The Hard Bounce

by Todd Robinson

  Using our best guesstimations, we triangulated the angle of the window’s view on the DVD and narrowed down the apartment’s location to somewhere opposite Papa’s Empanadas.

  NASA, we’re not.

  All we knew was that we could eliminate the boarded-up tenement directly across the street. For good measure, I ripped a strip of plywood off a smoke-stained windowsill and peeked inside to make sure our boy wasn’t squatting.

  So we sat, windows open, listening to the city lullaby of distant traffic.

  My eyes flicked from window to window on the apartment buildings, hoping. But creeping doubt began to poke its finger in my brain. Nothing said Snake lived where the video was shot. For all we knew, it was a rented space where he shot the videos, only returning when he had a new girl lured in. He might only use the space every few weeks… or months.

  I kept convincing myself that this wasn’t the case, that the apartment in the video had that bachelor lived-in look. A pair of full ashtrays. More than one meal’s worth of pizza boxes.

  Besides, it was all we had.

  Junior loudly munched on a chunk of green pepper that curled up over his lip, almost sticking in his nose. He mumbled something unintelligible through the mouthful of food.

  “Swallow first, you goddamn savage,” I said, never taking my attention off the empty street, the empty windows, the empty everything.

  A little clearer, he said, “I bet you say that to all the boys.” He finished swallowing and took a breathy slurp from the coffee. “I said, I talked to Underdog.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I talked to him after you did.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “He called me after he left you at the aquarium.”

  “Yeah. Forgot to tell you. He’s out. He doesn’t have our backs on this.”

  “That surprise you?”

  “Not really. Probably should have kept my goddamn mouth shut. I don’t think he’ll turn us in if this thing goes completely to shit, though.”

  “Yeah. He didn’t give me that impression either. He wasn’t making threats, but he was worried.”

  “About what?”

  “He was worried we were about to do something royally fucked up. Something that might screw us over. In a forever kind of way.”

  My heart started to sink. I didn’t answer. I didn’t like where the discussion seemed to be heading.

  Junior took another big bite of his grinder, chewed, and sucked down more coffee before he went on. “I kinda agree with him.”

  Brutal silence hung in the air between us. I was burning up inside. Junior and I had never backed away from each other. Ever. On anything. The feelings of betrayal slammed me right in the heart.

  “You want out? Then go,” I said softly, bitterness edging my words. “I’ll step out of the car right now, and you can be on your merry fucking way.”

  “What?” His voice was tinged with hurt. “Fuck you, Boo. I’m not backing off nothing. I got just as much at stake here as you do.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief. “Don’t even talk to me that way, you fuck.”

  “What are you trying to say, Junior? Spit it out.”

  He angrily chucked the rest of his sandwich out the window. “This ain’t our fight no more, Boo. The girl? She’s dead. We got hired to find her. We didn’t. We found out what happened to her, but it’s not the same thing. Technically? We’re done. We’re not getting paid for this, and it’s not our fucking responsibility anymore to pull this midnight-avenger shit.”

  “So that’s what this is about now? The paycheck? Fuck what he did to that kid, long as we get paid?”

  “Don’t be a fucking prick. Open your eyes. What if this thing goes all fubar and we get busted? Is it worth it to spend the rest of our lives in a fucking cage over this? Over a girl we never even knew?”

  I opened my mouth to say something. Anything to interrupt him. But nothing came out. The man was making a point—and a righteous one at that, goddamn him.

  Junior said, “Well, is it? I’ve been there, Boo. So have you. We spent most of our lives locked in, and there weren’t even bars on The Home. This guy just isn’t fucking worth it.” Junior motioned vaguely toward the opposite side of the street.

  “Maybe he isn’t to you.” Despite the sound logic in Junior’s argument, Snake—whoever he was—mattered to me. I wanted him out of the world I had to live in. I couldn’t explain it to Junior in that moment, but damn it, it mattered. My hands started shaking in anger at Junior’s sudden turnaround.

