Blue Envy looked like it was drawing a decent crowd, considering it was Monday and considering the radio was calling for another snowpocalypse to drop within the next twelve hours. And also considering it was jazz.
I wrapped my coat tightly around myself and opened the door to another gust of bone-chilling winter wind. My knee immediately flared up, begging me to get back inside somewhere, preferably a place with a large supply of both whiskey and Bengay. The cold felt good against my stab wound, though, so it wasn’t all bad.
I walked over to the doorman.
“Twelve dollars,” he said, brows knitted together as he gave me the once-over.
Oh for chrissakes. I gritted my teeth and handed him a twenty.
He wasn’t someone I recognized from the circuit, so I couldn’t pull the old “club courtesy” angle and skip the door charge. I had twenty-six bucks left in my wallet after the cover, and I cursed myself for not at least pulling another hundred out of the doctored trumpet case. As far as blood money was concerned, fuck ’em. It wasn’t the blood of me or mine that was on the floor.
Yet.
Blue Envy wasn’t as frou-frou as Raja, but it was still several steps—several staircases—above The Cellar. Lot of dudes around me dressed nicely. And they all smelled nice. I couldn’t be sure, since it was my own stank that was filling my senses, but after two days without a shower, and one rough and tumble roll in the sack, I was reasonably sure I was raising a Pigpen-esque cloud of filth.
The bartender wore a vest and sported a pompadour that had more work put into it than an aging starlet’s face. “What would you like?”
“Jim Beam and a Bud?”
He hid his disdain fairly well.
Fairly.
He put the drinks in front of me. “Nineteen dollars, please.”
I was glad he’d told me the price before I’d taken a sip, otherwise my spit-take might have ruined his fancy haircut. I placed another twenty down. Prick didn’t give me change, then had the balls to look at the bar to see if any other bills has sprouted wings and flown their way onto the mahogany.
He sniffed, then went back to making a regiment of bright pink and green martinis that had some sort of fruit salad dangling off the glass.
That should have been my first hint.
I took my booze and walked down to the front by the small curtained stage. There were a couple of tables, but they all had paper tents with Reserved written on them in gilt cursive.
There I was, all up in the schmancy again.
I leaned against the wall and waited for the show to begin.
Then I got my first sense.
My internal bouncer alarms gave a light jangle.
All good bouncers, and many bartenders, have a highly tuned sixth sense. Science hasn’t proven it, but it was a fact. I’d heard it described along the lines of when you were a kid and you walked in the door and knew, just knew, that your parents had been fighting.
That feeling.
You do what I ‘ve done long enough, you can read all kinds of shit off people—in their expression, in their posture, in their tone of voice. A good bouncer could walk into a crowded room and not only be able to tell that something heavy was about to hit the fan, but would be able to pinpoint from what direction it was emanating within a second or two.
Junior said it had a smell. Testing his theory, I breathed deeply through my nose, but all I caught was a suissant of dirty balls. Again, those were probably mine.
Then, just as quickly, it passed. It wasn’t gone, but it passed, right as the first notes from a stand-up bass thrummed through the loudspeakers. A deep voice announced, “Please give a round of applause for Ellie Confidential and the Brass Balls Band.”
Well, at least they were starting the evening. I didn’t want to have to sit through opening bands if it was all jazz. That, and I couldn’t afford another drink. I’d just wait out the set and chat up a couple of the band members after. Assuming my ball stank didn’t clear the room first.
A lone trumpet note carried the opening into “My Funny Valentine.” Something warmed in my chest. Not only did I not know that the song was considered jazz, but the old Chet Baker album had been one of my mom’s favorites.
The curtains parted, and Veronica Lake’s little sister stood center stage. She was the one playing the notes, a trumpet pressed to her full lips. I guess they had a replacement ready to go for Byron. Being a Neanderthal, watching her on the horn nearly instigated a second puberty in me.
Ellie was hot, straight-up.
Then she put down the horn and began singing one of my earliest lullabies with Greta Garbo’s voice. Her thickly lashed eyes pressed closed, she breathed the song gently into the microphone. Ellie Confidential had some mad talent.
I closed my eyes too, and let the notes wash over me.
For a moment, only a moment, I was The Boy and he was me, and we were in a warm place inside my childhood. I couldn’t tell you how long it had been since music had carried me away so far from the moment.
Man, it was music to fall in love with. My mind drifted to Kelly, to the idea of what we could have been, could have had. The mental image started to float away toward the idea that she’d been playing Hide the Kielbasa with Ian Summerfield, but even that thought was calmed and washed away on the music.
Then the first red flag popped up in my head just as the mush hidden deep inside me was traipsing through a field of daisies. It popped up with such force, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole room heard the booooiiiiing inside my head.
I opened my eyes. Yup. There were no women in the room. Toward the front of the stage, couples were slowly dancing to the song.
Guy couples.
Uh-oh. Maybe that dirty-ball souissant wasn’t only mine. There were a lot of balls in that room. At least a percentage of them had to be dirty.
Shit.
This wasn’t Kansas.
And I was in a room filled with Friends of Dorothy.
Red flag number two billowed magnificently in the winds of my brain as that sixth sense kicked in again. My eyes darted from person to person. My eyes first locked with the Veronica Lake lookalike on the microphone. Her eyes were wide, locked on mine. A note warbled in her throat and she glanced to my right.
I turned and was met with a glare blasting cold hatred from a swollen face—purpled under the eyes, a line of new stitches over the right eyebrow. It took me a second before I could piece together the features under the beating and where the hell I knew them from.
