Chapter Thirteen

I’m eight years old in my mother’s kitchen.

The cop’s forehead popped outward like a piece of squeezed bubble wrap, but didn’t burst. His right eye crossed up and to the center, as if trying to see what just happened to his brain. The left eye stayed on me.

The bullet hits my chest and I fall, fall, fall.

A thick gush of blood cascaded out his nose.

Another shot and my mother falls to the cracked linoleum.

Then the life winked out of both eyes. The cop crumpled onto the area rug, lifeless.

Ginny fell to the floor in a dead faint.

The Boy opens his mouth to scream.

Dana opened his mouth to scream.

“Don’t scream,” said Twitch. He doesn’t belong here, in my mother’s kitchen.

Dana smartly listened to the man with the gun.

The Boy can’t scream.

I am The Boy.

I am in my mother’s kitchen.

My brother Twitch just shot a cop. In the head.

My mother’s boyfriend just killed her. Just killed me.

I was in Ginny’s living room, and there was now a dead cop on the floor.

More blood.

The Boy is here.

Boo.

Boo.

“Huh?” I felt the cold of shock seeping in through my fingertips.

Every instinct told me to hide. To run. I was frozen, my body as lifeless as the cop. As my mother.

“Boo!” Twitch was kneeling over the dead officer, pulling the cop’s gun out of his hand with no more concern in his voice or demeanor than if he were pulling a Hot Pocket out of the microwave. “This isn’t a cop, Boo.”

“Huh?”

Twitch held up the hand cannon like an auctioneer. It was a nasty-looking silver snub-nosed revolver. “This is a .44 Ruger. Boston PD don’t carry these.”

“That’s it? That was why you shot this guy in the head?” I said quietly. I was afraid that if I said it much louder, it would come out a shriek.

“They’re not allowed to carry these, Boo. BPD all carry Glock model 22 or 23 which are .40 caliber semi-automatics. SWAT teams carry .45 caliber either Sig Sauers or Smith & Wessons.”

None of that meant a goddamn thing to me. Whenever Twitch turned into Tom Clancy, the part of my brain that processed math shut down.

I ran to the door. I opened it half expecting a few boys in blue to open fire, but only encountered the cold air. I looked up and down the street. No black-and-whites anywhere.

My blood pressure dropped a notch. I had a hard time believing that a beat cop in JP would be strolling the neighborhood in this weather, canvassing a murder.

Wait a minute…

Pieces started to fall.

The “cop” said he was investigating a disappearance, not a murder.

And I was pretty goddamn sure that Byron’s murder had long progressed past the point of canvassing uniforms and into the hands of detectives.

Twitch was right.

But we still had a fucking corpse on the living room floor.

When I walked back into the living room, Dana had Ginny off the floor and was moving her toward the bathroom. She was conscious, but her lips were blue with shock.

“He’s not a cop,” I said feebly. It seemed even to me a small comfort for the carnage in their home.

Twitch had Fake Cop’s wallet open. He looked at me with grateful tears in his eyes. “You believe me?”

And all of a sudden, he was the kid at St. Gabe’s again. The kid who was desperate for acceptance, to impress the big kids. To be believed when he told you that he’d done the right thing. He wanted me to tell him he’d done a good thing.

This touching moment when I saw Twitch for the boy he was deep inside was slightly knocked off-rail when a chunk of brain fell out of the hole on the back of Fake Cop’s head. It landed on Ginny’s ruined Oriental rug with a wet plop.

It also snapped me back to the horrible, horrible reality I was currently facing. I breathed deeply through my nose, trying not to hyperventilate. The stench of gunpowder, blood, and evacuated bowels filled my senses.

I felt like storming, grabbing the situation by the balls and squeezing hard. I really did. My legs and knees, however, were still weak from the execution I’d stood three feet away from. As I wobbled over to the bathroom, the sounds of vomit hitting toilet water hit my ears. I knocked stormish-ly on the door.

“We gotta talk, guys.” And yes, that sounded just as stupid to me.

The door opened a crack. Dana’s red-rimmed eyes looked back at me. His lips were also pale underneath his wobbling moustache. Christ, if both he and Ginny dropped from shock, this shitshow was would turn into a full-blown Emmy-winning six-seasons-and-a-movie shit-com.

Ginny yanked the door all the way open. She’d regained some of her color the way a solid vomiting could do for you. “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do, Boo?” Her face was a mask of barely contained panic, hair a pulled-back tangle. “Is he dead? Maybe…maybe he’s not dead.”

The chunk o’brain plop echoed back into my mind. “Um…no. He’s dead. He’s…really dead.”

Ginny’s face scrunched up and went beet red as she cried, “Ohmygod. There’s a fucking dead guy on my carpet.”

“Pretty sure he was intent on killing all of us.” I wasn’t, but I figured the suspicion was as good as surety when there was a corpse on the floor.

“What aren’t you telling me, Dana?”

“What?”

“That guy wasn’t here for me.”

Dana’s lower lip started trembling. “I don’t know anything.”

“Well, somebody was ready to kill the both of you for whatever it is you don’t know.”

“What are we going to do here, Boo?” Twitch called from the living room.

How the fuck did I know? Why was he asking me? Did his plan stop just short of having a goddamn body to handle?

And everyone was looking to me for an answer.

“You guys have to go,” I said to Ginny and Dana.

“What?” Ginny said, snapping out of her stupor.

“Grab a bag and get the hell gone. Don’t tell me where. Do it now.”

“Where are we supposed to go?” she said.

“Go back to Nova-fucking-Scotia, for all I care! Let me handle this.” Man, I sure could talk a talk. For a second, even I believed me. Then I remembered that I knew me. Knew me well. Very goddamn suddenly, the situation had spun out of any league I was qualified to play in.

I went back to Twitch while Dana and Ginny scootched off to grab whatever they could carry.

Twitch was doing his best to roll the body up into the carpet. A dead arm flopped out of the fold. Twitch had a sheen of sweat on his already pasty face and his bird-like chest heaved with exertion. The physical labor part of what to do with a body was plainly not in his wheelhouse.

Then the idea hit me, along with the nausea that was going to accompany my call.

Damn.

“You gotta go, Twitch.”

“What?”

“You gotta get out of here, too. I’ll take care of this.”

“I’m not—”

“You’re getting the fuck gone!” I used a tone I hadn’t used with Twitch since we were kids, when Junior and I ran our crew at St. Gabe’s. It was my boss voice. My bouncer tone. If everyone had decided I was the point man on this disaster, then I was sure as hell going to be one.

Twitch’s body immediately went rigid, his eyes popped wide. His shoulders slumped forward, his posture that of the little brother not only being bossed by but accepting the bossing from big brother.

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Stick with Ginny and Dana. Keep their heads down.”

“We’re not going anywhere with that psycho,” came Ginny’s voice from behind me. Her eyes were fiery, but there was a legitimate fear of Twitch behind them: fear of what he was capable of.

If she only knew.

Ginny slung a red backpack over her shoulder. Dana put a calming hand on her back that she shrugged off.

“Do what the fuck you want, Ginny,” I said. “I’m trying to keep you alive right now. And, very probably, the reason you might get killed is because of the goddamn lies you handed to me and Junior in the first place.” I could feel my own rage building. The whole shebang rumbled through my head, boiled down into its simplest terms.

It wasn’t fair.

And I fucking told her so.

“All of this. None of it would have happened if you’d been straight with us at the start.”

“You’re right, Boo. It wouldn’t,” she said, nodding. “Because you wouldn’t have helped us at all. You and Junior, with the macho bullshit you two strut around with…you wouldn’t have helped us at all if you knew Dana was a man and that he was gay.”

“You don’t know that, because you didn’t tell us the whole story. So you don’t get to judge us. Not now. Not when we’re neck deep in the mess that you shoveled all over us in the first place.”

“We needed you. I needed your help.”

“And you’re still not telling me everything.”

Twitch held up a finger. “Um, guys?”

But I was on a roll. “I’m talking to you, Dana. You seem awfully fucking quiet for the person at the epicenter of this shitquake.”

“I don’t know anything.” His voice quavered as he spoke. “I don’t know anything. Shouldn’t we be calling the police or something?”

With that suggestion, Ginny seemed to forget her righteous indignation at my machismo and remembered the concrete fact that there was a carcass in a police uniform rolled up in her carpet. Her face broke into tears. “And there’s a body on my fucking floor.”

“No cops,” Twitch said, a dangerous tone undercutting his words. The little brother was gone. The dangerous person who just shot a suspected fake-cop-cum-possible-killer in the head was back.

This was turning ugly. Fast.

“Look. You two get yourselves gone. You want to do it alone? Do it alone. I got enough crap to wash off of me and Junior now, thanks to you two. I’m perfectly fine losing your goddamn problems the moment this body is gone.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Ginny said.

“I got this,” I said with a firmness that belied the fact that I was lying my ass off.

It might have been the biggest lie of my life. And I’d spent a lifetime telling whoppers to myself.

We all stood there for a moment. Then Ginny and Dana started for the door. The only words spoken as they left us were Dana’s.

“I don’t know anything,” he said once more for good measure, almost mantra-like.

And goddammit, I believed him.

Which left us as screwed as we were when we showed up.

Except we were much, much worse off now.

You know. With a fucking corpse.

Fuuuuuuck.

“Give me the gun,” I said to Twitch.

“What?”

“The gun you…used. That’s gotta go too.”

“I can—”

I held out my hand.

He didn’t say anything, just handed me the ugly piece of metal. I slipped it into the back of my pants, the cold barrel icing my spine as it nestled between my butt cheeks. “Now get out of here.”

“But…”

“If this shit goes south, I need someone on the outside. I don’t need you caught up in this anymore.”

“Uh, Boo? I don’t know what you define as ‘caught up,’ but I already killed a guy.”

I had no answer to that.

Twitch hung his head, hurt emanating off his tiny body. As completely cuckoo as it sounds, it hurt me to send him off like that. Twitch spent his time with me trying to please. Fucked up as it was, killing the guy was just Twitch trying to help. And far as I was concerned, he may have saved us all.

Fake Cop was pulling his piece on me. That much was a stone cold fact.

Maybe it was an instinctive response to a two hundred and forty pound man bursting out of closet and sneezing like a Yeti with a sinus infection.

But maybe, just maybe, he was going to shoot us all either way.

I didn’t know what would have happened; I just now had to deal with what did.

Because heaven help us if Twitch was wrong, and that was an honest-to-God real cop that wasn’t breathing anymore because of us.

With the posture of a beaten dog in retreat, Twitch left too. Leaving me with only my thoughts and the recently departed.

I sat on Ginny’s couch and put my face in my hands.

How the hell did we end up here?

At least Junior wouldn’t be facing possible charges for this murder. Instead, he was facing charges for the one that we didn’t do. Ain’t that some shit?

Kind of amazing, if you really thought about it.

Was there a lesson so far?

I was sure there was one in there. Somewhere.

But I’d be damned if I could tell you what it was.

I pulled my burner phone out to make the call. If this all turned worse than it already was, I decided I was going to eat it. The whole turd sandwich. I didn’t know how much of the fall I could take, but I had every intention of taking it all.

I needed to minimize the impact. If stepping in front of the bullets kept Junior and Twitch out of the same cell I would wind up in, then I had to do it. Like Mr. Spock said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

Holy shit. Did I just quote Star Trek?

Ollie would be proud.

Twitch would call me a nerd.

Junior would just call me out for my martyr complex. And he would be right.

But Junior wasn’t there, now was he?

I had to take care of my family, one way or the other.

I didn’t know any prayers, so I just looked up at the ceiling before I dialed and spoke to Ginny’s ceiling fan.

“Give me a fucking break here, will you?”

The ceiling fan didn’t answer me, so I dialed the phone number I thought I’d never call.

The phone rang twice before a woman’s voice picked up, a pleasant Irish lilt inflecting the greeting. “Conor’s Publick. How can I help you today?”

I almost laughed. If only she knew the answer.

“Frankie Cade, please. Tell him Boo Malone needs a favor.”

 

***

 

The call was made.

I sat on the easy chair next to the dead man.

What the fuck had I landed in the middle of?

Why was this dude even here?

If the guy was a dirty cop and was there to cause traumatic bodily harm to Dana and Ginny, he sure as shit wouldn’t do so with his service piece. But “dirty” wasn’t the important word in that sentence. “Cop” was.

Who the frig was he?

I was missing some ridiculously huge pieces in the narrative I was in the middle of, and had no idea how to figure out where the gaps were.

The possibly fake cop was looking for something. I think.

Dana said he was holding Byron’s possessions after his trip abroad.

Somebody put Dana on the wrong side of the grass.

What I had wasn’t too bad. My pieces fit together well. All I was literally missing were the who, the what, the where, the when, and the why.

Shit.

I decided to start with the ‘what’. Once I knew the particulars of the item Dana was—maybe—killed over, it could lead me to the rest.

I opened the first bedroom door to what I quickly figured for Ginny’s room. Bright and tidy, a Helmut Newton poster hung on the wall over the bed, a black and white of some guy with a tire slung over his shoulder, more abs than I’d ever see in a lifetime. I subconsciously sucked in my gut as I closed the door.

The second bedroom was an unholy mess. A pile of dirty laundry sat behind the door. The black bedspread was in a heap at the foot of the bed, a framed, signed T-shirt from Tool leaned against the wall on top of a dresser piled with makeup and empty Diet Coke cans.

Huh. Tool was Ginny’s favorite band. Call me ignorant, but I was impressed that the tiny gay dude would be a Tool fan. Maybe Ginny had turned him on to them. Goes to show you what running with the stereotype will get you.

How was I ever going to find Byron’s mess in this junkyard? And how was I going to do it without contracting Hep C?

