Bad Boy Boogie

by Thomas Pluck

  “You wish,” Ramona said. Gave him a measure, a squeeze. “Did you…have sex in there?”

  “No,” Jay said. “Unless Howard Jones concerts count.”

  Ramona laughed. “I haven’t thought about that in ages. Howard Jones and Billy Joel.”

  “What is love anyway,” she sang, and watched herself work.

  Jay lay back and relaxed to her quickening touch.

  Ramona would spread a blanket in the grass behind their garage shed, bring a bottle of Jameson from the liquor cabinet Andre had built for her father, and an armful of pillows from the guest room. Some nights they talked while he rubbed her shoulders, others she lay waiting to pounce him, her hand plunging into his jeans for a possessive squeeze.

  The first time she took him to a Howard Jones concert, Jay froze like a deer in the headlights. His head was under her shirt, hands kneading her behind. She asked if he liked that, took his silence for the affirmative, working faster until he hunched against her, shuddering. She walked him through how to return the favor.

  They phased between mad-rabbit marathons and long spells of making out and talking under the stars. That night she huddled in her denim jacket despite the heat. Jay plucked a firefly’s glowing ember from the grass. Crawled onto the blanket, and kissed her hand.

  He stuck the firefly’s jewel to her ring finger. “Wanted to get you a diamond,” he said, resting his head in her lap. “But they didn’t have one big enough.”

  “You’re so corny,” she sighed.

  That day at school her kisses had been needful, but tonight she didn’t pounce. He kneaded her shoulders the way she liked, got no response. Some nights she wanted to control his every move, other times she expected him to take the lead.

  “What’s wrong, Blackbird?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m cold.”

  “I’ll warm you up,” he said, and cupped her breasts through her shirt.

  She flinched and pushed his hands away.

  He waited for the flint to go out of her eyes, then sat close, not touching. “What’s wrong.”

  She stared into the woods a long time. After a time, she stood.

  “This what you want?” She pulled off her shirt and reached behind to unsnap. She spilled out, revealing pinch marks fading to yellow bruises in the cream of her skin.

  Jay blinked.

  She pulled her shirt on and stomped toward the house.

  He caught her wrist. “Who,” he snarled.

  Her face broke into a silent rictus.

  Jay spied the old man in a worn tweed suit on Ramona’s porch, rocking his chair with a Waterford glass of whisky. He had a thick cobblestone jaw, and saliva sparkled in the corners of his mouth. His snores rumbled out horse nostrils like the rattle of cicadas.

  Ramona’s great-uncle Seamus visited a different relative each year, cycling through a large Irish family that had scattered after the Great Famine. She liked his stories of Ireland, and how his slender pianist fingers could effortlessly coax jaunty traditional ballads from her mother’s Chickering upright. She begged for lessons as soon as she could talk, learning from his lap, skipping to the liquor cabinet to refresh his glass.

  When she was too old for his lap, he sat beside her, and he corrected her with a pinch to the behind. For a while she thought it was cute, that maybe that was how they behaved in what her father reverently called “the old country.” This year’s visit, Uncle Seamus had waited for her mother to head out, before he pinched a bit more, as if measuring a fattened calf, and Ramona slapped his hand.

  Uncle Seamus slapped her back, and good. Gripped her by the wrist while he pinched her hard in tender spots, telling her how a temptress like herself should be washing laundry with the Magdalene nuns. Whiskey breath misted her ear. He said no one would believe her. That he’d tell her mother he saw her whoring around with that American boy unless she took off her shirt for him.

  Jay waited for her mother’s Volvo wagon to back out of the drive. Ramona said she’d tell her mother she needed a new bra fitting, and that they would argue again about the reduction before eventually leaving for the mall.

  When they did, Jay crept over the porch railing and shoved the old bastard’s rocking chair down the front steps.

  Seamus hit the paving stones face first, the chair clattering. His trembling hands pawed at the lawn, moans muffled by the grass. Jay put his knee on Seamus’s shoulder, gripped his wrinkled right thumb, and bent it back until it cracked. Then the other one, like pulling a drumstick off a chicken.

