Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick Page 8

  Zoey said, “And I suppose his death isn’t going to turn out to be something straightforward, like a jealous lover? The guy had issues with women.”

  “Someone who ate his guts afterward?” said Andre. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that jealous before.”

  “I have,” said Zoey. “Could it be organ thieves? Aren’t there stories of people waking up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney?”

  Will shook his head. “Urban legend. There’s no record of that ever happening for real, anywhere in America.”

  Budd said, “Just no market for it. As you can imagine, petty criminals are actually not the best at performing invasive surgery and dying patients aren’t big on getting mysterious, possibly infected black-market organs screwed into their bodies. There are better ways to get them.”

  Will said, “And to that end, we talked to the organ dealers in the city. Nobody showed up with a garbage bag full of Tilley’s guts looking to make a sale.”

  Zoey said, “Okay, then what’s he been up to the last four weeks that would lead to this ending? We were keeping tabs on him, right?”

  “Well,” said Budd, shifting in his seat, “Rico had instructions to tell us if he didn’t show up on the job site, or otherwise acted squirrelly. Said he showed up every day, seemed to like knockin’ holes in walls well enough. There was one night where he showed up drunk at Shae LaVergne’s momma’s apartment, but was turned away without incident.”

  “What? He did?”

  “Shae was in no danger, she wasn’t there at the time; she was on a camping and hiking vacation in Moab. Otherwise, if Tilley made new enemies or got into mischief, there’s no record of it.”

  Echo thought for a moment. “But if we’re going with the revenge angle here, don’t you start with Shae?”

  Zoey said, “It’s hard for me to imagine this dainty elven pixie girl hacking the guts out of a man.”

  Andre said, “Actually, I’ve dated some—”

  “Stop,” said Zoey, “we’ve already made that joke too many times.”

  “For all we know,” said Will, “her dad is a psychopath. Or she’s got a brother who’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-Navy SEAL…”

  “She doesn’t,” said Budd. “But that don’t mean she couldn’t have hired it out. Maybe her vacation wasn’t as relaxing as she’d hoped. Maybe a few weeks of PTSD and nightmares convinced her she wasn’t okay with the creep getting a new life out of the deal. Maybe she was making a point, with what was done to the corpse. Saying he’s gutless? Somethin’ like that?”

  Will nodded, just a bit. “That’s the least crazy, as our current theories go. Who do we know who’d take a job like that, including being willing to go the extra mile with the organs?”

  Budd said, “Ripper Genero, Stevey Bunson, Hack Pederson, Mike Cordry, Andy Smith, Donny Smith, Butch McCall, Holly Hollister, Doc Menace, The Red Nightfall…” Budd continued saying names for two minutes, then finished with, “plus a veritable stampede of cash-hungry newcomers.”

  Zoey said, “I think I see why the cops all quit.”

  Will started to say something, then got an incoming message alert on his phone.

  He studied it, then said, “Well, Megaboss Alonzo’s gang just put up a video in which they chopped up and ate a human heart.”

  Zoey said, “Wait, did you say—”

  “Yes, they ate a heart. On camera. Just now. Said it was Tilley’s.”

  Zoey threw up her hands.

  “Well, great. Go have them arrested, or whatever. Hot damn, we got this done in less time than it takes to make toast. I’m going back to bed.”

  Will said, “There are several problems with that, the main one being that eating a human heart is not a crime.”

  “It’s not?”

  Budd said, “No federal law against it, only state that outlaws it is Idaho.”

  “Why do you know that? Actually, don’t tell me. So, fine, call up the crazy people who put up the bounty and tell them.”

  “Tell them what?” asked Will. “For all we know, Alonzo’s people bought the heart from the killer. Or it’s somebody else’s. We need to go talk to him.”

  “Sure, let me know what he says.”

  Budd spoke up. “Actually”—he glanced quickly at Will—“you’ll get better information if Zoey tags along.”

  Zoey didn’t like his expression. “Why?”

  Will, clearly covering some kind of lie, said, “You’re the queen, like you said. Alonzo may feel insulted if you don’t come yourself.”

