The Hard Bounce

by Todd Robinson

  I strolled over to the dinosaur as casually as a man with a hole in his leg relying on a cane could. The dinosaur turned his head on a neck as thick as a telephone pole. “The fuck you want, Gimpy?”

  “Nothing with you, Bobo. I want your organ grinder.”

  A dull film passed behind his big dumb cow eyes. Dim bastard didn’t even know I was mocking him. “What?”

  Oh, this sweetheart was going to be an absolute pleasure. “I’m here to see Mr. Cade.”

  “Mr. Cade don’t see nobody when he’s eating.”

  “Where you from, paisan?” I smeared the last word with the same jackass Italian inflection the dinosaur was affecting.

  “Hyde Park.”

  “Then why the fuck do you talk in that Long Island wiseguy wanna-be patois?” I said with a smile.

  “Huh?” Again with the stupid.

  “I mean, this isn’t The Sopranos. If you’re gonna work for the Irish mob, you should at least affect a brogue or something. The Italian thing just makes you sound like the retard you look like.”

  A dangerous smile crawled across his lips. “You fucking kidding me, Gimp?”

  “If I wanted to kid you, big boy, I’d tell you a knock-knock joke.”

  He wrinkled his brow, unsure whether to pound me into dust or laugh in my face. He turned his head up a bit, thinking about it. I whipped out the stun gun and jabbed it into his neck.

  Nothing.

  Batteries were dead.

  Fucking great.

  “The hell you doing?” he asked, grabbing my wrist. The stun gun dropped out of my hand and smashed on the sidewalk. “What is that, a pager?”

  Plan B.

  Losing the crutch, I pulled the white and blue striped tube sock out of my leg brace. I brought it down on his skull as I hopped on one leg. If he hadn’t moved, he might have gone down clean. But in his effort to get out of the way, the sock popped him square on the forehead. The skin split wide open, blood immediately gushing over his eyes. He took a groggy step backward, and I took another shot.

  The second time, I landed right on the sweet spot. The dinosaur let go of my wrist, bounced once off the hood of the Caddy, and slid down to the sidewalk. A smear of darker red on the Caddy’s cherry color marked his descent. The sock tore from the impact and the change from my retirement fund spilled onto the street with a jingle. I dropped the sock on the dinosaur’s lap and limped inside.

  The air conditioning blasted me as I opened the door. Conor’s was empty but for Cade, who barely afforded me a glance when I walked in. Hung over the bar were portraits of the Irish Holy Trinity: JFK, RFK, and Teddy. Only Teddy’s had a half-full rocks glass of whiskey in front of him, whether in honest tribute or smartassery, I couldn’t tell.

  An empty restaurant was the last thing I wanted. The only three sounds in the place were my heart, some Chieftains on the speakers, and the cracking of the lobster claw Frankie was working on.

  I sat at his table as casually as I could. Brando in a leg brace.

  Caught in the silver lobster cracker in Cade’s scarred hands, the claw made a sharp splintering sound, like bone snapping. Cade couldn’t have cared less that I’d seated myself. I pressed my hands flat on the table to show that there was nothing in them—and to keep them from shaking.

  Looking at him up close was strange. He was as close to a celebrity as I’d ever come. I found it hard not to look at the distinctively wide ears, knobby and cauliflowered, that the crime beat loved to use in descriptives of the man. A thick head with a face like a fist perched on top of his wide body. The wide ears made his head look even bigger. Between the thinning, bone-white hair that was combed sharply back over his pate and the thick white moustache, Cade looked like a polar bear in a light blue, three-hundred-dollar sweat suit. A polar bear that could have me killed just as easily as he ordered his barley pudding.

  Something in his face gnawed at my mind. He and his nephew shared no features whatsoever, but something familiar was bugging me about the man.

  “You need something?” he said, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to go away. As he sat up to give me his attention, I saw the ridiculous bib he was wearing—a white plastic job with a picture of a smiling lobster in a pot of boiling water.

  I knew just how the lobster felt.

