by Eoin Colfer
“Well then you better stop calling me or I’ll send some voodoo down this line that will shrivel your balls like raisins.”
That is a graphic threat and the superstitious Paddy in me swears that his goujons are tingling a little, which jogs my memory.
“The code is; When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
“Dan, honey,” Sofia says all treacle and promise now. “Where are you?”
Girls putting on the baby voice usually make me wince, but Sofia does it with such need and conviction that it would break the hardest heart. If old Paddy Costello had met someone like Sofia he might have actually enjoyed his miserable life of untold wealth.
“I am on my way over,” I tell the microphone. “I’ll be with you in ninety minutes max.”
I’m coming up on the Newark Turnpike and traffic is slow but moving, which is about as good as it ever gets, so I might make it in an hour twenty.
“Are you feeling hot, baby?”
I think maybe Sofia Delano sincerely believes that sex is the only reason anyone would give her the time of day. This Carmine asshole screwed her up good. From what I can glean from her neighbors, Carmine was the jealous type who turned a vivacious young girl into a virtual recluse—think cat lady without the cats—and people will go to extraordinary lengths for attention when they have been systematically starved of it for years. I remember having a physical as a kid and half hoping the pain in my head was a tumor because fathers always love their sick kids, don’t they?
So I understand, sort of.
I tried to track down Carmine a couple of months ago to put Sofia out of her misery. I even put a computer genius friend of Jason’s on the case, but the guy has disappeared off the face of the earth, like aliens took a shine to him.
A guy like that is mostly likely dead or locked deep in the bowels of a Mexican prison. I can’t help worrying about it though. Bad pennies have a habit of showing up.
“No, Sofia. It’s not like that. Some people might come to see you, before I get there. I want you to put the brace on the door and don’t open up for anyone but me.”
“Are they bad people, Dan?”
She doesn’t sound afraid, a little eager maybe, and I’m worried she won’t lock the door because she’d appreciate the company. Mike could send over a couple of stone killers and my girl could mix them a shaker of martinis. Then again, she might cut them open and tell the future in their entrails. I’m exaggerating at both ends, but the point is that Sofia can’t tell good from bad when it comes to attention.
“Yes, these are bad people, Sofia. You have to trust me and lock the door. What weapons do you have?”
Sofia amps up the little-girl voice so I know she’s lying. “I don’t have any weapons, Danny. No guns on this premises.”
“I know you have at least one gun, Sofia. I found a shell box in the trash.”
“So I like to scorch patterns on the carpet, that’s not proof positive of a firearm.”
Shouting at ladies is bad so I stop myself from doing it.
“Please, Sofia. Protect yourself until I get there. Do whatever you have to do.”
“Whatever I have to do?”
“Whatever.”
There is a clunk as Sofia drops the phone. She is so excited that she has forgotten to hang up.
I don’t fully understand the strange hold that Sofia has over me. There’s an old Gaelic word, geasa, which is about as close as I can come to explaining it. My class learned all about geasa in school from this dick teacher we had one year: Mr. Fitzgerald, liked all the kids to call him Fitz. Winked at the girls and gave the boys cigarettes. Creepy customer. So anyways, Fitz asks a question about geasa, what they were and so forth. This was a genuine hard question and holy shit if I didn’t know the answer.
“Is that hand connected to your arm, Daniel?” said Fitz, when he saw who was volunteering. “I should take a photograph.”
“Geasa are magical bonds,” I rattled off, before my brain lost it. “Cast over a man to bind him to the woman who loves him.”
Fitz was stunned and I couldn’t blame him. In the three months he’d been teaching me mythology, I didn’t do it was only answer I’d ever offered. It wasn’t that I was slow, I just didn’t know the answers.
“Fuck me,” he said, big eyebrows arching like slugs.
It was a laugh. Fitz got suspended and I got to slit his tires without anyone looking too deep into it.
I only knew this particular term because my mom, wise in the ways of Irish folklore to the extent that only the child of an immigrant can be, suspected that perhaps my father had reversed the trend and magically bound her to him. Maybe she was right. Margaret Costello McEvoy certainly never got free of her husband. He even bore her down into the dirt with him.
