THE COPPER PENNY smelled a hell of a lot worse than Derek remembered. He recalled the look of it as if he’d never been away, its buckled floors and sagging stools and sleek U-bend bar stained a murky piebald ebony-ocher by decades of sweaty elbows and spilled beer and fingers greasy with buffalo sauce. Neon signs depicting beer and liquor logos flickered in the gloom. He knew every warp and tear on the felt faces of the three pool tables—could even work a physics-busting acute bank shot off a chip in the bumper of the one nearest the slit window, to the double-take vexation of unschooled opponents—and could chart the topography of ruined cork circumscribing the bar’s lone dartboard. The whine of blues guitar on the jukebox, the clatter of billiard balls, the laryngitic wheeze of the beer fridge’s bum compressor, he could hum it all like the title track of a beloved old album. But the smell was another matter. It burbled beneath the more recognizable odours of fryer grease and draught foam and sickly-sweet soft drink mixers, a subterranean trickle of stale piss and damp vinyl, of broken teeth and rancid sweat, of knuckle-busting machismo and ugly, pointless sex, all of it mashed into a bilious slurry and seeping, drip by foetid drip, into the bar’s groundwater.
Derek wafted his pint of 504 beneath his nose to block the worst of the smell, taking long, slow sips and sloshing the hoppy liquid against his tongue. He’d chosen a booth in a corner cobwebbed with shadows, affording him a near-complete view of the bar. An exit to the bar’s compact patio stood a mere three steps away. The door swung shut and locked automatically, meaning Derek could slip out while Ballaro muscle couldn’t slip in. His .45 nestled against his chest, its front sight digging into his ribcage. A baggy coat slightly too warm for the season obscured its telltale bulge and hung loose enough for an easy draw. With these precautions in place, Derek was willing to allow himself to get moderately drunk—a fairly large concession, as the situation called for nothing less than black-out intoxication.
Far safer would be to hole up in his little nest with a mickey of Jack Daniels and a twelve pack of beer, but Derek was and always had been a social drinker. In the absence of other people, his buzz inevitably sputtered into a sloppy melancholy, driving him to squander the night listening to Springsteen and feeling sorry for himself.
Not that Derek was feeling especially gregarious. He was content to sit in his corner and let the other patrons mingle among themselves, filter-feeding on whatever morsel of conversation drifted his way. It was thus with mixed emotions that he saw Bugs Merrithew strutting into the bar. A baseball cap sat backwards on his head, a youthful affectation belied by the lines in his face and the scraggle of beard hanging under his chin. Twiggy arms poked out from a baggy t-shirt, both covered wrist to forearm in tattoos depicting some mescaline-tinged pandemonium, a lunacy of cackling demons and big-breasted women and classic cartoon characters with melty sideshow faces. He wore steel-toed boots two sizes too big for him. Together with the t-shirt and backwards cap, he had the air of a child stricken with some dreadful aging disease, his features withering before they’d even reached full bloom. He spotted Derek and came over, his outsized shoes clomping over the warped floorboards.
“Yo, Matchbook, ‘sup? Long time no friggin see, eh?” He smacked Derek an exuberant high five and slipped into the booth opposite him. Bugs skittered about the outer fringes of Toronto’s criminal enterprise, dealing weed, breaking into cars, running the occasional number for the smaller loan sharks. He shied from violence and had no ambition—he seemed content, as far as Derek could tell, to feast on the scraps the big fish left behind—but was, in his own peculiar way, one of the most connected men in Toronto’s underbelly. Every don, dope fiend, and dealer in the GTA knew Bugs, though not better than Bugs knew them. He recited rap sheets the way kids of a bygone era traded baseball cards, fawning over stats and debating the fine points of hardness, rep, profile. Bugs normally made decent company despite his more irritating qualities, but Derek was too on edge to tolerate his frenetic discourse. Yet he found it difficult to take a hard line with Bugs. Something about the scrawny loser brought out an almost parental instinct in Derek; he supposed a lot of players in town felt the same way, which was as good an explanation as any as to why Bugs had yet to get his face pounded into the pavement.
“How’s it hanging, Bugs?” Derek said, his eyes locked on the bar over Bugs’ shoulder. Bugs seemed not to notice his distracted tone, or else chose to ignore it.