  “You won’t be pinching no more, you cruel old bastard.”

  Seamus groaned, beige vomit oozing from his lips.

  Jay righted the chair and walked back to his bike. He pedaled home fast. Mama was making a shrimp boil.

  A week later, they clutched one other on a blanket beneath the summer stars. Ramona wore nothing but Jay’s denim jacket and her knee-high striped socks, lolling sated in his arms. Her scent lingered on his lips and he breathed it in like a drug.

  Ramona relished in telling him how they had found Uncle Seamus face down in a pool of his own sick. Mother called an ambulance, and made her visit him in detox at Mountainside hospital. He had the shakes bad, and for his own health, the family decided his visit would be cut short this year.

  She gave a sly grin and worked her hand inside Jay’s pants.

  Jay sprawled on his back, a marionette with the strings cut. He couldn’t touch himself this way without seeing the Witch and the Gator man slavering from behind his eyes, but Ramona could. She drove away his old dreams, festering with sulfur and oil and Vaseline, and replaced them with visions of her swimming naked in a blue bayou circled with water lilies.

  She dragged her nipples down his belly, her breasts pillowing his erection in warmth.

  Their eyes locked.

  “Tonight I’m taking you to a Billy Joel concert,” she said, and ducked.

  Electric heat bolted down his spine.

  Fingers with broken nails brushed back his bangs. Revealed the Witch’s rotten smile. Just a kiss, just a kiss. The boy grabbed the doorknob and the Witch yanked him by the ankles. Dragged him along the moldy carpet toward a pair of oil-stained work boots.

  The Gator man.

  Jay woke to Ramona choking his name. Found himself gripping her hair with one hand, the other knotted into a fist. Her irises flicked side to side, seeking escape.

  Jay let go. Scanned her face. He had not struck her. “I’m sorry,” he gasped.

  She watched shivering as Jay collected his clothes and walked naked into the woods toward the railroad tracks.

  “Jay?” A hoarse cry.

  “I’m broken,” he said. “You deserve better.”

  He pulled his clothes on as he walked home. The Witch had stolen this from him, and nothing he could do would get it back. Jay wished the Erie freight train ran tonight. He’d lay his head down on the cold tracks as it thundered by to smear him from the earth.

  Chapter 24

  Leo Zelazko lived a life of rigid structure. Jay watched the police lot with binoculars from across the par, as Leo pulled his GMC Denali out of the Nutley PD lot at six p.m. each day in civilian clothes and took the main drag toward Route 3. Jay drove to Leo’s house and scoped the driveway from the right-of-way beneath the power lines. Leo arrived home about two hours later, entered the side door without disarming an alarm, and took his unfixed Doberman for a jog.

  On the third day of watching, Jay approached Leo’s door five minutes into his dog walk.

  A lockpick gun provided by Mack popped the rear door in fifteen seconds. The house had changed little since Jay visited as a teen. It smelled of dog now, but the kitchen was eat-off-the-floor clean. The living room a museum to late ’70s wood and brass, the den a revered warrior’s retreat.

  Up the hardwood steps, the twins’ room had been converted to an office decorated with Brendan’s track trophies and photos of Billy graduating from police academy. The master bedroom was still as a tomb. Ano
ther of Andre’s handmade platform beds, with sheets folded military tight. Jay knelt by the side with an indentation in the pillow and pressed the hidden release. The cubby opened, revealing a tactical flashlight and two speed loaders of .38 hollow points, but no pistol.

  He closed the cubby and eyed the beige monolith of the gun safe.

  Billy had liked to brag about his father’s gun collection. Jay had been raised around guns, so didn’t much care. He ran a blue glove over the safe and tested the door.

  Locked.

  Leo was not as careless as his partner. His secrets had already been leveraged against him.

  For many years Jay had fantasized about killing Leo each night. Bare handed, with his carpenter’s axe, Mama’s Colt, kitchen knives. As he aged, he preferred to imagine his tormentors in their own prison cells, weeping. Sinking into hollow, bird-chested travesties of their former selves, and finally swinging from a knotted sheet, jerking and choking as they splattered the floor with their own piss and shit.

