Page 78 of Antihero

The man dancing by their booth lost his balance, setting a palm down next to Joey’s bread plate to avoid toppling. He brayed laughter, his external jugular vein visible at the side of his neck. Evan’s three-tined fork was an inch and change off his right hand. The angle was good.

My turn! My turn!

“You are on a mission, Joey. You shouldn’t be making eyes at random men in a bar.”

“I’m hardly ma—”

His voice stayed dead calm. “This is a mission. Not happy hour.”

A waiter heaved forth from the crowd, swinging down at Joey. Evan’s hand twitched. A quick snatch to grab the shirt collar, slam his head to the table, and ready the table knife over his ear.

The waiter leaned toward Joey and Evan let him. Mouth at her ear above her bared neck. “The gentleman at the bar sent this over.”

Yellow-looking syrup in a coupe glass with a fucking dandelion floating in it.

Joey’s cheeks colored. As the waiter withdrew, she looked down at the drink, not touching it. Her voice, quiet: “Men always send Candy drinks.”

Black wool faces, naked bodies feasting.

The dandelion was imperfect, one side dimpled from the bartender’s thumb, the thrown-off symmetry like a stitching needle through Evan’s frontal lobe. A crack in the cushion pressed unevenly into his right hamstring. There were two wet drops on the tabletop and a smudge of something that looked sticky, and a stray hair glistened atop the booth nine inches to the left of Joey’s shoulder, wagging in the vented air. The egress routes intensified in his mind, blueprint routes through the throbbing crowd looping in his mind with compulsive intensity. The filter had snapped into high, his obsessive attention going hard now, raining hell down on everything like a fire hose he couldn’t control.

“Candy could murder every single person in this lounge with escargot tongs.” Evan’s tone was quiet, steady, observational. “Do not compare yourself to Candy. You haven’t earned what she has. You are operational. Right now. Your job is to remain unnoticed, inconspicuous. Not to present ostentatiously and elicit shitty cocktails from men at the bar. You want more responsibility. Earn it.”

A different means of handling the conflict flickered into awareness, a scantily lit corridor in his mind. But then another image arrested him: Anca’s limp leg shoved aside, the ankle handed off. He slammed the door, doubled down: “You can be the focus of the room,” he told Joey, words as steady and unvaried as a computer printout, “or focus on the room. You can’t do both.”

The color in her cheeks clarified into twinning circles. “Look, I’m sorry, okay. I haven’t been to New York, ever. It’s like a dream. Not all of us got to swan around like a less charming James Bond for half our lives.”

A stab of chagrin registered across the divide, in the other side of himself. He’d missed it. He’d missed the whole lane of her experience. The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

But this was not the time or place for chagrin.

“Do not use any tone or body language that is noteworthy,” he said. “Check your mood. Mind your emotion. Watch your vitals. Sip the drink.”

She was sucking air shallowly. He watched her slowly wind her way back into control. He blinked and saw that she looked—through another lens—like a beautiful young woman.

The scruffled guy was cutting through the crowd, coming for them. Watch on right wrist made him a lefty. Jacket too sleek to hide a holster unless it was a high-ride. Expensive loafers would have slick leather soles, no traction.

The guy smiled too broadly as he approached, smug, working himself up. “Hello. I’m so sorry to intrude. I assume this is your daughter?”

Joey’s face had gone numb, lifeless. She did not look up at the man; she kept her stare evenly on Evan, her words as dead as sand: “Not interested.”

The guy lingered, unsurely. His crotch was a foot and a half off Evan’s left elbow. A hammer punch would render him in need of hospitalization. Evan’s hand had already made a loose fist.

Evan stared into Joey’s emerald eyes and she stared into his. Nothing else existed.

The guy made a dismissive chortle and withdrew.

Joey lifted her napkin and wiped the bright red from her lips. Reaching up, she pulled free a clasp from the back of her hair, and her black-brown locks tumbled forward, hiding her face. She wriggled a too-large coat up from the booth behind her and across her shoulders, covering her bare skin.

Now she looked like not much.

“RedLite’s in Century City, probably visible from your penthouse,” she said. “I arranged a private jet for you out of Teterboro tomorrow morning. Devine’s fleet, untraceable tail number, both ends covered to ensure no FAA ramp check. You’re a blogger with a giant sex-positive Substack following. Melinda’s anchoring the legend, backstopping your bona fides.”

Melinda Truong, his brilliant forger, could counterfeit embossments, holograms, U.S. passport paper, NFTs, and virtually anything else. Standing up a fake Substack account and generating a backlog of AI articles would be child’s play for her.

“You’ll get thirty minutes with the chief content officer Tuesday at noon,” Joey said. “That gives you tomorrow to case the operation. In the meantime Candy holds protection around Anca and I’ll identify the offenders.”

Lowball glasses clinked drunkenly at the neighboring table, the sound of smacked glass redolent of a sniper round piercing a window. One of the men tilted back abruptly in his chair—pressed into the bare mattress, stomach down—nearing Joey and—unconscious form flipped like a living doll—Evan almost kicked out the wooden rear legs and brought him tumbling onto his back where—hands clutching and grasping, red grip marks across pale flesh—he could drop a kneecap onto the throat to shatter the trachea.