I drove Red Eye straight from the jail to my house and poured him a big shot of Wild Turkey. The three floor fans had made a little progress on getting rid of the stink.
Red Eye on the other hand looked like he’d been in ten train wrecks. Tsiropoulos neglected to tell me about his broken nose.
“We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” I told him.
“I gotta sleep first,” he said as he flopped down on the couch, Jap flaps and all.
“The body needs time to recover from hot dog overdose, then getting the shit beat out of you. I think I’m suffering from that disease the soldiers get.”
“Post-traumatic stress disorder?”
“That’s it. PTSD. I’m gonna sue their ass.”
“You ain’t gonna sue nobody,” I said. “You told me you’re going to Rio.”
Red Eye tucked two of the sofa pillows under his head and stretched out like he was down for the count but his eyes were still wide open
“You overdid it with the Pine-Sol, bro,” he said.
“Rio,” I said, “what’s up with Rio?”
He said he needed another shot of Wild Turkey, then we could talk about Brazil.
“It’s scary,” he said.
I set the Wild Turkey bottle down on the coffee table next to him and teed up another round. He downed it in one gulp. Red Eye never talked about “scary.”
“Washkowski said we were going down for that African bitch,” Red Eye told me, “said the next stop for you and me would be death row at Quentin.”
“He’s a punk. That’s all small talk. Tsiropoulos was just here. He had a talk with Jeffcoat and his lawyer. They’re gonna call off their dogs if we back off.”
“You mean that’s why they cut me loose?”
“Yeah.”
He grabbed the bottle and took a big hit. Red Eye never liked glasses that much anyway.
“Kirkland was pissed as hell,” he said, “told me Washkowski was on his own mission here. They’re going to discipline him.”
“You already handled that with the bucket,” I said. “Besides, Kirkland’s no big boy, just a squirrely little PO.”
I let Red Eye hit on the bottle again before I told him about the connection between Washkowski and Jeffcoat.
“They go way back,” I said.
The fans hummed quietly in the background as Red Eye rolled into a ball and started to fade away.
“At least you saved your carpet,” he said as he drifted into a deep sleep. After a few seconds, he was snoring like a sick warthog.
He didn’t even budge when I slipped the Jap flaps off his feet. No one had ever slept on my couch with their shoes on. It was no time to start compromising. In the meantime, the answers to my other questions would just have to wait; I still had the Jap flaps in my hands when the phone rang.