Wait…makeup?

I glanced back at the pile of laundry. Half a bra was sticking out of the pile.

Looked like I was in was Ginny’s room after all.

Should have stuck with the gay dudes being fastidious rather than the girls being fastidious stereotype. Or maybe I could try to stop stereotyping at all. Wouldn’t that be something? So would flying cars. Neither one was likely in my lifetime.

I went back to Dana’s room and opened the closet. There was a suitcase with a piece of paper taped to it that read BYRON’S CRAP.

I shit you not.

I pulled out the big suitcase and opened it. A couple of suits. A shaving kit. Stuff you’d pack for an extended trip abroad. I felt around the lined material. Nothing I could feel squirreled between the layers.

Wait. Dana said he’d taken Byron’s trumpet as well.

I reached up to the shelf and moved a couple of boxes of old photographs and a vacuum bag of what looked like summer clothes. Still couldn’t see what, if anything, was behind them. I felt around and my fingertips brushed a plastic handle. I grabbed it and slid whatever that handle was attached to toward me.

And lo-and-behold, I had me a trumpet case.

I had a strong feeling that there wasn’t going to be an instrument inside there. I popped the first hasp and held my breath.

I’d seen enough television and gangster movies to know that musical cases were only used to carry actual musical instruments maybe one out of ten times.

Okay, television might have skewed the numbers in my head a little bit.

I popped the second hasp and slowly opened the case…

It was a goddamn trumpet.

Somebody knocked at the door, and my heart tried to karate chop its way out of my ribcage.

It was him.

I closed the case and shoved it back onto the shelf.

He knocked again more insistently.

“Keep your fucking pants on,” I said, heading down the hallway.

I quietly opened the door to face the curled smile and blind eye of one Louis Blanc. “Evening, boyo,” he said. “Were you plannin’ on letting hypothermia take me?”

The first time I opened a door to him, he shot me in the leg.

The last time I’d seen him, he was flat on his back on The Cellar’s floor, with me on top of him, pressing a broken bottle neck into his throat.

All in all, we had a unique relationship.

He’d shown up at The Cellar that day to let me know that his boss, Frankie “The Mick” Cade, was in my debt after I’d passed some sensitive information his way. He let me know all this after I decided not to open his throat on the dirty barroom floor.

Fuck that debt.

I’d had no intention of calling that favor in. Ever.

Funny how circumstances could make a person reconsider their own personal codes of morality, wasn’t it?

To be fair, even straddling my tallest high-horse, I hadn’t been able to see far enough into the distance to catch the slightest glimpse of this particular situation.

I was calling that card.

He strolled past me like he was coming over to watch a hockey game. “In a bit of trouble, are we?” A half-smoked Gauloise cigarette poked out between his teeth. He winked at me with his milky-white blind eye. The long scar arching back from the eyelid wiggled when he did. He clapped me on the shoulder.

I wanted to knock the smugness out of his words with a right cross, but I had to keep in mind the trouble I was in. That Junior and I were in. “You could say that.”

Obviously, I couldn’t go into detail on the phone.

I hadn’t talked directly to Cade. The girl on the phone asked me the nature of my problem. I said major and immediate.

She said I’d get a call back.

Thirty seconds later, Ginny’s phone rang, and a deep voice simply said, “Give me the address. Nothing more.”

“Let’s sit down and discuss exactly…” The fancy cigarette dropped from between Blanc’s lips as he entered the living room. His eyes were laser-beam focused on the arm sticking out of the half-rolled carpet. “Is that a body?”

“Yep.”

“Is that a sleeve to a Boston Police officer’s uniform?”

“Yes, I—”

Blanc spun around, a small silver gun appearing in his hand like a magician’s trick—and pointing right at my forehead. “Have you lost your fucking mind, lad?”

I held my hands straight up, palms open, and stared into the barrel, strangely wondering if it was the same gun he’d shot me with the last time. I hated guns. Had since one killed my mother when I was eight. Hated having them pointed at me even more. Everything stood out in sharp contrast, with the gun dead-center of my focus. I could even see the eyebrow over Blanc’s one good eye bristling.

“I know what you’re thinking…” I said

“Oh, boyo. You have no clue what I’m thinking right now. And let me tell you, if you did, you sure as hell wouldn’t be keen on it. Where’s your boyfriend?”

“What?”

“His monstrosity of an automobile is parked outside. Where is he? Don’t need him popping out and irritating my already itchy finger.”

“He’s currently with the police, being questioned.”

“About what? It wouldn’t have anything to do with this, would it?”

“Something else.”

“No rest for the wicked, eh?” He waved the gun up and down my frame. “I’m kindly going to ask you to disrobe.”

“What?”

“Your clothes,” he said. “Can’t be too careful, as I’m still not entirely sure how fond of me you are, etcetera. I’m sure you understand.”

If he only knew precisely how fond of him I’d be if he helped me out of the mess I was currently in. A little burlesque would be worth it. I quickly stripped off my sweatshirt. The waist snagged for a second on the gun I’d forgotten was tucked into my pants. “Um, I have a gun?”

“That sounded like a question.”

I supposed it did. I cleared my throat. “I have a gun. In the back of my pants.”

“Turn around and remove it. Do it with two fingers and do it slower than you’d even imagine I’d like.”

Because things could never go smoothly, the tiny sight on the barrel snagged on my belt. “It’s stuck.”

“I can see that. Undo your belt with the other hand.”

I put my other hand onto the buckle. A bit too quickly, apparently.

“Slow it down.” A smile played out on his lips, his dead eye somehow filled with more mirth than his functioning eyeball. “That didn’t come out as I intended.”

“No problem,” I said as I unbuckled my pants. “If you have a Poison CD to put on while I do this, it might help.”

“Funny. Place the gun on the floor and step back.”

I did.

Blanc gestured to the gun with his own. “That the gun that did the deed?”

“Yes.”

“You do the deed?”

I stayed silent. I tried to give him a steely look right in the eyes, but my gaze kept flicking over to the chalky orb instead of the one that was looking at me. Instead of steely, I landed on shifty.

“Very well, then,” he said. “Resume.”

I kicked my Timberlands off and dropped my pants. I rubbed a hand over the long scar above my knee that he’d given me less than a year earlier.

“Looks to be healing nicely, that.”

Instead of taking the bait, I just opened my arms wide and turned. “Satisfied?”

“Keep going.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Keep going.”

Fun fact about me: I dropped my boxers with less shame than that which I removed my undershirt with. Not that I have a dick that any former sack-bunnies of mine would blog about, more along the lines of…

“Sweet Jesus,” Blanc said.

Yeah. That.

“You’ve got quite a tapestry upon you, lad.” He sounded almost impressed by the latticework of scars along my torso.

“We done?”

“Almost. Bend over and spread ’em.”

“Now, wait a goddamn minute…”

“Just kidding. Cover yourself.” Blanc picked up Twitch’s gun off the floor, emptied the bullets from the clip, then handed it back to me.

I had half my clothes restored when I noticed he still hadn’t stopped with the pointing of his own gun. “Think you can put that away now?” I said as I shoved my useless unloaded weapon back between my butt cleavage.

“Soon.” With his free hand, he plucked a fresh cigarette from the golden case inside his jacket pocket and lit it with his equally expensive-looking lighter.

Instinctively, I wanted to tell him to put it out, to be courteous toward my friend’s home. Then I remembered what Twitch had done to it. All things considered, I had the low-ground, morally.

“Starting at the beginning, you want to tell me who the departed member of the Metropolitan Police force is?”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“This does not help.”

“Why does it fucking matter? I’m calling in the favor that was promised to me.”

“Let’s be clear.” Blanc ashed his cigarette into an empty beer bottle on the coffee table. “During the last bout of unpleasantness that brought us together, Mr. Cade wanted me to pass to you the message that he was in your debt. How this came to be interpreted as a favor, specifically, seems to be something that you have decided.”

Well, shit.

He went on. “That said, Mr. Cade decided to send me along to see what exactly you could have meant by the aforementioned ‘favor.’ A favor is Green Monster tickets on opening day. A favor is a last-minute reservation at Menton on Valentine’s Day. This…” he waved the cigarette in the direction of the corpse, “…this is something that is far, far larger than a favor, wouldn’t you say?”

I clenched my jaw. “Admittedly, it is a large favor.”

“Let me ask you again, keeping in mind that I don’t like repeating myself. Who is this rolled up in the carpet in what appears to be a Bee Pee Dee uniform?”

“Someone who came here to hurt and or kill the residents. I was here. I…intervened. That’s all I know. He’s not a cop.” I hoped I sounded surer than I felt.

“I’m only asking, since, you know, if it is, in fact, a proper police officer, I’m putting a bullet into your head.” Blanc held up his gun. “Then I shall be tossing my favorite gun here into the Charles River and leaving you here with your sins.”

It was then I noticed that he’d never taken his gloves off. The man was ready to end me, if it came to that. “Good to know.”

“So, why don’t you roll up your sleeves, and unroll that carpet?”

I blew out a long breath and went to the body. I slid my fingers under the rough fabric, tried to remember a prayer, and flipped the body. I tensed up and closed my eyes in case a bullet was about to put me out of my misery.

I waited, misery intact.

I waited.

And waited…

“Well, well, well,” said Blanc, a hint of amusement in his voice.

“Are you going to shoot me?”

“Not right now, but the night is young.”

I chanced a look at Blanc, who holstered the gun underneath his sports coat as he walked to me. He leaned in close, inspecting what was left of the dead man’s face. “Farewell and adieu to you, Mr. Shaughness.”

“You know him?”

“Galal Shaughness.”

“Really? Galal Shaughness?”

“His father was Irish.”

“And his mother?”

“Wasn’t.”

Fair enough.

“Who is he?”

“Muscle. Works primarily out of New York. Third generation West Side. The Irish boys in the Apple don’t have as much structure as the old days. Primarily they hire out nowadays. I suppose I should be curious what you and your cohorts have been up to that would warrant such attention, but I’m afraid that my curiosity pales in comparison with the issue at hand.” He flipped open his cell phone case. “Now, let’s see how Mr. Cade would like to proceed.”

Blanc held the phone to his ear. I held my breath.

“Dia duit, boss. Forbairt suimiúil…” He turned his back to me, as though having the entire conversation in Gaelic wasn’t going to be enough to exclude me. The only words I recognized in the entire conversation were the names Malone and Galal Shaughness. At one point, I could hear Cade laughing uproariously through the earpiece, which brought a raspy chuckle out of the normally impassive Blanc.

“Fuair sé. Feicfidh mé é a láimhseáil ó anseo.” With that, he put the phone back into his pocket and withdrew a smaller phone from his jacket. “Today is your lucky day, Mr. Malone.” He pressd a few buttons on the phone, snapped the cheap flip phone in half, then walked to the kitchen and dropped the pieces into a saucepan.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait.” He filled the saucepan with water, then set it over a high flame on the stovetop. “Anything to drink in this fine establishment?”

 

***

 

Without much scrounging, I found a half bottle of whipped cream-flavored vodka under the kitchen sink. I wasn’t going to speculate as to whom it belonged.

We both winced at the first sip of the cloying alcohol, but bore the sickly brunt. Blanc carefully folded his sportscoat over his arm and sat on the lounge chair. I sat on the couch and almost put my feet up on the re-rolled up corpse rug. Instead, I awkwardly rolled around on my ass, balanced on one cheek for a moment, remembered that I had a gun in the back of my pants, almost drove it into my anus, then re-balanced myself with all of the grace that the previous actions allowed.

I didn’t want to look at the body anymore. I didn’t want to look at Blanc either, that Mona Lisa smile of his displaying his enjoyment at the predicament I’d found myself in.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I clasped the glass of diabetes-inducing vodka and tried to will it into Jim Beam like the Jesus of Jamaica Plain.

After a few minutes of silence, Blanc placed his glass on the end table and said, “Why do I get the feeling that this both is and isn’t your first?”

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I had the feeling he wasn’t just talking about the killing. I looked up at him.

Right into that goddamn smile.

An image of my mother flashed within my mind along with the piles of other bodies left behind in in my life’s wake. Some deserving, most of them simply caught in the maelstrom of fatality that my swirled around me.

I used to think, when half a bottle into the periodic pity-parties, that my sphere of detruction only applied to the people I loved—that my proximity got them hurt. Got them killed.

But in that moment, looking at Blanc, I saw it for what it was.

I was like a black cat walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror and knocking salt over when I did. And my bad luck touched everyone and everything around me. Maybe I could be more sensible and maybe take into account some of my life choices, but fuck that.

I continued my silence.

Blanc leaned forward, adjusted the cuff of his suit pants. “Do you remember when you called me a murderer?”

I remembered. It was when I was on top of him, ready to open his neck with a broken bottle. Kind of hard to forget.

I nodded.

“I told you then that I wasn’t. That there was a difference between a murderer and a killer. If I remember correctly, I also said that I thought you knew the difference.”

With a croak in my throat, I said, “I remember.”

“I’m not so sure I was right.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not sure you knew the difference then.”

The doorbell rang and my skin creeped icily over my bones.

Blanc stood, tugging at the cuffs of his shirt. “But I think you do now, boyo, doncha?” The Mona Lisa blossomed into a full-blown smile this time. The first time I’d ever seen one on Blanc’s face. The glee almost reached his dead eye as he strolled to answer the door. “Cleanup crew is here.”

“Should I go?”

“Now you’re kidding, right?”

I wasn’t, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I felt as fidgety as a four-year-old in church.

Blanc walked back in with two large Hispanic men in mover’s jumpsuits. They walked with a jail-yard swagger. Behind them was an older dark-skinned woman who, under other circumstances, could have been mistaken for their mother. The woman toted bags of cleaning supplies and a squeegee mop.

