“Don’t call me boss,” snaps Shea. “My father was boss. Like some plantation owner. Call me sir.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Shea. Just reflex. I’m an old dog, you know?”
Shea nods like ain’t that the truth. “Well, we know what happens to old dogs.”
Oh. Hello there. A little tension in the camp.
Shea drums the table again. “Envelope, please.”
I slide it over and begin visualizing my moves. Freckles has shifted slightly, out of my field of vision, so he’s what my Ranger buddies would call the prime hostile. Shea is just a kid and I can tell by his posture that he’s not a physical guy, but I still gotta factor him in. You never know who’s a crack shot or can throw a knife. Maybe this prick grew up on Duke Nukem and can decapitate a rat at fifty paces.
I still can’t figure the play. Why would Mike throw me into this mix? I’m chaos and unpredictability. If Mike wants to suck up to this varsity kid, surely he’s gonna sacrifice one of those mooks he keeps around the Brass Ring.
He should know that at some point I am going to see an opening and bludgeon my way through and then come home in the dark.
Shea counts out the bonds then slides one across to me. “This word, dumb ass,” he says, tapping the bond. “What is it?”
“Bearer,” I say, sounding out the syllables.
“You know what that means?”
I can guess but I give him the answer he might expect.
“Something about being like naked?”
“It means that you’re the bearer, the guy. I don’t know if you’re the actual guy but Mike has no use for you.” Shea slides the empty envelope back to me like it’s Long John Silver’s black spot. “I think your boss is trying to kill two birds with one stone and, Mr. Daniel McEvoy, you’re one of those birds.”
I have a road to Damascus moment, the penny drops from a great height, and I see Mike’s vision of the future stretched out before me. Irish Mike is as dumb as moss, but he has a condition that makes him very dangerous; he sincerely and in spite of all evidence to the contrary believes himself to be clever. A master strategist.
And I think he’s bumped into some other dumb smart guy.
This is what I think: Freckles and Mike have partnered up.
Freckles asked Mike to send over a patsy so Freckles can shoot Shea and blame the patsy and step into the vacant top slot. This poor college grad is getting disinherited.
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 an
d 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: