The Hard Bounce

by Todd Robinson

  What now?

  Who gives a shit, the demons answered, and toasted me another round.

  The media was still going apeshit. Forensics pulled up traces of blood on the floor of the DA’s bathroom. They found more in the trunk of Danny Barnes’s car. They’d pieced together that Cassandra died in the apartment and Barnes helped Donnelly cover it up, leaving the poor kid’s body in the squat.

  I got no comfort from Barnes’s involvement. I’d still cost him his life. I wasn’t so sure he deserved what he got. When I’d walked a mile in his shoes, would I have done the same for Junior? Would he have done the same for me?

  I didn’t like what I thought the answer might be.

  Right behind the Donnelly story was a report on a severed arm found wrapped in a black plastic bag in a Dumpster in Providence. The report included an artist’s rendition of the snake tattoo wrapped around the dismembered limb.

  Rhode Island police would appreciate any information.

  A week and a half after that, I started to feel a little better. I managed to stay sober for a whole twenty-four hours.

  I repossessed the last of the DVDs. In my recoveries, I only had to break a total of six fingers, one wrist, five noses, and three or four ribs.

  I enjoyed each and every one so, so much.

  Then I anonymously mailed the ledger with a note of explanation to the Boston Police.

  The bounty we’d collected was almost depleted between the hospital bills from both my trips and Junior’s care. I didn’t give a fuck. The money was tainted, and I couldn’t get it out of my life fast enough.

  Trying to buy a little bit of redemption, I bought a ’68 VW Van. After parking it in the driveway next to the house, I dropped the keys in an envelope and taped the envelope to Phil’s door. I think he’d been in hiding ever since he ran from the crash. I knew he was still up there, though. The clouds of pot smoke hadn’t diminished one bit.

  I ended the day by paying a visit to Cassie’s grave as the setting sun painted the horizon the same pink as her room. I knelt to say a prayer before I remembered that I didn’t know any. Somehow, I’d managed to spend ten years of my life in a place named Saint Gabriel’s without memorizing one prayer. Not that I believed in it, but I thought Cassandra might have liked to hear me say one.

  “I’m sorry, kid,” I said softly. “I wanted to be your hero. I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Then I placed the bouquet of yellow and white daisies under the long shadow of her grave marker and listened to the wind for a while.

  I got another message from Kelly. She sounded like she’d been crying when she asked why I wasn’t answering my cell or my phone at home or calling her back. As I listened, a gnawing ache dug through me. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to see her.

  I also wanted her to do better than me. She deserved better. She deserved better than a thug who was good for nothing but playing tough guy. I tried to think objectively about the events, about what had happened.

  Only one fact was carved in my mind as though set in marble.

  The people I loved died.

  She was kind enough never to come by The Cellar.

  That’s not to say I didn’t look for her every night.

  She deserved better.

  I was sitting at Junior’s bedside, reading him some Eddie Bunker, when the nurse came in. “Hey, Boo,” she said.

  I looked at her, vaguely recognizing her. “Hey,” I said.

  “My name’s Patti. You remember me?”

  Suddenly, I remembered the girl. She bartended at The Cellar while she was in school. For nursing, I could only assume. “Hey,” I said again. “You look different.”

  She ran her fingers through her chestnut brown hair. “Yeah, they kinda frown on platinum mohawks on the nursing staff. Had to grow up a little.”

  “Glad one of us did.”

  “Just thought you’d want to know. The kid who came in with Junior?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s gonna make it. He’s out of the woods and out of the ICU.”

  Relief flooded my chest so violently I couldn’t even breathe in for a couple seconds. “Thank you. I hadn’t heard.”

  She lifted her chin at Junior. “How’s he doing?”

  “Fucking thirsty,” Junior said.

  “I’ll get you some ginger-ale,” Patti said, unaware of how big the moment was.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Junior squinted and took in a long breath through his nose. “Was that Patti?” he mouthed in a dry whisper.

