I took a good breath to holler a victory taunt at my assailants, but instead took in two good lungfuls of the chemical mace suspended in the air. My lungs weren’t fans and closed up shop. Gagging and choking, I sat down on the stairs and wiped the sweat from my eyes, forgetting that I’d slathered them in the mace on Lineman’s neck.
I wanted to scream, but my throat was still raw from the dose I’d inhaled. Instead, I made a few sounds in my throat akin to Burrito’s squeaky toys and jammed fistfuls of snow onto my face
Speaking of my guard dog, at that exact moment, Burrito found the inch-and-a-half of ass crack sticking out the back of my jeans and figured it was as good a time and place to sink his teeth as any.
***
Nose re-bloodied.
Eyelids poofy.
Fat lip re-fattened.
Taking damage inventory in the dirty mirror, I could say I’d gotten off easy considering the size, if not the talent, of the two meatheads Summerfield had sent my way. Most of the damage was lumped onto what Summerfield had already done to me the night before. After a vigorous rinsing, my eyes finally stopped feeling like I’d mistaken a bottle of Tabasco for Visine.
Any time you could dish as well as you got and walk away, especially when the odds leaned definitively in favor of getting an ass kicking—that could be filed away as a win. And, hell, after the previous night, I was willing to take the win any way I could.
Then an intermittent buzzing started in my left ear. I stuck a finger in there and wiggled it, hoping somehow my magic pinky could cure it. I pulled my finger out and it started up again. It took me a second before I realized the buzzing wasn’t from inside my oft-rattled skull, but vibrating on the connected wall to my bedroom closet.
There were only two things in that closet. One was my clothes in various degrees of unwash. The other was bad news. I jammed some more toilet paper up my nose to stem the new bleeding and ran to the closet. Underneath dirty laundry and the several shirts that had gotten a little too snug after months of not working out post lead-in-leg, sat the duffel bag that had been a gift from Twitch to go along with my semi-effective security measures.
Equally useful in the event of going to the mattress or the zombie apocalypse, in Twitch’s words. Junior had the same bag. Ollie had the same. Twitch had the same.
We were on strict orders not to use the phone unless it was an emergency, and even then, we were to use a set of code words that Ollie had come up with in his infinite nerdiness.
I looked at the display and saw the last words I wanted to see.
Avengers Assemble.
In other words: Code Blue. It was sent from Junior’s phone.
The message meant run.
Apparently, I wasn’t alone on Summerfield’s revenge list.
I grabbed the run-pack and my jacket and bolted out the door for our safe house.
Fourteen Years Ago
We were about to get raped. Period. We were beaten, outnumbered, barely conscious.
Zach leaned over Junior, lubricating his junk with spit.
We were almost out of fight.
I put my face against the filthy tile and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see what was going to happen next. I gritted my teeth when I heard the scream.
Then I realized the scream wasn’t Junior’s…
…it was Zach’s.
As suddenly as we’d been attacked, the hands that were holding me down were gone. I heard feet slapping on tile as Zach’s cronies ran away from the fight where the dynamic had shifted.
I raised my head and saw two things I hadn’t expected. One was Ollie on Zach’s back, a pillowcase over the rape machine’s head. Ollie’s feet were dug into Zach’s lower back, both hands pulling back from the mouth of the pillowcase. He hung onto Zach like a champion bull rider.
But that wasn’t why Zach was howling.
Twitch sat on his foot like a kid going for a ride, arms wrapped around his knee, legs crisscrossed over his ankles…and Twitch’s teeth were sunk deep into the meaty flesh of Zach’s thigh. Blood flowed from between Twitch’s clamped jaws. But for the pillowcase, there wasn’t a shred of clothing on anybody.
Zach didn’t know which attacker to fend off first. It looked like a pictorial I’d seen in an old National Geographic of hyenas taking down a water buffalo. The thickness of Zach’s musculature kept his flailing arms from reaching behind to get Ollie off his back.