The motherly woman looked around the room, taking stock of the mess. “No too bad,” she said in a thick accent, smiling sunnily.

Really?

Blanc held a hand out to me. “Car keys.”

“What?”

“The body goes into the monstrosity your life-partner calls a car. You, my friend, are driving the car.”

Shit.

The two movers rolled out a blue tarp and slid the body, carpet and all, onto the plastic. Some blood had seeped thickly onto the hardwood, but otherwise left less a mess than Dateline would lead you to believe. All said and done, it was as easy a job as the cleanup crew could have expected.

“I’m going to pull the car around. Be a mate and hold the door for these fine gents?” Blanc said as he buttoned up his wool coat.

I opened the door to the frigid night and waited. I lit a smoke and noted the panel truck that had parked in the perfect position to blind the neighbors to anything coming in or out of Ginny’s front door. Claddagh Moving Co. was painted in huge letters on the side of the truck. Underneath, Ireland’s Relocation Associates.

IRA.

Who said the Irish mob didn’t have a sense of humor?

Blanc pulled Miss Kitty around the front of the panel van, again blocking any lookie-loos. I felt the strangest sensation seeing Blanc behind the wheel of Junior’s beloved car, like I was watching my best friend’s girlfriend being molested publicly by the biggest douchebag at the bar.

Huh.

Felt kind of like seeing Summerfield’s hand on Kelly’s ass.

Ugh.

Then…

Blanc popped the trunk.

And drew his gun.

Followed immediately by a small arm extending another gun from the depths of Miss Kitty’s cavernous boot.

Twitch was in the goddamn trunk.

Despite my best instincts to keep the corpse disposal on the down low, I yelled out, “No!”

The two gunslingers stood there in their best John Woo mutual-destruction poses.

“Mr. Malone?” Blanc said. “Please keep your voice down.”

I looked around at the neighboring houses, remembering that it was one of those nosy motherfuckers who’d dropped the dime on Junior and me in the first place.

Behind me, I heard a loud thump, much like a body wrapped in a rug and then wrapped in plastic would make when dropped suddenly. I turned back to see the “movers” unzipping their jumpsuits. Wild-eyed, they reached inside. Gentle smile gone, the old lady was beelining for something in her cleaning bag.

I held my hands up. “Wait, wait, wait!” I said to them in an Irish whisper. Christ, I hoped they spoke English.

They glared at me, but kept their hands where they were.

I was frozen, caught between keeping the cleanup crew from adding more weaponry into the mix and a firefight in the middle of the street.

“Mr. Malone?” Blanc said in a tight, angry voice. His gaze remained along his extended shooting arm, never breaking eye contact with Twitch. “Will you kindly come down here and explain this situation?”

I looked back at the cleanup crew. Both movers kept their hands inside their jumpsuits. The old lady stood stone-still, a dead expression on her face and a small snub-nosed revolver in each hand.

I made the double-handed open-palm motion for them to stay where they were. I thought back to my tenth grade Spanish. “Espera, espera!”

The guy with the ponytail scrunched up his face. “The fuck you saying, homes?”

Well, that answered that.

“Just hold up one minute. We have a misunderstanding happening.”

The abuela shifted the black pinpricks that replaced her eyeballs to me. “No a good time for meesunderstanding.”

No shit.

“Now, Mr. Malone,” Blanc said, a bit louder from outside. I didn’t like that he was abandoning his own volume control.

I approached the car slowly. Up the block, I saw headlights turn at the top of the street. “Guys, there’s a car coming, so I strongly suggest that you both put your dicks back into your pants.”

“Him first,” Twitch said, a fear on his countenance that I had never, ever seen in the lifetime of knowing him. This was really not good. Both of his eyelids were spasming like two moths had landed on his face and were having simultaneous epileptic fits.

Twitch was a tiny pink man who made his way through life knowing he could make people fear him when he needed to. Especially those who initially underestimated what he was capable of.

Which was not the man on the end of his gun that night.

Not Louis Blanc.

“You’re joking,” Blanc said to Twitch. I saw a muscle jumping with tension under Blanc’s dead eye, right under the thick scar. I was pretty sure even Blanc had never come across a Twitch before.

Two psychopaths, their eye muscles doing Cirque du Soleil, juggling their newborn emotions in the middle of the street.

With guns.

And I fucking hated guns.

I repressed the screaming of such sentiment. I really did.

I looked back up the street. The car was five houses down. “Put the gun down, Twitch.” I reached back into our history and used as much of my senior authority as I could draw on.

The headlights reflected off the panel van. Six cars away.

Twitch’s whole head twitched.

Blanc’s arm tensed.

Two cars.

Twitch lowered the gun into the car.

Blanc moved his hand inside his coat.

The car passed. The face of a little boy, maybe five years old, was pressed against the passenger side window. The driver didn’t even look over. The kid waved. I gave him a little wave back.

Blanc said, “You want to tell me who this is and why in sweet fuck all he was hiding in your trunk?”

“I didn’t know he was in there.”

“He didn’t,” Twitch said.

Blanc looked at us, back and forth. “There’s no answer that either one of you is going to give me that isn’t going to sound utterly ridiculous, is there?”

“Nope,” I said.

Blanc shook his head and blew out a deep breath. “Let’s make strides to end this evening, then, shall we?”

 

***

 

Twitch and I sat in the car as the movers efficiently hustled the remains of Galal Shaughness into Miss Kitty’s trunk.

“I’m sorry, Boo.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to do with him anymore. He’d more than likely saved the lives of Ginny, Dana, and me. Then he’d almost gotten the both of us killed less than an hour later.

I needed Junior.

My crew had always been an assemblage of misfits, each bringing an enriching quality to the mix, a quality that sometimes made them outcasts in the first place. Together, we were formidable. Broken down into parts, we were a flying mess of dysfunction.

But Junior and I were the core—the yin and yang at the center. I needed his sometimes idiotic common sense the same way he needed my pragmatism. Ollie brought the smarts, Twitch brought the…efficiency?

We were all broken pieces.

Together, we were a reasonably functional human being. But sometimes…the wrong two pieces in the wrong situation…

Ollie once called our family unit “ReVoltron.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it made Twitch laugh like hell..

Blanc rapped his knuckles on my window. I rolled it down, and he handed me the keys. “Follow my car. The apartment should be ready and sparkling by the morning.”

“Gimme five minutes,” I said, turning the key. Miss Kitty’s old engine coughed up a few hairballs, then roared to life. “It’s an old car. Gotta let her warm up.”

Blanc stared at me, I’m pretty sure wondering whether or not Miss Kitty had it in her to not break down on the ride. I wasn’t sure how much more he was willing to take before he cut his losses by putting bullets into us and ending his night. Truth be told, I was surprised he hadn’t already.

“Mr. Blanc?” Twitch said.

“What?”

“Pleasure to meet you. Big fan.”

I wished I could say that Twitch’s declaration of fandom for the hired killer surprised me, but my surprise glands had been emptied out and had shriveled up and died at that point.

Blanc walked back to his car, muttering in great puffs of frozen breath.

“You’re staying here,” I said to Twitch.

“But…”

“I need you to stay here and watch the apartment while this crew cleans up your mess.”

Twitch sank a small amount into himself at that. I could easily have said our mess, but didn’t. I also could have said that I didn’t mean it that way.

I didn’t do that either.

But I knew Twitch well enough to know what worked. I needed to give him purpose. “Watch them. Make sure they don’t walk out with anything that’s not theirs.”

Twitch pepped back up again. “I can do that.” Eager to please his big brother.

It felt dirty. It felt manipulative.

But I also knew that it was what I had to do. The first part of which was untethering myself from Twitch. And I had to do so leaving him no opportunity to pull his ninja routine on me again. I didn’t need him popping out of the goddamn glove compartment when I least expected it.

Part of him no doubt knew I was giving him the royal blow-off, but the greater part of him, the part that needed the task, needed to be of use, overrode the obvious.

Blanc pulled his black sedan up to the window as Twitch climbed out.

“Where’s he going?”

I held my hand up until Twitch was out of earshot. “He wants to make sure that they don’t miss anything. Shall we?”

Blanc believed my lie about as much as Twitch did, but in the greater interest of ending the debacle of a night, he simply rolled up his tinted window with a whirr.

Oh hell, I’d forgotten something. “One sec,” I said, holding up a finger.

“Fer fook’s seck,” I heard Blanc say through the window as he slammed his car back into park. I noticed that the more frustrated he got, the heavier his accent became. A little more effort on my end, and Blanc would be spouting about green clovers and blue diamonds.

Trotting back into the house, I waved at the crew, who gave me looks like they were still hoping to get a chance to shoot me. Twitch was in the kitchen, his head in the fridge. His tiny pink face popped up as I passed. “You okay, Boo?” he said through whatever it was he was already chewing on.

“All good,” I said as I ran back into Dana’s room, opened the closet, and retrieved the trumpet. I still had a feeling it was all connected to the damn trumpet, since it was the only thing that Dana had kept of Byron’s that wasn’t underpants, skinny jeans, and brightly colored polo shirts.

Worst-case scenario, I’d give the damned thing to Ollie as an apology and call it a day.

I almost slipped down the icy steps in my haste, and could see Blanc shaking his head in disbelief. He rolled the tinted window down a crack. “May we please move on now?” His gaze, even through the small window opening, very noticeably moved to the case in my hand.

“Yep,” I said. “Don’t want to forget my trumpet.”

“You don’t strike me as a musical sort,” Blanc said.

“Huge fan of John Coltrane,” I said, fumbling in the cold with the car keys and frozen fingers.

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. Since I was a kid.” I opened the door.

“Well, then, why do you play the trumpet?”

“Huh?”

“Coltrane played the saxophone.”

“Milo Davis?” I only knew two names of jazz musicians. I’d officially used them both.

“Closer. Miles Davis played the trumpet.”

Okay. Guess I only knew one. “What I meant. My lips are icing over.”

Blanc reached over and opened the passenger door. When the interior light turned on, he made a point of removing his gun from his jacket once again. He didn’t point it at me, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to. He just placed it on the seat and laid his hand over it. “Mr. Malone. Is there something in that case I need to know about? That I might possible have to shoot you over?”

I guess Blanc watched the same TV shows I did. Slowly, I opened the case and showed him the trumpet. “We good?” I asked.

“As good as we’re going to be, I suppose.” He reached over the seat and pulled the door shut.

I tossed the trumpet onto the back seat, climbed into Miss Kitty, and followed him away from Ginny’s house.

Blanc drove down to Centre Street, popped into the traffic circle, and hopped onto Arborway, then Parkman Drive. Wherever our destination was, I was glad we weren’t cutting through the city proper.

After a good stretch of suburbia, I was beginning to relax. By relax, I mean I was finally able to unclench my anus without fear of soiling myself at the idea of driving a corpse around town.

A couple more turns and we were on MA-9. By the time we jumped on and off the turnpike, I wondered just where the fuck we were heading. I didn’t think we’d be pulling over in the middle of the Tobin and tossing the departed into the Charles, but I sincerely hoped we weren’t going to drive into New Hampshire to dig a shallow grave in a field outside Nashua. My already shot nerves weren’t up to the road trip.

Once we pulled off outside Billerica, I started allowing myself to believe that we might get out of this.

And then came the flashing red and blue lights.

Not a hundred yards off the exit, and the cops crawled out of a side street and hit me with a woop-woop.

Anus clench re-engaged.

There was no way Blanc didn’t see the lights or hear the siren. He didn’t pull over.

So I didn’t either.

We kept driving.

My mind raced, bordering on panic.

Goddamn it.

Goddammit.

We didn’t speed up.

We didn’t slow down.

We just kept on keeping on.

Despite the barely above-freezing temperatures in the car, a greasy sheen of sweat popped out on my forehead and across the back of my neck. I was glad I didn’t have Twitch in the car. Behind me was a real cop. And I wasn’t sure that, things being what they were, Twitch wouldn’t have blasted him too.

I needed to get out of this without another goddamn body.

And if I could swing it, I wanted to apply that stratagem to the rest of my life. Which I would be spending in a cell if I couldn’t figure the best way out of my current predicament.

“Pull over the Buick,” barked from the loudspeaker on top of the black-and-white.

Blanc didn’t pull over.

Neither did I.

The siren woop-wooped again. The officer repeated himself with more force. “In the Buick. Pull over to the right and shut off your engine.”

Blanc put on his right turn signal.

So did I. It seemed we were pulling over after all.

Sour bile jumped up from my empty stomach, coating my throat and mouth.

But Blanc didn’t pull over. He made a right turn.

And gunned it.

Fuck it.

So did I.

Miss Kitty’s beautiful powerhouse of an engine roared like an enraged primeval beast and spat gravel under her wide tires as I cornered hard. I let loose a blaze-o’-glory howl that rattled the windows. Fuck it. Fuck it all!

The police car blazed to life, full sirens and lights as it slipped the corner behind me. My eyes flicked to the rearview and I wondered about the ramming power of Miss Kitty.

I almost shot past Blanc before I noticed he had, in fact, pulled over in a wide driveway-cum-parking lot blocked from the road by a tall fence rimmed with razor wire.

I slammed my foot on the brakes and turned into the lot, skidding only inches short from smashing into the flank of Blanc’s car.

The police car screeched alongside us, blocking me from turning back onto the road, should that option be one I had under consideration.

But to be honest?

I had nothing.

My mind was a clean slate of panic.

Both doors of the police car flew open, two officers erupted from the vehicle with their guns drawn out low and screaming at me.

“Put your hands high, palms up!”

I placed my palms flat on the interior roof and stared straight ahead, afraid to so much as gently blink.

