Page 71 of Hanging and Burning

“Find Twyla again. This time I’ll go with a pistol and a pair of brass knuckles.”

“Why not just drop the case?”

“I told you that I found her boyfriend dead, right?”

“You’ve seen dead men before.”

“Not like this.”

My daughter sat before me, across the low coffee table, deciphering my vocal tones, seeing clearly what I meant. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was a changing point in the trajectory of her professional life.

We sat there for a few minutes.

“You should still walk away, Daddy. I mean, the woman doesn’t wanna be found.”

“I tell you what,” I rejoined. “I’ll drop the case if…”

“If what?”

“If you call Grandma B and tell her that that’s what you want me to do.”

She had no answer to that request.

I lay back down on the sofa and fell into a quenched and sated sleep.

17.

I DIDN’T FULLY wake up until it was evening again.

Aja was gone. My breathing felt full and strong. Something about the past few days had shifted the way I was looking at things, which was good because there was nothing normal about the case that I’d taken on.

Directly after waking up, I called my friend the devil, Melquarth Frost, to thank him for sending Oliya and to ask for a favor I just knew he could grant.

The Ministry of the Divine Orgasm was walking distance from my office, literally. I knew, from talking to Melquarth, that they had meetings almost every day.

I dressed in an old-time maroon leisure suit with a yellow shirt and alligator shoes given to me by my father on my last birthday. After donning this appropriate attire, I took the twenty-three-block stroll. It was a big blue building, five stories, with few windows and an extra-wide front door that had an actual sentry standing guard.

“Hello,” I said, walking up to the copper-skinned man who wore all black except for a satin-finished elastic red armband.

“Private,” he replied.

“My name is Elephant Four Four Four.” This was a name that I’d been bequeathed within the last hour.

“So?”

“So, look it up on the iPad mini you got in your pocket.”

The man stood around five eight, was well built, but somehow was not intimidating. He gave me a look that he expected would be daunting.

“There’s four more like me behind this door, guy,” he said.

“Good. That means we won’t have any trouble. Now, look me up.”

Instead of doing as I asked, he gave some kind of coded knock on the door, and another man, who looked a lot like the first, came out. This sentinel carried a twenty-four-inch wooden baton clenched at each end by a straining fist. While the second man stared daggers at me, the first guard checked out his iPad mini.

“What name did you say?” he asked me while looking at the screen. The ghostly blue glare of the memory device highlighted his face in the darkening evening.

“Elephant Four Four Four.”