  “Yup.”

  “Always did want to fuck her.”

  Junior was going to be fine.

  I walked into The Cellar to work out the weekly schedules. Since Junior wouldn’t be able to work for at least a couple months and I wasn’t exactly at my fighting best, I decided to hire in a couple of the guys I’d just given their walking papers at the other bars. It was as close to redemption as I could get.

  When I walked in, Audrey was leaning at the end of the bar nearest the door, concentrating on a hand of solitaire with her well-worn deck of Jack Daniels cards. There was only one customer, sitting alone in the darkest corner of the bar.

  “Hey, Willie,” she said in a bored and lonely monotone.

  “How’s it going, cupcake?”

  “You seen Brendan around?” she asked, ignoring my attempt at idle chitchat.

  “Nope. Guess he’s taking a break.” I hadn’t seen him since the night at the loft. I hoped he was doing well. A week ago, I’d considered paying him a visit, but I thought it might unnecessarily complicate things.

  “I got nobody to play cards with no more,” she said.

  “When I come down from the office, we’ll go a few hands of gin.”

  Her round face lit up. “You promise?”

  “Promise.” I put up two fingers and held them together.

  I got two steps away from the bar when I saw who the lone customer was.

  Louis Blanc sat in an immaculate gray suit, sipping a bottle of Coke. He stared straight ahead at the liquor bottles behind the bar. His blind eye faced me, the long scar creasing the side of his head like a second mouth, frowning at me.

  His lips made a soft popping sound when he brought the bottle away from his mouth. “Got a minute, Mr. Malone?” he said toward the bottles in that eerily paternal brogue of his.

  I quickly calculated motive versus opportunity divided by common sense and decided he’d either come for the buffalo wings or to kill me. I took the barstool to his left, where he could at least see me. He didn’t look over. He wasn’t even watching me in the mirror. He seemed content to keep his eye on the bottles.

  “Mr. Cade sent me here,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. With gaping depression comes comfortable fatalism. It was a perk, in a way.

  “He doesn’t want to thank you, exactly, for what happened. But he wants you to know that he’s in your debt. For opening his eyes.”

  I didn’t want that unholy cocksucker to be in my debt for a goddamn thing, but I kept that to myself. I just nodded and stood up to leave.

  “And I wanted to apologize,” he said.

  Blanc saw that I didn’t understand.

  “Not for your leg. You earned that one. I wanted to apologize about your friend. And the boy.”

  “It was you at Sid’s that night,” I said with numb lips.

  “Yes, it—”

  Before I processed the consequences, my body was in motion. With a roar, I grabbed the collar of his perfect suit with my left hand and my right snatched the thick Coke bottle, smashing it into his temple in one vicious motion. His head snapped to the side as the glass exploded against his skull. As momentum and surprise took him backward over the barstool, I ran with him, off-balance myself, and drove him into the jukebox with my full weight. The glass on the jukebox shattered and we fell to the floor, my body on top.

  Audrey screamed as we hit the floor. “Willie! What are you doing?”

  Blanc’s good ey
e rolled up, and he groaned as I knelt over him. Two thin trickles of blood ran from the spot where the bottle burst on his head, one from the corner of his blind eye like a teardrop.

  I still grasped the jagged neck of the bottle in my fist. I pressed the splintered glass against his pulsing throat. “Motherfucker,” I screamed in his face, spittle flying. I was foaming at the mouth like a mad dog. “Why?” I pulled him off the floor and slammed him back down. His head knocked loudly off the wood. “Why?”

  “Willie, stop!” Audrey cried, doing a frantic dance from foot to foot behind us.

  “Get back, Audrey,” I yelled over my shoulder. “He’s got a gun.” C’mon, my mind screamed. I leaned close and whispered. “Reach for that fucking piece. Do it. Just try, and I’ll push this bottle through your fucking neck until I hit the floor.”

