Everything hurt. My pride. My body. My spirit.
I limped back into The Cellar. Junior and G.G. were racking up a pool game like nothing at all had gone down. I guess nothing had. To them.
“You want winner?” asked Junior.
“No, thanks.” My right arm still didn’t have full feeling back yet. A tingling numbness working its way through my shoulder to my fingertips was all I had. I walked behind the bar and pulled the pourer off the full bottle of Beam and took three long pulls. Seemed like a “fuck glasses” kind of night. Tommy could blow himself. I’d replace the bottle later in the week. “Any of you guys see Twitch?”
“Nah, man,” said G.G. “Those were some freaky Jedi moves your boy pulled there.”
Freaky wasn’t the half of it. Twitch was the master of urban camouflage. It was the most finely tuned survival tactic he’d learned back at St. Gabe’s. Granted, he was already a near-albino hiding in a snowstorm, but Twitch could make himself invisible standing on second base at Fenway during a playoff game.
Junior scratched the eight on his first shot. “Dammit.”
Twitch walked in from the back as the ball dropped. “Anybody got next?”
“You do,” Junior said, disgusted at his play. Then he froze when he got a look at Twitch’s getup.
Twitch was rocking some kind of dirty-white military snowsuit that, god knows, he must have bought in the kids’ section of the Army/Navy. The cold had lowered his normal skin tone from a creepy pink hue to a zombie gray. No wonder we couldn’t spot him.
“Wassup, little brother. Thanks for the backup.” G.G. low-fived Twitch, who smiled broadly across his boyish face. Twenty-seven years old and he could still be carded at Chuck E. Cheese. His pure white next to G.G.’s all black made the two of them look like a lopsided yin-yang of racial harmony.
“Where the hell were you?” Junior asked from behind the bar.
“On the roof.”
“How the hell did you get onto the roof?” I asked.
“The stairs,” he said.
Ask a stupid question…
“You want anything?” Junior asked him. The box of Chablis gurgled as he poured himself another glass of the grape-flavored toxic waste The Cellar called wine.
“Nah.” Twitch racked the pool balls. He was unusually casual for someone who’d only moments earlier fired sniper shots from a rooftop.
“Where’s the gun?” I fed a buck into the jukebox and dropped some Clutch into the air. The blood that had frozen in my upper lip stubble started to melt and drip into my mouth. I chased it with some more bourbon. Not bad. It’s a wonder that whisky and plasma isn’t a more popular cocktail.
“What gun?” Twitch smiled innocently. “I don’t see a gun.” Then he looked to G.G. “You see a gun?”
“I don’t see a damn thing. I never do.”
I heard footfalls coming down the back stairs from the office. Ginny was still arranging the night’s receipts in her hands when she almost walked into Twitch. “Gah!” she startled. “What the fuck is that?”
“That’s a Twitch,” I said, quietly thanking the gods that Twitch no longer had the gun.
“Looks like a Gollum,” she said, giving him the once-over. “No offense.”
Twitch shrugged. “You’d be surprised how often I get that.” Some color went back into his face as he blushed. Only Twitch could hear a comparison to a fish-gut-sucking goblin and take it as a flirtation. Poor guy. It was probably the closest he ever got to one.
Ginny looked like she had something to say. Thank god “Binge and Purge” started blaring from the speakers at a teeth-rattling level. I was in no mood for her commentary. I pointed to my ears and shrugged.
Ginny rolled her eyes and marched over to me. She tiptoed up and yelled into my ear, “I need to talk to you!”
“About what?”
Up close, she got a better look at the damage that had temporarily re-structured my face. “Are you bleeding?”
“No,” I yelled. “Old family tradition. I come from a long line of white trash squirrels. I like to store ketchup in my nostrils for the winter.”
“I can’t talk to you while you’re bleeding,” she said. She walked to the bar and scooped some ice into a bar rag.
The song cut out, and I caught a piece conversation between G.G. and Twitch.
“…the hell did you shoot that moving bat out of his hands? In a damn blizzard?” G.G. asked.
Twitch shrugged. “I was aiming for his head.”
The next track clicked on a second too late. I’d have really felt better off not knowing how that sentence ended.
Ginny handed me some napkins and the makeshift ice pack. I rolled up two napkins and shoved them in my nostrils. “That’s…that’s not better,” Ginny said, grabbing my bottle and taking a gulp. “Did Byron kick your ass too?”
Maybe it was my underlying anger about my ex banging the drug lord who’d just handed my ass to me, or maybe it was simply the punches to the head I’d sustained, but any woman drinking straight from a whiskey bottle is pretty hot.
“Who the fuck is Byron?” I said, taking the bottle back and matching her intake. I could feel the whiskey beelining to my brain, possibly aided by the probable concussion, or the blood loss, or the concussion.
Then again, it might have been the concussion.
“Byron was the guy who got all grabby with me before.” It was the middle of winter, but Ginny dressed to bar-impress. She wore an old Rathskeller half shirt and jeans tight around her curves. I guess I’d assumed the guy’s Russian hands and Roman fingers were merely the end result of a few too many four-dollar pints and a run-of-the-mill dickhead’s lack of self-control.
“Who?”
Ginny sighed. “The guy who Junior danced with earlier.”
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaaaaa!” I pointed right at Junior.
“What?” he said.
“Byron!”
“Huh?”
“The guy who kicked your ass was named Byron.”
“Ah, dammit,” Junior said as he realized that the years of mockery he had ahead of him had been stripped from him. “At least my guy didn’t talk with a Mary Poppins accent.”
“His name is Byron!” I said gleefully. “Byyyyyyyyron.”
“Shut up,” Junior said, pouting.
Ginny blinked rapidly as she looked back and forth between the two of us. “You’re both retarded,” she said, grabbing the bottle back.
Yes, my brain decided, whiskey-chugging Nova Scotian broads were indeed hot. I wasn’t in any kind of place to argue with her, but again—concussion. “No. Junior and I suffered completely different ass kickings.”
“You guys are terrible at this.”
A tiny bit of humiliation crept in again, even as I remembered Byron’s parting words.
He wanted me to tell the cunt he’d be back.
Unfortunately, my mouth ran before my brain even knew there was a race. “You’re the cunt!” I said.
“Excuse me?” Ginny’s eyes went wide. Her gorgeous blue, blue eyes…
Hold on. Concussion. Back to the point. “Wait, you know that asshole?”
“What did you just call me?”
“Byron called you that. Outside.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he did. You guys want another shot at him?”