Scarlet
The night whirs on into madness. Mickey drags me to the center of the dancefloor and tosses me around as his men toss their prostitutes around. He twirls me and throws me clumsily, making it so that all I can focus on is not smashing into a wall or somebody else. I see Cor at some point taking Moira by the elbow and leading her out of the ballroom, to the bedrooms. He’s probably going to hide her in the furthest one and tell her to wait there. Even as Mickey snakes his hand up the small of my back and brings his whisky-reeking mouth close to my face, I allow myself a small smile. Everybody is too drunk now to notice who’s here and who’s not, as long as they stay on this floor. The waiters have left, glasses of champagne and food scattered and smeared all over the place. It’s like the aftermath of a party, and yet the party is still going.
Mickey backs me into the wall by dancing on my toes, a giant bear of a man stamping on the floor, waving his arms and forcing me into the corner. He looms over me, smiling, eyebrows wriggling up and down as he tries to focus. “You’re a real angel, do you know that? I used to sit alone at lunchtime in school because the other children didn’t understand me. They would call me names. Children are cruel and dislike anything that is different from them. So I would spend a great deal of my time watching the young females and wondering what it would be like to slide my hand up their skirts. My cousin Moira used to let me sometimes. She used to beg for it.”
I know this isn’t true; Moira has told me about her perverted cousin and how he would try and pressure her sexually. But all I can do is stay small in my nook. I see Cor reenter the room, become still for a moment as rage flits across his face, and then nod to me and toward the bedrooms. The message in his ice-blue eyes is clear: get him alone, isolate him, and make him vulnerable. He doesn’t look happy about it, but he also knows that trying to take him out here, with armed men everywhere, won’t work. He’s a professional. He must also see that none of his men have guns.
“Oh, she used to beg,” Mickey goes on as Cor sits down near the hallway, waiting. “She used to beg like a real whore.”
This is it. He’s drunk enough. He’s stupid enough. It’s time to make use of what tools I can. I’m going to enjoy breaking your nose, I think silently, before plastering a flirty smile on my face.
“Who can blame her?” I giggle, then touch his arm, stroking his shoulder.
Cor turns his face away, hands gripping his knees in anger. He glances around the room again, wondering, but there is too much potential death hanging in these men’s holsters. It has to be one on one. “I certainly can’t.” I giggle again. Maybe if I was sitting on my couch watching TV and a woman did what I am doing now, I would say that she shouldn’t need to resort to this. But right now, in the moment, it doesn’t feel like resorting to anything. It feels like weaponizing. If I can turn this man’s lust against him, and if that can save the life of the man I love, why shouldn’t I?
“I’m so bored out here!” The more time I spend on this planet as a woman, the more I am convinced that certain types of men don’t see me at all. They only see what they want to see. When I stamp my foot and wave my arms like a restless little kid, Mickey wipes a line of spittle from his lip. “Shall we go somewhere private?” I giggle again. “Or ...”
“Private, like the bedroom? What a good idea.” He grabs my arm way too hard, digging his fingers in, making it so that my smile shakes. Then he drags me toward the hallway. I signal to Cor with my eyes, and he nods imperceptibly. The music roars on, people dancing, kissing, drinking too much, and throwing glasses at the walls. “This is a great idea, baby.”
Mickey shoves me into the bedroom, to the bed. When it hits me, I feel like an idiot. He’s going to lock the door. I try and go to him before he does, to distract him, but he’s already turned the lock, and now he’s standing over me, a giant of a man, chest heaving. His eyes are the bloodshot, crazed eyes of a man who’s past drunk and into blackout territory—a man who will do anything.
He leans down, lips pursed, meaning to kiss me. The door rattles as Cor tries to open it, and then thumps, but the lock holds fast. Mickey is too drunk to hear it.
“So sweet,” he murmurs, lips almost pressed against mine. “So tender ...”
“Wait.” I take a step back. “Don’t you want me to skip around first, like those mean girls who wouldn’t talk to you in school?”
His perverted face twists into pleasure. “Yes, please. Skip around. Yes. Please.”
