Screwed

CHAPTER 2

MY DAY JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT MORE COMPLICATED AND I can’t help feeling that a large percentage of that is down to the poison chalice of friendship with Dr. Zebulon Kronski. But my own mouth has gotta shoulder some responsibility too. Every time I have a face-to-face with Mike, I find myself back talking and slinging zingers. When I get too anxious it’s like my mouth runs independently of my mind, which is shriveling like a cut of meat on a hot rock. Simon Moriarty, my sometime shrink, commented on this tendency during one of our sessions when I’d made a stab at humor to gloss over my shell shock.

“You have two problems, Sergeant McEvoy.” He told me as I stood by the window looking out over the quad.

“Only two,” I remember saying. “We are getting somewhere.”

“You see that’s one of your problems right there. All the chatter. The verbal diarrhea.”

“Verbal diarrhea gives me the shits,” my mouth said.

Simon clapped his hands. “There it is again. The technical name for this tic is denial. You use it as a coping mechanism.”

“Denial. That word is too complicated for a lowly sergeant, Doctor.”

“Once upon a time you were vaguely amusing, but now you’re wasting your own time.”

I relented. “Okay, Simon. Tell me.”

“Denial is a classic defense mechanism. It protects the ego from things that the individual cannot cope with. So the patient will basically refuse to believe that he is experiencing stress, and I imagine you crack wise in any stressful situation without even realizing it. The more dangerous the situation, the more smart-assed you get.”

I mulled this over. It was undeniably true that I often shot off my mouth and hit myself in the foot. I had thought this was bravado, something for other people to grudgingly admire.

Something occurred to me. “Hey, Doc. You said I had a second problem?”

“That’s right.”

“You planning on telling me?”

Simon scooted to the window on his office chair and lit a cheroot, blowing the smoke outside.

“Your second problem is that you’re not very funny, and the only way people are going to tolerate a smart-ass is if he’s amusing.”

This wounded me. I had always quietly thought myself reasonably witty.

Zeb is in the corridor begging Manny to hit him in the stomach.

“Come on, man, punch me,” he urges, yanking up his shirttails to reveal a stomach with about as much definition as a bag of milk. “Just do it. I’ve been working out with the Zoom Overmaster Trainer to the Stars DVDs. You couldn’t hurt me if you tried. These abs are like rocks.”

I can see Manny Booker’s brain going into meltdown. People do not usually ask to be assaulted, and yet hurting people is what he is employed to do. I put them both out of their misery by jabbing Zeb in the solar plexus on my way past. He collapses in a breathless ball and I can’t say that I don’t grin a little.

“You should ask for a refund on those DVDs, Zeb,” I say, still walking, which must look pretty cool if anyone’s filming.

I’m tempted to stop and watch Zeb writhe on the carpet, but it’s enough that I can hear him retch.

I am two blocks away before he draws level with me in his Prius. Someone told Zeb that Leonardo drives a Prius and that was it.

“What the fuck, Irish? You are testing our friendship.”

I keep walking. You can’t enter into a debate with Zeb Kronski or it will drive you demented. All the same, I can’t help thinking what I would reply.

I’m testing our friendship? Me? Because of you I’m delivering a mystery envelope to a touchy guy in SoHo. Because of you I am involved, yet again, in a life-or-death situation. The life being mine and also probably the death.

“I thought we were a team, Dan. Semper fi, bro.”

Semper fi, my Irish arse. He was a medic with the Israeli army, I was a peacekeeper for the UN. Not a Marine between us.

I stride down the block and he cruises alongside like a john.

“Is this about Mike’s old lady? Okay, I was getting in good there, man, but at a later date I was gonna bring you in to lay some emerald pipe. I was doing it for both of us.”

I grit my teeth. Really? Both of us? So how come I’ve got this envelope in my pocket and you’re off to inject Jersey housewives’ faces with cheap Chinese filler? Doesn’t seem fair.

Zeb lights a fat cigar and fills the Toyota’s interior with blue smoke. “I was thinking long term. I shoot Mike’s bitches up for a couple of years and then we’re golden. How was I to know Mrs. Madden would get herself electro-fuckin’-cuted?”

A couple more blocks, then I’m at the casino and Zeb will find himself barred from Slotz.

“I can’t believe you hit me,” says Zeb, who never could stay penitent for long. “I thought you were my bobeshi.”

I am starting to believe that Zeb comes out with these incredibly dense statements just to trick me into engaging. If it is a ploy, it works every time.

I take two rapid steps to the Prius’s window. “You can’t believe I hit you?” I shout, drawing looks from the clusters of midmorning cigarette-break employees on the sidewalk. “You were begging to be hit. You lifted up your shirt, for Christ’s sake.”

