“No, man. No, I’m sorry.”
I hang up the phone and roar into the sky, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“Excuse me, mister.” The man taps my shoulder. He’s tall, around six feet, but I still loom over him. He’s standing a few yards in front of his daughter, who I guess is around five or six, and who’s staring at me like I’m an animal that’s gotten loose from the zoo. “Could you ease up on the curse words?”
I grin at him. “You’re a brave bastard, you know that?” I say, quietly so his daughter doesn’t hear. “A brave fucking bastard. If I was the man I once was…goddamn, be careful who you approach on the street, that’s what I’m saying. Not everyone will be okay with it. But sure, I’ll stop swearing loud enough for your little girl to hear.”
I walk away from him, opening and closing my hands, wishing Mac’s throat was in my grip so I could crush it. When I get back to my apartment building—I was at the gym around the corner, working out and thinking—I walk a block down the street and climb into my junker car that nobody apart from me knows about: just a rusted frame of a car that, to look at, probably doesn’t run. But it does run, just about, and when I start the engine I guide the croaking hull to Mac’s bar.
The place is empty apart from Nora, cleaning a glass. She looks up when I enter. “Ah, Henry,” she says. “He said you’d be by soon.”
“The bastard left me a message, I’m guessing.”
“Yes.” She sighs. “Please be careful about this, Henry. I know you want a different life, but you can’t have a different life if you’re not alive .”
“You’re a good woman, Nora. I wish you were my mother. But I have to do this. What did he say?”
“Mother!” She giggles. Again I see the girl she was, pressing through the wrinkled skin. “Grandmother, more like. But yes, the message. It was that twin, Ripper, who told it to me, and he was very solemn and mean-looking as he said it, I don’t mind remarking. He said: Tell that big hunk of shit to meet us where the walls are blood .”
“The walls are blood,” I repeat, and then nod. “The walls are blood. The Red Room. I just fucking passed there. Goddamn it.”
“Be careful!” Nora calls after me.
I drive the junker to The Red Room, sprint across the sun-kissed parking lot, and then slam through the door, roaring at the top of my lungs, “Daisy! Daisy! Where the fuck is she?” I’m angrier than I’ve ever been on a job, but I have the same itching sensations in my fists, the same desire to punch and do harm, the desire that once brought me pride and then shame and then, when I was dead to it, nothing at all. But now all I feel is an overwhelming protective urge. “Daisy!”
I charge into the main room where the auditions were held. Red lights shine all over the place and it looks eerie when empty, as it always does, without the women strutting at the poles or circulating and laughing, dead-quiet without the pop music. But the stage isn’t completely empty. Mac stands on it, just in front of Daisy, who’s tied to a rickety old wooden chair, the rope digging into her legs and arms. She’s been crying and blood trickles from the corner of her lip from where someone—I’m guessing Ripper—has hit her. Mac smiles when he sees me.
“Hound!” He claps his hands like we’re pals meeting at a barbeque, like he doesn’t have the love of my life tied up right where I can see her. “I was wondering when you were going to show up. Old One-Arm really is good, isn’t she?”
“Mac.” I talk to him, but I keep my eyes on Daisy. I try and tell her with my eyes that everything’s going to be okay. I try and tell her that I’ll get her out of this. But I can tell she isn’t convinced; maybe it’s because I’m not convinced myself. “Why have you got her up there like that? Let her down, Mac.”
“Let her down, he says.” He looks back at the twins, and then to me. “You need to let her go , Hound. You’ve become soft, weak. You’ve let her legs and her ass and her cunt hypnotize you. I don’t blame you. I really don’t. If we had more time, I would sample them myself. But you can’t let a tight hole rule your life. Only weak men do that. I never thought you were a weak man. Even as a boy, you were stronger than this.”
“No,” I say. One word, but it’s the most I’ve ever openly defied him.
“What did you say?” He tilts his head at me, as though one second he’d expected to see the obedient teenager and the next he saw me, the real me, the man who’s tired of his shit.