  Before I spoke, I realized that I was staring at his garlic knot ears despite myself. “You had me shot.”

  A broad smile stretched his thin lips wide. “Oh. You’re the tough guy who thought it would be a bright idea to smack my nephew around.” Crunch. He sucked noisily at the claw, letting me know I was as much a threat as the lobster.

  “Your nephew is a piece of shit.”

  That got his attention enough to stop his wet slurping. He leveled his gaze at me over the claw. “Watch your mouth.” His eyes threw daggers with the warning.

  “You know what he does?”

  “I don’t fucking care what he does. I care about what you did.” He casually pointed a broad finger, greasy with melted butter. “You should care what you do. You should be careful what you’re doing right fucking now, kid.”

  “He makes videos. He rapes girls, and he videos them.”

  “So what? You a faggot or something? You don’t like fucking girls? Maybe you’d like it if there was some nice cocksucking on there? That your thing?” He smirked and lifted his chin. “Huh, big boy? That it?”

  “What you should know is that the girls are underage. Not only does he rape them, but he smacks them around first.”

  “So maybe the little cunts are into that shit. You don’t know.”

  “Vice has a file on him. They’d love to get a name.”

  Cade rolled his eyes and dropped the lobster cracker on the table from a height where it made a nice thump. “Oh. And you know the name? Is that what you’re saying?” He laced his fingers in front of him, the index fingers pointing at me like a child’s approximation of a gun. “Let me make sure I’m perfectly clear about all this.” He cleared his throat and looked me dead in the eye. “You making threats? That right? Hey, Lou? You hearing this?”

  “I’m hearing it.” Like an apparition separating himself from the shadows, Louis Blanc came walking around the corner. He circled us slowly, one perfectly manicured hand tracing the material of the green-checkered tablecloth. An obscenely large diamond winked at me from his cufflink, like it was letting me in on the joke. “But I’m not sure I’m believing it.” He made his way behind me, the hand coming to rest on the back of my chair. He leaned over my shoulder. “That true, kid?” he whispered. “You making threats to Mr. Cade?”

  His breath was warm on the hairs behind my ear. His inflection was gentle, almost paternal. Good thing I’d pressed my hands onto the table, since they were starting to tremor. As was my jaw. But since I couldn’t press my face onto the table too, I just chomped on my lip to make it a sneer. Unfortunately, I think it made me look like I was pooping.

  “You fucking making threats against my family, you little cocksucker?” Frankie’s temper was starting to flare. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Do you know who the fuck you’re talking to?”

  “I know all about you, Mr. Cade. I know you have two daughters—”

  Cade stood up, sending his chair backward onto the floor with a bang. “Don’t you say another fucking word!”

  It was all so absurdist in a way, made more so by the smiling lobster I was now eye to eye with.

  “How old was she, Frankie? How old was your daughter when she died last year?”

  “Lou! Hold this punk down!” With an animal growl, Cade snatched up the silver lobster crackers.

  For the second time that week, I felt the chill of Louis Blanc’s gun against my head. His other arm reached around my throat in a headlock, pulling me off-balance in the chair. I had no footing or leverage to resist if I wanted to. So I kept talking instead.

  “How old was she, Mr. Cade? She was fourteen, wasn’t she? What if it was her, Frankie? What if it was her?”

/>   That caught him for a second. Then, just as fast, the rage overwhelmed his doubt. He grabbed my wrist and went straight for my fingers with the lobster cracker. I made a fist and pulled my hand back. I wasn’t going to resist all that strenuously, not with a gun to my temple. Still, I wasn’t going to give up my fingers without making it difficult.

  “Gimme his goddamn hand, Lou!”

  “Uh, Frankie? I only got two hands here. You want me to let him hold the gun for me so I can keep his hand straight?”

  “Shoot him in the fucking head, he keeps moving.”

  I stopped. But then Cade stopped too.

  Because I was smiling.

  “The fuck you smiling at?”

  Suddenly, the grip around my throat loosened. “Well, shit on me,” Blanc said.

  “What the fuck areyou smiling at, Lou?”