“Sit down then, honey. Come on.” Switching places with him, so that he’s nearer the bed and I’m nearer the door, I shove him gently. He takes a step back and drops like a boulder onto the mattress. “Watch me skip.” I do skip, right to the door. By the time Mickey realizes what I’m doing, Cor and I are on him.
My FBI hand-to-hand training drives my anger, propelling me across the room. My fist catches him in the nose, causing it to explode in a shower of blood. Meanwhile, Cor is working his body, throwing his hands at his gut and his chest, roaring in anger. I run to the door and lock it again, just in case some of Mickey’s men hear. When I turn back, Mickey is flat on his back, his arms flailing wildly at Cor’s face. But Cor has his shoulders pinned, making his arms come up short. He head-butts Mickey, breaking his nose again, then digs his thumbs into the fat flesh of Mickey’s throat.
“Take my sister?” He head-butts Mickey a second time. His forehead is stained with blood. “Take the woman I love?” He head-butts Mickey a third time. “Take my fucking father?” The fourth time causes Mickey to go slack, moaning softly as his arms spread out to either side of him. Cor takes Mickey’s gun and cellphone. Shooting off a quick text, he holds the gun to Mickey’s head. “I’ll drag your fucking corpse out there and then everyone will see who the goddamn Don is!”
“Cor, wait.” I touch his shoulder. There’s blood in his beard and sprayed over his cheeks. He looks at me like a man intent on murder. “Don’t kill him. We have evidence on him. I’m guessing you haven’t been idle for the past couple of months, either. I’m guessing you have video, or you’ve talked to people, or something. We can put him away for life. Don’t kill him. We can do this right. And think about it ... if you kill him, what have the FBI got? Nothing. Nothing to show for two months of Irish mob mayhem. But if you let us take him, we can leave you be. It can go back to the way it was, but with you as Don. We can be together.”
“An FBI agent and a Don?” Cor coughs out a laugh. “This ain’t a fairytale, Scar.” He pulls back the hammer on the pistol.
“Cor!” I grip his shoulders, reminding me of the first time I was intimate with him, when he discovered his dad was dead back at The Leprechaun. All this talk of crossing lines, but that was the line back there, the only line that mattered. The line between criminal and human. “Think about this. Think past your anger.”
“You can kill me,” Mickey groans from the floor. “I don’t mind. I’ve never been a very happy person. I don’t think death will be that bad, will it? Darkness, like before you were born? I miss not being born. It was so peaceful.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Cor growls, kicking him in the side. “Try’n rape my woman? Take my sister? Kill my father? Shut the fuck up!” He kicks him again.
“Cor, stop.” I dig my fingernails into his neck, trying to get his attention. “Just think. All killing him solves is your need for revenge. You say you love me? Make it so we can be in love, then!”
Cor stares at Mickey for a long time, a single tear sliding down his cheek into his beard, before closing the hammer on the pistol. “Your dad is on the way,” he says. “With a couple of my guys. We need to take Mickey out there and show these pieces of shit what their boss is really like. But you should stay here, Scar. All it takes is one stray bullet and this ends now.”
I make for the door. “I’m not staying here,” I tell him. “I’m an FBI agent. We’re not in the habit of running away from the danger.”
Cor grins at me. “All right, then. Let’s do this.” He leans down and drags Mickey to his feet, letting out a breath with the effort. “Listen to me, you big bastard, you’re gonna walk right in front of me like this.” Cor places the barrel of the gun to the back of Mickey’s head and wrenches his arm up behind his back. “If you make one move I don’t like, I’m gonna make you eat your own fucking brains.”
Mickey laughs, swaying on the spot, his face already swollen. “I hope you know that that doesn’t make much sense, cousin. I’m not a scientist or anything like that, but isn’t it the brain the lets a person move their jaw so they can eat food? So if you blew out my brain, I couldn’t be very good at chewing food, I don’t think.” He talks in a drunken, woozy way, and he walks like a hunchback.
“Just fucking move.”
Cor jabs him with the gun, and I open the door, wishing I had a gun of my own. To the right is the ballroom. Moira calls from the left, poking out from the corner that leads to more bedrooms. “Scarlet,” she whispers, looking uncertain. “What’s happening?”