“I wasn’t begging to be hit by you,” argues Zeb. “That other guy was a jelly roll. My abs coulda taken a shot from him.”

I change tack. “And bobeshi?” I say, slapping the Toyota with my palm. “Really?”

“Hey,” says Zeb. “Take it easy on the car. Have you got something against the environment?”

“I’m a feckin’ Irish Catholic and even I know bobeshi means grandmother. I’m your grandmother now?”

Zeb is unrepentant. “Patients like the Yiddish, so I throw it in every now and then. Makes me seem wise or some shit. I was just going for the family vibe, like we’re brothers. I’m more of a Hebrew guy to be honest, Dan. Is that what this whole sulk is about? I don’t know Yiddish?”

It’s a goddamn maze arguing with this guy. Like trying to hold onto an eel, if you’ll excuse me mangling my metaphors.

I rest on the car for a moment, feeling it thrumming gently through my forehead, then I straighten.

“Okay. Go home, Zeb.”

“Are we good?”

“Yeah. Golden. Whatever. Just forget it.”

Zeb flicks ash onto the asphalt. “What about my accent?”

I’m beaten now, he knows it. “Your accent?”

“You said my Irish accent was bad. I worked on that, man. I watched Far and Away twice.” He screws up his face for a Tom Cruise impersonation. “You’re a corker, Shannon,” he lilts. “What a corker you are.”

I feel like heaving on the sidewalk. I could be dead by nightfall and this dick is nursing a bruised ego.

“That’s good,” I say for peace sake. “Uncanny.”

Zeb’s eyes find the middle distance. “I coulda played the shit out of that role.”

“Maybe they’ll do a reboot,” I say.

I know this term because Zeb and I spend a lot of our free time, as two single middle-aged bucks, watching TV. How cool and edgy is that? Most of our references are pop culture and our favorites at the moment are old episodes of the egregiously canceled shows Terriers and Deadwood.

Whores get fuckin’.

Classic.

Why the hell would anyone cancel Deadwood? If that guy ever comes into my club he better have the viewing figures in his pocket.

Zeb perks up. “Reboot. Fuckin’ A.”

“Fuckin’ A,” I agree wearily.

Seeing it all ahead of him, Zeb guns the Prius and shoots off down the street at the speed of a four-year-old on roller skates, and I wonder not for the first time whether my life would be less pathetic without him in it.

Fuckin’ A.

At the raggedy end of Cloisters’ nightclub alley sits Slotz. My kingdom.

About two steps up from a bordello. Most nights.

I won the lease for this place in a poker game a few months back, so I reckoned I might as well occupy the apartment that sits on top of it seeing as I’m already paying for it. The previous leaseholder lived elsewhere but kept the apartment up as what he tenderly referred to as a fuck pad. You can bet your last nickel that I brought in a team of industrial cleaners to steam the shit out of that place before I moved in, but I held on to the waterbed and a Jacuzzi, which is coin operated if you can believe that. I bet if Mike knew about the Jacuzzi coin box he’d want a slice of that too. I realize protection is a necessary evil, but these guys don’t seem to realize that there is a recession on.

Zeb is not sold on the whole Jacuzzi idea.

Fucking jizz pools, he informed me one night when he actually scored a classy lady in the club and I gallantly offered the two of them a handful of change for a whirl in my deluxe power bath. What do you think goes on under those bubbles? And how often do you clean the pipes? That pearly gunk has probably made its way into the water system by now. We’re all down here chugging down some guy’s tadpoles, smacking our lips and saying yum yum.

I guess you don’t have to be smart to be a doctor.

I try to stay positive about Slotz but it’s hard because of the specter of shitholery hanging over the joint. This place has been a dump for a decade and a craphole for twenty years before that, but we’re trying to change things. Me and my business partner Jason Dyal.

Jason is doing most of the work, to give the guy credit. Jason has been a revelation and a godsend. And if that reads a little over the top, it’s because Jason is gay and I tend to overdo the praise thing just to show how cool I am with that. I get embarrassed when he starts bandying around words like queer and homo, but he says he’s been holding it in for so long that he feels entitled to queer it up a little now.

I’m a queen in a safe environment, Danny, he told me a couple of months back. So you’re getting an eyeful of the real me.

Fag away, I said, trying to get into the swing, which stopped him dead in his tracks.

I’ve stayed out of the swing since then.

So anyways, Jason has been my partner for several years since we started bouncing this place. I always knew he was a tough-as-nails kind of guy, but I did not know that he also had natural business acumen and could handle a toolkit, which is not a euphemism. I stood in a porch with the guy for the best part of a decade through the rain and snow holding doors for addicts and perverts and knew damn all about him. Then again, he knew the square root of damn all about me. But now that we’re business partners we got a stake in each other’s future, so mutual trust has entered the equation. This feels good on a day-to-day basis, but it the long term it’s bad, because now Mike has someone else to punish for my sins.

