While the woman filled his order, Taylor set the case on a barstool, unlocked the clasp, and took out the cue. He screwed its two parts into one as he surveyed the action on the pool table.
They were playing nine ball and it was clear that The Cripple wasn’t much of a match for The Shark. He missed what should have been a gimmee on the six in the far corner and Taylor watched the other clear the table. The stakes, two twenties, were secured under a plastic ashtray on the ledge that ran along the alcove’s far wall. By the time The Shark was folding them into the fedora’s black band, Darren had relocated the pitcher and two of the glasses to the table in the rear corner where he and Trevor had settled in to watch the show.
The ZZ Top song had ended and the ominous tolling of a bell preceded the opening bars of track one on AC/DC’s Back in Black.
It had been almost four hundred years since John Donne had penned his famous warning, and while it’s unlikely that he could ever have imagined his poem would resonate so thoroughly in a scuzzy little biker bar in a city that hadn’t been more than a few bundles of sticks overlooking a cornfield when he was putting feather to parchment, there was no doubt that he would have been suitably impressed by the reach of, if not his exact words, then at least the sentiments they expressed. For in that moment, there wasn’t a soul in the bar who wasn’t thinking that those bells were indeed tolling for Taylor, sipping from his beer as he made his way towards the pool table. Just another cocky rich kid taking a break from exams and overdue papers, come down to test his mettle amongst the great unwashed, thinking his daddy’s money would make him immune to their stain, not yet cognizant of the fact that he was done for from the moment he came in, mistaking their reserve for apathy when it was something else entirely: antipathy if not outright hate. For what he was, all that he stood for, and everything in his pockets besides. The cue an added bonus, for even if they didn’t know its real value, they knew it was worth something; fifty bucks, maybe, at Squire’s Pawn Shop just down the block—n to the power of the unknown times that if they happened to probe beneath the case’s padding and found where Bryson had stashed its gold-fringed certificate of authenticity.
Boy you’re in for a time of it. Order another pitcher for your friends, you’ll see.
Such, anyway, were the thoughts churning through at least Taylor’s mind and that he hoped were also worming their way into the head of the largest of the Flaming Eagles. Hoping the way he looked, the way he walked, and the arrogance radiating off of him as if it was his birthright would be enough to serve as cause for his anticipated effect. His only real knowledge of these things, mind you, being movies he’d watched in which it didn’t take more than a glance to incite riot in a specimen such as the one doing his best to ignore the cocky young buck just now placing a twenty on the pool table, not saying a word as he looked to The Shark for a nod. He found instead an upward thrust of his chin, the gesture and the drift to his eyes motioning towards The Cripple.
Taylor shrugged.
If that’s the way you want to play it, so be it.
He busied himself with a cube of chalk, letting The Cripple rack the balls even though that task should have been passed to him since there was no doubt in his mind that The Cripple’d be the one breaking.
And so it was.
Lining up the cue ball, The Cripple threw a quick glance over his shoulder to see if Taylor was looking. Finding him otherwise distracted by the young woman just now coming out of the bathroom, he leant forward and poked the diamond of racked balls with the tip of his cue, so as to confer a slight advantage. The clatter of balls breaking wasn’t enough to break Taylor’s fixation on The Girl and chuckling to himself as the four and the six found opposite corners, The Cripple looked back over at the young man. The smile parting the biker’s lips suggested he knew right then how the night was going to play and also that he’d been on the receiving end of that shit stick often enough to call it justice, as if the universe had nothing better to do than drop some pretty little rich kid into his world solely to provide him with a little payback for a lifetime of poverty, misfortune, and pain.
Such was the impression the smirk on his face gave Taylor when he watched the scene for the first time, later that night. Then, he couldn’t help but think that had The Cripple known then that Taylor’s thoughts were in perfect symmetry with his own, it might have robbed The Cripple of the obvious satisfaction he felt as he made the shot and moved into position to bank the seven in off the two. The quicker he finished up with the preliminaries, the sooner the main event could begin, the same thought, in fact, that had been on Taylor’s mind from the moment he saw The Girl step through the door in the back marked, Chicks.
