The Hard Bounce

by Todd Robinson

  Junior said, “Dude, we’re boned.”

  “We’re all right. I don’t think anybody saw us.” I turned and checked to make sure no one was pointing and staring, writing down license plate numbers.

  “Your goddamn blood is all over that floor. That DNA shit is gonna point right to us!” He was gulping in huge panicked breaths. “CSI, motherfucker! CSI!”

  “Shut up. Let me think.”

  “I mean, if it was a dude? Like if that was Snake on the floor? I wouldn’t give a shit. Courts probably wouldn’t either. But we just smoked a female. A female!” He was too freaked to even bust my balls about getting cold-cocked by the aforementioned female.

  “I don’t think DNA testing gives a name and address. I think it just does blood type and hair color and that shit.”

  “How the fuck do you know, Professor Malone? You been following the technology in Scientific Weekly World News?”

  He had a point.

  Junior drove into the parking lot behind The Cellar and screeched to a halt behind the Dumpster. For a second, I thought he might knock the damned thing over again. I unlocked the back door to the club with my keys and staggered into the rear of the bar. I was hoping nobody would see us. Junior let the door slam shut behind him.

  The huge metal door.

  It sounded like two Mack trucks colliding. All conversation stopped in the packed bar, and all eyes turned to us—including the last pair of eyes I wanted to look into at that moment. Barnes sat in exactly the same seat he was in the week before, smirking at us. We had only one option.

  Be casual and lie, lie, lie.

  We walked through the room like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Unfortunately, we were felt neither good, nor bad. Just dazed, pale, sweating, and blood-covered. I moseyed up to the bar right next to Barnes. I can mosey real well when I try.

  “Ice, please.”

  Barnes stared straight ahead and sipped his Heineken. He was playing it casual too, and pulling it off better than we were. You try to be casual when your face has been pounded into tuna tartar.

  “So,” he said in a chipper tone. “Should I even bother?”

  “Cut myself shaving,” I said.

  “Fell down the stairs,” Junior said.

  “I fell down the stairs while shaving.”

  “Poor bathroom design,” Junior said with a snicker.

  “Funny,” Barnes said, taking a sip of his beer. “Got anything for us?”

  Junior and I just looked at each other. The bartender brought me a bar rag filled with ice. I pressed it against my broken face. Heaven. Barnes waited for a response.

  Junior looked at me. “You know? I like it better when they send in the girl.”

  “Me, too. Seems less obvious for us to be talking to a broad—any broad—than Mr. Trying-not-to-look-like-a-cop, here.

  “True. Wasn’t discretion supposed to be a big factor?”

  I shrugged. “I thought I heard them say that. And look at you, using a big-boy word like discretion.”

  Junior beamed. “I know, huh? Being around all these classy edjamuhcated people must be rubbing off.”

  “Osmosis.”

  “Like Donny and Marie Osmosis.”

  Barnes snorted, shaking his head. “Thought so. You two fuck-wits have five more days.” He tipped the last of the beer into his mouth.

  “Five? You guys said two weeks.”

  “The two weeks were conditional. We both assumed you might have idea one before today. You got five more days.”

  I pulled the ice from my face, the terrycloth a Rorschach in crimson. “Fine. Won’t even need that many. Wanna bet we can name that tune in three?”

  Barnes snorted again as he got up and walked out. He didn’t dignify my bravado with a response. He didn’t have to. My bluff sucked. I didn’t believe me either.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Sid’s Vids,” came the voice over the phone. The voice was unmistakably Sid’s. She sounded a bit fuzzy, but alive. Dead women answer no telephones.

  I hung up the pay phone outside the bar and sighed with relief.

  “What happened?” Junior asked. Dark saddlebags camped under his eyes, matching my own. We’d spent the night in the office, pacing and smoking like mobile forest fires, wondering on Sid’s fate and consequently our own.

  “Sid lives,” I said.

  Junior sagged noticeably without the weight of Sid’s possible demise riding him. “Thank Christ. Man, I would not want to go down for having killed a broad. Even if it was an accident.”

