between not fixing the bathroom grout for six years (#27) and selling her deadbeat old man to Eskimos (#29). I’d’ve fixed this parka jerk up with the former Mrs. Banyon when this was all through, if only I thought the guy deserved to be banished to a hell of tossed frying pans, burned grilled cheese sandwiches and months of unwashed socks…a land where love and hope stuffed the tailpipe with a rag of grimy dreams and sat on the front seat together in the locked garage with the engine running.
Turns out a second later Parka Man gave me every reason in the world to give him my ex-wife’s number, hire a minister, rent a hall and yank the pin on the bliss grenade.
The guy was smooth for a tourist. He pulled the rod on me before I even had a chance to grab under my coat for my roscoe. Lucky for me, his rod was an actual rod.
The metal bar was about three feet long and shiny. Could have been bronze; more likely gold. If he thought he’d whack me with it, that might’ve worked if his arms weren’t quite so stubby and if I wasn’t still over a hundred feet away.
The weirdo in the parka didn’t aim the rod at me. He pointed it in the direction of the bay, and it was only then that I got a good look at the thing’s headpiece. It had three fat prongs, the two outside ones curving out in either direction. There was some kind of flippered snake coiled around the base that clamped the prongs to the pole.
I already guessed what I was dealing with even before I heard the deep voice from the deck of The Seaweed Palace Bar at my back.
“Oh, bulfinch,” Poseidon, the bastard god of the sea, swore.
I dug under my coat as I ran, and my hand was already wrapped around the butt of my piece, but it was already way too late.
The stranger in the parka swept his arm up and around in a broad arc, and brought it sharply down, the pointed tips aimed directly at me. Simultaneous with the gesture, a curl of water had risen up from the bay like a soggy question mark, and on the downward snap of his wrist it burst forward.
The stream of water roared at me like a cannonball blasted out of a bidet. It struck me full force in the chest and I went back into the granite foundation of the taffy shop next door to the health bar. I swore I heard a crack when my elbow whacked the wall, but then the back of my head slammed rock and there was nothing but a bright flash of stars.
I woke up seconds later on my hands and knees spitting water like a cheap Home Depot backyard fountain and listening to the percussion section of an all-horse marching band galloping John Philip Sousa’s greatest hits from one side of my skull to the other.
Over the equine racket playing between my ears, I heard another sound.
The whine of a small motor assaulted my ringing ears, and I looked up to see the guy in the parka sitting in a little boat and already halfway to the other side of the bay.
He wasn’t heading out to sea. This end of the bay angled in to the rear of a shopping mall that was built on a short cliff. There were small trees that had sprung up like weeds and partially obscured the J.C. Penney’s and Gap signs on the rear loading dock side of the mall. The guy in the boat was heading for the stairs that led to the mall.
I pulled out my gun and squeezed off one shot. The slug dinged off the outboard motor. It coughed, spluttered to a stop and began to send out a cloud of thick black smoke, but by then the boat was already gliding up to the dock on the far side of the bay.
My attacker hopped from the little motorboat, out onto the dock and raced up the long staircase to the rear of the mall. He disappeared around the corner Footlocker.
I stood on the opposite side of the bay, panting, drenched, aching and with a pounding headache. It was pretty much how I felt on my most awful Sunday mornings, but without the pleasant lengthy numbness of the preceding Saturday night’s debauchery.
Up on the deck of the health bar, Poseidon and Miss Ravelli held onto the railing and stared dumbly across the bay at the spot where Parka Man vanished.
“Yeah, I’m just fine, thanks for worrying,” I snapped.
I fished angrily around in my trench coat pocket where I thought I’d felt a spare slug the other week. It had fallen through a hole and got stuck in the lining. I managed to pop it out and shove it into my piece before jamming the gun back in my holster.
I snatched my fedora from the dock. It had come through the attack relatively unscathed. I bent the damp brim back into shape and dropped it on my aching skull.
“Why didn’t you tell me somebody stole your trident?” I demanded as I squished my way back across the wooden walkway.
Everybody knew that Poseidon’s trident was like the atom bomb of the undersea world. Three prongs of heavy duty firepower that could be used to stop that pesky drip in the bathroom sink or summon tidal waves. I suddenly realized why the ocean had been so tumultuous lately. Poseidon’s trident had fallen into the hands of some demented, bowlegged loon with a Nanook of the North fixation, and the first couple of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge hadn’t bothered to tell the cops someone had looted the sea god’s gun cabinet.
The pair of them exchanged a nervous glance. It was Miss Ravelli, of course, who was silently voted spokesman.
“We weren’t sure it was stolen,” she said. “Poseidon misplaces it sometimes, but it always turns up. You know how it is. You put down the car keys and you’ve searched the whole house three times and you’re sure they’re lost, then they suddenly turn up on the hook near the door where they were supposed to be all along. Last time the trident went missing I found it in the kitchen cupboard with the mops.”
I squished back up the stairs to the deck. “I still want my thousand.”
