Mickey Slips (Tyler Cunningham Shorts) Read Free

counterproductively, although he couldn’t know it yet ) to put up a brave face for me, and now gave up.
    “If only Bill really was the worst thing … he actually comes in third, maybe fourth. The officer that I struck last night came in to talk with me a while ago, and was quite nice about it, but they’re charging me with drunk and disorderly, along with some form of failure to comply with an officer. What if I go to jail Tyler?” Mickey hung his head in disgust.
    “You won’t. This is bad, but you’re a somewhat important guy who’s never been in this sort of trouble before, you can afford a team of flesh-eating lawyers to get you a deal with a fine and some community service at home … and maybe some diet-form of probation or suspended sentence … if they pursue it at all.” I believed that this was true, but legal research has, strangely, never been an interest of mine.
    “Worse … after the policeman left, and just before you came, Lily came … you might have passed her in the hall on your way in.” Mickey’s eyes filled with guilty tears, and although I felt that I knew, I had to ask.
    “Who is Lily? Is she the woman you met at the conference?” Mickey grimaced when I used the word ‘met’, and just nodded. “What did she want?”
    Mickey picked his wallet up off of the table that his tray of breakfast was sitting on, and chucked it at the wall with an angry gesture. This was the first such gesture that I’d seen from him in the 25 years that I’d known him ( it’s possible that he had an angry outburst during the first three years of my life, but if he did, I can’t recall the incident ) He said, “She wanted to return my wallet which fell in the gutter during the bar fight last night, she said.”
    “And …” I prompted. That couldn’t be all that there was to the story.
    “She mentioned what a good time that she had had last night in my hotel room until I got too drunk afterward and wanted to head out to a bar.” Mickey said this with a combination of anger and confusion in his voice.
    “Seeing her this morning, I have no doubt about what happened last night between Lily and me … but I can’t understand it. I don’t drink much, would never cheat on Anne, and don’t go bar-hopping. Tyler … just what the FUCK happened last night?”
    In the ordinary course of events, Mickey would never talk like this, but he felt as though his life had come undone. I had to help him keep from falling apart, and also I had to see what I could do to fix whatever had actually happened. He had slipped, as people do, and I would help catch him.
    “But wait, it gets worse! She said that I had encouraged her to make a video of … what happened in my room, and that her ‘friend’ Shane had come by to pick her up later in the evening, and seen the video at one of the bars we visited. He got mad and we started fighting, which was when the police were called to the scene.” By the end of this, Mickey could scarcely talk … he was red in the face and crying this point and wouldn’t look at me.
    “Let me guess the rest Mickey. She managed to talk her friend out of pressing charges, but he ( not Lily, of course, but unreasonable Shane ) wants money or else he’ll send a copy of the video to Anne and the girls, whose pictures they saw in your wallet.” I paused for breath, “Is that about the size of it?” Mickey just nodded, ashen.
    “You got set up Mickey … quite nicely. I’m pretty sure that she’s not registered for your conference, but was trolling for a rich doctor. You enjoyed the attention of a beautiful woman, as men often do ( myself excepted ), and she gave you some drug to render you docile and impressionable. When she was done with you ( no need for too much in the way of details here, I don’t like thinking about anyone having sex, much less a father-figure of mine being drugged and forced into the act ), she dragged you to a public place, and set you up for an embarrassment and