Skunk Hunt (68 page)

Mom's voice again floated out over the field
of wrecks.

"There she is!" Barbara exclaimed. "I can't
just run away!"

"It's her or me, sister." Monique's tone was
decipherable in retrospect, but I hadn't reached that far, yet. Her
choice of words disturbed me. Brothers and sisters abounded in my
sorry lifeline—more than I had ever known. Even as metaphor,
sibling rivalry was disturbing me.

"Monique, it's my
mother
!"

"The bitch who dumped you in the gutter with
diddle-twerp."
"Hey!" I said, then winced. She could have meant Doubletalk, or
even Skunk himself. I was demeaned by my premature conclusion.
Monique acted as if having her sit on my lap was my one and only
wet dream.

We were abruptly blinded by a blast of light.
Barbara and Monique yelped in pain as their vision gear scooped up
a billion trillion photons and threw them directly into their
retinas. For an instant I saw them in their grotesque, oversized
goggles, like those humans in Star Trek absorbed by malevolent
machines. They whipped the gear off and clutched at their eyes.
Using my hand as a shield, I turned to Jeremy and Michael.

"You little fuck," Jeremy cursed. "You try
that again and we'll shoot you."
"You have gun?" I asked.

In the flashlight's backwash I saw his face
turn to steel.

"One of has one, and he'll shoot you."

A nice little revelation. He had
forgotten Yvonne's gun in her van. He was not so fearful of them
that he felt the need to be armed. The three of them—Jeremy,
Michael and Yvonne were to one degree or another in this together.
Still, for not bringing the gun I had to credit Jeremy with some
dork points, which I found irritating. I didn't want my worst known
enemy to be
likable
.

The rest of the posse poured out from between
the rows. They gaped at my sister and Monique, decked out in camo
jackets and pants, looking like day-old dead turtles. I guess they
planned to go deer hunting if the treasure didn't pan out. Mom
spotted Barbara and ran to her, giving her a heartfelt hug. At
least my own heart melted, dribbling out in a gunky mess on my
shoes.

Still blinded, Barbara reacted to the unseen
hugger with a violent burst of woodshed kung fu that was a lot more
fu than kung, but which still managed to knock Mom down.

Jeremy looked at Michael and said, "Help her
up."

"
You
help her up."

I glanced at Todd, who was already staring at
me. One of us would have to make a show of obeisance. I stared a
little longer and he stared back.

"You're the one she chose to live with," I
said finally.

"You think she was doing me a favor?"

There was no question that, in the absence of
our twins, any one of the four of us would have done the right
thing. But we had not had a chance to work out our rivalries. None
of us knew who was dominant in the pecking order. Our misapplied
egos froze us in place.

With a grunt of disgust, Uncle Vern handed
his flashlight to Marvin and helped my mother to her feet. By then,
Barbara had recovered her sight enough to see what she had done.
She rushed forward and tried to hug Mom, but Mom pushed her
back.

"One big happy," said Marvin. "You girls mind
telling me how you found us out here?"

Several of us shouted "GPS!" and laughed.

"On
both
your vans," Monique added wickedly, squinting at
us.

The laughter stopped. At the same moment,
there was drunken laughter in the distance. It sounded like a
party, but we couldn't be sure.

"Anyone here have a gun?" Marvin asked,
rubbing his stomach gingerly.

"I just happen to…" Monique took a pistol
from out from a pocket in her camouflage jacket and pointed it
roughly in our direction. She must have still had stars in her
eyes, because she never saw Uncle Vern jump forward to snatch it
out of her hand. Although I have to add, ol' Vern moved pretty fast
and could probably have gotten the gun from any of us.

"Shit!" said Monique. "I got enough of this
crap from Dog."

"Ruger SR9c," said Uncle Vern, tilting the
gun this way and that. "Nice and light. The perfect sidearm for a
lady."

Monique snarled.

Carl's recitation finished, he took the
flashlight from Marvin and stood back, the gun lifted in our
direction. "Well, finally, I can have peace of mind."

"Uncle Vern!"

"Don't you 'uncle' me, you little shitwit,"
he snapped crisply at Marvin. "It's your complete idiocy that put
us in this predicament."

