at an investigators’ conference once. He had hooks for hands—his original hands had been blown off by a box of railroad torpedoes when he was a kid, and legend had it that he’d gotten a pistol built into one of the hooks—frightening hair, and a jacket that hurt my eyes. He’d been shot at by a .44, and he said that the joke about the Super Blackhawk, back in the fifties when it was first launched, was that it was a great gun for holding up trains. You just fired the gun at the train and it stopped. It’s a huge, heavy piece of blued metal, a six-shot revolver—not an I-need-a-gun-to-protect-my-property kind of gun. The long barrel, the great big bullets, and the sheer weight of the thing damping off the recoil makes the Super Blackhawk an extraordinarily accurate, one-shot-stopper of a gun. Even if that huge damn bullet somehow doesn’t kill you, the rocket force of the impact kicks you clean off your feet. These days, it’s mostly used as a hunter’s handgun. Though God knows what you’d hunt with it. Anything smaller than a rhino would probably splatter like God himself reached down from the clouds and punched it in the head.
This was a guy who wanted a nice big retro-style gun. A six-shooter, no less. With a shoulder holster, even, that still reeked of new leather and creaked when I pressed on it. I bet he put it on and posed with it in the mirror every now and then. Someone should have told him that Travis Bickle was from New York and Dirty Harry was from San Francisco and neither of them would have been caught dead in Los Angeles.
I replaced the sheet carefully.
The fridge was the size of a car. I found some fruit in the bottom bin, and piled bananas, clementines, apples, and passion fruit on a plate, grabbing a knife and a couple of spoons before walking it through to Trix.
Trix was in front of the widescreen TV, watching a local news report about a blind man who’d been arrested for raping his guide dog.
I laid the fruit next to her. “Sometimes I almost understand why that old bastard wants to use the book on America,” I smiled.
Trix picked up a clementine and started skinning it without looking away from the screen. “I don’t even get how he’s going to do it. Read it out on TV?”
“Apparently he can’t do that. You have to be in the actual presence of the book, to get the subsonic effect or something. They’ll take it from town to town, like the Freedom Train in the seventies. Big public gatherings. Putting the reset button to all you weirdos one crowd at a time.”
Trix flipped a segment of clementine into her mouth. “Will that work?”
“He seems to think so. I mean, unless this is all one big costly joke at my expense.”
“You have to admit that’s possible.”
“Yeah. No. I don’t think so. Not this time. He really believes it. And, you know, he might be crazy, but he’s not stupid.”
Trix chewed and considered. “I don’t think you should give him the book.”
“Why not?”
“Okay. Assume this isn’t totally nuts and this book can somehow affect people’s brains. Is it right that the government should be able to reset people’s personalities to some two-hundred-year-old notion of ‘morality’?”
I sliced off some apple. “Because people should be free to rape their own guide dogs any time they like?”
“Aside from the fact that there are many, many working bestiality relationships in America today—”
“You’re kidding me.”
“There was a TV documentary about it last year.”
“That’s not exactly anyone’s idea of a mainstream society, Trix.”
“Says who? It’s on national TV and it’s not mainstream? This is the mainstream. This is how life is.”
“You’re going to sit there and defend dogfucking as a lifestyle choice?”
“Why do I have to defend it? Why not just accept that such relationships exist and then ensure that abuse isn’t taking place?”
“Fucking a dog isn’t abusing a dog?”
“Why not find out first, before condemning it? Adult animals crossbreed all the time. When I was a kid, my rabbit and my guinea pig were shafting each other senseless every season. It’s not like we’re talking about pre-sexual beings.”
“Trix, you are seriously defending people who fuck animals here.”
“I’m saying there’s more going on in the modern psyche than can be defined by some Puritan notion of the way life should be. Hell, in the last couple of weeks I’ve done things to you that