A Productive Outlet

“Quite the shiner,” Carson said when he opened the door and saw me. He looked unimpressed.

Never mind the fact that we hadn’t seen each other in a decade, three years of which I’d been tooling around with a fake name and an even faker smile. A new life, a new start, a way to get out from under Uncle Sid’s heel. Only that last bit proved to be true, and I was begging to reacquaint myself with his boot coming around here. But I needed answers.

As for that other stuff–the ‘fresh start’ part of it all–well, I never believed any of that. You can empty a shit bucket and fill it with caviar; it’s still gonna stink up the place just the same.

“What can I get you?” Carson said once the door was closed behind me.

I told him I needed some ice, but when he started wrapping cubes in a kitchen napkin, I clarified: “I was thinking in a glass with something strong.”

Carson poured us each two fingers of scotch and we sat down at the kitchen table together. I was expecting a grilling on where I’d been these many years but he seemed more interested in the recent past. He gestured to my eye. “Who did that to you?”

I wasn’t about to get into it, so I put it in terms that a degenerate gambler like Carson could understand. “Let’s just say I bet on the wrong horse.”

Carson snickered. “Looks to me like you bet the ass the back leg wouldn’t kick ya.”

We fell silent a moment. Carson kept his eyes on a cookie tin on the table. “So, how’s Benny Jr.? Staying out of trouble?”

“That’s actually why I came here,” I said, taking my phone out of my jacket pocket. “I was waiting for his call. But, you know, dead.”

Carson’s eyes snapped from the cookie tin to me. His shoulders slumped. “Aw, jeez, Benny. I had no idea. You know, it’s every father’s nightmare to–”

“Dry your tears, Carson,” I said, cutting him off. “Despite my son’s tendency to get involved in every harebrained scheme that might reinsert me as the last of my bloodline, he’s fine. I was talking about my phone. I was hoping to lay low here a while as it charges. You got an outlet I could borrow?”

“Oh, yeah,” Carson stammered. “Sure, sure. I got a whole bunch. Under the table.”

It took me just a moment to get down on my knees and plug the phone in, but it was enough. When I got back up, the cookie tin was open and Carson had a revolver trained on me. “Now, Benny. You know I love you like a brother but if Sid or someone sent you here, you gotta tell me, okay?”

“I don’t work for Uncle Sid no more,” I pleaded, my hands up in the air. “You know that!”

“Nobody stops working for Sid without going into a body bag,” Carson said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the faint glow of my phone coming back to life. A moment later, there came the sound of it vibrating on the tile floor. “Carson, it’s my boy,” I said, not lowering my hands. “I gotta take this.”

He kept the gun on me.

I didn’t want to have to do this, not yet. I wanted to wait for the right moment to tell him, but it was the only way. “Carson, it ain’t just your electricity I came for,” I said. “I’m here because this thing I’m messed up in, it’s about Maude, your sister. Carson, she’s alive.”

Editor’s note: When Benny plugged in his phone, it was into an Aduro Surge Swivel Wall Charging Tower.