The Hard Bounce

by Todd Robinson

  “Look, Malone, you’ll know everything you need to know when you need to know it. Until then, you’ll just have to make do.”

  I laughed. “With what? A first name and a picture? Are you shitting me?”

  Junior returned from the basement towing a protesting kid with dreadlocks and bad acne by the back of his Mudvayne shirt. “This little jackass was smoking a joint in the downstairs bathroom. He knows the girl.” Junior pulled another chair over and dropped him in it hard. The kid tried to shake it off with a defiant shoulder roll. “What’s your problem, man?” he said to Junior, feeling safer in the company of witnesses.

  “Look at me,” I said to him. “Listen carefully. You’re going to answer my questions and that’s it. Now take a look at this guy.” I thumbed at Barnes. Barnes straightened up, confused at where this was going.

  The kid looked him up and down. “Who, the cop?”

  Barnes frowned and went red. I did my best not to chuckle. “Yeah, the cop. If you don’t answer me, he’s going to drop your ass in juvie.” I turned to Barnes. “What will possession get a kid his age? Three years?”

  Barnes finally caught on. “Uh . . . five. Minimum.”

  The kid’s fearless facade shattered. “It was just one joint, man! Please! I don’t know anything about Cassie.”

  Hell, just knowing her name, he had as much info as I’d been given. “Relax. What’s your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “All right, Paul. How do you know Cassie?”

  “I see her around the Square and stuff. She was just here for the show. What did she do?” He meant Harvard Square, a traditional hangout for the young punk kids and skate rats.

  “No questions, Paul. Answers.” I thumbed at Barnes again. Paul nodded quickly. “Who was she here with?”

  “I dunno. I think she was alone. She wasn’t with that creepy dude she’s always going off with.” If Barnes was a German shepherd, his ears would have shot straight up.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know the dude. He just gives me the creeps.” Paul shuddered to emphasize those creeps. “Y’know. Slimy fucker. Got that big snake tattoo around his arm.”

  “What else?”

  Paul thought about it. “Real skinny. Got greasy black hair, goes halfway down to his butt. Looks like a rocker. Nobody knows why Cassie hangs with that guy.”

  “Is he her boyfriend?”

  “Jeez, I hope not. He’s like in his twenties.” Paul leaned back in his chair, teenage cockiness back to full. He’d realized he had something we wanted and that information gave him an edge. “Cassie’s a cool chick and all, but she’s a little flaky. That guy’s just… I dunno. Like I said, he creeps everybody out.”

  “Junior, take him up to the office.”

  “Move your ass, Weedy McTokesalot,” Junior snarled.

  “Get his number and address.”

  Paul panicked. “But you said—”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Relax. It’s just in case we need to ask you some more questions. Junior’s going to give you my beeper number.”

  “A beeper?” Paul looked at me, aghast. “Who are you, Fred Flintstone?”

  “We can still toss you in juvie, smartass.”

  He mimed a key between his lips and turned it.

  “If you see Cassie anywhere, and I mean at any time, you beep me. Got it?”

  Paul snapped me a brisk salute. “Got it.”

  “C’mon.” Junior walked off with Paul.

  I looked over at Barnes. “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much are we going to be paid if we find the girl?”

  “There’s twenty-five hundred in the envelope to get you started.” My heart did a somersault. Twenty-five might not impress Bill Gates, but in my world, we were starting out on the right foot. And that right foot was in a Gucci loafer. “I’ll need to talk with my employer on a final amount.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “I meet your employer.”

  “That’s not happening. You deal with me,” Barnes said.

  “Ooh! I’ve got an idea! How about no? I meet him before I do another goddamned thing.” Barnes started to protest. I cut him off. “You tell him what you just saw. You tell him we meet or he can go fuck a duck. You know where I am.” I got up from the table. “I’m done.”

  Barnes and Kelly stood up. Barnes didn’t offer me a goodbye handshake as he walked out. I wasn’t hurt.

