by Ken Bruen
I went up the stairs; the hallways were pretty clean and there were few busted lights considering it was public housing. I got to the fourth floor, an older lady all bundled up coming at me from the opposite direction, humming a tune. She lifted her head and then stopped singing. Her eyes went wide and she breathed all funny ’cause she wasn’t sure what to make of me prowlin’ about.
“What’s this then?” she said as I stepped past. “You going undercover for the Gardaí?” She smelled of cigarettes and crushed flowers, and I finally got to the door I’d been directed to after Maura had made her third call.
“Now, mind you, you’re an able lad, Zelmont,” Maura had said, her hand down between my legs, “but you want to stay sharp, right? They’ll be more scared of you, what with you being big and black and delicious”—she kissed me—“but they grow them tough over there too, right? Just because this isn’t the South Side or Harlem doesn’t mean they’ll all curl up and cry.”
“Thanks, baby,” I’d said, kissing her back. “You just order up a roast beef sandwich or potato pancakes or whatever the hell y’all eat over here from room service, and I’ll be back soon for round two.”
“You better,” and she put some flutter in her lids while she locked her hand around my johnson, sliding her grip up and down its growing length. But I had the cravings so bad I didn’t let her finish and left her snug under the blankets and me flicking icicles off my nose.
“What?” came a voice from inside the apartment after I knocked on number 435 a second time.
“Ian said I was cool.” That was the name Maura told me to give.
“Did he now?” I didn’t hear any feet scuffling.
I felt like hitting the door with the dull end of my fist to let him know I wasn’t fuckin’ around, but didn’t want to jump wrong on turf I was clearly out of my element in. “Look here, I don’t want to conduct my business in the street.” A pensioner from the next door apartment was glaring at me. She wasn’t going nowhere until I did.
“Who did you say?”
Fuck. “Ian. What? I talk like I got feathers in my mouth? Open this mothafuckah up, man, c’mon. I got the cheddah,” I spat close to the wood. “Got dollars if you want.”
The door hinged back. “Oh, well, that’s different then, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t see much of the room beyond and didn’t much care. I pushed through, if only to keep the old girl from giving me more of her vulture’s stare. She was getting on my nerves, which were already about to shoot out of my pores, tingling as my sweat dripped over their raw ends.
“You a long way from home, my brother.”
“You ain’t never lied.” The one who’d opened the door was lanky, with a dainty potbelly like you saw on cats who appreciated their apple pop tarts too much. He wore a pullover shirt and pants made out of cotton so goddamn thin I wondered how he didn’t freeze his nuts off when he went out in them. He was barefoot but had on a plaid snap-brim hat pulled low over longish hair.
“And you’re in need, yeah?”
“That’s right.” We’d each taken a step back from the other. I knew I could take his skinny ass, just like I knew it wasn’t only me and homeboy in this crib. Which wasn’t jacked up—no holes in the wall, the furniture, while there wasn’t much of it, wasn’t busted up, and there were no panes missing from the windows. There was even a TV on low with that big-headed Al Gore on it answering questions about him getting his campaign for the Dems nomination underway.
“So what is it you want, sir?” He smiled, lifting his chin some even though he was pretty much my height.
I was holding a few folded bills. “What I want is some crack.”
He cocked his head to one side.
“But I’ll settle for some snow,” I said, putting a finger to the side of my nose and sniffing. Maura had explained to me that rock cocaine wasn’t that big over here like it was in London, but that I should be able to purchase some flake. I figured at the hotel I could find some ammonia and cook it down to the shit I wanted.
“Ah, well, you’ve come to the right place, my American friend.” He made to take the money from my hand.
“Don’t play me for no chump,” I said, holding onto them benjamins like I was guarding grandma’s teeth
He snapped his fingers. “Right you are. Barbara,” he said, adjusting his hat. To my left, where I guess the bedroom was, a thick-shouldered but pretty-in-a-rough-way chick with dirty blond hair stepped into the doorway. She had on tight jeans and a loose shirt, heavy boots on her feet. She jiggled a plastic baggie with a measure of white stuff in it. Maybe she figured I’d make like Rover and start panting. Did I look that messed up?