  I agreed with him insomuch as Sid wasn’t the person we wanted to damage. She was strictly a cobblestone on our road to Snake. I tried not to let my evil imaginings linger too long on what kind of damage I would inflict once I got my hands on that chickenhawk piece of shit.

  Bad things.

  “We gotta look at the DVD,” Junior said suddenly.

  I shook my head. “No. No way am I watching that shit.”

  Junior chewed off a piece of his thumbnail and spit it to the floor. “If you got a better idea, lay it on the table and we’ll go with it.”

  I didn’t have any better ideas. We didn’t want to tap Sid again. One look at us, and she would opt for the shoot-first, ask-questions-later scenario.

  Junior continued. “Whether or not it’s our girl in the movie, there might be something there that could clue us to where the guy holes up.”

  The idea wasn’t bad. I just had no urge to watch kiddie porn even if it gave us an address, business hours, and directions from my front door. “It might have been shot in a studio, Junior. It might be in somebody else’s apartment. Shit, after what we did to Sid, the guy’s probably halfway to Mexico himself.”

  “And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry fucking Christmas.”

  “Give me a sec,” I said.

  “We’ve been through this all night, bro. We’re at the end of our options here. I don’t wanna see what’s on that video either, but if it’s gonna help put twenty-five thousand rocks in my hand? If it could help us get the kid away from that freak?”

  The bottle in my hand was almost half empty, and since prayer was never my strongest anchor, I took one last pull. “Let’s go.”

  A fist-sized lump swelled in my throat as Junior slid the first DVD into my machine. The player closed silently and hummed. A few seconds of blackness, then slow focus from the dark.

  A man sitting on a white cushioned chair, completely naked but for a snake tattoo coiling down his arm and a black leather mask covering his head. The S&M kind with the zipper over the mouth.

  A soft knock sounds. The camera pans over to the door, the lens passing over the windows. Heavy black curtains cover the glass.

  “Come in,” the masked man says.

  I listened for anything familiar in the speech pattern. Snake’s voice was a low baritone with a slight touch of local accent. Quincy, maybe? Beyond that, nothing.

  A girl walks in the door.

  Not Cassie. This one’s around the same age, though. Too young. Way too fucking young.

  She’s tiny, blonde, and scared. Wide ears poke out from under her hair, making her look like a frightened mouse. A low chewing sound.

  For a moment, I was afraid the DVD player was starting to fritz. Then I realized the sound was coming from the teeth grinding inside my head. If we didn’t get this over with soon, I was going to need that twenty-five grand to buy myself a nice pair of dental crowns.

  “Are you here for your lesson?” Snake says.

  “Y-Yes,” the girl replies, badly acting her part. “I’ve been very bad.”

  Snake stands up and walks over to the girl. He strokes her face with a disturbingly gentle tenderness. Then he balls his fingers tightly in her hair, yanks her head back, and flings her across the room onto the bed. The girl mewls in pain and fear as Snake backhands her. He kneels over the kid, straddling her chest, and tears her shirt open. The camera zooms in on her terrified face, as thoug
h her fear is the most important thing caught on the film.

  I looked away, unable to watch anymore. The contents of my stomach had churned into rotting cottage cheese.

  All I heard was one more heart-wrenching word. “No.”

  Junior slowly rocked back and forth in his chair. His eyes never left the screen. “Shut it off,” he said in a monotone. “There’s nothing more to see on this one.” I guess Junior forgot he had the remote clutched in his hand.

  I stood up to hit the stop button. My finger shook and missed it the first time. I closed my eyes and pressed the button carefully. If I missed a second time, I was going to shut it off with my fist. “I didn’t see anything. You?” My voice was as flat as his.

  Junior shook his head. “Put another one in.”

  “Junior, this guy’s careful. There were curtains up over the windows. He wore a mask. There’s nothing on the goddamn discs.”

  “Put another one in. We don’t know there’s nothing on the other ones. We gotta look.”