For that Poseidon found his voice. “You didn’t catch him,” he snarled.
“I was not in full possession of the facts,” I said, more calmly than I felt. “Facts which, since they were not disclosed to me, nearly goddamn killed me while the two of you stood there and watched.” I closed my eyes for a second and dripped on the deck. “Forget the thousand. I’ll settle for a couple of aspirin.” I waved a hand at her purse, which doubled as a pharmacy for every dame on the planet. Water ran from the sleeve of my trench coat and dribbled out onto the table.
“I don’t believe in them,” she apologized. “I only trust natural cures.”
“Natural. Right. Dissolve two crystals under your tongue, and if that doesn’t cure your migraine chop your head off. Goddamn new agers.”
“You need not be so testy, Mr. Banyon,” Miss Ravelli said. “My husband wanted to help, but if you must know I stopped him. The trident is a formidable weapon, but I saw that man was heading for shore. Poseidon couldn’t go on shore with his ankle monitor, we explained that to you. We told you everything that we knew for certain.”
“I’ll be sure to explain all about your forthrightness to my concussion if it ever regains consciousness,” I said. I started to go, but stopped dead. “You know, I get that you’re afraid to make landfall and that by the time you saddled up and took off after him, he’d probably have been over the other side. Gutless, girly, and ungodlike, but I get it. But why didn’t you just send the damn dolphins to cut him off?”
“I’m not Aquaman, for Christ’s sake,” Poseidon snapped. “I can’t just--”
He pressed his fingers to his temple and bugged his eyes in a sarcastic pantomime of shooting out telepathic rays.
His team of dolphins instantly took off from the dock below the bar and raced across the bay to the spot where Parka Man had jumped to the dock. They splashed around doing those annoying ack-ack dolphin noises, swimming in circles offshore.
“What the hell?” Poseidon said. “I didn’t know I could do that. Damn.”
“It’s all right, darling,” Miss Ravelli cooed. She rubbed her delicate little mortal hand on the back of Poseidon’s clumsy catcher’s mitt.
That’s how I left them. Her rubbing his massive mitt and cooing soothing and sweet you’re-not-stupids in his ear, and him literally scratching his peroxide blond head and trying to figure out how to get his team of runaway dolphins to make the return trip across the bay.
The dame behind the counter flashed her idiot’s grin as I marched through the main bar. “Are you sure I can’t get you something, sir?” she asked.
“No,” I snapped, and immediately changed my mind. “Yes. A towel, some aspirin and a bottle of water.”
I was surprised when she managed to produce all three. The aspirin she collected from her own purse, which she stuffed quickly back below the bar, making sure that none of her hippie-dippy coworkers had seen the Anacin label.
I threw back the pills, drank as little of the Poland Springs as possible (water is for bathing, flushing, or freezing into cubes), and wrapped the towel around my neck.
“Thanks,” I said, handing back the water bottle. “Recycle that into swizzle sticks. And send the bill to the barefoot behemoth making wolf whistles at the school of dolphins from the back porch.”
When I got back outside I heard the sound of the one o’clock train rumbling away from the platform two blocks away. The next one wasn’t due for another forty-five minutes. It’d be quicker to hike all the way back to the office.
“Monotheism didn’t put all you Olympus bastards out of business fast enough,” I grumbled. A garden gnome exiting the taffy shop next-door overheard me and shot me a look like I was the one wearing the pointed hat and ceramic lederhosen. I resisted the urge to make a field goal with the little son of a bitch between a pair of telephone poles.
Leaving a dripping trail down the sidewalk, I trudged back toward the shriveled black heart of the decaying city.
CHAPTER 2
The six story sandstone slouched in the middle of the block like a killer who’d volunteered for the search party but was trying to go unnoticed in the crowd.
The building was a dump but the rent was cheap, which was the primary reason it was the international home of that indispensable Western institution, Banyon Investigations, Inc. I saw from the sidewalk as I approached that the name on the third floor window was barely visible, and looked more like “Banjo Invest…..Inc.”
I’d planned to get it repainted months ago, but some jerks had recently begun wandering in off the street asking me for stock recommendations. I’d been telling them all to buy IBM and pocketing the fifty bucks advice fee. Hey, you wander blind into some lousy joint in a crummy neighborhood asking a guy named Banjo who looks shifty like me where you should shovel your money, you get what you pay for. Besides, I’d been checking lately and since I started my inadvertent side business IBM had been going through the roof. That was the main reason I’d filched a paper on the way to my meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Poseidon. If I’d only taken the loot I’d made and followed my own advice instead of blowing it at local taverns I’d be sitting pretty.
The street outside the building was packed tighter than Zombie Liberace’s colon.
Thanks to the craziness going on out at sea, most fishermen were too scared to go networking. Consequently, fish for sale was growing scarce and prices were soaring. The only place in town not negatively impacted by the shortage was the dingy fish market that stunk up most of the ground floor of my building.
