Disaster Inc

by Caimh McDonnell

  “Oh,” said Amy, realisation dawning. “This would be the stuff that…”

  “Yeah, that I lost when I got robbed or…”

  “But can’t you just call, like, the FBI or whatever and ask to speak to this Agent Dove woman?”

  Bunny shook his head. “That’s not really her name. Like I said, they only want to know if I find Simone. That’s her name, the woman, the particular woman.”

  Amy nodded. “So…”

  “So,” said Bunny, “I need to go and do what I was heading to do when you stopped and picked me up. Go find whoever robbed me and get my stuff back.”

  “Do you know how to find them?”

  “Well…” Bunny looked down awkwardly at his feet, embarrassed. “I don’t exactly have what you’d call perfect recall of what happened on Saturday. ’Tis a bit blurry, because of getting spiked and all.”

  “Right,” said Amy. “Well, what do you remember?”

  “I remember leaving my hotel.”

  “Hang on, you’ve got a hotel?”

  “Not exactly. I had to leave pretty quickly.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’ll sound bad if I tell you.”

  “Well now you have to tell me.”

  “I, kinda… well, I threw a man down the garbage chute.”

  “Woah!”

  “See, I told you it’d sound bad.”

  “And what exactly did this guy do to inspire such wrath?”

  “He threw a couple of punches.”

  “I pity the fool who throws a punch at you, slugger.”

  Bunny shifted in the seat. “He didn’t throw them at me.”

  “Oh?” said Amy, before her mind caught up with the conversation. “Oh,” she said again.

  Bunny nodded.

  “Anyway, I was hotel-less at 2am. What stuff I had was in my bag on my back, and, it being Saint Patrick’s Day, the chances of getting a hotel in the city were not great. Plus, I needed somewhere that wouldn’t ask for ID, and that sorta limits your options. Anyway, I slept in the Central Park for a bit and then, well… I’m not exactly sure.”

  “Wait. Are you telling me you don’t remember a whole day? Like, you blacked out?”

  Bunny pulled a face. “For a woman who is wanted for murder, you’re fierce judgey.”

  Amy leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. Then she started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She looked down at Bunny, which only caused the laughter to increase.

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Seriously, what’s the fecking story here?”

  She waved her hand at him. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh my God – I am so royally screwed.”

  “What?”

  She held her head in her hands as her body shook from the laughter.

  “Are you alright?”

  “No,” she said, tears now streaming down her cheeks, “I’m really not. People are trying to kill me, I’m wanted for murder and my one shot at survival is a drunk Irishman being able to piece back together what he did on Saint Patrick’s Day.”

  “For the last time, I was fecking spiked.”

  Amy looked at Bunny and then laughed so hard she fell off the sofa.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sherlock Holmes he was not.

  Embarrassed though he was to admit it to himself, seeing as he’d been a proud member of the Garda Síochána for thirty years and a detective for twenty-four of those, Bunny was not much for detecting. His skills lay in other areas. He was good with people – particularly in the area of putting the fear of God into them until they told him what he wanted to know. To be fair, the majority of police work wasn’t trying to figure out who did something, but rather proving that the bastard you knew did it actually did it. For that, you needed to find evidence. Bunny was fine with evidence. But this was different. This was what you’d call “a mystery”, and mysteries had clues. Bunny fecking hated clues.

  It was a deeply unpleasant sensation, having a stretch of time that he couldn’t recall. It had never happened before, and that was why he was sure that he must’ve been spiked. He remembered starting the day waking up on a bench in Central Park. Or rather, being woken by a pissed-off looking beat cop. Bunny guessed the morning rousting of the homeless was nobody’s favourite duty. He was cold, homesick and hungry, all of which was, he had to admit to himself, understandable.

  He’d sacrificed everything to come to America and find Simone – literally everything. He was dead as far as all but a very small and select group of people knew. He didn’t mind it; he’d do it again. But that didn’t mean it was easy. He’d been in New York nearly a week, and in that time he had achieved precisely nothing in his search. He had one lead, the Sisters of the Saint – a rogue bunch of slightly out-there nuns who had first helped Simone escape New York, and then, he was pretty sure, assisted her again to flee Dublin, when her past and Bunny’s present had conspired against them. That had been eighteen years ago. If the Sisters of the Saint were even still in New York, they made it a matter of principle to stay out of public view. The realisation had hit Bunny that he wasn’t so much looking for a needle in a haystack as a needle in a stack of needles – and one that didn’t want to be found to boot.