"But—"

"There isn't a single person here I can
trust," Uncle Vern interrupted, aggrieved.

"Vern…" my mother said gently.

"Stay put. You're the one who got Skunk to
hand over the Brinks money to you and worthless here."

Todd made a sound of protest. I made a
different sound.

"Skunk still had feelings for you," Uncle
Vern said to Mom. "I won't call it 'love'. I won't even call it
'like'. Whatever it was, you used it."

Mom didn't wilt. Uncle Vern himself had
called her a lady, and she used it against him. She drew herself up
regally, all trace of dementia gone, utterly.

"You know that's not the truth. Not all of
it. And you know why we're here—"

"Silence!" Uncle Vern yelled. Straight out of
a comic book.

Monique and Barbara were making throaty
sounds, a real pair of drowners.

"What is your problem?" Uncle Vern asked.

"Who is…
that
?" Monique had finally concluded the two
Jeremys were not reflective artifacts of the light zap.

Barbara pointed at Jeremy, then Michael, then
Jeremy. She checked out the clothes, and switched back to Michael.
"You're the one at Starbucks! You were pretending to be…" Back to
Jeremy. "Him!"

"Son of a bitch!" Jeremy shouted.

"Careful…" Michael said, nodding at Mom.

"Son of a bitch!" Jeremy repeated.

"Later," Marvin said. "Right now we've got
more pressing business." He sounded like his uncle.

"I didn't do anything," Todd whined. "I'm a
victim."

Marvin and I laughed in unison. This
drew a baleful look from Uncle Vern. "And
you
…you knew all along where the jewels
were."

"So sue me," I said. "Anyway, I thought it
was cash." Boy, that was productive. He pointed the gun between my
eyes.

"Okay."

I had said 'sue', right? I hadn't said
'shoot'?

To my utter and complete and perfectly true
astonishment, Jeremy stepped forward. "Hey!"

"Oh, stop the theatrics," Uncle Vern said
with a shake of the head. He looked at Monique. "Why didn't you
load it?" He pointed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger
several times. The click was loud and harmless.

With the sexiest sheepishness this side of
Charlotte Simmons, Monique lifted her bosom and lowered it in
camo-covered innocence.

"You thought the threat would be enough?"
Uncle Vern pocketed the gun—no sense throwing away good money—and
resumed his stern demeanor. "That doesn't change the terms of my
disenchantment."

"Like hell it doesn't," said Michael, balling
his fist.

Uncle Vern ignored him. "I understand how
Sweet Tooth became involved in all of this. It's a family matter,
after all. But…" He directed his gaze at Monique. "You're not
family."

"Yes I am," said Monique. "We're
married."

Uncle Vern searched the group for qualified
faces: Jeremy, Michael, Todd…and myself. Well, in my dreams….

"To one of
them
?" Uncle Vern demanded in a nauseated
voice.

"Or course not. I'm married to Barbara."

"You've got to be kidding," said Uncle Vern.
This was accompanied by a chorus of disbelief from the rest of us,
including Yvonne, who pulled her flesh out of range.

"Why not?" Monique continued saucily, as
though explaining away a peppermint kid she had picked up off the
street instead of my sister of the female persuasion. "We've known
each other for over a year."

"I don't think that's the point," said Uncle
Vern. "Really, I can't believe—"

Monique stepped over to Barbara and draped an
arm around her. "Meet my wife."

Barbara frowned. "I thought we agreed.
You're
my
wife."

"It's true?" I squeaked, horrified by the
waste of it all. But wait. Didn't this make them virgins? I
mean…sort of? That wasn't so bad. Weird, yeah, but….

Mom shrank away from her daughter and
unanticipated daughter-in-law.

"Oh Mom, boys are so icky!" Barbara fussed.
"You should know that, after Skunk."

"But…what about
men
?"

"Never met one," Monique explained.

I checked out Todd, the closest thing around
here to a mirror. I wanted to see my reaction in his face. Which,
surprisingly, was perfectly bland.

Aw crap, I had forgotten.
He
had slept with Monique, as a
reward from Carl for….