And when his elder daughter died, even then Paddy Costello had not broken and hurried to her graveside to comfort his grandson.
Guy’s a rich asshole. Only difference between him and regular assholes is monogrammed shirts.
So, like I was saying, Sofia Delano has me under a spell. And I think the main reason I don’t break free is that I don’t really want to. Part of me hopes she’s gonna snap out of it and we’ll have end-of-days sex and then embark on a series of adventures in a Caddy convertible.
Even Zeb knows enough about mental illness to realize that I am being slightly optimistic, or as he put it:
You have your head shoved so far up your ass that you’re working your own mouth from the inside.
I could have misheard that metaphor, or it’s possible that even Zeb didn’t know what he was talking about, he does favor the graphic image. Among his more confusing references is the description of his morning boner: Danny, I got a hard-on like a vengeful baboon who just won the jungle lottery.
I have no idea what the hell that means, and I would emigrate before asking, as Zeb would drone on circuitously for hours to justify his choice of words.
All I know for sure is that I cannot allow harm to come to Sofia because of my situation. I hope I can get to her before Mike hears the sound of his shit hitting my fan. Or as Zeb might say:
Before Mike realizes his plan is more fucked than a waxed badger walking backward through a flamingo patch with honey on its ass.
See what I mean? Just thinking about what the guy would say is enough to bring on migraine.
Sofia is squared away for now and there is no more I can do on that front until I get there, so I turn my mind to the other cold fronts that are closing in from the north and east. Jason, I put on red alert with a quick text. He’s gonna love that, tooling up his beefcake brigade. I pity the mobster who goes knocking on the Slotz door now. Jason’s guys will kick the shit out of him, then do his color palette.
If you have a fashion problem. If no one else can help you. Maybe you can hire the Gay Team.
Was that homophobic? Am I allowed to tease the other team at all?
Best to say nothing. Keep out of harm’s way.
I make it to the city limits in just over an hour and then I gotta sit in off-ramp traffic for ten minutes while some fender bender gets sorted out. There are a couple of bike cops on buffer duty between the drivers so I don’t lean on the horn and vent my frustrations. Mike’s boys could be on their way to Sofia’s apartment right now and I gotta sit here watching some hedge-fund, Armani-wearing, winter-tanned asshole do kiddie hysterics over his E-Class bumper. The notion that I could toss him off the ramp and be on my way grabs hold of me and I have to squeeze the steering wheel until it cracks to stop myself acting on it.
By the time they get around to waving us through with traffic wands, I am so wound up that I take off like a bat out of hell clipping a wand on my way past.
Way to stay below the radar in your stolen car, moron.
That’s what Sofia does to me. All reason goes out the window.
I avoid Cloisters’s main street, such as it is, and go across Cypress to hang the technically illegal U-turn that everyone does, which save
s me a couple of blocks. Sofia’s building is so commonplace that I often find it difficult to believe that she lives inside, that some of her mercury has not bled through to the walls, staining them with violent slashes of color.
Now who’s the psycho? Mood walls? I really should call Dr. Moriarty and fill him in on some of my new theories.
I abandon the car on a yellow line and take the steps two at a time, catching a break when my ex-neighbor old Mr. Hong shuffles out the front door dragging his shopping buggy on a cord trailing between his bowed legs, pulling tight against an area where I would not want a cord to be.
“Mr. Hong,” I say, reflexively courteous.
“My balls are smarting,” he says to me crossly. “Like they’re tied in knots.”
The first hundred times he said this to me, I pointed out the cord dividing his nethers. Now I just make shit up.
“It’s the New Jersey damp,” I say, not putting too much effort into it. “Notoriously bad for balls.”
Hong grunts, produces a peach from somewhere, stuffs the entire fruit into his mouth and begins the daily race to gum the peach into a paste before it chokes him. I slip past into the brownstone lobby thinking, We are all mad here.