She was a skinny little thing with a greasy drape of murky blonde curls teasing at what appeared to be two walnuts set on end within the stretch of a skin-tight orange tank top, and though she didn’t look much older than sixteen, she walked with the practised swing of a seasoned pro on the way to her next trick. She’d noticed Taylor right away too. She must have also seen an opportunity in the way he was looking at her because as she sat on the largest biker’s lap she nuzzled her nose into his neck, using that as a ploy so she could sneak a peek at Taylor to see if he was still gazing after her. When she found he was—smiling at her and even having the audacity to wink—she took her old man’s ear in her mouth, suckling at its lobe and running her tongue into its canal while her hand wriggled its way past his over-ripe gut, weeding through his short and curlies until it came to the stump of his manhood, no doubt already inflating by the time her press-on nails were raking against its shaft. Every thrust against his leg and toss of her hair meant not so much to make Taylor jealous as it was to prime the man sitting below her so he’d be good and ready when the time came to teach that arrogant little prick a lesson he’d not soon forget.
Taylor played along with her game by feigning a blush then turned back to the table in time to see the five ball graze the side pocket. It came to a rest not more than an inch away, making his first shot one he could have made blindfolded. Three shots brought him to the nine and when he’d sunk that, The Cripple was already reaching into his back pocket for the wallet chained to one of his belt loops.
Taylor left his winnings where they were and chalked his cue, knowing that he didn’t need to look at The Girl again to know that she was still looking at him. The Cripple racked the balls tight but Taylor got a good break nevertheless, sinking the four and making the table into a constellation of perfectly spaced stars. If he’d have been playing his A-game he could have cleared the table shooting from behind his back, but he was saving that for The Shark. He intentionally missed a bank shot for the six, making sure to leave the cue ball wedged between the eight and the far rail where The Cripple would have had to channel Stephen Hawking to work out the physics of even grazing the seven. But The Cripple got more spin than Taylor thought possible without bumping the eight. The white curved into a drastic arc and made solid contact with the seven. For a moment it looked like it had a real chance at the near corner, The Cripple wincing and shaking his head as it caught the bumper and spun out.
It wouldn’t have put much of a dent in Taylor’s plan had it gone in, and it wouldn’t really have mattered either if The Cripple had taken the game because of it. Still, it might have given Taylor pause to think that maybe things weren’t as cut and dried as he’d imagined. And a little pause, he knew, might be all that it would take for this night to spin off its rails. So he took careful aim with his next two shots and by the time he was circling towards the cue ball to take a straight shot at the nine, The Cripple had all but conceded and was walking back towards his buddies.
The Girl had since reclined into the big man’s lap and was spooning fingernails full of white powder into his nose and hers at intervals. The Cripple leant close to his shoulder and whispered a few words. The big man nodded, then turned his head ever so slightly to get a sense of what he’d been talking about, seeing maybe t
he start of something developing at the table. Taylor was shaking his head and scowling over at The Shark, who replied by shrugging and chewing idly on his toothpick.
“Hell’s Bells” faded into obscurity and in the quiet that followed his voice rose in angry declaration.
“I get to break because it’s my fucking table,” The Shark said, and Taylor threw up his arms in a huff as he turned towards his beer stowed at the corner edge of the bar. It was all for show, this display of mock injustice, for on his periphery he’d just caught sight of The Girl snatching up the empty pitcher from the Eagles’ table on her way to getting a refill.
At the other end of the bar, the keeper was fiddling with her phone at the stereo. The time she spent thumbing at its touchpad suggested she was looking for a perfect match to the mood set by the last song and also that she was a little unsure of how things might proceed. Taylor had a pretty good idea though and as he took a sip from his beer, he threw a quick nod over at the table in the rear. Trevor nodded back and Taylor returned his attention to The Girl. She was leaning over the bar and tilting the pitcher under the taps, not more than two feet away from where Taylor was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Being that close to her, it was obvious to Taylor that she hadn’t had a bath in going on a week, something he was able to glean by way of the odour souring the air at a distance of three paces—equal parts cat piss and Jack Daniel’s if he had to wager a guess—and by the dribble of long-dried blood leaked from a pimple on her left shoulder picked into an open sore. As she waited for the pitcher to fill, Taylor watched her with something akin to genuine interest. She responded by throwing a few glances in his direction, fleeting enough to be called skittish had they not also been accompanied by a look of gleeful malevolence glaring out of her dime-sized pupils.