  Kelly said softly, “Thanks for the beer.”

  She followed Barnes out without a second glance back at me. I did the opposite and didn’t take my eyes off her butt as she exited. Then the low-watt bulb flickered over my dome.

  Sonofabitch.

  As I stared at her exiting skirt muffins, I realized I’d just been had.

  Kinda.

  Chapter Three

  Junior sat at the desk writing down Paul’s info on an index card. We planned on getting a computer one day. On the other hand, we also planned on winning a million bucks on scratch tickets and retiring to Hawaii to build custom thongs for Natalie Portman. We were about as close to execution on either plan.

  Paul stood, leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed, looking like he was aching to get the hell out. The kid looked at me. “Am I done?”

  “Couple more questions,” I said. “What’s Cassie’s last name?”

  He hummed the “I dunno” notes.

  Swing and a miss.

  “What about the Dutch House?” I asked. Junior looked at me.

  “What about it?” It was no secret why kids went to the Dutch House. A big squat in Cambridge, just off the Square, it was a safe place for kids to get high, drink beer, and do anything else they didn’t want their parents catching them doing.

  “Has Cassie been there?”

  “Once or twice. I don’t think she dug it. She’s not into the scene that much.”

  “What scene is that?” Junior said, sneering. “Future Junkies of America?

  Paul smirked but his eyes reflected hurt. I shot Junior a “leave him alone” look. Junior scratched his chin at me. He forgot to use all his fingers.

  “I don’t think she’s been staying there or nothing.” Paul looked at our business card. “What does 4DC stand for?”

  “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.”

  He smiled. “Hunh, cool.”

  “We’re done,” Junior said, dismissing him with a wave.

  Paul started to go, but I grabbed his arm and slid a hundred from the envelope into his hand. He gaped at it. “Holy shit!”

  “If you get me to her, there’s more. Cassandra’s not in any trouble, despite the cop. You’re working for 4DC now. You know what that means?”

  “Uh… no?” His eyebrows met in confusion.

  “What it means is you’re representing me. You’re representing Junior, here.”

  Junior waved his hands in protest. “Oh, no, no, no. This little shit ain’t representing me.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re representing us. Nobody else needs to know. Anybody asks, you’re just wondering where Cassie’s gone off to. Got it?”

  “Got it, boss,” he said with a crisp salute. He smiled so wide I thought the corners of his mouth would meet in the back of his head.

  As he ran down the stairs, I yelled after him. “And if you use that money to buy weed, I’m gonna break your shins.”

  I looked back at Junior, whose face was a mask of amazement. “Was that a hundie you just gave that little prick?”

  “Yep. We’ve got a gig.”

  I ran Junior through the basics, since basics were all I had. He sat on the corner of the desk and chewed his lower lip as he mulled the information. My fingers massaged the ache that roosts inside the lumpy cartilage of my nose when I think too much in one day. I’ve had my nose busted six times—one on Junior. Believe it or not, that bothers him competitively.

  After a long silence, Junior said, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.
”

  “Man, that’s not a lot to start with. A picture and a pothead.”

  “True that.”

  “This isn’t what we do.”

  “I know, Junior. I told them that. They still want us to try. If they want to hand out money, why not to us?”

  Junior thought that over. “That is a shitload of money, though.” He drummed his fingers, tapping out a cadence with the letters H-A-R-D tattooed across the knuckles of his scarred right hand. He rubbed his other hand, the one with C-O-R-E across it, over the pocket where he had deposited the twelve-hundred I’d just handed him.

  The picture of Cassandra sat on the desk. Junior stared deeply at it, jaws tight. “Boo?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Who the fuck is this girl?”

  We closed the bar at two, and Junior and I hung out shooting pool while the bartender counted out the receipts.

  I nursed a beer and bourbon, since all us tough guys drink bourbon.

  Well, almost all of us. Junior placed his plastic cup of wine on the lip of the table while he lined up his shot. The only vintages served at The Cellar could probably strip the barnacles off Old Ironsides. Plus most of the iron. I never understood his taste for it, but it was all he drank.