  “Frankie, you might want to look at your lobster,” I said.

  Cade looked down at the stupid bib. At the tiny red laser dot that danced in the center of the cartoon lobster’s forehead. “The fuck?”

  Louis whistled through his teeth. “Nicely played,” he whispered in my ear as he released his grip around my neck and put all four legs of my chair on the floor. He gently smoothed out the shoulders of my shirt and clapped me on the shoulder as he holstered his gun with the other hand.

  “What the fuck is this?” Frankie tried to wipe the laser dot off his bib with a napkin. The light just ran over his hand.

  “That, Frankie, is a laser beam. Most commonly used on sniper rifles and the like.” I knew Blanc’s gun was gone, but I could still feel the ghost of its pressure against my temple.

  “Shit,” Frankie said.

  Feeling a sudden empowerment, I reached across the table and took Frankie’s glass of white wine. I swallowed a mouthful to clear my slightly crushed voicebox. “This isn’t a threat, Mr. Cade. This is a fucking promise. Now I want you to hear me when I say this.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You got my fucking attention, kid. Hey, Lou, can you believe this shit?”

  Trying to regain my composure, I finished Frankie’s wine and placed the glass back on the table. “I understand why you did what you did. But Derek is pulling some sick shit, and he’s pulling it publicly. So I’m offering you two things: The first thing is my silence. You talk to him. He stops. Period. I hear of any more movies, and I buy myself a ‘get out of jail free’ card, courtesy of turning on your nephew.” Cade didn’t answer me, but I knew he was hearing me. His eyes were down to two slits.

  “Second thing is I don’t raise my hand right now. If I do, your bib won’t save your lovely sweat suit. You proved your point. You got me. You got me good. But don’t you ever, ever threaten my friends or anyone I care about again.” I let my words hang.

  Then they both started laughing. Whooping guffaws of amusement that threw me off the cool hand I thought I was playing. Cade walked around the table and put his arms around me, lifting me up from my chair.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Lou! You believe this kid?” Frankie cupped my face in his hands and kissed me on the cheek. I don’t think it was a kiss of death, but it wasn’t full of passion, either.

  “I must admit, Frankie, I’m impressed.” Lou leaned against the table, took a pair of cigarettes from a polished gold case, and lit them with a gold lighter. He handed one to me. I was too bewildered to refuse it. I guess state tobacco laws didn’t apply in mob-run establishments.

  Frankie put his arm around me like we were long-lost family. “I mean, where do you buy pants with balls so big?” There were little tears of laughter in the corners of Frankie’s eyes. “C’mere.” Frankie hugged me again.

  “You’re a piece of work, Malone. No doubt.” Louis’s scar crinkled up when he smiled, the cigarette clenched between his teeth.

  Frankie grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen. You impressed me today. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been so impressed.”

  Louis blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “You used to like that Rainey kid in Pittsburgh.”

  “Before he went and made me have him shot.”

  “Yeah.” Louis looked at me hard. “Before that.”

  Cade clapped his hands and laughed. “True. But you, Malone. You, I hope, won’t make me kill you.”

  How was I supposed to respond to that?

  Frankie continued. “I’ll tell you what. You have actually done both me and my nephew a favor today. I’m sure that he don’t know about any police file on him. He don’t need the grief, and I sure as shit don’t. As of today, Derek’s production company comes to a halt. I’ll see to it myself, okay?”

  “Okay.” If there was anything else I wanted to say, I couldn’t think of it.

  Cade chucked me on the cheek and flecks of ice came back into his eyes. “Now, if I ever see you again, I’m gonna personally make sure you eat your own testicles. Got it?”

  I got it. He knew I got it. There was no need for me to answer.

  “Now, get the hell out of here. I gotta piss, you made me laugh so hard.” He dismissed me with a wave and left.

  Before I turned to go, Lou gave me one more smile and a wink.

  With his dead eye, of course.

  Out the door, I hustled quickly past the dinosaur. He’d managed to make it back to his feet with the assistance of the small crowd of rubberneckers that had grown around him. He held his hand to his head, blood streaming between his fingers.

