Read Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) for Free Online

we're right back to your $25,000. Prescott may just have handed over the collective cash."
    It cohered. It felt right. I could roll with it. "Yeah, I can buy it, Bud. But they didn't get the head, near as we can tell."
    "Naw," my interviewer said. "Something happened between the time Emil handed it over to his confederate and the confederate was to get it to Senator Bush. That's the mystery that remains to be solved."
    "So tell me more about this Skull and Bones bunch. What's the capsule history there?"
    Bud fished around the bag and pulled out a short dog. He steered with his knees and used the seat belt handle to pry off the lid. Fiske drained half that sucker at a pull. "Serious kink, Mr. Lassiter," he said, dragging a sleeve across his mouth. "They track back to 1832. They've got their own building on High Street --- looks like a big-assed crypt. No fucking windows. They call it 'The Tomb.' The initiates pass around the same nicknames from class to class. Some of those names are pretty demonic sounding. Prescott's son, George, a WWII hero, was a member. His nickname was 'Poppy' --- admittedly not so Satanic sounding. President Taft was a member ... Henry Luce, too. It's rumored the S&Bs are tied to the CIA and something called the 'Trilateral Commission'; the NWO and the Illuminati.
    "They are initiated by two older members, one dressed as Don Quixote, the other dressed as the Devil. They bind their members to the order and secure their secrecy by making them strip down and lay in a coffin," Bud said, pressing ahead in the face of my palpable skepticism. "The suckers then have to jack off to orgasm, describing in detail their sexual experiences while the other members stand there, looking on."
    Jesus pleading, bleeding Christ on a crutch . "Well, if true, that'd breed some flavor of silence, I reckon," I said. Suddenly, I was fiercely proud to have never finished high school. I said, "They sound too much like the goddamned Freemasons."
    "They're purportedly linked," Bud said. "And some think the sexual confessions have more to do with eugenics than shaming the subjects. You know --- useful for tracking bloodlines."
    We were finally drifting into Navajo territory now. Mesas and buttes; cholla, burro weed strangler, fanwood, cottonwood, ironwood and smoke thorn; jackrabbits, Gila monsters, rattlesnakes and loggerhead shrikes. It was merciless, it was vast and it was unthinkingly beautiful.
    "Coming up on a crossroads. Where precisely are we headed, Hector? I mean, beyond, 'Keep heading west, Bud.' We still trying to keep this meeting of yours with Orson Welles?"
    "We're still Cali-bound, Bud. Emil the head thief is still on the right side of the dirt --- lives out in L.A. somewhere, according to Wade's notebook. And I've got that film stuff to attend to, which makes all of this a business expense and thus deliciously deductible. I owe Orson a face-to-face 'no' on a project. See no reason we can't double up on errands...settle things with Welles and maybe look up Emil."
    Destination: Venice, California.
    9
    Eight hundred goddamned miles, give or take, from El Paso to the dubiously named City of Angels.
    In between: motels --- not ho- tels, but mo -tels; small towns; county seats; old Victory gardens grown thick with weeds. White picket fences sandblasted gray by wind-driven red dust. Railroad depots. Greasy spoons and all-nite diners. Good coffee, bad coffee ... catastrophic coffee. But we drank it all, just the same, to stay awake for the long cross-country haul.
    Doughnuts; pep pills they sell to truckers at cash registers; sugar and more of that coffee, good, bad or indifferent.
    I'm really not what you could describe as a man given to nostalgia, but it seems more and more to me that the older things are, the better they were built. The ones who came before fashioned things to last. But in this age of laminated furniture and Naugehyde upholstery ... well, it all just seems to be winding down.
    Someday , I thought, staring