“I said no. I said fucking no, Mac. Let her out of that chair. Let her live her life. You want to cause some harm? Fine, have a field day. String me up, bleed me out. I don’t give a damn. Just let her go.”
“You’d really die for this cunt,” he mutters. “That’s interesting. I knew you were whipped, but I didn’t think you were that far gone. Listen.” He walks almost to the edge of the stage. I feel my predator’s instincts primed and ready. Ripper and Hitter are close to Daisy, but Ripper and Hitter are tools, have always been tools; they won’t act without their boss’s say-so. Their boss’s…it hits me heavily, the realization that Mac, after all these years, isn’t my boss but my enemy. “That’s incredible. I’ve been with my fair share of women—some of the girls in here still call me a lady’s man—but I’ve never lost my head like that. She must be one tight hole.”
“You’re right,” I say, hating how my voice takes on the Old-Hound sound, the proud sound, the sound of trying to please this bastard. I lean in conspiratorially, hoping that will make him inch forward. It does. “You’re right,” I go on. “She is. I reckon she’s got to my head. Did I really just fuckin’ ask you to let her go? Let me tell you something, Boss.” Call him Boss, lean in, make him take one more step forward.
“What?” Mac says, smiling that perverted old man’s smile. Behind his eyes, I can see what he’s thinking, and it makes me sick.
“She’s the best piece of—” He steps to the edge of the stage.
That’s when I make my move.
Even now, when he has my woman up there against her will, even threatening to make me kill her, he’s surprised when I strike. I grab his ankles and yank, making him tip backward, his head smashing into the stage. As he falls, I see the look in his eyes, the same look I must’ve had in my eyes that day Mom turned me away from her place in California: wounded shock. Even now, the old psychopath thinks we can be friends, thinks I’ll be his son. I jump up on the stage, everything foggy, hardly thinking, meaning to stamp his head into the wood, get Daisy, and get the hell out of here. But then Mac is on his feet, way quicker than I would’ve thought an old man like that could move, and Ripper and Hitter are at his side. Hitter doesn’t look awkward or apologetic now. He looks deadly. At least they’re not standing near Daisy anymore. Behind them, I see Daisy trying to work her hand out of the bindings, scraping her skin on the rope.
“That was—that was foolish.” Mac dabs at his head; his hand comes away carmine, his fingers bright and colorful. “That was a mistake, boy.”
“Boy,” I repeat. “Boy. Call me boy and send me to slaughter dozens of men. Call me boy and send me to intimidate old weak men. Call me boy and soak me in blood. When are you going to learn, you old moronic fuck , that I’m not your boy?”
Mac smiles, a sick sense of pride in his eyes. “You’ve grown up. I’m surprised. I never thought you would.” He pauses, and then says, “We’re going to kill you now, Hound, and then the three of us are going to rape that whore. I bet she likes it in the ass. She looks that sort. A real fucking slut.”
I’m on them, fists swinging, my mind heavy and weighted, weighed down so that the only things I feel are my fists and the blood. Ripper dodges my hook and gives me a couple in the gut with his knuckle-duster. I grunt, dance back, and then dodge Mac and Hitter, letting them run past me, before grabbing Ripper’s head in both my hands, holding it in place, and smashing my forehead so hard against his nose I feel the crunch of the cartilage. I hit him again and then pick him up by his head and toss him like a rag doll off the stage. He crashes into a table snapping it in half and then
lying in a mess of wood and blood on the floor.
Mac and Hitter come at me again, Hitter shouting in anger because even if his brother’s a prick, he’s still his brother. He lands a blow on my jaw by feinting at my belly and then ducking and weaving. I reel back, Mac landing another on my forearm, would’ve been my face if I didn’t lift my arm to block it. They push me back to the opposite side of the stage, past Daisy, and then off the stage. I land with a thump on the floor, the wind going out of me for a second, but then I roll over and jump to my feet, grabbing the closest thing at hand. The chair lifts Hitter off his feet and sends him flying into a table like his brother, where he crashes and groans and then lies still, breathing weakly.