  “All right. Fine. I’m not saying we don’t jack this boy up six ways to Sunday and twice on Monday. I’m not saying we don’t find him and beat his ass like a piñata until he tells us what he did with the kid and we get it on tape.” He paused. “But we leave him, Boo. We leave the fucker alive. We drop the dime on his now-crippled ass with the video and his confession. All on tape. Then we let the real cops handle this. This just isn’t our game anymore. This is bigger than we thought it was going to be, kid.”

  Junior was right, but I couldn’t hear him anymore. I opened the car door and got out. “Go, then,” I said. “Step the fuck off.”

  Junior’s tipping point tipped. He kicked his door open and faced me across the car roof. “Goddamn you, Boo! This girl? This fucking little dead girl? It sucks. It sucks worse than anything I’ve dealt with since The Home. But you know what? It had nothing to fucking do with us.” Junior smacked his open palm on the hood of the car. He folded his arms, shook his head, and dropped the bomb. In a quiet voice, he said, “This girl? You gotta realize something, Boo. She’s not Emily.”

  Bang.

  All the blood raging in my ears. All the adrenaline pounding in my veins. All of it dropped in a single heartbeat into the pit of my stomach like a mouthful of mercury. Hot tears welled up in my eyes, but I fought them back. I wanted to scream. I wanted to curse and start swinging on him. My best friend. My only family. I wanted to make him hurt like his words did me. But I couldn’t. There was something hard and pointy lodged in my throat that made it hard to breathe, harder to speak.

  Because he was right.

  He threw his hands up in the air. “There. I said it. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to, but you’re blind to your own goddamn motivations. So you can listen to me and think it over or you can tell me to fuck off again. Your choice. Say the words, and I’m gone.”

  I stared down at the concrete, trying to fight back the anguish Junior’s words had brought up from the bottom of the hole I’d thought I’d buried it in. “You’re right.” My voice came out in a hollow rasp. “You’re right.” I lit a cigarette with numbed fingers. I had a hard time looking up at him. “Maybe… maybe I’ve been screwed in the head with this thing all along. But you’re right, either way.”

  “Good. So let’s give this shit up for the night, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow. Sound good?” Junior climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  I followed him into the car. As suddenly as everything had come to a boil—all of the anger, the adrenaline, Junior’s coffee—it all rushed out my system just as quickly. My body felt like a full bathtub with the drain pulled. I was exhausted in a place deeper than physical.

  We drove in silence. I wanted to apologize again, but it took all the will I had left just to stay awake for the drive home. Junior pulled his car up into the driveway behind the ridiculous hippie van, and I climbed out.

  Junior leaned over the seat. “What time you want to get there tomorrow?”

  I rubbed at dry eyes with the back of my hand. “Around five, I’m figuring. If the fucker has a jobby-job, maybe we can catch his ass on the way home.”

  “Sounds good.” Junior shifted the car into reverse, but left his foot on the brake. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You pissed at me?”

  I shook my head. “Nah.”

  “You sure you’re not pissed?”

  I nodded.

  “Still friends?”

  “Yeah,” I
said, tugging a strained smile onto my face.

  “Good, ’cause I owe you this.” He flipped his hand across the seat and whacked me on the balls through the open door.

  I groaned loudly as my lower equator cramped in pain. Crumpling from the blow, I tumbled backward into the hedges.

  Junior peeled out, his spinning tires spraying me with gravel. I could hear him cackling over the engine’s roar as he pulled out toward Cambridge Street at a clip.

  Luckily for me, his leverage was off and he didn’t get off as clean a shot as I had given him. With effort, I got to my feet and stumbled toward my apartment. The hippie was on the steps, looking at me open-mouthed as I approached.

  “Hey, dude, you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “Never better.”

  “Did that guy just hit you in the nuts?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause he’s my best friend.”

  “Oh,” he said, as if my answer made all the sense in the world.

  I got to the top of the porch, then stopped. “What’s your name?”

  “Phil.”

  “Nice to meet you, Phil. I’m Boo.”