“Go back to the bedroom,” I tell her. “Don’t come out. Hide.” I won’t lose another sister, is what I don’t say. I saw the life drain from one sister’s face and I won’t let that happen again. No way. “Go back!” I snap, when she stands captivated, watching Cor and Mickey emerge from the bedroom. “Now!”
“Okay, okay.” She nods. “Just—okay, be safe. Please. Both of you.”
“When we get into the ballroom,” Cor says, leading Mickey, “find a way to turn off the music. We need to show who’s in control, all right?”
I walk ahead of Cor into the ballroom. The divide down the center is even more pronounced now. On one side the unarmed men sit in a cluster, drinking slowly and looking like prisoners when they glance toward the exit. On the other side, men and scared-looking prostitutes dance, stamp their feet, shout, and generally act like animals in a zoo at feeding time. I scan the room, looking for the sound system. It’s on the opposite side, within view of the armed guards. The guards stand near an elevator, on either side. When the elevator opens and three men jump out, they turn in shock, but too late. My dad pushes his FBI-issued gun under one’s chin, and the other two men secure the second guard. I’ve never been so happy to see my father in my life.
When I cut the sound system out, quiet spreads across the room, a crowd forming around Cor and Mickey.
“The fuck is this?” a man grunts.
“He has the boss!” another exclaims.
Soon everybody is shouting it. “He has the boss! He has the boss! He has the fucking boss!”
Half a dozen men pull out their guns and wave them in Cor’s direction, but that also means waving them in their beloved boss’s direction. They hesitate, a couple of them leaning over drunkenly as though wishing they were good enough marksmen to fire at Cor without accidently hitting Mickey. But, of course, they’re not. They’re men Mickey picked up and they’re drunk. As this happens, the men on the other side of the room stand up. They don’t look like prisoners anymore. They look like an army getting ready for a fight. I glance behind me, making sure dad and the two men, one with a goatee and one with a bushy ginger beard, still have the guards under their control. They do. Maybe this doesn’t have to end in blood.
“You all thought this man would make you into part of the family!” Cor roars, standing side-by-side with Mickey, but with the gun still placed against his head. “You all thought he was the toughest bastard you’ve ever met. You all thought you could do any damn thing you wanted because you had him at your back! You don’t have him at your back anymore! Look at him! He’s beaten. Without him, none of you are shit. If you drop your weapons, leave New York, and never come back, you live. If one of you makes a fuckin’ move, you all die!”
It’s not true, of course. Their guns outnumber ours twenty to one. But it doesn’t matter what’s true. It matters what Cor can make them believe. And he’s right. The only reason these men feel comfortable behaving this way is because they have Mickey backing them up. I see it, looking into their faces. They deflate, taking a step back. To them, it’s like seeing a God turn into a mere man. One by one, the men drop their guns, the sound like the ringing of a bell at the end of a boxing match. Soon all of the men are without weapons, Cor’s half of the room scooping them up and training their guns on them.
“Get clear, girls,” one of the men says to the prostitutes. They scatter, heading for the hallway, and then it’s over. One half of the room has guns, the other doesn’t.
Cor turns to me. “You can call it in now, or whatever terms you use.”
“But wait!” one of Mickey’s men grumbles. “I thought you were letting us go!”
Cor smashes Mickey over the back of the head, sending him to his knees, then standing over him—standing over the whole room. “You took the woman I love, you took my sister, and you had a part in killing my father. All of you did. This here is an FBI agent. That man over there is an FBI agent. You’re free to go ... when they let you go.” He pauses, looking like some kind of wild man with his sweat and blood and grown-out hair. “You give criminals like us a bad name, you stupid fucks.”
At that, the men start to chant, “Don, Don, Don!”
I smile at Cor, and he smiles back.
“I love you,” I whisper, far too quietly for him to hear over the sound of the cheering.
Moira emerges from the hallway, standing at Cor’s shoulder. Dad joins me once the men he was guarding have been led into the crowd. For a second or two, it’s like we’re a new family.