Screwed (21 page)

Actually, with KFC and that other guy in the trunk I might not even merit my own hole.

And that is depressing.

I think my balls actually are itching.

I grind myself right up on the glass partition, trying to get a hand down my pants. Through the crook of my arm I notice we are off Twelfth and down by the river. I see that weird-looking melted pier, an altar to scores of busted planks and rotting tires heaped at its base. I always used to wonder about that pier when I drove past, what its story was and so forth. Now I probably won’t ever know.

Tragic, right? A man goes to his grave without comprehensive pier knowledge.

So anyways, I’m basically humping the partition trying to get at the key and Freckles turns the speaker back on so’s I can hear them laughing. It’s not like they need to worry, right? Freckles frisked me pretty good, even gave my privates a decent squeeze. So, they’re cocksure I ain’t armed. But I got a key and my hand is only a coupla inches away.

Ha. Wait. That pier collapsed from pier pressure.

Zing.

In your face, Zebulon. That is a genuine joke. I could send it in to Ferguson.

Always the cautious optimist, I bank that joke for later if there is a later.

My index finger brushes the key. So close.

“Oh,” I say, which sets Freckles off laughing again.

“Listen to this asshole,” he says in between chortles. “We should take a drive to Connecticut for laughs. This guy is better than Howard Stern.”

So then they’re off on a DJ debate. Apparently this Harvard girl that Shea once banged in a bathroom stall voiced the opinion that Howard Stern was a misogynist asshole, and Shea happened to agree with that position. Freckles, on the other hand, was loudly opposed to this argument despite the fact that it quickly became obvious that he didn’t understand the term misogynist.

I have to stop myself joining in, because I got stuff to do, staying alive and so forth.

I reach the key, pull it out between two fingers and slump gratefully on the seat. Usually when I sit down, I don’t attach an emotion to it, but this time gratefully works okay.

Stage One complete.

I look down at my hands, the palms worn shiny like the hands of a fisherman, the fingers curved like a gorilla’s, and they are shaking like I got a charge running through me, but I manage to hold on to the key and after a minute of trying to thread that toy-sized key into a hole the size of a match head I manage to free myself.

Correction: free my hands.

There’s a long way to go before I can consider my entire self to be free. Ideally, I could simply jump out of the car the next time Freckles slows to take a corner. But the central locking button is up front and there are no controls for the windows back here. I will have to trick Shea into giving me a shot at grabbing his gun, then I’ll be in the driver’s seat.

Metaphorically.

I butt the partition with my forehead and because of my entertainment value so far on this trip, my captors are inclined to listen.

“Wassup, ballsack?” says Shea. “You need some exfoliator for your asshole this time?”

That’s not bad, but I don’t have time. I need to provoke the kid with some outrageous remarks. It’s not denial this time or a coping mechanism, it’s part of a general strategy that is too loosely thrown together to qualify as a plan.

“Listen, kid. I’m done screwing around. Do yourself a favor and turn me loose. Then you and Freckles can round up your big scary posse and get your gangster on with Mike.”

Shea is eating again, a big blueberry muffin that he had stuffed in some pocket and sat on, looks like. The muffin is flat as a cookie and he is picking off the edges like a fecking squirrel. I hate this kid.

“Turn you loose? You had more chance of me scratching your balls. I’m gonna shoot you, McEvoy. Deal with it. Visualize your next incarnation or some shit, I could give a fuck.”

“You ain’t gonna shoot me, kid. Not you. The old man maybe, but you? Nah. I got a date with a bullet okay, but you ain’t the one pulling the trigger.”

Shea twists in his seat to look back at me and I can see the first rays of sunrise behind his head, making him look like one of those pale Scandinavian Jesuses movie people were so fond of in the fifties.

“You ain’t even my first, McEvoy. And I liked that other guy. He was my favorite.”

“Maybe, but he was wounded, immobile, most like. Me, you gotta get all the way from the car to the hole, and I ain’t going easy. Also bigger guys than you shot me just before I killed them. I got more holes in me than 50 Cent.”

I said 50 Cent all wrong. Should be “Fiddy” or some such.

Respect for “In Da Club” though—classic. Jason and me used to play Celebrity Beatdown on the door: 50 Cent was the only guy who we put through to the next round without argument. Fucker’s huge, plus he’s got that smart/crazy glint in his eye.

