I TURN BACK to the bar and finish my gin, and then his vodka. I reach for a half-drained Heineken that looks to have been abandoned. The bartender shakes his head, smiles cordially, points to the door.
I rub the side of my face and feel pretzel remains in the craggily brown nest adorning my chin. I brush them off. Life has grown, what’s the word Hearty used—ignominious. Or tedious, pathetic, whatever is the right word when you drink other people’s swill and scratch out a living filing other people’s manila folders.
I look down the bar and catch the eye of my journalist acquaintance, Nat Idle. Nat’s a bit sentimental for my tastes but he’s a world-class journalist, picks up things, like the clear fact that I’d crossed words with some paunchy dude. Nat’s looking at me with a head tilt, wondering: everything okay? I nod. I’m not in the mood for a partner. Besides, Nat’s got a pregnant girlfriend, and doesn’t need to get involved with this kind of jerk. I wonder if I once had a pregnant girlfriend, namely Meredith, before she dropped me.
I go after Hearty.
I’ve never liked running because it makes me look like a punch-drunk ostrich. So I walk/run/lope to the door, parting gawking revelers, seducers and their prey and push through the red door with the circular window.
I don’t see Hearty.
I look at my grandfather’s Rolex, the first thing I’d take with me in a fire and last thing I’d pawn when it comes to that.
It’s 8:50.
I see Hearty. He’s poked his head and arm out of the driver’s-side window of a sedan that is parallel parked half a block away between an SUV and a Bug. He removes a flyer tucked under his windshield wiper. He tosses shredded flyer parts onto the pavement and rolls up the window.
I drunken-ostrich-lope toward the car.
He starts inching the car back and forth to extricate it from the parking spot.
With help from a streetlamp, I see his eyes widen as I jump onto the sedan. In the air, I twist my body so that I land on my butt. I can feel the hood dent under 260 pounds of thin fat man.
I slide off the sedan.
Hearty is out the door.
He’s reaching into his internal jacket pocket. Gun? Knife? iPhone?
I lurch for the door and smash it into him, sandwiching his thick corpus against the car frame.
He smirks, unhurt. Standoff. Does either of us want to take the next step toward rolling around on the cement and trading broken noses?
“Zeke,” I say.
“You see, I speak the truth.”
“Gutter name. My grandfather was Ezekiel. Zeke. He killed my great-grandfather, a violent pedophile bastard and the mouth of the filthy river that became our gene pool.”
“But you hate the name Ezekiel.”
“Which also was the name of my great-grandfather, the pedophile. Of course that bitch would name her son Zeke. So, no, I don’t think you’re lying.”
He says: “Meredith does seem like a bitch.”
This is the part where I have no control. I lean my hairy bowling-ball cranium back and snap it forward right into Hearty’s nose.
Satisfying crack of forehead against cartilage followed immediately by a momentary trip to the planetarium inside my eyelids. When my vision rights, I see Hearty buckle and regain his balance, smile slightly, practiced at taking a blow, nonplussed by the blood bubble that grows and pops and sends a trickle underneath his nose.
I know then I’m being set up, even before I feel the physical presence behind me.
I don’t have time to turn around before some mallet or bat or baton wallops the back of my leg, just above the knee.
Hairy Neanderthal down.
I cross my arms over my head to stave off the next shot but it never comes. I dive for the feet of the soon-to-be savagely attacked bat wielder.
Then I hear the click.
Gunplay.
“Stop,” Hearty says.
I stop. Beyond the threat of having my brain bisected by shrapnel, I appreciate the mature tone in his voice. It says: we’re all adults here.
I look up. Hearty points a pistol in my general direction.
“I understand that what I’m about to say is something you will take great offense with,” he says.
“With which I will take great offense.”
“You’re predictable. You did exactly what we thought you would. Exactly.”
He wipes his nose on his soaking sleeve.
“You wanted me to know that you can take a thumping to the head.”
“That we’re smart and extremely tough. Take that into account when doing the math on your son’s life.”
I start to stand.
“Stay down,” he says.
“Ignominious—word of the day.”
Without getting a good look at the bat wielder, I see him take off The street is dark and empty.
“What’s so special about the computer file?” I ask.
“To you: it’s worth fifteen hundred. Minus my medical bill.”
The offer for three thousand must be off the table. Either way, I’m probably in the red.
“And if I get you the file, you’re going to spare the life of some boy who may or may not exist and who may or may not be named Ezekiel and who is absolutely, positively, almost certainly not my son.”
“Absolutely, positively, almost certainly.”
He lowers himself into the car. He starts the engine. He leans out the window.
“Bring it back to this bar. Same time tomorrow.”
I have to move so he won’t run me over.