Eoin Colfer - Screwed

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.