Screwed (18 page)

This simple statement calms any niggling doubt I may have harbored about Edit. I think I’ve always been suspicious of saints. If I’d been Joseph the carpenter and the Virgin Mary had come home with the line that she’d been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, then Christianity would have gone a whole different way.

“I also should thank you for letting me stow away here for a few days. I’ll be no trouble.”

“I know you won’t, McEvoy.”

McEvoy?

What happened to Dan, Danny, Daniel, my hero?

Also a new tone, not hostile exactly but definitely imperious. I suppose she’s entitled.

“Don’t worry, Edit,” I say swirling what’s left of my whiskey. “I don’t want to bring trouble to your door. Two days max and I’m out of here.”

“I’d say that’s about forty seven and a half hours too long for me, Mr. McEvoy.”

I glance up from my sophisticated spirit swirling to find Edit not even looking my way. She’s got her BlackBerry out, searching for a number.

“What I said about Paddy leaving me the empire. That was true. Unfortunately, thanks to this recession a lot of those businesses are pretty strapped at the moment. I can fix it, but I need a cash injection, which brings us to Evelyn’s hefty trust fund.”

What’s going on here? Edit is talking like a bitch now but she can’t be.

I read people.

“As for you. Evelyn phoned me a couple of weeks ago to ask for money. I tried to talk her in, but she wasn’t ready. Said good old Daniel would sort her out.”

She finds the number and selects it. “You know Paddy cut you off, right? But Ev was going to have the final laugh.”

Final laugh. It’s grammatically correct, but not really in popular use. Edit slipped up there because she’s Swedish. She would be so screwed for that in The Great Escape, if it was set in New York with American Nazis.

American Nazis? What is going on in my brain?

“Dear Aunt Evelyn put you in her will. If anything happened to her, you get the entire trust fund. Twenty-five million dollars.”

Twenty five million dollars is always a nice thing to get in the post delivered by a stork, like babies.

“Luckily I’ve had two crooked policemen on my payroll since they worked in the city so I sent them to pick you up and see if you knew where Evelyn was.”

The package. Evelyn was the package, not Mike’s envelope. No wonder Fortz laughed when I claimed to have the package in my pocket.

“If not, they were supposed to kill you as a precaution,” continues Edit. “And wait at your sleazy club for Evelyn to show.”

A precaution. Like a condom. We call those Rubber Johnnies in Ireland, which is pretty hard to take if your name is John, even harder if your name is Robert John.

“I am so glad you escaped from my pet policemen. I followed you from their torture room and it really has worked out perfectly. You brought Evelyn to my door. I cannot believe that. I should have hired you directly instead of Krieger and Fortz.”

Hey. Edit and I have people in common. She knows Fortz, I know Fortz.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she says into the phone and I know then that I’m screwed.

Or as Zeb would say: More fucked than the chief fuckee of Fuckville during Fuckapalooza on the fuckteenth of Fuckuary.

And worse: I’ve delivered Ev to the lion’s den.

The lion’s den with a gorilla in it. That’s hilarious so I laugh a little.

Edit laughs along with me.

“No,” she tells whoever’s taking the call. “I don’t think he’ll be any trouble now.”

There used to be a show on TV with that guy from Oliver except he had a magic flute called Jimmy or Billy. Anyway it was a flute. There was big monster too but he was friendly. Genuinely friendly too, not like a grizzly bear who’s gonna eat you as soon as his smaller food sources run out.

Balls. I’ve been drugged.

I’m on the main stage at Fuckapalooza.

Hello, Fuckville.

Focus, soldier. Rescue the civilian.

“I would prefer to just let you go,” said Edit. “But Evelyn might refuse to change her will. And also, my little policemen don’t want you and your big mouth on the loose. And they have been faithful and useful boys to me. So . . .”

I squint down at my feet and try to marshal them but they seem so far away on long spindly legs that are definitely not mine. Some idiot has dropped a crystal tumbler and it tumbles down . . .

Of course it does. It’s a tumbler.

. . . Catching the light in its facets, which is so beautiful that I want to cry.

What the hell did she give me?

I will have to rely on my trusty arms. I topple forward onto the rug, which I realize that I can understand now.