Sofia’s place is on the third floor and I take great bounds up the stairway, shouldering the wall on each turn rather than slow down. I knock a dent in the sheetrock on the second floor and it occurs to me that I will have to pay for that at some point, which bothers me, because a person should get a pass when he is trying to save someone’s life for Christ’s sake.
The banister bears the brunt of my shoulder charge on the final turn and I make splinters of the railings, which crack loud enough to warn any intruder that I am on the way. Even a deaf intruder could feel the vibration of my thundering approach.
What happened to stealth? I was a specialist once upon a time.
No time for softly softly. My Celtic sixth sense that only predicts bad stuff is bubbling in my gut. It’s like a spider sense that brings on the shits, which would be a very bad look for Peter Parker, swinging over Manhattan.
Bad things have happened. I’m too late.
This notion is confirmed by Sofia’s door, which yawns open, still creaking, so I’m seconds late. Seconds.
Oh Sofia, darlin’, I think, fearing the worst, what other way is there to fear? I did not protect you. I could not save you to be my own.
If she is dead I will hunt down that husband of hers and take my time with him, I promise myself. Maybe sell the video to Citizen Pain.
I barrel inside, my momentum carrying me across the room, totally off balance.
Stupid amateur. Stupid.
First thing my senses pick up is the tacky resistance as my soles leave the floor. My life is a trail of bloody footprints so I know what’s sticking to my boots. I look anyway to confirm it, and there is a lattice of blood following the grout patterns in the floor tiles, forming an irregular triangle. At the tip is a woman’s head, cracked open by a blow, hair fanned like a halo. Sofia lies awkwardly, the quirky spirit bludgeoned out of her.
I forget everything I ever learned about violent situations. I do not compartmentalize. I do not defer my grief. Instead I behave like a civilian who has had the blindfold of civilization whipped off to reveal a first look at the ugliness of the world.
I collapse from the inside out, tumbling forward as my brain cuts off motor commands. I fall to the floor cursing the men responsible for this brutality. I curse the banker at the off-ramp. Mike Madden, Zeb, Freckles. All those guys. A pox on their heads and a plague on their families.
All bullshit of course. I’m the one who brought this on poor deluded Sofia. I kissed her on the lips and lit her up for the bogeymen.
So I curse myself and my bloodstained hands. I curse my tangent-driven mind that cannot seem to focus in even the most urgent circumstances. I cry for everything that has ever happened. The line of bodies that dog me from the past all the way back to the tangled pile of limbs inside a crushed car in Dublin.
I am a rotten fruit with barely a scrap of untainted meat left. One more bite and I am lost.
I lie there on the floor, head half under the settee watching the sunlight draw laser lines in the blood pattern, when Sofia’s hand twitches and I notice the nails bitten to the quick.
Sofia doesn’t bite her nails anymore. She is proud of her painted talons. She likes to purr like a cat and scratch the air.
Not Sofia? Not dead?
This is too much for me. I feel dull and stupid, and left out of the joke.
I roll to my knees.
“Sofia?” I croak.
And she comes out of the kitchen, all in black, plenty of pockets, military style.
Janet Jackson. Rhythm Nation.
“Hey, baby,” she says, a hammer dangling from her fingers, a ribbon of bloody scalp in its claw. “You were right. Someone came a-looking for you, but I did what I had to do. No gun necessary.”
Who is on the floor? Who is nearly dead?
I need answers to fill this awful vacuum.
Crawling seems achievable. I crawl across the floor, dragging my knees through the darkening blood and with infinite care, turn the woman’s head and gaze upon her face.
I have finally gone mad.
It was only a matter of time. I should pay attention now, because Simon is going to want details when we go over this in therapy.
The woman is my mother.
Dead these twenty-five years.
My sweet mom. Looking not a day older.
“Mom?”
I hear the word and I know it came from my mouth but I am a little out of body right now. Shell shocked on seashells by the seashore on Blackrock beach, where we used to walk.
The woman’s eyes flutter open and she coughs a lungful of booze fumes in my eyes, scalding them.