“Real good, man, you know. Rocking. So you back in town?”
“Nah, man. I’m on the International Space Station. This shit you see here’s just a hologram. I send it down to dives like this to get pissed up in my absence.”
Bugs let out a stuttering laugh. “Yeah, man, yeah. You’re in orbit. Cool, cool. So what’s up with you these days, man? You got somethin’ on the go, or . . . ?” He let the sentence trail off, its upward lilt suggesting a question.
“Nah. Just back for a few. Keeping a low profile. Don’t want shit to get too hot, you know what I mean?”
“Cool, cool, respect. Hey, you know who else I’ve seen around? Lucky Luke!”
In the pit of Derek’s stomach, some clumsy caretaker upended a bucket of ice water. “Luke Volchyin?”
“Yeah. You know him, right? He was gamin’ down there in Niagara for a while.”
Derek ran his finger through a bit of spilled beer, drawing nonsense figures over the table. “Not well, but yeah. I remember the guy.”
“We all thought Ballaro had wasted him. Guy fuckin’ vanished, chief. I’d heard rumors Ballaro had him, whattayacall, incinerated, and torched an old folks’ home just so he had a place to hide the ashes. So there’d be no motive, like.”
That would be among the dumber reasons to torch a building, thought Derek, who knew from arson. “You don’t say.”
“That was the word. But he’s back now, and word has it he’s headin’ back to Niagara. I saw him chattin’ up some of your boys from down that way, guys on the outs.”
“Yeah, like who?”
“Remember Nails?”
Derek swished beer between his molars, savoring the sting of carbonation against his gums. He knew Nails (née Earl Parks) in passing, a mid-level bookie and loan shark on the Ballaro roster with a trailer-park complexion and punk sensibilities. The sort of guy who wore leather vests with too many zippers and earlobe spacers threaded with iron nails (hence his street name), listened to sludgy metal, and read comics about pregnant chicks getting murdered. He considered himself cutting edge, but Derek found him tiresome. In his experience, that sort of counterculture death fetishist posturing was a wrinkly shell hiding a nugget of cowardice.
“I thought you said on the outs. Nails is a Ballaro man.”
“Nah man, you really have been out of it. Nails and Ballaro are history. Didn’t you hear?”
Derek shook his head. “What happened?”
“He was getting’ mouthy, man. Started steppin’ on toes, doin’ his own Shylockin’ on the sly, actin’ a big shot. You know Nails, man, guy’s a two-inch cock in a ten-inch condom. Ballaro caught wind of it, told him to knock it off. Know how that crazy fucker responded? Mailed Ballaro a package with a dead rat in it, its belly all stuffed with shit. Parks’ shit, man.” Another burst of hiccup laughter. “Ballaro didn’t like that.”
“I wouldn’t want to meet the sort of guy who did.”
“Yeah, for sure. So anyway, Ballaro sends a couple boys up to Hamilton. They find Parks and send him a message. Held him down, got some pliers, and ripped the nails outta his ears. You know how he had them studs? Well, he ain’t gonna be danglin’ no metal from there no more. His ear lobes look like paper you tear it out of the receipt machine wrong. All ragged. Nasty.”
Derek sipped his beer. “He learn his lesson?”
“Maybe, man. But he ain’t happy. Been talkin’ all sorts of shit. I’d keep my mouth shut, I were him. You do not mess with the Ballaros, man. Every player and wannabe in the province should know that.”
Thanks for the tip, you dipshit. Derek felt his smile curdling. He did his best to skim the sour skin from it, not wanting Bugs to sense something amiss and burrow deeper into his business.
“I’m pretty tired, Bugs. Think I’m gonna polish off this beer and head home. It was good talkin’ to you.”
“Yeah man, for sure. Always a pleasure. Look, so . . . ” Bugs leaned in close enough for Derek to catch a whiff of his breath, a thunderhead of menthol cigarettes and eggs two weeks past their prime. He spoke his next words in a conspiratorial whisper. “Whatever it is you got on the go, you can cut me in. You need a spotter, someone to run a message, maybe gather some friendly names, I’m your guy. You can ask anyone in this town, Bugs don’t shirk a job. I’m like one of them, whattayacall, mercenaries, man. I get in, get it done, get out.”
