Screwed

CHAPTER 6

SO HERE’S EVELYN COSTELLO, THE AWOL HEIRESS WHO schooled me in the ways of mammipulation which is not a word but should be, back in my life again after twenty years within four hours of me meeting her stepmother, who is about a decade younger than her stepdaughter.

This is starting to sound like yee-haw heaven; It gits so darn lonesome in the trailer park that there ain’t nuthin’ for it but to hump yore own sister.

I know plenty of people that don’t believe in coincidence, but I do. They happen all the time. It’s usually petty stuff like meeting two guys called Ken inside an hour or buying a DVD on the very night a movie shows up on cable. Generally coincidences do not have immediate and obvious life-altering consequences. I suppose it’s possible that Edit and Evelyn would plonk themselves in the middle of my stressful day by total coincidence, but it would be one hell of a twist of fate.

Now that I’m close to her, examining the head wound that Sofia inflicted, I notice that Evelyn smells just like I remember. Still using the same shampoo. Women do that; stay loyal to a product. Men always think there might be something better out there. Men like Carmine.

I swab the wound with a little antiseptic, but that’s all I do because anything more and Zeb will have one of his doctor-ial shit fits like I’m not a professional and did I think he spent six years in medical school just so some grunt could go around getting all surgical? It’s not often Zeb gets to play real doctor and so he gets pissed if anyone steals so much as a peal of his thunder.

My Twitter icon chirps and spits out a nugget from Simon:

To Klingon22- Sure it’s okay for you to be attracted to a Romulon. We are all the same under the latex.

I don’t know who Klingon22 is but I would swap places with him in a heartbeat.

I lay Evelyn out on the sofa and am still watching over her when Zeb shows up. As usual, Sofia is less than happy to see his face, and as usual Zeb tries it on with her.

“Hey Sofia, baby,” he says, arms wide. “It’s me, your darling Carmine, back from the wars where I’ve been for the past coupla decades. They had me in a stockade, baby. Did stuff with bamboos and shit. All that kept me from spilling my guts was the thought of your sweet ass.”

Someone should write a book about Zeb and the series of shenanigans that his life so far is composed of. A book would be good, but not a movie because movies gotta have story arcs and through lines. And what kinda through line is “guy does dumb shit daily”? Not much of one. Not a whole lot of character development there.

Sofia glares at me like I’m responsible for this douche. “You got guns, Dan. Why don’t you shoot this guy and do the world a favor?”

Zeb brushes past her. “Nice. That’s what I get for trying to be a gentleman.”

I wish Zeb wouldn’t screw with Sofia, especially when she’s in a hammer-swinging mood. One of these days he’s gonna greet Sofia with one of his casual misogynisms and she’s gonna crack his skull like an egg. And when that happens all the king’s horses will not give a rat’s ass.

Zeb squats beside me.

“Yo, movie star,” he says, dropping a Gladstone bag between his feet. “What do we got here? Live flesh or dead meat?”

It worries me that the doctor doesn’t notice his patient is breathing. I decide to defer the usual banter until Evelyn is patched up.

“Head wound,” I say tersely, not giving him much to work with. “Couple of sutures, I’d say.”

Zeb leans in close and pokes Evelyn’s injury with a grubby fingertip. “I agree with your prognosis, Dr. Paddy. Of course the patient’s skull could be fractured in which case her brain fluid is leaking right now. She spasming at all? Or speaking in tongues? You now, Exorcist shit?”

“No. Just lying there. And could you take your finger out of my aunt’s head?”

Zeb retracts the digit and examines the clotted blood on its tip. “Aunt? So she’s available?”

I am not sure what kind of low self-esteem issues Zeb has going on that make him want to screw anything that does not currently have a dick. Maybe he’s just depraved. I vaguely remember that I once found his unrelenting horniness funny but right now, with all the stress factors I have on my shoulders, I am a hair’s breadth from punching Zeb in the temple, even though he’s the only one who can patch up Evelyn.

“Zeb. You are on my shit list at the moment because of the whole Mike thing, but if you do this for me, if you fix this lady, we’re square, got it? You should take that deal, it’s a good one.”

Zeb hums “Tainted Love,” which is one of his thinking songs, then pulls a huge hunting knife from the bag at his feet.

“Nice knife,” says Sofia, drawn in by the glint.

Zeb attempts to twirl the blade but only succeeds in fumbling the knife and almost cutting off his toes. “Yeah, thanks, my little goyish princess. This beauty is a genuine reproduction of John Rambo’s blade from Firstblood. A collector’s item.”

I am a little worried that Zeb is going too far with his movie-star obsession but more worried that he’s gonna excise half of Evelyn’s scalp when all we need is a little stitching.

“Zeb, no cutting. She’s been cut enough.”

Zeb sighs. “Cutting? I thought you were a movies man, Dan. Don’t you remember that scene? They’re all doing it now, it’s kind of a staple, but at the time Stallone was breaking new ground.”

