Skunk Hunt (60 page)

"It might as well be in a baseball field," I
said. "Skunk buried it at a drive-in."

"An outdoor movie theater?" said Uncle Vern.
"I thought those were extinct."

"I guess not," I shrugged. "We can't go at
night, because it'll be open for business."

"Not
all
night," said Marvin.

"Anyway, we can't go during the day because
it's out in the open," I continued. "And it's far away, too."

"How far?" demanded Jeremy.

"West Virginia, in a no-place called
Bartow."

"That's not so horribly far away," Uncle Vern
said.

But my mother and Jeremy were taken aback.
Oregon Hill had been home to hundreds of West Virginians who had
come down from the high ridges in search of work at the Tredegar
Iron Works. Most people don't know the factory held on after the
Civil War, and was a working foundry through the end of World War
II. When the place finally folded, or rusted, the Hill and its
transplanted hillbillies remained. So far as I knew, not one
returned to their ancestral shack in the mountains. They had lost
the ability to uproot themselves, and West Virginia became a
mythical outpost on the dark side of the Moon. Not a homeland to
return to but a cold harsh planetoid no one in their right mind
would even visit. The very mention sent shudders down our spines.
West Virginia was good for a joke—a lot of jokes, actually—but that
was all. I was pretty amazed when Skunk told me he had buried his
loot out there. He must have figured it was the one place no one
would find it, because no one wanted to go there. Mom and Jeremy
reacted as though they had ordered scrambled eggs, only to be
served rotten yolks.

Marvin had taken out his phone.

"Who are you calling?" my mother asked
warily.

"No one. I'm checking Bartow on my GPS."

"What's that?" she asked.

"The same tech stuff everyone's been using to
track everyone up to now," Jeremy said sourly, forgetting to look
in the mirror.

Marvin punched some buttons and studied his
small screen. "Hell, it's not even 200 miles straight up Route 250.
We can get there in four hours…less, if we use the interstate.

"Past Charlottesville," my mother said
weakly. I think her mental map of Virginia cut off at that point.
Unless, of course, she knew the lat and longe of Bartow to within
an inch—which would make sense....

"Past Staunton," Jeremy affirmed with
knowledge no doubt garnered from a visit to a state prison in the
Blue Ridge Mountains.

"Past Puketown," said Marvin, snapping his
phone shut. "But for the money we're talking about, I'd walk
through—"

"You're all under arrest!"

Yvonne's announcement was premature. She was
only halfway to her feet, and had only halfway drawn a gun out of a
body crevice deep enough to hide a holster. She huffed and puffed
and almost succeeded in unraveling herself from the couch when
Jeremy snagged hold of her and dragged her back down.

"Cut it out," he said, amused and irritated
at the same time. She yelped when he plucked the gun out of her
hand. "This is serious business here." He looked down at the gun.
"Hey, this is real! Hey, it's loaded! You could've shot yourself by
accident!"

"She'd need a harpoon," I said.

"Why didn't you tell me you were packing
heat?" Jeremy asked, mystified.

Yvonne didn't answer. Instead, she kept
flapping away at her side, where I guessed something besides a
holster had been hidden. Jeremy edged away from her as she lifted
the side of her jogging blouse and slapped at her hip. She was
having some kind of fit, that was for sure, and my brother thought
it might be contagious. Her bosom heaved, flew up and retracted
violently, throwing her back on the cushion.

"Cm'on, you moron," she muttered, keeping one
eye on Jeremy. He had no intention of turning her own gun on her,
but I was beginning to work on the idea.

"Girl, if it's that bad, take it outside," my
mother said, all sympathy.

But Yvonne's malaise had nothing to do with
an unknown virus or food poisoning. I caught a glimpse of a small
rectangular box strapped at her waistline.

"She's communicating!" I shouted.

Todd studied her antics with a casual air. "I
think you mean she's wired." Then he got a good look at the box and
shot up. "Oh shit!"

The front door opened. In the entrance stood
a man who seemed utterly surprised to find it unlocked. He wasn't
the only one.

More surprising—to all of us, if not to the
man himself—was that it was Jeremy standing there. He held up a
badge and said:

"Police."