Derek shifted in his seat, partly out of general discomfort and partly to put some distance between his face and Bugs’. “Sorry, man, but it’s like I said. I’m not here on business. All I’ve got on the go is some heavy drinking and maybe a little pussy on the side.” Derek expected a laugh at this, but Bugs didn’t smile. He licked his lips, beads of moisture clinging to strands of dead, chapped skin.
“Hey, c’mon, man, you didn’t come back into town just to drink in this pisshole, eh? You got somethin’ on the take. I got connections, I can make things happen. Frig, I was built for this shit. You cut me in, whatever you got goin’, you’re gonna get double profits. Triple, even.”
Bugs clutched Derek’s forearm, his fingers rigid with bony strength. His wrist turned upward, revealing track marks amongst the cacophony of artwork. Derek looked from them to the purple-black shadows under his eyes, to the yellow-brown rubble of his bottom teeth.
“You dumb asshole. You’re using again?”
Bugs winced as if struck.. “So I take a taste every now an’ again, man. What’s it to you? Ain’t done a thing to my game. I keep it straight when I’m workin’, man. I ain’t gonna punk out on you. Ask anyone. Bugs don’t punk out, he’s on the street.”
Was there anything more stubbornly pathetic than a junky after cash? Derek didn’t think so. He’d seen men begging him to spare their lives who showed more dignity. It would be a kindness to pull out his .45 and spray the miserable bastard’s brains over the bar. But Derek was in too tight a spot to indulge in charity. Bugs would have to go about dying his own way—a path he’d set more than his first step upon, to look at his arms. He locked eyes with the junky, his face awful in its blankness. “You’ll want to be lettin’ go of my arm now, Bugs.”
Bugs’ tongue made a fresh circle of his lips. His hand skittered back to his side of the table. “My bad, Derek. You get somethin’ on the go, you call Bugs, eh?”
“No doubt, man.” Derek took a long slow sip of his beer. Bugs, taking the hint, slid out from the bench and found a fresh target on the far side of the bar. Derek sighed and slouched deeper into the bench. A crick worked its way into his hunched spine and Derek, after a few half-hearted attempts to shift his weight into a more accommodating position, ignored it. The puddle of good cheer he’d accumulated, as sad and shallow as it was, had evaporated. He wished he hadn’t bumped into Bugs. That idiot would be blabbing to half the city about how he saw Matchbook McCulloch down at the Penny, probably back in town on a job. Word of mouth was the last thing he needed right now. Toronto wasn’t Niagara, but Ballaro had a long reach and could easily stretch across the lake and swat Derek into oblivion, given the inclination and a bit of intel. And now fucking Volchyin was back in the picture? There was a name Derek had hoped never to hear again. He was pretty sure ol’ Lucky didn’t bear him a personal grudge—he’d always got on okay with the guy, and knew enough to cover his tracks during that final dust-up—but the guy was bad news all the same.
The intelligent thing to do would be to get on a bus and not get off again until he’d reached the coast. Hole up in Vancouver, maybe, or down to the States, if he wanted to risk the border. But what would he do then? He didn’t know anyone out west, or out east for that matter. The GTA was his home, for fuck sakes, the golden horseshoe shining from Toronto to Niagara the extent of his charted cartography. He’d be damned if he was going to let some bigshot wop force him into exile. Let Ballaro’s goons come for him. They’d find ol’ Matchbook a wilier rat than they were used to, the sort that can sniff out poison before it’s even been laid. That might, with a bit of luck, even manage to nudge that poison into daddy Ballaro’s morning coffee.
Derek downed the rest of his beer in a long, rolling swig. He pulled out his wallet and began counting up his bill, paused, and slipped the wallet back in his pocket. He flagged down a passing waitress and pointed to his glass.
“Another pint, please.”
He flashed the waitress a smile as she set the pint down, sneaking a quick glance at the wink of cleavage she showed as she bent over. “Wonderful. Thanks.” The first sip, foamy and frigid, filled his mouth with citrusy hops. He licked a bit of foam from his upper lip and let his hand fall naturally on the masked butt of his revolver.
Let the wops come find him, they wanted to see him so bad.