  So yes, it would be fair to say that, even prior to Friday night, his trip to New York hadn’t been going swimmingly. Then he’d had to flee the fleabag hotel he’d been staying in after he’d thrown that gobshite down the garbage chute. The place had very thin walls. He’d heard the asshole deliver the backhand slap and he’d felt the vibration as the woman had hit the floor. If Bunny had one guiding principle, it was that a man who raises his hand to a woman is no longer a man. As far as he was concerned, the fella was garbage and he got disposed of appropriately. The prick had an unpleasant landing and learned a valuable lesson. Bunny had no regrets. Still, the manager had been hollering about calling the cops and Bunny didn’t need that kind of attention. He had no ID of any kind and that was a problem. It was also why he’d been staying in that shitty hotel in the first place, as it turned out all the decent hotels wanted to see some ID on check-in. Agent Dove hadn’t given him any. He was pretty sure that was deliberate. He’d said he would find Simone and make sure she was safe, but he’d no intention of trusting her fate to Dove and her friends, whoever they might be. The lack of ID was their way of keeping him under control. The ATM card with a two-hundred-dollar daily withdrawal limit and the special mobile phone, he realised, were easy ways of keeping tabs on him. If he ever started getting anywhere in his search for Simone, he’d have to do something about that. Of course, ironically, he had. Getting robbed had got rid of both of them, and now he needed them back. Contacting Agent Dove was the only thing Bunny could think of to help Amy, which meant that regaining his stuff was right back at priority number one. To do that, he needed to find the day he’d lost, along with whoever had robbed him. That meant doing some serious detecting.

  So, there he’d been, waking up on a park bench, cold, hungry and homesick.

  Yes, homesick. It being Paddy’s Day had really brought it home. Not that he’d ever been a big fan of parades: he couldn’t see the point of all that marching-band nonsense with the stick twirling and all of that. No, his Paddy’s Days for the last thirty years straight had been spent at the All-Ireland Club Championship in Croke Park. For most of those years, he’d got tickets and brought along any of the St Jude’s under 12s team, which he’d coached, who wanted to come. That had always been his day. Getting them all into the club’s knackered minibus, bringing them all to the game and then back home via a stop-off for burger and chips. That had been his life.

  Now, he was a dead man wandering the streets of New York, trying to find a bunch of crazy nuns who didn’t want to be found. He’d ended up spending the night sleeping on a bench in Central Park, shivering in his sheepskin coat. Clue number one, your honour, the “victim” had been cold, friendless and fecking miserable, with only a bottle of Jim Beam for company
. In the morning he’d woken to find that he’d finished the whiskey and some little scrote had nicked his rucksack with all his clothes in it. He remembered thinking at the time that it was lucky his wallet and phone were zipped into the inside pocket of his coat. Being moved on by the cop was the last thing he remembered clearly until waking up at 6am the next morning. As well as a pounding headache, he had a sore jaw, indicating he may’ve taken a punch at some point in the evening. The lost time felt like the gap where a tooth had once been; he kept feeling around it, trying to come to terms with it. He was also worried about what exactly he’d find – the lack of details left an unsettling sense of guilt floating about, waiting for a memory to attach itself to.

  Now, he sat at the bar and looked at the array of objects in front of him. Except for some loose change and a solitary twenty-dollar bill, these four items were all he’d had in his possession when he’d woken up the previous morning.

  One: a gold medal – actually made of plastic that proclaimed the wearer was a tap legend. Bunny had never danced, tap or otherwise.

  Two: a lady’s lace bra, pink in colour.

  Three: what looked like the fortune from a fortune cookie, only it read “Death comes to us all,” which left a little to be desired in the motivational quote stakes.

  And four: a picture.

  Beside these items sat a pint of Guinness – that hadn’t been in his pockets when he’d woken up, although Bunny would have to admit that it clearly played a large role in the case. The fourth item was the only one that had been in his possession long before Saturday. It was the picture of Simone and him that had been taken almost twenty years ago. His younger self beamed back joy at him, so real that it was painful to see. His arm was around her; she was giving that smile that broke his heart every time. The picture had lived in the back of his wallet, the one he no longer had. That in itself was a clue.

  Cold, homesick and hungry.

  Speaking of which, he was starving now. He’d not eaten anything all day. What he’d give for a full Irish breakfast.

  And there it was – know thyself.

  He drained the remains of his pint and shoved the clues back into his coat pockets. He picked up his change. All he had was the remains of the two hundred dollars Amy had fronted him, and he felt uncomfortable spending money that, as far as he was concerned, he hadn’t earned yet.

  Hopefully he’d soon start earning it properly.

  He was off to Central Park – and then to go find the nearest full Irish breakfast.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the back of Bunny’s mind, faint bells were ringing. Also, there were actual bells ringing. Somewhere in the distance, the peal of church bells could be heard. It was now just after lunchtime on Monday: somebody was either getting married or getting buried.

  Still, the reasons for the bells ringing in Bunny’s mind was that the bar with the sign proclaiming it “Paulie’s” looked familiar. What really looked familiar was the fact that that wasn’t what the sign actually said. The u was missing, leaving a faint outline where the gold letter should be, so the sign actually proclaimed “Pa lie’s.” Bunny had gone to Central Park, found the bench that he’d used when he’d hopped the fence a couple of nights previously and then started to walk around its outskirts, hoping that something would jump out at him. It had taken nearly two hours, but something finally had – Paulie’s minus the u.

  Bunny stepped in the door.

  “Oh no.” The exclamation came from a middle-aged woman behind the counter with a blonde perm held with enough hairspray to ensure it would survive the apocalypse. She was looking right at Bunny and didn’t seem happy to see him.

  He slowly approached the bar. “Hey, how are ye?”

  She pouted her lips for a moment and then gave him a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Hello, sir, I didn’t expect to see you back here again.”