“Hello,” she said, being too friendly.
“Hi yourself.” The way I was positioned, I could drop her boyfriend with a kick and spin, and catch Barbara just right on the jaw. Between the two of them, she’d be the one to give me trouble. She didn’t move and neither did he. I unzipped my jacket to give my arms more freedom.
I walked toward her, one hand out and the other extending the bills. Maura had told me I should be able to get a hit for roughly forty-five American. She took the money and gave me the shit. I opened the bag, worried the powder was more yellow than white. I sampled a taste on my pinkie, my face scrunching up.
“This is heroin.”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Did I say I wanted H?”
“Look, Sonny Jim, that’s the way it is, yeah? You come for your high, get mellow, and we’re done.” The dude was peddling backward, no doubt to fetch his persuader.
I was hurtin’ but I wasn’t gonna be bitched up, especially by some foreigners. Naw, that kind of shit don’t happen to me. “Give me back my scratch. We ain’t got a deal.” I tossed the bag on a chair.
“We’re not Dunnes, understand? All sales final.” The chick stood her ground, ready to throw down. She squinted at me.
“You’re that hard man, aren’t you? The one that was mouthing off on the telly last night about how you’d come to the land of Lucky Charms to show us how to play real football.”
Usually I got a twang in my dick when a broad recognized me. Not tonight. “My money, huh?”
“You say he’s famous?” the man asked, now positioned next to a low cabinet with a lamp on it. “On a team, is he?”
“Yeah,” she said, her tongue cavorting. “And he used to be something over in the States.”
“Still am, baby.” Now these mothafuckahs were clownin’ me.
“Right, he’s worth something to somebody,” the man said, as he whipped open the cabinet door and reached inside for his gat. But I’d already turned, stepped, and leaped. I plowed into him and we knocked the lamp over, breaking it apart, making the room shadowy. The chick was also in motion and she jumped on my back, rockin’ and sockin’.
“Spence, for fuck’s sake, get him down!” she hollered, as I bent my arm back and got it around her neck and threw her off me and into her boyfriend. Problem was, she wasn’t without reflexes and she’d grabbed hold of me and took me with her. It was like some kind of fucked-up Abbott and Costello movie with the three of us wrasslin’ and yankin’ on each other.
I got a grip on Spence’s upper arm to keep him from planting that piece, which wasn’t much of one, in my grill, while Broom Hilda rode me like Lafite Pincay and punched me good in the lower back and kidneys. I pushed back to the wall to put my weight on Barbara and still keep a grip on Spence. I managed to tag him with an uppercut, jarring his eyeballs in their sockets.
“Come on, be fair, we’ll share what we make on you,” the blonde said.
I couldn’t figure out whether to laugh or cry. Wasn’t no one in the NFL or Pop Warner, for that matter, ’bout to put together a buffalo nickel to ransom my sorry self. We tumbled to the floor all tangled up.
I was hitting Spence again, who was straddling me, but homegirl, who was underneath me, got her arm around my neck and hammer-locked the shit out of my Adam’s apple. I had to let go
of the man and he crashed the muzzle of his gun down against my temple. But like I said, it wasn’t much of a gun, it was a derringer, like what Jim West used to pop out of his sleeve to make Dr. Loveless shit in reruns of the Wild Wild West TV show.
For a hot minute the black lights had me, but I couldn’t let ’em take me under.
“That’s it,” I heard her say, as if she were deep in the ground below me. “Put him under.”
Spence clubbed at my head again, but I got my shoulder up and that took most of the blow. I drove an elbow into her rib cage and that got her gasping and sputtering. I shook loose from Barbara and came up, arms wrapped around Spence, taking him over in a tackle. I was quick enough that by the time he tried to level his pea shooter, the back of his head made contact, loudly, with the thinly carpeted floor, dazing him.