The lead officer came to my driver’s side. The second officer, a female cop, nervously moved both her gun and her gaze back and forth from my hands to Blanc’s car.

The lead officer, older than his partner by at least a decade, tried opening my door, and found it locked. “Open the door.”

I made the slightest movement of my hands to do exactly that when Officer Two shrieked, “Keep your hands where I can see them!” Her gun moved toward my head so fast the sight tapped the window.

I didn’t shit myself, so that was something, but I did let out an impressively forceful fart.

Even in my peripheral vision, I could see how badly her hands were shaking. I was guessing the two didn’t see too many situations like the one I’d put them in the middle of out here in the boonies. It looked like it was a night of firsts for a lot of people.

Trying to keep my voice even, I said, “I can’t do both, guys.”

Before they could figure out what to do next, a loud clank struck the air and the driveway gate started grinding its way slowly open.

Emerging from between the gates, walking two thick-necked pit bulls on inch-and a-half chains came a…troll?

The guy was barely five feet tall with an inch or two for spare change, but walked with the swagger of a man twice his size. “Put the guns away, R.J.,” he said casually, scratching a beard with more hair than remained on his pate.

“What’s going on here, Bray?” said the older cop. Presumably R.J.

“They’re here to see me.”

The lady cop said, “We got an APB…”

Uh oh…

“Don’t care if you got an XYZ. They’re here to see me. Lou?”

Blanc stepped out of his car. “Officers.” His sly smile was back on, but there was something underneath it. Something deadly. “Bray.”

“Be with you in a moment, Lou,” Bray said, turning his attention back to R.J. “Would you mind stepping to the side with me so we can discuss this? The bitch can stay in the car.”

“Hey,” the female officer said, but with more hurt than anger or authority.

R.J.’s graying moustache wiggled ominously, but he holstered his piece. “Listen to the man, Stephanie.”

Steph, while unhappy with the new orders, if not being stripped of her opportunity to shoot me, also put her gun away.

The two pit bulls in Bray’s grasp snarled and chuffed, but didn’t bark. White foam rimmed their wide jaws as they looked over the assemblage, no doubt wondering which of us they’d like to digest chunks of the most.

Laconically, Bray spat out the frayed toothpick from between his teeth. He gave a short, sharp whistle through his wet lips and said, “Stand down.”

Both dogs immediately plopped their haunches onto the gravel and sat at a stiff attention that would have impressed the hardest drill sergeant.

“What’s the story here, Bray?” R.J. said, walking toward the side of the car. Even though Bray had the dogs heeled, the old cop kept his eyes on the two, his hand only a short distance from his gun.

“Just a misunderstanding. These boys are dropping off a car for me.”

“The Buick?”

“Yeah. You didn’t call it in yet, did ya?” Something dangerous flared in Bray’s eyes as he stroked his beard.

“Not yet. Figured that since we were this close to your place, we’d wait and see where it was headed.”

“You did right, R.J. Walk with me.”

Their quick exchange rattled me deep. The way the old cop was laying things out made it sound like they were looking for Miss Kitty. Specifically.

The cop and the troll walked back through the tall gates. As they progressed up the lane, motion detectors flared up arc lights illuminating the gravel path. Motion detectors that must have been disabled when Bray made his way to us in the darkness. Not that that was fucking creepy or anything…

“In for a penny, eh?” Blanc said, lighting a cigarette. The flame from his gold lighter reflected off his milky eye. He took a deep drag and blew twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Think we’re well past a point where this can safely be called a ‘favor,’ boyo?”

I had to agree with him, but stayed silent. The problem with this particular act in my little drama was that it was collapsing underneath the weight of my own overactive sense of debt.

Balance had shifted big time.

After tonight, I was going to owe Blanc and Cade.

And I really, really hated that I would.

After a few minutes, the path lights blazed on again, marking the approach of Bray and R.J. As they passed under the gate, R.J.’s voice carried on the frosty air. “All I’m saying is—”

Bray cut him off sharply. “What you’re saying it that you’re unhappy with the amount I regularly add to your paycheck?”

“No, no. That’s not what I’m saying—”

“So what are you saying, R.J.?”

“I’m saying that staying out of your business is one thing. Ignoring an All Points Bulletin on a vehicle is another.” Officer R.J. stuck his thumbs in his gun belt, trying to lean Bray into his way of thinking by being all cop-like.

“And staying out of your business is yet another,” Bray said with a smile, popping another toothpick between his wet lips.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What I mean is, if I can ignore the fact that you’re fucking Officer Stephanie behind the Sunoco, then I think you can ignore this tidbit.”

Silence.

Whoops.

Officer R.J. began thumbing the wedding ring on his left hand.

“Good night, R.J.”

“Night, Bray,” Officer R.J. said softly. He even tipped his hat at Blanc and me as he passed us on the way to his car, tail between his legs.

As R.J. opened the police sedan’s door, I heard Officer Steph say, “What the hell is—”

“Shut up, Steph,” R.J. said. The police car pulled into a three-point turn and slowly drove back the way we came.

I let out the huge breath I didn’t even know I was holding in.

Bray grinned and flipped the toothpick between his teeth, frayed end out. “Well, might as well pull the cars around back.”

I followed Blanc once more up the long path to a large trailer with a sheet metal shack built onto the side. A hand-painted sign read Porter’s Pawn and Wreck.

Miss Kitty’s headlights passed over several dilapidated cars, a few smashed in well beyond repair. Other, less identifiable hunks of garbage and twisted metal rimmed the road all the way up to the lowered trailer.

I parked Miss Kitty and followed Blanc and Bray into the mobile home. Inside, the place smelled like someone had recently pooped in a bag of Cheetos, and I wasn’t too sure if it was the dogs or Bray. The walls were lined with smoke-browned centerfolds and tourism posters for Disneyland.

Seeing the two side by side skeeved me out more than I’d have thought possible.

The left half of the trailer was fenced off in chain link and Plexiglas, a short glass counter filled with jewelry, watches, and other bric-a-brac. The wall behind held a couple of guitars, an old TV, a signed Drew Bledsoe jersey, and a saxophone. Guess that was the pawnshop part of the trailer.

I tried to stay in the background when the back of my legs hit something at thigh-level directly behind me. A loud snarl told me what it was and I almost added to the shit smell in the trailer.

The dogs were crated to one side of the office. Both still sat with a military rigidity, but their jowls trembled with fury as they stared me down.

They won.

I yelped and jumped my butt off the cage.

“Don’t lean on that unless you want to get an ass full of teeth,” Bray said.

Yeah. Thanks, dick.

Bray carefully moved several old copies of Swank and a number of Paris Reviews off a console and started flipping switches. The yard lit up brightly, and I could see more clearly what was in his backyard.

Oh hell no.

Bray said we were bringing him the Buick. Not like he was going to tell the cops that we were bringing him a body, but he was being more specific than I’d realized.

With a nightmarish rumble, the enormous car crusher turned on.

Oh fuck no.

“Keys,” Bray said, opening his hand toward me.

I reached into my pocket and placed Junior’s Motörhead fob into Bray’s grease-rimmed fingers. It felt like I was signing a death warrant.

“Gonna give it a quick strip and get it done for you before the sun comes up. Anything you need to get out of the car, do it now.”

“Gun?” Blanc said to me, opening and closing his fingers.

I handed him the empty pistol.

The three of us walked back out to the yard. Blanc opened Miss Kitty’s passenger door and tossed the gun onto the seat.

“That thing unloaded? Bray asked. “Don’t need it popping off rounds mid-crush.”

Blanc nodded.

Bray handed me another set of keys. “First car at the bottom of the lane on the left. Got about a half tank. Enjoy.” He said it with an amused smile that I didn’t enjoy.

“What is it?” Blanc asked.

“A red ’90 Dodge Omni.” Bray laughed in a manner befitting his name. I wasn’t a car guy, so I had no idea what was so funny.

I’d never heard Blanc laugh before, either, so that Bray’s statement made him guffaw soundly filled me with dread.

“Well, then, I’m off,” Blanc said. “I’ll drive you to your new steed.”

“I’ll walk down,” I said, placing my hand on Miss Kitty’s sun-faded brown hood.

“You need a moment alone with the car, boyo? Maybe say a few words?” Blanc said. I could hear a smirk in the statement.

“Fuck off,” I said, shooting him a glare.

He winked at me.

With his dead eye, of course.

“Bray,” Blanc said with a wave as he headed back toward the front.

“Lou,” replied Bray as he turned toward the car crusher.

I didn’t get so much as a fare-thee-well, but I was just happy that I hadn’t ended our date together by getting myself shot.

I looked back at the condemned, remembering the times. The good times. Feeling slightly stupid at the emotions I was feeling. And as bad as I felt, this was going to destroy Junior.

We’d spent our lives with nothing. In St. Gabe’s, we didn’t own a damn thing, or have anything we could claim as ours. Miss Kitty was the first thing Junior possessed of any significance, of any permanence, that said we were free of a system that did its damnedest to bury us as numbered casualties of a class war nobody even knew was being fought. Or if they did, they didn’t care.

There was a reason Junior spent fifteen years repairing a car that should have seen a yard like Bray’s five years before he even bought it.

He could have gotten himself a different car at any time.

He didn’t.

She was as much a part of our crew as I was, as Twitch or Ollie was.

And there I was, putting her in her grave.

I still felt stupid, though.

I unscrewed her stiff antenna, collapsed it, and placed it into the pocket of my sweatshirt. “Sorry,” I said.

A thick hand placed gently on my shoulder made me tense. I turned to look at Bray, who I was surprised to find wore an expression that matched my own.

“For what it’s worth, I get it.”

I nodded, feeling awkwardly grateful for his empathy.

“You got five minutes,” he said. “Then I let the dogs out to roam.”

Then I had a thought. “You have all those instruments inside. You play?”

Bray shrugged. “A little bit. Mostly a listener. You looking to buy or sell?”

“Neither. Looking for an opinion. You know instruments?”

“Enough to buy ’em from failed musicians. Wouldn’t be too good at running pawn if I didn’t.”

I opened the car door and removed the trumpet case, which I’d almost forgotten was still in the car. Would’ve made a perfect ending to a perfect day, me not remembering the one piece of possible evidence I had that might keep me and mine out of jail for the rest of our fucking lives. I shuddered at my near-forgetfulness. “Would you look at this trumpet? I want to know if it’s anything special.”

“Special like what?”

“I don’t know. Unusually valuable or something.”

“Bring it inside so I can look at it.” He led me back to the trailer. When we walked back in, both dogs gave a whimper. “Give it here.” He looked at the beat-up case, flipped it over, and gave it a once-over. “Case is nothing special, but let’s see what you got. Give you a good price on it, if it’s worth anything.”

“Maybe.” Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass? Sell the freaking thing and make some chicken salad out of the chicken shit I was up to my eyebrows in. “What would a valuable one go for?”

“Well, that depends. Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet sold at an auction twenty years ago for sixty grand.” He popped the latches and I held my breath.

Sixty grand. That would be the right number of zeroes for somebody to take another’s life over.

Bray turned on a pair of bright work lamps over the drafting table. “If there’s some kinda historical significance to it, I won’t know until I look at it. See the maker and whatnot. You think it’s something like that?”

“I really have no idea.” And yet, it seemed ridiculous. How would Byron, playing in a Boston club-level jazz band, acquire himself a trumpet worth that kind of scratch? It didn’t make sense.

Bray clicked open the hasps on the case and reached in. The trumpet looked stuck. The whole case lifted when he tried to pull it out. “The hell?” he said. He pulled a flathead screwdriver off the wall.

I didn’t like this. Not one bit.

Suddenly having the Irish mob associate with the cops in his pocket and murder dogs in his home didn’t seem like my best choice to have appraise the potentially head-stoving-worthy valuable I’d been carrying around.

What could I say? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Something inside the case made a click. Bray’s eyebrow shot up, but quickly went back to its at-ease position as he quickly—but not too quickly—closed it again.

The energy of the room changed. Real fucking fast. The dogs knew it too. They immediately started whimpering. The gray mottled pit let out a sharp woof.

Bray had seen something in that goddamn trumpet case. Something he didn’t want me to see. His fingertips never once left the top of the trumpet case. With complete insincerity, he said, “It’s not a bad instrument. I’ll give you two hundred for it.” He wouldn’t look me in the eyes, but kept glancing around me. I took a quick look over to see what he was looking at.

His nightstand.

Want to bet that nightstand wasn’t where he kept his ice cream?

And he didn’t put the screwdriver back either. If anything, his grip tightened on it.

“Two hundred?” I said, trying to keep the suspicion out of my tone. “That what you think it’s worth?”

“Give or take.”

“Give or take?”

“Give or take.” His eyes flicked from the nightstand and finally connected with mine. I didn’t like what I saw in them. I saw me in the trunk of a fucking Buick.

I rolled my neck. “Why don’t we try a different give or take?”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you give me that screwdriver, or I take it from you and shove it somewhere you’re not going to enjoy.”

That stopped him. He looked me dead in the eye, mulling his options so hard it nearly made a sound.

“So why don’t we do this. I take my trumpet, I don’t talk to Blanc and Cade, and we part our ways. You keep on—”

Then he whipped the screwdriver at my head.

It was a hard throw, meant to stick in my brainpan, but it wasn’t a good one. It sailed slightly to my left, clunking harmlessly off the wall. But as I predicted, he had a plan if he missed. That plan was in the nightstand. I zigged, making the assumption he would zag.

The dogs went berserk as he charged.

Right at me.

That I was not expecting.

With his thick, oversize skull, he drove himself like an enraged rhino right into my stomach.

He rammed his forehead so deeply into my gut, all the wind violently rushed out of my lungs.

I dropped, wheezing like a balloon with a slow leak.