I do remember it. The screw-top knife.

“Classic.” I have to admit it.

“Firstblood was a movie?” asks Sofia. “I could have sworn that was real.”

Zeb screws off the compass on the hilt of his knife and inside the handle is a needle and thread, sealed in a SteriPack.

“Sly didn’t have a sealed packet,” says Zeb casually, like he and Stallone are bowling buddies. “But then he didn’t have to worry about his license.”

Zeb is still at the honeymoon phase with his medical license, having recently acquired it through some outrageous wheeler dealing involving a fat envelope, two members of the state board and the mother of crazy weekends in Atlantic City. Zeb hinted that at least three of Tiger Woods’s mistresses were involved but more specific information would no doubt be eked out over the coming years.

“You got any anesthetic?”

Zeb snorts and raps on Evelyn’s forehead. “Are you kidding? I could amputate this chick’s arm and she wouldn’t flinch.”

He swabs the wound with a very un-Rambo-like baby wipe, then stitches Evelyn up. Two minutes and he’s biting the thread. I gotta give it to him, the little bastard can be efficient when he feels like it.

“Good work, Zeb,” I say, enjoying the fleeting moment of sincere gratitude that Zeb will no doubt screw up by speaking.

“Yeah, well maybe when Aunty wakes up, I’ll get a real thank-you, know what I’m saying, Sarge?”

Reliable as a Swiss banker. Zeb adds fuel to the fire with: “You think the nutjob has anything to drink? I’m parched, movie star.”

Sofia is apparently unperturbed by being referred to as nutjob and walks to the kitchen to fetch us a drink.

I am relieved to find Evelyn’s breathing steady. I concentrate on that for a moment because I have so many urgencies to consider that I can’t engage with any of them.

Something that Zeb said niggles at me, breaking through my funk.

“Hey, Zebulon, why are you calling me ‘movie star’? That’s new.”

Zeb literally jumps to his feet, stumbling backward a few steps, almost colliding with Sofia and her tray.

“Oh fuck! Oh shit, Dan! You don’t know? You genuinely don’t know?”

I groan. This sounds like big news so Zeb won’t give it up easy.

“No. So do me a favor and don’t tell me. I got enough shit on my shovel at the moment, okay?”

I am not playing games here. My crisis dance card is pretty full.

Zeb walks up and down, agitated like he needs to Riverdance but is holding it in.

“Okay, screw it. I’m just gonna show you.” He pulls out his phone and opens a clip.

“This is up on YouTube. Fifty thousand hits and counting.”

My stomach lurches because my subconscious has figured it out. The rest of me needs to look at the screen.

Don’t look.

I gotta look. How can I not look?

I’m warning you. This ain’t gonna be a video of some kid wasted after the dentist.

So I look.

And it isn’t a kid after the dentist. Or a cat punching a dog. Or some be-dreadlocked teen falling off his board.

It’s me. Hitting a cop with an enormous dildo. The porn crew caught the entire episode. Maybe Zeb doesn’t know my victim is a cop.

“You know that’s a cop, don’t you?” says Zeb. “And that guy back there, weeping. Another cop. Detectives Krieger and Fortz. They been tagged about a hundred times, mostly by other cops LOL’ing their cyber assholes off.”

“I thought that dildo was smaller,” I mumble just to take the focus from the video.

Zeb’s focus does not waver. “It’s perspective. Dildos always seem smaller when you’re holding them.”

I am in no position to judge Zebulon right now.

Sofia plucks the phone from Zeb’s hand and retreats to the corner with a bottle of whiskey. After a couple of replays she slugs from the neck and says:

“Nice thong, Dan.” And then: “This is real but Rambo isn’t? I’m confused.”

Me too. Most of the time.

My own phone brrrps and spits out a Tweet. I check it even though screen checking hasn’t been working out so well for me lately.

Life is not a rehearsal. Life is real. No do-overs. So put down that bottle of Grouse and go have safe sex with someone.

No do-overs. No take backs. The genie is out of the bottle.

It’s just a pity the genie is wearing a pink thong and wielding a dildo.

Somehow then I fall asleep, right there standing up. It comes out of no-where. One second my neck is burning with embarrassment, and it seems like the next that I am blinking away the fog of a power nap.

“Huh?” I say, because it takes a second for the cylinders to fire in my brain.

A bit of advice for you: never answer the phone rising out of a deep sleep. First because your voice sounds like you spent twenty years sinking shots with Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart, and secondly you might say something not strictly relevant to the real world. I learned this the hard way when Tommy Fletcher called me on Irish time and I bolted upright in bed, blurting: Terrorist pigeons, honest to Christ, they’ve trained the pigeons.

Tommy reminds me of this often with great hilarity from his end. So my advice is when you hear that phone ringing, talk to yourself for a few seconds before answering. Gets everything moving.

Apparently I have been talking in my sleep because Zeb is all caught up on the events of my hellish day.

“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 doesn’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.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, come on.”