Business was booming at For the Halibut Fish Bazaar. The owner, Luigi Vincetti, had even used some of the proceeds to fix his ice machine, which had broken during the Johnson administration and which he’d subsequently used as a playpen for his moron sons when they were snot-nosed little brats. The Vincetti spawn were long grown, but from the stench I always figured the sentimental old dago had stored all their diapers in the beat-up old ice maker. Cheaper than tipping the garbage man at Christmas.
Vincetti’s place hadn’t been negatively impacted by the lack of fresh fish in the local marketplace mainly because “fresh” was not a word in the Vincetti pidgin lexicon. All the healthy eaters in town were flocking to For the Halibut, without a clue that it was the last stop on the town’s ptomaine tour.
There were cars double parked on both sides of the street, a meter maid gleefully tearing pages from her ticket book like my ex-wife writes checks, and emaciated health fanatics in Lycra bike pants crowding every inch of the sidewalk.
On my way in through the building’s side door I saw the counter dame from The Seaweed Palace Bar entering Vincetti’s place along with a crush of customers. She wasn’t half bad on the eyes, and if I knew she was going my way I would’ve asked her out and awarded her the privilege of driving me across town.. As it was, she’d probably fall for the doctor who’d be pumping her stomach by sundown. Story of my life.
At least the elevator wasn’t crowded. For some reason it was the only spot in the whole building that was air conditioned, which was true winter as well as summer, and the clothes I thought had mostly dried on my long walk felt wetter than ever in the cold.
The upstairs hallway was quiet for a change. Myron Wasserbaum, the bastard dentist down the hall, had organized all the cases against him into a single class action and was spending Thursdays these days at the courthouse staring into the toothless maws of his victims, so the scream machine in his office was off that afternoon.
Madame Carpathia’s Dance Studio on the top floor had been shut down for the past week. Some ballerina had started a gang war when she wore a pair of stolen slippers to class. Turns out she’d dropped a Winnebago on some witch over in the barrio and stole her shoes, and all hell broke loose when senora’s sister showed up at Madame Carpathia’s to claim her dead hermana’s zapatos. Twenty years ago they were shooting each other over Air Jordans, now they’re launching fireballs and tossing pails of water over some ruby red slippers. The whole world is going to hell.
My own office at the end of the hall was quiet as well. I was happy to see there wasn’t anybody waiting for me when I stepped inside. I’d had it up to here with clients and didn’t care if another one didn’t darken my door for another six months.
My secretary wasn’t at her desk in the outer office. Doris was in the hospital getting her tonsils out and needed a few days off. When she told me that morning the reason she needed time off I admitted I was surprised.
“Why?” Doris accused, planting her hands on her hips and snapping her gum so viciously I knew that she was imagining my mug on the popping pink Bazooka bubble. “It ain’t so strange, people get their tonsils out all the time.”
“I just assumed, Doris, that a woman who spends so much of her day yapping on the phone would have worn her tonsils down to insignificant nubs by this late stage in life.” It was my smile that got a high heel heaved at my head.
“You’re a bastard, Crag Banyon.”
She didn’t speak to me again the rest of the morning except to scream at me the wrong name of the client who’d called for a meeting at the bayside health bar.
The elf holding down the fort behind my dingbat secretary’s desk looked up with a pair of tennis ball eyes when I walked through the door. His face brightened when he saw it was me.
“Hello, Mr. Crag,” Mannix, my office assistant and all-around go-to gofer sang happily. “You had one phone call.”
“Court, cops, collection agency, or the former Mrs. Banyon?” I asked as I walked straight past him and through the door to my private office.
“None of those people,” the elf said. He scooped up a scrap of paper from Doris’ desk and hustled to keep up with me. “It was from Miss Ravelli. She said she was the woman who you met with today, but I checked the file and Miss Doris had written that person’s name down as ‘Ravioli.’ Should I start a new file?”
“Yeah,” I said, tossing the towel I’d carted clear across town to my beat-up couch and stripping off my hat, coat and suit jacket. “Write on the tab ‘Replacement Secretary Front Runners,’ then run over to St. Attila’s Home of Criminally Psychotic Females and get a list of their twenty most likely recidivist recent parolees, including most violent offenses, body count and weapons of choice. Then leave that file in Doris’ top drawer. You got all that? Good.”
Mannix stood there holding the scrap of paper in his hand, unsure what to do with it. His big eyes watched in confusion as I climbed out onto the fire escape and hung my suit coat and trench coat in the sun on the rusty railing. He was still standing mute in front of my desk when I climbed back inside.
“What did she say, Mannix?” I asked wearily as I sat my fedora on the windowsill and draped my tie next to it.
“Oh,” said the elf. He glanced at his note. “Miss Ravelli said she was sorry for what happened and that she and her husband would still like to hire you to find the item. That’s exactly what she said, Mr. Crag. ‘The item.’ She wouldn’t tell me what the item is. Is it candy?” When those huge eyes looked up they’d developed a hopeful glint.