  Junior viciously smacked the cue ball off the nine ball. With a hard clack, the nine and the cue bounced off the rails and both dropped. “Shit.” Not only did he scratch, but he was playing solids.

  I took the stick and smoothly banked the cue off both bumpers without hitting any balls. “Shit.” Fewer people got as much as we did for our four quarters. If one of our matches ended in less than a half-hour, we were unusually hot.

  Luke, the night porter, rattled the front locks. Somewhere between his sixties and his early hundreds, Luke had been the clean-up man at The Cellar ever since its doors opened twenty years earlier.

  He looked over at me and beamed his five-hundred-watt smile. Luke had the darkest skin I’ve ever seen on a man, which only served to make his smile all the brighter. His face bunched up in a way that made it look like his wrinkles were smiling at me too. “Mr. Boo. How goes it?” he said with a tip of his faded Red Sox hat that looked like he bought it when Ted Williams was in Little League.

  “It goes, Luke. It goes.”

  He looked over at Junior. The smile dimmed a bit. “Junior.” A smaller tip of the hat.

  Luke stopped calling Junior “Mr.” after Junior accidentally let loose with one too many curses while Luke was in earshot. That was Luke’s one serious and unforgivable pet peeve. All I needed was one good tongue lashing from him. From then on, I turned on my filter when he walked in.

  “Luke,” Junior said, lifting his glass.

  “Good night?” Luke asked me, while seeming deliberately to not ask Junior.

  “A little slow. Day was busy after the game.”

  “Those Sox. God bless ’em,” he said with a warm chuckle. “I’m just glad I got to see ’em win a big one. Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “Heck Luke, I never thought I’d see the day.”

  He laughed like it was the best joke he’d heard in a while and clapped me on the back. “Aw, you gots a long ways to go, youngblood. You might see a couple more.”

  “You’re gonna outlive all of us Luke, you know that,” I said.

  “Lord willing, Mr. Boo. Lord willing.” Luke slowly shuffled back into the kitchen to get his mop and broom. The sound of his little radio came through the swinging doors. Same station every night—a preacher giving his late-night sermon to the airwaves, presumably in the hopes of converting the sinners who were still up and listening at that hour. I gave him no mind, of course.

  I swallowed my bourbon and poured another. I made two hash marks on our monthly tab under the register. “What are you drinking?”

  “White,” said Junior. There were only three kinds of wine in the bar anyway. White, red, and pink. I grabbed him another bottle from the ice bin, made another hash mark.

  Luke came out from the kitchen, mop in hand.

  “Hey, Luke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you were looking for a girl, where would you start?”

  “C’mon, Mr. Boo. You trying to tell me that you having a hard time finding girls?” He laughed at the very idea. Junior laughed too, but not in the same way. I was strangely flattered that an elderly black man would think me irresistible to the opposite sex.

  “Never mind.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Boo. They always come along.” The whole left side of Luke’s face winked at me as he worked his way down the back stairs.

  Junior was still laughing. “He don’t know you too well, do he?” Junior handed me the stick. It was the last intact stick in the house, so we had to share.

  “What if it isn’t her father who’s looking?” I said. I dropped the cue ball again, but actually managed to knock in one of my own.

  “Who else would be?”

  “C’mon, Junior, don’t be a dumbass. What if…” I thought for a second. “What if she’s a runaway from New Bedford or something and some assho—someone took her in and was using her to turn tricks? She leaves him, he loses revenue. He wants her back.”

  “Where does the cop fit in?” Junior knocked in another one of mine. “Shoot.” He was getting better at not cursing around Luke, whose presence forced us to edit out 90 percent of our pool banter.

  I gave him a look as I handed him his wine.

  “Okay, okay, so not every Boston cop is on the up and up.” He poured the wine in his cup, then straightened, excited with a new idea. “The girl. The skinny chick.” He snapped his fingers. “Kelly! Where does she fit into your little runaway hooker theory? She a coworker?”

