Todd Robinson - The Hard Bounce

“Sure.”

“And these Canadians went after Kelly because…” He held onto the last syllable, waiting for me to answer. I didn’t. It was too early in the morning, and I’d been shot. My tank was low on smartass juice. “ Because ?”

“Because of the wonderful things she does?” No, wait. Had a little left.

Barnes grabbed the front of my johnnie and slammed me back onto the bed. I was too weak to offer much resistance. “Play your games, Malone. Play your little fucking games.”

“Get your fucking hands off me, Barnes.” I grabbed his thumb and twisted it back. The knuckle popped, straining. “You want to dance sometime, we’ll dance. You want to get hard on me when I’m too weak to stand? I’ll still rip your fucking thumb off.” I wrenched the thumb harder, close to the breaking point. Barnes didn’t so much as flinch, even though it must have hurt like hell.

“Let’s do that sometime.” Murderous fires blazed in his eyes. “Soon.” With that, he let me go and I released his thumb. He exited, trying to slam the door, but the hydraulics just hissed violently as he stormed out. It was nice to know we were still buds.

My heart was still pounding, hands shaking, five minutes after he’d left. Barnes could have jacked my ass up into the next millennium, if he’d chosen to. Cop right outside the door or not. Shit, the cop probably would have given him a hand.

I figured Donnelly would be worried about damage control. The bullet wasn’t an act of God. I’m sure they wished I’d come up with a more plausible line of bullshit to cover their asses, but I was doped up and pissed off. Let them cover their own asses if they needed to. I wasn’t lying for them. I was lying for Cassie. Besides, fuck Canada.

The rest was the standard battery of bullshit. Not satisfied with what Barnes told them, another detective came in and tried the threatening approach. I stuck to my story about the rogue gang of gun-toting Canadians. Twitch’s theory about disproving an absurd lie seemed to hold true. The second cop didn’t seem any happier with my answers than Barnes was, but what were they going to do?

The doctors grudgingly gave me my walking papers. Junior brought me a set of clothes, which was an improvement on the pantsless state I’d arrived in.

Armed with a pair of crutches and a prescription for painkillers, I hobbled out with slightly more strength and muscle control than a rubber chicken. What I needed more than anything was to get back out and rip the world a new asshole. I planned on starting with Snake and Scarface.

It’s funny how sometimes the worst idea can seem like brilliance to a bunch of liberal hippies living as far away as possible from the problem they’re trying to help. Camp Freshwood was one of those ideas. Every summer for two weeks, we got trudged deep into western Massachusetts for some fresh air and macramé lessons. Sounds good, don’t it?

Two to three different Homes occupied parts of Camp Freshwood at any given time. Still sound good? We were supposed to make friends interacting with others in the same situation as us. Guess what? We hated each other. We weren’t peers; we were soldiers all thrown abruptly into one another’s company, and we all had something to prove. The only arts and crafts I learned were the art of war and the craft of being crafty.

In the seven years I fought in the wars of Camp Freshwood, three kids mysteriously drowned, countless others got bizarre food poisoning. One kid “fell” off a cliff, and another hung himself with a macraméd noose. I shit you not.

But nothing compared with the summer Twitch vacationed at Camp Freshwood. Incidentally, it was the last summer of that ill-planned social experiment.

We were hardcore kids, but we were still a step behind the Roxbury boys. They were just a little bit bigger, a little bit meaner, and carried weightier chips on their shoulders. They’d also earned themselves quite a rep as a gleeful bunch of ass-rapers. That summer, we got shifted into the camp at the same time.

Twitch caught the first offensive, of course. They found him in the woods. Alone. What he was doing out there alone, I’ll never know. I’ll never ask, either. I didn’t even know he was gone from the group. At mess hall that night, in he limped, wincing each time he brought his left leg around. As he made his way over to our table, I heard chuckling from the Roxbury table. One of the boys made kissy sounds. A thin line of blood dribbled down the back of Twitch’s thigh, one sock soaked bright red.

Later that night, the rest of us tossed around ideas for payback. Twitch sat apart from us in the corner, head between his hands like he was trying to hold his skull together. We all went to bed, ready to start the day fresh for blood.

We never got the chance.

All that night, rain beat down on the camp, pounding a wet cadence onto the corrugated metal sheets that passed for roofing. Wet and miserable in our cots, we were woken by a wild-eyed counselor on the edge of full-blown panic. We were herded quickly onto a waiting school bus. The sobbing middle-aged hippie didn’t give us an explanation until the bus was tearing down the highway.

Apparently, three of the Roxbury campers snuck out of their cabin during the night. The only thing the staff, the State Police, and the local ME could figure was that they encountered an animal, possibly a bear. What they never figured out was why the bear ripped those kids into chunks but didn’t bother eating any.

That morning, Twitch’s shoes had an awful lot of mud on them. And his face had an awful lot of smile.

To this day, I believe Twitch gives me far too much credit for his safety at St. Gabe’s. I have no doubt of his love for me and Junior; his devotion to us is absolute. Twitch would die for us, if it came to that. So despite him being a sociopath, a borderline psychopath, and pretty much any other path I can think of, his was the safest place I could think of to deposit Kelly until we could get shit cleared up.

Thank god the teenage Puerto Rican gang that lived on the floor below Twitch wasn’t home when we got there. I had Phil haunting the front of my house; Twitch had Boriquas. Nothing had ever escalated into physical conflict, but they got their ya-yas making visitors uncomfortable through stare-downs and low-voiced Spanish threats. Kelly was already at nerves’ end, and I didn’t need a tête-à-tête with those punks to bring the rest of her roof crashing down.

Twitch jumped out of Junior’s car as we pulled up. “Um, could you wait here a sec?”

“What’s up?” I asked.

A blush crept up Twitch’s pale neck as he cast a nervous glance at Kelly. “It’s, um, kinda messy up there, and I want to straighten it up a bit. I wasn’t expecting company.” Twitch’s eyelid had been stuttering nervously for the entire drive.

“No more than five minutes,” I said tossing an obvious glance with raised eyebrows to the empty front porch.

When he was out of earshot, Kelly gave me a watery-eyed look so full of tension it broke my heart. “What am I doing here?”

I took her hand in mine, trying to meet her eyes with a hard confidence I wasn’t feeling. “Listen, sweetie. Me and Junior need to get this straightened out.”

“But the police-”

“No. The police don’t give a shit. This is between me and…” I didn’t have a way to finish that sentence without letting Kelly in on more than I wanted. “I just need you to stay here with Twitch. You’ll be safe here.” Relatively speaking.

“For how long?”

“I need you to stay with him for a couple days until we can figure out exactly what’s going on.”

Her eyes glistened, and she hugged me hard. Fear radiated off her skin.