Project Purple

50 - The Detective

He was in some shit hole called Leh. How he got there, Rigor wasn't sure. Was it the altitude sickness? He had slept in the mini-van a good deal of the way, on broken roads that seemed like long-disregarded passages; more like hiking trails, vulnerable to landslides from the looming mountain-side at any time.

Discretion seemed the name of the game in the Himalayas.

They were talking about taking him into China by bus. Now, Rigor had a lot of time to wander the streets of this little piss-poor town. Time to think, time to write. He knew they were watching him, though he hadn't seen his guide-the boy with the smooth skin and the smile all day.

He was up at a Stupa called Shanti, and it gave a good view of the bowl that this place was in, ringed by the highest mountains in the world. The place had an ancient, Tibetan Buddhist feel to it. Actually, the whole town seemed to be crumbling into dust.

It all still felt like a dream, like he was being gently tugged along by some invisible leash. But he still had a long way to go.

Wherever he was headed, it was North.

He walked the streets a lot at night, swept along under a dimple of an alabaster moon. He bought meals with his remaining cash from the vendors on the street, despite the signs warning that tourists got really cheated when they did this. He walked under the cackling neon, and went into the pubs and restaurants, coffee shops, even clothing stores, that never seemed to close.

Then he found his next station-He didn't need a guide: The bar, in bleeding neon, was called 'Angels'. It was small and rectangular, with the bar on one side and a half-dozen booths on the other. A television showed a cricket match. The bartender smiled at Rigor when he entered, but his smile was crooked, just like his soul-This place was not good; Rigor sensed the evil.

"You drink?"

He sat at the bar and had two India Pale Ales. They went down real smooth in the humid evening.

"American?" the bartender asked, fiddling with the remote.

Rigor nodded. Suddenly, he was watching airplanes flying into the World Trade Center.

"9-11?"

These were different pictures, different angles, new video he'd never seen on TV before.

"Mossad?"

Rigor shruggd. He didn't know if the Zionists had done it; he wasn't sure who had done it anymore.

The bartender nodded, "Your team. They do it."

"My team?" Did the guy mean, like, the CIA, Dick Cheney's wolf pack, the Rothschilds, all the YouTube video crap? The conspiracy theories were getting worse than the Kennedy killings. But Rigor was beyond all that now.

He watched a cricket match on the TV with the bartender, about to ask him to explain the rules of cricket, so he could appreciate a little better what he was watching. But then the match broke off, and Rigor knew he'd found the right place...

His Goatwench ... But her eyes were different; they held a severe kind of willpower he'd never seen before. She looked like some steely new authority. But how could that be? He was looking at a different woman, that was or sure-one who had burst out of some hemming cocoon.

"Now she's really in it," Rigor said.

But the bartender had slipped out. He was quite alone, watching this clip.