Chapter 10: The Girl in Room Thirteen
"Fuck," Mummering I kicked the sneakers, letting them hit the floor next to the bed with a moist slap. I flinched, finding the noise gross and very off-putting. Then I carefully started to peel off the soaked hoodie.
Which was when something rather unexpected happened.
"You're not Pop?" A young woman's voice caused me to spin around, my eyes wide as we both took in each other's bodies. I recognized her as the girl that I'd met yesterday, Louise. A girl that was much too old for me to be her dad… I hope?
"I fucking hope not!"
"Wait… Pat?" Lousie asked, leaning forward without actually getting any closer to me. "What are you doing here?"
"What am I doing here?" I replied, confused by the rather bizarre question for someone that barged into my room. Took some balls, let me tell ya, "What are you doing here?"
Louise's face went through several expressions that I wasn't even sure of, one of them looked close to surprise, another one looked like anger before finally shifting to something that I thought was embarrassment
"I thought this was Pop's room," She said, not bothering to shuffle her eyes away from the half-naked body.
There was an odd quirk from one of her brows, almost like something that I'd expect from the Rock. "Clerk must have given me the wrong room, thought it would be funny or something."
While she checked me out, I noticed something about her that I hadn't before. She was pretty tall, like I wasn't a small man, standing at 6'2" but she was at least two to three inches taller than me. Impressive I suppose, but not at all indicative of any accomplishment on her part.
Just good genetics.
"What's his name?" I asked, curious about the subject but I also had this tiny bit of suspicion that if the clerk had pointed her this way, that her dad was someone that I knew.
She didn't talk for a bit, instead just closing the door and walking around to the other side of the room.
"It would be O'Reilly, Jim."
"So you told the clerk that Jimbo sent you?"
Louise let out a noise from her nose, I think it would be called a snort. Something that I'm pretty sure meant that she was suppressing a chuckle or a giggle. Something that may have been against her image but I didn't know her all that much, I'd need to spend more time around her to be sure of that.
"Oh, so you're a friend of Pop," she sighed as if disappointed with me. "So you some sort of junior member? Certainly, sound like one."
I've never been asked before if I was part of the Irish Mafia, or then Kitchen Irish as I would soon learn, which made this a unique experience, in a day of other unique experiences this somehow felt like it was something more interesting. Probably because I could be lit on fire and shot at any other day.
And I hoped that I wouldn't be asked if I was part of the mafia often.
"Nah, O'Reilly's just helping me out," I replied, making my way towards the bathroom. "He found me just after I left that place we met at," I grabbed a towel, rubbing off the excess water fast enough that I wouldn't have to be put under the stare of a young girl while soaked to the bone. "Some moron nearly ran him over, I shoved him out of the way. O'Reilly offered me this place to stay."
"Thank god," I heard her groan, jumping on the bed with a loud thump. "Pop would kill me if he found out that I'd managed to interfere with his boss's business." I loudly chuckled something that Louise seemed to hear right away if her response was anything to go by.
"What's so funny?"
"What… not going to kill ya if you reveal to strangers that he works for the Irish Mafia?"
"Nah, Pop just works for the Kitchen Irish," Louise said, from the sound of her voice, she was speaking into the pillow. "They're a loose series of mobsters, connected to but not really part of the Irish Mafia families."
"Is there really a difference?" I found a dry set of clothes sitting on the cardboard under the sink. "Irish descended mobsters are mobsters of Irish descent, no matter how they arranged the organization."
"Gotta say, a potato is a potato."
"That's just ancient Irish know-how there."
When I came back into the other room, dressed in a smile black tracksuit that I'd been left. My hair having been completely dried by the towel seconds beforehand as I took in how my bed was completely overtaken by the teenage girl.
"So what made you think your Pops would be here?" I asked her, taking the chair by the door, sitting with my right foot on top of my left knee. Jitters took over the limb beneath, shaking the one above all the while.
This wasn't just a nervous tic, it was something called stimming. It was an instinctual action that I couldn't control.
"Look, it's none of my business," I course-corrected my approach with the girl, obviously there's something with her dad that I shouldn't be asking about. "Forget I said anything, though I imagine that you should be getting-" Once more the door clicked open, this time with male O'Reilly entering the room with a rather alarmed expression.
"What the hell is going on here?" he asked, his teeth grinding with such force that I could hear how they were losing calcium by the second. The thing that actually worried me was the way his face flushed a furious red; furious being the operative word. "Louise!"
"Yo, Pop!" Louise lazily raised a hand but still laying down on the bed. There wasn't a single inch of her body that seemed to be concerned with the fact that her dad was enraged at the sight of her being here. Which in fairness…
… if I found my daughter alone, sitting on the only bed, with a man who'd been homeless the day before. I would be pissed too!
Suddenly the elder O'Reilly sighed, the timbre heavy in the air as he looked to me. I couldn't decipher what the look on his face meant, but I would assume it was something to do with how spent he felt dealing with a teenage daughter.
"Louise… what have I told about doing this?"
"Don't get caught and shakedown some gobshites along the way?"
"Louise."
"Right… right," Louise rolled off the bed, sending me a wink along the way. Very slowly the young girl walked over towards her dad, something that highlighted once more that she was pretty tall compared to most people that I've met in life, which included her father, who seemed to stand under six feet himself. "See you later Pat! We've gotta chat some time!"
In all her rush to leave, or rather lack of rush, I don't think Jimbo noticed the rather odd bit of paper that she left on the bed. The one with her mobile number written on it.
"So… " I trailed off when the O'Reilly Patriarch turned to glare at me. "How's those local sports teams?"
x-x-x
The Man In Black
He took a deep breath, letting the sound bounce off the room, letting him head right to the sink without any issue from running into something. The world had been on fire since he was a child, ever since the accident, it only took a while to notice it.
To take advantage of it.
Stick had told him that he had gifts.
But Matt had never met anyone else besides Stick that had gifts of a similar nature. For years, he thought the two of them were alone in the world of girt, of pain. Today showed him that there were more people with gifts; gifts that made his own seem mundane.
The gifts this man had made Matt Murdock feel small.
"Matt, you're back!" He heard his friend and current roommate's voice from the other room, but he had smelled the liquor from his breath, the cheap cologne that the fellow law student liked to use to mask the smell of his clothes when he didn't have the time to properly wash them "I thought that you were going to be gone for the weekend?"
"I got back early, Foggy," Matt replied, keeping his voice soft, even as his friend neared the bathroom door. "Got some unexpected help and got everything done early."
"I tolda that I would've helped you," Foggy whined drunkenly, slurring his words and suddenly turning towards his bed. Matt could hear the carpet decompress from his friend's weight lifting off it before Foggy even landed on the bed. "Now couldn't I have helped instead of some stranger?"
Matt was sure that Foggy meant how and not now, but he didn't feel the need to correct his friend.
"Oh, they didn't offer," The blind man between the two started to explain. "In fact, the guy was already doing the deed for me, and I forced my help on him."
"That's nice," Foggy mumbled into his pillow, his voice breaking against the soft fabric. "But next time I'm going to help ya… whether or not you want it or not… "
Matt smirked, grabbing his toothbrush so he could start to clean his teeth. It was only when he had finished, changed into his pajamas and sat on his own bed, that he spoke once more.
"You're a good friend."
"Good? I'm the greatest friend," Foggy wasn't above correcting Matt. "Not just good. THE BEST!"
"You're the best."
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