“You playin’ or not?” The Shark called out from behind. He was leaning over his cue about to break, something he seemed reticent to do without an audience to bear witness to his particular form of genius.
Taylor held up one finger as he tilted his glass to his lips, draining the liquid in three easy gulps and letting his gaze linger on the cleavage squeezing from The Girl’s top just long enough to make sure she noticed.
When he finally looked up again she was smiling at him through yellow teeth.
“Lester catches you looking at me like that, it’ll mean your ass,” she said, scraping at the corner of her mouth with one of her cartoonishly long fingernails, each of them painted fire engine red.
“Who’s Lester?” Taylor asked, as if he didn’t already know.
She jerked her head and Taylor followed the motion back to her table. Lester was glaring at him as a mama bear might at a hunter who’d just set his sight on her cub. As The Girl pushed herself off the bar she made a sound like a hiccup, which could just as well have been a laugh. Taylor watched the wiggle to her step all the way back to the table. She hadn’t made it halfway before Lester was on his feet and Taylor tempered his delight by unscrewing his cue. He fit it back in its case and snapped the clasp shut. When he turned back, Lester wasn’t more than two strides away, his hands wrecking balls and his eyes reduced to narrowed slits.
But that would have to wait.
A Louisville Slugger had just materialized between them, and Mike the bouncer was wedging the butt end of it under Lester’s chin, stopping him short.
The buttonhole camera wasn’t good for much beyond discretion, and so, nine days later, when Taylor was sitting in the back seat of his Lexus, watching the scene unfold on the iPad in his lap, the figures onscreen were reduced to shadows playing against the smoky light. But the microphone taped to Taylor’s chest had no problem picking up the bouncer’s voice, loud and clear.
“Goddamnit, Lester,” he says, “take it outside.”
It’d never failed to send a chill up his spine, and as the screen faded to black Taylor could still feel the hairs hackling over the back of his neck, his breath held in anxious anticipation of what was to come next.
* * *
Taylor watched it through to the end. He was just about to click play so he could watch it all over again when he heard Davis mutter something, sounded like “shit,” from the driver’s seat.
He looked up from the screen and dislodged the Beats from his right ear, peering between the seats at the hulking black man behind the wheel as if he was going to ask him what was wrong. But they hadn’t spoken a word on the two-hour drive from Toronto, and Taylor had no intention of breaking the silence now.
A moment later, the faint strains of a siren arose from behind and he leaned forward just far enough to see the speedometer’s digital readout. It was just dropping below 110, a far cry from the 140 he was doing before they’d turned off the 11 just south of Tildon, letting the two-lane 118 lead them in a circuitous route towards Hidden Cove Road where Taylor’s family had, his father liked to brag, their own little piece of paradise. Still, thirty clicks over the limit was plenty to get the attention of one of the local Roscoes, which was what his dad called the members of Tildon’s police force. The reference was lost on his son but not on his mother who, when he was a kid, Taylor would hear scoff from the passenger seat whenever her husband complained about being pulled over yet again, most often for speeding on this very stretch of road.
“They’re just doing their job,” his mother would chide. “If you don’t like getting pulled over, maybe you should slow down.”
But getting Bryson Wane to listen to reason was about as easy as it would have been to drive the family’s Volvo through the proverbial needle’s eye. For most of the year, the station wagon collected dust in the six-car garage beside their palatial residence in The Windfield’s, an exclusive neighbourhood in Toronto’s York Mills. When Taylor was young, his dad always made a point of driving it up to the cottage himself the first weekend of summer, giving his driver, and his wife’s, the week off, the same as his own father had when he was a boy. Over the years, he’d been stopped so many times that the Roscoes, to a one, had come to know him by name and greeted him with wide smiles as he rolled down his window.
“Well, hello, Mr. Wane,” they’d say, “so nice to see you again,” making their meaning clear by way of a quip about the police station needing a computer upgrade or a new snowmobile for their fleet, before thanking him for his generosity as they handed him his ticket.
The cruiser was coming up fast behind now, its reds and blues flashing over the evergreens creating an unbroken wall on either side of the road. Davis’s hands were gripped hard on the wheel and the muscle running in a thick cord up the side of his neck gave a sudden twitch so it was clear to Taylor that his run-ins with the law had been of an entirely different sort.
