by Eoin Colfer
‘You’ll be thinking on it?’
I don’t say anything, because suddenly there is no air in the room. More than that, the room has become a vacuum, popping my ears and expanding my brain.
A metal tube. Glittery substance.
Detective Deacon is still talking. ‘Right, Dan? Yo, Danny boy. You’re gonna work with me on this?’
My fingers paw the desktop like a blind man’s, until I find the phone and cut Ronnie off.
I hate people calling me Danny boy. My father used to do that, and sing that goddamn dirge in pubs, though no one asked him.
‘I know you want to make changes, Dan,’ Brandi is saying, doing her best trailer-trash talk-show spiel. ‘I know that and I respect you for it. But I think, if you look inside yourself, you’ll find that you’re still in shock over Connie. She never went in the booth, so now you’re gonna shut the booth down. See what I’m saying?’
Brandi’s six-inch heels are in my face. Her trademark Catwoman boots. I’ve seen her kick sparks from the pavement with those boots.
She picks at a tiny square of body glitter on her forearm.
‘I hate to speak ill of the dead, Dan. But that girl’s morals were costing us all money. Hell, we lost a dozen high-rollers last month because little virgin Connie didn’t want any hands on her ass. My tips were way down. And I need my tips. Cat’s gotta have her cream.’
The phone is still at my ear, beeping. I can’t seem to remember where it should go.
‘I ain’t missing her. None of the girls are.’
I can see how it happened. They met in the parking lot, words were exchanged. Connie and Brandi differed on how the job should be done. Things got heated. Maybe a slap turned into a tussle. Connie went down and Brandi put her heel through Connie’s forehead. She’s capable of it; God knows she’s capable.
It’s true. My gut knows it.
I stare at Brandi’s heels, mesmerised. They are shining and wicked. After the deed was done, Brandi stood at the door beside me building her alibi. Hell, she probably had blood on her if anyone bothered to look.
‘So come on, Dan. What do you say to a little action in the booth? I’ll give you a free taste.’
The heel glints, and I see in the centre a tiny perfect circle of dried blood. Could be mud, coffee, anything.
It’s blood, I swear I can smell it.
Jason puts his head around the door. He’s half apologetic, half smiling.
‘Boss, we got a lady outside, looks like Material Girl Madonna. Got a casserole for you, says she’s your wife. You want me to show her the door?’
I can’t talk. Can’t say a word. I shake my head to defer the decision.
Brandi doesn’t want her meeting hijacked. ‘So, Dan? Is the booth back in business? You want me to slide under that desk?’
I keep shaking.
Brandi killed Connie.
‘Should I bring her through? She’s pretty hot, boss. And that casserole smells amazing.’
I manage one word.
‘Just . . .’
‘What, Dan?’
‘Just throw her out, boss?’
I try again. ‘Just . . .’
Brandi is doing a few slinky dance moves. ‘Just do it, Dan. Give me five minutes.’
‘Bring her in? Throw her out? Keep the food though, right?’
‘Just wait!’ I shout. ‘Just wait a goddamn second.’
The handset is still beside my ear, and suddenly the beeping is replaced by a familiar voice.
That bitch murdered me, says Ghost Connie. She made orphans out of my Alfredo and Eva.
No. Not another one. I slam the phone into its cradle. Not another ghost, no way.
I want to go back in time. I want to steal apples from an orchard in Blackrock and eat them with my little brother on the beach. I want to count the new stars as they switch on and stay out until we’re sure Daddy is passed out drunk.
Connie. Beautiful Connie. Brandi deserves to be dropped in the river.
The look on Brandi’s face tells me I’ve said this out loud. She wants to laugh, but is afraid to.
‘Who’s going in the river, Dan? Not me, right? All I want to do is sell a few hand-jobs. That’s not a crime, is it?’
I try to speak calmly. ‘Jason, please bring Mrs Delano to the back room, tell her I’ll be with her in a minute. Brandi, stay where you are. You take one step towards the door and I swear to Christ you’ll regret it.’
‘But Dan . . .’