  Andre asked, “You want me there?”

  Will waved him away. “No, he’d see through that.”

  Zoey felt like she was clearly missing a bunch of context.

  “Alonzo has sex workers,” said Will, “maybe Tilley got weird with one of them, maybe even killed one of them.”

  Zoey went cold. The implication there was clear: if that was true, that woman’s death was on her for letting Tilley go free.

  “Or,” said Andre, “he bumped into Alonzo on the sidewalk and scuffed his shoe. If so, he won’t be shy about saying it.”

  Zoey said, “All right. Let’s go talk to the flesh-eaters. Do we need to make an appointment?”

  Budd stood. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Anything else? I have to go figure out what to wear to a cannibal meet.”

  Will studied her for a moment with an expression she liked even less than Budd’s look earlier. “You remember when they made you leave the refugee benefit banquet, because they said your dress was inappropriate?”

  “Do I remember the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me? Yes.”

  “Do you still have that dress?”

  “What? Why? I don’t know.”

  From his spot by the door, Wu said, “The larger issue is making it to the meeting at all. We do have a bounty out there.”

  The million dollars had been offered on the “Skin Wall,” a public board on which such contracts could be posted for any suitably awful person to claim.

  “The bounty isn’t for my death, it’s for evidence of my guilt. Wait, it just occurred to me that this bounty is actually less than the last time somebody put a bounty on me. How am I going backward here?”

  “And what do you think will be the easiest way for them to obtain said evidence of your guilt?” asked Wu.

  “Oh. To grab me and beat a confession out of me.”

  About four different people in the room simultaneously said, “It’s what I would do.”

  9

  Zoey had decided that if/when the peasants finally rose up to overthrow the rich, she’d just put on some of her old clothes and quietly go join them. It’d only taken a few months of extreme wealth to realize that if everyone back home actually knew how these people lived, they’d have burned the system down long ago. First, there’s the fact that at this level, debt is usually a good thing—it makes you richer. Zoey was getting loans on hilariously friendly terms and was pretty sure that if she failed to pay, the bank would apologize. She could borrow at a low rate, invest that same money in something with a much higher return, then just pay off the loan and keep the difference. If the investment fell through, it wasn’t Zoey who would take the hit—Will said it was always done through an “LLC,” an organization created out of thin air purely to absorb all the risk, kind of a financial bodyguard. Zoey had said it sounded like a free money hack in a video game, though Will insisted it wasn’t that simple.

  Then there’s the fact that when you’re rich, people just give you things. When Zoey was spotted at a concert drinking a bottle of some Ukrainian beer that a dude had just handed to her, the manufacturer sent her ten cases of it. She got gift baskets of makeup, phones, shoes, and bras that somehow fit perfectly (that last one kind of made her skin crawl when she stopped to think about it). Restaurants comped meals, she got offered free tickets to events. When she’d mentioned hiring a personal trainer, all of them offered to do it for nothing in exchange for weekly Blink u
pdates from her saying what great results she was getting (she refused; she didn’t need the whole world to know that she was always lucky to make it to the third session). She had a walk-in closet in one of the spare bedrooms that was literally nothing but band T-shirts. She had jewelry that looked so expensive that she was afraid to even touch it, let alone wear it out of the house. She had outfits for ritzy clubs and red carpets and other situations she intended to spend the rest of her life avoiding. She had two hundred pairs of skull-themed underwear in an unopened box somewhere.

  She was not, however, going to dress to make this man-eating crime lord swoon. He wasn’t getting the red dress that she’d decided to wear to that benefit banquet while in a particular mood. He was getting jeans and an ordinary black button-up shirt that could be worn with or without another top to make the cleavage more dignified, and today she was covering up to the collarbone. She would wear sneakers, shoes she could run away in. Not cute shoes. Action shoes.

  Zoey passed Will on the way downstairs and he looked mildly disappointed but knew not to say anything. Zoey was pleased that he knew.

  “Your mother’s here.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “But we do need to go, soon.”

  “Yep, don’t want to keep a psychopath waiting. Makes a bad impression.”