Genius, right? I should be a professional comforter. Surely I have a couple more platitudes in the barrel.

“It’s okay, Evelyn. I’m here now.”

These pathetic überclichés make her cry all the more. Evelyn is bleating now, like a goat, digging her nails into her own legs. I do not know what to do. I am seriously stumped. Should I pull over and give hugs or something?

So I do nothing. I ride it out, waiting for my aunt to run out of steam. Eventually she calms down, drawing the folds of her worn shirt tight as though hiding nakedness.

“Dan,” she says, voice thin from wailing. “Daniel. Danny. I’m hurting, nephew. Could we stop at a liquor store? All I need is a hit. One belt.”

Hit, belt, slug.

All terms of violence. Why is that? Seems like something I should contemplate moodily at some maudlin moment in the future. Might be important but I’d have to be loaded to get it.

Loaded. There it is again.

“No, Evelyn. We need to get where we’re going. It’s not safe to be with me right now. You picked a bad time to make contact.”

“Sorry,” says Evelyn, scratching her forearm. “I was coming last week but something happened in Queens. I met this guy and he rolled me. Can you believe that? A guy rolled me. Once upon a time, I was doing the rolling. You know, before the goods went south.”

“You’re good. You look good. All you need is a weekend in one of those spas. Maybe a few shots of thiamine. You’ll be fine.”

It’s true, Evelyn does look good. She’s a skinny drunk without a single strand of gray in her dark hair. I can see how she would work that face to roll guys. Zeb and me have this people-watching thing, where we try and figure out if a girl is actually beautiful or simply young. I figure it’s okay for us to play this game seeing as we’re so goddamn perfect our own selves. But the point is that some faces have a beauty that lasts. Others hit thirty and get plain overnight. Evelyn’s beauty has longevity. She has fine features and the kind of clean neckline that people take photos of and show to their cosmetic surgeon. And it pains me to think of my mother’s baby sister using her features to turn occasional tricks for beer money.

Evelyn flaps her lips. “Vitamin shots? Spare me, Dan, okay. I been down that road a dozen times. All I need is a fifth. Maybe a coupla Percodan for this goddamn headache.”

I find myself losing patience faster than I normally would. Christ, I’ve been a bouncer half of my adult life. I deal with drunks on a daily basis. But this is Evelyn. Sweet, plucky Evelyn who’s the image of my mother. So I slap the steering wheel with a palm and blurt: “Pull yourself together, Aunt Evelyn. For Christ’s sake you’re my mom’s baby sister. You’re the last of her.”

Evelyn laughs. No doubt she meets meaner characters than me in the gutter.

“Okay, nephew. Wow. I’m the last of her. That’s deep or some shit. And here I was thinking I’m my own person.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Relax, Danny. You could use a drink. What say we pull over and knock a couple back. Talk about the old days. You remember that thing with the ice pick?”

She has ruined that memory for me. Polluted it with her slovenly alcoholic self. Fecking alcoholics.

Selfish.

Disease, my arse.

“Please, Evelyn, just sit there, okay?” I am pleading now, funny how quickly it comes back. Please, Dad. Just sit there. Let me make you a cup of tea.

Evelyn tugs on her belt. “I don’t have much choice, do I, Dan? You kidnapping me?”

“Hey, you came to me, remember?”

“I thought we could hang out. Party a little, like we used to.”

Evelyn gave me my first sip of alcohol. Cooking sherry, it was. Revolting stuff, but there was something glamorous about stealing it from the cupboard. The shine has worn off at this point. Nothing glamorous about a middle-aged woman with stains on her pants.

“You’ve partied enough. How did you find me?”

“Kept your postcards, Dan. Last one was from Cloisters.”

Ask a silly question. I bet my postcard pep-talks really helped Ev through withdrawal.

“So that’s it? You’re just working your way down the list?”

Evelyn finger combs her matted hair in the visor mirror. “Kid, you are the list.”

“So, you don’t need help?”

“Yeah, I need help, look at me. And I’ll get it too, maybe in a couple of years. I still have some partying to do first.”

Evelyn rubs at some dry skin under one eye, then seems to notice that we’re going somewhere. “Dan, where are you taking me?”

“Home,” I say, hanging a right onto Central Park south.

I expect Evelyn to freak out, to scream and thrash in her seat, to curse her father’s memory and swear that she’s rather be dead than set foot in that blasted apartment where her life was a cold hell on earth. But all Evelyn does is shiver like she just swallowed her first oyster, and say:

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You don’t mind going back?”

“Nah, it’s time. Edit is okay. And they have good booze up there. I heard stories, Dan. Stories about rich drunks who get their blood changed once a year. They can function, Danny. Run banks and all that stuff.”

I think maybe some of those functioning bankers were drinking meths these past few years.

“So why did you leave?”

Evelyn coughs for half a minute or so before answering. “Leave? I was stupid, I guess. Poor little rich girl, right? I thought I knew about life, well I didn’t know.”