I’m about to charge at Mac when I see the panicked look in his eyes. I know what he’s going to do before he does it, but by then it’s too late. He’s across the stage and standing over Daisy whilst I’m still clambering up after him. He has his pistol out and pressed against the back of her head whilst I’m still walking toward him. Then I have to stop, because he pulls back the hammer and I know he’ll do it, blow her brains out right in front of me. I see a red spray and for a second think he’s already pulled the trigger, but then I wipe the blood away from my eyes—mine? somebody else’s?—and look at Daisy, who’s teeth are chattering in fear.
“If you kill her, you die,” I tell him.
He grins. “Maybe. But if I kill her, she dies. There’s no maybe about that.”
I’m clenching my jaws so hard my teeth are throbbing, feel like they might shatter. I watch as Daisy closes her eyes and mutters something and then opens her eyes. Suddenly her teeth aren’t chattering. Suddenly she’s calm. “Make him suffer if he kills me,” she says, eyes locked on mine. “Don’t let it be quick. Make him hurt.”
“Quiet!” Mac makes to hit her over the head, but then, from across the room, a voice calls out.
“Wait!”
Mac pauses, gun held in the air. I turn to the voice.
Dean Dunham walks into the room, holding a briefcase in one hand and a pistol in the other, aiming the pistol with a shaky hand toward Mac and clutching the briefcase to his chest. “I don’t want to use this, Mr. White, but I sure don’t like the way you’re aiming that gun at my daughter.” His face is less swollen now, but he still looks like he can barely walk. He totters across the room on instable steps and comes to a halt beneath the stage, gun aimed directly at Mac’s head. “I don’t want to kill anybody. I don’t want anybody to die.”
I see Ripper struggling to stand behind Dean, so I kneel down and take the gun from Dean, and then go and stand where I can shoot any of the three: Mac, Ripper, Hitter. “You might want to drop the gun,” I tell Mac. “You know I can use this.”
Mac swears, but drops the gun. I quickly pick it up and then prod Mac in the back, guiding him to the edge of the stage where I can easily keep the three of them in my sights.
“You’re going to kill us now, eh?” Mac chuckles. “That’d be a mistake, and you know it. I’ve got friends in New York, Miami, fucking Cuba. You’d be on the run for the rest of your life.”
I swallow bitterly. He’s right. We would be. But what other choice is there?
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Dean says, walking up the stairs to the stage on wobbly legs, holding his briefcase like a kid holds a lunch bag, scared the bully will take it away. “I have your money, Mac. I have it. Right here.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mac says. “I’ll need more than—”
“I have one and a half million dollars.”
Daisy gasps. I’m too stunned to say anything. Ripper coughs out a bloody laugh. Mac just shakes his head. “Of course you do. And I’ve got the cure for cancer. Give me a fucking—”
Dean falls to his knees and opens the briefcase, showing stack after stack of fifty dollar bills, so many that it’s difficult to believe they all fit into the briefcase. Mac takes a step forward before remembering that I have my gun on him. He looks mesmerized, a man in a desert who’s just spied water. Everything else seems to fall away for him until only that briefcase full of cash exists.
“We may have our differences,” Dean says from his place on the floor. “We may not, well, like each other very much. But I have to believe that you’re a man of business, Mr. White. I have to believe that if you take this money, you’ll agree to leave my daughter alone. And you’ll agree to leave Henry alone.”
Mac falters for a moment, but then nods. “If I count this cash and find one and a half million, you can have them both. It means nothing to me.”
I shouldn’t be hurt at the easy way he discards me. It’s what I want, after all. And yet I am. It stings me. I swallow the feeling and keep the gun trained on Mac as he goes to the briefcase and begins counting, laying the bills on the floor when he’s counted a stack.
