Eoin Colfer - Plugged

His nerve-clumsy fingers crab down his body towards the nine in his belt. He’s way too slow. I reach across and crush his hand in mine. Brandi puts him away with a vicious elbow to the side of his face. That girl changes allegiances in a heartbeat. No, that’s wrong. Our girl Brandi only has one allegiance. Vic slides off his chair, moaning, blood pouring from a cut above his nose.

AJ is moving, but I have so much adrenalin in my system that he might as well be wading through mud, coming around the side of the table at my ten o’clock with a look on his face that’s more animal than human.

I draw my little Glock 26 and put a shot in the bar mirror over his head. Fragments rain down spectacularly, glittering icicles, slicing AJ’s neck and hands.

I don’t have to say anything. Even AJ is not dumb enough to go up against a gun. He lies on the floor and starts crying.

I turn to Marcie and her friend. ‘Go now. Don’t ever come back in here. Stay off the strip.’

They kiss and hug me for a minute, like I’m an old rock star.

‘Thanks, Daddy,’ blurts Marcie. Then, ‘Oops. Sorry. I mean thanks, mister.’

Then they’re gone, skittering across the casino, sandals slapping the floor.

‘Thanks, Daddy,’ says Brandi, imitating the California/MTV twang that all kids speak with these days, then she cracks up laughing. ‘I don’t believe this, Dan. You own the club.’ She stamps the heels of her Catwoman boots with sheer joy. ‘That asshole’s time has come. I should crack his skull for all the shit I’ve had to put up with these past months.’

‘Don’t crack anything yet, Brandi. Vic hasn’t signed the lease over.’

‘Hmm,’ says Brandi.

She rouses her ex-boss with a sleet of ice from a steel bucket. As soon as he signs, she cold-cocks him with the bucket.

‘Finally this club is going to rock,’ she sings, pouring herself a healthy shot of bourbon. ‘We can get some professional girls working in back. Maybe cut a deal with Irish Mike for some product. Make us some serious money.’

I can see I’m going to have staff problems.

Jason shows Vic and AJ the door with unseemly glee. He actually sings them out using the tune from ‘YMCA’ and his own lyrics: ‘Get-the-Fuck-Out,

You pair of assholes.

Get-the-Fuck-Out,

And don’t come back here!’

I’m impressed. I haven’t seen Jason this happy since his signed Lou Ferrigno T-shirt arrived.

News spreads across the club like electricity across water, spasming everyone it touches. Pretty soon the entire staff are gathered outside the back room waiting for some kind of pep talk.

Talking to staff is not my area. Having staff is not my area, for Christ’s sake. Travel light has always been the code I live by, and yet somehow here I am with a casino and a dozen people depending on me for a living.

My transplants are itchy.

Thank God the wages were paid yesterday.

What about me? Ghost Zeb pitches in. Don’t forget about me .

And Zeb is still Irish Mike’s captive. Irish Mike who collects a little tribute every month from Slotz. It seems every time I crawl out of no-man’s-land, the earth tilts and rolls me back in.

I hear Brandi’s steel heels clacking across the casino floor and I decide to face the music before she launches into another tirade. I rise, check my skullcap in a remaining shard of busted mirror and duck under the door frame to meet my public.

It’s a weird feeling to have subordinates smiling at you; didn’t happen a lot in the army. Mostly in the army people muttered gobshite under their breath when I was dishing out orders. But here, all I’m getting is happy faces.

Jason is still riffing on ‘YMCA’.

‘Dan-Mac-Evoy,

Is fucking awesome,

Dan-Mac-Evoy,

Kicked Victor Jones’ goddamn ass!’

He abandons the song’s structure for the last line, but nevertheless his efforts earn him an enthusiastic round of applause.

‘Okay,’ I say, forcing a smile. ‘Okay. I thank you, Jason. The Village People thank you.’

More laughing. Marco tickles Jason in the ribs, which opens my eyes about a couple of things.

‘For tonight, we do everything as normal. Except the booths; no more hands-on in the booths. Anyone has a problem with that, talk to me later. Also, anyone working off a debt, you don’t owe me a dime, so from now on we all get paid.’

A couple of smiles from those no longer in the hole, but the hands-on girls don’t seem too thrilled.

‘If you get the opportunity to piss off Victor Jones, do not take it.’

‘Too late,’ chortles Jason, accepting multiple high fives. High fives? Christ, these guys are happy.

‘Don’t take it, because I don’t know how legal that poker game was.’

‘Legal?’ says Jason. ‘Vic’s been rolling girls for years back there. How legal was that?’

This is a good point.

‘You know any good lawyers, Danny?’ continues Jason.

Sure he does , says GZ. ’Cept Danny here has a tendency to get lawyers shot dead .

Marco trots across the floor, bearing a large Jameson on a scarred martini tray.

‘Here you are, Dan. You earned it.’

I accept the drink gratefully. The Irish whiskey is smooth going down, but has an aftershock like a jolt from a defibrillator.

‘Back to work everybody, enjoy the new management while it lasts. I need to think for a while.’

Brandi positions herself at my side. ‘That’s right, people. You heard the boss: back to work. We need to negotiate the booth action.’

Looks like I have a second in command.

First thing I do in Vic’s office is to kick Brandi out; the second is to rip down the porn. It’s not that I find naked women offensive; it’s just that I prefer the real thing. Also the pictures remind me of the previous occupant, and all the acts he claimed to have performed with the various club employees. Not images you want popping into your head in the course of a work day. Plus if Vic does manage to legal me out of here, I would like out of sheer vindictiveness to mess up his system as much as I can before he does it.

I don’t know how Vic got anything done. His work surface is a jumble of magazine towers, burger cartons and wadded foil wrappers. There’s a trash can in the corner that looks like it exploded some time in the nineties, and the window blinds are streaked brown and yellow from decades of cigar smoke.

I wipe the boss’s chair off and sit down, and that’s about as far as my plan extends.

Adjust the chair .

It’s a nice touch. I lower the chair six inches so Vic will get an unexpected little shock. Little nuggets like this keep a man going.

So sit down, and then what? Payrolls, overheads, rent, booze orders, cash deposits.

My transplanted follicles are begging for a scratching, something Zeb forbade me to do.

I didn’t employ five students and spend eight hours separating your follicles to have you scratch the little bastards out again. No touching for a month .

Hands flat on the table, I tell myself. Do not touch the new hair. It’s hard to believe how difficult not scratching is. I’ve waded through plenty of hard and distasteful tasks in my careers, but right at this moment, keeping my palms glued to the desk ranks right up there with any of them. Including latrine digging in the Lebanon.

I try to focus on something else, and the first thing that pops into my head is: Keerist almighty beep .

What did Sofia mean by that? Where did the beep come from? There was no beep mentioned the first time around. Where the hell do you even hear a beep these days? Maybe there was a car passing by.

Or maybe. . Something almost occurs to me, but I don’t let the thought materialise fully in case there’s something to it. I can deal with this eventuality if it becomes a possibility.