Like the house, the plushie was smaller than he remembered, a little bit longer than his hand but squishable. With a black body constructed more like a flattened X than any similarity to an animal, its white head was topped with floppy round ears. Two black button eyes were set above its squished, dirty pink embroidered nose.
He’d been eight and at a street carnival, scrounging about between the booths for dropped money or game tickets. Fifteen tickets meant a small popcorn. Thirty gained him a hot dog with the works. Miki couldn’t remember how many he had when a woman shoved a handful of tickets at him but all of it been enough for cotton candy, two hot dogs, and the oddly shaped black and white plush dog-panda he spotted at the prize booth.
It wasn’t pretty, but it hung alongside the other toys as if proud of its cobbled-together appearance. The guy at the booth thought he was crazy for wanting it. Miki couldn’t imagine taking anything else home.
“Hey, Dude,” Miki whispered into the stuffed animal’s ear. “How about if I take you home now? There’s a guy I want you to meet. Oh, and I’ve got a dog, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem. He’s mostly into tennis balls.”
After stuffing the toy into the inside pocket of his jacket, Miki made his way out again, banging his elbow on the garage’s framing. He stumbled out of the shed and into the full daylight, blinking away the tears stinging his eyes at the bright sun. Patting his chest, Miki gripped the head of the shillelagh and dug its tip into the backyard’s scrabbling weeds. He took one step forward then the back of his head exploded in pain. The world spun around him, a battalion of stars swimming through the blackness edging around his vision.
He hit the ground face first, his stomach aching where the shillelagh dug into his side. The pain across the back of his head was nothing compared to the agony of his twisted knee, and Miki nearly threw up when he flipped over to face his attacker.
And saw nothing but the black muzzle of a gun as it was shoved into his open mouth.
Chapter 20
When you said you loved me, I believed you.
Then when you needed to be free, I deceived you.
—Junie’s Lies
“YOU like sucking on my things, bitch?” The gun jammed further down Miki’s throat and he gagged on it, its crust and oil filling his mouth. “Here. Suck on this. Just like you sucked on him!”
He didn’t recognize the guy shoving a gun into his mouth, but Miki knew what he was intimating. The gesture was obscene, a vulgar rape of his mouth with a piece of dirty steel. The knit beanie pulled down low on the man’s face was meant to intimidate, but it only emphasized his greasy shank of hair and flushed, pocked skin. The man spat as he screamed at Miki, his words a string of nonsensical profanities. From the way the young man held the weapon, he believed he had the upper hand.
If Miki had learned one thing in his life, it was to even the odds. And when the odds were evened, cheat.
He grabbed a handful of dirt and flung it up into the man’s face, spraying rocks and fertilizer into the gunman’s wide, crazed eyes. The gun slipped out of Miki’s mouth, its muzzle slick with Miki’s spit. His knee buckled when he turned over, but Miki kept going, reaching for the cane Donal had pushed into his hands before he left the Morgans’ home. Staggering to his feet, he spit out the taste of the gun and got a good grip on the shillelagh’s shaft.
Right then, he couldn’t care less if the man was a saint and it was all a horrible mistake or if he was some crazy person who knew him and came in from San Francisco’s streets. Miki would ask questions later. Better to apologize for kicking someone’s ass than to end up dead because some asshat got something wrong in his head.
Feeling the weight of the wooden cane in his hands, Miki smiled when the familiar tingle of adrenaline hit his nerves. Donal’s shillelagh would go a long way in evening the stacked odds.
The first swing connected with the man’s jaw, and the crack of the wood knob against bone seemed to echo in the small yard. Staggering back, the man tried to bring the gun up, his finger squeezing down on the trigger, as Miki rounded back and struck again, slamming the end of the shillelagh across his knuckles.
A loud boom burst from the gun, and its bullet whirred past Miki’s arm. He felt the bite of something on his shoulder, and then a creeping burn spread down his arm. A numbing shockwave hit his hand, and his fingers convulsed around the shaft. Shaking, Miki shifted his grip and held on harder, flinging the cane up again, knocking the gun out of the man’s hand.
He didn’t know where it landed, but from the crazy, wild-eyed stare on the man’s face, Miki guessed his assailant knew. The man leaped toward the thick weeds by the garage’s open door, and Miki jumped after him. His knee screamed in agony as he tackled the guy to the ground, and his shoulder set up its own refrain, throbbing and oozing a wet trail inside the arm of his jacket.