I am not in the mood for argument, so I simply take my gun from the drawer and place it on the desk. It’s a clear message, hard to misinterpret, but Jason does anyway.
‘Hey, come on, boss. Guns all of a sudden? Did Mike initiate you into the gang? What, you got a shamrock tattoo now?’
It’s a tense situation, so I say something to Jason that I regret before the echo fades. ‘Get out, Jason. Go give Marco a cuddle.’
Brandi shrieks with joy. ‘Finally. Zing. Fuck you, Jason. Tough guy.’
Jason gives me a look like I shot his puppy and I feel like I’ve turned into my own father. He closes the door softly and I start figuring how I’m going to make it up to him. A weekend in Atlantic City at least.
‘The elephant has left the room,’ Brandi crows, her legs doing a little scissors kick on my desk. ‘You need to get rid of that faggot, Danny. He’s bad for business.’
This switches my attention back to her and gives me a nice segue.
‘Like Connie was bad for business?’ I say this ominously, but Brandi’s self-preservation cat sense is switched off.
‘No, not really. I’d say Jason would have no problem with some guy licking his ass. I’d say that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d have zero problem with.’
‘So, you’d get rid of him?’
Brandi winks, her eyelid heavy with crusted glittering eyeshadow. ‘Toss that boy on the street. Marco too. We gotta make some business decisions.’
‘Like you got rid of Connie?’
I don’t expect Brandi to fall into that trap, and she doesn’t, but her eyes give her away. It’s not much, just a quick flicker, but I notice.
‘Got rid of Connie?’ she says, haltingly, drawing her boots off the desk.
This to me seems like a crucial moment in the development of this whole confrontation. For some reason I absolutely believe that if Brandi gets her boots off the surface of Vic’s desk (my desk) then I have lost whatever upper hand I had, which was pretty crappy in the first place.
So Brandi is pulling her boots away from me, knees up around her pirate earrings, but she doesn’t move fast enough. I reach out and grab her right ankle and squeeze it till the patent leather squeaks, which kinda sucks the gravity from the moment.
‘This smells clean,’ I say, gritting my teeth with the effort of holding on to the boot and carrying on a conversation. ‘Real clean. I bet you used a whole pack of antiseptic wipes on this boot.’
‘Gotta keep germ-free, Daniel,’ says Brandi. Her voice is super-innocent, like a girl scout, but her eyes are darting around the office like something or someone is going to pop up with another surprise.
‘You should have burned this pair, Brandi. I know they’re your favourites, but you’ve got others.’
I’m rambling a bit, but that’s because half of me knows that the accusation I’m about to make is at best based on a hunch and at worst based on supernatural intervention.
‘Why the fuck are we talking about my boots? First no booth, now you have something against my boots? Let go of my goddamn leg, Dan.’
‘You should have burned them,’ I say again, using my old trick of repeating myself to buy a second. ‘Because all the blues need is one strand of DNA, caught in a stitch. All they need to do is match your heel to the hole in Connie’s head.’
Brandi is a little pale under her make-up. ‘Let go of my leg, Daniel. You’re hurting me.’
Is this what she should say? Is this what an innocent person would say?
‘Aren
’t you going to tell me that you’re innocent? Protest and so forth?’
‘And so forth? Who the fuck are you?’
I admit it. That was a little Dr Moriarty.
‘I’m taking this boot to the cops. If they find nothing, then no harm done and you can jerk whoever’s pecker you like for a month. But if they find some trace, then there won’t be any peckers where you’re going.’
Brandi sees in my face that this isn’t one she can talk her way out of.
‘Get your hands off me, asshole.’
‘What’s the problem? Just give me the boot and you get to rule the roost around here, so long as you had nothing to do with Connie.’
Brandi sneers at the sheer volume of dumbness in my plan. ‘I don’t care if that boot has Connie’s eyeball stuck on the heel, you’re still the one handing it over. The jilted boyfriend.’
That takes a moment to sink in, but she’s right. Even if Brandi owns the murder weapon, it doesn’t mean she did the murdering.
‘I’ll take my chances. The police will look closely at both of us, something I have no problem with.’