I nod along to this. I have seen this sad story play out a dozen times: rich kid thinks she has it tough, so lives on the credit card for a few years, then ends up with grazed limbs and blackouts. If she survives the cheap hooch, she runs back to the penthouse faster than you can say delirium tremens, which is also comically known as the Irish jig.

You know a country is in bad shape when they start naming alcohol-related illnesses after its inhabitants.

“To be honest, Dan,” says Evelyn, rubbing her nose with a sleeve. “I don’t remember why I left. Not specifically. I was always angry with Dad about something. Seemed important.”

We are stuck behind a horse and carriage loaded with tourists heading into the park. It always amazes me that people can do normal stuff when life-or-death stuff is happening not ten feet away. I remember seeing kids in the Lebanon playing mortar attack with shrapnel from actual mortar grenades, in a minefield, using blood from real corpses as fake blood.

Okay. Maybe not that last bit.

“Edit will look after you,” I promise Evelyn. “It’s time you got straight.”

“Tomorrow,” says Evelyn and her eyes are flickering. “I need a couple of shots of the good stuff first. Maybe a few hours’ sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the clinic.”

This is good enough for me. “Okay. Tomorrow.”

Evelyn chuckles and the decades of whiskey and smoke make her sound like an emphysemic octogenarian. “Did you know Edit is more than five years younger than me? My own stepmom. I wish she was a bitch. I really do; then, you know, I’d have someone to blame besides myself. But Edit was cool. We never did too much group hugging in our family, but she was okay. Bailed me out a couple of times.”

The ultimate good deed in the eyes of a lush: bailout from the drunk tank.

Suddenly my eyes are watery and my laser focus is diffused by sentiment. This is happening to me more and more lately; a childhood memory bobs to the surface and gets me all mushy. I remember, back in Dublin, hiding out with Evelyn on the garage roof. She was teaching me how to roll a cigarette, which is a skill every kid should have in his arsenal, and I was thinking how she looked like my mom and I always wanted to marry my mom, but maybe I could marry Evelyn instead. So I said that to her, how we should get married and she replied; Sure, Danny. We can get married, but you gotta take it easy on my boobs, okay?

Now look at the both of us: A drunk and a fugitive. Where did it all go wrong? Zeb has a saying for most occasions and I think the most apropos one for this moment is Sometimes the ugly duckling don’t turn into no swan, ’cause it’s a fucking duck. And you know what happens to ducks? They get fucked.

That’s what we are, Ev and me, a couple of ugly ducklings. And I know what happens to ducks.

I like a nice four-star hotel, something minimal and modern where the plumbing hasn’t had a chance to buckle under the onslaught. Five-star upscale joints usually bring on an attack of the unworthies. Especially ones like the Broadway Park House, an old-world Central Park South upscale joint with uniformed doormen shooting me the beadies the moment Evelyn and I are disgorged into the lobby by a revolving door. Smells like money in here: floor polish and whiskey fumes. Evelyn’s nose goes up like a bloodhound’s.

“Hey, Dan, you smell that?” she says. “Why don’t we . . .”

“No,” I say, cutting her off sharply. Whichever version of just one drink she is about to launch into, I’ve heard it before. I’ve heard them all.

Edit is pacing the lobby waiting, which is just as well because the doormen have formed a casual cordon around us and are getting set to tighten the noose. She catches sight of Evelyn and freezes like someone pulled her plug. It takes a few seconds to reboot then she’s across the shining floor and all over my aunt. Hugging her close, kissing her forehead. Evelyn grins and works her elbows like she’s dislodging a puppy.

“I don’t even really know this bitch,” she whispers to me between giggles.

If Edit hears this comment she doesn’t let on, but after a few more seconds of flurried hugs and kisses, she backs off and straightens the skirt of her wraparound pattern dress, which, I happen to know, from watching the ruthless Joan Rivers eviscerate red-carpet celebrities on Fashion Police, is a Diane Von Furstenberg.

“Last season,” I say inanely. “But an instant classic.”

“Thank you, Daniel,” says Edit and I swear she is blushing a little, not because I noticed her dress but because she has let her emotions show in public. Getting emotional is anathema to the top 1 percent. Nobody ever got rich by wearing a heart on their sleeve, unless it was someone else’s heart. And this was especially true of Paddy Costello, who tried his darndest to turn his kids into Vulcans and succeeded instead in pushing them somewhere to the left of Cheech and Chong.

Your mother is a whore, was my own father’s comment on mom’s hippie politics. I remember him telling me in a bar in front of all his drink buddies. She screwed so many guys before you popped out, I ain’t even sure you’re mine. Then he paraded the length of the bar collecting pound notes from all the soaks who bet him he couldn’t make a tough little terrier like me cry. Pop was so thrilled with himself he even gave me one of the notes. I took it too, for my ice-pick fund. Screw him.

Terriers. What a great show. What kind of moron cancels Terriers?