Bray jumped right back up and went for the nightstand.

I couldn’t breathe or stand. He hunched over, opening the drawer. I rolled onto my back and kicked him hard as I could square on the ass. He launched forward and smashed his head into the aluminum trailer wall with a loud gong.

While he was stunned, he was far from out. I pulled myself up and worked real hard to get some oxygen back into me.

In the open drawer sat an electrical-taped snubnose.

That fucker was trying to kill me.

Over a motherfucking trumpet.

Despite my innate and burning hatred for the implements themselves, I took the snubby from the drawer and pressed it to his swelling forehead, the gun butt burning in my grip.

“No,” was all he said, a trickle of blood gumming his filthy moustache from a sliver cut just under his cheek.

“No?” I screamed in a higher pitch than I thought would come out of me. “NO?” A lot of people had spent the better part of the last year trying to kill me. I had fucking had enough.

Through my eyes, the room was bright, bright red.

The dogs bayed and screeched, no doubt smelling the violence pouring off me.

I popped open the chamber and dumped the bullets onto the floor. Bray relaxed, comfortable with the idea that I was no longer going to seam his forehead with one of the bullets. Instead, I flipped the short barrel in my grip, and with the taped handle, pistol-whipped him to the temple.

He fell to his knees, clutching his head. Blood streamed from between his fingers and he curled fetally on the floor. He still wasn’t out. Christ, that guy had a thick forehead. He pushed himself onto all fours and crawled a couple of feet before falling back over.

Slowly, but with purpose, I walked to the trumpet case and threw it open. Inside was…

STILL ONLY A FUCKING TRUMPET.

What the hell had Bray seen in there? I had every intention of happily beating that information out of the bridge troll.

Except while I was making another unsuccessful attempt at figuring out what was so special about a trumpet, Bray was busy crawling.

To the dog cages.

Oh.

Fuck.

Blood covered his face, ran into his mouth. “Fuck you,” he said through a tight gore-red smile.

Then he popped the latch.

And screamed the command.

“Throat.”

And for my next impression: Jessie Owens.

The dogs exploded from their crates at the exact same moment I ran through—

—yes, through—

—Bray’s screen door, my panic and mass tearing it right off the hinges.

Lucky for me, Bray had installed an iron-gated door on the front of his trailer. I slammed shut the heavy door behind me a half second before the first pit’s jaws of death clamped down onto an iron bar an inch from my fingers.

You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I swear to God, I thought the iron bent under the impact from Fido’s skull. The gray pit hit the door behind the second one, and the whole trailer shuddered.

I was so concerned with the dogs that I hadn’t noticed the woozy Bray had crawled over to the bullets and gun I’d idiotically thrown to the floor. The first bullet spaaannng-ed off the bar next to my face, showering me with sparks. I dropped to the ground and rolled away from the door. The latch held against the pit bulls’ assault, but I couldn’t be sure for how long.

However, I did know how long it would take for a slug to catch me.

I vaulted over the rail, dropped three feet, tucked the trumpet case under my arm, and ran, ran, ran like two hundred and forty pounds of shit through a goose.

I made it twenty feet before I heard the gated door screeching open. I didn’t know if it was the dogs or the hairy beardo with a reloaded gun. I didn’t like either option.

The second bullet whizzed past my ear and smacked into the tree directly to my left.

I had the first part of that question answered.

I turned my head away from the shards of bark that flew off the tree and saw the dogs bearing down on me.

I could serpentine through the trees as I worked down the hill, lessening the chances of my skull getting split with a bullet, but increasing those of my getting caught by the dogs and becoming man-flavored Alpo.

Fuck it. I might be able to hold off the dogs. There was no way I could fight a bullet.

I cut to the right sharply, ducking below a dead pine as the second shot shredded the dry wood by my neck. The gray-mottled dog overestimated its charge and ran past me, but not before snapping at my wrist as momentum carried it too far. I zigged back to the left and ran for the line of cars.

Thank God only one of the shitboxes was red, so I bolted toward it and hoped that it was the Omni.

The brown dog came at me from the other side, right out of my blind spot. I shifted my hips at the last possible microsecond and avoided the dog enjoying a full serving of my ass cheek. In doing so, my feet slid out from under me on the icy ground.

Deciding to let my fat ass do the work, I transitioned my inelegant topple into a Macho Man Randy Savage Atomic Elbow onto the dog’s thick skull. Half WWE—half Loony Toones, but fuck it. Whatever worked,

The dog yelped and backed off for a moment, my elbow exploded in pain, and I wanted to apologize.

I like dogs.

I really do.

But for some goddamn reason—between Burrito, my own adopted Chihuahua, Pickles, and now these two—they were always trying to kill me. There wasn’t any time to feel bad about clobbering the murder dog, though. Its partner had found its footing and was ready to come at me again.

I found myself pleading with the hairy kill machines. “Heel!”

Didn’t work.

“Good boy! I like dogs! Please don’t kill me!” Didn’t work either.

I couldn’t remember what Bray’s order was for the dogs to stand down.

Wait…

“Stand down!” I yelled.

Both dogs immediately sat on their haunches, but kept growling a low rumble at me. I took a step toward the red car, and both dogs increased the volume of growl, stepping between me and the car. I was boxed in.

Where was Bray?

Then I realized why the shooting had stopped.

A loud grinding metal sound startled all three of us.

Bray had gone back inside the trailer.

And the gate was closing.

The loud noise of the moving chain link took the dogs’ attention off me for just long enough.

I ran first for the car, getting a few strides in before I heard the dogs’ paws scrabble frantically on the gravel in order to launch themselves back into the chase.

Twenty feet.

Ten feet.

Then the floodlights fired back on, blinding me for just enough time to miss the swath of thick ice that was right in front of me.

My eyes refocused one step too late.

And this was no slippery gravel that I could majestically parlay into a primetime wrestling move.

No siree.

This ice was thick, and wide, and boy-oh-boy was going to hurt.

I hit Mother Nature’s Slip’N Slide at top speed. My feet went up and over my head. I spun in the air at an angle of about 112 degrees and came down hard, all the breath knocked clean out of me.

And somehow, that was the luckiest thing that could have happened. Gray dog hit the ice running even harder than I was. If he wasn’t trying to turn me inside out with his fangs, the dog’s expression of panic and confusion might have been funny as it rocketed past me on the ice, down the hill, and out through the slowly closing gate.

Wheezing, I got to my feet and limped toward the comically tiny car with Omni written above the bumper.

The brown dog leaped for my throat as I reached for the handle. I held up the only thing I had to put in the dog’s mouth that wasn’t part of my anatomy. The dog’s teeth clamped down on the trumpet case with a crunch. He shook his head so violently, something popped in my wrist, but I managed to hang onto the handle of the case.

“Let go, you sonofabitch,” I yelled.

The dog went into another violent spasm, trying to wrest the case out of my hand, and I couldn’t help but think in the moment how glad I was that it wasn’t my throat between those teeth.

With one final pull on both our parts, the handle tore off the case, and one of the latches ripped off in the dog’s jaws.

The gray bitch came back around the car, snarling, as I tucked the case under my arm and reached for the door handle.

They had me dead bang. I wasn’t going to get in the car with all of my meat still attached to the bones.

Then two bullets smacked into the dirt between us, kicking up snow and stinging chunks of earth right up into the dog’s muzzles. The gray dog yipped in pain and surprise and scuttled away behind the other cars.

Bray was back, and his terrible aim had just saved my structural integrity.

Both dogs scattered for a second, giving me barely enough distance to get inside the car. I opened the door and dove in, chucking the murder trumpet onto the passenger seat. I got my door shut just as the gray dog smashed her whole body weight into it. She struck the car with enough force to knock the trumpet case onto the floor all the way over on the other side of the vehicle. Her brother ran around the passenger side as I popped the key into the ignition and prayed that I was in the right car.

The engine roared to life. Well, it felt like a roar. A roar of victory. It was an Omni, however, and the reality was that the engine came to life with a sound like an asthmatic twelve-year-old trying to play a tuba.

I roared with victory.

Then, through some goddamn doggie intuition, the brown hellbeast locked his teeth right onto the handle of the unlocked passenger door, yanking it open.

Fuck it.

I dropped the car into drive and stomped on the gas.

With more gravity and ice to propel it than actual horsepower, the car dropped down the hill toward the closing gate. The passenger door slammed shut, but the dog hung on tight like a streamer on a little girl’s bicycle handlebars.

What was left for an opening in the gate didn’t have enough room for the car and the dog.

Sorry, Fido.

The impact of dog-to-fence was sickening. I didn’t know what part of the dog hit the fence, but it popped him off the side, tearing the door handle off with it. In the rearview, I saw the brown furred assassin flopping end over end behind the car.

Then he got right up and resumed his chase.

What the fuck was up with these dogs?

I yanked the steering wheel hard onto the road with minimal drift.

Both hellhounds gave chase for three blocks before I put enough distance between us for it to break their doggy spirits.

I couldn’t believe I’d made it through all that with only a rapidly swelling wrist. It was unbe-fucking-lievable! I wanted to cheer and sing at the top of my lungs. I pounded on the roof of the car with my good hand and whooped at what was undoubtedly a change for the better as far as my fortunes were concerned.

I wanted music, and whiskey, and women. But since I only had the car radio, and a distinct lack of whiskey and women available in the car, I cranked the volume all the way up and let her rip.

Right onto a radio station playing Taylor Swift.

Good God, no.

And the tuner knob was busted.

Why have you forsaken me, oh Father?

The trumpet.

FUCK! THE TRUMPET!

I pulled the car off the road and behind a darkened Sunoco station by the on ramp. I shut the engine off and listened to the engine tick and groan as it cooled in the freezing air. Or maybe that was my heart going bugnuts off the adrenaline dump and terror that the trumpet had been rendered worthless by a goddamn dog.

If those teeth were strong enough to pull a door handle off, there was no telling the damage they might have done to my one possible bargaining chip. I didn’t have clue one about how these things were appraised, but I was sure that chew marks would dramatically lower the value of the thing.

The trumpet itself looked undamaged, thank Jesus, Buddha, Allah, and any other god or saint that looked after trumpets. I ran my fingers over the cold brass, feeing for indentations, but found none. Then I rubbed it two more times quickly just to see if a genie would pop out. For all I knew, I was in possession of the magical trumpet from Milo Davis’s Arabian Nights.

Nope. No genie. But if one had popped out, it wouldn’t have been the strangest incident of my week.

What my fingertips did find were a pair of deep fang grooves in the felt right at the point where the clasp had been ripped off. Where the felt met the plastic hardshell, one leftover canine—were all dog teeth canines?—jutted out from the bloody root. Yuck.

It left a pinkie finger-size hole between the board and the velvet. So, of course, I stuck my pinkie finger in it. I was only human.

Then the felt popped up.

As did the lateral half of the trumpet.

That’s right. Half.

It wasn’t a trumpet in there at all. Somebody had gotten industrious and cleanly cut a trumpet in half, made a small indent in the felt to make it look like there was space underneath, and then kept the bottom half empty.

The felt backing was heavy, covering a metal plate of some kind. I guessed that it was lined with lead, to throw off x-ray machines in airports and the whatnot. Looking from the top, it sure as hell looked like a damn trumpet.

The million-dollar question: what was in the hollow bottom?

Whatever was being so carefully camouflaged was tightly wrapped in what appeared to be strips of black garbage bag, then bound with duct tape. Each brick was three inches deep and three by six inches across the top. Whatever was in there, it sure wasn’t going to improve my day.

I pulled out one package, which was snugly placed next to six more, side by side in the case. I tore a corner off the plastic and tore the duct tape along the length with my teeth.

Then I knew what Bray had tried to end me over, what a fake cop was willing to take out three people for. I knew why Byron had wound up on a Revere street corner with his skull staved in.

And boy, was I ever wrong.

What was in there improved my day. A whole fucking lot.

Each packet contained three wrapped bundles of hundred dollar bills.

That added up to…a buttload of money. It was too goddamn cold and I was too goddamn amped up to do the math in the moment.

I started hyperventilating.

I got out of the car and took deep gulps of frosty air as I leaned onto the still-warm hood. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do when you hyperventilated? Breathe or not breathe? I didn’t know, but it wasn’t helping. I was going to wind up passed out in the parking lot if I didn’t figure it out soon.

Then red and blue lights started dancing between the trees along the side of the gas station.

A spotlight soon followed.

Looked like Bray had made a phone call to his cop buddies not long after I’d peeled out.

Then bad got worse when I realized I was quite likely parked behind the Sunoco where Officers R.J. and Stephanie had been playing moisten the nightstick.

I looked back at the money and realized it was also great. Really great.

I held my breath and stuck to the shadow of the building as the police car passed. My instinct to get the car off the road and not just pull over had been the right one. The years in St. Gabe’s had served me well. You doing something, anything you didn’t want people to see? You went to a place where they wouldn’t see you, even if it was in the middle of the night in Bumblefuck, Massachusetts.

The flashing lights passed, then moved toward the exit ramp ahead that I would have been heading for.

The glow from the arcing spotlight slowly moved away. Then they were gone.

I exhaled the breath I’d been holding, and my lungs felt better immediately. So there. Hold breath when hyperventilating. Learned something new every day.

I climbed back into the car and held the money up to my nose and breathed deeply. It smelled like most of the problems in my life taking the first bus out of Boosville.

Of all the contraband that could have been hidden in there, it was the one thing I actually knew what to do with. If it had been bags of coke, or pills, or state secrets, I’d have been screwed.

But what the hell was I thinking?

This was the reason Junior was in lockup. I needed to figure out whose money it was.

Problem was, it could be anybody’s money.

Just like it could be mine.

I shook my head.