Halfway through this last sentence, I try to take Brandi by surprise, standing suddenly and yanking the boot with me, hoping it will come clean off, but Brandi is ready and curls her toes going up with the boot. Now I am in the cartoon situation of holding a grown woman upside-down by the ankle.
‘Shite,’ I say. Seems appropriate.
‘What next, Dan?’ asks Brandi, her hair brushing the floor. ‘I worked the pole for years. I can do this all night.’
I don’t know what next. I really don’t. I cannot believe the situation in which I find myself: standing in my ex-boss’s office, holding the stripper who possibly murdered my potential sweetheart aloft by her ankle. It pains me to say it, but this girl is heavy and my bicep is aching already.
‘Hey!’ says Brandi, having a light-bulb moment. ‘Are you wired?’
This thought freaks her out so much that she does a pretty impressive stripper move and folds herself upwards, swinging her other leg around, and suddenly there is an angry woman on my shoulders. I hear something scrape along the desktop and a quick glance is enough to confirm that she has snagged my gun on the way up. Brandi’s legs are strongly muscled and she’s doing her damnedest to squeeze my brain out of my ears. I feel a metallic ring digging into my scalp through my cap and I realise that I probably have two seconds to live before Brandi composes herself and flicks the safety. Amazingly, I am almost as worried about Brandi damaging the hair grafts as I am about sudden death.
I take two rapid steps forward, around the side of the desk. It’s instinct really; I’m just trying to get away. As I clear the desk, I hear a dull bong, like a bell in a sack, and Brandi goes over backwards. Her legs are still locked but her upper half is dazed. She’s cracked her head on something metal. The ceiling beam, I remember. Barely six-and-a-half-foot clearance.
The immediate danger is past and so I take a second to assess, to look at myself from afar. I see a middle-aged, craggy-looking ex-soldier standing in the middle of his office, panting like a donkey, with a stripper wrapped around his neck, and it’s not even the strangest situation he’s been in today.
Jason comes through the door and his face is red with choked-down rage. I don’t blame him.
‘Hey, screw you, Daniel,’ he says, barging all the way in, still pissed about the give Marco a cuddle comment, eyes burning holes in the floor. ‘It’s bad enough that I gotta go around every second of my life . . . But then I actually try to help you and . . . you throw that shit at me.’
I gulp down a couple of breaths like there’s a shortage, and try to get my middle-aged heart to slow down a little, while Jason folds his arms, apparently oblivious to the person around my neck.
The least I can do is apologise. ‘Okay, Jason. That comment about Marco was crude. I was going for light-hearted: I know about the gay thing and I don’t care, but it came out all spiteful. So, you know, sorry. I misjudged.’
Jason softens a little, but he’s gonna hold it over me for a while.
‘Okay, Daniel. You get one chance. Next time we find out how tough you really are.’
I hang my head in shame, which is not easy with Brandi’s thigh in the way. ‘I hear you, man. Do you want to hug or something?’
Jason frowns. ‘What am I? A Walton?’
I am a crap modern man. I just assumed . . .
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You call the cops. I gotta take the boots off this unconscious ex-stripper.’
Jason seems to suddenly notice Brandi, but it doesn’t faze him. In our line of work we see stranger shit than this at least once a week.
EPILOGUE
Zeb is back in business after a week bolstering his system in Cloisters General. He was finally kicked out having been caught on video loitering around the pharmacy with obvious intent. The blues questioned him for six hours straight over the incident at his store, but he stuck to his story: got hit on the head from behind, woke up in an ambulance. Don’t remember anything. They questioned me too, but Deacon took the lead and she was prepared to swallow my monumental crock of shit in light of all my lifesaving efforts. I tried to mention the word freezer as much as possible while giving my final statement. The file is pretty much closed and I’m hoping it will be gathering dust soon.
The Brandi file on the other hand is wide open. Deacon ran the boot through the lab. They found blood, bone, brain matter, DNA. The works, Brandi’s boot was the murder weapon, no doubt about it. Unfortunately Brandi fled custody from the hospital before the tests came back and fled the state shortly after that, pausing only to raise funds at a Slotz regular’s house in the suburbs. She was last sighted in Florida.
