Screwed (12 page)

But Mike is also running his own game. Instead of sending some clumsy stumblebum he sends ex-military Daniel McEvoy in the hope that I will be forced to kill both of these guys just to stay alive.

I gotta admit it, he suckered me with that fifty percent outta the hole bullshit.

“You got it wrong, kid,” I say, normal cadence, hoping he’ll take notice. “I’m not one of the birds. I’m the stone.”

This is a really good line and I can just imagine the movie trailer guy doing it in a promo, but it doesn’t impress Shea much.

“You’re speaking fast now? What, you’re a smart guy all of a sudden?”

“Okay, everyone. The important thing now is that we all stay calm. I’m gonna lay out what I think is going on, and everybody just keep it in your pants till I’m finished.”

“You’re gonna lay it out?” says Freckles. “Who the fuck are you? Shaft?”

Second time today. One more and I gotta consider that I might be a little Shafty.

“What are you talking about?” says Shea. He ain’t worried but at least he’s listening.

“Shea. Focus on me now. Forget everybody else. This situation is about to escalate.”

“Yeah, escalate into you being dead.”

“I like the way you took my verb and used it again. That’s good stuff but listen now. I think you’re being played here.”

Food jets outta Shea’s throat as he guffaws. “Played? Mister, I invented the word. I come from the world of business. Great white sharks, man. I’ve worked the floor on Wall Street. The bear pit, man. These goons can’t play me.”

This guy is in his own little bubble. I don’t have the time it would take to get through to him.

I twist in my seat, keeping an eye on Freckles. “I bet if you ask Freckles here to turn out his pockets, you’re gonna find a silenced pistol in there somewhere.”

Shea is young and so still thinks he’s immortal.

“Yeah? So what? The bullets are for you.”

“Really? You shoot guys in the penthouse now, Junior?”

Shea frowns. “Shut the fuck up, dummy. Freckles doesn’t have a silencer. Do you, Freckles?”

“’Course not, Mr. Shea. This prick is winding you up.”

“I thought he was stupid.”

“So did I. Mike said he was thick as pig shit.”

I lean back on the chair to give myself a bit of spring if I need it. “Mike has played us all, gentlemen. He is one hundred percent aware that I would be the most dangerous person in this room, and still he put me here with both of his prospective partners.” I see doubt flickers across Freckles’s brow so I press on. “Oh yeah, it’s win-win for old Mike. If you manage to plug me and your boss on the quiet and set me up as a patsy, then he’s off the hook with the kid, in tight with the new king and settles a score with me. If I go operational on the two of you, then he’s forgotten in the chaos and his little cottage industry in Cloisters stays independent.”

Shea is still eating but half-listening too. “But you ain’t got a silencer, right Freckles?”

Freckles is glaring death rays at me. “No, I fucking ain’t. But I got a gun. Can I please shoot this prick?”

I point a finger gun at the kid. “He draws a weapon and you’re history, Harvard.”

“Your gun, it don’t have a silencer on it?” asks Shea.

His accent is pure Brooklyn now, university washed away.

Freckles frowns for a second and I see he’s making a decision and that decision is Fuck it.

“No,” he says, pulling a gun from a holster behind his back, then a suppressor from his pocket and expertly screwing it to the barrel. “But it does now.”

It takes him three twists to get the silencer onto his pistol, which gives me plenty of time to duck under his gun arm and come up underneath with the Kel-Tec already in my hand. I twist the small barrel into the soft flesh below his chin hard enough to tear the skin and say gently:

“Shhhhhh.”

Freckles freezes like he’s perched on a landmine, and because he can’t nod perceptibly, blinks twice to show he understands. He does not need to know how my pistol has come to be pointed at his brain, he just needs to know that it is.

“Good,” I say. “Now drop your weapon.”

What the hell am I doing?

Drop your weapon?

This is not how battles are fought in the real world. A guy has a yearning to shoot you, you put that guy down. You do not purposely engineer the situation so that the guy gets to draw further breaths.

Freckles’s gun makes a couple of clacks as it hits the floor, not enough to draw the boys in from outside.

“Come clean,” I say to Freckles and if he gives me so much as one syllable of bullshit, so help me God I will send him bullshitting into the afterlife.

“Power play,” he says. “Me and Mike. I was moving him up.”