  Audrey gasped and Blanc, the cold bastard, smiled. “Actually,” he said calmly, “I don’t have a gun.” Bleeding, assaulted, and on the floor with a broken bottle pressed to his neck, he might as well have been on a cruise.

  “Answer me why, you fuck! I swear to God, I’ll do you right fucking here!”

  Blanc cleared his throat and spoke gently. “It truly was an accident. Sid pulled a gun on me, and I killed that pig. But I don’t kill children.”

  His eyes locked with my own, never blinking as he said his confession.

  And Lord help me, I believed him.

  I climbed off him, panting harshly. “You… you’re a fucking killer,” I said, my voice ragged.

  “This is true,” he said, gingerly applying his fingers to his wounds. He rubbed the light smear of blood between his thumb and forefinger. “But I’m not a murderer, and I think you know the difference.” The trickle of blood ran down his neck, seeping into his shirt collar. “Excuse me, do you have a napkin?”

  “Get out of here. Now.”

  Blanc helped himself to a few napkins off the bar. Dabbing at his head, he said, “Derek was told only to make one disc. He wasn’t supposed to make the second—the fake.”

  Derek had said something about “making the other movie.” Another hint I’d missed.

  “What disc? Who’s Derek?” Audrey was still way in the dark and confused to tears. “Who’s got a gun?”

  Blanc took Audrey’s pudgy hand and smoothly kissed the knuckles. “I apologize, Audrey. It was a poor joke on my part, and Boo misunderstood me. Everything is fine.”

  Hardly. But Audrey seemed satisfied with his answer and, so help me, blushed like a virgin on prom night. “That right, Willie?”

  “Yeah. Misunderstanding.”

  Satisfied, Audrey poured me a whiskey and cracked Lou a fresh Coke. “You two drink and make up, or I’m kicking both your asses.” With that, Audrey sauntered back behind the bar and resumed her solitaire game.

  “Slainte,” said Blanc, holding his bottle to me with that smile.

  “Fuck your mother,” I offered back, and I downed my shot.

  “May I continue?”

  When Audrey was out of earshot, I lowered my voice. “Cade…”

  “Mr. Cade wanted his nephew to capture the girl in an inappropriate situation. A situation he could use for leverage, were Mr. Donnelly to be elected mayor.”

  “And you don’t see where that’s fucked up?”

  “I’m not justifying it. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  I swallowed a swelling lump of disgust. “She was fourteen. Fourteen fucking years old.”

  “Fourteen-year-olds have sex every day, Mr. Malone. I’m not here to debate the proper age for sexual activity to start. But that was all the DVD was supposed to be. Unfortunately, Derek was a weak and confused young man, and he made a second DVD to sell. I was at Sid’s for the same reason you were. Mr. Cade wanted me to recover the other discs, but you interrupted my recovery.”

  “And you shot at me.”

  Blanc smiled at me again. “I shot around you. I had no reason to kill you. I didn’t have to miss.”

  “Gee, thanks. You’re a fucking prince. We done?”

  “You feel bad, don’t you? About the cop?”

  That stopped me. I felt like a fly caught in a web as it was built around me.

  “You shouldn’t. Barnes is no loss to this world.”

  “How do you know?” I was the only person left alive from the loft except Underdog, and I couldn’t see him relating the story to Blanc.

  “Knowledge is power.” Opening his gold cigarette case, he took out a long, dark cigarette and tapped it on the case. “Don’t worry. I won’t light it in here.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “I received a phone call,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I had been keeping tabs on Barnes all week. He was working both sides, as you may or may not have known. We weren’t sure how much we could trust him anymore, recent circumstances being what they were.” He paused when he saw me fighting to process the new information he’d tossed on my lap. “He thought you were stringing them for more money. If at all possible, he wanted to avoid more deaths. At least, deaths he would have to dirty his hands with. You played it well, Mr. Malone. The only reason he didn’t kill you himself was your aggression. With you putting him on defense, he couldn’t take you out, not knowing fully all that you had on them.”