CHAPTER 28

The cornerstone of any decent
conspiracy must be founded on locked doors. Only a moron—or a
roomful of morons—would ignore this basic precondition. But instead
of lashing out at each other, with everyone accusing everyone else
of being the aforementioned moron, we sat (or stood) in dumbfounded
(moronic) amazement. I mean, really...he was the spitting
image...double douche bag
deluxe
.

The differences were surface, sort of like a
Todd copy, one impeccably dressed and the other impeccably
slobbish. The new Jeremy did a quick mental riff, each note of
acknowledgement producing a little burst of song from his eyes. He
knew us, that was abysmally obvious. And not just our names and
addresses. This was someone who had peeked into our closets and
introduced himself to our skeletons. It was the creepiest feeling
I'd ever experienced, outside of meeting Todd--yet I knew I wasn't
half as creeped-out as Jeremy, stretched backwards on the couch and
gawping like a grouper facing its image in a mirror. Like the
territorial fish, his first impulse was to attack anything that
looked like him—a perfectly understandable reaction, I thought. He
would have done so now, only he had fallen back on Yvonne's lap and
she was holding him down. When he threatened to break free of her
grasp, she clamped a hand on his crotch.

"Keep trying and see what happens," she said
in a voice filled with affectionate menace.

Jeremy didn't want to see what would happen
next. None of us did, really. Except me. He put his horror on hold
and met the eyes of the newcomer with muted logic. "Who the fuck
are you?"

"If I said Jeremy McPherson, would that
send you over the edge?" It was exactly the kind of sadistic thing
Jeremy would have said if the situation were reversed and he had a
brain. I was immediately on alert. This wasn't Jeremy, of course.
This was Jeremy
Plus
. A menace
to all Mankind and adjoining dimensions.

The metaphors of the day cry out for gross
exaggeration.

The new and improved Jeremy did not wear a
police uniform. Nor did he flaunt a gun. His existence alone
disarmed us.

Nor was he a quick draw on explanations. He
was so preoccupied with smirking that we turned to Mom for
answers.

Anyone who had known her for five minutes
easily saw through the bourgeois sham, but the three sons who were
present (okay, four) witnessed a catastrophic collapse not only of
pretense but of personality, too. She was devolving before our
eyes, leaving an unholy mess of fumbled assumptions and rotting
certainties. Even the nastiest of people (which didn't include Mom,
believe it or not) develop a concrete halo of faith in their world
view. Both her current world and the world she had left behind
shattered the instant Jeremy Plus opened the door. I recognized her
speechlessness. This was the mother I was accustomed to, standing
silent before a raging Skunk who would not have heard her even had
she chosen to open her mouth.

Okay, no answers there. Our heads swiveled
back to the door.

"So..." Marvin, not as overwhelmed by twin
twins as the rest of us, winced as he drew himself up, the wound my
father had given him still tugging at his torso. "You arresting us,
or what? Where's your backup?"

I had the distinct feeling he was feeding him
a line.

"Arrest you? Sure, I'll arrest you. Or maybe
I'll take a pass, with blood being thicker than the law and all
that." We couldn't credit our eyes or ears, and this double douche
was laughing in our stupefied faces. "I've already got what I came
for, twenty years worth of jewelry heists buried in the Bartow
drive-in. I could dig it up and return it to the owners. If the
stores are out of business, I can return them to the descendants,
the equitable owners, the trustees, whoever—no questions
asked."

Already boggled beyond belief, I reeled.
"Jewelry?"

"Like you don't know."

He was grating my nerves, just like the real
Jeremy, and my tongue escaped. "Just like you don't know the exact
space where to dig."

He gave me a 'huh?' look.

"Drive-ins are pretty big. What are you
looking at? An acre? Two? You don't know the aisle row or space
number, do you? No, you don't."

Lifting a superior nose to the air, I
caught Todd giving me a thumbs up. Shit. I had withheld the vital
tidbit on the off chance that someone might take it into his head
to hold a gun to
my
head. If
so, I could laugh raucously and declaim: "Go ahead, kill me. Then
the secret dies with me, ha-ha-ha."