  I took a deep breath, and I switched the discs. They felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. I hit the play button again. The second disc didn’t open with a cryptic attempt at a storyline.

  The picture kicks right in to Snake, still masked, spanking a girl with a large paddle. She’s on all fours, freely offering her backside to Snake’s blows. The girl’s a bit older—maybe even legal. The action goes a little beyond typical S&M. She’s not just receiving a playful tapping on the ass. Thin lines of blood run from huge red welts on the back of her thighs. The girl moans orgasmically with every blow.

  We watched until we were sure there was nothing on that DVD either.

  We started the third. From the get-go, the feel of the video was different.

  Snake stands on one side of the door, shuffling back and forth like a kid who has to pee. He seems excited, eager to begin the scene. Cassandra opens the door.

  My throat closed.

  She’s wearing the same clothes as when I first saw her at The Cellar. Her bright red hair sticks to her scalp, as though she’s been caught in the rain.

  I’d been stuck in the same rain. “This was shot the same day,” I said.

  “Same day as what?” Junior asked.

  Snake pounces from behind the door. He smacks Cassandra hard enough to send her sprawling onto the curtains. The camera follows her. She screams.

  Junior and I both leapt to our feet, reacting to the violence in real time.

  “Motherfucker,” Junior muttered.

  Snake grabs a fistful of hair. He says, “You’ve been a bad girl, Cassie.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she whimpers.

  “You need to learn a lesson.” He cracks her another one, still gripping her hair. Cassandra’s head snaps around and she swoons, stunned from the blow. Snake easily tosses her onto the bed.

  He reaches into the nightstand by the bed and pulls out a large hunting knife. Viciously, he slices the clothes off her. Cassandra doesn’t move, either in a state of shock or still stunned from the blows. Snake roughly forces her legs open while she struggles weakly.

  “This motherfucker’s dead,” Junior said, looking at a space far beyond the television.

  I tried to respond. My jaw clenched so tightly, the muscles around my mouth started trembling.

  The world bloomed red. The room pulsed deep crimson in perfect time with my heartbeat. Heat surged from my eyes.

  I stood up and pressed rewind. I ran the video back to the first blow when she walked in the door.

  “I can’t watch that again, Boo.”

  I pressed play.

  “Goddamn it, Boo!” Junior’s voice sounded like he was yelling from the other end of a hallway.

  I watched it again frame by frame. Watched Cassie’s fear with a sharp eye. Remembering it. Watched her in slow motion stumbling toward the heavy curtains. Her tiny hand brushing the curtains ever so slightly.

  Ever so slightly enough.

  Outside the window, at an angle toward the street, was a portion of a sign. I couldn’t make out any details, but I knew someone who could.

  Gotcha, fucker.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was the spring of 1994, Opening Day at Fenway, when we first officially met Ollie. All the kids at The Home were buzzing with the welcome distraction from our shitty day-to-days. At St. Gabe’s, you found hope wherever you could, even as misplaced a hope as the Red Sox might provide.

  Having a regular broadcast game was a treat, an event. But our one TV in the rec room was always flipping between light snow and blizzard conditions. Not blessed with cable or a serviceable antenna, we’d pocketed enough tinfoil from the dining common to wrap the television like a cocoon. The only parts visible were the knobs and screen. Problem was, the night before, the TV decided to shit the bed all the way. Most of us had spent a large part of the day figuring out what the fuck we were going to do come game time.

  After lunch, a large group of us headed to the rec room, tinfoil in pockets, hoping to wrestle some life, if not reception, into the old Zenith. We would suffer reprimands and punishment for cutting classes, but fuck it. Hope had a price, and we were willing to pay it.

  We walked into the rec room, then stopped short enough to get nearly knocked over by the kids behind us. Mouths hung open in shock at what lay before us. The kids in the back swept around us, all trying to see what had stopped us in our tracks.

  Somebody said, “The fuck?”