Edit calms herself down with some yoga breathing and literally beams at me. Her teeth are white and even like rows of Orbit spearmint except for a slightly crooked fang. I read somewhere that orthodontists are leaving in a flaw these days for a more natural look.

“Daniel,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t believe this is happening. You are my savior.”

I am almost blushing, myself. Edit is genuinely over the moon. There’s no fakery here. I read people pretty good and my levels are all in the green with this woman. She may not be a straight shooter but she’s shooting straight vis-a-vis Evelyn and myself.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say, playing the “shucks ma’am” card. “Just gave my aunt a ride home.”

Home. The word sets Edit off again. “Yes, home. You are home, Evelyn. Please stay. Please. You are all I have. You too, Dan.”

I thought she’d never ask. “Actually, I could use a hideout for a few days. My situation is complicated right now.”

“Of course. Of course. I have plenty of room. Stay as long as you need. In fact longer than you need. Do you have any bags, Evelyn?”

Evelyn frowns. “I had a trash bag full of stuff but the guy who rolled me in Queens took it, the bastard. What the hell does he need pantyhose for?”

Edit is confused. There are so many elements of her stepdaughter’s statement that she can never relate to.

“Rolled you?” she says, almost afraid to ask.

Evelyn elaborates. “Yeah. I had to do a little light hooking for beer money.” She winks. “You know that story, right Edit?”

One of the hovering bellboys snickers and I decide this is the ideal moment to get my aunt squared away before she gets the both of us tossed.

I take a good grip on Evelyn’s belt and march her past the snicker-er. “Elevators back here, Edit?”

Edit’s Laboutins (Fashion Police) tick-tack the marble as she hurries to keep pace with my marching feet.

“Yes. Big golden doors. You can’t miss them.”

That’s not true. You could miss them. All the doors in this place are big and golden, even the restrooms. I take an educated guess and pick the set of golden doors with call buttons.

The Costello penthouse is more subtle now that Edit is pulling the curtain cords. I remember being here once before, the year before Dad introduced the family car to a concrete wall. I was fifteen and mom brought me over for a reconciliation attempt. The logic being that I was the spitting image of Paddy himself as a young man and that gazing into the time-mirror might melt the ice packed around Old Man Costello’s heart. Mom didn’t really want to be there, but she didn’t really want to be where she generally was either and so allowed Evelyn to talk her into coming over.

Father wants to see Dan, Evelyn had told us on her last visit. Dan’s a scrapper and you know Dad’s a sucker for a spunky hard-ass.

I remember sitting in the antechamber waiting for an audience, feeling a little anxious about the phrase spunky hard-ass.

In those days, the Costello penthouse apartment was like something from the Acropolis, with honest-to-God Greek pillars and a couple of busts mounted on plinths. The décor was all from the testosterone school, including the mounted head of a twelve-point buck and a taxidermed mountain gorilla, which was scaring the pants off me with its unblinking stare even though I knew its eyes were glass. I remember Mom hugging the gorilla and calling it Buttons, but that only made the thing creepier. If it had come alive at that moment and squashed my mom in its powerful black fingers I would not have been in the least surprised.

We were kept waiting for half an hour, then a light over the office door flashed green, which meant Mom was cleared to enter.

She squeezed my hand and said. “Okay, Dan, I’m going into the lion’s den. Don’t worry if you hear shouting. That’s just how Paddy Costello communicates.”

Mom slipped inside, the double-height doors making her look elfin, and there was plenty of shouting, almost immediately. I managed to contain myself until I heard the musical tinkle of breaking glass, then I thought to hell with this and barged into the sanctum.

I was feeling pretty good about myself in the role of protector. Only the previous week I had pushed my dad so hard that he cracked his spine on the tabletop and I regularly messed up boys much older than me. Surely I could manage an old man.

Paddy Costello was not even the giant I had built him up to be, in fact I was half a foot taller than he was, but the guy had an energy coming off him in waves, an aura of harsh intimidation. He reminded me of a billy goat, with his spearhead Vandyke, wiry frame and wild, darting eyes. Those eyes flitted from the trophy cabinet, with its glass door that had been shattered by the hurled book, to my mother, who huddled scared in a low wooden chair, then finally to me. The boy who had come to rescue his mother.

My grandfather spat on his own floor then pointed a stiff finger at me, as though I was to blame for the thrown book. I didn’t know what to say to this old guy—I say old but I guess he was maybe fifty—but I needed something strong. My mouth went ahead of its own accord and said, “Fuck you, old man.”

The fuck you didn’t bother Paddy at all. It was the old man that riled him.

“Old? I could take your head off with a punch.”

I didn’t bother responding to that challenge. I just arranged my feet the way my school boxing coach had taught me. Now either he would fight me or shut the hell up.

Paddy did neither. Instead he chuckled, showing a mouth of craggy teeth, and crossed behind his desk to the trophy cabinet.

“Young Daniel. A chip off the Costello block, so they say. Seems like a day doesn’t go by without someone filling my ears with stories of young Daniel.”

