“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.
I have no idea what the hell that means, and I would emigrate before asking, as Zeb would drone on circuitously for hours to justify his choice of words.
All I know for sure is that I cannot allow harm to come to Sofia because of my situation. I hope I can get to her before Mike hears the sound of his shit hitting my fan. Or as Zeb might say:
Before Mike realizes his plan is more fucked than a waxed badger walking backward through a flamingo patch with honey on its ass.
See what I mean? Just thinking about what the guy would say is enough to bring on migraine.
Sofia is squared away for now and there is no more I can do on that front until I get there, so I turn my mind to the other cold fronts that are closing in from the north and east. Jason, I put on red alert with a quick text. He’s gonna love that, tooling up his beefcake brigade. I pity the mobster who goes knocking on the Slotz door now. Jason’s guys will kick the shit out of him, then do his color palette.
If you have a fashion problem. If no one else can help you. Maybe you can hire the Gay Team.
Was that homophobic? Am I allowed to tease the other team at all?
Best to say nothing. Keep out of harm’s way.
I make it to the city limits in just over an hour and then I gotta sit in off-ramp traffic for ten minutes while some fender bender gets sorted out. There are a couple of bike cops on buffer duty between the drivers so I don’t lean on the horn and vent my frustrations. Mike’s boys could be on their way to Sofia’s apartment right now and I gotta sit here watching some hedge-fund, Armani-wearing, winter-tanned asshole do kiddie hysterics over his E-Class bumper. The notion that I could toss him off the ramp and be on my way grabs hold of me and I have to squeeze the steering wheel until it cracks to stop myself acting on it.
By the time they get around to waving us through with traffic wands, I am so wound up that I take off like a bat out of hell clipping a wand on my way past.
Way to stay below the radar in your stolen car, moron.
That’s what Sofia does to me. All reason goes out the window.
I avoid Cloisters’s main street, such as it is, and go across Cypress to hang the technically illegal U-turn that everyone does, which save
s me a couple of blocks. Sofia’s building is so commonplace that I often find it difficult to believe that she lives inside, that some of her mercury has not bled through to the walls, staining them with violent slashes of color.
Now who’s the psycho? Mood walls? I really should call Dr. Moriarty and fill him in on some of my new theories.
I abandon the car on a yellow line and take the steps two at a time, catching a break when my ex-neighbor old Mr. Hong shuffles out the front door dragging his shopping buggy on a cord trailing between his bowed legs, pulling tight against an area where I would not want a cord to be.
“Mr. Hong,” I say, reflexively courteous.
“My balls are smarting,” he says to me crossly. “Like they’re tied in knots.”
The first hundred times he said this to me, I pointed out the cord dividing his nethers. Now I just make shit up.
“It’s the New Jersey damp,” I say, not putting too much effort into it. “Notoriously bad for balls.”
Hong grunts, produces a peach from somewhere, stuffs the entire fruit into his mouth and begins the daily race to gum the peach into a paste before it chokes him. I slip past into the brownstone lobby thinking, We are all mad here.
Sofia’s place is on the third floor and I take great bounds up the stairway, shouldering the wall on each turn rather than slow down. I knock a dent in the sheetrock on the second floor and it occurs to me that I will have to pay for that at some point, which bothers me, because a person should get a pass when he is trying to save someone’s life for Christ’s sake.
The banister bears the brunt of my shoulder charge on the final turn and I make splinters of the railings, which crack loud enough to warn any intruder that I am on the way. Even a deaf intruder could feel the vibration of my thundering approach.
What happened to stealth? I was a specialist once upon a time.
No time for softly softly. My Celtic sixth sense that only predicts bad stuff is bubbling in my gut. It’s like a spider sense that brings on the shits, which would be a very bad look for Peter Parker, swinging over Manhattan.
Bad things have happened. I’m too late.
This notion is confirmed by Sofia’s door, which yawns open, still creaking, so I’m seconds late. Seconds.
Oh Sofia, darlin’, I think, fearing the worst, what other way is there to fear? I did not protect you. I could not save you to be my own.
If she is dead I will hunt down that husband of hers and take my time with him, I promise myself. Maybe sell the video to Citizen Pain.
I barrel inside, my momentum carrying me across the room, totally off balance.
Stupid amateur. Stupid.
First thing my senses pick up is the tacky resistance as my soles leave the floor. My life is a trail of bloody footprints so I know what’s sticking to my boots. I look anyway to confirm it, and there is a lattice of blood following the grout patterns in the floor tiles, forming an irregular triangle. At the tip is a woman’s head, cracked open by a blow, hair fanned like a halo. Sofia lies awkwardly, the quirky spirit bludgeoned out of her.
I forget everything I ever learned about violent situations. I do not compartmentalize. I do not defer my grief. Instead I behave like a civilian who has had the blindfold of civilization whipped off to reveal a first look at the ugliness of the world.