Sea no evil, p.11
Sea No Evil, page 11
“No, I’m sorry. You can ask Poseidon. Maybe he worked here before we were married. I know he had a new roof put on a few years ago. And Sodomite & Son replaced the puer delicatus in the andronitis a couple of times. That’s it as far as I know.”
Turns out I didn’t have to wait to question the bleached-blond nitwit himself, since at that moment Poseidon came stomping into the kitchen hauling two giant crates propped up one to each massive shoulder.
“Hey, babe, I’m home.”
The god of the sea caught one look at me sitting at the table and his wife sitting all nervous-like across from me, and dropped the crates to the floor. Turns out they were old rotting wooden chests, and when they hit the marble floor they split open and spilled two giant piles of gold coins as well as necklaces, tiaras and gold and silver goblets all the way over to the Whirlpool fridge and the cellar stairs.
“What are you doing here?” Poseidon demanded.
“I’ll give you three guesses, I.Q., and the first two don’t have anything to do with buggering fish.”
“I hired him, honey,” Miss Ravelli interjected, jumping to her feet and grabbing onto and massaging one of her husband’s giant, tan forearms. “I tried to call you.”
“Phone cracked again,” Poseidon said with a grunt. He tossed on the table a cell phone that had snapped in the ocean’s great depths. “They work for shit under pressure.”
“Your phone and I are kindred spirits,” I suggested.
“Yeah, yeah, Banyon. I don’t like you or your smart mouth.”
“Merely an understandable natural instinct to recoil from that which accurately contrasts your inherent obtuseness,” I said, with a big, fat, disarming smile plastered across my kisser. “That’s me apologizing for any misunderstanding.”
The wife got it. Lucky for me, the moron didn’t.
“Yeah, all right,” Poseidon said, kicking through the coins and joining his wife at the kitchen table across from me. “So what can you do about the phone calls and mail?”
“Well, I’d actually like you to pack up the mail and get it to my office.”
She immediately got on the kitchen phone and made a call. The dame was efficient. She ordered the Water World undersea post office to bag up everything and send it to my office pronto. She was back at the table in less than a minute.
“The Postmaster Admiral will have it shipped out by whale mail within the hour,” she assured me. “I hope it will help, Mr. Banyon.”
“Hopefully hope isn’t all we’ve got to go on,” I told her. “There might be something in there we can find to track this guy down.”
I tapped the photo of Parka Man on the table. Poseidon tipped his head to take a look at the close-up picture.
“What does Makalooka have to do with this?” Poseidon asked.
He realized he’d said something important when his wife and I both shot him one of those over-the-top, cartoon-reaction glances.
“You know him, honey?” Miss Ravelli pressed.
“Well, yeah. Sure I do,” Poseidon said cautiously. “He hooked up the DirecTV dish on the roof two weeks ago. It was when you were at your sister’s those two days.”
She shook her head. “We haven’t been hooked up,” she insisted. “Wood’s Hole said it would take months to lower down the van.”
“What do you know about this guy?” I demanded.
Poseidon clearly didn’t like being in the hot seat. If it was just me pressuring him he’d have probably just whipped up a monsoon as a distraction and ducked out the pantry door. But the wife was giving him a look too, and I could see the god of the sea really had something good going with this dame.
“I don’t know,” Poseidon said. “He was just some island native, I guess. I’m not racist,” he added quickly. “It’s just I’ve swamped so many islands…allegedly. Most of those were done by Zeus and Vulcan. Tectonic plates and volcanoes.”
“Yeah, you gave me that whole song and dance yesterday,” I said. “Don’t sweat it. It’s almost impossible to lift a fingerprint from a tsunami.”
“Right,” Poseidon said. “Well, I still don’t know what to tell you. He had a grass skirt and a DirecTV jacket when he came to the door. I just let him in. I was in a hurry that day. You were gone, hon, and I had to fix my own breakfast. I burned the toast.”
“That’s fascinating,” I informed him. “Hold on, because if there was jelly involved I’m going to want to take copious notes.”