Of course. It’s so simple. The meaning of life is hidden in our fingerprints. All I have to do is take a photograph of my fingers and blow it up so I can read the whorls.

Edit lifts her feet daintily and swings them away from the broken glass, and over her shoulder I see the door open and Buttons the gorilla is standing in the doorway.

This sends me right back to my teen years and I know Buttons heard me threaten his master and he’s been waiting for a chance to shut my mouth for good. I am suddenly more scared than I have even been. There is not a doubt in my addled head that Buttons intends to tear my head from its shoulders.

My life begins to flash before my eyes, which I do not want to happen because we all know what that means.

No. Not yet. I’m not ready yet.

The flashing continues regardless. I see my father stretching a Band-Aid across a cut on my knee, saying good soldier, good soldier. Did that happen? I don’t remember him being human. There’s Pat, my baby brother, with a pillowcase tied around his neck like a cape and the poker in his hand for a sword. He’s going to catch a belt later for getting coal dust all over his clothes. I want to warn him, but my lips are sealed. I’m in the car now, on that last fateful journey and I see for the first time that the only reason I’m alive is because the rear window was open to let out Dad’s cigarette smoke. I hear the screech of the tires and see the wall rush at our puny vehicle and mom’s hair fan out like it’s underwater. I reach for Pat but he is rag-doll dead and I am flying.

Buttons shambles into the room and I see a smaller figure behind him that could be Tarzan or maybe Mowgli. I am afraid to look and I am frozen by chemicals but I see that Buttons has some kind of blackjack in his hand. He squats before me and I see the gorilla is wearing shoes.

“Don’t do it here,” says Edit to the gorilla. “I don’t want any evidence if his cop friend comes looking.”

“Remember this, McEvoy?” asks the gorilla, dangling the club before my face. “Every cop in the state knows what you did to me with this fucking thing.”

I have no clue what Buttons is talking about. I never touched him with a big dildo.

Buttons pulls his arm back, and I hear his labored breath burr in my ear.

“Now it’s your turn,” he says and I close my eyes.

I read people pretty good, right?

CHAPTER 7

I
N EVERY NOIR BOOK I EVER READ THERE’S A BIT ABOUT THE
guy, the gumshoe, coming to after a beating. I never liked those passages because some of those scribes put their shit together pretty good, and it all gets a little close to the bone for a guy like me, who’s been clipped enough times to move down a bracket on the IQ scale. I’d swear I was a gifted kid, now I’m barely average thanks to Tasers, rubber bullets, spiked drinks, steel-toe-capped boots and now a goddamn dildo. There was also a time with high heels and a spiral staircase but I don’t know anyone well enough to tell them that story. And I will never go to a hypnotist’s show just in case I might let it slip.

You come out of it different each time. Fast or slow. Easy or so damn hard you want to be dead. Sometimes the pain is so massive, so everything that you feel it can no more come to an end than the universe itself. This is gonna be one of those times, I just know it. Drugs with a side of dildo? There is no way this is gonna be anything but a nightmare.

I feel myself surfacing and part of me is glad not to be dead but most of me wants to stay down here in the cool dark and have no network for a while, but my subconscious is running the show at the moment and picks up on some red flags that need my immediate attention, and so sends me surging toward consciousness like an oxygen-starved swimmer pulling for the surface.

I hear a screeching noise that could be a large bird, something from the Amazon maybe, and my body is being vigorously shaken. Am I riding some huge Amazonian bird? Could that be it? How has my life arrived at this point? I stop worrying about the bird when I realize that I can’t breathe. Imagine the panic our friend the oxygen-starved swimmer would feel if he broke the surface only to find no breathable air in the atmosphere. That is how I feel. Panic and pain are my motivators. How could I not have realized how happy I was back then, in the past, when I could breathe freely and there was no constant pain?

My eyelids open themselves, allowing my eyeballs to swell and bug out. No photos please. I am in the back of a car, which is skidding sideways toward a cowboy cushion on the freeway. The screeching is the protests of four melting tires that were not designed for lateral hops. There are two familiar-looking heads in the front and they are howling in panic, slapping at each other like kindergarten girls in a yard fight as if that can help. The side windows are filled with the elevated grille of the Hummer that has rammed us. I don’t even know who’s trying to kill me now. Probably everybody in both vehicles.