No.

This amount was the killing kind. If I could find out where it was supposed to end up, or who it was coming from, then I’d most likely have a definitive bead on whoever took Byron out.

Mystery solved, me and Junior off our hooks.

Except I had no idea where to go from here.

It was just after 3 a.m. when I made it back to Boston proper. In that car, it was a miracle I made it at all. Every mile or so, the transmission would give a sickly whirr, then catch again. Each time, I found myself gently patting the dashboard and talking to the damn thing.

It was in those moments that I understood Junior’s relationship to Miss Kitty.

I hadn’t eaten a thing since the diner with Junior, which felt like a decade ago. I got a sack of Mexican goodness from El Triunfo in East Berkeley. While a 3:30 a.m. shrimp and bean burrito might not be the greatest gastrointestinal choice in your country club, it was either that or a microwave barbecue sandwich at Store 24. So don’t you fucking judge me.

I paid for my late-night snack with the hundy off the top of the open stack for two reasons.

One: I wanted to make sure that my enthusiasm wasn’t going to be cut down by finding out the hard way that I was dragging around stacks of counterfeit bills. The nagging voice in my head that had read too many Ed McBain novels needed to know.

Two: Whoever was the rightful owner of the money could suck my chode. I’d earned at least a burrito in payment for my recovery services. The voice that had read all of John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee books told me so.

The Hispanic kid raised his eyebrow when I handed him the crisp bill, no doubt having seen his share of fake bills during the late hours. He held it up to the light, ran his thumb across the paper, then took out a counterfeit pen and drew a wide X across Benjamin Franklin’s face.

He rang in my tab on the register and gave me change.

Sweet bleedin’ eyes o’ Jeebus, it was all real.

 

***

 

I parked in the municipal lot behind the bar, stuck the burrito under my arm, and grabbed the trumpet case. The Cellar had been closed for two hours, so it was as safe a place as any for me to rest my head. My apartment was still off-limits until I knew who had targeted me there. My first thought had been Summerfield as the obvious suspect, but with all the current goings on, I couldn’t be so sure any more. At least The Cellar I could lock down.

I locked the door and turned directly into a flashlight beam shining in my eyes. Instinctively, I threw my hands into the air. The burrito hit the concrete with a wet splat.

“Where have you been?” yelled the man blinding me.

“Goddamn it, Underdog. Look what you did to my burrito.”

“I don’t care even the slightest about your freaking burrito. I’ve been looking for you all night.”

“Weren’t you the one who told me to go out and find a reason not to put me and Junior in jail?” I bent over to collect what remained of what was now a taco salad. “And shut off that fucking light.”

“I also told you to stay in touch with me.” He shut the Maglite off, then pointed it at my hand. “What is that?”

“It’s a trumpet case.”

“Why are you carrying a trumpet case? And what are you driving? Where is Junior’s car?”

“Any particular order you want me to answer those questions?”

“Do you really want to be a smartass right now, Boo?”

“You really want to be the cop right now? Or are you my friend? Hard to tell nowadays.”

Underdog sighed, his long exhalation frozen on the night air. His shoulders slumped back into their submissive position. Like the Hulk in reverse, Brendan Miller the police officer slowly shrunk back into Underdog. Sweet, needy, pliable Underdog.

My burrito-spurred appetite dwindled as guilt washed over me. Second time in two days I’d forced him into submission, when if I was a real friend, I should be doing everything I could to keep him strong. Underdog was a mess—a human trash fire. Brendan Miller was the man I wanted my friend to be.

It made me feel like shit, but I didn’t need another cop in my night. I needed Underdog. But if I was the type of guy who needed to knock a man down to where I felt he wasn’t an enemy, what did that make me?

I didn’t like feeling like a bad friend.

“You know?” Underdog said. “Every day, it gets easier to understand how people might want to shoot you.”

As a reminder, the cold was starting to crush my old knee wound with an icy vise. “Listen, can we at least get inside a car and talk?”

“Which brings me to my first question. Where’s the Buick?” Underdog opened the door to his sedan, gesturing for me to get in the other side.

“I don’t have it.” Not the whole truth. I needed to dodge lying where I could. I was bad at it. And the cop in Underdog would sniff it out right away. So I left it at that as I slid into his unmarked police car. I hoped it was the last time I would be getting into one for a long, long time

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re lying to me, Boo.”

Goddammit.

“There’s an APB on it, so it’ll turn up sooner or later. Why don’t you save us both the trouble?”

“I can’t.”

Underdog rubbed his eyes vigorously. “So, the car that is possibly going to be pivotal in a murder investigation is…what? Missing?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re supposed to be helping me here, Boo. This does not help. What’s in the trumpet case?”

“Something that might help.”

Underdog glared at me. Again, it wasn’t a full-on pants-on-fire lie, so it must have thrown his radar off. “You want to give it to me?”

“Not yet.” Probably not ever, said a voice in the back of my brain.

“Should I bother asking where you’ve been?”

“I wouldn’t suggest it.”

Underdog closed his eyes and slowly bellowed out his cheeks with a pained exhalation. “I can’t help but feel like you’re not taking this as seriously as you should, Boo. When they charge Junior—”

“When?”

“When. The homicide guys feel they got a slam dunk. So, when they charge him, they’ll be coming for you not long after. You understand that, right?”

“I understand that.”

“You also understand that it’s worse than just that. Why did Byron have Junior’s phone in his pocket?”

“I have no idea. We tussled. Confusion ensued.”

“Confusion ensued? That what you’re going to say in court?”

“How bad is it looking?”

“Almost as bad as it can get, Boo. They’ve decided to move forward with this as a hate crime. Your bad got worse.”

My suddenly dry throat clicked as I swallowed. “There’s no way to prove that one way or the other.”

“Well, with Junior referring to the victim casually as ‘the faggot’ three times during interrogation, I don’t think they’ll have to try too hard.”

“Is it going to help in court that, to Junior, the use of that word is less of a slur than a descriptive?”

Underdog hung his head sadly. “You can get out of my car now.”

I opened the door with a sinkhole feeling in my gut, like I was leaving behind a broken piece of our friendship in the car. “If I can figure anything else out…”

“Close the door,” said Brendan Miller.

I did.

He drove off, leaving me with nothing but deepening desperation and a cold and dirty burrito.

Fuck me.

I went in through the back, hoping Luke was done for the night. I quietly opened the metal back door, which screeched on the hinges like an attacking Pteranodon.

Luke poked his head around the corner of the basement stairs. “Who’s there?” His skinny arms held the mop handle aloft.

“It’s me, Luke.”

“Oh, Mr. Boo, you gave me a fright. Weird vibes running through here tonight.”

“What? What’s happening?” Automatically, I went into caveman mode. The Cellar was my cave away from cave. Part of the reason I was good at what I did was that The Cellar really was a home to me, and I was honestly protective of her.

Oh Christ, did I just call The Cellar “her”?

I’d always busted Junior’s balls for naming Miss Kitty as such. I’d driven his car for less than a day, and now I was suffering The Shining-like symptoms of his personality.

“G.G. said there was a lotta people looking for you tonight. Where were you, by the way? Don’t you normally work Sundays?”

“I had errands to run.” I opened my burrito wrapper and flopped my tired ass onto a barstool. What was inside looked more like Tijuana slurry than anything edible, but it was all I had. I tore off a piece of mangled tortilla and did my best to mop up the mess.

Luke’s face scrunched up. “Don’t know that you want to be eating that, Mr. Boo.”

I popped the mess into my mouth. Still tasted good. But at that point, a sewer rat might have tasted like foie gras. Luke winced. I went on. “What else?”

Luke snapped his fingers like he’d remembered something. “The girl, works here…Ginny. Don’t know what’s going on with that young girl, but she was crying something fierce when I came in.”

“Wait, she came here? She was still here when you got here?”

“Thought that was strange too. There was some new girl working her tables, and Ginny came in anyway. Just sat at the bar drinkin’ like she was trying to hurt herself, drinking with a man with a silly-looking moustache who I’d be willing to bet was not the source of her heartbreak,” Luke put a finger under his lower eyelid, “if you catch my drift.”

I caught it. “What time?”

“This was around midnight. Came in early tonight. Audrey gave me a call, said the beer compressor was acting up.”

I guessed Ginny and Dana had come here for the same reason I had. The Cellar represented the safest place we had. I felt a twinge of guilt for cutting them loose like I did, but I had no idea what else I was supposed to do. Were they the reason an APB got put on the car, or was it the cops digging deeper into Byron’s death? Had they cracked? “When did she leave?”

“Dunno. I was working on the compressor. Got back upstairs while Audrey was counting the money. They was gone by then.”

“Who else was looking for me?”

“I dunno. G.G. left messages for you upstairs. I know that Brendan came by twice after the doors shut, asking where you were. Ain’t he a police officer?”

“Yeah.”

Luke’s eyes narrowed at me suspiciously. “Anything I need to know or that you’d like to disclose?”

“I got nothing, Luke.” Really, I didn’t. How I’d managed to make it through this entire day without achieving any knowledge other than a probable motive was beyond me. I’d have to backtrack to Ginny’s in the morning. This had been one losing battle of a day.

“Well, I’m done in about fifteen more minutes, so I’ll leave you to your thoughts. At least until you want to share ’em.” Luke beamed his best grin at me, and I’d be damned if it didn’t make me feel a bit better.

With all of the dirty, nasty, ignorant, mean motherfuckers in my life, some of whom were my best friends, there were still people in it like Luke. To step outside myself sometimes made me ashamed of who I was. What I’d made of my life. Luke’s simple kindness humbled me. And did so nearly on a nightly basis.

As he went down to finish his cleaning, I poured myself a thick finger and a half of Jim Beam and downed it. The bottle had a finger’s worth left in it, so I popped that back too. There was a backup bottle under the bar. I cracked that one open and took a long pull. I wasn’t drinking for any reason other than I wanted to get good and ripping drunk.

Things Ginny said had hit me. Without putting words to it, Junior and I, from the time we were at The Home right up until today, we’d fashioned ourselves the anti-bullies. We bullied the bullies without allowing the irony of that existence to seep into our consciousness. Any man should be able to handle his shit—to a degree. If you stepped to one of our friends? If anybody tried to lord themselves physically over someone else on our watch? There were fewer things we found more enjoyable than being a counterweight on the Darwinist scale.

But, somehow, someway, all of that unspoken philosophy had gone out the window over the last couple of days. And it all came down to dick. Ginny made me realize that we’d abandon our protective stance if somebody was gay. Simple as that. And her assumption that this would be the case pissed me off.

Because her assumption was straight-up right on the nose.

I wished I could explain why that was.

I couldn’t even discern where my natural alpha male protect-the-tribe instinct stopped kicking in and ran screaming in the other direction. It just did.

Maybe my open mind wasn’t quite as open as I’d deluded myself into thinking it was.

Maybe we weren’t the knights in shining armor we liked to envision ourselves as. Shit, we were barely serfs in dirty underwear.

By the time I came to the end of my deep, dark musings on the number of things that made me an asshole—new things, anyway—I’d polished off another third of the new bottle.

I heard Luke say good night. I responded, noticing a slur creeping into my pronunciations. I headed toward the back stairs, legs a little wobbly, and made my way up to the office. I would take a few hours sleeping on the desk, and then hit tomorrow fresh. Junior… Where was Junior? Was he still being questioned? How long could they question somebody?

The whiskey sloshed around the burrito in my stomach as my entire body cried out for sleep. I unlocked the office door and threw my jacket on the floor. Flopping into the threadbare desk chair, I saw my burner phone next to Junior’s phone—Byron’s phone—which he’d left when Underdog walked him out.

I had to stop being so hard on Dog. Simply allowing me to hang on to the phone wasn’t the action of a cop. It was the action of a friend.

Both phones’ batteries were dead. I fumbled through the lost and found drawer until I found the right chargers amongst the tangle of wires.

I crossed my arms on the desk and lay my head down. I felt every muscle give in to inertia. Before I exhaled, my eyelids slowly drifted down…

Something thumped loudly in the stairwell.

My eyes popped open as I inhaled sharply through my nose.

Blood immediately began surging in my ears as all the old anger flared.

Enough was enough.

I was suddenly and actively murderous.

Enough.

This whole time, I’d been running against a tide, backpedaling. Trying to advance while maintaining a steady retreat.

I wasn’t a runner. Fuck that. it went against every natural instinct I had to fight.

Fight or flight, and flight was for pussies.

Boo Malone was going to show whoever was in that stairwell just what a fucking fighter was.

It was time to move this shit forward, fists first.

I pulled the door open hard, screaming my best blue-face-paint-balls-hanging-out-in-a-kilt Highlander war cry. Whoever was coming up those stairs was getting themselves one hell of a surprise along with a face full of whiskey bottle.

Except I was the one who wound up surprised when my war cry was met with a very high-pitched terrified shriek.

I was even more surprised when Ginny stabbed me in the stomach.

My war cry ended with just a loud, “Ow!”

The “ow” was more for the shrill tone emanating from Ginny than the knife, which didn’t hurt yet.

But it would. Boy howdy, I was willing to bet my ass on that.

Ginny’s mouth fell open as she realized precisely who she’d perforated. “Oh God, Boo! What are you doing here?”

I looked down at my belly.

Yup.

That was a knife handle sticking out of me about three inches to the left of my bellybutton. “The fuck are you doing? Did you just stab me?”

Her face blanched. “I didn’t know it was you. You scared the piss out of me!” She quickly pulled the blade out of my abdomen. She’d got me right above the hip. I felt the blade skip off the bone as she removed it.