So that’s Sofia, my kinda girlfriend on her good days.

Dr. Zeb, my peacetime buddy from the Lebanon war zone.

And Jason, my tool-swinging business partner.

Three friends now. I’m turning into Miss Popularity.

Jason spots me coming in the front door and he climbs down from a stepladder and hails me.

“Hey, boss man. You came home, I was worried sick.”

“Less of the sarcasm, J. And we’re partners now, remember?”

Jason looks like a linebacker in dungarees and a hard hat, and I know if Zeb was here that he’d ask Jason if he was going to a club with the rest of the Village People and Jason would laugh his ass off. I aspire to that level of nonchalance.

“Yeah, partners. I do all the work and you grace us with your presence when the day is nearly done.”

“Sorry, J. Won’t happen again.”

Jason tugs a Post-it from his helmet where Marco, his boyfriend and our head barman, probably stuck it.

“Here’s the to-do list for today.”

I hang my leather coat on the stand. “Gimme the summary, J. I gotta wash and go. Mike trouble.”

Jason snarls and I can see the diamond twinkling in his incisor and I don’t think there is a soul on this earth would use the term queen to describe him right now.

“That Mike guy is a thorn in our side, Dan. Come on. We got skills, I think we could call in a few people and take him.”

Jason knows plenty about accountancy and remodeling spaces, and maybe he can crack heads pretty good, but he doesn’t know shit about going tactical, and I don’t just mean pulling the trigger, I mean living with yourself afterward.

“No one’s taking anyone, J. I gotta run an errand for Mike. You keep banging away here.”

Jason pouts, which is new. “It’s a bit more than banging away, Danny. This dump is going to be a palace by the time we’re through. This whole area will be open plan. I swear I could pull down these partitions with my teeth, and the sweet part is we don’t even need a permit because the walls are not even on the original drawings.”

Being made partner has given Jason a real shot in the arm. He goes at everything with the enthusiasm of a five-year-old wired on Skittles.

“That’s great. So what have we got on today?”

It’s crazy; I’m making small talk like it’s an ordinary day when I’ve got two hundred large in prehistoric currency burning a hole in my pocket. It occurs to me that it would not be beyond Mike to send someone after me to steal his own bonds and put me in the frame with Shea. In one move he could extricate himself from this guy’s debt and get someone else to take the risk of sneaking up behind me.

Jason walks with me like we’re in the halls of power and I try to focus on what he’s saying. “Today, we’re breaking through from the back room to the roulette wheel. Practically doubles our space. I got a few of the boys coming over to help out. Throw on some nice green and yellow paint.” He eyes me pointedly. “You’re good with those colors, right?”

Shades of emulsion are way down on my list of concerns right now.

“Sure. Why not? And we’re still gonna be open by Friday?”

“Not completely finished, but we can open, sure.”

“Good. You the man.”

It’s true. Jason is the man. Without him and his goodwill network we couldn’t afford the new coat of paint for this job.

I am gonna allow myself to think positive for five seconds, so I fake punch and Jason fake blocks. “I got high hopes, J. We could actually make a living. All of us.”

“Fuck living,” says Jason. “We’re gonna make bank.”

I wince. It’s an Irish Catholic pre-emptive guilt reaction to any expression of optimism. Pride comes before a fall. The Jewish folks have it too, as Zeb puts it: You get too cocky, you get that cock cut off.

Like many of Zeb’s sayings it doesn’t bear scrutiny but gets the point across.

Plus even banks ain’t making bank these days.

I have a plan of sorts re the Mike/bearer-bonds situation. Nip upstairs to my apartment to clean up and put on my stomping boots. Swing by the bus station, select a gun from my locker stash and take the bus into the city. Maybe I’ll stop off at Spring and pick up a slice at Ben’s but that’s not a priority, and only works if I’m alive and the queue of tourists doesn’t stretch too far around the block.

This is a pretty slapdash plan but I figure I’ll have plenty of time to fine-tune it on the bus.

But the best-laid plans come undone, and the causal ones unravel even faster. My shower and change proceeds exactly as envisioned but the gun-bus-pizza portion of my strategy lasts precisely five steps from the club when I notice an unmarked cop sedan idling beside the hydrant opposite. I know the two cops inside by the shapes of their heads. Coupla knucklehead detectives called Krieger and Fortz, who Lieutenant Ronelle Deacon once informed me couldn’t find their dicks with mirrors and a dick-o-scope, which cracked me up at the time. Now that level of incompetence seems a little ominous. Fortz looks like he’s wearing a helmet and, with his long neck and slender skull, Krieger could have a lightbulb on his shoulders.

Maybe they’re not looking for me, I think.

