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.