author's note. You have been warned. But if you insist on throwing tomatoes, I prefer Roma, okay? thanks
"I'd get the number changed… Women keep calling for Spanky."
-Agent Gibbs, "SWAK"
For the first week or so, Tony didn't give it another thought. He was preoccupied with more pressing concerns, such as not dying, plus he knew that hospitals had some rule about cell phones. It wasn't until he was finally released from Bethesda that Tony discovered he had 357 missed calls.
Lying on his couch with nothing to do but watch movies all day, Tony figured he might as well take some of the calls. When he wasn't drugged into the sleep of the dead, when he could find it in the nest of pillows and blankets before it stopped ringing, Tony flipped his phone open and greeted the caller with a groggy "Hello?"
And it was strangely fun, at first. Some of the women sounded kind of hot over the phone. Tony saw it as a good way to get back in the game, after his little brush with death. He chatted up one particularly blonde-sounding caller for a good ten minutes before he got too short of breath and had to stop.
When it got really weird, though, was when men started calling. A bit of logic pushed through his plague-addled thoughts, told him that Spanky could just as easily be a woman's nickname as a man's. He laughed at the thought of his number scrawled on the men's-room door of a techno club somewhere. "For A Good Time Call." Would have laughed, anyway, if it didn't hurt so much. Still, after the seventeen millionth time of explaining that it was a wrong number, that he was a federal agent, Tony started to contemplate the idea of getting up off the couch and looking up the number for the phone company, already.
In the middle of Ernest Goes to Camp the phone rang for the seventeen million and first time. Tony managed to dig it out from underneath a wad of tissues and greet the caller, who stuttered out an obviously uncomfortable "Uh, is this, um, Spanky?"
"No," Tony replied easily. "Wrong number."
"Sorry," the caller fumbled. "My… my friend gave me this number and… um…"
And then Tony knew the voice. "Probie?" He stared as the phone went dead in his hand. That's it, he told himself. Tomorrow I am definitely calling the phone company.