So here I am, back to the quiet life in Cloisters again. All the craziness seems totally unreal. Could it have actually happened just last week? All that crap in a couple of days when things had been pretty quiet for over a decade, not a single person killed, less than a dozen in the hospital, and a couple of them were faking trauma for legal reasons, then Faber comes along and things go red all over again.
Did any of it happen? I know it did because Connie’s kids are in a foster home instead of watching TV with their mom. It’s not an institution and the McGuffins are good people, and I’m gonna visit every week like I promised, but it’s still a foster home.
What I should have done, looking at it now in retrospect, was to walk into the casino and kick good old Mister Faber so hard in the balls that any mischief-making he was cooking up in his ginger head would have disintegrated along with his favourite executive toys.
But I didn’t do that, since I can’t see into the future and apply it to the past.
So it all went ahead and happened. I sat down and watched Barrett bleed out. I’ve still got blood on my cuff. Or I used to until I burned that shirt and flushed the ashes. It took three flushes. Crappy plumbing.
Ronnie Deacon’s words echo in my mind: People like you and me, Dan, trouble sniffs us out. Maybe you can hide out for a while, maybe even a few years, but eventually someone needs to be saved or someone needs to be killed.
No. It won’t be like that for me. I was Superman for a week, but now I’m just a bald guy with a humdrum job. No more quick thinking, crazy coincidences or lunatic plans.
I feel a little antsy walking into work this afternoon, because today’s the day Mike’s coming to personally collect his payment. Also he says the brakes on the Lexus are whistling a little and I gotta take care of it, which is a crock, cos that Lexus was braking fine when I sent it over.
I look around and the car park is empty but for the aforementioned Lexus and my ghosts. I can hear cars passing on the street and they seem a long way away.
I yank my hat off my head, defiantly revealing my head in public for the first time post-op in some kind of gesture, symbolising I don’t know what. Maybe I’ve turned a corner; maybe there are things more important than a head of hair. Zeb says the bald patch will be gone, and that�
�s enough for me. No more needles in the scalp.
So that’s no more:
Killing.
Lunatic plans.
Needles in the head.
The club is quiet except for Jason in the foyer pulling on a giant rubber band that he swears does wonders for his abs.
‘Gotta keep myself looking good for Marco,’ he grunts. ‘I swear that guy bats his eyes at every queer on the strip.’
This statement is more important than it sounds. Jason is being casual like this to show me I’m forgiven. I stop for a minute, trying to think of something to say that won’t open the wound again.
‘Hug?’
‘In your dreams, Danny. You better go in. Mike’s waiting.’
Mike is waiting in my chair, which is a bit of a cheek, but after the month I’ve had, I’m finding myself very tolerant of things that don’t threaten to immediately kill me.
‘Mister Madden,’ I say, squeezing into the old wooden chair on the visitor’s side of the desk, hoping it doesn’t collapse, which might startle Mike into shooting me. ‘How’s tricks? I mean business tricks, not prostitution obviously.’
Mike does not glare at me. He is calm, a man biding his time.
‘Business is good, Danny boy. Booming. People always want shite, you know, so I give them the shite they want, and to be honest I can’t get hold of the shite fast enough.’
Seems as though Mike is afraid of wires and likes the word shite.
‘And how’s tricks with you, Daniel? Business, I mean.’
I give the standard Irish tell-’em-nothin’ response. ‘Ah sure, you know, not too bad.’
Mike winces. ‘Not what I hear. I hear Vic Jones is causing a few problems.’
It’s true. Victor has a lawyer claiming that the poker game never happened and he signed his lease away under duress. With AJ and Brandi in the wind, the only other witnesses to the game are the two girls whose future we played for. Jason has a team out looking for them. But even if we do find them, a poker lease transfer may not hold up, as it wasn’t agreed to by the owner.
But I say, ‘Don’t worry about Vic. You get your shite no matter who’s behind the desk.’