Mickey Slips (Tyler Cunningham Shorts) (5 page)

Mykonos Coffee Shop, Syracuse, 1/22/2013, 12:03 p.m.

It was, as it always seems to be doing in Syracuse, snowing when I arrived at the intersection of North Salina and Kirkpatrick Streets at sixteen minutes after eleven. I saw nothing that made me want to keep driving, so I pulled into the big parking lot that the cafe shared with a Kinney drugstore, and parked in such a way that pointed my rear window at the front door and window of the Mykonos Coffee Shop (
not, I noticed, a coffee shoppee, which spelling drives me to distraction every time I see it … and apparently sometimes even when I don’t see it
). The geography of my parking also avoided the external video cameras placed to record drive-up pharmacy traffic. I went into Kinney’s, and saw a manager-type a few isles over stocking shelves with drugstore things.

“
Excuse me,” I spoke loud enough to get his attention, but I didn’t want to distract him too much from his task. “My car battery died, can I plug my charger into the outlet I saw on the side of your building by the parking lot to run the battery up a bit?” I asked, using a slightly modified #3 smile (
friendly/sincere/helpful, with a touch of honest added for effect
). Lacking the usual range of human expression, I’ve always been surprised at how much of human communication is non-verbal; and as such, have had to learn how to fake smiles and frowns and shrugs and such … I have twenty-four smiles in my repertoire, not counting slight variations, like the one I was using now.

“Sure, no problem,
” looking up briefly but barely noticing my effort at personality. “But could you throw something over the cord, so nobody trips over it?”

“Great! I’ve got to pick up some stuff anyway, and I’ll just add a towel to my basket.” I said jiggling my partly full
hand basket … I have a towel in the element (
I’ve read ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ seven times after all
), but I decided to use the one from Kinney’s for a couple of reasons: it makes me a customer, it shows him that I’m interested in complying with his wishes, and I don’t get my own towel all covered with Syracuse.

With my new towel (
and some other assorted stuff that I didn’t really need, but could always use)
in hand, I headed back out to my car, popped the hood for verisimilitude (
thinking of Dan for a second, and wondering what he’d think of the role his shotguns were playing in today’s fun
). I ran a heavy duty extension cord from the back of the Element out to the all-weather wall socket, plugged it in (
cringing slightly when I did so, hoping that it wouldn’t short circuit the plug/building/neighborhood, or cause the gizmo in the back of my car to explode … it didn’t
), and laid my new towel down on the cable and snow and dirt of the narrow walkway. I added a traffic cone that I’d picked up off the side of the road on my way down here (
people respect a traffic cone and always assume that it must be there for some important reason).
I’m sure that I only imagined that I could hear a hum from the back of the Element as the massive capacitors built up their charges. I opened the backdoors and pulled some lumber partway out to explain the open backdoor to the casual (
yet curious
) passerby, chucked my watch up to the front seat (
so I wouldn’t lose it if everything worked as it should
), grabbed the red backpack that Lily would be looking for, and went over to grab a coke and a snack before she arrived.

She arrived a few minutes late by the clock on my burner-phone (
which placed her well within the acceptable range of ‘promptness’ for the majority of humanity
), alone
(I assumed that Shane was busy and/or arrested this morning
) and looked past me twice before her eyes came back to the red backpack that ‘Tony’ had mentioned yesterday in their/our phone call. I needed things to happen in a specific order in a pretty short timespan, so I waved her over and initiated the conversation to try and insure that things went in the correct manner. While she was walking my way, I turned on the walkie I had in my lap, and made certain that it was on the correct channel to initiate a link with the device in the back of my Element.

“Lily, you’re late. Show me the camera and video and tell me that you haven’t been dumb
enough to make a copy for ‘insurance’, please.” She recognized my voice and manner, and stopped just short of sitting to pull a coffee-brick-sized camera from a shoulder bag and put it down on the table.

She pushed a button on the top of the camera, and a noise preceded a small door on the side opening and partly ejecting a little videocassette. “I didn’t make a copy
… this thing’s not as easy as the new digital ones, but …” I didn’t care much about where she was headed with that sentence … I pushed the ‘SEND’ button on the walkie, imagined that I could feel a surge of something racing through the air at the speed of light to damage my central nervous system, and the lights and radio and TV in the coffee shop went out with a couple of expensive sounding pops and puffs.