  Zoey had summoned her mother after the morning’s meeting, as it occurred to her that she, too, was a potential target with this bounty out there, since they could easily snatch Zoey’s mother in exchange for a confession. It’s understandable if at this point one got the impression that about once a day Zoey flew into a panic believing that her mother was in some kind of mortal jeopardy. In reality it was only slightly less frequent than that.

  Melinda Ashe was thirty-nine years old and would probably claim to be thirty-nine for several more years. She believed in the goodness of men, had arranged her life so that she’d had one male or another taking care of her since puberty. She’d been through three marriages that ended horribly but would never say a bad word about an ex. Zoey watched her mother excuse away bruises and black eyes, saw her lie to the cops about pulled knives and threats. When Melinda looked at these tattooed, sweaty men, she saw only the scared little boys inside.

  It was last December when Zoey’s mother had in fact walked into an abduction situation, shortly after Zoey came into her money. After having nightmares about her mother in a shallow grave every single night for weeks, Zoey had moved her to Tabula Ra$a, thinking that having her nearby would put Zoey at ease. That, Zoey now knew, had been stupid. What was she imagining, her mother living at the estate under the watchful eye of armed guards twenty-four hours a day? That she would sleep alone? That she would, in other words, live Zoey’s lifestyle? No, Melinda Ashe would shrivel up and blow away without a flock of giggling friends to breathe life into her. And so she had insisted on her own apartment, on getting her own job (as a sex therapist—she could charge five times what she did in Colorado), and within a month, had made more close friends than Zoey had made in her entire life. Her mother seemed to know the names of all of the bartenders at every drinking establishment in the city. She’d had her first shady boyfriend before she’d even finished unpacking. This was how it would always be, Zoey knew: if someone ever wanted to get to Zoey, her mother would be there for the taking.

  She made it downstairs and heard her mother’s laughter from down the hall. Zoey turned to her right and followed the sound through the dining room and into the vast kitchen. Sitting at the bar was a woman who could pass for Zoey’s sister if she didn’t seem too pretty to be from the same bloodline, next to a weirdly tan middle-aged guy with neat white hair. Zoey had never seen this guy before. If he was a boyfriend, at any moment she would get the “I have a great investment idea!” conversation. So far, Zoey had paid for a food truck, a tattoo shop, and a rap video.

  “Heeeey, Z!” said her mother. “Carlton made us brunch, though we told him not to bother.”

  They were picking at a tray of halloumi fries, sticks of hard cheese that were deep-fried, then served under ropes of white yogurt sauce and sprinkled with bright red pomegranate seeds. Carlton’s cooking skills had been developed under Arthur, who’d required him to cook a cuisine Zoey thought of as “upscale county fair.”

  Before Zoey could speak, her mother said, “Your lashes look amazing today. God, you are just so beautiful. I wish I had your curves. I want you to meet Clarity.”

  Zoey decided right then that she was making a resolution: if somebody gave her a one-word name, or a name that was clearly a phrase or a slogan, she was not going to ask them to elaborate. That was, after all, what they wanted.

  “Good to meet you, Clarity.”

  Clarity looked like he might possibly be nuts, but he didn’t look like a scumbag or ex-con. Of course, you couldn’t always tell an abuser from a glance. But here was the thing: in many cases, you totally could.

  “You have a lovely home,” he offered through a blinding white grin.

  “Thank you. It was built with crime money.” To her mother, Zoey said, “Don’t freak out, but something happened last night.”

  “Oh, my god. What?”

  “Somebody tried to…” She tried to think of a word for what had occurred. “… mail something to me. But we’re okay.”

  “Oh, honey. Did you call the police?”

  “Sure. It’s, uh, all taken care of. But there might be more of them. Bad guys, I mean.”

  “Ugh, Z, this city, I tell you. Did you hear what happened last night at Zero Hour? Me and Maddie were at the bar, just minding our own business, and this guy just slams into me. They were fighting, the bar jammed me in the ribs. I have this huge bruise. Look—”

  “Mom, I want you to stay here, for a bit. At the house. And to not go out without security. Just for a while.”