  Now he saw how to realize his fantasy.

  Take one of Leo’s guns and kill Bello with it.

  The Denali was locked in the garage. Leo might leave the revolver in the glovebox. Jay searched for a spare set of keys in kitchen drawers and jacket pockets, but found none. He locked up and left the way he came.

  Tony had a lockout kit.

  Jay waited in a parking lot along Leo’s evening route. The kit from Tony’s shop sat in the compartment under the rear seats. Jimmies and door wedges, everything one might need to gain entry to a locked vehicle. When the Denali roared by in the left lane, Jay gunned it onto the pockmarked shoulder. He dodged a fallen muffler and passed cars in the right lane, then fell behind a cluster of traffic where he could follow his prey.

  They crossed the Passaic, passed the Meadowlands arena, and took the Turnpike south. Jay weaved between trucks as the Denali became a dot far ahead in the Gordian knot of concrete twists by the airport.

  When the Turnpike split, he followed Leo into the truck lanes.

  The Denali raced ahead in the left lane, hugging the guard rail. Jay flattened the pedal and cut into the shoulder, kicking up busted glass and trash. A tractor trailer’s horn lowed as he blasted past it on the rumble strips. Jay eased back in front of a tanker in time to see the Denali slam on the brakes in the left shoulder, then lurch through a break in the guardrail back onto the cars-only side of the highway.

  He’d been seen.

  Horns wailed as Leo bulled his way into the car lanes.

  Jay swore as the Denali vanished into the heat mirages far up the highway.

  He didn’t feel like hearing Tony mope about Ramona, or want to think about his best friend had mooned over his girl the years he was away. He took a shift bouncing at Cheetah’s, eager to deal out a beating.

  The clientele behaved themselves, to his chagrin.

  As the club closed, Jay left by the front doors and scanned the streets. His hackles tingled. He let his eyes adjust and made out a man in black against the wall of the alley, watching the club’s rear door.

  Jay soft-stepped in the shadows, then jumped and looped his arm around the man’s throat. Hooked a half-dozen kidney punches, then pulled the man down into the choke.

  Jay knelt to search the man’s wallet. A second later his eyes exploded white. Jay flopped next to the unconscious man like a fish. Felt someone zip tie his wrists and bag his head, give him another jolt, and toss him hogtied into the back of a truck. They yanked the barbs of the Taser out his back and rumbled away.

  Jay recovered his breath and tested his bonds. His hands went numb as he felt for a door handle.

  If they’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead.

  Unless they wanted him dead slow, for an audience.

  A short time later the truck stopped. The lift gate opened and an octopus of limbs pinned him. Snips popped his ankle bonds. He moved to kick and they jammed his ankles to his ass.

  “We’re going for a short walk and then your hood will be removed,” a deep, authoritative voice said. “You will be released unharmed if you cooperate. If you don’t, we’ll use the Taser or compliance holds, neither of which will be pleasant.”

  “Okay then,” Jay said through the hood.

  They steadied him on his feet and walked him into a rattling elevator that smelled of concrete dust. The doors opened and they led him into a cool room. Pressed his chest to a wall and pulled off the hood.

  Jay blinked at the dim light. Inhaled the familiar sweetness of coolant and the scent of fresh oil. The faded tang of exhaust hung in the air. They spun him around.

  Three beefy men in black turtlenecks and work pants. Two he recognized from the black truck on freedom day. The new guy rubbed his neck.

  Beyond them, rows of vehicles parked beneath concrete supports. A Matchbox display of classics and rarities. Jay recognized a red Mercedes 420SL convertible, an Alfa Romeo Spyder Veloce, a bathtub Porsche. A Corvette ZR-1, a vintage Countach with the wing, a classic Jag XKE ragtop in British racing green. A rich gentleman’s collection of dust-binned toys.

  A thin man in a gray suit walked from behind the three soldiers. Sharp cheekbones and a knob of a chin, skin smooth as a baby’s ass, hair in glossy short curls.

  “You can remove the bonds,” the suit said. He turned to Jay. “He’s taking a call. Then he’ll meet with you.”