“Shut up, Banyon,” Poseidon said. “Anyway, I burned the toast because the toaster was set too high. You always set it too high,” he told the little woman. “Makalooka went upstairs. He said he could access the roof from the rampart outside our bedroom. I had that hurricane I’d been working on in the mid-Atlantic, so I was in a hurry and I left. I got halfway to the subtropical ridge when I realized I forgot my trident at home, and I had to turn the dolphins around and come all the way back. That’s the first time I noticed it was gone.”
“So was the satellite guy,” I pointed out.
“Don’t say it like that, Banyon,” Poseidon snarled. “He was just the cable guy. I didn’t figure anything was wrong. I figured he’d gone back to a ship on the surface to get a pair of pliers or something. I turned the place upside-down for days looking for my trident -- we both did -- and by the time we were sure it was gone I guess Makalooka just kind of slipped my mind. I mean, who remembers the cable guy?”
“Satellite,” I corrected. “And he wasn’t that either.”
“Whatever,” the god of the sea said. “I just wanted the Weather Channel. The antenna on the tower has been worthless ever since the switchover to digital.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Well, it could be worse. At least we still know next to nothing about the guy your brother hired to come in and swipe your trident, so your total knowledge vacuum didn’t actually suck what little we knew from our brains.”
“Wait, what? What about my brother?”
I gave him the short version of what I’d learned from my trip to Mount Olympus. I made sure I used the smallest possible words which I figured was still a long-shot, but had the greatest chance of sticking to the inferior frontal gyrus of his moron brain.
I knew he’d gotten it when he jumped to his feet, swirling storm clouds forming in the irises of his outraged eyes.
I figured from the muffled booms, the shaking appliance, and the water suddenly running out the front door that some bottles of Evian in the fridge had just exploded. The pipes in the cupboard under the sink groaned like a son of a bitch.
“Dear, the plumbing,” Miss Ravelli warned, eyeballing her growling Kohler.
But this time a little rub to the arm wasn’t enough to keep the god of the sea from going typhoon on somebody’s ass. Even without his trident, it was obvious that water anywhere in his immediate vicinity needed to sweat like bottles of Stolichnaya when they get a whiff of my thirsty liver.
“Zeus! No way! That is bulfinch! There is no way he’s moving down here!”
“He can’t,” I explained. “Not while you’re here.”
“Damn straight!” Poseidon hollered.
“Your brother’s getting desperate,” I said. “That’s why this bastard’s doing what he’s doing right now.” I tapped a finger to the picture of the phony DirecTV guy in the parka.
“What the hell does he have to do with all this?” Poseidon demanded.
“Mr. Banyon says he’s waiting for you near the health bar we were at yesterday,” his goddamn helpful wife stupidly interjected.
That was all the angry god needed. He charged for the door.
I made the mistake of trying to get out in front of him, and the next thing I knew I was getting a solid arm like a block of granite to the chest, and I was flying back across the kitchen. The door of the stainless steel Whirlpool fridge collapsed under my weight, the back of my head snapped back and I saw a flash of light.
The last image I saw was Poseidon charging like an enraged bull out the kitchen door, the wife crying and pleading with him and running out behind him.
Somehow through the growing cloudy haze I realized I was sitting in a puddle of water for the millionth time in the past twenty-four hours, but before I could utter so much as a single appropriate curse of complaint about my goddamn sopping wet ass, the lights winked out and the whole kitchen went dark.
CHAPTER 10
I was out like a light for I don’t know how long. When I came to I was seeing stars and I felt something hard whacking me repeatedly on top of the head.
When I’d dented the front of the fridge door, I’d started the ice machine. Cube after cube was smacking me on my skull. Judging by the skating rink the floor around me had become, I’d been out for a good five minutes. There was a ton of ice mixed in with the pile of gold coins Poseidon had dumped out on the floor.
I was hauling my bruised carcass off the wet tile when Miss Ravelli came running back into the room, red-eyed and frantic.
“He’s gone!” the dame wailed. “He got in his chariot and took off. I’m afraid he’s going to do something stupid, Mr. Banyon.”
