Screwed: A Novel

  A line from Ghostbusters pops into my head: Do not cross the streams; that would be bad.

  I duck underneath what I hope is a forearm and tumble to the floor.

  A film crew is by the foot of the bed and the director jumps to his feet, all ponytail and pout.

  “A eunuch? I didn’t order a eunuch?”

  I will replay that later and be offended.

  After a moment’s grace my sudden apparition causes pandemonium. Even in the kinkiest pornographic scene no one is expecting a semi-nude middle-aged man to come crashing through the wall. I ain’t even waxed, for heaven’s sake.

  The guys lose their tempers among other things and the girl’s squeals sound a lot more authentic than the ones she was making a few seconds ago.

  “Sorry,” I say automatically. “Just passing through.”

  Waiting in the wings is an aged fluffer standing sentry at a dessert trolley loaded with various accessories. She is the only one un-freaked out by my arrival. Her jaded, heavy-lidded eyes tell me she has seen a lot weirder things than me in her day.

  “Can you uncuff me?” I ask from the floor, shaking my chains urgently at her.

  The woman squints at my shackles while the director calls “cut” over and over again in increasingly panicked tones and an expensive-looking light on an aluminium stalk keels over, exploding in a shower of white sparks.

  “What kinda cuffs you got there?”

  I glance nervously at the hole in the wall. “Police. Standard issue.”

  She laughs. “Cop cuffs. I could open those with my tongue.” This idea is made even more unsavory by her mouthful of nicotine-stained choppers.

  “A key will be just fine, darlin’,” I say, laying on the leprechaun.

  The woman locates a key and goes to work on my cuffs. Meanwhile there is more activity behind me on the bed as Krieger attempts to climb through the hole.

  “A gimp!” exclaims the director. “I am not doing a gimp scene. What is this, nineteen ninety-two?”

  I twist around just in time to see one of the working studs, an obscenely muscled man, deliver a right hook that just about takes Krieger’s head off.

  “Motherfucker has a gun,” he explains, which is enough to send the starlet shrieking from the room.

  Krieger droops in the hole. One hundred sixty pounds of dead weight.

  A few clicks later I am a free man.

  “Who the hell are you?” the director screams. “What the hell is going on?”

  I read someplace that it’s acceptable for men to scream like girls if they’re movie directors or being electrocuted.

  “It’s okay, people,” I say, climbing to my feet, trying to muster some gravitas in spite of my appearance. “I’m police. Undercover. Those two were planning an illegal shoot. Just put all your permits and birth certificates on the table and I can have you out of here in five minutes.”

  The room goes quiet and I can hear Fortz gurgling next door like a baby looking for a boob.

  “Anything else I can do for you, honey?” says my savior, with that kind of frown on her brow that lets me know that she ain’t swallowing word one of my bullshit.

  I tuck the cuff key into my thong—well you never know—then scan her trolley for something useful.

  “Can I borrow a dildo?” I ask.

  This is not really a specific-enough request. “Sure. Which one?”

  “The big one,” I say.

  I think about killing Krieger and Fortz, I really do. The bastards deserve it. No doubt this ain’t their first rodeo, so God knows how many lives I’d be saving by putting them in the ground.

  But it’s not in me to murder them no matter how easily I could justify it.

  Maybe this whole episode comes off a little comical with the thong and porno scene and so forth, but the reality is that I have never been so scared or sickened. There were times in the Lebanon when I endured some pretty harrowing depravity, but in that room my psyche grew a whole new layer of scar tissue.

  I push Krieger back into the room leaving him flopped on the bed and climb through after him. Fortz is still in a puddle of fat and blood on the floor, bitching about his ruined mouth, like the day has dealt him a bum hand. He finds it in him somewhere to go for Krieger’s gun and I heft the dildo and give him a solid whack on the temple, which is enough to put him down.

  “You are lucky,” I shout at the unconscious cop, “that I used this tool as a club and not in the fashion for which it was realistically molded.”

  My heart rate is still at around two hundred, which is in the danger zone for a man my age, but I feel a little better. The immediate peril is past and now all I have to worry about is Mike’s errand and these two gimps coming after me when they wake up.

