Chapter 55 Dickfest
Dickfest
The RoamZone’s distinctive ring jerked Evan from sleep.
He felt bizarrely refreshed, his veins plumped from the rapid bolus. It was light outside, morning bright.
He blinked himself the rest of the way awake, checked his Vertex fob watch. Ten o’clock. In the A.M. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept for seventeen hours.
The aches had receded but still made themselves known when he rolled over to grab the RoamZone. Caller ID showed Joey.
When he picked up, she said, “I got two dicks.”
The flesh over his left high rib was puffy and tender but it did not look infected. Beneath the skin, blood had drifted across his pectoral, bruising the color of Syrah.
He said, “Come again?”
“Not, like, anatomically. I mean I identified the owners of two of the dicks. I’m sending their dossiers now.” Bink. Bink. “Guess how many videos said dicks have appeared in?”
“Do I want to—”
“Eighty-seven.” A pause to let the number sink in. “They always appear with the same two other dicks but I can’t tie those to the humans they belong to so for now they remain just: dicks.”
Sitting up, Evan flicked through the files she’d sent.
Finley Jacowski and Michael Macmanus.
They’d had enough arrests and petty convictions to have aliases listed in their jackets: Finn-Finn and Big Mikey. Michael shared a last name with the Goliath Evan had anchored to the earth at Glass Bottle Beach. Brother, perhaps, or cousin.
“Anywho,” Joey said, “they left location services on because they’re clearly idiots and they’re in the same place. Right now.”
He shot to his feet. “You have them pinned?”
“Sending link.” Bink. “If you get there fast, you might get lucky and find out that the two unidentified dicks are also there with the identified dicks, having a, dunno, dickfest.”
He thumbed open the GPS.
There they were, two blinking dots nearly on top of each other. He zoomed in until he could see the building, a diner in Turtle Bay near the East River.
“They’ve only been there, like, two minutes so if you move it, you can catch up to them.”
Rushing, he slung on a shirt, his chest aching with the effort, and then his cargo pants, dried stiffly from the rain. As he tugged on socks and laced up his boots, his hip flexors complained. And his intercostals. And left triceps brachii tendon.
But the pain was manageable.
“And also?” Joey said. “RedLite? They’re wiped out for now, X. Nothing loading, multiple sites down. They’re gonna haveta toss every piece of equipment they’ve got and rebuild from bare metal. Their stock is in free fall and Devine is about to make his move.”
“Are they shut down completely?”
“Their home page is closed for repairs. But there’s a notice that they’ll have live streams up by tomorrow. I’ll put on my black hat and get after it but they’ll have a window of operation before Devine takes control of the joystick.”
His holster was empty. He looked for his gun. Couldn’t find it.
His heart rate spiked.
Hanging up, he moved to the door, flinging it open.
Candy was waiting, ARES resting on the flat of her palm. Shiny and polished.
“Cleaned it,” she said. “Given the mud and all. Debris in the barrel, and the extractor channel needed a scrubbing—a pipe cleaner and three Q-tips.”
He took the pistol, locked back the slide, removed the magazine, eyed the chamber, and performed a function check.
Every- thing felt like precision ceramic ball bearings running on lightweight silicone oil.
Then he reloaded the ARES and spun it through the magnet buttons of his shirt straight into his appendix holster.
Candy would have performed the exact same function checks had their roles been reversed. The act of professional courtesy combined with trust was not lost on either of them.
Giving her a nod, he charged into the bathroom, brushed teeth, threw water over his face, pissed out about a liter of fluid.
As he emerged, Anca came around from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. “Oh. You’re up! Can I make you something to eat?”
“No time.” He hustled to the door. “I got a bead on the location of two of the men.”
Anca looked stricken, the reality dawning. “Two of the men who did that? To me?”
He hadn’t considered the impact the news might have on her. He spun to look at her. Despite the rush, she deserved eye contact. “Yes.”
Anca said, “What will happen to them now?”
“Now?” Candy said. “They are fucked.”
Anca fluttered her hand as if the expletive were still floating in front of her and she had to shoo it away. “So they will be effed,” she said. “But not dead.”
“Not dead,” he said.
“Backup mags?” Candy asked.
He tapped his cargo pants over the discreet pockets, fingertips plinking against steel.
Candy nudged him toward the door. “EDC?”
With a knuckle, he knocked the Strider, his everyday carry, in the left front pocket of his cargo pants.
“Flex-cuffs?”
No.