“Danny,” she says like we talked yesterday. “Something happened to my head. I forgot again.”
My long-term memory fizzles into life and I get it in a jumbled rush of memories: ice picks, chaste good-night kisses, boob lectures.
Not my mother. Her baby sister, with enough of a resemblance to fool my frazzled brain.
Clearly not your mother, idiot.
Evelyn Costello reaches up a hand; her nail stubs are painted blood red. No, not painted. It’s real blood, her own.
“Danny. I found you. You treating girls with respect, Danny?”
Her eyes flicker and she is gone again, borne off by head trauma.
Just as well. I need to think.
I feel Sofia behind me. “Who is this, Carmine? You got some whore stashed away? Is that it?”
So I am Carmine again. Figures.
There’s a lot of blood on the floor.
“No, Sofia. This is not some whore, this is my aunt.”
Sofia sniffs like this is such a crock. Who can blame her? Evelyn is only a few years older than me.
“Aunt? Really, baby?”
It’s not her fault. Sofia was only doing what I told her to do, but suddenly I’m angry.
I jump to my feet and snatch the hammer. “Yeah, really. You brained my aunt.”
Sofia knows crazy when she sees it and backs off.
“Sorry,” And she cocks a hip and salutes. “Just following orders, Carmine.”
Dan-Carmine. Carmine-Dan.
Maybe I am Carmine. How hard could it be?
This is all too labyrinthine. There are too many strands for me to follow. Soldiering was simple:
You have one enemy.
His face will be darker than yours and he will be wearing desert shit. Not camo gear, genuine desert shit. Goatskin, rough scarves, vintage Levis.
Find your enemy.
Kill your enemy.
But here and now, my enemies are multitude and look all the bloody same. Mike, Freckles, Shea, KFC, Krieger and Fortz.
I need a friend. Someone who can out-sneaky the sneakers. A person with paranoia in his veins who owes me his life.
This apa
rtment is too bright. Everything seems bleached. How does that happen with small windows?
Evelyn moans at my feet.
I need a doctor.
I pull out my phone to call Zeb.
He better not give me the runaround. I am not in the mood.
I punch Zeb’s number and while the phone chirps in my ear, I pray that my friend is not stoned already.
CHAPTER 6
SO HERE’S EVELYN COSTELLO, THE AWOL HEIRESS WHO schooled me in the ways of mammipulation which is not a word but should be, back in my life again after twenty years within four hours of me meeting her stepmother, who is about a decade younger than her stepdaughter.
This is starting to sound like yee-haw heaven; It gits so darn lonesome in the trailer park that there ain’t nuthin’ for it but to hump yore own sister.
I know plenty of people that don’t believe in coincidence, but I do. They happen all the time. It’s usually petty stuff like meeting two guys called Ken inside an hour or buying a DVD on the very night a movie shows up on cable. Generally coincidences do not have immediate and obvious life-altering consequences. I suppose it’s possible that Edit and Evelyn would plonk themselves in the middle of my stressful day by total coincidence, but it would be one hell of a twist of fate.
Now that I’m close to her, examining the head wound that Sofia inflicted, I notice that Evelyn smells just like I remember. Still using the same shampoo. Women do that; stay loyal to a product. Men always think there might be something better out there. Men like Carmine.
I swab the wound with a little antiseptic, but that’s all I do because anything more and Zeb will have one of his doctor-ial shit fits like I’m not a professional and did I think he spent six years in medical school just so some grunt could go around getting all surgical? It’s not often Zeb gets to play real doctor and so he gets pissed if anyone steals so much as a peal of his thunder.
My Twitter icon chirps and spits out a nugget from Simon:
To Klingon22- Sure it’s okay for you to be attracted to a Romulon. We are all the same under the latex.
I don’t know who Klingon22 is but I would swap places with him in a heartbeat.
I lay Evelyn out on the sofa and am still watching over her when Zeb shows up. As usual, Sofia is less than happy to see his face, and as usual Zeb tries it on with her.