But that didn’t keep him from trying. He backed into the wall, crushing Ollie between his bulk and the tile. Ollie whoofed as the air got knocked out of him, but held on.
Zach kicked out the leg that had Twitch along for the ride, but that wasn’t enough to shake him off. Like a pink police baton, Zach’s fully erect penis kept slapping Twitch on the top of his head.
Junior lifted his head and pushed himself into a sitting position against the shower wall.
I tried to stand and offer my assistance, but a wave of concussed nausea overwhelmed me, and I doubled over.
However…
In their panicked exit, Zach’s partners had left us a gift.
As my eyes cleared, I saw what they’d clobbered me with. I grabbed the piece of rope that had been tightly bound with duct tape along its length. At the business end they’d attached our missing cue ball.
“Junior!” I yelled.
Woozily, Junior looked toward me.
I skidded the homemade bludgeon across the floor to him. Junior grabbed the rope end, and with a surprisingly fluid motion, came up swinging. The cue ball caught Zach right under the chin with a sound like he’d bitten into an ice cube. The horsepower behind the blow almost sent Junior back to the shower floor.
Blood blossomed immediately into the rough white fabric of the pillowcase.
Zach’s arms came down as he dropped to his knees. He let out a low moan through a mouth that sounded shattered.
Junior brought the bludgeon back around a second time, the cue ball striking Zach square on the back of the head. The behemoth pitched forward. Twitch rolled out of the way before he got crushed, but Ollie rode him all the way down, adding extra weight to the landing.
Zach’s face met the shower floor with one more sickening crunch.
Ollie finally let go of the pillowcase. A pair of shattered teeth fell from the open end and rattled into the drain.
Junior bellowed a primal howl and raised his arm high to bring down the cue ball for a final time. If Zach was still breathing—and I wasn’t sure he was—that last shot would make it a surety that the breath in his lungs would be his last.
I got myself up halfway and let gravity and momentum do their jobs. I tackled Junior around the waist, but his arm still came down with murderous force. The cue ball shattered the tile two inches to the left of Zach’s skull, then fell from Junior’s grip.
Junior was still screaming, “Fuck you!” at the fallen Zach as Ollie and I dragged him from the showers.
Twitch picked up Zach’s teeth as a souvenir, then followed us out before the workers at The Home came to investigate.
We watched the EMTs wheel the still-unconscious Zach out the front a half hour later. I don’t know if he lived or not. I didn’t give a fuck either way, but I was sure we would have heard if he’d died, even as a hushed rumor.
We never heard anything.
We never saw Zach at St. Gabe’s again.
We’d not only defended ourselves against the threat, we’d removed it.
And Zach removed any and all chance of Junior enjoying a rerun of Will & Grace.
Chapter Ten
It took me way too long under the circumstances to get to The Cellar. This was life without a car. The weekend Green Line was like riding in a metal turtle—especially since it felt like I had a target on my back. The moment I got to the stop, a pair of cruisers went up my street. It was safe to assume that one of the neighbors had seen or heard my little kerfuffle and called it in. After the events of last year, I was pretty sure I was on the unfriendly list of a numbe
r of Boston cops who would love to bust my ass for something. Anything.
I got the train without taking a baseball bat to the back of the head, so I considered myself lucky. Even so, I felt the eyes of every other passenger. This shit was making me even more paranoid than my normal walking-around paranoid. And as I’ve explained, that shit ain’t insignificant.
I took the stairs at the Kenmore stop two at a time and burst into the bar with enough force to make Audrey jiggle spastically—the fruit knife she was cutting limes with jumped off the board, nearly taking one of her fingers with it. The Cellar was full of Sunday drinkers and stragglers who still held an interest in the early evening football game on the two box TVs that had made their way into the bar after falling straight off the back of a truck in 1992.
“Goddamn it, Boo!” Calming herself from my dramatic entrance, Audrey took a big gulp from her ever-present Jack and water.