“I would’ve figured you’d be used to that by now,” I said. “You know, your husband being a complete moron and all.”
I touched my elbow and winced. I thought I must have whacked it a third time, but I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that it hurt like hell, pretty much like every other square inch of me. I took one step, slipped on a cube of ice and fell right back to my ass.
“That’s it,” I said. “Take back the money. I quit.”
“Mr. Banyon, please,” she begged. “He’s going to try to get his trident back.”
I kept my rear end planted in the puddle on the floor, ice cubes hammering me in the noggin.
“That is unadvisable,” I said. “I pretty much figure that’s been Zeus’ plan all along. The other gods have been cooking this up for a hundred years. The Greek economy collapsing is just dumb coincidental timing that’s giving them cover. They were leaving Olympus anyway. Your husband is a hothead. Everybody knows it. They shoved that iceberg out in front of the Titanic and then blamed him for it. To supposedly keep peace with the Leprechaun Mob they fitted him with that ankle monitor that kept him off dry land. But he was never supposed to stay in the water for a whole century. They were sure he’d lose his cool and step on shore and boom. But the hothead shocked every bastard god on Olympus and actually managed to hold on all this time. The clock was ticking, time was running out. The monitor was coming off in a couple of weeks. So Zeus had to push the issue by getting somebody to steal your husband’s trident and start playing around with the seas. That’s all that asshole in the parka’s purpose in all this has been: to lure your husband onto shore. I don’t know his motivation in all this…maybe it’s personal or maybe he was just paid off. But he’s the one who planted the seahorse head in your bed, he’s been making the hang-up calls and sending the threatening notes to wire you people up real good. Of course, if he hadn’t gone all WWF and flattened me unconscious against this heavy appliance, I would have told your idiot husband all this.”
If I had any residual doubt of the dame’s intentions, I lost them then as I laid it out for her. Her face grew more horrified with each word, until she was so completely terrified for her husband that the tears dried up before the waterworks could even start full blast, and all I was left with hovering over me was a frantic woman whose only concern was for her dumb spouse’s stupid neck.
“Mr. Banyon, you can’t let him do this,” she insisted.
“And yet here I sit getting clocked on the head with ice cubes. Say, this is a lot of ice for one fridge, isn’t it? How much does one of these numbers set you back?”
She waded furiously through the ice and gold coins, grabbed me by the lapels of my trench coat and with a mighty wrench tried hauling me up off the floor. All she managed was to slide me across the water puddle and knock me sideways so that I whacked my elbow for the fourth time, this time on the marble tile floor.
“Knock it off, lady! All right already.”
I slipped and stumbled and somehow made it across the floor, which was pretty much like every late afternoon except the usual path to my loss of equilibrium was generally a hell of a lot more enjoyable. I scooped up my fedora from the table and the two of us made our way back outside the palace.
We took off at a sprint down the path to the wall that led to the lagoon and the dolphin parking lot.
I saw trouble the instant we ran through the archway.
There was a dame standing down at the far end of the pier. She held some hunk of triangular metal in her hand and was aiming it at the sheer wall of water that separated Poseidon’s kingdom from the deepest, nastiest depths of the sea.
“What the hell is she doing here?” I demanded as we ran.
“She’s just an itinerant muse,” Miss Ravelli explained. “She showed up at the door this morning offering to inspire me to write a better shopping list for the grocery store. I’m always forgetting the bananas when I get to Kroger’s. Hurry, Mr. Banyon.”
I hurried all right. I hurried up and pulled my piece from its holster.
“Hold it right there, sister!” I hollered.
The dame looked back with a start and shot me the same spiteful, strung-out look I’d seen once already that day. She was the same big-mouthed muse I’d seen screaming bloody murder at Mercury on the steps of Zeus’ temple back on Olympus.
She wheeled back to the wall of water and aimed the metal doohickey in her hand like she was Commissioner Gordon pointing the goddamn Bat-Signal.
