“You putz,” he says, slapping my forehead with the heel of his hand. “You were bored, was that it? You couldn’t just take a meeting with Mike without it turning into Armageddon.”
I huff a little but he’s right. It’s like I move people toward violence. Like they weren’t really considering it until I showed up.
Bullshit. Mike has violence on the brain like a poultice. And Shea picked out your burial plot before you even got there.
Those are violent people but I can’t deny that the common denominator in all their twisted scenarios is Dan McEvoy.
I lumber to the sofa and perch beside Evelyn’s feet. Once you get past the shampoo smell, she stinks like a brewery but looks so peaceful. I could live with the booze sweats to be that peaceful.
“She gonna be okay?” I ask, figuring that prioritizing is the way to get through this mess.
“She’s gonna be fine,” says Zeb. “You on the other hand are more screwed than my cousin Ada at a bat mitzvah. And she gets screwed a lot ’cause of her being the whore she is.”
Ada is the sweetest kid you ever met. Odds on she turned down Zeb’s advances or wouldn’t lend him money. But though we may disagree on Ada’s whorey-ness, there is no arguing the fact that I am screwed.
I touch Evelyn’s head and Sofia growls from her corner.
“Is there any way out of this?”
Usually I wouldn’t turn to Zeb Kronski for tactical advice, but he’s a slippery character and the tighter the hole the more he wriggles to get out of it.
Zeb paces a little. “You got no power here, Irish. All you got here is liabilities.”
On the word liabilities Zeb does an unsubtle head tilt toward Sofia, who responds by rising out of her corner, whiskey bottle by the neck.
“Hey, I’m including myself in that package,” says Zeb hurriedly. “We are all chinks in the McEvoy armor. Soon as Mike finds out his plan went to hell, he’s coming here. Also you got the blues to worry about and whoever survived the Shea massacre.”
I wince. Zeb has been desensitized by The Sopranos and cocaine and thinks massacres are cool. He should know better, we’ve both been in war zones. Granted he was self-medicating at the time.
“Why am I worrying about the blues?”
Zeb double takes. “What? Are you serious, man? You just dildoed out a beating to a couple of their guys in high definition.”
I suspect this might not be a correct use of the verb dildoed.
Sofia senses I might need a drink and so hands me the bottle. I have it halfway to my mouth before it occurs to me that I may want to stay sharp.
“No thanks, baby. One drunk family member is enough.”
Zeb stops pacing. “Okay. Okay. Let me ask you, is this Edit person legit? Sounds pretty iffy to me. She asks about bag lady Evelyn, and suddenly your aunt shows up?”
That had occurred to me. “Yeah, that occurred to me. I think Edit is cool. It makes no sense for her to bring Evelyn home, unless she’s telling me the truth. If it was a money thing, then she would leave her stepdaughter rolling with the lowlifes.”
“Okay,” says Zen. “That being the case, here’s the plan: Get the aunt home and beg for asylum.” He spreads his arms wide like he just presented me with a lost Shakespeare sonnet.
“That’s it? You want me to drive back into New York where there are cops and gangsters looking for me?”
“Exactly,” says Zeb, swiping the bottle from my hand. “Jason and his boys are all tooled up, anyway Mike ain’t going near that place in the daylight. I’ll take Miss Fruitcake on my rounds and you deliver Evelyn to your hot grandma. Ain’t nobody gonna break into a private apartment building in Manhattan. Rich folk have more security than the president. You’ll be safer in there than in a safe. One of those safes with tungsten and shit in the door.”
I rub my chin against the grain of bristle. Tungsten and shit. Dr. Kronski sure knew how to screw up a presentation. But if you ignored him being a dick, Zeb made a good point. Just one thing to clear up.
“Where will you take Miss Fruit . . . Sofia? She doesn’t like leaving the building.”
Sofia steps up to Zeb and if he had glasses they’d be steaming up.
“Miss Fruitcake doesn’t leave the building,” she says firmly. “Ever.”
“I can give you some pills,” says Zeb, who knows how to push people’s buttons. “And you get to inject people . . . in the face.”
Sofia’s eyes glaze over and I know she is already gone.
Before we split up, Sofia plants one of those kisses on me that pulls my heart loose from its moorings. Initially I’m a little embarrassed to be kissing a lady right out in the open like that, but then Sofia grabs fistfuls of my hair and gives it an extra 10 percent, and I am lost in the moment. I want to appreciate this while it’s happening because every kiss could be the last one.
