Screwed (13 page)

“I could shoot you in the arm now. Would that shut you the hell up?”

KFC realizes that there is no right answer to this question and so wisely decides to keep quiet.

I get back to the point. “The point is that this group is not working as a unit. I don’t know who’s loyal to who, but you guys need some private time to sort it out. You know, brainstorm or make a graph or whatever. This has nothing to do with me so I’m gonna absent myself.”

Shea gets a little antsy. Probably wondering if Freckles has paid off his boys.

“Take the guns, McEvoy. You need to protect yourself.”

I shrug. “I got plenty of guns. I’m gonna leave those two on the table there. I don’t like to overstock in general. I only kill what I can eat, like the Apaches.”

Shea is sweating now. “You can’t leave me here. I’m not one of these guys.”

The kid is good as dead and he knows it. I wonder will I feel guilty about this? Probably. But if an Irish Catholic made his decisions based on guilt avoidance then he wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning, and he certainly wouldn’t play with himself while he was in bed in the morning.

I back away from the group, mentally assigning survival odds to each one. My money would have been on Freckles but he gets a handicap on account of the dropped pants. KFC is shot in the leg but his hand is already on the table. Shea is getting dead unless he jumps out the window or gets abducted by aliens in the next ten seconds, and the other guy is still blubbering. So overall, I gotta stick with Freckles.

I back out the door, holding my guns steady.

“Nobody moves until I’m in the elevator, after that you make your own decisions.”

It’s a tense situation. Freckles is trying to hitch up his pants with knee flexes and KFC’s hand is crabbing toward the weapons. I shoot a hole in the desktop to stop him jumping the gun.

“Nu-uh,” I say, like a kindergarten teacher to an impatient toddler. “Wait for the elevator door.”

Shea is sobbing uncontrollably, squeezing Freckles’s hand like the guy is his prom date. I try to feel sorry for him but the kid has got food on his face, which counts against him. I realize with a jolt that I am more pissed off with Shea over the hummus than the attempted murder.

Shit. That is messed up.

But there’s whole lot more to eating with your mouth open than just the chewing involved. It says: I am arrogant. I don’t give a shit. I care so little about you that I can’t even be bothered to close my mouth.

In my opinion if you see a person eating with their mouth open, then that person is probably psychopathic at the very least.

I need to do a little more research before I publish.

I knuckle the elevator button and I can hear the car cranking and the cables working in the shaft. Not far, I’m guessing. Maybe one floor down.

“You got options,” I tell the foursome. “You can all just walk away.”

It’s bullshit, I know, but I am trying to kid myself that I’m not passively murdering at least half of these people. I’m separating myself from the bloodbath that is about to happen. It’s like the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, except in reverse, with homicide and only one degree.

The elevator sighs and I skip smartly inside, jabbing the lobby button with my silencer. The gun battle commences before the mirrored doors slide across and give me a look at myself when I’m not expecting it. I flinch with every shot, like they’re shooting at me. But also I flinch because in that unexpected reflection I catch myself looking like my father.

I try to deflate the swelling in my head with a zinger.

“You should have kept your mouth shut, kid,” I mutter at myself.

I Am Not So Bad. No no, I am not so bad.

My arse.

The valet barely glances at me, I suppose one Mick tough guy looks much the same as another after thirty years of facial hardship. He just scans the ticket with his handheld gizmo and five minutes later I’m buckled into a Cadillac that has more kit than the USS Enterprise.

Freckles’s phone synchs with the on-board computer, which asks me if I would like to send a message, and this gives me an idea that could buy me a little time. I dictate a text from Freckles to Mike Madden that reads simply: It’s done, partner.

Hopefully Mike will embark on the traditional celebratory shit-faced binge and will not know what hit him, when I hit him, as I now must. Maybe once upon a time I would have simply pointed the car westward-ho and kept my foot on the gas until the radiator split, but now I have taken responsibilities upon myself.

Sofia. Jason. Even Zeb. They have all wiggled through cracks in my armor.

If my armor was actual physical armor I would be bringing it back to the armor store and having stern words with the armor salesman.