As I thought. Freckles and Mike: two Shakespearean wannabes spinning tangled webs.

I nod at Shea, who has stopped chewing and sits slack jawed.

“From the horse’s mouth,” I say.

And before Shea gets the words out I know exactly what’s coming:

“I could use a man like you.”

Then:

“Execute that motherfucker.”

Ah, Harvard. Thine veneer has faded like dew in the morning sun.

I should kill Freckles and Shea. I could do it easily with the silenced gun and probably take out KFC and his partner in the hall, but you’re talking carnage. Mass murder.

And if I gotta do mass murder, I want to go the whole hog. Get Mike and his boys and Krieger/Fortz while I’m about it.

I’m drifting toward war criminal with those numbers.

And I like to tell myself, on the cold winter nights when I’m flashing on all the ghosts of violence past that haunt my sleep-deprived spirit, that I Am Not So Bad. Sounds juvenile, I know, but it’s a good 3-
A.M.
mantra.

I Am Not So Bad. Sometimes I sing it to the tune of U2’s “In the Name of Love.” I try to remember not to do this if I have someone sleeping over.

“I can pay you, McEvoy,” says Freckles, making the inevitable counter offer. “I got some bricks of cash in my car. An escape fund. A hundred grand.”

I slap the back of his head, hard, knocking him over onto the desk into what doormen refer to as the Deliverance position.

“I bet you do, Freckles. Thanks for the tip.”

Shea glares at Freckles. “You fucking shitbag. I trusted you.”

The older man’s head is ringing and he is not interested in Shea’s bullshit.

“Fuck you. You ain’t even a man. I don’t owe you shit.”

“Shoot him, McEvoy. Freckles is my employee, so I have more funds than he does. Stands to reason.”

I pick up Freckles’s silenced gun and poke him in the arse cheek with it. “That does stand to reason, Freckles. How are you, an immigrant from Donegal, gonna up that ante?”

“You can take the money and the car. Keys are in my pocket.” He wiggles his arse and the keys jangle. This is humiliating for him. No man should be forced to arse wiggle after the age of fifty. There should be a waiver.

I follow the jangle and find a ring of keys, a valet ticket and a phone. No car key.

“These are house keys, Freckles.”

“It’s the key ring McEvoy. Remote starter.”

Now that is convenient.

“That is convenient,” I say, pocketing the keys, ticket and phone.

I can see the attraction of robbing folks now. You just go around with a gun and take what you want.

“So are you going to shoot this little prick?” presses Freckles. “He’s killing the business.”

Shea takes a handful of hummus and smears it across Freckles’s cheeks. “You go straight to fuckin’ murder? We couldn’t talk it over?”

The kid is still in cloud cuckoo land. I should shake him up a bit to make him think twice about coming after me should he survive. I take two rapid steps around the desk and force his head into his carton of food, mashing it in there.

“Like you were talking it out with me?” I say. “Is that what you mean?”

“I was trying to scare you,” he protests.

“Bullshit. As far as you were concerned, you were talking to a dead man.”

“You were totally dead,” Freckles confirms. “We had the plot all picked out, McEvoy. This prick wanted to shoot you himself, make his bones, like anyone even says that anymore.”

I got one guy with his head on a table and another with his arse in the air. This is unsustainable. I need an exit strategy.

“Okay, over by the window, both of you.”

“But . . .” says Edward Shea, so I crack him on the crown with Freckles’s silencer.

“Shut up, kid. Talking just gets you dead faster. By the window.”

They go, glaring and elbowing like two kids. Freckles is all mutter and bluster but he knows I could give him his gun back, put one hand in my pocket and still beat the bejaysus out of him, so he’s gonna bide his time.

The effect by the window is what I’d hoped for. Sunlight blots out their features, makes it difficult to see who’s who.

“Okay. Now drop your pants.”

Freckles has some balls, and he doesn’t want to show them to me.

“Fuck yourself, McEvoy. I ain’t going out with my pants down ’less I’m getting blowed by Jennifer Aniston.”

It’s a nice ambition but Freckles has gotta accept that it’s aspirational to say the least.

I cock the weapon. “I’ll call Jenn. You get yourself ready.”

Freckles goes to work on a buckle in the shape of the classic Playboy bunny silhouette, which I’m sure would impress the hell out of Ms. Aniston.

The one where the superstar blows the Paddy mobster.

