I gotta admit it, he suckered me with that fifty percent outta the hole bullshit.
“You got it wrong, kid,” I say, normal cadence, hoping he’ll take notice. “I’m not one of the birds. I’m the stone.”
This is a really good line and I can just imagine the movie trailer guy doing it in a promo, but it doesn’t impress Shea much.
“You’re speaking fast now? What, you’re a smart guy all of a sudden?”
“Okay, everyone. The important thing now is that we all stay calm. I’m gonna lay out what I think is going on, and everybody just keep it in your pants till I’m finished.”
“You’re gonna lay it out?” says Freckles. “Who the fuck are you? Shaft?”
Second time today. One more and I gotta consider that I might be a little Shafty.
“What are you talking about?” says Shea. He ain’t worried but at least he’s listening.
“Shea. Focus on me now. Forget everybody else. This situation is about to escalate.”
“Yeah, escalate into you being dead.”
“I like the way you took my verb and used it again. That’s good stuff but listen now. I think you’re being played here.”
Food jets outta Shea’s throat as he guffaws. “Played? Mister, I invented the word. I come from the world of business. Great white sharks, man. I’ve worked the floor on Wall Street. The bear pit, man. These goons can’t play me.”
This guy is in his own little bubble. I don’t have the time it would take to get through to him.
I twist in my seat, keeping an eye on Freckles. “I bet if you ask Freckles here to turn out his pockets, you’re gonna find a silenced pistol in there somewhere.”
Shea is young and so still thinks he’s immortal.
“Yeah? So what? The bullets are for you.”
“Really? You shoot guys in the penthouse now, Junior?”
Shea frowns. “Shut the fuck up, dummy. Freckles doesn’t have a silencer. Do you, Freckles?”
“’Course not, Mr. Shea. This prick is winding you up.”
“I thought he was stupid.”
“So did I. Mike said he was thick as pig shit.”
I lean back on the chair to give myself a bit of spring if I need it. “Mike has played us all, gentlemen. He is one hundred percent aware that I would be the most dangerous person in this room, and still he put me here with both of his prospective partners.” I see doubt flickers across Freckles’s brow so I press on. “Oh yeah, it’s win-win for old Mike. If you manage to plug me and your boss on the quiet and set me up as a patsy, then he’s off the hook with the kid, in tight with the new king and settles a score with me. If I go operational on the two of you, then he’s forgotten in the chaos and his little cottage industry in Cloisters stays independent.”
Shea is still eating but half-listening too. “But you ain’t got a silencer, right Freckles?”
Freckles is glaring death rays at me. “No, I fucking ain’t. But I got a gun. Can I please shoot this prick?”
I point a finger gun at the kid. “He draws a weapon and you’re history, Harvard.”
“Your gun, it don’t have a silencer on it?” asks Shea.
His accent is pure Brooklyn now, university washed away.
Freckles frowns for a second and I see he’s making a decision and that decision is Fuck it.
“No,” he says, pulling a gun from a holster behind his back, then a suppressor from his pocket and expertly screwing it to the barrel. “But it does now.”
It takes him three twists to get the silencer onto his pistol, which gives me plenty of time to duck under his gun arm and come up underneath with the Kel-Tec already in my hand. I twist the small barrel into the soft flesh below his chin hard enough to tear the skin and say gently:
“Shhhhhh.”
Freckles freezes like he’s perched on a landmine, and because he can’t nod perceptibly, blinks twice to show he understands. He does not need to know how my pistol has come to be pointed at his brain, he just needs to know that it is.
“Good,” I say. “Now drop your weapon.”
What the hell am I doing?
Drop your weapon?
This is not how battles are fought in the real world. A guy has a yearning to shoot you, you put that guy down. You do not purposely engineer the situation so that the guy gets to draw further breaths.
Freckles’s gun makes a couple of clacks as it hits the floor, not enough to draw the boys in from outside.
“Come clean,” I say to Freckles and if he gives me so much as one syllable of bullshit, so help me God I will send him bullshitting into the afterlife.
“Power play,” he says. “Me and Mike. I was moving him up.”
As I thought. Freckles and Mike: two Shakespearean wannabes spinning tangled webs.
I nod at Shea, who has stopped chewing and sits slack jawed.
“From the horse’s mouth,” I say.
And before Shea gets the words out I know exactly what’s coming:
“I could use a man like you.”
Then:
“Execute that motherfucker.”
Ah, Harvard. Thine veneer has faded like dew in the morning sun.
I should kill Freckles and Shea. I could do it easily with the silenced gun and probably take out KFC and his partner in the hall, but you’re talking carnage. Mass murder.
And if I gotta do mass murder, I want to go the whole hog. Get Mike and his boys and Krieger/Fortz while I’m about it.
I’m drifting toward war criminal with those numbers.
And I like to tell myself, on the cold winter nights when I’m flashing on all the ghosts of violence past that haunt my sleep-deprived spirit, that I Am Not So Bad. Sounds juvenile, I know, but it’s a good 3-A.M. mantra.
I Am Not So Bad. Sometimes I sing it to the tune of U2’s “In the Name of Love.” I try to remember not to do this if I have someone sleeping over.
“I can pay you, McEvoy,” says Freckles, making the inevitable counter offer. “I got some bricks of cash in my car. An escape fund. A hundred grand.”
I slap the back of his head, hard, knocking him over onto the desk into what doormen refer to as the Deliverance position.
“I bet you do, Freckles. Thanks for the tip.”
Shea glares at Freckles. “You fucking shitbag. I trusted you.”
The older man’s head is ringing and he is not interested in Shea’s bullshit.
“Fuck you. You ain’t even a man. I don’t owe you shit.”
“Shoot him, McEvoy. Freckles is my employee, so I have more funds than he does. Stands to reason.”
I pick up Freckles’s silenced gun and poke him in the arse cheek with it. “That does stand to reason, Freckles. How are you, an immigrant from Donegal, gonna up that ante?”
“You can take the money and the car. Keys are in my pocket.” He wiggles his arse and the keys jangle. This is humiliating for him. No man should be forced to arse wiggle after the age of fifty. There should be a waiver.
I follow the jangle and find a ring of keys, a valet ticket and a phone. No car key.
“These are house keys, Freckles.”
“It’s the key ring McEvoy. Remote starter.”
Now that is convenient.
“That is convenient,” I say, pocketing the keys, ticket and phone.
I can see the attraction of robbing folks now. You just go around with a gun and take what you want.
“So are you going to shoot this little prick?” presses Freckles. “He’s killing the business.”
Shea takes a handful of hummus and smears it across Freckles’s cheeks. “You go straight to fuckin’ murder? We couldn’t talk it over?”
The kid is still in cloud cuckoo land. I should shake him up a bit to make him think twice about coming after me should he survive. I take two rapid steps around the desk and force his head into his carton of food, mashing it in there.