Eventually even Zeb is blushing and decides to puncture the romantic bubble.
“Dan, why don’t you shoot off in your shorts already before you get us all killed?”
Sofia pulls away with a soft pop as she breaks the seal along with the spell.
“Dan,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “I get to inject people in the face.”
“I’m happy for you, baby,” I say. This is not sarcasm. Anything that gets my Sofia outside in the sunshine is a good thing.
Evelyn is still out on the sofa. I heft her easily and she burps fumes into my face. I don’t react well to whiskey belches usually, but she’s family so you gotta make allowances.
“Come on, Aunt Evelyn,” I say, draping her arm across my shoulders. “Let’s get you to the car.”
Evelyn perks up for long enough to prove to me that her sense of humor is intact.
“I’ll drive,” she says, then slumps heavily in my arms.
I sit Aunt Evelyn in the passenger seat of Freckles’s Caddy, cinching the belt tightly to keep her secure. Being out on the road like this in a stolen car is not ideal, but ideal is a fond memory at this point. Compared to being strapped into a torture chair, driving a hot automobile ain’t too much of a chore.
I go out of my way to drive past the club and am relieved to see Jason himself on the door, flanked by two of his construction crew, shooting menacing looks at the public in general and flexing their pectoral muscles in a synchronized manner that suggests that they can hear music that I can’t.
Jason spots me driving past in the big Caddy and puts in a call to my cell. I take the call through the car’s system.
“Yo, boss. How’s she cuttin’?”
This is an Irish rural expression that Jason picked up from me. He does my accent too when he’s feeling brave.
“Yeah, she’s cuttin’ fine but I got a lot of heat on me today, so I gotta keep out of the club. You cool to handle Mike if he shows?”
Jason growls into the phone. “Yeah. I am so cool to handle that seersucker-wearing motherfucker.”
This is not good. J is at DEFCON 2 already.
“Hey, partner. Take it easy. Mike has plenty of bodies to throw at this. We don’t. It does
n’t matter if you beat Mike down, he’s just coming back with guns. So gently gently, comprendé?”
“Got it, Dan. You gonna be all right, dawg?”
“Ten four, dog. I’m gonna be cool if I can steer clear of the five-oh.”
Ten four. Dog. Five-oh?
I have no shame.
Next thing you know I’ll be putting my hands in the a-yuh.
The drive into Manhattan takes barely two hours but feels like it knocks about five years off my life. I’m seeing cops behind each windshield and on every rooftop. If there’s one thing the blues and the hoods have in common it’s their desire to rain down vengeance on anyone who applies a little bodily harm to members of their fraternity. Adding dildoes and YouTube videos into the mix only serves to increase agitation on both sides.
The blues will have their vengeance and you can bet it will be entirely disproportionate.
My shrink, Simon Moriarty, once told me I was obsessed with vengeance, to which I replied: Obsessed with vengeance? Who told you that? I’ll kill him.
How we laughed. Happy times. I miss those days when all my issues were in my head. Nowadays it seems my problems are external and well armed.
I give Edit a terse call to let her know I’m en route with the package, and my chatter brings Evelyn around. She walks two fingers along her scalp, wincing as they make contact with the spongy ridge of sutures.
“Man,” she says. “That was a bad one. You got anything to drink in this car, buddy? Something to help a girl straighten herself out.”
I’m starting to feel like the women in my life are actively trying to forget who I am.
“Evelyn. It’s Daniel, remember? Margaret’s boy.”
I sneak quick sideways glances at my aunt and watch her disintegrate. All that self-loathing is hard on the features. They say the eyes are the window to the soul but the face is a roadmap to the past, which would be a pretty good tattoo for those people who like whole paragraphs inked along their arms.
Evelyn’s features collapse inward as though she’s been punched. Her mouth crinkles and purses, dragging her nose down and chin up. Her forehead is momentarily smooth then deeply lined once more as she draws breath. Evelyn’s skin is dry and flaked across the nose, and sunspots dot her cheeks. She snuffles like a baby bear, then bawls aloud. I am embarrassed and not because adults shouldn’t cry. I’ve seen grown men cry on the battlefield. I did it myself a few times, hunched behind cover waiting for the ordnance with my name on it, but grown-ups don’t howl. That’s worse than letting the bowels go.