by Martha Carr
“I see.”
“Then there’s the… Aw, what the fuck?” Johnny stopped on the sidewalk and folded his arms to watch the latest display of Portland’s weirdness.
A woman on a unicycle pedaled down the middle of the street, juggling bowling pins. She wore striped knee socks in bright colors, and a purple cape flowed behind her as she rolled down 3rd Avenue. Stuck under one arm was either a burning stick or an actual blowtorch, which pumped gusts of flame into the air behind her in rhythm to some hip-hop song that blasted from the Bluetooth speaker dangling at her hip.
“And what the hell is that supposed to be, huh?”
Lisa tilted her head and watched the unicyclist disappear behind the cars parked along the street. “It looked like a woman on a unicycle juggling and spraying flames. Don’t tell me that’s weirder than anything you’ve seen in NYC.”
“It ain’t the things. It’s the folks. No one in New York would give two shits about somethin’ like that. But here? Look at this. Everyone stops on the street to smile and cheer and film the damn thing with their stupid little camera phones. Jesus Christ, it’s like they’re all tourists in their own damn city.”
“And there you’ve nailed the issue right on the head.” Lisa fought back a laugh. “You don’t like it when people notice things.”
“What? Naw, you’ve got it all wrong, darlin’. I don’t like tourists.”
They kept walking through the crowded streets until they reached the hub of Portland’s bar scene. Outside one establishment, a woman with long purple hair had set up her solo gig on the bar’s outdoor patio and finished playing one of her songs on a ukulele. Those watching her clapped politely, punctuated by a few whistles.
“Thank you. Thank you. It means so much to be here, sharing this space with you all. I want to take this opportunity to remind you why I’m doing this. If you enjoy my art and what I have to create and offer, please think of the kittens.”
“Huh?” Johnny turned to look over his shoulder as they passed the entrance to the bar.
“Don’t play into the capitalist scheme. Don’t let yourself be brainwashed. I don’t want you to buy a CD from me, although you’ll find them at all major retailers. I want you to adopt a kitten and I have four right here who came to the show with me, hoping for someone with a big heart and a love for felines to take them to their new, loving home. After the show, come say hi. Now, this next song is something I wrote while I was on a spiritual journey…”
“I don’t fuckin’ get it.” Johnny shook his head and strode down the sidewalk.
“No one said Portland didn’t have its unique character, Johnny.”
“Why d’ya care so much what I think of this wackjob city, huh?”
Lisa bit her lip through a smile and studied the mural in the alley of a half-naked old woman feeding herself grapes. “Honestly? Because you’re turning into an even bigger asshole than usual. All that negativity can get heavy very fast.”
“Aw, not you too.” The dwarf clenched his eyes shut. “What do ya want me to say, huh?”
“Maybe nothing.” She grinned at him and despite his very real frustrations, the bounty hunter laughed gruffly.
“Johnny. Hey, Johnny.” Luther stopped in front of a restaurant with its doors wide open and sniffed the air. “Tacos.”
“No way. Johnny, please.”
“Move along, boys.” He snapped his fingers. “This ain’t the place.”
“Sir.” A man in a full brown velvet suit who stood outside the next bar with a prohibition-era theme nodded at the dwarf. “I have to ask you to put your dogs on a leash while walking through downtown.”
“Are you the leash police?”
The man laughed. “No, but we do have certain—”
“I’m not interested.” He brushed past him, and the velvet-suited guardian stared after them in disbelief.
“If you’re trying to avoid people paying attention to you, Johnny, you’re accomplishing the exact opposite.”
“We’re fine. All I want is a drink. How hard is that?”
Lisa paused to study the signs pointing into an alley, where another neon sign blazed in the dark space between buildings. “Greeley’s Dive. Hey, I think I found your kinda bar.”
The bounty hunter stopped, took two steps back, and peered into the shadowed space. Alley, neon sign, grungy brick wall, and stairs to a bar underground. He sniffed. “Yeah, all right.”