Girlfriend got her arms around my legs and put her choppers into me like my thigh like it was prime rib. “Fuck!” I screamed, and used my fist as a club to work at the base of her neck. That got her jaw open and I straight right-crossed the broad, making blood spray.
Spence fired his derringer but I’d grabbed the hefty chick for a shield and he’d pulled his aim up, shooting the ceiling. We were back on the floor and I lashed out with my foot, catching Spence alongside his cheek. He bowled over and, shoving the woman away, I jumped on him and commenced to wail on the chump like he’d stolen from my baby’s mama. He lay still and I got up, putting the derringer in my jacket pocket. That toy wasn’t much of a threat, but I might need it.
“Come on,” I said to her, a jagged piece of the busted lamp steady in my hand, on her eyeball.
“You gonna have your way with me?” There didn’t seem to be a lot of fear in her voice. Maybe Barbara the blonde was sizing me up to be a replacement for Spence.
She got off the floor and I made her give me their stash. It was H and some marijuana. I had a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon and what was the chance I’d be able to parlay this stuff into the coke I needed before then? Fuck it, though. They had to offer decent recompense for inconveniencing me. I fooled with the idea of doing Barbara—big-legged women had serious effects on me. She was giving me that look. Of course, there was Maura waiting for me at the hotel and the chronic would cut some of my hype. Of course, pussy was pussy …
She started unbuttoning her shirt. I watched a thin trail of sweat dribble between her braless breasts. She smiled, showing overlapping teeth.
I uppercut her, dropping her like a sack of cement. “I can’t shake the feeling that you’d slip a blade between my ribs just for fun.”
I left her blinking at me, sitting on the floor. I stepped over the beaten Spence and left with my plastic bag of thrills.
Back at the hotel, the fight and fatigue had spent some of my craving. With a little weed, some blasts of the scotch I’d bought earlier, and hopefully mucho head from my visitor, that should keep me tight.
“Darling,” she said. She was laying down, a patch of light across her from the slightly open door to the bathroom.
“They didn’t have any crack.”
“Oh, don’t give out. Come over here and I’ll make it up to you.” She squirmed, that gorgeous ass waiting for me to do something to it.
“You better.” I already had my jacket off.
I was slipping out of my shoes when she came from beneath the covers. The gun she had on me was the business, as they say over here. Not at all like that pop gun of Spence’s
“That’s my lad.” She got out of bed, fully dressed. She grabbed the shit I’d brought back, me sitting there frowning on the end of the bed, watching her, the gun dead on me. “I’d hoped those eejits would get dumb, I think the term is, right, baby? Try to cheat me, would they?”
“And what would have happened if they’d jammed me up?”
She patted my face, doing a kissy thing with her lips. “I had no such worries. You’re too much of a stud to let them do that.”
She was at the door, looking back, halfway into the empty hallway. “I told you I’ve been following your career, Zelmont. I know all about your problems with drugs, how you got exiled over here. And like all of you pampered sportsmen, you can’t imagine a woman not swooning because you have sleek muscles and a lovely dick. Which you do have. You lived up to your reputation.”
“For being stupid.”
“No. I’d say you’re too much a slave of your appetites. That’s going to get you in real trouble someday, love, if you’re not careful. But for my purposes, you were certainly the man for the job.” She left, closing the door quietly behind her.
I curled up on top of the bed, the crack crawlies convulsing my body. I downed half the damn bottle of booze and sweated it out as fast as I took it in. Somewhere around 6:00 in the morning I got to sleep, and at 9:00 I woke up and couldn’t get my eyes shut anymore. I cleaned up and was ready when the bus came to get us for the airport.
Walking through the facility, I spotted a dude reading a Time magazine. There was an article about an expansion football team starting up in Los Angeles called the Barons. L.A. hadn’t had a pro team since the Raiders left. Now that was something. Maybe I had one more chance at the bright lights, just one more shot. Could be last night was a kind of warning.