"You," I said.

Todd's eyebrow went up a notch. "Huh?"

"Turn out your pockets."

"Make that a double 'huh'?"

Uncle Vern caught on quickly. He nodded at
Todd. "Marvin…"

Marvin wasn't sure what was going on, but
understood something was up. He looked at Todd. "You heard your
identical twin. Show us what's in your pants."

"Like fun I will." Todd moved back, as if
Marvin had asked him to pick up the soap. We all understood that it
only sounded perverted because Marvin was an idiot, but Todd took a
pose out the Perils of Pauline. Pauline, duly horrified when faced
by a mini-gorilla who threatened to transgress her virtue.

"Oh, stop that," I said, embarrassed for
myself.

It was Monique who threw the game. She was
probably a lot less self-possessed than she let on. Acting was part
and parcel of the skin trade, I supposed, even if there were some
things you just couldn't fake.

"You don't have to show them anything!" she
said.

Uncle Vern let out a bull moose roar. "Mr.
Innocent Victim has a GPS in his pocket! I rest my case."

"Ha!" said Marvin, inordinately pleased,
since Todd having a GPS in his pocket didn't preclude another one
on his van.

Uncle Vern might be able to thwart his
curiosity (must be his age), but like hell I was going to let this
pass.

"Sweet Tooth works at the PFZ. That's where
she became chummy with Monique." I was unwilling to be more graphic
than that. "Todd comes into the bar, looking for a little humdrum
excitement, gropes his own sister—"

"Don't make it sound like I knew what I was
doing!" Todd moaned.

"So Barbara finds my twin, with Carl Ksnip
and Dog in attendance. They learn about the Brinks money which
turns out not to be Brinks money but that's beside the point. They
also find out that someone is twisting me in the wind, and it sure
looks like this someone—that's you two, Marvin and Uncle Vern—wants
me to find the money, only they're actually trying to trick me into
leading them here—so you join in with Dog and Carl to out-trick the
tricksters…" I was almost out of breath, but had just enough to
add, to Todd: "Who was that girl you called, when we went into the
house and found your dead buddies?" I turned dagger eyes on
Monique.

"And those two?" Uncle Vern touched Jeremy
and Michael with his beam of light.

"Michael probably really works for a
detective agency. The mystery is when did he find out he was a
McPherson."

"I've known all my life," Michael admitted
with smooth Jeremy-esque indifference. "My adoptive parents didn't
think it was any big deal for me to know. They didn't think
anything was much of a big deal, except beer and dip chips."

Sounded like he had been raised in a white
ghetto, which would account for his ability to mimic an Oregon Hill
bumpkin like his twin. The fact that the impersonation was
imperfect only added to his air of McPherson incompetence.

"So you knew about the Brinks job," Uncle
Vern said.

"Which didn't mean beans to me at the time,"
Michael told us. "But it got my parents' attention. They kept
telling me what a rotten man Skunk was and how much they admired
him. And they knew about some of the other robberies, too. They
must have kept in touch..." He looked at Mom.

"They would call me every so often to tell me
how you were doing," Mom said in a small voice.

"And you would fill them in on the
family business," Michael smiled crookedly. "But not about the
house on Ferncrest. I started out at the Radcliffe Agency as a
clerk, and if that's the beginning of a laugh I'll break your jaw.
At least I started
somewhere
."

As opposed to starting nowhere and stopping
off years later at the same stop. No, I was not about to laugh.

"Radcliffe was one of the several agencies
hired after the police flubbed the Brinks investigation. My
stepparents had told me about Skunk's involvement in the Greeter
Robbery, so I snooped through the files. And guess what I found? A
cross-reference between Skunk and Vernon Baldwin. One of the
earlier investigators thought there might be a link between the
Brinks job and the jewelry store robberies—which we were also
investigating. Lucky for me, he didn't go beyond that point. I
looked into Vern's financial transactions—"

"Perfectly illegally," Uncle Vern fumed.

"And found out he had co-signed on a house in
the West End for someone named Neerson. I drove by Ferncrest and
got a gander at Todd—snapped a picture and gave it to my
associate..."