He held out his hand. She set a tight roll of them in his palm. He reloaded the secondary pouch inside his top thigh pocket.
Nearing the door, he remembered. Bracing himself, he turned back to face Anca. “Your test.”
She grinned. “Negative.”
His exhalation was longer than usual.
Anca held up her hand and Candy skipped back to high-five her. The casual exchange elicited a twist of emotion in him. They were such different women and yet something had grown between them, binding them together.
He took them in, these two women standing in the calm of the apartment.
The heater blew warm air with a not-too-strong mustiness that felt vaguely homey.
The frayed kilim rug, the wiped-clean dark furniture, the sun-faded floral still life.
And that secretary desk tilted on its venerable legs, laden with candles and pictures of Anca’s parents.
Anca would be safe here with Candy. Of course—anyone would be safe with Candy. But it was more than just that. They were together and that meant something more than safe.
Anca would be okay here.
She would be okay.
He let go. A conscious effort to release, to drop into operational mode, to allow his blood to run cold.
Anca was looking at him, puzzled. “What?” she asked.
But he was gone.
Evan stood outside the diner, hands in his pockets, a point of stillness among the rush of pedestrians.
It was the kind of archetypal diner found only in New York City and small American towns.
Behind a massive plate-glass window, Finn-Finn and Big Mikey sat in a booth, torpidly thumbing at their phones.
Mikey slurped at the last of a strawberry milkshake.
If they looked up, they would see Evan standing right there at the window.
But they did not look up.
He’d scouted the area physically and virtually, knew which of the neighboring stores had rear exits, the blueprints of the floors above, the sprint time to the closest subway stops in case he didn’t have the luxury of returning to his car. The diner was packed.
Evan entered to a jingle from the belled front door. An old-fashioned jukebox glowed red and gold, humming with doo-wop harmonization. Meat sizzled on an unseen grill. The place smelled deliciously of root beer and burger grease.
“Help you?” The hostess wore a jaunty paper diner hat that looked like a battleship turned upside down.
“My party is already here,” Evan said.
He threaded through the tables and sat down next to Big Mikey, scooting him in so he was trapped against the window. The booth was padded vinyl, cherry red, the cracks spot-patched with duct tape.
“Hey, man. What the fuck?”
Big Mikey looked like the genetic runoff from Goliath, huge but not colossal, ugly but not troll-like, menacing but not intimidating.
He was brutish, big features, girthy at the chest, stomach, and thighs.
At first Evan thought there was crusted blood in his scraggly facial hair, but a closer look showed it to be a port-wine stain that he’d tried to hide with his beard.
Across the table, chewed grilled-cheese crusts remained on Finn-Finn’s plate, and his lips were greasy like a little kid’s. The men were younger than Evan had anticipated. They looked like boys still catching up to adult bodies.
He recognized their carriage and bearing from the video, images strobing in his mind. A goat-skull tattoo on sweaty flesh. Drawn-out moans. Anca’s sluggish body adjusted this way and that, her limbs flung aside to grant access.
The two young men looked disappointingly ordinary here in the midday light of a bustling diner, a world apart from that subterranean apartment where they’d done things that men in ski masks did.
In person they looked like nothing at all.
Even if he hadn’t made a promise to Anca, Evan wondered if he would have had the heart to kill them.
Sitting with them now looking into their faces was anticlimactic.
His fury wasn’t lost—it was still in the bucking chute waiting for the gate to lift—but in this moment he felt nothing so much as worn out.
“Finley Jacowski,” Evan said. “Michael Macmanus.”
“Are you a cop?” Finn-Finn said. “Because you haveta tell us if you’re a cop. You haveta.”
That voice. It summoned a haunted echo from the footage: My turn! My turn!
Evan said, “No.”
Big Mikey said, “The fuck you want then?”
Evan pivoted his head. Looked at him.
“Oh,” Big Mikey said. “Oh, shit. You’re him. The scary fucking friend.”
“Yes,” Evan said.
“You don’t look scary.”
Finn-Finn glanced over his shoulder, gauging a route to the door.
Evan watched to see if he’d make a run for it.
Evan was looking for an excuse, just like when he’d baited Tyler Russell into taking a swing at him with the baseball bat so he could kick him through his house and a chicken coop to shove his face into the aboveground pool.
Big Mikey leaned back and spread his arms across the padded back of the booth. “What are you gonna do? Here? There’re, like, witnesses everywhere.”
The starting gate rattled, holding Evan’s rage in check. He kept his voice calm. “Witnesses don’t concern me.”