  I dress myself, leaving on the thong because the porn crew, who have probably figured out that I am not in fact a cop, are peeping through the hole in the wall. Then I wave Mike Madden’s envelope under Fortz’s nose.

  “You see this?” I say, but I doubt he can hear the question. “I did have the package. I told you but you wouldn’t listen.”

  The cops’ gear offers up a bounty of weapons, which I am glad to accept. Four handguns: two official Glock 19s and a couple of baby Kel-Tecs in their Uncle Mike’s ankle holsters.

  Matching guns. I bet Fortz even decides what weapons they carry.

  I distribute the cache of weapons to my pockets but the dildo I leave in Krieger’s twitching fingers, for spite, and snap off a photo on my phone to post on the police Web site.

  These guys are lucky, I tell myself as I leave this room of nightmares for the first and last time. If I catch so much as a glimpse of these cops ever again I will kill them both.

  I decide to tape the thong to my bathroom mirror later, Rocky style, to look at every morning just to remind myself of how much hatred I am capable of mustering up, in case I should ever need to channel it.

  All this rigmarole to give perverts their jollies.

  The older I get, the less I like this world and the more I appreciate anything good.

  Like Sofia.

  CHAPTER 4

  AS SOON AS THE DOOR CLOSES BEHIND ME I FEEL WEAK AS a kitten in a sack. The righteous adrenaline drains down to my feet and I have to lean my forehead against the wall to stop myself throwing up. The Taser burns on my chest feel like they might be smoldering and my thoughts are suddenly swirling down the drainpipe of my confused cortex.

  At least that’s what it feels like.

  Maybe I should go back in there and put those cops down, because the first thing they’re going to do is come after me. They have no choice.

  On a purely practical level this is a good argument. Just finish off Krieger and Fortz and be done with it, but killing cops would pretty much ensure that my case would never make it to trial, even with a buddy in the department.

  I spent a night on the town with Deacon and her captain a few months ago and we ended up in the back room at Slotz with a bottle of Jack Daniels and sloppy grins on our faces. The conversation got around to the dumb excuses cops actually committed to paper for firing their weapons.

  This one guy claimed that he had to shoot the suspect because the suspect was wearing a T-shirt with writing on it, the captain said, hand on heart. The writing was, quote, “un-American” and this dumb rookie motherfucker thought he saw the word jihad in there somewheres—the Cap paused for a slug of whiskey and we knew the punch line was coming. And the rook felt he couldn’t let this guy live ’cause he wasn’t more than five miles from an airport at the time. Turns out the writing was from Lord of the fucking Rings. Elvish or some shit.

  And Ronelle said, Elvish has left the building.

  How we had split our sides in drunken laughter at the time. That war story doesn’t seem that funny now. If Krieger and Fortz ever do catch up with me, they will have their excuses all figured out in advance.

  Ronelle Deacon is a cop’s cop. True blue back to her granddaddy, who was one of the rare African-American members
of the Texas police force, and one of the famous group who stormed the university tower in seventy-seven to bring in the Austin City Sniper. Ronnie picked up the baton from her father who walked a beat in Rundberg, where it takes guts to put one foot in front of the other when you’re a black man wearing the blue. Ronnie was raised tough but straight. By the age of twelve she was spotting her daddy while he bench-pressed in the garage. By fourteen she was bench-pressing a hundred pounds herself, and by twenty-two she was a rookie in the NYPD, working hard on her arrest rate and harder on her studies so that she could make detective by thirty. She managed it with two years to spare.

  Krieger and Fortz used my friendship with Ronelle to get me into their cruiser in the first place. They gotta know she’s the first person I’m calling once my hand stops shaking. Them being cops won’t mean shit to Ronnie, she hates bent cops more than normal criminals. So now she’s on the danger list too. Fortz does not strike me as the kind of guy to leave loose ends floating around. They gotta come after me and then make Ronelle’s death look like an accident.

  I need to handle this.