I do not give two shits about any of this. All I want to do is breathe. This is beyond a joke. Why can I not breathe?

I paw at my throat with handcuffed hands to find a seat belt cinched tight across my Adam’s apple.

It’s probably the belt across your windpipe that is stopping you breathing, genius.

And why am I handcuffed? Did Buttons handcuff me?

The belt is tight across my chest like a Band-Aid and I can’t get a finger under it, so now I have a dilemma: leave the belt on and suffocate, or take it off and be killed on impact. Is this Murphy’s Law or a Hobson’s choice or a Catch-22? I can never distinguish between those three. Murphy’s Law has something to do with potatoes, I’m pretty sure about that. If this run of bad luck continues, they might have to coin a phrase in my honor, posthumously of course.

Daniel’s Dilemma.

Catchy.

Got a ring to it.

Screw it. I have to breathe. My fingers crab down toward the safety buckle but the choice is taken from my hands when the car crashes into the impact barrel, smashing the barrel flatter than an unassembled coffee table, sending water seething through the cracks with enough force to fracture the side windows. The safety belt holds, but cuts through my clothing to the skin below. My shirt pocket bursts into flame and I cannot understand why until I remember the book of matches I keep in there to light the tipped cigars Zeb and I smoke to celebrate staying alive for another week. Is the matches’ flaring symbolic somehow? I am showered with glass and water, which is painful but at least the fire goes out. Every cloud as they say.

I am held in place by the belt but I still cannot bloody breathe. For feck sake. Gimme a bloody break. God, Buddha, Gandhi, Aslan. Whoever. I remember that I have hands when the body of the car settles on its buckled chassis and stops moving. I unsnap the buckle, slide across the seat and draw a greedy breath that feels like I’m swallowing glass, but I don’t care. My brain was seconds away from starvation and I do not have spare brain cells to lose. I breathe again, deeper, and feel my panic subsiding. Confusion quickly fills the vacuum.

What is happening?

What part of my life is this?

Am I in Ireland or the Lebanon or Jersey?

I do not know exactly who the guys in the front are but I imagine they were planning on doing me harm so I am glad to see that they are not moving, their heads enveloped by the mushroom sprawl of air bags. Maybe they didn’t survive. I think I am safe enough, conscience-wise, to hope that they didn’t.

So this is a rescue? Could that be it? My friends have grouped together, pooled their resources and come to save me.

Doubtful. Do I have friends? No one springs to mind. Something about Madonna and the Bee Gees.

Two dead now. Tragic, what a band.

There is a horrendous creaking of twisting metal as the Hummer backs up a few feet, taking the side door with it.

I hope this is a rental, I think unkindly. So those two bent cops will be hit with the bill.

Cops? They’re cops. I remember that now. Krieger and Fortz.

A shadow falls across me and I am relieved to see a human framed by a doorway that until recently had a door in it. I am relieved because the figure is human and not simian, though it is wearing an Obama mask.

Simian? Buttons. That couldn’t be real.

The figure moves quickly leaning in and grabbing fistfuls of my lapels.

My savior, I try to say but there is something hard in my mouth so I let it dribble onto my lap.

A tooth. One of my molars. All those years flossing, wasted. And I hate flossing too.

The guy is familiar.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” I say. Well you don’t want to be rude.

“This ain’t no fuckin’ rescue, retard,” says a familiar voice.

Freckles. I remember.

Friend or foe?

Foe. Most definitely.

I spit out a lump of bloody gum. “Freckles. I was rooting for you, dude.”

He drags me out of the car, gets up real close.

“Don’t call me Freckles,” he says. “My boss calls me Freckles and guess what? I am the boss now.”

It’s a reasonable request. “No problem. What do I call you?”

Freckles hustles me to the blacked-out Hummer. The freeway is quiet so it must be very late or very early. Regardless, it won’t take the blues more than a minute or two to get here and a bashed-up Hummer won’t be so hard to spot. I can see the Silvercup sign near the off-ramp. There can be only one.

“You can call me Mr. Toole.”

He has got to be joshing. “Your name is tool?”