  Good point. She didn’t fit in. We both knew some girls who worked that biz. She wasn’t… well, she just wasn’t. “Fine, I’m just saying, before we hand a kid to anybody, I want to make sure that we’re handing her to the right people.”

  Junior took a sip of his wine and smacked his lips. “So riddle me this, Batman. There’s gotta be two hundred PIs in Boston. Why us? This whole Little Girl Lost in the Big City shit? Been there, done that in at least a dozen books that I read.”

  “And you’ve only read seventeen books.”

  “Hey, three didn’t have no pictures. Two of those didn’t even have pictures of titties.”

  “What was your point?”

  Junior stopped. “I forgot. Started thinking about titties. Oh yeah. PIs. Seems like their standard gig, if books have taught me anything.”

  “And they haven’t.”

  Junior bowed. “Ahthangyooverramuch.”

  “Most of those guys are retired cops. We’ve already established that they don’t want the cops in this.”

  “But why us?”

  “A different perspective?”

  Junior snorted. “That’s for fucking sure. But seriously. Why us?”

  “Because we’re so pretty?”

  “I am, but you could scare flies off a shit wagon.” Junior winced at his own word choice, hoping Luke didn’t hear. “Maybe ’cause we’re underappreciated geniuses?”

  I lined up my shot. “I am, but you’re so dumb, you can’t spell PI.”

  “But I might be able to sound it out.”

  Junior had a lot of points. All valid. Why us?

  Why the fuck us?

  I scratched the eight.

  Chapter Four

  Whenever anyone asks, I say Junior and me go way back. If anyone asks how long is way back, I say none of your goddamned business. Nobody asks a third time.

  Truth is, we go back to The Home. As ironic a name for a place as any.

  It was always The Home.

  Never home.

  The real name was Saint Gabriel’s Home for Boys. Or Saint Gabe’s. Or Saint Gabe’s Home. It sure as shit wasn’t ours. What it was was half juvenile detention, half state-funded residence.

  Most of the kids there were orphans from birth. Me and Junior lived in the minority. We’d
had families, once. I got shipped in when I was eight. That’s how old I was when I lost everything.

  Think about it. Try to remember back to when you were eight. Try to remember everything that was important to that kid. Now imagine losing it all.

  Your home?

  Poof.

  Your family?

  Gone.

  Everyone who loves you?

  Bye-bye.

  Even the kids whose bodies were pockmarked by little round burns the same size as a cigarette cherry. Even those whose backs and legs were crosshatched by vicious belt buckle scars. More than those whose wounds rested deeper than any place on their bodies, we were all united by that little piece we’d lost.

  Blood from blood.

  No matter how shitty our lives may have been, we’d had something. Anything is better than nothing when you’re that young.

  More so than the never-hads, we instinctively arranged ourselves into groups. The neo-progressives who ran the program called us makeshift families. The counselors still linked to reality called us gangs. Whatever kept our backs safe and our asses covered.

  Fact was, until you or your crew could inflict enough physical damage on an attacker, you were a potential victim. You never wanted to get caught alone. Ever.

  Me and Junior ran our own crew, The Avengers—named after the comic book. Since there was no comic book called the Make Sure You Don’t Get Ass-Raped League, we took what was available. We wanted X-Men, but it was taken already by some older boys. Bigger boys, who would defend their little piece of the world—something so simple as an adopted name—with a violence polite society would find shocking.

  So we were The Avengers. It was all just an earlier incarnation of 4DC. Protection and services. At least now we make a little money for it, instead of a couple extra pieces of commissary cake and an unsullied rectum.

  We both turned eighteen around the same time and left tracks running out of St. Gabe’s. We worked your typical bullshit eighteen-year-old jobs. Never for very long.

  Junior worked at Dunkin Donuts until he slapped a customer after three straight mornings of busting Junior’s balls regarding cruller freshness. He got forty hours of community service and an anger management class.