Mickey came to on a torn velvet couch in the back of Save The Robots. He’d have checked his watch if he’d had one. Save The Robots was a revival of an old East Village after-hours club where people went to do drugs and doze. And this was definitely after hours. He looked around him, and he knew the gray light that came in at the sides of the blacked-out windows was the dawn. He heard a scratching noise and checked his cast, which he’d been ignoring. A mouse was gnawing on it.
I should jump, Mickey thought. But he didn’t. There was a brown drink cradled next to him on the ugly sofa. Guinness? Maybe. He took a sip and spat it out, whatever it was. Man, was his dad ever going to kill him. That is, assuming that his dad hadn’t gone out to Montauk the day before, or the day before that. He wished he kept better track of these things. No, wait. He’d had dinner with his dad last night. Shit. Maybe they’d gone to Montauk after dinner?
He looked around him and saw little knots of people talking, still awake, incredibly. And then he recognized someone. Randall Oddy was there with some guys and a few women and a young girl who had a lot more energy than anyone else. Ooh. Mickey stood up. If he could have connected the dots, he would have. But the last thing he remembered was hanging off the back of an SUV and making a sharp right into the East Village. Then … that was it.
“Hi!” Kelli said.
“Ooh,” Mickey said.
“Enough with that,” Kelli said.
“I didn’t mean—” but Mickey stopped. He’d meant Ooh, there’s a mouse on the floor near your feet. But he wasn’t ready to explain that, not just yet. If Kelli was the kind of girl who could have a mouse nibbling on the fringe of her leather boot and not notice, that was her problem.
“Come and sit with me and Randall and the gang,” Kelli said. “We were just discussing the right place to get some food. I’m sick to death of Florent.”
“You’re tired of Florent? You’ve been here a week and a half!” Mickey said. “Calvin Klein’s been here for about ninety years and he still goes to Florent.”
“I know,” Kelli said as she shook the mouse off her foot. “I was talking to him about that last time I was there.”
Kelli had Mickey by the hand and she led him to sit down with Randall Oddy and his crowd. They were all discussing who’d been accepted into the Whitney Biennial art show. Mickey watched Kelli nod intensely, as if she had a clue what they were talking about.
“Man,” Mickey said. He’d looked down and he had a notepad with a bunch of information on it. This notepad told him two things—that he’d actually spent some time researching where Patch had gone, and that he’d done a lousy, drunken job of it. Because the words on the page looked like nonsense—they could have been in Farsi for all he could make of them.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Randall Oddy said. Mickey brought him into focus. Oh, he thought. This clown.
“It’s cool,” Mickey said.
“What’s that?” Randall Oddy asked. And he and his friends all gathered around to see Mickey’s pad.
“Cool,” someone said.
“Look,” Mickey said. “I know all you art guys think these are like my little drawings and whatever, but the truth is my buddy Patch is missing. And clearly I wrote all these notes about it last night, but because I’m on, um, pain medication, now I see that they’re gibberish. So it’s not what you think.”
“Not art,” Oddy said.
“What did you say your friend’s name was?”
“Patch. Patch Flood.”
“Funny name.”
“So is yours.”
“You know something?” another guy asked. He had a high voice and his hair was all down in front of his face. “I think I’ve heard that name recently, at Graca’s house.”
“Graca?” Kelli asked. Even Mickey could tell she didn’t like the sound of another woman’s name. A hush surrounded the group.
“If your friend is who I think he is,” the high-voiced guy said, “he’s the luckiest guy in the world.”
“That’s him,” Mickey said. “No doubt.”