“What about you, kid? You got any conditions?”

“Sure. Why don’t you blow me?”

All credit to the kid. Maybe he has some moxy too.

But he wiggles out of his little hipster jeans and holy shit I cannot believe it, the two of them are wearing matching underpants. White y-fronts with yellow piping.

I’ve been teetering on the brink of hysteria the whole day and this sends me tumbling over the edge. I cough through ten seconds of ragged laughter and wipe tears from my eyes, because blurry eyes when you’re covering hostiles is for amateurs.

“You gotta be kidding me. I don’t know why you guys are fighting, you have a lot in common.”

“I’ve been wearing these shorts for years,” says Freckles sullenly. “Not this exact pair.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” says Shea. “I broke into your house and stole them.”

“I don’t fucking know, do I?” says Freckles. “Who can understand kids, these days. I saw a movie the other day where this Saw guy was peeling faces. What kind of shit is that?”

Freckles is showing initiative by trying to appeal to me as a fellow oldie, but it’s having zero impact.

“Now, hold hands,” I order, stony faced. I know they’ll object, which I have no patience for, so I shoot a hole in Shea’s stool, knocking it over backward. The falling stool makes more noise than the bullet.

“Hold hands, girls. Squeeze fucking tight.”

What choice do they have? They hold hands. I wonder would they kiss, if I insisted?

The clatter brings a goon to the door. He raps gently.

“Eh, boss? Everything okay?”

“Don’t call me boss!” screams Shea, impulsively I guess.

“Sorry, Mr. Shea. You all squared away in there with the guy . . . situation?”

I wiggle the gun a little and Shea gets the message and calms down.

“Yeah, it’s all cool. Come in here, both of you. There’s a little heavy lifting to be done.”

I back up, keeping one gun on the window and the other on the door. This is the tightrope bit, keeping the balls in the air, to mix my circus metaphors. It’s all smoke and mirrors and windows. And two douche clowns outside.

The clowns walk in with that tough-guy, rolling-shoulders nonchalance and stop dead in their tracks when they catch sight of what is framed by the window.

“What . . .” says KFC.

“The fuck?” completes his partner with comic timing that would make Ferrel and Rudd crap themselves.

I feel myself waiting to see how these two would interpret the situation so I decide to jump in.

“Okay, boys. Guns on the table.”

KFC moves a little faster than I’m expecting, jinking left and diving for cover, with the result that I shoot him in the calf rather than the foot, and he face-plants into the desk, stunning himself. His partner is frozen by indecision and stands there shuddering until the opportunity has passed. His massive shoulders hitch as he begins to sob, disgusted with himself, and he takes his gun out and meekly lays it on the table. I frisk KFC and find a single pistol and a knife. I keep the knife hoping I don’t have to go through a metal detector anytime soon as I am fast becoming a walking arsenal. The gun I place on the office table.

I grab KFC’s collar and drag him to his feet.

“You better belt that,” I say, pointing to the bullet wound.

“You’re dead, man,” he says, but it’s just for show. His face is pale and he’s already halfway into shock, but he has enough motor skills left to remove his belt and tie off the wound.

When I have everyone by the window, I give them my speech.

“Let me summarize the situation. You guys are some kind of hooligans. Drugs, money, whatever, I never heard of you.”

“Mostly drugs,” says KFC, a little addled by his situation. “And we off folks and shit.”

“Great. Okay. We’re all on the same page. So here’s what happened; I got dragged into the middle of a gang dispute. Freckles here was gonna shoot the kid, and set me up as a patsy.”

KFC raises his hand. “What’s a patsy?”

I was not expecting interruptions. “It’s a stool pigeon.”

“No,” says KFC. “You’ve lost me.”

I think maybe this guy is playing me with my own dumb act.

“Are you taking the piss?”

KFC is wounded. “Nah, man. You shot me. My mind is a little fuzzy with the pain and whatnot.”

Whatnot? I like this guy.

“Okay. The deal is that Shea and Freckles want to kill each other. Is that clear enough?”

Everyone nods. Even Shea and Freckles.

“So you people have a schism in the ranks.”

KFC’s hand goes up. I do not have time for this.

“A split,” I tell him. “A split in the ranks. Okay?”

KFC leans on his bloody knuckles. “Yeah. I got it. You couldn’t shoot me in the arm? That’s my career fucked?”