A Visit From the Goon Squad Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t—”
    “Just one?”
    Bennie sighed. “One.”
    The boy carefully removed a gold flake and placed it on his tongue. “What does it taste like?” Bennie couldn’t help asking. He’d only consumed the gold in his coffee, where it had no discernible flavor.
    “Like metal,” Chris said. “It’s awesome. Can I have another one?”
    Bennie started the car. Was there something obviously sham about the medicine story? Clearly the kid wasn’t buying it. “One more,” he said. “And that’s it.”
    His son took a fat pinch of gold flakes and put them on his tongue. Bennie tried not to think of the money. The truth was, he’d spent eight thousand dollars on gold in the past two months. A coke habit would have cost him less.
    Chris sucked on the gold and closed his eyes. “Dad,” he said. “It’s, like, waking me up from the inside.”
    “Interesting,” Bennie mused. “That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do.”
    “Is it working?”
    “Sounds like it is.”
    “But on you,” Chris said.
    Bennie was fairly certain his son had asked him more questions in the past ten minutes than in the prior year and a half since he and Stephanie had split. Could this be a side effect of the gold: curiosity?
    “I’ve still got the headaches,” he said.
    He was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions (“doing whatever” involved a lot of aimless driving), every one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer than ever to Bennie that he hadn’t had a chance of lasting in this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when freshly showered and shaved. Stephanie, meanwhile, had ascended to the club’s number one doubles team.
    “Chris,” Bennie said. “There’s a musical group I need to visit—a pair of young sisters. Well, youngish sisters. I was planning to go later on, but if you’re interested, we could—”
    “Sure.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    Did “sure” and “yeah” mean that Chris was giving in to please Bennie, as Dr. Beet had noted he often did? Or had the gold-incited curiosity extended to a new interest in Bennie’s work? Chris had grown up around rock groups, of course, but he was part of the postpiracy generation, for whom things like “copyright” and “creative ownership” didn’t exist. Bennie didn’t blame Chris, of course; the dismantlers who had murdered the music business were a generation beyond his son, adults now. Still, he’d heeded Dr. Beet’s advice to stop hectoring (Beet’s word) Chris about the industry’s decline and focus instead on enjoying music they both liked—Pearl Jam, for example, which Bennie blasted all the way to Mount Vernon.
    The Stop/Go sisters still lived with their parents in a sprawling, run-down house under bushy suburban trees. Bennie had been here two or three years ago when he’d first discovered them, before he’d entrusted the sisters to the first in a series of executives who had failed to accomplish a blessed thing. As he and Chris left the car, the memory of his last visit provoked a convulsion of anger in Bennie that made heat roll up toward his head—why the fuck hadn’t anything happened in all this time?
    He found Sasha waiting at the door; she’d caught the train at Grand Central after Bennie called and had somehow beaten him here.
    “Hiya Crisco,” Sasha said, mussing his son’s hair. She had known Chris all his life; she’d run out to Duane Reade to buy him pacifiers and diapers. Bennie glanced at her breasts; nothing. Or nothing sexual—he did feel a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff.
    There was a pause. Yellow light scissored through the leaves. Bennie lifted his gaze from Sasha’s breasts to her face. She had high cheekbones and narrow green eyes, wavy hair that ranged from reddish to purplish, depending on the month. Today it was