It would be standard counter-surveillance procedure for me to tool around SoHo for a while and shake off any tail that I might have picked up. For all I know the Feds are up on Shea’s people and I could be popped driving a vehicle stuffed to the door panels with contraband, but I don’t have time for spy games. People are in danger because I didn’t lie down and die like I was supposed to, so I gotta deal with the threat.

I ask the car to call Sofia and it says:

“Call Sofia Dominatrix?”

Dominatrix? Freckles won’t have my Sofia in his phone. But he has been busy in his downtime.

“No. Negative. Cancel call,” I shout, in my eagerness to not get into a row with a leather-clad hooker.

“Canceling call,” says the car, in a voice that takes me a second to recognize as Clint Eastwood’s.

Wow. Freckles is/was a tough guy. Even his software kicks ass.

I dictate the number as I swing the Caddy into the Holland Tunnel and drum the steering wheel waiting for Sofia to pick up.

Three rings, then:

“Welcome to the House of Jesus. Can I interest you in our latest publication, Living Rent Free in the House of Jesus?”

This is a standard Sofia pickup. She has a whole ream of responses calculated to make the caller instantly hang up. Another classic: “This is an automated ordering service, please speak to be redirected to our credit card debit line.” My personal favorite is lifted from Ghostbusters. Sofia treats the unfortunate caller to ten seconds of harrowing screaming followed by the growled word, “Zuul.”

Sofia calls this technique the Reverse Jehovah. I once asked her why she bothered keeping her line connected and she replied: “You are such a sad sack. Don’t you want to laugh whenever you can?”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“I don’t leave the house much anymore,” she’d continued, poking my chest with a finger, backing me into a corner. “And you have that stupid goddamn casino. So all I do is take junk calls and do my look. You like my look today, baby?”

I did like her look. She was done up in a leather coat belted at the waist, torn tights and earrings so big they could pick up stations from space. I think Paula Abdul might have been the inspiration.

“You look great. You sure do.”

Sofia stroked my cheek and I blushed like a virgin. “If look so great then why don’t you do something about it?”

I ask what I always ask when something like this comes up.

“What’s my name? Who am I?”

Sofia’s gaze muddied and she stamped her kitten heels. “Why do you always ask me that question, Carmine? Ain’t we been married long enough? I make all this effort and you quiz me up and down. You shouldn’t be putting any questions to me unless the answer is ‘Oh baby.’”

Sofia was up against me like a molten bar, her curves finding all my hollows.

I’m only human for Christ’s sake.

I needed to cool her down and I knew just how to do it.

“Sofia, have you taken your lithium?”

She pushed me away in disgust. “Lithium? You have all this jammed up on you, and you’re asking me about meds? Christ, Daniel.”

And just like that the well was dry.

How come I’m always Daniel when she’s not horny anymore?

If Sofia is coming on really hot and heavy I ask her what happened to Carmine. That cools her down real fast and the only answer she’s ever given me is:

The same thing that will happen to you if you don’t stop asking about him.

Which doesn’t bode well for our fledgling relationship.

I speak into a little microphone on the visor, probably louder than I need to given the multidirectional specs of these things.

“Sofia? It’s me, Daniel.”

“What’s the code, Dan?”

I had forgotten Sofia Delano’s paranoia. The weekly code was usually the title of an eighties dance-floor filler.

“Sofia, darlin’. I don’t remember the code.”

“Well then you better stop calling me or I’ll send some voodoo down this line that will shrivel your balls like raisins.”

That is a graphic threat and the superstitious Paddy in me swears that his goujons are tingling a little, which jogs my memory.

“The code is; When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

“Dan, honey,” Sofia says all treacle and promise now. “Where are you?”

Girls putting on the baby voice usually make me wince, but Sofia does it with such need and conviction that it would break the hardest heart. If old Paddy Costello had met someone like Sofia he might have actually enjoyed his miserable life of untold wealth.

“I am on my way over,” I tell the microphone. “I’ll be with you in ninety minutes max.”

I’m coming up on the Newark Turnpike and traffic is slow but moving, which is about as good as it ever gets, so I might make it in an hour twenty.

“Are you feeling hot, baby?”