I did nothing but keep my eyes on him. Could be he was a tricky bastard.

“Daniel is bright and he’s tough. Daniel could carry on the Costello business, if not the name.”

Paddy reached into the trophy cabinet, through the ring of jagged shards, ignoring the fresh cut on his index finger.

“Let me tell you something, Daniel,” he said drawing out the book. “I don’t need someone to carry on my business or name. I’m gonna live longer than a man has ever lived and after that they’ll put me into the ground. Then I could give a shit about the whole ball of wax. The whole world can go to nuclear hell and I won’t know a thing about it. I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been.”

My mother once told me that her father only had two moods: bad and worse. I supposed that he was giving me a peek at worse.

Paddy thrust the book at me and I caught it on reflex.

“Here’s a test for you, boy. That book is a signed first edition of The Fountainhead. You can sell it today for ten grand. There’s a guy on Fifty-ninth that would give you twelve. But if you hold on to it for a few years it could be worth ten times that. Choose wisely, boy, because this book is all you’ll ever get from me.”

I looked down at the book with the spatter of his blood soaking into its leather cover, then at the man, my grandfather, who had given it to me. He wanted me to throw it back in his face, but I wouldn’t, because when little Patrick was older, ten grand could get us to London. Far away from our father. I’d take Mom with me then, just as I would take her out of here now. So I said:

“You better take two steps back, old man, or you’ll be going into the ground a lot sooner than you planned.”

He wasn’t convinced I was serious, so I played the schoolyard trick of faking a punch. The old man wasn’t used to that sort of behavior. It had probably been a long time since someone faked out Paddy Costello, so he flinched and I laughed in his face. I saw in his eyes then that he would kill me if he could, right there in his office, and I knew I had sealed Mom’s fate as an outcast, but there was no upside to being beholden to this man.

“Get out,” he spat. “Take my . . . your mother with you. And do not ever come back.”

So I took my mother with me and I never came back. Until now.

And the book? I sold it the following day and hid the ten grand in the trunk of our car inside the first-aid kit. It was incinerated when Dad rammed that wall.

I often remind myself that there are people worse off than me; in the Lebanon and so forth, or Calcutta. But on dark days, I can’t help thinking that I’ve been cursed to live a certain kind of life. I try to take care of my friends and run a straight business but instead I get people hurt or run foul of people who want to hurt me. Maybe I have some kid of dark destiny, or maybe that old maxim the luck of the Irish doesn’t apply to me.

Years later, I spotted a secondhand copy of The Fountainhead at a stall on Mingi Street, the rambling souk adjacent to the UN HQ in Beirut. I tried to resist but a person clings to anything with resonance in a war zone. So I paid my ten bucks and pocketed the paperback along with some editions of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. I liked The Fountainhead fine, and I realized that Paddy Costello’s whole “I regret nothing” speech was lifted from the book. I understood then that Gramps considered himself to be in the same principled genius bracket as Rand’s architect Howard Roark.

When I hit on that notion, I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks and the guy in the top bunk threatened to smother me with his pillow. Of course I couldn’t stop laughing then on principal so there was a bit of argy-bargy and I may have popped someone’s shoulder out.

You might not believe it, but I like thinking about Granddad; it vindicates me for despising his ghost.

So anyways, Edit swipes us into the apartment, where every trace of Paddy Costello seems to have been replaced with stuff that Howard Roark might actually have approved of if he ever took a break from being noble. I don’t know much about modern design but I bet most of the furnishings in here come from some Scandinavian store that ain’t IKEA, and the artwork looks so bovine and gloomy that it must be worth a fortune.

Evelyn is on her last legs, usually by this time in the evening she’d be keeping herself topped up with Everclear and getting set to commit to a major bender, but she hasn’t had a drink in several hours and she’s hurting. Edit leads us down a corridor longer than a subway car and into a guest bedroom that probably cost more to decorate than my entire club. Nice though. Tasteful. Chocolate brown rugs on golden wooden floors, and a king bed in the same colors set askew in the corner.

I lay Evelyn on the bed and she whimpers a little, begging me for a drink and I can’t help remembering how she used to be.

What’s the word?

Vivacious.

Now she’s a drunk, and drunks all have the same personality; a blend of cunning and pathetic. Evelyn looks pretty far gone in the face and it occurs to me that this beautiful room is going to look like a portaloo exploded in here pretty soon.

“She’s bad,” I tell Edit. “Running on fumes. It’s gonna be a rough night.”

Edit sits on the bed and takes Evelyn’s rough hand in her manicured fingers and even that little snapshot tells a lot about how each woman spent the past decade.

“A doctor is coming, Evelyn. He’ll make you feel better.”

“One drink,” Evelyn mumbles. “I’m a goddamn heiress, aren’t I?”

Aren’t I? Ev’s Manhattan/Hamptons accent is reasserting itself faster than that kid Shea jettisoned his.