Yeah, and maybe if Zeb’s Uncle Mort had a pussy and so on and so forth.

Krieger spots me in the mirror and attempts to exit the squad nonchalantly, which is tough to do when your partner has parked level with a hydrant. Krieger dings the door panel real good before he realizes he’s shut in there.

This would be a great jumping-off point for me if I wanted to get into some back and forth with these guys, but I’m feeling a little worn out with all the morning’s repartee, plus I got an envelope in my breast pocket with big denominations inside it, which I am pretty certain were not attained legally. With this in mind I decide to play it straight with these blues no matter how much klutzing they get up to.

Fortz slides out the driver side but keeps his distance. I guess the word is out that I can knock people over pretty good.

“Morning,” says Fortz, hiding his bulk behind the door. “Or is it afternoon?”

“Brunchtime,” I say, all cultured.

“Good one,” says Fortz, flopping his wallet open to give me an eyeful of the ID inside. “I’m Detective Fortz and that dummy trying to get of the car is Detective Krieger,” he says, a thumb hooked into his belt, keeping one hand close to his holster. “You’re McEvoy, right?”

Not much point in denying it. “That’s me, Detective Fortz of the force. What can I do for you?”

Fortz is living proof that evolution goes both ways. He’s got the aforementioned helmet-head look going on, with a skull that shines like a buffed bowling ball. The man is completely hairless as far as I can see and his features seem to belong to a much smaller face. It’s as if his head kept growing but his eyes, nose and mouth said screw it at about age fifteen. His tongue lolls a bit when he’s not speaking and another one of my doorman theories states that tongue lollers are quick to violence. Someday I’m gonna write all these nuggets down for future generations of doormen. Maybe I’ll attain guru status and get on Dr. Phil. I would love that, sitting on the chair opposite Phil, just close enough to smack that smug fucker in the chops. I probably wouldn’t take the shot, but little dreams keep a person going.

Fortz swaps his wallet for a phone and checks the screen to show me how in demand he is.

“Lieutenant Deacon wants to see you,” he says. “It’s important.”

“You’re running errands for the Troopers now?”

Fortz grins. “Just lending a hand. We’re all on the same team.”

I tell myself not to panic. Ronnie is straighter than Robocop and I haven’t done anything bad yet today. “Tell her I’ll be in the club later and to come on down.”

“Nah,” says Fortz. “She sent us to pick you up, get it?”

In my imagination the envelope is glowing through the fabric of my jacket.

“What kind of appointment is this?” I ask, like there’s a good kind.

“I think it’s a doughnut-tasting sorta deal,” says Fortz, his little features jiggling with mirth like the last jelly beans in a bowl. “Now, are you gonna get in back or do I have to start wondering why?”

Krieger has given up trying to get out of the car and I can tell by the set of his shoulders that he’s sulking.

“Okay, I’m getting in. Just tell your partner not to shoot me. I ain’t the one who locked him in the car.”

Fortz’s eye roll implies a fractious relationship with his partner, soured by years of grumpy stakeouts and botched coffee orders. “I think maybe I’ll shoot him and pin it on you. How does that grab you?”

He ushers me into the backseat, still chuckling.

Blues. Comedians every last one. I read somewhere that cops develop a macabre and inappropriate sense of humor just to survive the job, but I reckon that mostly this disposition has been lurking under the surface looking for a way to climb out. Like a troll down a dark well.

Krieger is not pretty to look at even from behind. He’s got these weird little clumps of hair sticking out from the back of his head like greasy stalactites and his shirt collar is clumping up his neck fat, which is weird because the rest of him is skinny as a matchstick.

As Fortz drives, Krieger has his arms folded and is giving off icy vibes. Fortz puts up with this for about two minutes, then . . .

“Come on, man,” he says, leaning across to punch his partner in the arm. “That hydrant thing was funny shit. Took some driving too. Talladega Nights, dude.”

Shake and bake, I think.

Krieger slaps away the punch. “Funny shit? How many times are you gonna pull that? I am sick to death of bashing the car door. You know I’m claustrophobic, Fortz, you asshole?”

“’Course I fucking know. That’s why it’s funny.”

Much as I would like to consider these guys total idiots, I’d have to be deep in denial not to hear the similarities between their bitching and what Zeb and I get into on a daily basis. It’s a little depressing.

“Hey, fellas,” I say, trying to keep it jaunty. “You really want a civilian listening in on your domestics?”

Krieger twists around poking his hand between the headrest and seat. I can’t help noticing there’s a Taser in his fist and the charge light is flashing green.

“No,” he says. “I guess we don’t.”

And he shoots me in the chest, which turns my entire universe electric blue. Through the neon I hear Krieger’s voice saying: “Moron brought that on himself.”

I wonder who the moron is?