or used it as secret leverage…”
“Hold on.” I quickly lit myself a cigarette. “You’re a bit ahead of me. Mentioning him running for office, that put up the red flag, because it’s the first political connection to the book I’ve had so far. But you think it could actually leverage someone into office?”
“Don’t know. I mean, if your guy honestly believes it’s full of…what? Precepts by which America can be healed? If your guy believes it, maybe someone else is crazy enough to. A book that can save America, signed by all the Founders…”
“…hell. That’s interesting. That’s really interesting. We need to get on a plane.”
“Hell, yeah,” she said.
Chapter 20
At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.
“My asshole boyfriend’s in San Antone,” she slurred, pressing the plastic handle, sticky with beery sweat, into my hand. “Take over the plane, drop it on the fucking Alamo.”
Trix and I dropped the things into the nearest wastebasket. I looked back to see a team of cops lay into her with batons. “I’m white, you bastards!” she yelled, until one of them shot her with a Taser. The cops gathered around and silently watched her flop around on the floor like a fish out of water.
“Just another day out at the zoo,” Trix whispered. “Keep walking, Mike.”
Chapter 21
Bob Ajax was waiting for us in the arrivals lounge at the San Antonio airport. Huge and fifty, with a grin like he’d just cheated God out of his savings.
“Mike Mc fucking Gill,” he bellowed. “Man, you’ve lost weight. New York City must be killing you.”
“Look at your goddamn stomach, man. You eat your last wife or something?”
“Bastard. And I see you’re hanging out with a better class of person these days.”
Trix read him in a second and gave him a sexy crooked smile. “Trix Holmes. Mike’s assistant.”
“Hell. I could use an assistant like you.”
“You couldn’t afford me, Bob.”
Bob laughed out loud. He’d always liked women who’d talk back to him just a little bit. “Girls with balls” were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. He’d heard of a place in Iceland where troublesome women were in fact drowned in a freezing bottomless well. Bob had once gotten inhumanly drunk and attempted to dig such a well outside the office in Chicago, using a stolen pneumatic drill and, in the final moments of his excavation, the head of a passing police officer. I helped him keep his job in the aftermath, and we’d been solid friends ever since.
Bob was still driving the same car: an immense, battered old Lincoln Continental that was held together by spit and a prayer. He slung our bags in a trunk already half-full with, in Bob’s words, “tools of the trade,” and then wrestled himself behind the wheel.
“One of those things looked like a harpoon, Bob. You do much whaling in San Antonio?”
“It’s a Persuader. Punches out door locks. Tool of the trade. You see the big black tube next to it?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the harpoon gun. Not loaded. Need to buy more ’poons. Because, y’know, I’m not as young as I was, and some of these bastards can run fast.”
“You harpoon people?”
“A bit.”
The Lincoln coughed and rolled out of the airport parking lot. It was warm, and the air conditioning smelled like something small and furry was trapped inside it, so I settled for rolling down the window.
“Yeah, sorry,” Bob said, reading my face in the rearview mirror. “There’s a rat stuck in here someplace. Little fuck is waiting for me to show weakness. He don’t know Bob Ajax.”
“Rats do that. How long to the hotel?”
“Forty minutes. So tell me about this job.”
“Short version? Mad old rich guy in D.C. lost an antique book, hired me to recover it. The paper trail led us down here. The Roanoke family.”
“Well,” Bob said, “I didn’t want to talk about it too much on an open line. But this might be the end of the road for you.”
Trix leapt on that. “Open line?”
“Damn right,” Bob shrugged. “You don’t screw around where the Roanokes are concerned. The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharaohs and crazier’n a snake-fucking baby.”
Trix shot me a look. I didn’t react. I knew Bob. And sure enough, his eyes were flicking to the rearview mirror, watching us. His shoulders