Shea is getting a little angry, but tries to laugh it off. “Listen to this dope,” he says to Freckles. “Handcuffed on the way to his own execution, and he’s still playing the big man.”

Freckles has his eyes on the road, lotta potholes down here. Homeless guys too. It’s like Thunderdome by the river.

“He’s just yanking your chain, kid. Pay no attention. You can shoot him right in his stupid mouth in about five minutes.”

“That gives you about five minutes to live,” I say.

Shea pulls out his gun and lays it on the partition. “You want to shut the hell up? Maybe I’ll shoot you right here.”

I laugh with a savage glee. Spraying the glass.

“Shoot me in a moving vehicle? You goddamn amateur. You wanna tell him, Benny T?”

“Tell me what?” Shea demands.

Freckles sighs. “Shea-ster. It’s your first day on this side of the fence. You ain’t expected to know everything.”

“So why can’t I shoot this prick now?”

I break the news. “Because you’re in a reinforced vehicle on uneven terrain. Firstly you’d most likely miss, then that bullet is gonna ricochet off all the metal ’round here and most likely kill the wrong person. And even if it don’t, then the noise alone is gonna blow out a couple of eardrums and we’d all end up in the Hudson.”

Shea has a counterargument. “Yeah? But you’re in a sealed compartment, McEvoy, with bulletproof glass all around. All I gotta do is poke my pistol through this hatch and it’s a million to one that a ricochet could come back. Plus the noise is gonna bounce off the glass.”

I try to look stumped by this line of reasoning. The place I go to for this expression is every single conversation I ever had with Sofia.

“Yeah . . . I guess.”

Shea is delighted that his youthful logic has trumped my veteran’s wisdom.

“That’s right, McEvoy. I can shoot you anytime I feel like it. And guess what? I’m feeling like it right now.”

Come on, you little turd. Come on.

Shea slips the catch off the small door in the middle of the glass where real customers would pay their fare. The door opens with the soft hiss/pop of a seal being broken.

“Smile, motherfucker,” says Shea, poking the barrel of his gun through the hole.

Freckles spots this out of the corner of his eye.

“No,” he blurts. “Don’t.”

Freckles may have been about to deliver more specific instructions along the lines of: Don’t give the ex-soldier access to your weapon as he doubtless knows a dozen ways to disarm you.

But it’s too late. As soon as the hatch opens my hands are coming up. Shea ain’t got much of a grip on the handle and so more or less delivers the gun into my waiting fingers.

I spin it around, flick off the safety, which the Shea-ster neglected to do, then stick my hand through the hatch.

Shea is stunned for a moment, then a petulance born of entitlement settles on his face like a crinkled mask.

“No,” he says. “That’s my gun. Give it back.”

Freckles needs a few seconds to come up with a plan so he says, “He’s right, McEvoy. It is his gun.”

I cannot believe these two.

“Get out of the car,” I tell Shea. I need to separate them or they might try to out-bravado each other.

Shea’s bottom lip juts. “I am not going anywhere. Now you turn that gun over, right now, mister.”

I do something that anyone who has ever met Shea, except Freckles, has been praying for. I shoot him. Just in the arm but the scar should draw admiring coo’s at his legendary pot parties. The noise is loud and flat like the snap of a dry branch but most of it stays in the cab so I don’t get disorientated, which is more than I can say for Freckles. Shea is disorientated too, but that’s mainly from shock and pain. The blood drains from his face through the hole in his upper arm. It was harsh, I admit it, shooting the kid and so forth, but some people never learn unless the lesson is public and humiliating.

“Get out,” I tell him again.

Shea’s lip is wobbling and his body is wracked with tension and I don’t blame him; getting shot is about the most painful thing that can happen to a body besides childbirth. The one thing a person learns once they’ve been shot is how little they want to get shot again. Shea nods. “Okay. I’m getting out. Can you slow down a little, Benny?”

Freckles nods more times than are necessary. “Yep,” he says. “Yep, yep. Uhuh.”

I think he’s answering questions in his own head.

“Slow down, Freckles,” I tell him. “Just to thirty or so.”