Well, maybe I would skip the laugh. But it
was a nice little ace in the hole to balance against a potential
hole in my head.

I had zapped the douche double right
between the eyes. He gave me a look saturated with loathing, as if
I was a stage extra who had stepped on his best line. "But
you
did
tell us. I
heard
..." As proof, he held up the
electronic twin of the device strapped to Yvonne's waist. But when
he glanced down to his left, to where Yvonne retained her grip on
Jeremy's balls, he noted a possible glitch. "Jesus, Yvonne, no
wonder they threw you off the force. Now I know why the signal kept
breaking up. You can't even wear a transmitter without burying it
in Crisco."

Wounded vanity broke Yvonne's attention. She
let go of Jeremy's jewelry box and clasped her hands to her neck,
as if the douche had slashed her jugular. That was all my brother
needed. He shot up off the couch. Before the douche could jump or
jerk, Jeremy clocked him on the chin. Being a ringer, he knew about
the newcomer's glass jaw. The douche went down, his eyes rolling up
neatly in miniature toilet rolls.

"You've killed him!" Quivering with dismay,
Yvonne rolled off the couch and crawled heavily across the carpet,
sort of like a soft boulder falling uphill. Her performance raised
more than one eyebrow, with Jeremy's notching up over his brow and
falling off the back of his head. Who was the aggrieved lover here?
Jeremy? Jeremy Douche? I certainly wouldn't include myself among
the cast-offs. If Todd knew that I had lumbered in the sack with
Yvonne, the guffaws would have stretched from here to Uranus. Pride
is funny that way. It doesn't stop you from doing stupid things.
Just from admitting them.

Jeremy accepted the sight of his girl's
smothering concern for his twin with as much grace as he was
capable of—he didn't kick her in the wide target. But he was
tempted.

Uncle Vern's patience had finally given way,
his anger measured on a string of questions. "Mrs.
McPherson-Marteen? We seem to have a few moments to ourselves. Are
you capable of giving us an explanation?"

Just like Marvin, I thought. He spoke as
though holding up a card, only this time the cue was being fed to
Mom. I might be gullible, but for the last week I had been gobbling
down Berlitz lessons on International Gobbledygook.

When the douche went down, my mother had
given a little jump, not exactly of joy, but maybe with a bit of
hope, as if an agonizing dilemma had shown itself vulnerable to a
solution. I doubt if she wanted him dead, but permanent brain
damage might save her from opening a can of worms—something we
would have forced her to eat, if we could have found a can of
worms.

"You didn't tell—"

Uncle Vern cut her off with a raised
finger.

A couple of things struck me about the way
Uncle Vern addressed Mom. The hyphenated name was an annoyance,
naturally. An unwieldy weight had been tagged onto the McPherson
product, like a beloved brand acquired by a company that knew
nothing about what it was buying. You don't want a cheese mogul
snapping up your cigarette manufacturer, right? Your tobacco might
become tainted by cheddar, yuck of ages. That Winny might have
squirted his whey into the mighty Skunk lineage made me weak at the
knees. But Uncle Marvin's familiarity with my mother was even more
unsettling. Instead of using her first name, he had chosen
formality. Johnny knows he's up shit creek when his parents call
out, "Jonathan Thurston Getty, what have you been up to?"

Uncle Vern knew Mom pretty well, and a bit of
reverse engineering told me she knew what he knew. Which meant she
had known about the mental torture I had been put through over the
last few weeks. What else are mothers for?

While Mom pulled herself together—or apart,
it was hard to tell which—I scooted past the combined blobs of
Yvonne and Jeremy Douche and picked up the badge from the
floor.

Radcliffe Detective Agency

"We Find the Plus in Minus"

Insurance Claims Our Specialty

Michael Schwinn, Junior Associate

Fully Licensed and Bonded

My new-found brother, Jeremy's twin, was
named Michael Schwinn, a two-wheeled name for a doubletalking
slimeball. Coming across as a cop was like a pile of shit claiming
to be an honored member of the Fecal Club. Why bother? He could
have admitted he was a detective working for an insurance company
and we wouldn't have thought any better of him.