And on the heels of that thought, another: the look of surprise on the face of whatever Roscoe it was who pulled them over, seeing that it wasn’t Young Master Wane driving the Lexus LX 570 so plainly registered in his name. His confusion given over to alarm as the officer tilted his flashlight towards the rear seats, its glare scouring over the bulge as big as a McIntosh apple cut in half swelling over Taylor’s left eye, and that giving the officer every reason to suspect foul play.
“There a problem here, Mr. Wane?” he’d ask, the only thing to express the apprehension he felt at the sight of the hulking black man driving and the rich prick’s son, bruised and bloody, in the back seat being the way his hand ever so casually reached to unclip the strap securing his sidearm.
Taylor answering, “No problem, officer,” even as he nodded, the pretence of fear widening his eyes, his own hand reaching for the door latch beside him. He’d yell, “He’s got a gun!” and throw himself backwards and out of the cab so as to be well clear of the volley of shots sure to follow.
It’d serve that son of a bitch right, Taylor thought as the SUV pulled onto the shoulder, and thus he was sorely disappointed when, a moment later, the cruiser raced past, its siren and lights almo
st immediately swallowed up by a bend on the road ahead.
Davis breathed a sigh of relief and with nothing to look forward to but a return to the stilted silence creating separate worlds of the front and back seats, Taylor slipped the headphone back onto his ear, returning his attention to the screen.
* * *
In the three weeks since it had been shot, he’d replayed the video more than a dozen times which was barely a drizzle amidst the ocean of viewers who’d watched it after it had been posted to affluenza.com. The website had been Trevor Lourdes’s idea. Trevor’s father, an entertainment lawyer, had bought him his first camera for his thirteenth birthday and during his teenage years Trevor had accumulated the thirty-odd hours of footage that comprised the fledgling dot-com’s archive, tagging along after his older brother, Nick, and his friends, all of whom spent their idle hours testing the bounce of the safety net provided by their parents’ considerable fortunes.
It was one of Nick’s friends, a Vito Babič who’d provided Trevor with the inspiration for affluenza.com. Six months previous, he’d swiped the keys to The Toybox—his father’s luxury car dealership—in retaliation for having been banned from the lot by his dad two days earlier when, drunk and coked-up, he’d crashed his Aston Martin into a Ferrari Testarossa heading out of the parking lot for a test drive. His dad had changed the security code for the retractable door in the rear of the display room in the interim, leaving young Vito no apparent choice but to drive The Toybox’s most expensive car, a McLaren 650s Spider, through the front window. The ensuing police chase was captured on film by Chuck Milner, the owner of the Flyby Helicopter Academy. That evening, he was conducting one of his popular “Eye in the Sky Traffic Watch” classes and thus had the good fortune to be flying over the 401 at the moment Vito was re-enacting a few of his favourite scenes from The Fast and the Furious, a half-dozen police cars in hot pursuit.
The chase had ended at a section of the highway that had been reduced to one lane during resurfacing. Vito hadn’t seen the preceding warning signs, or simply hadn’t cared. When the cement barriers protecting the road crew had finally come into view, so said the police report, at a rate of 51.389 metres per second, he had approximately three quarters of a second to swerve into the only available lane as a last-ditch effort to avoid what anyone watching must have assumed would be a fiery end to his midnight joyride. Vito had somehow managed this feat with inches to spare, though even his (now) well-documented skills behind the wheel hadn’t been enough to prevent the Spider from fishtailing out of control, its rear shortly thereafter impacting at 165 kilometres per hour with the back of an airport shuttle van transporting the members of the First Baptist Church of Toronto’s choir to Pearson International for the red-eye to O’Hare where they were scheduled to perform at a sister church in the Windy City. There were no injuries from that crash besides a few bumps and bruises and a concussion sustained by Jasper Delaine, a plumber who sang baritone. The same couldn’t be said about what happened after the McLaren was catapulted into the air. Its trajectory reached a height of four metres, plenty for it to clear the cement barricade on its way to barrel-rolling some one hundred and ten metres through the construction site and crashing to an abrupt halt against the back of an asphalt spreader.
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