Crooked Little Vein Read Online Free PDF

here?”
    “I’ll tell you if you tell me more about this place.”
    “Deal. You look a bit pale, and I don’t think you want to see the clean-up session.”
    The door guy entered the room, carrying cages of thirsty-looking monitor lizards, long tongues flicking.
    I ran so fast there was a vapor trail.

Chapter 5

    O utside , I scrabbled for my cigarettes, still vaguely angry at the world. The tattooed girl stole one off me and lit up with a plastic lighter in the shape of a baby alien. We leaned back against the nearest wall and exhaled up into the night air, little prayers that our passive smoke would kill someone we didn’t like.
    “I’m Mike.”
    “Trix.”
    “Hello, Trix.”
    “What were you doing there, Mike? There’s no way you’re MHP.”
    “I’m a private investigator. This place was an old lead I wanted to follow up on. But the usual happened.”
    “What’s the usual?”
    “Doesn’t matter. You stood out in there, too, you know.”
    “Yeah, I guess. I’m writing a thesis.”
    “On what?”
    “Extremes of self-inflicted human experience. It’s not everyone who subjects themselves to Godzilla bukkake, after all.”
    She had a dirty laugh. Green eyes studied me from picture frames of intricate eyeliner and shadow. I was abstractly aware of wanting her to like me.
    “Got anything about tantric ostrich date-rape in your thesis?”
    Her eyes sparkled in the dark.
    “Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee. You can tell me about the Godzilla fetishists and I’ll tell you the story.”
    “Buy me vodka and you’ve got a deal.”
    We took a cab to the Shark Bar, a block down from CBGB, where they skinned anyone who complained about cigarette smoke. The barman wore the scalp of a Straight Edge punk boy from San Jose as a hat. It was going yellow and crunchy around the edges despite frequent applications of handcream, but the lovingly tended brush of peroxide mohawk was as thick and lustrous as the fur of a pedigree cat.
    Trix was twenty-three, lived in the Village, and had three girlfriends and two boyfriends. She was therefore the one who had my missing share of sex, as well as apparently four other people’s. She was a little defensive about that, possibly because she was talking to a straight guy with short hair in a suit with a sign floating about his head blaring NO GIRLFRIEND . “Polyamory doesn’t mean I’m a slut. It just means I have a lot of love to give and I want a lot of people in my life.”
    She had problems with men. “Most guys are wired for one-way monogamy. You only sleep with them, but they jump someone else any time a chance to stay in practice raises its head. Plus, I’m very multiple.”
    “As in…?”
    “Multiple orgasms. I get off fast and often. Which means any guy fucking me feels like James Bond. Which means that they don’t want anyone else to feel like James Bond.”
    “Or-gas-em. I’ve heard of those. Is that with other people?”
    She laughed, which I liked. “So tell me what ‘the usual’ is.”
    I groaned, checked my glass. Groaned again.
    “Vodka later. Talk first. Dish, secret-agent man.”
    “The usual is that…well, I met someone the other day who put it well. I’m a shit magnet.”
    She arched a drawn eyebrow.
    “There are eight bars around this block. I naturally find the one where the barman accessorizes with human headskin. I follow up one lead on this case and I find fifty people furiously masturbating over recut Japanese monster movies.” I told her the ostrich story, which had her rolled up with laughter.
    “This is just lousy luck, though. It can’t happen to you all the time.”
    “That’s the thing. It does. Every case I’ve had since I opened up business on my own. Never happened when I worked a desk. It’s something to do with my direct interaction with the world. I’m a shit magnet. I’m everything that never happened to anyone else.
    “Here’s one. I was hired on a missing-persons gig. A sixty-five-year-old terminally ill man