Get it together, Zee, and there could be the roaring crowds and sweet honeys again, the smack-talkin’ interviews on ESPN and the million dollar endorsement deals pimping glorified grape juice. Yeah, shit yeah. I was going to show Maura and all of them, I was the man for the job. Fuuuck …
THE NEW PROSPERITY
BY PATRICK J. LAMBE
The first thing you have to get used to working in the IT field is all the bloody Pakis. They’re stinking up the cubicles of Ireland with their curry stench. I know they’re not all Pakis, they’re not all angling for their seventy veiled virgins in Jihadville. Some of them are Hindus. Some of them talk with refined Cambridge accents. Some of them will spring for a round or get their feed on in a chipper. A generation or two hence, I wouldn’t doubt they’ll be praying to Mohammed and Ganesh in Gaelic.
Megan says I shouldn’t be so hard. She says Ireland went out to the world, now it’s time for the world to come to Ireland. She might have a point. It’s been a few years since I’ve been on the dole. It’s not like any jackeen who wants a job is left out. Everyone seems to be working with the new prosperity. We all have to eat, even the bloody wogs and Pakis. Can’t accuse me of not doing my part, I was feeding one of them: my boot.
Steel-toed solution.
“A race of bloody poets,” the Englishman says. He’d just walked in, got a look at me as I’m cleaning blood off my boot with a rag dipped in a pint of seltzer water, after me mate Freddy and me had finished our jig on the wog. I’d thought I was done, but got a touch of last-minute inspiration, turned heel on the way back to the pub, and kicked him two more times, “One for Molly Maguire and one for the Queen Mother.” Freddy got a kick out of that one, doubled over laughing.
“Fucking blow in, shouldn’t have been trying to pull a Bloom on us. He should be sticking his little brown stick into his own kind,” I say, as I replace the rag with a shotglass, tilt the Jameson down. I winked at Megan when I said it. She was a beauty all right, if not too discerning. I’d often thought about going a round or two with her. Freddy had told me kissing the blarney stone would be more sanitary. He then educated me as to what the lads are up to when the tourists aren’t around. Apparently it’s the biggest cock manger in the whole country.
“Bad form, lads. The Indian fellow works with me. He’s a friend of mine. There’ll be consequences.”
Fred’s bloodlust was still up, but I put my arms around his shoulder before he took a step toward the Englishman; ordered another round of the black, with a Jameson chaser. Something about the Brit’s eyes. I think he lived west side, Tallaght maybe. I felt he was almost one of us, despite the Imperial legacy. He’d been drinking here at the Clannagh for nigh onto a year now, by my best estimate. He’d worked with Fred and me for a f
ew months at the financial institution, babysitting the computers running the new prosperity, feeding off Dublin’s newly ripened teat. A few steps up from the dole, just like the rest of us.
Besides, he had a Celtic surname, as far as I can recall. Figured him for a county boy come back to see how his grandfather lived, before he emigrated to Liverpool to stick rivets in the side of the Imperial Navy. I’d bet he knelt down and genuflected in the direction of the Pope five times a day, just like the rest of the lads throwing back Guinness and Jameson at the pub.
“Fucking wanker. Why don’t ye go back across the sea. We don’t need you stirring the pot over here,” Fred said.
He should be one of the last to speak, Fred. He’s a fucking culchie. Blowed in from County Cork, I think. His company is barely tolerable at the best of times. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him if he didn’t have a throat as often as I did.
The Brit downed his pint in one long, continuous draught, catching my eye the whole time. “There’ll be consequences,” he repeats.
“Call the Gardaí if you’ve a mind,” I said.
The Gardaí had better things to do than worry about a Punjabi bleeding a Ganges of blood into the gutter. The reason me mate and I were so pissed is because the bank we worked at turned us out early. Couple of lads in Balaclavas had robbed the place; gotten away with a boatload of euros. The cunts worked over the narrowback who had repatriated to guard the stash. The Yank had reclaimed his Irish citizenship, only to have the shit kicked out of him with hurley sticks. Freddy and me had gotten a raise out of that. Score one for Ireland.