“Of course you are,” says Edit soothingly and she gets in close to hug Evelyn tight, ignoring the grime compacted in the folds of her stepdaughter’s clothing, ignoring the sour, stale smell of alcoholism. “Everything will be all right.”

When I said that, it sounded like Christmas cracker cliché, but when Edit says it, in her singsong accent, it sounds true. I want to believe it myself.

Can everything be all right? Is that possible?

Edit offers Evelyn a couple of light sedatives and Evelyn gobbles them from her palm. You will never hear an addict ask what’s in that? Whether it kills or cures doesn’t really matter, as long as the edge is taken off. The mere fact that she has ingested a drug of some kind calms my aunt and she lies back on the bed, good-naturedly cursing us for assholes until she nods off, snoring through a nose that looks like it may have been busted since I saw her last.

Only then does Edit allow her own shoulders to droop a fraction and the worry to show in her eyes.

“I’ve seen people come back from worse,” I say. “She’s got all her teeth, which is a good indicator. Once they loose their teeth there’s not far to go.”

Edit shivers at the thought. In her ivory tower, people only lose teeth they don’t like.

Edit laughs. “You know what, Dan? I need a drink.”

I smile. “You know what, Edit? Me too.”

I am surprised to find Buttons the gorilla still guarding the office door.

“I didn’t figure you for a taxidermy girl,” I say, rubbing the big ape’s nose for luck.

Edit pushes through the doors. “Buttons. Toward the end, he was all the company I had.”

I don’t express my sympathies because I don’t feel any. Edit is an okay lady, but she knew what she was getting into, marrying a billionaire who could probably remember when Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show. Sure it cost her ten years of her life but she came out of it pretty sweet.

Edit has left her mark on the office too. The trophy case has been replaced with a Japanese bamboo water fountain and where Paddy’s old desk used to squat, now stands what looks like reclaimed railway sleepers on brushed steel legs.

I could never live here. Even the furniture has a philosophy attached to it. Trying to interpret the wallpaper would give me an aneurism.

“Whiskey okay, Daniel? Irish, of course.”

“Of course.”

Edit pours a couple of generous shots from a bottle of Bushmills that looks nearly as old as I am.

“You better lock that cabinet when we’re finished. Or better yet have someone shift the entire cabinet out of here. Locking the door would only work for about ten seconds.”

Edit passes me a glass and we clink. “You’re right. Don’t worry, Dan. I’m committed to this process. Evelyn will have the best treatment. No sending her away this time, I’ll have her treated here.”

We sit on opposite ends of an L-shaped sofa with fake zebra cushions, our feet sinking into a patterned rug that is probably loaded with symbolism that I am too brutish to understand, and we sip our velvety drinks in a civilized manner. I am so glad that Zeb is not here as he would doubtless blanket bomb this classy situation with crass comments in an attempt to get Edit to either sleep with him or lend him money.

Zeb told me once that society dames like to fuck down, as he called it. Why else you think Rapunzel kept throwing her hair out the window? You honestly believe Prince Charming was the first swordsman up in that tower?

When I was a kid I read Rapunzel maybe a thousand times and that particular moral never occurred to me.

Something does occur to me now. It took a while, but I am not accustomed to being around decent people.

“I admire you, Edit. What you’re doing for Ev.”

My gran studies the pointed toes of her shoes. “She’s family, Dan. I’m all alone without her, and you too.”

“Maybe. But like she said, Evelyn’s the heiress. She comes back and you’re out of the driver’s seat, right?”

Edit laughs. “Oh God no. I’m not that much of a do-gooder. Paddy was pretty hard on Evelyn. When she disappeared, he left everything to me, except a trust fund should his prodigal daughter ever come back. It’s a big fund, don’t get me wrong, but she’s very much a guest in my home.”

This simple statement calms any niggling doubt I may have harbored about Edit. I think I’ve always been suspicious of saints. If I’d been Joseph the carpenter and the Virgin Mary had come home with the line that she’d been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, then Christianity would have gone a whole different way.

“I also should thank you for letting me stow away here for a few days. I’ll be no trouble.”

“I know you won’t, McEvoy.”

McEvoy?

What happened to Dan, Danny, Daniel, my hero?

Also a new tone, not hostile exactly but definitely imperious. I suppose she’s entitled.

“Don’t worry, Edit,” I say swirling what’s left of my whiskey. “I don’t want to bring trouble to your door. Two days max and I’m out of here.”

“I’d say that’s about forty seven and a half hours too long for me, Mr. McEvoy.”

I glance up from my sophisticated spirit swirling to find Edit not even looking my way. She’s got her BlackBerry out, searching for a number.

“What I said about Paddy leaving me the empire. That was true. Unfortunately, thanks to this recession a lot of those businesses are pretty strapped at the moment. I can fix it, but I need a cash injection, which brings us to Evelyn’s hefty trust fund.”

What’s going on here? Edit is talking like a bitch now but she can’t be.

I read people.