Freckles does this, fingers drumming a fierce rhythm on the wheel. He probably doesn’t intend it, but I swear he’s tapping out the beat to George Michael’s “Faith.” Normally I would sing along or at least whistle depending on the company, but at the moment I am trying to impress my determined professionalism on these two, so I ignore the rhythm, which is difficult and distracting.

The cab slows and I can see scrub and cracked asphalt in the high beams. The city is on our right, and on the left a series of working piers stretches into the blackness of the Hudson. I bet there are more bodies buried down here than in the average cemetery. Hopefully I won’t become one of them anytime soon.

“Go,” I say to Shea. “I’m gonna count to ten.”

Shea is crying and I don’t blame him.

“Ten?” he says. “Come on, man. Let me work up to it.”

“Three,” I say.

“You’re skipping numbers,” he squeaks.

“Nine,” I say.

Shea hits the central locking button, pops the passenger door and is sucked out; he whips past like a tumbleweed and is lost in our wake, and the wind closes the door behind him.

He’s probably dead, but technically I didn’t kill him. Constructive suicide at worst.

No, no, no, I am not so bad.

Freckles steps on the accelerator as soon as the kid is gone and we both know why. He doesn’t know about my aversion to killing people, so is convinced that I can’t let him live. If Shea survives, he is done in this world of shadows, but Freckles would never stop coming. He’s Irish, like me, and we know all about holding grudges. When it comes to vendettas, the Irish make the Sicilians look Canadian. Freckles would not be happy until both my knees were blown out and he’s feeding me my eyeballs.

Eyeballs if I’m lucky.

Could be ball balls is what I’m trying to say.

I know, I should’ve left it.

So, the recently re-monikered Benny T reckons his number’s up and floors the accelerator, and the only thing preventing me from tumbling backward is my arm hooked through the hatch.

“Freckles, slow down,” I shout. “We can work something out.”

“Fuck you, McEvoy, you fucking prick,” he says. “Fuck all you fucking Dublin bastards.”

According to the doorman rules of swearing, we are now officially in the red zone.

I push my arm further through the hole and screw the barrel into Freckles’s temple.

“Maybe I’m gonna let you off with a warning. You ever think of that?”

Freckles doesn’t even answer; instead his face comes over all grim and he swings the car ninety degrees counterclockwise.

“This is a bad idea,” I say, maybe aloud, maybe to myself.

“You like this one, McEvoy? You think you’re the only one with balls?”

I smack Freckles on the side of the head with the gun but there’s no power in it and I’m at full stretch already. I see the speedometer needle jiggling around ninety.

I could jump, but at this speed I would snap like a dry twig. I should have bailed with the kid. Freckles knows I can’t risk shooting him while his foot in on the gas.

The cab is headed for one of the less sturdy-looking piers, which is protected by a tin sign that says No Access. What kind of preventative is that? A fecking kid with roller skates could circumvent that security.

“I’m ready to go, McEvoy!” shrills Freckles, and I can see in his face that he ain’t backing down.

I gotta shoot him. With him dead, things can’t get worse.

I got no option but to plug this bug-eyed, ginger shit-for-brains right this instant. Actually there should be a comma after ginger, otherwise it might read like Freckles has ginger shit, which would be a weird thing for me to be privy to.

“You ain’t doing it, McEvoy,” shouts the ginger, shit for brains triumphantly. “You ain’t got the nerve.”

If we could freeze this for a moment, I would point out that Freckles is preparing to kill himself in order to avoid being killed by me and surely there is a better way to resolve our issues.

But we can’t freeze this moment, so I gotta pull the trigger or take a bath.

Shoot.

You’ve shot people before. Remember that time you were in the army? The hard bit comes afterward.

Shoot.

“Freckles,” I shout over the rattle of tires on gravel and the blood rushing in my ears. “Don’t make me do this. You’re Irish, surely we can work this out.”

Sure, if we had seven hundred years.

Too late. We’re on the pier now. A drum roll of planks rattles underneath, my jaw rattles and then we are flying.

Freckles let’s go of the wheel like he has time to roll out in midair or some other frankly impossible move unless he’s got bullet time on his cell phone and last time I checked the raciest thing Freckles had on there was Sofia the Dominatrix. He’s got his legs out the door when we touch down and a giant fist of water slams the door on his torso more or less cutting him in half.