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?”
Freckles hoists me so we’re nose to nose. “That’s right. Ben Toole.”
Sometimes you gotta laugh even though it could get you killed. “Bent Tool? Get the feck out. What is wrong with parents?”
Ben blushes with rage and his freckles disappear. “Ben . . . Toole. With an E.”
I am still not altogether together, if you know what I mean. My face feels like it’s been flayed, my body is for shit, but I think it’s important to keep the conversation going.
“Everyone knows there’s an E in Ben, Freckles. I’m not a fecking tool . . . No offense.”
Freckles jabs me in the solar plexus, which is probably doing some damage, but my pain levels are so off the scale that the blow doesn’t even register.
“The E is in Toole. At the end.”
I get it. “Oh, like O’Toole, without the O.”
This apparently is a vowel too far for Freckles because he howls with that particular anguish brought on by decades of taunting and bundles me into the back of the Hummer. I get an upside-down glimpse of the driver and it’s the kid: Shea.
I am confused.
Freckles climbs in behind me and slams the door.
“Did you see that, Ben?” asks the kid. “I nailed those fucking cops. I fucking crushed them. Who’s a college boy now? Who’s got soft hands now?”
And then, I cannot believe this, they actually high-five each other. These guys are tight. It’s like they watched Sesame Street and learned all about tolerance and seeing the other person’s point of view.
Shea jerks a thumb toward me. “Tell me we’re going to torture this motherfucker, old school.”
Bent Tool pulls off his mask and knuckles me in the temple. “You know it, kid. Old school.”
Old school? I remember when Run-D.M.C. were old school, now it’s torturing the Irish guy.
Fecking old-school, hummus-eating, catch-Murphy’s-22 bullshit.
Shea follows Freckles’s directions and pulls the Hummer into a chop shop two blocks back from Javits. I always wondered who had the brilliant notion to drop the city’s biggest convention center in this neighborhood. Every year dozens of accountants and IT guys get themselves in hot water because they take the wrong cross street on the way back to their midtown Holiday Inn. The lucky ones get a couple of taps and their wallets lifted, the unlucky ones end up hooked on smack. I heard a rumor of a pimp who runs a specialty stable of ex-librarians that he picked off from the pack and turned out. Probably an urban myth.
I take advantage of the drive to pull myself together a little, and by the time Freckles hauls me out of the vehicle I am pretty certain that I was not handcuffed by a gorilla. On the negative side, whatever Edit gave me is wearing off and I realize that I am just about the most messed up I have ever been. My bruises have got bruises and those bruises have got welts, and don’t even get me started on the lacerations. I reckon my left ear is cauliflowered for good and one of my eyes has a weird shelf above it that doesn’t feel like any swelling I’ve ever had.
What I am is past caring.
If it was up to me, I would throw in the towel right now and spare myself the rest of this shitty day.
Freckles jostles me across the factory floor, which is occupied by luxury sedans mainly, but with a couple of cannibalized mopeds lying around like busted Terminators. There’s a grease monkey in Texaco ov
eralls poking around in the guts of a yellow cab but he doesn’t even take his head out from under the hood. I guess whatever goes down in here, he doesn’t want to witness it.
With rough encouragement from the barrel of Freckles’s pistol I stumble through an oil puddle to an office area that has been blocked off by a rank of filing cabinets on one side and a dirty partition on the other. Freckles sits me down in a plastic chair that squeaks with fright under the sudden trauma of bearing my weight. He never takes his gun off me for a second.
Shea follows and takes a moment to study a wall-mounted Miss July 1972 who is holding a wrench and biting her bottom lip like holding wrenches is pretty stressful.
“What the hell did you do to those cops, McEvoy?” asks Shea, when he is done with ogling. “Whatever it was, they took it real personal.”
“I did a number on them with a dildo,” I say, which is about the strangest statement I’m ever likely to make. I don’t elaborate because I can’t. I only got enough energy for breathing. I try to speak anymore and I could asphyxiate.
This suits Edward Shea just fine, because even though the whole dildo thing is an incredible conversation starter, he wants to get back to his favorite subject: himself.