Alex.
Remember him?
Took me a second too.
I’ll give you a minute.
…
…
…
…
Time’s up. Same for me.
As I remembered the little gay dude who’d caught a savage beating at The Cellar…
…just as the beginnings of an apology were forming in my head…
…somebody grabbed my left arm from behind and wrenched it back. I turned and saw Cornrows from my apartment assault, both meaty hands clenched tight around my wrist.
Rookie mistake, leaving me with one arm open. I clenched my right fist and readied a hook that was going to break his fucking jaw.
Then somebody grabbed my right arm and wrenched it back to meet the other. Fuck. Lineman.
The rookie mistake was mine.
That wrenching of my right arm was the one that hurt, pulling open the tape and my stab wound.
I cried out in the sudden pain before I could even say a word. And any word that might have followed was cut short by the bottle of Grey Goose that walloped me on the face. The thick glass—or my temple—made a loud crack that drew a long and horrified “Oooooh!” from the room.
Bright spots danced before my eyes and my knees buckled. The two goons didn’t let me hit the floor, but my falling weight pulled at my side again. The starburst of pain from my perforated belly took my breath away, but was the only thing that kept me conscious.
I didn’t think I was going to be so lucky the second time, in more ways than one.
(Here’s a Boo Malone Bouncer Fun Fact for ya! Most of the time, the impact from a bottle strike isn’t where the damage happens. It’s the glass. Say someone whacks you on the skull with a thinner-glassed bottle—Stoli, for instance—it’s going to shatter. At which point you’ve got a shower of glass streaking across your face. Then, what’s left attached to the bottleneck carves your face into ribbons. I’ve seen it. It ain’t pretty.)
Through my blurred vision, I could see a long crack along the vodka bottle from the impact on my head. The second shot, when that thick glass shattered, would fillet my face off like a chicken cutlet.
Self-preservation and my rage kicked in.
The room went red.
With a roar, I dropped all my weight down, pulling the goons halfway over with me. I didn’t care how many gym muscles you have, two hundred and forty pounds of dead weight is a bitch. They held their grips on my arms.
Good.
I ignored the pain in my side and the motherfucker of a headache that I’d been delivered via French vodka bottle and rolled back, mule-kicking my heel up along the length of my left arm. The bottom of my Timberland blasted Cornrows right under the chin. He was unconscious before he even had a chance to let me go.
I swung the same leg back behind Lineman and swept him at the knees. He pitched forward on top of Alex, and they both went down in a heap. I tried to spring to my feet, but still didn’t have my equilibrium back. I saw the exit, had every intention of running for it, but my looped brain decided to turn the floor into a listing boat on the high seas, and I toppled, doing a soft shoe the entire way, until my back slammed against the stage.
In the scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened, tactically. If I had to fight off a bar full of righteously pissed off gay dudes, at least I wasn’t going to have to defend my flank.
(And no, I wasn’t going for a rimshot there.)
(And no, I wasn’t going for one with my use of “rimshot” either.)
I put my fists up and readied myself for an ass-kicking I hoped would only send me to the hospital and not to a slab.
Sometimes being a man meant you just had to take that beating. But I was damn sure going to let these boys know they were in a fight.
Lineman disentangled himself from Alex and stood, reached into the back of his pants, and with a flick of his wrist, opened an extension baton.
This was going to hurt.
Lineman rushed me, the baton raised high.
I put my left arm up to block the baton, and cocked my right to throw a haymaker that would, with a bit of luck, take his head clean off. And then, I hoped, the sight of his bleeding neck stump and disconnected head would be such a shock to the room that it would buy me enough time to scamper out the door and run like a bitch.
As Lineman closed the distance, my mind went through the fastest prayer in history along with the thought that I was a dead man.
Five feet.
One foot.
KER-FUCKA-BLOOEY!
From behind and above me, the weighted bottom of a mike stand arced through the air and blasted Lineman right on the side of the face with devastating force. The bone structure of his face shifted unnaturally to the left, spinning him around as he nosedived to the floor. A pool of blood immediately fanned out from his broken face.
Somebody screamed, and the room fell into chaos.
I looked up and saw the Veronica Lake-alike standing over me like a Viking queen, the mike stand her sword. Through my concussed brain, she looked like Brunhilda come to deliver me to Valhalla. (Did Brunhilda deliver dead souls to Valhalla? Who the fuck knew.)
She tossed her improvised weapon to the side and reached under my shoulder, pulling me up onto the stage. “We’re going out the back, buddy,” she said.
I planted my other hand on the stage and pushed myself, rolling onto the stage.
Alex still had other ideas, despite his fallen henchmen.
With a yell, he charged us both from stage left, two bottles held high, one in each hand.
Veronica tore the blonde peekaboo hair off her head and tossed it into Alex’s face, blinding him with lustrous wigginess. Within the second that Alex’s vision was impaired, Ollie followed up with a straight right, square into the wig’s part—which happened to line up perfectly with the middle of Alex’s face.
Alex wobbled and fell off the stage, landing on one of the bottles. A good dozen shards of glass poked out of his designer suit, blood trickling out of each fresh puncture.
Alex screamed again.
Wait a minute…
OLLIE?
I spun back and looked at the face of one my oldest friends, now recognizable under the carefully applied makeup.
Ollie smiled through his flawless lipstick, breathing heavily. “Still think I’m no good in a fight?”