Todd Robinson - The Hard Bounce

I strolled over to the dinosaur as casually as a man with a hole in his leg relying on a cane could. The dinosaur turned his head on a neck as thick as a telephone pole. “The fuck you want, Gimpy?”

“Nothing with you, Bobo. I want your organ grinder.”

A dull film passed behind his big dumb cow eyes. Dim bastard didn’t even know I was mocking him. “What?”

Oh, this sweetheart was going to be an absolute pleasure. “I’m here to see Mr. Cade.”

“Mr. Cade don’t see nobody when he’s eating.”

“Where you from, paisan ?” I smeared the last word with the same jackass Italian inflection the dinosaur was affecting.

“Hyde Park.”

“Then why the fuck do you talk in that Long Island wiseguy wanna-be patois ?” I said with a smile.

“Huh?” Again with the stupid.

“I mean, this isn’t The Sopranos . If you’re gonna work for the Irish mob, you should at least affect a brogue or something. The Italian thing just makes you sound like the retard you look like.”

A dangerous smile crawled across his lips. “You fucking kidding me, Gimp?”

“If I wanted to kid you, big boy, I’d tell you a knock-knock joke.”

He wrinkled his brow, unsure whether to pound me into dust or laugh in my face. He turned his head up a bit, thinking about it. I whipped out the stun gun and jabbed it into his neck.

Nothing.

Batteries were dead.

Fucking great.

“The hell you doing?” he asked, grabbing my wrist. The stun gun dropped out of my hand and smashed on the sidewalk. “What is that, a pager?”

Plan B.

Losing the crutch, I pulled the white and blue striped tube sock out of my leg brace. I brought it down on his skull as I hopped on one leg. If he hadn’t moved, he might have gone down clean. But in his effort to get out of the way, the sock popped him square on the forehead. The skin split wide open, blood immediately gushing over his eyes. He took a groggy step backward, and I took another shot.

The second time, I landed right on the sweet spot. The dinosaur let go of my wrist, bounced once off the hood of the Caddy, and slid down to the sidewalk. A smear of darker red on the Caddy’s cherry color marked his descent. The sock tore from the impact and the change from my retirement fund spilled onto the street with a jingle. I dropped the sock on the dinosaur’s lap and limped inside.

The air conditioning blasted me as I opened the door. Conor’s was empty but for Cade, who barely afforded me a glance when I walked in. Hung over the bar were portraits of the Irish Holy Trinity: JFK, RFK, and Teddy. Only Teddy’s had a half-full rocks glass of whiskey in front of him, whether in honest tribute or smartassery, I couldn’t tell.

An empty restaurant was the last thing I wanted. The only three sounds in the place were my heart, some Chieftains on the speakers, and the cracking of the lobster claw Frankie was working on.

I sat at his table as casually as I could. Brando in a leg brace.

Caught in the silver lobster cracker in Cade’s scarred hands, the claw made a sharp splintering sound, like bone snapping. Cade couldn’t have cared less that I’d seated myself. I pressed my hands flat on the table to show that there was nothing in them-and to keep them from shaking.

Looking at him up close was strange. He was as close to a celebrity as I’d ever come. I found it hard not to look at the distinctively wide ears, knobby and cauliflowered, that the crime beat loved to use in descriptives of the man. A thick head with a face like a fist perched on top of his wide body. The wide ears made his head look even bigger. Between the thinning, bone-white hair that was combed sharply back over his pate and the thick white moustache, Cade looked like a polar bear in a light blue, three-hundred-dollar sweat suit. A polar bear that could have me killed just as easily as he ordered his barley pudding.

Something in his face gnawed at my mind. He and his nephew shared no features whatsoever, but something familiar was bugging me about the man.

“You need something?” he said, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to go away. As he sat up to give me his attention, I saw the ridiculous bib he was wearing-a white plastic job with a picture of a smiling lobster in a pot of boiling water.

I knew just how the lobster felt.

Before I spoke, I realized that I was staring at his garlic knot ears despite myself. “You had me shot.”

A broad smile stretched his thin lips wide. “ Oh. You’re the tough guy who thought it would be a bright idea to smack my nephew around.” Crunch. He sucked noisily at the claw, letting me know I was as much a threat as the lobster.

“Your nephew is a piece of shit.”

That got his attention enough to stop his wet slurping. He leveled his gaze at me over the claw. “Watch your mouth.” His eyes threw daggers with the warning.

“You know what he does?”

“I don’t fucking care what he does. I care about what you did.” He casually pointed a broad finger, greasy with melted butter. “You should care what you do. You should be careful what you’re doing right fucking now, kid.”

“He makes videos. He rapes girls, and he videos them.”

“So what? You a faggot or something? You don’t like fucking girls? Maybe you’d like it if there was some nice cocksucking on there? That your thing?” He smirked and lifted his chin. “Huh, big boy? That it?”

“What you should know is that the girls are underage. Not only does he rape them, but he smacks them around first.”

“So maybe the little cunts are into that shit. You don’t know.”

“Vice has a file on him. They’d love to get a name.”

Cade rolled his eyes and dropped the lobster cracker on the table from a height where it made a nice thump. “ Oh . And you know the name? Is that what you’re saying?” He laced his fingers in front of him, the index fingers pointing at me like a child’s approximation of a gun. “Let me make sure I’m perfectly clear about all this.” He cleared his throat and looked me dead in the eye. “You making threats? That right? Hey, Lou? You hearing this?”

“I’m hearing it.” Like an apparition separating himself from the shadows, Louis Blanc came walking around the corner. He circled us slowly, one perfectly manicured hand tracing the material of the green-checkered tablecloth. An obscenely large diamond winked at me from his cufflink, like it was letting me in on the joke. “But I’m not sure I’m believing it.” He made his way behind me, the hand coming to rest on the back of my chair. He leaned over my shoulder. “That true, kid?” he whispered. “You making threats to Mr. Cade?”

His breath was warm on the hairs behind my ear. His inflection was gentle, almost paternal. Good thing I’d pressed my hands onto the table, since they were starting to tremor. As was my jaw. But since I couldn’t press my face onto the table too, I just chomped on my lip to make it a sneer. Unfortunately, I think it made me look like I was pooping.

“You fucking making threats against my family, you little cocksucker?” Frankie’s temper was starting to flare. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Do you know who the fuck you’re talking to?”

“I know all about you, Mr. Cade. I know you have two daughters-”

Cade stood up, sending his chair backward onto the floor with a bang. “Don’t you say another fucking word!”

It was all so absurdist in a way, made more so by the smiling lobster I was now eye to eye with.

“How old was she, Frankie? How old was your daughter when she died last year?”

“Lou! Hold this punk down!” With an animal growl, Cade snatched up the silver lobster crackers.