  He mulled it over for a moment, blinking in slo-mo. “Is that like Boo Radley or like Casper, the friendly ghost?”

  “Radley.”

  He smiled and nodded dreamily. “Cool. Good book.”

  I nodded and went inside my dark, empty apartment. From under the bed, I pulled out my ragged blue hardcover of The Hardy Boys and the Mark on the Door. Inside the cover, I found the brittle piece of folded construction paper. My one valuable. I carefully unfolded it and looked once again at the two smiling stick figures standing on a faded field of grass that never existed in front of a house we never lived in, LovE Emily scrawled above the smiling yellow sun in a deliberate child’s hand. Gently, I folded the paper up and placed it back in its safe place. The Boy lay under my bed, hiding. From what, I didn’t know. He took the book from me and held it tightly to his grotesquely scarred little chest.

  I held onto the image of the smiling sun as I lay back and closed my eyes.

  Day two.

  More coffee.

  More sandwiches.

  No Snake.

  The closest we came to activity was around 9 P.M. when a bum started harassing us for change and wouldn’t leave.

  He stood at the car window, swaying and reeking like sour milk. “C’mon, big guy. Help a vet’rin out. You gotta have some change you kin spare.” He redirected his focus to Junior since I refused to give him my attention, much less change. His breath filled the car with the odor of cheap wine and gingivitis.

  “You know what I got for you, alkie?” Junior reached under his seat and pulled out what looked like a homemade remote control. He pressed a button on the side, and a burst of electricity crackled across two metal studs attached to the top. “Zappy-zappy. That’s what I got for you, you don’t start walking.”

  The bum backed off from the window, palms up. He walked away, slurring his irritated sentiments. When he got halfway down the block, he turned around and flipped us off.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I just hate bums,” Junior said.

  “No, I meant what is that in your hand?”

  “What? This?” He held up the thing. It still looked like a big remote, held together with black duct tape. One thin green wire protruded from the bottom of the tape and re-entered the plastic molding just under the metal studs.

  “What is that? Is that a stun gun?”

  Junior smiled and nodded. “Sweet, isn’t she?” He pressed the button again, sending electricity dancing between the electrodes. It made a sound like corn popping. “Twitch made it. He gave it to me on my birthday. I call her Rosie.”

  Why the hell does everyone name their weaponry?

  On my last birthday, Twitch gave me a set of Reservoir Dogs action figures. I didn’t feel like I’d gotten off easy at the time. At least he hadn’t gifted me with something I could electrocute myself with.

  We sat until Junior’s snoring woke us both up around 11 P.M. Neither of us could figure out exactly when we’d fallen asleep. Needless to say, neither one of us had spotted our man from inside fucking slumberland.

  Day three. Pouring rain. And I mean pouring. The rain fell in solid sheets around the car, and gray rivers ran down the gutter. Junior and I made a game out of guessing what would come bobbing by next, caught in the current. You’d think it would have been a nice relief from the stifling heat, but just an inch of open window and my entire right side would be drenched immediately. With the windows closed, the humidity built up in the car, fogging up the glass and giving us zero visibility.

  “This is retarded,” Junior said, wiping the condensation off the inside of the windshield with a napkin. “We wouldn’t see the guy if he was doing a cha-cha on the hood. Let’s do this tomorrow.”

  We’d only been in our spot for an hour, but Junior was right. I sighed. Day three and zip. Wasn’t even noon yet, and the day was in the shitter. “Fine. I’m just going to take a piss and get smokes. You want anything from inside?”

  “Cherry Coke.”

  “Got it.” I got out, head down, and ran into the store as fast as I could.

  Our bribed counterman pressed the button from behind the counter, opening the lock on the bathroom door. Under the fluorescent lights, my skin had taken on a lovely jaundice, dark bags pooching under my eyes. I sighed at the living dead in the mirror. He sighed right back at me. I took a wonderfully extended piss and walked out. The bell on the door dinged as someone else came into the store. I grabbed Junior’s soda and headed to the counter.

