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?
CHAPTER 7
IN EVERY NOIR BOOK I EVER READ THERE’S A BIT ABOUT THE guy, the gumshoe, coming to after a beating. I never liked those passages because some of those scribes put their shit together pretty good, and it all gets a little close to the bone for a guy like me, who’s been clipped enough times to move down a bracket on the IQ scale. I’d swear I was a gifted kid, now I’m barely average thanks to Tasers, rubber bullets, spiked drinks, steel-toe-capped boots and now a goddamn dildo. There was also a time with high heels and a spiral staircase but I don’t know anyone well enough to tell them that story. And I will never go to a hypnotist’s show just in case I might let it slip.