I clamped my hand over my newest wound. Blood quickly seeped between my knuckles. “I don’t think you’re supposed to pull—”

Oh yeah. There was the pain that had been missing. My abdomen cramped immediately and a white flash exploded before my eyes. The ol’ knees buckled and I slumped into the stairwell. “Ow,” I reiterated for good measure.

“I’m so sorry!” Ginny’s fingertips flittered around my general area, as though unsure whether touching me would make things worse somehow. Or maybe she was just grossed out.

I took a deep breath and pulled myself up by the handrail. “Can I please have that knife?”

She clutched the knife to her chest, my blood running down the blade. “Are you going to stab me?”

“Not right now.” I held my hand out. She placed the fruit knife with the green handle into my hand. Small blessing, the knife only had a two-inch blade that the bartenders used to cut limes. Hurt like a bitch, but it probably hadn’t filleted anything too important. Thank God the kitchen was locked at night, or she might have cut me in half with a real one off the butcher’s block.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go, you prick. Remember the body you left on my floor? What are you doing here?”

“Same answer. Minus the body.” I went back into the office and tried to lift my shirt up, but I couldn’t lift my arms without another flare of bright pain. I handed her the knife back. “Would you mind cutting the shirt off of me?”

Ginny grabbed the hem at the bottom of my T-shirt and sawed through the material. Even through my whiskey haze, I could smell the rum coming off her. Once she cut through the thick base, the sharp knife zipped up the first six inches of material.

“Please don’t slice me open any more than I already am.”

“You want me to help or not?”

“Where’s Dana?”

“He’s passed out in the equipment room. Which is where we both were sleeping when we heard you clomping around up here. We heard Luke leave and thought...”

Which would explain why Luke didn’t know they were still in the building. Since the equipment room was off limits to anyone who wasn’t staff, he wouldn’t have to clean it as regularly as the high-traffic areas that usually ended up painted with spilled beer and vomit.

She slowly worked the knife up to the neck. “Oh…” she said. “Oh, wow.”

I was so wrapped up in my current predicament—what with having been stabbed and all—that I hadn’t been thinking about the slasher-movie assortment of scars on my torso. The self-consciousness was bad enough when Blanc got a look at them. Call it whatever the fuck you want, but my body-consciousness skyrocketed when a woman got a look at them. I normally kept them well-hidden, even during intimate moments with the odd young ladies who every now and then chose to fiddle my diddle.

I was a lights-off guy, to put it simply.

I felt myself blushing, me cheecks and neck going hot. “Guess the good news is that my new scar will hardly be noticed amongst the general mess, huh?”

“Dude. What happened to you?”

“Porcupine,” I said. “Porcupine with a butterfly knife. Attacked me at a camp site when I was twelve.”

Ginny glared at me. “I don’t have to help you, you know.”

“And I don’t need to tell you my fucking life story right now. You stabbed me. I would hope that alone might be enough reason for you to help me.”

I took a bottle of vodka off the liquor shelf and cracked the cap.

“At least this is going to hurt you,” she said. Adding, “Dick.”

She had that right.

This was going to hurt.

And I was a dick.

I poured the vodka directly onto the wound.

And screamed my head off in a tone oddly reminiscent of Whitney Houston after stepping in a bear trap.

Boy howdy.

When the dancing pain-lights fled my vision, I took two clean bar rags from the linens, soaked one in the vodka, covered it with a dry one, and pressed them against the hole. “Duct tape is in the upper right hand drawer.”

“Seriously?”

“Just do it.”

With a noticeable blear in her eyes, she tore off a long strip of the gray tape and wrapped it around me at an angle. I gritted my teeth as she pulled a second strip tight. That tiny hole hurt more than I wanted to let on.

What little chauvinistic manliness I had remaining didn’t want Ginny to feel guilty for the pain I was in.

The pain.

From her stabbing me in the fucking stomach.

MANLINESS!

Ain’t that some shit?

I closed my eyes against the hurt and tried to think of England. Except I’d never been to England. I’d never been anywhere. So I found the next best thing and inhaled the pleasant smell of Ginny’s perfume and shampoo mingling with the spicy rum wafting off her.

It took a couple seconds after the fourth strip was applied before I realized nothing more was happening. I opened my eyes, and saw Ginny’s alcohol-wobbly gaze looking up at me.

It was equal parts terror, apology, and a dash of plain old sexy-time.

I hadn’t seen that last look in a while.

As her fingertips pressed against my ribs, where she held the duct tape, I was suddenly aware of the heat coming off of me, coming off of her as she straddled my leg in order to get the tape on me.

Before I could say or do anything about it, she pressed her mouth to mine and kissed me deeply.

Stabbing as foreplay?

Why not?

I wasn’t even sure she was particularly attracted to me, but in that moment, all things considered, the act was a “fuck you” to death. Two stabbings and beatings and all of the bad things that had rained down on our heads like so much bird shit pouring from the anus of an angry avian god.

That, and we were hammered.

It was an acceptance of drunken release and animal want. It was a damned good kiss, despite the overwhelming taste of Captain Morgan on her tongue. I pushed all thoughts of pirates out of my head and leaned into her kiss.

She broke off the smooching, grabbed my face and said, “I so fucking hate you, Boo Malone.”

Fair enough. She wasn’t the first woman to express the sentiment. Kelly had expressed similar vitriol less than twenty-four hours ago. I reached for my sweatshirt. Guess we were done here.

She reached for my belt.

Maybe we weren’t done here.

It was the angriest unbuckling of my belt I’d ever experienced. Then I realized that I was angry too. I grabbed her hair hard and planted my own solid whiskey kiss on her mouth. I grabbed Ginny under the ass with my other hand and spun her around, seating her on the edge of my desk, hands reaching for the buttons on her jeans.

She got her hand inside my boxers and gave my junk a good, possessive squeeze. It hurt, but man oh man, it hurt real good.

I got her pants to her ankles, then tore her damn panties off.

It was a ferocious fucking. I think she punched me in the face once in the middle there, but it might have been a drunken flail on her part. We fucked the death, the fear, and the fear of death off of us. We fucked because, goddammit, we were alive. And nothing says you were alive like a good, stinky, bruising, sweaty, hair-pulling, ass-slapping, thigh-pounding, possible-face-punching toss in the hay.

Once or twice, my mind flashed to Kelly. And the anger kicked in harder, so I laid into Ginny a little harder as a result.

Okay, maybe three times.

In all fairness, when Ginny wasn’t snarling at me, her eyes would wander off on their own, no doubt imagining who she would rather have been with at that moment. But we both made do with the available drunken genitalia in the room.

We finished up and Ginny lifted a leg and pushed me off with a heel under my hip. I was just thankful it wasn’t the side she’d stabbed.

The exertion had made the wound bleed though the bar rags, and pink sweat dribbled from under the duct tape.

Then it dawned on me that the last time I’d had sex, which was with Kelly, I’d had a traumatic knee injury. I hoped there wasn’t any kind of karmic balance at play. Because Lord knows, I enjoy sex, but I didn’t know how much trauma my body could manage in order to facilitate the exchange.

Then the mood got awkward right quick.

Ginny slipped her bra back on, not looking at me, then gave her head a small, almost imperceptible “I can’t believe I did that” shake.

If I’d had any self-esteem left, that might have bruised it.

“Uhhh…” I said. “Where’s Dana?”

“He’s still passed out in the equipment room.”

“Oh. Okay, listen…”

She held her hand up and winced, angrily putting her top back on. “No. Please don’t make this any weirder than it already is. I don’t need platitudes and Hallmark liners right now. I just needed…” She paused, trying to find more elegant words for to get laid.

I saved her the effort. “I was going to say that you could crash on the desk if you wanted. It’s warmer up here than in the basement.”

She gave me a weird look, as though she was a little disappointed I didn’t even offer a Hallmark sentiment she’d said she didn’t want.

I did not understand women. At all. The end.

She shook her head, tying back her wild hair with a rubber band from my desk. “I’m going back to the equipment room. I just need to close my eyes for a couple hours before we figure out what we’re going to do.”

“Well, I’m kind of at an impasse.”

“No offense, but our ‘we’ doesn’t include you. I think you’ve done enough.”

“Then I hate to break it to you, but you are both part of mine. This is still technically your fault, or have you conveniently forgotten that?”

“Have you forgotten that your psycho friend killed a man in my home?”

“Have you forgotten that my psycho friend possibly saved your life?”

“I am not continuing this conversation until you at least put your pants back on.”

Dammit. The strength of my argument might have been damaged by delivering it in my boxers with the pee-hole wide open. I hastily addressed my pants.

Ginny closed her eyes and blew out a rum-soaked breath. “Listen, I’m drunk and exhausted. I need to crash out. We’re both in bad places right now. Let’s hash it out in the morning.”

“Fine.” I caught myself before I thanked her for the sex.

She walked down the steps and I looked at the two phones charging on the desk. My burner had almost a dozen messages. The first was from Underdog, telling me we had to talk. Well, that we did. I didn’t know how he’d gotten the number, but it was most likely from Junior. The second and third were from Junior, cursing a lot and saying that they hadn’t charged him with anything yet. Three more from Underdog. More of the same. More of Junior cursing.

The last was from Twitch.

Yeah. These guys are done. They did an awesome job. Didn’t have to shoot anybody, so I guess that’s a plus.

Well, wasn’t that just ducky.

Place is cleaner than when we got here. I’m, uh, gonna have some beers with them and then I guess I’ll go home. They’re all right. They gave me a card in case I ever need their services.

Jesus. Nice to hear that Twitch was making new friends.

So I guess I’ll go home and I’ll find you tomorrow. Peace.

I had no doubt he would find me. I was a little afraid he would.

I looked at Byron’s phone and my heart-rate skyrocketed.

There were twenty-four messages showing.

The display only told me the number of messages, not who they were from, or when they were from. I needed to know who was so eager to get in touch with the departed. Especially if any of those messages happened before Byron got himself cooled.

I needed to crack the password.

And I had an ace up my sleeve where technology was concerned.

I needed Ollie.

I rang his phone, but he didn’t answer, no doubt still pissed off at us.

When the voice mail beeped, I said, “Ollie, call me back, brother. We need your help.”

I took a few more pulls off the whiskey bottle to calm my newly excited brain.

I had something, but the answer was going to be unavailable until the morning, at least.

I closed my eyes and lay my head down with a smile on my face for the first time in days.

Gotcha, fucker.

 

***

 

“Wake up.” Ginny placed a black coffee next to my head, then handed me a bagel.

“Thanks. What time is it?”

“Ten after one.”

Good Christ. The bar was already open. I was hungover, but damn, the sleep felt good. I looked at the burner. No message from Ollie. Guess there was my answer to how pissed off he still was.

“Where’s Dana?”

“He’s downstairs. Audrey is trying to get some hair of the dog into him. He’s not quite made of the sturdy stuff that we are.”

“Keep an eye on him or Audrey is going to jam the entire kennel down his throat.”

“If I say he can handle himself, are you gonna say something wiseass?”

“It’s a safe bet that I might.”

“Then let’s leave it at that. How’s the uh…” She wiggled a finger at my new hole.

I gave it a quick look. It had stopped bleeding, but was rimmed with a fiery red inflammation. I was going to have to get some anti-bacterial ointment and redress it. Last thing I needed was to add an infection to my list of growing ailments. “Looks dandy,” was all I said to her.

“Can I say I’m sorry again?”

“Sure. You made up for it,” I said, trying to lighten the air.

“Just…don’t,” she said, holding a hand up as she turned and walked back down the stairs.

Self-esteem awaaaay!

I shoved a huge chunk of bagel and cream cheese into my mouth and followed Ginny down to the bar. I chased it with a scalding mouthful of Dunkins, which woke me more with the burning than the caffeine.

Dana sat at the bar, looking greener than the Grinch and about half as happy. Audrey was doing her thing, Jack and water in one hand, the other rubbing Dana’s back with a motherly love. “Drink it, hon. You’ll feel better.” She took a gulp of her own beverage, then slid a merciless pint of Bloody Mary toward Dana.

“Gah,” Dana replied before turning a half shade greener. With a jade-hued hand, he gamely took a big gulp, shuddered, but held it together.

Burrito scuttled up and down the bar, happily ignoring any and all health codes against fat hairy bags of fur in a food service area. My adopted dog gave me a thousand-yard Chihuahua stare and snarled. I could say he was mad due to my two-day absence, but the mangy prick was probably more concerned that I was there to take him home, away from Mama Audrey.

I sat down next to Dana. Audrey auto-piloted a shot of whiskey onto the bar in front of me. I dumped it into my coffee and took a big sip off the top. “So, let’s begin at the begin. When did the shit start hitting the fan with you and Byron?”

He pressed his eyes together tight. “There was no shit. There was no fan. We hooked up over the course of a few months. We went dancing. I went to see his band on Mondays. We hooked up when it was convenient. We weren’t looking for anything more than that. Nothing that should have wound up…where we are now.”

“Is there anything, anything at all, you could tell me about what he did outside of playing in a band and fucking you?”

His eyes popped all the way open, and he shot me a look of indignation. “Well, that’s awful presumptuous.”

Ginny shook her head at me, disgusted. “You’re such a dick.”

“The fuck did I presume now?” I broke off a piece of bagel and put it on the bar for Burrito, who sniffed at it before licking at the cream cheese, giving me the hairy eyeball the whole time.

“How do you know who was fucking who, straight boy?” Dana’s lip curled in a sneer.

“I was being metaphorical. He fucked you financially, didn’t he?”

Dana and Ginny looked at one another.

“Listen,” I said, “we all need to let whatever preconceptions we’ve got hanging over us go. You’ve both been pissy with me and Junior because of ours. I’m trying, really trying, to let my issues go. You two need to do the same if we’re going to get anywhere here. For starters, could the two of you at least try to treat me like I’m not a flying asshole? ’Cause I’m really trying not to be.” I looked to Dana. “I’m sorry if you feel like I was making assumptions.”