  A lanky new kid named Ollie had not only unwrapped years’ worth of carefully calibrated foil, but also managed to get the TV apart. We all stood there, gobsmacked at the sight of our beloved television, its parts laid out like chess pieces on the checkered linoleum. Ollie only looked up at us briefly, adjusted his Coke-bottle glasses, and furiously went back to his task.

  Grumbling began to well up from the stunned mob. Grumbling that ran along the lines of how to make the new kid’s head fit up his ass. It may have been a shitty TV, but it was ours. We didn’t have many things we could call ours.

  The threats grew louder and more ominous. One boy picked up a folding chair, tested its heft, and made his way over to Ollie in order to brain him properly. As the chair was raised overhead, Ollie plugged in the set. The screen lit up on Roger Clemens warming up in the bullpen. The grumblings erupted into cheers and handshakes. Ollie was smiling nervously and sweating through his shirt in a dozen places. He had to know how close he’d come to getting crippled. The kid ready to do the crippling lowered the chair and opened it front and center, a seat of honor for Ollie. Ollie watched the entire game seated in the chair that almost caved in his skull.

  The Red Sox won the game, 9–8.

  At St. Gabe’s there were only two ways to insure your safety: be dangerous or be useful.

  Ollie became one of the strays who wandered in with me and Junior’s crew. He may not have been a brawler, but he earned his keep. And those smarts had brought him a lot of cash since his days at The Home. He wasn’t a complete flake job like Twitch, but he was koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs in his own fashion. If the Unabomber was pro-technology rather than anti, he might have been Ollie.

  Ollie’s basement apartment looked like a utility closet on the Death Star. The walls were painted sterile white, all four layered with computers, pieces of electronics, and what looked like miles and miles of wires twisting around themselves in a three-dimensional Jackson Pollack.

  “You guys gotta see this,” Ollie said, leading us to one of the many screens posted along one wall. “I can’t tell you guys which, but one of the major airlines just dropped a chunk of cash in my hands to test their electronic defense systems. Look.”

  On the screen was a radar layout. Little dots slowly moved around the screen, identifying numbers beneath the dots.

  “That’s the system?” I asked.

  “Nah, it’s a simulation program they’ve linked me into. Basically identical to the real OS they use, same security and whatnot.”

  “Solid system
?” I asked, as though I had any idea what we were talking about.

  “This?” Ollie huffed at me like I’d just defended the Ewoks. “This is shit work. Any hack with half a brain, half a system, and a little bit of patience can break into it.” Then Ollie smiled and held his hands apart like a magician about to yank a rabbit out of a hat. “Ever see a man crack a Federal Black Ice firewall in under a minute?”

  “Uh… No?”

  “Watch this.” Ollie went to work. He leaned forward in his chair as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Numbers that were meaningless to me raced down the bottom of the monitor. Junior gaped at the screen like a chimp forced to translate ancient Egyptian. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and popped open his Zippo.

  Ollie whipped a pointed finger at Junior. “Do not light a cigarette in here. These machines are exceptionally sensitive.” His eyes never moved off the dancing numbers. The hand remaining on the keyboard picked up speed, as if to compensate for its missing brother. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke curling off Ollie’s fingertips.

  Junior frowned and flipped off the back of Ollie’s head. He tucked the cigarette into his T-shirt pocket.

  “Now,” Ollie said, “watch this.” With the last few flicks of his fingers, the dots on the screen disappeared. It looked like the computer had shut off.

  “Taa-daa!” Ollie sure was excited by the blank screen.

  “Uh, I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly. And neither do they.”

  “Where’d the planes go?” Junior asked.

  “Oh, they’re still up there. I haven’t hacked into their individual systems, but their ground control is completely blind. About eighteen hundred tons of airplanes are about to go crash kaboom.”

  “Well,” Junior clapped his hands. “I’m not getting on a plane again. Ever.”

  “Man, the boys monitoring these boards must be shitting their pants right now.” Ollie wiggled with pleasure in his seat. It was the way he laughed. He never made a sound, just wiggled happily.

  Like most things Ollie, the humor was lost on me. “I thought you said this was a simulation.”