  “Two packs of Parliaments,” I said.

  The clerk put the cigarettes on the linoleum counter next to the soda, then he nodded at whoever was standing right behind my shoulder. “Pack of Reds?”

  “You got it,” came the reply. All the hair on my body shot up straight into the air. I’d heard that voice before.

  The clerk passed over a box of Marlboros. Put the pack into a hand. A hand that was on the end of an arm. An arm with a snake tattoo curled around it. The hand dumped a few bills and some change onto the countertop.

  Slowly, I turned my head and looked into a pair of blue eyes, drops of rain hanging from his thick eyelashes. His long, too-black-to-be-natural hair hung wetly around his head. Given the time, I probably could have counted each pore on his nose. He had thinner features than I thought he would. He looked about twenty-five. He’s too young, my mind said. He looks too… normal.

  He flipped me a quick, cursory smile. “How are ya?” he said and walked out. The bell sounded again.

  A snapping of fingers next to my ear brought me back. “Yo, bro? You with me here? You paying for the smokes and Coke or what?” I put a bill on the counter, grabbed my items, and walked to the door, numb with disbelief.

  Junior was out of the car, standing in the downpour and wearing the same thousand-yard stare I was sporting. I walked over to him and stood at his side. I opened my mouth, but Junior beat me to it. “Please. Please, dear God, tell me that’s who I think it is.”

  “It’s him,” I said. We watched him walk through the front door to an apartment building that sat at ten o’clock from the front door of Papa’s Empanadas. Once he was inside, Junior grabbed the duct tape we’d brought with us off the car seat and the two of us bolted across the street, oblivious to the traffic zipping past us in both directions. A car passed close enough to nip the back of my pants leg.

  Snake hadn’t used a key to get in the first door. He’d just pushed it open. I hoped it wasn’t a double-door foyer with the lock on the second door. It wasn’t. It was just one door with a busted lock.

  Snake wasn’t in the lobby, but the elevator was on its way up. We watched the numbers climb to the fifth floor and stop.

  “Gotcha, fucker,” I said.

  We rode up to the fifth floor. Our original plan was to knock on each door
with a pitch for the Church of the Divine Ascension until we got to the right one. I was thankful we didn’t need the shtick. Instead, we just followed the wet footprints on the tiled hallway to apartment 506.

  “And here we are,” said Junior, a bit breathlessly. “You want the honors?”

  I knocked on the door and waited, heart pounding like a bass amp. A shadow passed over the peephole in the center of the door and something snapped in my brain. I actually heard a pop inside my head.

  The world exploded red.

  I pressed myself flat against the wall opposite the door in the thin hallway. With the wall bracing my back, I kicked at the lock full-on. The dry wood around the bolt shattered like a Saltine. The sound of the heavy wood bashing onto meat and bone was orgasmic to my ears.

  I charged through the open doorway. What I lacked in panache, I made up for in sheer momentum. To his credit, Snake was still standing. It probably would have been better for him if he’d gone down. His eyes were rolled halfway up his skull, and his nose looked like somebody had stuck an M-80 inside a nostril and lit the fuse.

  I decked him with every muscle, every pound, focused into the tip of my fist. His wiry body went airborne, launching clear over the couch behind him. When gravity resumed its grip, he crumpled on the hardwood and slid across the floor all the way into the far wall. His trip came to an abrupt end when the back of his head crunched into the scuffed wood molding. I didn’t care if it was the molding or his skull that had made the crunch.

  I stood over Snake’s body, wishing he would stand so I could pop him a couple more times. My fists shook, breath hissing out from between clenched teeth. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Junior walked in behind me and gently placed a hand on my shoulder. The muscles bunched under his fingers. “Nice punch.”

  It was a second before I could answer, snapping out from under the spell of violence as though from hypnosis. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I blew out air in a long stream, the violence still under the surface, wanting to do bad things.

  Bad things.

  “Yeah,” I finally said.

  Junior nudged Snake with the toe of his boot. “Shit. He dead?”