“I wasn’t lying about signing a non-disclosure agreement,” Dean says, facing me. “That day in the alleyway, I was telling the truth. Years ago, must be five, six, I won big on poker, really, really big. I shouldn’t even have been in that game. I bluffed my way in. I didn’t have the cash. But I won big and if there’s a god, he was smiling on me that day because before I could blow it, I got a call from one of my friends from the old days. Had a business opportunity, he said. Needed some cash, he said. I pledged every cent I had, even though back then I didn’t understand the business—an algorithm to do with advertising—but he convinced me. And made me sign an NDA, since it was a risk that some other company might just steal his code. The NDA was watertight. If he even heard of a whisper that I’d said something, to anybody, even my family, I wouldn’t be eligible for my payout. But I’ve had my payout now. So there’s no risk.”
I stare at him in disbelief, seeing Daisy’s mouth fall open out of the corner of my eye.
“It’s all here,” Mac says, already putting the money back into the briefcase. “Every single dollar.”
When Mac stands up and walks to Dean, he’s like a different man. He’s behaving how I imagine he behaves in the legal sides of his business, proper and respectful. Dean climbs to his feet and the two of them shake hands. “We can go?” Dean says. “All three of us?”
“Never step foot on my property again,” Mac says, “and we won’t have a problem. And remember, Dean, if you ever need a loan…”
I untie Daisy as quickly as I can, and then the three of us rush out to the parking lot. I’m surprised to find that it’s still daylight, that the sun has barely moved an inch. I turn to Daisy and wrap my arms around her, holding her close, savoring the feel of her, smelling her hair, smelling her skin, kissing her, and then all at once I’m crying, both of us are crying, and Dean is backing away saying, “I’ll leave you two to it,” and Daisy is kissing my cheeks, kissing the tears away.
“Is it over?” she asks. “Is it really over? Can we be together?”
“If you’ll have me,” I say, smoothing a stray strand of hair from her eyes. “If you think you can stomach living with a hound.”
“I can stomach living with a Henry ,” she says. She holds up her left hand. “I think I’m ready for my rings again. But for real this time.”
I pull her close to me, pressing our bodies together. When we kiss, I forget about Mac, forget about violence, forget about Hound. When we kiss, I forget about the past and the future. I forget about everything but this woman, this magical woman, this life-changing woman.
For the first time in my life, I can smile without being afraid of smiling.
Epilogue
Daisy
I sit at the window overlooking the garden, my papers and books on the desk in front of me. The textbook title reads Principles of Real Estate in large, bold letters; the cover is shiny and new. Every time I run my finger down the spine I shudder at how stiff it is, shudder when I think about cracking it open so many times that it’ll become easier each time, until its knowledge is pouring into me. Downstairs, I can hear Henry and Lola. Lola…named for my mother, sweet Lola, but already Lola own
s the name. When I think of Lola, I don’t see Mom, but my baby, her gap-toothed grin and her pawing hands, her giggling voice.
Henry is singing to her, if you can call it singing. I listen to it for a while and then get on with my work. I started the course a week ago, when Henry found out he got the job as a security guard for a large firm in Austin. He’s doing his own studies, too, after passing English lit. That’s our deal. When one of us is studying, the other person has to sing to the baby. I think it’s a pretty sweet deal. And with a little help from Dad, and with Henry’s saved-up cash, along with what small amount I was able to add, we were able to close on our dream home, that perfect house that was only ruined because of our argument. Well, the arguments are few and far between these days. And when they come, they’re about petty things, normal things, and the making up is always worth it.
After working for an hour and a half, I lean back and hold my hand up to the sun which shafts through the window. It glints off my rings, my real rings. Henry and I were married quietly without any fanfare, with Dad and a man named Denton as witnesses. Maybe it’s sad that we didn’t have hundreds of people to invite, but I don’t think so. There was nothing sad about the feeling I got when he fell to his knees and kissed my growing bump. There was nothing sad about the passion that exploded between us on our wedding night. That was nothing sad about seven-foot Henry sitting behind me in pregnancy classes muttering, “Breathe, breathe, breathe…”
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