Эйс Аткинс - Kickback

“Hard to know who is who,” I said. “How about we check in to the hotel and get changed. Nobody looks tough wearing a scarf.”

“Babe, I could wear a pink dress and it wouldn’t matter.”

“I shudder to think,” I said.

They gave him medicine that made him sleep. The boy had dreams, weird dreams, that took him home and back with his forgotten mother. He thought about his dad with his back turned. Danielle was there watching, but not speaking. He remembered waking up shaking and a big black woman bringing him more pills. She walked him to the bathroom and then back. And after a few hours, or a few days, he woke up. The mattress was wet with sweat. He was having another dream and he awoke with his breath caught in his throat.

He sat up.

And there was the guard. The one Dillon called Robocop. He stood at the end of the boy’s bed holding the stick with the nail in the end. He’d been watching the boy sleep.

There was something unnatural about the man. He was wiry thin but corded with muscle. He had a skeletal face with the eyes that burned a weird, almost neon, blue. He palmed the stick in his hand. A long twisted row of black-and-blue tattoos snaked from under his T-shirt down one arm.

“What do you want?”

The man didn’t answer him. He tightened his jaw, eye twitching.

“What?” the boy said. The words felt weird and tight coming from his cotton mouth. These might’ve been the first words he’d spoken in days, and everything felt hollow and weird. His mind was still half in a dream and his arms shook just holding himself upright. He felt like he’d just run a marathon.

“Don’t you ever make me look bad again.”

“Excuse me?”

“In front of the other boys,” he said. “Don’t do it. When I saw you on the boat, I knew you’d be trouble. I seen a lot of you come and go off this island. It’s up to me who stays. You go when I say it.”

The boy tried to remember the man’s real name. All he could think of was Robocop. He hadn’t seen the man without sunglasses since that first night on the boat. The way the man had stared, appraised him, made him feel uncomfortable then. His mind rushed with thoughts of explaining that Tony Ponessa had jumped him. That this wasn’t his fault. He’d meant no disrespect. But he stopped himself. He looked at the man. Maybe he did mean some disrespect. This man just wanted to break him.

“You could have killed Tony.”

The boy nodded.

“He’s special here,” he said. “You’re nobody.”

It was early in the morning. A soft light bled through the blinds in the sterile room. Someone had brought him a clean uniform and left it on a hard folding chair. The man continued to stare. The boy waited for him to hit him with the stick. Or yank him from bed.

Instead, the man tossed the stick to the linoleum floor.

“Get it.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘Get it.’ ”

When the boy shook his head, the man lunged for him, gripping the back of the boy’s neck, like you would a puppy, and pulled him from the bed. He fell to his weak legs, but then was up. It was no different than wrestling. You get tossed down, you get up. It was all automatic.

“Did I say, ‘Get up’?”

You couldn’t win. The boy stared at him.

“Get dressed,” Robocop said.

The boy crossed his arms tightly over his chest to stop shaking. Outside he heard yelling and a group of boys running through the morning count off. They yelled out their number aligned on the broken basketball court.

“You’re nobody,” the man said. “Nobody cares if you ever make it back home.”

The man picked up the clothes and threw them at the boy. He watched as the boy took off some white threadbare pajamas. Robocop licked his lips, his Adam’s apple bopping up and down. He ran a hand over his forehead as if he’d been the one with the fever.

The man spit on the ground. “Follow me.”

35

We checked into the Vinoy in St. Petersburg, changed into lighter attire, and drove back over the bay to Tampa and a bar district called Ybor City. The Florida secretary of state’s office noted Scali and Callahan’s wives also having an interest in a place called Dixie Amusements. It was nearing night by the time we pulled up in front of the address on Seventh Avenue. There was a lot of pulsing dance music and women wearing next to nothing strolling along the street. The address for Dixie Amusements turned out to be a bar called Bikini Wings.

“Charming,” Hawk said.

“Marketing geniuses at work.”

“Shall we?” Hawk said.

“After you.”

Bikini Wings was, as advertised, a bar that had beer and hot wings served by waitresses in bikinis. They only wore the bikini top and hot pants below. Perhaps pants is where the health inspectors drew the line. The bar was a long, open space in an old storefront, with the original terrazzo floor indicating it had once been a bank. We ordered a couple of beers at the bar and looked around the place.

“Inspiring to watch a master at work.”

A very short Latina in a black top and with many tattoos down one arm set down two Sam Adams. I liked to stick with one type of beer for the evening. Must be loyalty.

The light was low and I counted eight customers in a space that could have held a hundred. I glanced down at the laminated menu, protected from the hot sauce, and noticed they served over fifty different flavors of wings. Buffalo to Szechuan.

“You find this in the Zagat guide?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Off the rating chart.”

Hawk glanced down at the menu. “Must be those Hawaiian wings,” he said. “Inventive.”

Ceiling fans spun overhead. There were Sam Adams beer signs and mirrors behind the bar and framed jerseys for the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots on the wall. Hawk noticed me staring and pointed out the Pats jersey for Kinjo Heywood.

“Lot of Boston down South,” he said.

I nodded.

He sipped his beer. Hawk had changed into a white linen suit with a navy dress shirt. He wore a gold rope chain, not unlike the magnetic charms of ballplayers, with an authentic Roman coin as a pendant. Underneath the coat, he sported a .44 Magnum with a blue finish. The coat fit well, but loose, and the bulge was not noticeable.

In a booth across from us, a group of five guffawing men in cheap suits tossed chicken-wing bones into the center of the table. They were drunk and loud and would whistle for the two women in bikini tops to bring them another round or order another specialty off the menu. Salesmen out for an evening on the town. One of them offered the waitress a hundred-dollar bill to take her top off.

Hawk drank a bit more beer. The fans twirled overhead. I didn’t even know he was listening. “I could make the shot backward,” he said. “Over my shoulder.”

“May cause a disturbance,” I said.

“Thought our job was to make ourselves known in these parts,” Hawk said.

“To the right people,” I said. “I hate for us to waste our professional abilities on random creeps.”

“You mind if I glower?” Hawk said.

“Be my guest,” I said.

Hawk turned to the table. He wore sunglasses, but the direction of his gaze was obvious.

The table grew very quiet. The men huddled over their beers and looked up at the television monitors. Hawk turned back around and sipped his beer.

“Bravo.”

“Smart boys,” Hawk said.

“What’s a nice Boston bar doing in a place like this?” I said.

“Why don’t we ask?” Hawk said.