I quickly scanned the bar for any possible threat, but other than the snack mix, nothing appeared to be an immediate hazard to my health.
“Sorry. Anybody else here?”
“Who would be here? You’re two hours early.”
“Junior. Twitch. Ollie. The boys?”
“No, but Brendan called twice looking for you.”
“Underdog called?”
Audrey scrunched her face at me in disapproval of the nickname we’d all used for the last half decade for Boston police officer/regular customer/former junkie/possibly the world’s worst undercover vice officer Brendan Miller.
“What did Under—what did Brendan want?”
“He just said for you to call him as soon as you got here.”
Cops at my house, maybe. Cops calling me at work. This was shaping into one hell of an evening.
“He calls again, tell him I’m here. In the meantime, the boys are on their way. Send them up to the office.”
As I went down the rear hallway to the stairs, she called out, “He was really serious, Boo!”
I’m sure he was, I thought. But answering a possible disturbing the peace call, or whatever he wanted to ask me about, was going to have to wait.
I walked up to the office and stopped when I saw the padlock hanging off. Tentatively, quietly, I tried the door. The deadbolt was still engaged. Luke most likely just forgot the padlock after he re-stocked the bars. I unlocked the bolt and then nearly shat myself when there was somebody already inside.
“I wasn’t jerking it!” said Twitch, watching porn on his tablet.
“Jesus Christ, Twitch. How did you get in here?”
He shrugged. “Like I do.”
Like he did. It wasn’t enough that he’d gotten by Audrey, but he’d somehow picked both locks. I was actually a little surprised he hadn’t figured out a way to close the padlock from the inside.
Twitch closed the browser on the two flexible lesbians. “The fuck is going on?”
“Two goons hit me at my house.”
Twitch’s face lit up. “Did you engage my security measures? Did they work?”
“Yes and kinda. I guess they tried Junior’s too.”
Twitch’s forehead creased with a slight twitching action along the eye. “What do you mean they ‘kinda’ worked?”
Immediately, the old familiar stress headache bunched up in the middle of my face. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Can we discuss this later? It worked fine.”
“Why can’t we discuss this now?”
A timid knock that could only have been Ollie sounded on the door.
I opened the door and saw the one member of our crew who operated in the world that other, more normal human beings did. Ollie stood there in a too-big red parka, clutching his own run-pack, his thick glasses fogged from the cold he’d just come out of. “What’s going on? Why did Junior send the alert?”
“I dunno. He’s not here yet.”
“Should we be worried?” Ollie asked.
“Again, I do not know. He sent the alert, so I’m gonna assume he took no more damage than I did.” My tongue pressed against the thickened part of my lip.
“What happened to you?”
“I got jumped at my house. More than likely members of the IronClad crew.”
Ollie raised his hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who the IronClad crew is.”
Christ. What was Ollie even doing here? Yes, he was a part of our gang, our family, but this fresh hell we’d gotten ourselves into didn’t involve him in the least. The guy was a citizen. And an upstanding one, if you could ignore the company he kept.
“IronClad is another security company. They mostly do work for Ian Summerfield’s clubs.”
“And he is…”
“Possibly the biggest pill runner in Boston,” Twitch said.
“Oh Christ,” Ollie said. He took off his glasses and began nervously polishing them on his shirt. “What the hell are we mixed up in now?”
I could see the remnants of our previous shenanigans dancing in Ollie’s subconscious. We had needed his expertise with all things technical in the past. As a result, he’d seen things that would make most tough guys pee in their Dickies.
Ollie was one of us.
But he would never be one of us.
“Ollie,” I said. “This doesn’t involve you. You should probably go home.”
“What are you talking about? It involves all of us. How does it include him, then?” He pointed at Twitch, who had re-opened the video of the lesbians.
Twitch raised his hand without taking his eyes off the action. “I shot at them last night.”
“You did what?”