“One point for Agent Breyer.” She stepped into the thoroughfare and waved him forward.
“Well, you don’t have to make it a contest or nothin’.”
“I think I do at this point. Finding a place that doesn’t make you look like you’re going to have a heart attack is a challenge I’m completely willing to take on.”
“Uh-huh. I ain’t decided nothin’ yet, mind.”
She stopped at the iron railing around the top of the staircase and gestured with a flourish. “After you.”
Johnny whistled and looked at the hounds. “What’re y’all doin’ back there?”
Luther scrambled away from a puddle of thick, oily liquid on the ground and looked at the high walls rising around them. “Enjoying the view, Johnny.”
Rex swallowed and stared at their master. “Isn’t it—” A cellophane wrapper popped out of his mouth.
“Get on before I have to come drag you down.” Johnny pointed down the stairs, and the hounds trotted obediently toward him.
“Told you he was paying attention.”
“When did dwarves start growing eyes in the back of their heads?”
Luther gasped. “He can do that?”
“Y’all stay close, understand? I reckon these folks’ll try to set y’all free out in the woods somewhere if they find you unleashed on your own in a bar.”
“Oh, that’s what free-range means.”
Johnny snorted and pushed the door open into Greeley’s Dive. Lisa waited for the hounds to enter before she stepped inside.
The bar was filled to capacity. Posters in black, yellow, and red boasting band names Johnny could hardly read were plastered over the walls. Leather chairs had been moved to either side to allow for more standing space, and everyone crowded into the long, narrow room wore all black. They clapped and whistled at the musician at the far end.
All right. Now we’re talkin’.
The bounty hunter moved toward the narrow horseshoe bar in the center of the room as the woman seated at the microphone with her guitar hooked up to an amp started her next song. The guitar part was okay—a little on the dark ballad side—but when the woman opened her mouth and started to sing, he shuddered.
“What is this?” He frowned at Lisa and thrust a hand toward the guitarist.
“Music.” Agent Breyer didn’t look too convinced by her statement either.
“It sounds like she’s dyin’ or some—”
“Shh!” A man with black makeup on his eyes and an eight-inch mohawk pressed a finger to his lips and scowled at them before he whispered, “We’re here to listen.”
“Uh…” With a snort, the bounty hunter continued toward the bar and had to climb onto one of the high stools to get his head above the edge. “You got Johnny Walker Black, don’tcha?”
The bartender turned his head slowly away from the musician to glance at him. “Yep. But keep it down, huh?”
“Sure, pal.” He wrinkled his nose at all the grungy Portlanders who nodded their heads to the music and glared at him at the same time. And they like this? It’s nothin’ but a new spin on death metal and it ain’t gonna last. It sucks.
“Anything for you?” the bartender whispered to Lisa.
“Gin and tonic. Thanks.”
The man got to work on their drinks, and Johnny turned on the stool. “Someone needs to break it to her.”
She grimaced. “Yep. I’m with you there. And I didn’t think this place would be…like this.”
“Surprise, surprise.” He rested his forearms on the bar, and the bartender glanced impatien
tly at him before he placed both drinks on coasters.
“That’ll be twelve dollars.”
“Yep.” He couldn’t get to his wallet fast enough and dropped a ten and a five on the counter. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, and while you’re at it, go ahead and pour another one and keep ʼem comin’—”
“Shh!” This time, more than one punk-dressed hipster turned toward the bounty hunter to shut him up.
“It’s a bar!” Johnny shouted at them. “I thought at least you folks would understand how a bar’s supposed to work.”
He snatched his whisky on the rocks up and gulped half of it.
Beside the high bar stool, Luther uttered a high-pitched whine and pawed at his ears. “Johnny, make it stop.”
“Yeah, my head’s about to explode.”
“Even the rabbits don’t squeal this much when we wring their necks, Johnny.”
Lisa faced the musician and sipped her drink with a grimace.