  I call Ronelle but it goes straight to voice mail, so I leave a terse message, trying to inject the words with urgency but not desperation.

  Ronnie. It’s Dan. We need to meet. I am überscrewed.

  My tone implies, I hope, that this is really serious. It strikes me that Ronnie doesn’t know about the über thing, and if you don’t know that then the message could come off a little jokey. Hopefully she will infer from my tone. But more than likely Ronnie won’t infer shit. She will listen to the words and apply the usual meaning to them. I have this terrible habit of reading in layers that nobody else sees or that are simply not there. It’s like in my mind everybody’s speaking in metaphors or broadcasting their intentions through micro-movements and I’m trying to dig down to what they really mean. That’s what happens when you grow up with an abusive parent: always trying to read the signs, predict the mood, keep yourself clear when it breaks bad.

  What you eventually realize is, that when people blink they are mostly just blinking, not spelling out some kind of code, or when they shift away from you in bed, it ain’t because they don’t love you anymore, it’s because you have sharp elbows.

  Sometimes a tiger, tiger, burning bright is just a tiger.

  I know this, but still years of beatings have made this habit reflex to me.

  Watch for signs. Everything means something.

  In a way, it’s handy having had an abusive parent. Pretty much every bad thing I’ve ever done can be traced back to Dad on a big thick blame arrow.

  For some reason I had thought myself in a detached house, out in the country a little. Maybe with a garden. Someplace the neighbors would be horrified when they found out it was a porn studio.

  I cannot believe it. That house was always so quiet. Kept itself to itself and never threw parties.

  But as I settle enough to take stock, I realize that my spatial sense has probably been bamboozled by the porn room’s soundproofing. I am in a New York high-rise hallway, no doubt about it. I can tell by the street noises jostling each other in the stairwell. Traffic and fat throngs of pedestrians. New Yorkers shouting terse messages into their cells, the delighted cooing of tourists getting their first glimpse of the Donald’s golden tower or the Apple Store, and a blend of Middle Eastern dialects that you wouldn’t find in Guantanamo. The smells are familiar too; street food, hot asphalt and the rubber of a million tires.

  New York. Those clowns humped me to New York.

  There is a tight elevator cab to my left, which would take me down to a back door but I choose not to trap myself inside. Contrary to what the movies would have us believe there is often not a handy escape hatch in the roof that is left unbolted in case of action-hero distress. If you get caught in a lift, then you are, as the gamers say, totally pawned.

  It’s hard to keep up with the kid lingo. I said FUBAR to a college jock in the club recently and he looked at me like I was in black-and-white.

  Tango and Cash, junior. Buy a DVD, why don’t you?

  So I don’t get in the lift for that reason. But also because I have a phantom memory of being manhandled into that shaft with Fortz’s snide laughter wet in my ear and just looking at the steel door gives me the shivers.

  Feck it. I’m just gonna kill them.

  No. I’ve done a lot of desperate things in my life, but I’ve never killed a person when there was another way. Any other way.

  That arsehole Fortz better learn from his mistakes, because next time I can’t promise this level of self-control, especially when I’ve had time to brood on the wrong done to me.

  After a few breaths to steady myself I take the stairs. Three stories down past a nail spa and a meat refrigerator and I’m out on the street. I turn right and walk head down just in case there is some sort of surveillance. Putting a little mileage between me and that building is my priority. When my heart stops pounding, then I can try to figure my whereabouts. It shouldn’t be too difficult. All I have to do is ask my phone.

  As it turns out, I’m way down in Manhattan on Forty-second and Eighth, which is an area I know pretty well from my years bouncing the Big Apple clubs. I could jump a cab to SoHo and get this accursed envelope dropped off, but I need a little headspace to ride out the after-tremors of combat neurosis that I feel coming my way, and also food would be a very good idea. It’s after two and I haven’t eaten a crumb.

  After two? How the hell did that happen?