  “He wanted you to do it,” I said, stunned.

  “I told him to clean up his own messes. Either way.”

  “Donnelly wasn’t going to be a problem for you or Cade anymore.”

  “Smart boy,” he said, tapping his finger on the tip of his nose. “How do you think Mr. Cade has remained so untouchable for all these years? Who do you think led us to Cassandra, so that Derek could make his little movie?”

  A chill ran through me. “You telling me it was Barnes? Barnes set the whole thing up?”

  A nod.

  “Why?”

  “Mr. Barnes had his own weaknesses, or shall we say tastes? Mr. Cade makes these tastes his business. As I said, knowledge is power.”

  Nearly the same words Donnelly had dropped on me the first time we met.

  Blanc went on. “Let me ask you a question.” He leaned in and looked me straight, eye to eyes. “Assuming you watched them? The DVDs.”

  “Yeah. I saw them.”

  “Did you notice anything about the cinematography, so to speak?”

  Then it hit me like a thunderclap between the ears. Why hadn’t I noticed it? How the hell could I have missed something so simple? It was literally right in front of my face on the screen.

  The camera panned.

  Somebody else had to be in the room, in the closet behind the two-way, moving the camera.

  Blanc saw understanding dawn on my face. “Bright lad,” he said. He opened his black leather billfold, placed a twenty on the bar, and stood to leave. “Be seeing you,” he said, crisply pulling the creases from his coat sleeves. As he walked out, he lit his smoke with the lighter that would have cost me two weeks’ wages. Over the flame, he gave me a warm parting smile and a wink.

  With his dead eye, of course.

  Coda

  I opened the door to the office one Saturday afternoon. On the floor sat a folder with my name on it, slid under the door. No other markings on the front.

  I knew what it was.

  Still wasn’t sure that I wanted to see what was inside.

  I opened it…

  … just a bit…

  … just a peek.

  There was a picture of a woman on the lower left side. I forced my eyes to not look at it directly, squeezed them shut and looked up as I closed the folder.

  She was a woman now. She’d made it that far. I swallowed hard. The lump that had swelled there didn’t want me to.

  Sliding my thumb under the fold, I pushed the top page up just a bit.

  Just a bit…

  There was the name at the top.

  Last name: Malone.

  First name: Emily.

  Middle name: Madeline.

  I took a deep and shuddering
breath as I realized that I’d forgotten her middle name.

  I didn’t know her anymore.

  She didn’t know me.

  And for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with a good goddamn reason why she would want to.

  I wiped moisture from under my eyes as I touched the flame of the Zippo under the corner of the folder. I watched it burn away, felt the flames touching my fingertips. I let the fire burn me, I let it hurt…

  … just a bit…

  … before I dropped it in the metal wastebasket.

  Goodbye, Emily. Hope your life’s as good as I imagined—as good as I hope it has been. Shit, I hope it’s been even better than that.

  Better than mine, baby girl.

  Then the fucking fire alarm went off.

  Acknowledgments

  OR, you can blame the following people I’m about to thank for the book you just read. Your choice.

  First and foremost, thanks go to my agent, Stacia Decker. It took a long time to get this book into hands that cared for it, and she stuck with it and busted her ass to make it so. Ben LeRoy and the staff at Tyrus Books—you’re the good hands. Thanks for that.

  My family—you support what I do, even when you don’t necessarily get what I do. Sorry, Ma. Love ya.

  To my wife Allison—you’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met, and you’ve been strong enough to stick by my ass. I love you. To my little man Sam—you’re not going to be reading this for a long time, but I hope daddy makes you proud when you do.

  To those readers who made it this far—hope you dug it, and I appreciate the time you chose to spend with this book. Deep thanks go to you, since without you, I’d be screaming stories to the air and that would just make me a crazy person. Thanks for being a reader.

  Copyright © 2013 by Todd Robinson

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any

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