The vertical face of water sat beyond the short stretch of river at the end of the small lagoon. It was like one of those undersea viewing areas they have at the aquarium, where grammar school kids get to flip-off whales swimming by the glass.
In this case there weren’t any whales in sight, probably because they’d been swallowed whole by any number of the colossal monsters that had been slowly circling Poseidon’s home, drooling into their own reeking wakes and looking for a doorway into the human buffet that was the city of Water World for the past few thousand years.
Unlike the aquarium, it wasn’t comforting thick glass separating us from the bulging eyes and hungry stomachs on the other side, but some kind of divine hoodoo.
Whatever Olympian technology Vulcan had built into the huge ring half-buried in the silt outside, it was not impervious to the device he’d hammered together and given to the babe in the bed sheets at the end of the dock. She aimed, the wall of water that was keeping the ocean from coming in started shimmering, and the next thing I knew something dark and fast was being vomited out the now-permeable sheer water face.
When you’re looking at a wall of water seven miles high, even Everest is going to look like a midget on his knees in comparison. With that monster wall as a backdrop, the real monsters that were suddenly rampaging across the grass beside the lagoon looked tiny. It was only as they closed in that I realized how big they really were.
The first had been followed by a second, then a third.
They were some kind of deep sea shark-headed man-monsters. Huge heads, massive dorsal fins, but with bodies built like Schwarzenegger in his prime. They’d had eyes at some point in their history, but the ocean’s depths had turned them milky white and covered them with a thin film like cobwebs. They apparently made up for a lack of eyes with nostrils that’d make a truffle hog jealous. The trio barely sniffed the air once before making a beeline directly for me, Miss Ravelli, and the idiot muse at the end of the dock who was so strung out she had no idea she was ringing a dinner gong.
I slammed on the brakes halfway down the dock, and Miss Ravelli plowed into me, then tried to shove her way past.
“Ignore them!” she shouted, as I held her back. “We have to help my husband!”
“I’m sure you must have a very good idea how us being lunch will help but, regrettably, I’m ashamed to admit I’m at a goddamn loss.”
A bunch of dolphins were still dolled up in harnesses and saddles in the lagoon, but the playful bastards weren’t as dumb as their idiot grins and crazy cackling suggested. When the shark-headed freaks flew down the grassy slope, through the thick cattails that rimmed the lagoon, and started splashing across the shallow water’s edge, the five brave dolphins immediately booked it for the other side of the pond, acking like a society dame who’d just had a mouse slipped down the back of her swanky evening gown.
I’m a pretty good shot, especially when I’m sober which, unfortunately, I was disgustingly so at that moment. I figured I’d take out the hunk of metal in the muse’s hands easy, then hightail it back for cover until we could figure out what to do about the couple of monsters who’d managed to sneak in the barn while the hayloft was open. Too bad my tactical brilliance hadn’t taken into account how fast the shark-heads might be.
Once they hit the water of the lagoon, they were like ICBMs. The trio zipped to the marble pier and the first one was up and running on stumpy legs before I’d manage to get a bead on the triangular piece of metal in the dame’s hands.
Their leader ran across the pier to the dock that stuck off the end, where at that moment the suddenly screaming and horrified muse was probably musing some amusing ode to mortality. Too bad for her she didn’t have a pen and paper to jot her thoughts down real quick before the racing shark tipped his head, snapped his massive jaws, and split her into two impressively equal halves.
The object in her hands flew up in the air in a wide arc. I just missed seeing it splash down in the middle of the lagoon because at that moment the next two shark-heads leaped up onto the pier five yards away from me and Miss Ravelli.
They had teeth like snapping bear traps. I could see the rotting flesh of whatever luckless bastard had been their last meal clinging to their razor sharp choppers. The veils of cobwebs over their eyes were like miniature shrouds, covering crystal balls in which swirled sightless white mist. They were ugly as a son of a bitch, with blue leather heads and flaring nostrils so big they could pick two-fisted all day and never shake hands with themselves. Their bodybuilder physiques were impressive, but they’d neglected the sunlamp. Their skin was paler than a Swedish stewardess’ ass.