“They… We called Twitch for some backup. We had a situation.”
“And you didn’t call me? Why?”
I pinched my nose again. There was no way around it now. Ollie was getting his feelings hurt. Truth was, Ollie was more than useful with what he was good at. And none of those things was in a brawl. In a stand-down fight, Ollie was about as useful as tits on a bull.
“I get it,” Ollie said, nodding his head. “You guys think I’m a pussy.”
“No, Ollie…”
Twitch raised his hand. “I do, no offense.”
Ollie’s face went red, and his voice went up a notch. “No offense? How is that supposed to be not offensive?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Up your ass, Twitch. Do any of you remember how ‘useless’ I was with Zach Bingham back in the day?”
That fucking name again. All the old ghosts were having a surprise party in my life that week. One ghost at a goddamn time. I put my hand on Ollie’s shoulder. “Ollie, listen…”
He shook my hand off, his eyes red. “No! Fuck you both, then. You want to play your tough guy games? You don’t need me? Fine. I’m out.” He slammed the door open and almost bounced off Underdog, whose hand was poised to knock on the door.
“Jesus Christ, Ollie!” Underdog held his hands up, stepping back from the rampaging nerdling.
Ollie stormed down the stairs and was gone before I could even formulate an apology. And even if he’d earned his stripes in one scrap back in the Home, he didn’t need to be involved in our bullshit. He was much better off out of it.
Underdog stepped into the room. “Boo, where’s Junior?”
Subtly, and without taking full notice of Underdog, Twitch nudged his own run-pack under the desk. I could only imagine what was in it that he didn’t want the police officer to see.
“The fuck, Underdog? I don’t know where Junior is.”
“Then you better find him.” There was a cop authority in the tone that I didn’t like. A tone that had only recently appeared in Underdog’s recovery from years of drug abuse. It was the voice of the cop Brendan Miller, and not Underdog’s. Not the voice of my friend.
Then it dawned on me that I’d thought Dog wanted to talk to me about the fight on my stoop, not that he’d be looking for Junior. “Why are you looking for Junior?”
“A lot of cops are looking for him, Boo. You too.”
“The frig for?”
“The name Byron Walsh mean anything to you?”
Fuuuuuuuuuck. The prick went to the cops after we beat his ass. I hadn’t seen that coming, considering the drugs and all. The realization came crashing down on me that Byron—much like Ollie—didn’t live in the same plane of existence as we did in our mostly imaginary tough-guy world. Even though he’d jammed himself into that world in the worst way possible, he’d reacted like any normal person would. We beat his ass, he went to the cops. Plain and simple.
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“Well, he’s fucking dead, Boo.”
Chapter Eleven
My stomach dropped into my shoes. So I said the first thing that came to mind, which was pretty stupid. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean he’s dead. They found him in Revere.”
Right where we’d left him.
Underdog’s gaze was gone, replaced by the cold metal stare of the police officer named Brendan Miller. “What did you guys do, Boo?”
“I…” I was shell-shocked. We’d given the guy a righteous beating, sure enough, but enough to kill him? “Maybe the guy had a latent aneurism, a heart defect, something.”
“You even know what a latent aneurism is?” Dog asked in a tone I didn’t like.
“I used to watch House.”
Dog didn’t think that was funny.
In all fairness, neither did I. Nor did I know what the hell I was talking about. Panic was settling in.
We couldn’t have killed him.
Could we?
Because if we did, we were fucked. Dead bang.
I was so wrapped up in the possibility that I didn’t even have the right questions. “Why do you think we had anything to do with this?”
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me, Boo.”
“I dunno,” Twitch said. “Doesn’t sound like you wanna help to me.”
“Twitch,” Dog said, slowly turning toward him, “I’m going to suggest that you shut your mouth and get gone. There might be a lot of cops here really soon. They might search the place, and this office. And in this office right now is you and that bag you think I didn’t see you kick under the desk.”
Rough Trade Page 10