  I climbed into the car, and Junior sped off. “We good?”

  “We good.”

  Junior tossed the laser sight he’d pulled off of Twitch’s rifle onto the backseat. “By the way, what was the backup plan in case they didn’t buy the laser?”

  “We don’t need no stinking backup plan.”

  “Didn’t have one, did you?”

  “Um, no.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Boo Malone. Had a hell of a week.

  It was time for as close to a vacation as I ever got. Kelly took the week off from work to nursemaid me back to health.

  That, and we fucked. A lot. One night in bed, a thin trickle of blood smeared down her leg. “Oh, crap,” she muttered. “Oh, God, this is embarrassing.” It was nearly dark in the room, but I thought I could feel the heat of her blushing.

  Before she could get any more embarrassed, I felt the warmth pooling in the sheet under my leg. “I think you’re good. I think my leg might have been a little overtaxed.”

  “Oh, thank the lord.”

  “Yeah, thank the lord that the bullet hole in my leg is bleeding again.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She turned the bedside light on. In the yellow glow, the blood looked worse than I thought. And now that the endorphins were wearing off, my leg was starting to hurt like a motherfucker again. “Well, looks like somebody needs a bath.”

  “Looks like we both do.”

  “I’ll get the sponge.”

  “Let’s try something else for a change.”

  I limped into my kitchen and found an old roll of cling wrap in my junk drawer. After I daubed the blood from my wound and applied a generous dollop of Bacitracin to the stitches, I wrapped my thigh tightly in the plastic.

  Kelly poked her head from around the bedroom. “Hmmm, kinky…” she said in an inflection I recognized.

  “Did you just Hedley Lamarr me?”

  “That I did, cowboy.”

  “Wow. Any woman quoting Blazing Saddles is a woman I can fall in love with.”

  She winked at me. “Feel free.” Moments later, I heard water filling the bathtub.

  We sat in the hot water, slowly washing each other off, face to face, my legs over hers. Good thing the old claw-foot bathtub was big enough for two.

  She squeezed the sponge and the water dribbled down my neck, over my chest, the thick scar parting the water as it ran down my body. She moved the sponge lower and held it, warm and soapy, against my mark. My badge. My ever-present souvenir from a time a loving God could have allowed me to forget but ne
ver did.

  She never asked. Not once. Maybe that’s why I wanted to tell her. Outside of Junior, nobody knew. I’d been asked. I’d never told.

  “I was eight years old…”

  It was a summer of long, humid days and sticky nights. I was spending my summer like all kids did. Playing wiffleball with sugar-sticky hands until dusk settled and mothers started yelling. Chasing the ice cream man. My birthday was coming, and the summer stretched ahead of me with the great promise that only exists until you hit puberty. Maybe I’d get to go to a Red Sox game and see my heroes, Jim Rice and The Yaz. Maybe we’d get to go to Lincoln Park down on Route 6, or make the big trip into Rhode Island to Rocky Point for clam cakes.

  Every day had endless possibilities.

  Also endless, or so it seemed, was my mother’s lineup of boyfriends. That summer, there was the plumber with the rough hands and the musician with the perfectly feathered hair who called me “little man.”

  I hated that.

  I did like the bartender, who always smelled faintly of beer, cigarettes, and maraschino cherries. But, like every summer, the boyfriends came and went.

  My mother wasn’t a bad person. She was so young. Lonely. That summer, she was younger than I am now. She wasn’t a woman who slept around town. If she was, she kept it hidden, and I’d rather not think of her like that. What she was, though, was a poor judge of character.

  My mother’s name was Annie Malone. I have her last name.

  Time hasn’t erased her in the slightest, unlike most of my early memories. I remember every kissed scrape. I remember every sacrifice. I remember her love. She was the most beautiful person I ever met. If I’d known who Elizabeth Taylor was then, I might have said my mother looked like her, but with a better smile. My mother had the same black hair. And the eyes. I’ll never forget my mother’s violet eyes. God’s little joke on me, all I got were her cheekbones.