  Krieger must have given me a shot of something in the car, to make sure I stayed out. Another reason I should have finished those guys off. I decide to ask Zeb for a thorough once-over if I make it home, to make sure there are no alien chemicals floating around my system. A lot of sedatives cause side effects unless you get them flushed. Anything from amnesia to paranoia can crop up for days after taking a shot. The last thing I need is to be wandering around, convinced that people are trying to kill me but unable to remember who exactly.

  I’d probably ask a cop for help and that cop would be Dirk Fortz.

  I hike the dozen or so blocks to the Parker Meridien, glad of the density of human camouflage on the streets, and grab myself a small table in the famous Norma’s breakfast restaurant.

  Dirk Fortz. What kind of stupid name is that? It’s like his parents couldn’t decide if they were in Dynasty or Star Wars.

  This guy has gotten under my skin in a way nobody else ever has. He didn’t just want to kill me, he wanted to go beyond that.

  My hands are shaking and I hide them under the table when the waitress comes over with the menu. Sorry, not waitress. Server. The server is maybe ten years younger than me, so just about eligible for the fantasy league, with an open face and eyes that are bright with good diet or speed.

  “No need for a menu,” I say. “I’ve been before. Bring me a pot of coffee and the french toast, with everything.”

  The server’s smile is so wide that she makes me believe in it. If there’s one thing Americans know how to do, it’s how to make people feel welcome.

  Shit, I feel like a regular and I haven’t been up the steps in years.

  “French toast,” she says, writing the order on her pad. “Some comfort food, huh?”

  “Yep,” I say. “I need a little comfort right now.”

  I used to treat myself to breakfast here when I’d had a rough night on the doors. A lot of joints have the Best Breakfast in New York City sign in the window, but Norma’s might actually deserve it.

  I read the server’s name tag. “Nothing like french toast to make a guy feel comforted, Mary. You Irish, Mary?”

  Mary is thrilled with the question. “Oh my God. I am like, totally Irish. My great-granddad came over from County Wales.”

  I am glad to have an excuse to smile. “That’s great. I got cousins in County Wales.”

  Mary thrusts out her chest with some determination. “Well, I hope you’re hungry, cousin. ’Cause this toast will be big eno
ugh to feed an army.”

  I like Mary already and if I hadn’t been recently electrocuted and abducted I might even put some effort here. But I have bearer bonds in my pocket and the truth is Mary is probably working on her tip and even if she isn’t I feel a crazy loyalty to Sofia like a bipolar angel sitting on my shoulder.

  Mary strides off to the kitchen and I lay my hands on the table, daring them to shake.

  Deal with it, assholes, I beam at them. You got stuff to do.

  Norma’s is a lot swishier than my usual diner but sometimes you gotta tolerate a little class in the name of toast. Even at close to three in the afternoon, the high-ceilinged room is half full of businessmen loosening their ties and buttons, and out of towners here for the famous pancakes. I bet a girl like Mary could pull in a couple of hundred extra a day in tips.

  Maybe I’ll offer her a job.

  While I’m contemplating my server’s totally over-the-top reaction to my imagined job offer, in the real world Mary has plenty of time to grab a pot of coffee and swing back around to my table.

  “Hey, cousin,” she begins, then freezes, staring at my hands. No, not my hands, something between my hands. I look down and see that I have put one of the Glocks on the table. I don’t remember doing it. Why would I do that in a restaurant? I feel a cold sweat push through the pores of my neck.

  Mary is not fazed for long. This gal works in NYC.

  “Oh, I get it. Irish, right? So, you’re a cop?”

  It’s nice when people invent your excuses for you. I wish it happened more often.

  “This is a cop’s gun,” I say truthfully, sweeping the Glock off the table. “I was just making sure the safety was on. I wouldn’t want to shoot any of your customers.”

  Mary leans in close and pours me a cup of java that I know is top class just from the aroma.

  “See those two guys in the corner with their eyes on stalks every time my ass swishes by?” she whispers.

  “Yeah, I see ’em,” I reply.

  Of course now that she has said the words ass and swishes, my eyes are going to be on stalks too.

  “You can shoot those two if you like, Officer,” Mary says, and I feel her breathing in my ear, which almost cancels out the memory of Fortz doing the same thing.