I think maybe Sofia Delano sincerely believes that sex is the only reason anyone would give her the time of day. This Carmine asshole screwed her up good. From what I can glean from her neighbors, Carmine was the jealous type who turned a vivacious young girl into a virtual recluse—think cat lady without the cats—and people will go to extraordinary lengths for attention when they have been systematically starved of it for years. I remember having a physical as a kid and half hoping the pain in my head was a tumor because fathers always love their sick kids, don’t they?

So I understand, sort of.

I tried to track down Carmine a couple of months ago to put Sofia out of her misery. I even put a computer genius friend of Jason’s on the case, but the guy has disappeared off the face of the earth, like aliens took a shine to him.

A guy like that is mostly likely dead or locked deep in the bowels of a Mexican prison. I can’t help worrying about it though. Bad pennies have a habit of showing up.

“No, Sofia. It’s not like that. Some people might come to see you, before I get there. I want you to put the brace on the door and don’t open up for anyone but me.”

“Are they bad people, Dan?”

She doesn’t sound afraid, a little eager maybe, and I’m worried she won’t lock the door because she’d appreciate the company. Mike could send over a couple of stone killers and my girl could mix them a shaker of martinis. Then again, she might cut them open and tell the future in their entrails. I’m exaggerating at both ends, but the point is that Sofia can’t tell good from bad when it comes to attention.

“Yes, these are bad people, Sofia. You have to trust me and lock the door. What weapons do you have?”

Sofia amps up the little-girl voice so I know she’s lying. “I don’t have any weapons, Danny. No guns on this premises.”

“I know you have at least one gun, Sofia. I found a shell box in the trash.”

“So I like to scorch patterns on the carpet, that’s not proof positive of a firearm.”

Shouting at ladies is bad so I stop myself from doing it.

“Please, Sofia. Protect yourself until I get there. Do whatever you have to do.”

“Whatever I have to do?”

“Whatever.”

There is a clunk as Sofia drops the phone. She is so excited that she has forgotten to hang up.

I don’t fully understand the strange hold that Sofia has over me. There’s an old Gaelic word, geasa, which is about as close as I can come to explaining it. My class learned all about geasa in school from this dick teacher we had one year: Mr. Fitzgerald, liked all the kids to call him Fitz. Winked at the girls and gave the boys cigarettes. Creepy customer. So anyways, Fitz asks a question about geasa, what they were and so forth. This was a genuine hard question and holy shit if I didn’t know the answer.

“Is that hand connected to your arm, Daniel?” said Fitz, when he saw who was volunteering. “I should take a photograph.”

“Geasa are magical bonds,” I rattled off, before my brain lost it. “Cast over a man to bind him to the woman who loves him.”

Fitz was stunned and I couldn’t blame him. In the three months he’d been teaching me mythology, I didn’t do it was only answer I’d ever offered. It wasn’t that I was slow, I just didn’t know the answers.

“Fuck me,” he said, big eyebrows arching like slugs.

It was a laugh. Fitz got suspended and I got to slit his tires without anyone looking too deep into it.

I only knew this particular term because my mom, wise in the ways of Irish folklore to the extent that only the child of an immigrant can be, suspected that perhaps my father had reversed the trend and magically bound her to him. Maybe she was right. Margaret Costello McEvoy certainly never got free of her husband. He even bore her down into the dirt with him.

And when his elder daughter died, even then Paddy Costello had not broken and hurried to her graveside to comfort his grandson.

Guy’s a rich asshole. Only difference between him and regular assholes is monogrammed shirts.

So, like I was saying, Sofia Delano has me under a spell. And I think the main reason I don’t break free is that I don’t really want to. Part of me hopes she’s gonna snap out of it and we’ll have end-of-days sex and then embark on a series of adventures in a Caddy convertible.

Even Zeb knows enough about mental illness to realize that I am being slightly optimistic, or as he put it:

You have your head shoved so far up your ass that you’re working your own mouth from the inside.

I could have misheard that metaphor, or it’s possible that even Zeb didn’t know what he was talking about, he does favor the graphic image. Among his more confusing references is the description of his morning boner: Danny, I got a hard-on like a vengeful baboon who just won the jungle lottery.