A woman with her head completely shaved joined the bartender inside the horseshoe to whisper something in his ear. The man approached Johnny and leaned over the bar to see Luther still pawing at his ears and Rex trying to bury his face against his brother’s coat.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he whispered. “You can’t have your dogs in here.”
The dwarf glared at him. “I must have missed the sign.”
“We don’t have a sign. It’s merely implied.”
“How the hell is that implied?”
“Shh!”
“Damnit!” He slapped the bar. “My hounds ain’t leavin’ until I do. And I ain’t leavin’ until I finish my drink.”
The bartender and over-sensitive patrons glowered at him. He slurped the second half of his whisky noisily and stared in return.
“Okay, Johnny. You got your drink. Maybe we should—”
“Naw, this is fun, ain’t it?”
“We’re trying to listen,” a woman with rainbow stripes painted on her face protested in a whisper-shout. “You’re being so disrespectful right now.”
“Better yet.” Johnny yanked another fifty dollars out and slapped them on the bar. “Go on. Pour me another.”
“Then you’ll leave?”
“Sure.”
The bartender gritted his teeth, did as he was asked quickly, and slid the second drink toward the bounty hunter. He picked up the fifty dollars and shook his head. “You gave me too much.”
“Nope. That’ll cover the rest of the bottle. I’m takin’ it with me.” He gestured for the guy to hurry, and the whisky bottle thunked onto the counter. Once he’d thrown the second drink back, he slammed the glass onto the wood, hopped off the stool with a loud thud, and snatched the bottle to take it with him. “Come on, boys. We got what we came for.”
“Shh!”
The hounds cut through the crowd toward the door. “Time to go.”
“Let us out, Johnny.”
“Out, out, out, out!”
The musician sang one last high, warbling note. Johnny threw his head back and howled. The hounds followed suit without question as he shoved the door open and trudged onto the staircase landing.
Lisa reached the door as the musician said meekly into the microphone, “Thank you so much for…being here. That’s…uh, that’s the end of my set.”
The applause was minimal, to say the least, mostly because the crowd inside Greeley’s Dive was busy glowering at Lisa and Johnny as they let the door swing shut behind them.
“Happy now?” she asked and hurried up the stairs with the help of the iron railing.
“You bet. At least in Brooklyn, they woulda thrown shit and chased us out.”
“And that’s supposed to be better how?”
Johnny reached the top of the stairs, turned to face her, and spread his arms in a dramatic gesture. “It’s more fun.”
Chapter Fourteen
“So we’ll go to the hotel with your bottle?” Lisa studied a rack of handmade postcards outside a lingerie shop, then hurried forward to keep pace with the bounty hunter.
“That’s all I wanted, darlin’. If Nelson fucks up like that again, I ain’t gonna be so easy to persuade onto another case.”
“Yes, it was so easy.” She shook her head. “Please tell me you’ll eat something with your whisky dinner.”
“This is for the whole stay.” He lifted the bottle and wiggled his eyebrows. “Don’t you worry yourself now. What you saw the other day was a dwarf reevaluatin’ his take on a decade and a half. Now, it’s done.”
“All right. I can give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. I merely don’t wanna find you passed out in your hotel room in the morning unable to walk straight.”
Johnny snorted. “Come on. That ain’t happened to me in…shit. It’s been fifteen years.” And it's not what I need to be thinkin’ ʼbout now anyway.
“Okay. So what time do you—”
A shriek rose from up the street. “No!” a woman shouted. “Give it back, it’s mine—hey! Mikey, you’re hurting me!”
Something banged against hollow metal, and Johnny growled. “Hell no. Hold my bottle.”
“What?”
“Take it!”
Lisa snatched the bottle from him and saved it from slipping out of her hands before she raced after him. The dwarf drew his utility knife and flipped it open as the screams rose again from two alleys down.
“Right behind you, Johnny!” Rex called with a sharp bark.
“Those damn hamsters won’t get away with it,” Luther added.
He skidded to a stop at the alley entrance and saw exactly what he expected—a dirty, skinny man in soiled clothes pinned a woman up against the dumsper along the brick wall. He fumbled at something in the woman’s hands and tried to pry it from her grasp as he hurled her back against the dumpster again with a hollow clang.