I stood up, probably before anyone else had really noticed, grabbed the backpack, and turned to head back out into the snow; only pausing to check the coffee shop to make sure that I hadn’t killed anyone with a pacemaker (
I had failed to think of that until after I pushed the button ... oops
). I hadn’t.

“Wait, what, wait
… what the fuck is going on? Where the fuck are you going?” Lily asked, scooping up the camera as she followed me outside.

“We’re done here ‘Lily’, take a look and think about it for a second.” I said as I held up my burner phone for her to see
… not that there was much to see. I had bricked it with what amounted to an electro-magnetic pulse (
EMP
) using the high energy radio frequency energy from the modified microwaves in the back of my Element. I had made use of the stuff I’d picked up at Home Depot to aim the wave generally into the coffee shop, where it fried everything with circuitry (
especially stuff with magnetic data storage like Lily’s video
).

“But I’ve still got the camera… the tape
… I can …” she seemed to run down as she looked at her watch, which had stopped at a few minutes after noon.

“Can what?” I dug into my pocket for a folded packet of hundred dollar bills (
ten of them
). “Here’s the new deal, I give you $1000 for the time you spent in bed with Mickey, so it wasn’t a total loss, and you walk away from me, from here, from Mickey.”

“But Shane
...” she started, but I had neither the time nor the desire to hear idle threats or more whining.

“If Shane was going to do anything about today, he would have had
to be here, which he isn’t. I’m betting that his life got more complicated this morning ... the good news is that yours just got much, much, more simple. If you want my advice, which you probably don’t, you should also walk away from Shane ... go pack a bag, get on a bus, and pick a new home with this and any other money that you might have.”

She spent four seconds with her mouth open and gaping, seven seconds getting angry, and eleven seconds thinking her way out of anger
… I appreciated both her silent thoughtfulness and the Fibonacci-ness of the timing of her thought progression. She started to say something, thought better of it, plucked the hundreds out of my hand, turned her back on me and walked away, pausing at the corner only to peel off her watch and throw it, along with the camera, into the garbage can.

I will gladly admit that a small part of me had wanted to explain my actions, and was disappointed when Lily walked away from me in the parking lot. Mostly however, I was enormously relieved that this thing was over for Mickey.

I like to think that she will leave well enough alone, that my tricks and treats at the Starlight should serve to hobble whatever backup or muscle or help she might hope to access. She may even take this opportunity to change her life, although I doubt it.

I checked afterwards, and found that one of the responding officers had been treated for minor injuries from a ricocheting shotgun pellet or fragment
. The owners and various staff at the Starlight face multiple weapons charges, assault/battery/attempted murder of peace officers, and a hearty stew of drug and prostitution charges … all of which added up to significant and multitudinous felonies for Morty and company (
presumably including Shane
).

After Lily had turned a corner and walked out of our lives forever, I quickly walked over to the Element, unplugged the extension cord, picked up the dirty towel, wrapped the cord around it, threw it into the back along with the traffic cone, pushed the lumber back into place, slammed the rear door and hatch, closed the hood, and was ready to drive awa
y 28 seconds after I had turned away from Lily.

Just then
there was a tap on the passenger-side window. A Mister-Rogers-looking man, just closing the door on his 1970s era Monte Carlo made a rolling-down motion (
old school
), so I did, feeling my heart and respiration rate pick up a bit.

“
Everything work out?” he asked.

It took me a second to parse out his meaning
.

“With your car … you looked to be having some car troubles, everything work out?”

I smiled, nodded, turned the key, and when it (
thankfully
) started, said, “Yup, everything worked out pretty well … thanks!”

We nodded at each other and I drove off.

Gas ‘n’ Go, Star Lake, 1/22/2013, 2:47
p.m.

I drove just under the speed limit all the way to Watertown, got off of Route 81 long enough to find a Walmart dumpster that I loaded with all of the leftovers of the stuff that I’d bought in the last few days. That done, I went inside to use their bathroom and load up on a bit of road food in the form of protein and caffeine (
beef jerky and coke, not feeling the need for fats or carbs after my donut-tastic breakfast
), and then got back on the road heading North and eventually West, back into the Park … back into the woods … back home.