  “Well, if they come with me to class, they have to stay outside. I can’t have scary guys looming over the—”

  “You may have to skip the classes.”

  “I can’t, I’m teaching.”

  “If they fire you, we will buy the clinic and put you in charge of the whole thing. A whole chain.”

  “Here, have some cheese, I’m full.”

  “No, thank you—”

  “Drink? Coffee? Anything? I never get to do anything for you!”

  “No, I just need to not be nervous, I’ve got a big meeting this morning with … I’m not sure what he is.”

  “Oh! I’ve got something for that, too. This is perfect. Clarity and I are selling these mood-enhancing skin creams, it’s an amazing program and the product, oh my god. Here…”

  Ah, there it was. Her mother pulled out a white tube the size of a fat cigar, animated flowers dancing on the label. She pulled off a cap and there was a spiral pattern of tiny slits in the end. When she twisted it, the cream squirted out of those slits in thin white layers, then a dotted yellow ball emerged, forming a perfect miniature daisy made of skin cream. Her mother swiped it off with her fingers and spread it between her palms.

  “Give me your hands.”

  Zoey would have worried about applying a mood-enhancing anything to any part of her body if she for one second thought the stuff actually worked. She let her mother spread it on her palm and fingers. She felt a mild tingle, something they’d added to enhance the placebo effect.

  “Great, right?”

  “Yeah. So, I’ve got to run—”

  “All we need you to do, if you can, is just use this on camera at some point. And say the name of the cream. The brand is Mood Food, there are twelve moods, this one is Amazey Daisy. It builds confidence!”

  “Do I … have to say the whole thing?”

  “No! You don’t have to do it at all. But if you can that would be huge, I get a free set and fifty credits for a mention. And if you can say the whole thing, yeah, that’d be amazing.”

  Clarity said, “Also if you mention the effects, you need to point out that the health benefits haven’t been verified by the FDA.”


  Zoey looked over the tube. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but how many tubes of this did they make you buy, as your starter stock?”

  Her mother said, “Five hundred.”

  Clarity sensed the conversation was taking a wrong turn. “That’s at only half of the sell price! Just moving this initial stock and she can clear twenty thousand dollars, easily. And for every sales associate she recruits—”

  Echo walked into the kitchen and Zoey said, “Oh, thank god.”

  Zoey’s mother took one look at Echo, then her eyes went wide and she said, “Oh my god, you look a-may-zeen! Look at your hair!”

  “Will says it’s time to go.”

  Zoey’s mother sighed. “It always is.”

  Zoey took the chance to escape and as they entered the hall, Echo said, “Ha, I told him you wouldn’t wear the dress.”

  10

  It was decided that the envoy to meet Megaboss Alonzo and his gang of murderous cannibals was to consist of Will, Zoey, and Wu. Budd was going to go to Fort Fortuna to talk to the staff there, and Echo and Andre were going to try to track down any friends or family of Dexter Tilley, to try and figure out how he’d wound up losing both his life and all of his most important organs while he was supposed to be learning how to recover copper plumbing from defunct buildings. They were covering all of the bases in case the Alonzo thing was a dead end, since most things in life are.

  Zoey owned multiple vehicles with various arrays of countermeasures (the leopard-print convertible, for instance, could launch a drone from its trunk that could do serious damage to up to a dozen bad guys), but obviously the first choice was to avoid detection/confrontation altogether. In a city with more cameras than people, this was not easy. In fact, Wu said that there were four drones with eyes on their driveway, either owned by bounty hunters or street streamers hoping to catch the ambush by said bounty hunters.

  The three of them left the house in the convertible (by far the most recognizable of her vehicles) and pulled into a car wash that Zoey frequently used and also owned, one built with a Roman bathhouse theme in which scantily-clad animatronic slave girls would come out and scrub down your vehicle. A nondescript van had entered said car wash one minute ahead of them, and while both vehicles were progressing through the wash, the water and scrubbing girls abruptly stopped and allowed the three of them to exit the convertible and enter the van in front. They would continue on their way in the van and the convertible would then lead the spy drones through a series of leisurely stops around the city, the tinted windows hiding the fact that there was no one inside.