“I said get off!” the woman screamed and slapped his face with far more force than her tiny frame seemed capable of.
“You heard her, Mikey,” Johnny muttered.
The assailant lurched away from her and stared at the dwarf with his knife out and two snarling hounds at his side. “Mind your own business, man.”
The woman leapt at him and delivered another surprisingly strong slap. He grunted and stumbled back across the alley and into the opposite wall.
It gave Johnny enough time to see that the woman was as dirty and skinny as the man was. Her hair was matted in an unbrushed mess around the dirt smears on her cheeks and her baggy sweatshirt hung past her wrists, even in the summer heat. Damn. It’s not a mugging. At least not the kind either of them didn’t get themselves into.
“You little bitch,” Mikey snapped. “If you weren’t already in the gutter, I’d throw you there myself.”
“Screw you!”
“Hand it over, Janice. You know that’s all there is right now.”
“No!”
Mikey lunged toward her and tried to pin her against the dumpster again. He barely succeeded and only with the full weight of his body behind it, which wasn’t much.
“All right, cut it out.” Johnny flipped his knife shut and returned it to his belt as he stalked down the alley. “I said stop.”
“Give it!” Mikey shook Janice by both wrists, but she clenched her hands shut, shook her head vigorously, and groaned.
“No. No. I can’t. I need it more.”
“You already had—”
“Y’all need to quit it.” Johnny caught the man by the back of his dirty jacket—which felt more like oilcloth but he assumed it was originally ordinary denim—and hauled Mikey away. The man’s grip broke around her wrists. He stumbled, lost his balance, and landed on his ass with a grunt. “Janice—”
“How do you know my name?” The woman stared at Johnny, clutched both fists to her chest, and turned away from him. “I don’t know you. I never seen you before.”
“I’m the guy keepin’ your friend from bustin’ your head open against t
hat dumpster. He’s not much of a friend anyway, if you ask me, but we’re all workin’ with what we got, right?”
“What do you want?”
He opened his hand and raised an eyebrow.
“No. Uh-uh. It’s mine!”
“Yeah, you said that. Come on, darlin’. In my hand.”
“Johnny?” Lisa asked at the mouth of the alley, her right hand crossed over her body to rest cautiously on the grip of her service weapon in its shoulder holster. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell y’all what’s goin’ on.” He held the wide-eyed woman’s gaze and nodded slowly. “You see them hounds behind me? If you run, darlin’, you’ll be at the wrong end of a couple of coonhounds trained to bring down their mark, you understand?”
“Johnny, what’s wrong with her?” Luther padded slowly forward behind his master. “She one of the crazies seeing demons?”
“That goes for you too, Mikey.” Johnny snapped his fingers and pointed at the man grimacing on the ground. Rex immediately headed toward the guy, who scrambled away until he was stopped by the alley wall.
“You can’t,” Janice whispered.
“You drop it there or I’ll take it from you.” He wiggled his open hand. “And I ain’t as easy to slap around as he is.”
“You… What are you?” She looked warily at him. “You a cop or something?”
“FBI,” Lisa said. “And I wouldn’t test your luck with him if I were you.”
“Fuck.” It wasn’t clear whether Mikey said it because he thought they’d been caught or because Rex was inching slowly closer.
Janice scrunched her face up, uttered an indecisive moan, and slapped her hand onto Johnny’s open palm.
The dwarf caught her wrist to make sure she emptied everything into his hand before he released her. “Good choice.”
“Man, you can’t take it.” She wrapped her arms around herself and bounced up and down in her hole-ridden sneakers. “We need it.”
“No, you don’t.” Johnny looked at the small plastic baggie filled with a thin spread of brown powder. When he flipped it, a sharp hiss escaped him and he scowled at the Red Boar stamp he’d seen on the drug baggies in Manhattan. Is this fuckin’ shit all the way out here now too?