“As for you. Evelyn phoned me a couple of weeks ago to ask for money. I tried to talk her in, but she wasn’t ready. Said good old Daniel would sort her out.”

She finds the number and selects it. “You know Paddy cut you off, right? But Ev was going to have the final laugh.”

Final laugh. It’s grammatically correct, but not really in popular use. Edit slipped up there because she’s Swedish. She would be so screwed for that in The Great Escape, if it was set in New York with American Nazis.

American Nazis? What is going on in my brain?

“Dear Aunt Evelyn put you in her will. If anything happened to her, you get the entire trust fund. Twenty-five million dollars.”

Twenty five million dollars is always a nice thing to get in the post delivered by a stork, like babies.

“Luckily I’ve had two crooked policemen on my payroll since they worked in the city so I sent them to pick you up and see if you knew where Evelyn was.”

The package. Evelyn was the package, not Mike’s envelope. No wonder Fortz laughed when I claimed to have the package in my pocket.

“If not, they were supposed to kill you as a precaution,” continues Edit. “And wait at your sleazy club for Evelyn to show.”

A precaution. Like a condom. We call those Rubber Johnnies in Ireland, which is pretty hard to take if your name is John, even harder if your name is Robert John.

“I am so glad you escaped from my pet policemen. I followed you from their torture room and it really has worked out perfectly. You brought Evelyn to my door. I cannot believe that. I should have hired you directly instead of Krieger and Fortz.”

Hey. Edit and I have people in common. She knows Fortz, I know Fortz.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she says into the phone and I know then that I’m screwed.

Or as Zeb would say: More fucked than the chief fuckee of Fuckville during Fuckapalooza on the fuckteenth of Fuckuary.

And worse: I’ve delivered Ev to the lion’s den.

The lion’s den with a gorilla in it. That’s hilarious so I laugh a little.

Edit laughs along with me.

“No,” she tells whoever’s taking the call. “I don’t think he’ll be any trouble now.”

There used to be a show on TV with that guy from Oliver except he had a magic flute called Jimmy or Billy. Anyway it was a flute. There was big monster too but he was friendly. Genuinely friendly too, not like a grizzly bear who’s gonna eat you as soon as his smaller food sources run out.

Balls. I’ve been drugged.

I’m on the main stage at Fuckapalooza.

Hello, Fuckville.

Focus, soldier. Rescue the civilian.

“I would prefer to just let you go,” said Edit. “But Evelyn might refuse to change her will. And also, my little policemen don’t want you and your big mouth on the loose. And they have been faithful and useful boys to me. So . . .”

I squint down at my feet and try to marshal them but they seem so far away on long spindly legs that are definitely not mine. Some idiot has dropped a crystal tumbler and it tumbles down . . .

Of course it does. It’s a tumbler.

. . . Catching the light in its facets, which is so beautiful that I want to cry.

What the hell did she give me?

I will have to rely on my trusty arms. I topple forward onto the rug, which I realize that I can understand now.

Of course. It’s so simple. The meaning of life is hidden in our fingerprints. All I have to do is take a photograph of my fingers and blow it up so I can read the whorls.

Edit lifts her feet daintily and swings them away from the broken glass, and over her shoulder I see the door open and Buttons the gorilla is standing in the doorway.

This sends me right back to my teen years and I know Buttons heard me threaten his master and he’s been waiting for a chance to shut my mouth for good. I am suddenly more scared than I have even been. There is not a doubt in my addled head that Buttons intends to tear my head from its shoulders.

My life begins to flash before my eyes, which I do not want to happen because we all know what that means.

No. Not yet. I’m not ready yet.

The flashing continues regardless. I see my father stretching a Band-Aid across a cut on my knee, saying good soldier, good soldier. Did that happen? I don’t remember him being human. There’s Pat, my baby brother, with a pillowcase tied around his neck like a cape and the poker in his hand for a sword. He’s going to catch a belt later for getting coal dust all over his clothes. I want to warn him, but my lips are sealed. I’m in the car now, on that last fateful journey and I see for the first time that the only reason I’m alive is because the rear window was open to let out Dad’s cigarette smoke. I hear the screech of the tires and see the wall rush at our puny vehicle and mom’s hair fan out like it’s underwater. I reach for Pat but he is rag-doll dead and I am flying.

Buttons shambles into the room and I see a smaller figure behind him that could be Tarzan or maybe Mowgli. I am afraid to look and I am frozen by chemicals but I see that Buttons has some kind of blackjack in his hand. He squats before me and I see the gorilla is wearing shoes.

“Don’t do it here,” says Edit to the gorilla. “I don’t want any evidence if his cop friend comes looking.”

“Remember this, McEvoy?” asks the gorilla, dangling the club before my face. “Every cop in the state knows what you did to me with this fucking thing.”

I have no clue what Buttons is talking about. I never touched him with a big dildo.

Buttons pulls his arm back, and I hear his labored breath burr in my ear.

“Now it’s your turn,” he says and I close my eyes.

I read people pretty good, right?