  “I was here on Saturday?”

  He said it as a question, but she’d not taken it as such. “Yeah, I remember it well. You and the owner had quite the stand-up row.”

  “Yeah,” said Bunny, trying to play along. “I just wanted to say sorry about that.”

  When in doubt, an apology seemed like a sensible way forward. It appeared to work. She leaned across the counter, and after glancing around to make sure they were still the only two people in the bar, she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Hey, don’t worry about it. Paulie was being an asshole.”

  Bunny lowered his voice to match hers. “To be honest with you, I can’t even remember how it got started.”

  “You’d just finished your breakfast and I’d asked you how it was, y’know, doing the good customer service and all. You said it was good but, y’know, sorta mentioned how it wasn’t actually a full Irish breakfast, like we had on the sign.”

  “Right, yeah.”

  “To be real with you, hon’, Paulie got a deal on that haggis stuff and so he just told Svetlana to cook it up and put it in there.”

  “Haggis is Scottish.”

  Bunny could see her resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what you said. Paulie overheard though and y’know, he’s a little thin-skinned. Always has been. He starts in on how it was all the same. Ireland. Scotland.”

  Bunny saw his own knuckles whiten slightly as he gripped the bar. “Right.”

  “Yeah, it got pretty heated after that. Paulie said something about potatoes and, well… it was lucky your friend was here.”

  Bunny looked up in surprise. “Excuse me?”

  “Y’know, the African American gentleman?” Bunny could see the waitress registering his confusion. “Sorta skinny kid, big ears – cute though. I don’t go for the baby-faced guys myself. My friend Tina, though, she laps that stuff up. Woman sees a pair of dimples and she’s on her back faster than…” She blushed as she stopped herself talking, straightening up and going back to polishing the counter. “There I go running my damn mouth again. Ignore me.”

  “And this black fella, he broke up the argument?”

  The bartender gave Bunny a look. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  It was Bunny’s turn to look embarrassed. “Look, I can’t exactly remember what happened to me on Saturday.”

  “Really, like that amnesia and shit?”

  “Sort of, yeah. You could say that.” Bunny preferred that phrasing. Made it sound more medical.

  She didn’t look fully convinced, but she cautiously continued. “Well, I s’pose. Anyway, the guy agrees with you but still calmed the whole thing down. Said he’d take you someplace else, to a proper Irish bar. He got you out of here before Paulie goes and gets his bat.”

  “His bat?”

  “Shush, keep your voice down. Paulie is all bark. He thinks he’s some kinda tough guy. Don’t worry about it.”

  Bunny noticed that she was starting to look a little edgy. Like going over this ground might’ve been a bad idea.

  “Look, let’s forget about it, alright? Your friend got you outta here so, y’know, it was all’s well that ends well.”

  Bunny nodded. “Fair enough. I don’t suppose you happen to know the name of the bar he might’ve taken me to?”

  “Sure.” She turned around and started going through a stack of till receipts that were on a spike behind the bar. Eventually she found the one she was looking for, ripped it off and placed it down on the counter.

  “Is this the name of the bar?”

  “No, honey. This is the bill for your friend’s breakfast that he forgot to pay before he pushed you out the door.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Yeah. Honest mistake, I’m sure.”

  Bunny nodded, took the wad of twenties out of his trouser pocket and laid one down.

  “He struck me as being a big tipper too.”

  Bunny placed another twenty on the bar, looked at the bartender’s face and then placed down a third.

  She gave him a wide smile. “The Porterhouse Lodge over on Eleventh Avenue in Hell’s K
itchen,” she said, scooping up the money, “down near the Lincoln Tunnel.”

  “Grand.” Bunny looked at the money he had left. “I don’t suppose my friend struck you as the sort who might be expecting change?”

  She shook her head firmly.

  “Yeah, I’d a feeling.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Porterhouse Lodge was an actual pub. It wasn’t trying to look like a pub. They hadn’t brought in a team of consultants in order to achieve a pub-like quality and it hadn’t engaged in customer consultations to determine what they most looked for in a pub. No, they’d just put a bar in a building and let nature take its course. In Bunny’s opinion, good pubs weren’t built, they were carefully grown over time. No two were the same, and if they were, then they weren’t proper pubs to begin with. Bunny had strong opinions on this and had been known to explain his views at some length. Pubs, the full Irish breakfast and why soccer was rotting the brains of the younger generations were his Holy Trinity of hot-button topics.

  He couldn’t tell if he’d been in the Porterhouse Lodge before or if it just echoed the kind of pubs he regularly frequented. The bar was of the same dark wood as O’Hagan’s in Dublin and he was taken aback by an unexpected pang of nostalgia.

  It’d taken him thirty minutes to walk there. The sun was out and though it wasn’t doing much to warm the place, it was still a pleasant experience. By the time he got there though, his foot was throbbing. It was painful every now and then in normal usage, but the boot he’d received to it the day before had rather knocked it up a few notches. He’d not wanted to splurge on another taxi, as he felt bad burning through Amy’s money, especially if bar staff were going to expect to be quite so well reimbursed for their helpfulness.