“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 does
n’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.