Dana rolled his eyes. “As am I, then.”

“To be fair, your own dog doesn’t seem to like you very much,” Ginny said, nodding at Burrito.

Burrito bared his crooked teeth at me again with a whistling snarl.

“Okay, if everyone is through crapping on me, can you two get yourselves back to the place where you liked me? Or at least where you liked me enough where you thought I was useful to your cause? I need your help here. Did you want me to say it? I’m saying it. I need your help.”

“Was this point before I knew that you and your heterosexual life partner were violent homophobes?” Dana said with a sneer.

“You serious right now?” I said, my blood pressure ticking up a notch.

Ginny put her hand on Dana’s forearm. “I don’t know how to help you, Boo. I really don’t,” she said.

“What about you?” I said to Dana.

“What about me?” he said. “I didn’t ask for your help in the first place. I didn’t want any of this.”

“We’ve all fucked up here, one way or the other,” I said. “Least we can do is work together to un-fuck the situation as best we can.”

“My only mistake was a poor choice in boyfriend,” Dana said.

“Let’s not forget your pirating something that belonged to him that led to his death. Let’s not forget that, shall we?” I said.

Dana just turned his head from me.

“How about starting with the issues you two had with one another,” I said, hearing a pleading in my voice that made me angrier. Blood pressure up another notch.

Dana braced himself with another mouthful of spicy tomato juice and vodka. He gave a pained sigh before he spoke. “Three weeks ago, Byron came back with the band from Europe. They had a couple gigs in Amsterdam and Germany. He came back, dropped some of his stuff at our place, then disappeared on us. After a week, I started getting pissy with him about the money he owed me—which he said he would pay me when he got back.”

“I had to cover Dana’s rent for the month,” Ginny said.

“I didn’t even have the rent because of that asshole.”

I thought about the amounts of irony in play. How much could the rent have been? A grand? How much did Byron owe Dana? Maybe a couple grand? The whole time, a fuckload of money sat in the closet. More than any one of us would see over a long stretch of our lives, if ever.

And Byron, schmuck that he was, couldn’t get to it. He could have easily given Dana back the money that he owed out of the trumpet case.

But if he paid Dana out of the case, the people who the money belonged to were going to notice. People who were openly willing to kill for that kind of money.

And that could include a lot of people.

It was the Ouroboros of idiocy.

“Think the band might know?” I asked.

“Know what?” Dana said.

I almost blurted out about the money. Maybe I didn’t need any more whiskey. But I sure as hell needed the coffee. Hell with it. I took another gulp of my laced brew. “Anything. Anything at all. Anybody who Byron might have pissed off enough—”

Ginny cleared her throat loudly, then darted her eyes past me to the bar.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Audrey hovering, her bartender ears tuned into our conversation while she polished the one martini glass behind the bar. The martini glass that hadn’t had liquid in it sine 1983.

Christ. There was no way we were going to have this conversation without me accidentally saying something I wasn’t supposed to or them saying something Audrey didn’t need to be party to.

This was going nowhere. No matter how many times I tried to dig out anything, anything at all that could help, they didn’t know a goddamn thing. They just didn’t.

All I had left was the band. “You said you saw them on Mondays?”

“They have a regular gig in Cambridge every Monday night at Blue Envy.”

“Are they playing tonight?”

“Is today Monday?” Dana said, not bothering to hide his disdain.

“You know, Dana? All that shit about us not helping you because you’re gay? That’s one thing. Right now, I would choose not to help you simply because you’re an asshole.”

Ginny stood up. “Okay, boys. We’re all tired, hungover, and a lot freaked out. Why don’t we all take a deep breath and try to work out what to do?”

“That’s what I’m trying to goddamn do here. And his bitchy attitude isn’t helping,” I said, jabbing a finger at Dana’s forehead.

“My bitchy…” Dana said, his voice rising. “My bitchy attitude?”

“Watch it,” I said.

“Or what? You going to have your little buddy put a bullet—”

I grabbed him by the throat.

“Boo!” Ginny yelled

I heard Audrey, old school as ever, mutter into her Jack and water, “Talk a lot of shit, spit a lot of teeth.”

Without a word, I dragged Dana through the bar, down the stairs, and out the back.

Ginny followed, yelling, “Don’t hurt him, Boo. Let him go.”

I fired a look at her. “We’re simply going to have a nice talk.”

I slammed him into the door-bar on the back door and pushed him all the way into the parking lot with my hand on his neck.

He let out a soft, pained grunt as I shoved him hard against the dumpster. “Listen up, you little dickhead,” I said. “I’m at the point of not giving two shiny fucks anymore. You hear me?”

Dana’s eyes were wide, his lips staring to go purple. He tried to say something, but his air was being constricted by the fingers o’mine I had clenched around his trachea.

“If you’re understanding me, nod before you pass out.”

Dana’s chin moved.

“Boo!” Ginny said sternly as she followed us out.

I wheeled to her. “Shut your mouth, Ginny. Little man wants to talk tough? Then let him bring some tough to the table. I have had fucking enough!”

Ginny flinched under my fury.

I’d tried to be nice.

I really had.

“You can both see that, right?” I said.

Ginny nodded.

I felt Dana’s chin move atop my fingers in an attempt to nod.

“Good. Now let’s get something straight right here. I’m about a day away from my brother being railroaded for a killing he didn’t do, and I’m on the fast track to following him right into a jail cell. I am beyond a point of caring about your issues when you’re going to be a dick when I have questions for you. Understand?”

Dana nodded again.

“Just so you know exactly where I’m at, I don’t give a rat’s ass who you fuck, how you fuck them, or whatever goes up, into, or around your anus. What I care about is keeping me and mine out of a cage. What I also care about is the simple fact that you’re a goddamn asshole, and no amount of sexuality is gonna influence my opinion deeper one way or the other.”

Ginny said softly, but firmly, “Get off of him,” and reached for my hand. With equal restraint, I took her in a tight grip by the front of her sweater and held her off at arm’s length.

“Almost done,” I said. But when I turned back to Dana, I saw the last thing I wanted to see. The look he was giving me had shed any fear that he was going to be hurt by the big bad man.

What I saw was the hatred and sadness of a small man. A small man who got called “faggot” his entire life. There was a shaking defiance in the look, and in my mind, I could imagine the other tormentors he’d faced off with that expression. Every jock who stuffed him into a locker. Every alpha who tried to knock him down simply because he thought he could, or should dominate the small boy who acted like a girl.

I was now in their company in his mind. And now I saw his bitchiness and attitude for what it was—his only weapon in a dangerous fucking world. Especially dangerous when guys like me and mine called him names, slammed him against dumpsters.

He’d been hurt before by other big bad men. I was presenting him with nothing to fear that he hadn’t faced over and over again.

I let him go.

Dana sagged against the dumpster, his back sliding down the cold metal until he planted onto his ass, flakes of rust falling into his hair.

I let Ginny go too, and she ran over to Dana to help him back to his feet.

I still felt he was an asshole.

And his moustache was hella stupid.

I wasn’t the bad guy here, but I sure as fuck wasn’t the hero.

I wiped my hands on the front of my jeans, trying to maintain control though my self-righteousness had slipped into discomfort at being the bully. “So, now that that’s done with, I’m gonna tell you what we are going to do. We are going to go back to the bar, you are going to answer my questions. That okay with everyone?”

Ginny tried to immolate me with her eyes. Dana wheezed and nodded.

“Good. Let’s go back in. I’m freezing my balls off.”

Audrey made a point of not looking at us when we re-entered. “Everything okay?”

“Peaches,” I said. “So again,” I said to Dana, “Byron’s old band is supposed to play tonight?”

He cleared his throat. “Unless they’re on the road. Or if they’re even able to play. They are missing a trumpet player.”

True that.

“What time they go on?”

“Nine-ish?”

It was almost three. I had some time to kill before I could talk to the band. I needed to make things right with Ollie somehow. Other than the band, the cell phone was the only road I had to any place other than IAin’tGotShitsville.

“What are you guys going to do?”

“What can we do?”

“You can go home.”

“Can we?” Ginny asked, glaring.

I opened my mouth to answer, but then felt hypocritical for telling them they could. I’d abandoned my apartment right quick after the first assault. And those guys, whoever the hell they were, only left me with the impression that they were there to lay down some hurt on me. Not to end me like Galal Shaughness was there to do. Maybe. “It’s all handled. Unless you want to go back to my place.”

“Excuse me?” Ginny said, offense in her tone.

My mind raced What the fuck was her problem now…ohhhhh sheeee-yit. I held my palms up to her. “Wait, wait, wait—are you thinking that with all that’s going on, I’m coming on to you for another round of abuse you call sex?”

Ginny’s mouth formed a perfect O of horror and wrath.

Behind me, I heard Audrey spit-take a mouthful of Jack and water.

I went on. “Don’t get your panties twisted, sister. Or are they still on the office floor?”

I know.

I shouldn’t have said that.

But c’mon. That was a good one.

Either way, I knew it was just about the dickiest thing I could have said the moment the words left my lips—good one or not.

So…whoops.

Dana looked back and forth at the two of us. “Ew,” he said softly, finally understanding what had happened while he slept in his alcohol-induced coma.

Ginny gave me a pretty solid right hook to the mouth and stormed out the door.

Dana gasped.

Audrey wheezed.

Burrito yipped and snapped at my fingers.

Dana followed Ginny out the door, off to who knew the hell where.

Audrey handed me a short stack of bar napkins and another shot.

I dipped the napkin into the whiskey and dabbed it against my lip. It burned like hell, but didn’t seem to be bleeding too much.

Audrey’s eyes were watery with the laughter she was holding in.

“Please don’t,” was all I said.

And it was all she needed. The dam burst and she spent the next ten minutes guffawing at me. “You got less game than the Special Olympics, Willie.”

 

***

 

The snow had started falling in thick clumps again, because, you know, fuck me and my life. As strong winds blew sideways, I relished the one advantage the Omni had over Junior’s Buick. Unlike Miss Kitty, the shitbox I was currently sitting in had an operational heating system.

Without warning, I was flooded with guilt at my disparaging thoughts toward Junior’s old car, and…a little grief?

What the fuck was wrong with me?

Junior was the sentimentalist amongst the two of us. Part of my varying and often self-destructive defense mechanisms was the ability to let go, to separate myself from the painful memories of my past, my childhood.

Junior embraced and expanded on them. Where my apartment and living conditions could be considered Spartan at best, Junior decorated his apartment with collector’s totems from the childhood neither one of us had.

One morning, after a particularly epic drinking session, I’d woken up on his couch with all the flavors of hell having an oily orgy in my mouth.

I went into his bathroom to find some toothpaste, mouthwash, anything to banish the unholies from my tongue. What I found instead was a trail of toothpaste on the floor to Junior’s bedroom door. Apparently, he’d tried an oral exorcism of his own.

I found Junior on the bed in his boxers, snoring like a water buffalo with emphysema, tube of toothpaste in one hand, the other down the front of his drawers. As I quietly shut down my gag reflex and attempted to remove the toothpaste from his paw, I saw the action figures in bed with him. In this drunkenness, he’d opened a half dozen of his precious in-the-box toys. Duke and Starscream and Magneto had met on the epic battlefield of Junior’s single bed. The single bed with the Justice League sheets.

Somewhere in his drunken lizard brain, the twelve-year-old Junior played with the toys that the angry, isolated kid at St. Gabe’s never had a chance to own.

The whole tableau made me sad, especially when my first thought was that Starscream wouldn’t have had a chance against Magneto.

That thought belonged to the kid in me who never had those toys either.

A small, ghostly hand crept over the side of Junior’s bed. The Boy’s fingers tried to close over the G.I. Joe figure, but passed through, unable to grasp the playthings.

I know. I really should see a psychologist at some point.

But on the other hand, fuck you.

It was the same emotion that filled me when I thought about that goddamn car.

Junior had infected me with his sentimentality.

And I didn’t have the time or patience for sentimentality.

I drove by Ollie’s place, hoping he could work what was technologically impossible for me, and crack Byron’s phone. I parked the car behind a big pile of snow in a spot that wouldn’t have been able to take half of Miss Kitty’s girth.

I knocked on Ollie’s door and waited, apology ready and my sword positioned to fall on. Nothing.

Through the slatted blinds, I caught a flicker of movement.

“Come on, Ollie,” I said to the door. “I’m sorry.”

No response.

“We need your help, buddy. We really do. I’m sorry if I made you feel…like you couldn’t contribute.”

Another flicker of movement.

“Really?” I said to the air. I knocked at the window by the door and tried to peek in when the blind shifted and I found myself face-to-face with an ugly orange tabby with a lazy eye. The tabby seemed as surprised as I was, jumping back and shifting the blinds over behind the couch cushion.

With the cat’s help, I could see into the apartment that clearly had no Ollie in it.

Where the hell was he now?

I felt a second of concern before I remembered nobody had any reason to go after Ollie, except to get at me. Amongst our peers, Ollie was as removed from the scene as one could be.

It wasn’t like Ollie brought dates to The Cellar.

Far as I knew, Ollie barely dated at all.

Far as I knew.

Jesus. Was I really so disconnected from his life?

I didn’t even know he had a cat. Must have been a recent purchase, since the last time we did a boys’ day kung fu marathon at his pad, there wasn’t a cat.

But the addition of a pet into his life was something I should have known about.

On cue, the cat returned to the sill and pressed his bright ginger fur against the glass. I traced my fingers along his ruffled pelt, feeling his deep purr vibrating on the window.

First animal this week that hadn’t tried to eat me.

Felt nice.

But where the hell was Ollie?