I stopped at the Gas ‘n’ Go
in Star Lake, certain from past experience that I would be able to get cell service when parked at the pump, gassing up. I dialed the number of Mickey’s burner phone.

“Tyler! I’ve been going nuts all day! Tell me you’re OK!” He shouted into the phone, not even noticing that I was calling from a different number.

“Easy Mickey, you’ll run out of exclamation points.” I said, “Everything’s fine. I just wanted to get home before calling you (
a slight exaggeration that he wouldn’t understand, but that I felt I could be excused for
). You’re off the hook with Lily and Shane, it’s as if the video never existed. Nobody got hurt (
not 100% true, but he didn’t need to know
). You can head home whenever you want. What you tell Anne and the girls is entirely up to you … if you asked me, I’d advise you to say that you were mugged, which you essentially were.” I stopped talking to let him in, knowing that by now he’d be waiting.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking during my imprisonment at the Airport Radisson, and
I have decided to go with what I call the ‘Mugging-Plus’ explanation. The girls will hear that I was mugged, and beaten, and woke up in the hospital. Anne will get the full story.” I cringed as he finished.

“Mickey
… the full story could involve some significant trouble for me, and maybe even for you if absolutely everything came out. Don’t get me wrong, you do whatever you think/feel is right, but it may bring some substantial headaches for you and Anne … and me.” I was surprised to find that I wasn’t lying when I told Mickey to do what he thought was best.

“That’s sweet of you Ty, but by the full story, I meant that Anne gets to hear about my screw-up and Lily, not what you may, or may not, have done to get me out of trouble. My plan in that department is to tell her nothing about the proposed extortion, just leave it at drugged infidelity and a mugging.”

“I still think it’s a lousy idea, but you’re a much better person than I am, so it must be the right thing to do.” I replied, to which he chuckled … as he always did when we talked about my not being exactly the same species as him.

“I assume that you will have some loose ends to tie up in Syracuse with the police and hospital and maybe some of your colleagues? If you tell me ahead of time, I can meet you there and buy you the best lunch you’ve had in years.”
I offered. Mickey gets up so early every day for work that lunch is his big family, and talking, meal.

“That’s nice, Tyler, I will be coming up in a few weeks to deal with some of the aftermath of the last few days, but I’ll also be coming up to Saranac Lake for a visit
after I finish up, and I expect you to do the right thing and talk with me about how you were able to rescue me.” I heaved a deep internal sigh, and tried to imagine how I could dodge his questions.

“And don’t waste time trying to aim that great melon of yours at the problem of dodging my questions. I’ve known you all of your life, and you’re a horrible liar. You had something to do with fixing that creep up in Malone a couple of years ago. You were into something last summer which has had an impact on you physically, the range of motion in your left arm and shoulder is diminished, and you’re too thin. You were able to come up with some solution to my problem in seconds after hearing about it.”

Mickey, what you’re saying is …” He cut me off.

“Stop. I’ve always known that your mind works differently
… if you’ve found a way to make that work for you, and also help people, I’m all for it. I just need to know what it is, and that you approach what you do with some form of moral compass, or a reasonable facsimile.”

I don’t think that I necessarily do have a moral compass, but my actions always make sense to me, and are based on my understanding of the situation and the preservation/restoration of order, as I see it
… I hoped that would be enough for Mickey.

“OK Mickey, just tell me when, and I’ll make sure that I’m in town and presentable. You can meet my dog, Hope, then too.”

“Sounds good Tyler, I’ll call you next week when I know more.” We ended the call in our usual way, “Love you, boy!” Mickey said, with a slightly thick voice.

“Love you too, Mickey.” I answered.

I filled up the Element, picked up some road and camping food, and headed for a chunk of State Forest Preserve I’d been wanting to explore. I set up camp, made a big campfire (
mostly for Frank’s sake, so that when I ran into him tomorrow morning, I’d smell like camping
), enjoyed a few hours of quiet and cold and dark (
unlike anything that could be found in Syracuse
), and then climbed into my hammock, happy to be back in the woods, back in the Park, back in my world.