  A guard reached behind Jay with a multitool. Brush Cut held the Taser at low ready.

  “Who’s he?” Jay said.

  “You’ll see,” the suit said.

  Jay rubbed his freed wrists and said to the grunt, “Sorry about the ribs. Didn’t have a knife.”

  The man ignored him and stood relaxed by his compatriots. All three springy on their feet, ready to go. The driver Jay had made puke held a collapsible baton.

  “I wish you were armed,” the suit said. “Then you’d be off to jail and out of my hands.”

  Jay heard a muffled argument and scanned the room slow. Squinted as he recognized the robin’s egg blue Triumph TR6 that Ramona’s across-the-street neighbor had been restoring. Beside it, a 1984 Porsche 928S in Risky Business silver, coated in layers of dust.

  Matty’s father had owned one exactly like it.

  A tall man sat in it, gesticulating as he argued into his phone. Matthew Strick. Jay took a deep breath.

  “Who are you, Matty’s court jester?”

  “You don’t recognize me?” He removed a Nat Sherman cigarette from a platinum case, and lit it without offering. “Greg Kuhn.”

  Jay tilted his head and smirked. “Thought that brown nose looked familiar. You got it up a new ass.”

  Greg arched his eyebrows, then straightened them with a roll of his eyes. “You haven’t changed much. Matthew and I started working together in college.”

  “Tony said you squeezed him out.”

  “He didn’t have the spine for it.”

  “Didn’t recognize you without your Yankees cap,” Jay said. “What do you hide the beanie under these days?”

  Greg laughed and patted his head. “We’re not the same people we were in middle school. Well, maybe you are.”

  Let them think that.

  “I should thank you for what you did,” Greg said, puffing. “I tried to, but you refused my gift. Rude. Why would you do that?”

  “Because this ain’t about money.”

  “Oh, it’s always about money,” Greg said. “Money is the great measurable. Worth nothing on its own. Just paper with a high linen content, some special ink. Its true purpose is to quantify the ineffable. Everything has its price.”

  “Every thing maybe,” Jay said. “But not every one.”

  “Such principles,” Greg said. “Matthew thinks people should get what they deserve, and he’s already decided you deserve nothing. No matter, I’m prepared to quadruple my original offer, if you’ll say your goodbyes and close this unfortunate chapter of our childhood.”

  “How much is that again?”

  “A hundred
thousand.”

  “Boy, a hundred gees.” Jay cracked a smile. “What’s that look like?”

  Greg held out his right hand as if gripping an overstuffed sandwich.

  “Looks like it would just about fit.”

  “Where?”

  “Right up your ass, which is where you can stick it.”

  Greg smirked, shook his head. “Don’t hold out for more. More than that, and it costs less to deal with you differently.”

  Jay looked at the guards. “He’s skimping on your life insurance.”

  “Nothing so crass. You’re employed by a known criminal. The county sheriff would be happy to shut down your pal’s strip club and jail you all for human trafficking. We made a generous contribution to his reelection campaign.”

  “See,” Jay said, “the more you want me gone, the curiouser I get. What’s a little old boy like me doing to bother a couple of rich jag-offs like you?”

  The charged conversation inside the 928 rose to a crescendo before coming to an abrupt end.

  Greg rolled his eyes. “That, right there.”

  Matthew Strick sprang out of his father’s old Porsche. He stopped, took a breath, and tucked his phone away.

  He had put on height since school. Six-foot-two of slender gym physique with bespoke gray herringbone painted on his rangy limbs. Sandy blond hair brushed straight back. Lines at the corners of eyes and mouth, stress cracks from practiced glares of contempt. Soft gray eyes behind slim gunmetal frames.

  Jay leveled a glare that Matthew returned with equal intensity.

  “You keep eye-fucking me rich boy,” Jay said, “and we’ll see if your rentboys can drop me before I bite your throat out.”

  “Charming as always,” Matt said. “You should’ve taken Greg’s offer.”

  Greg moved to speak.

  “It’s all right, Greg. I’m accustomed to your attempts at behind-the-scenes manipulation. You think you’re a consigliere, it’s cute.”

  “Matthew, it was my money—”