Todd Robinson - The Hard Bounce

Goddamn it, he did it again. He didn’t slip a damned inch. “I dunno. That’s going to have to be between him and Donnelly.”

Barnes chewed his lower lip, mulling it over. He came to a decision. “Shit,” he said. He opened his cell phone. Halfway through dialing, he got bumped again. He spun and grabbed a handful of his nuisance’s shirtfront. “Listen to me closely, Pinky,” he said through clenched teeth. “You bump me one more fucking time and I’m gonna knock two more inches off you. You got it, midget?”

“Yeah, man,” Twitch slurred. “Jeez. Take a chill pill.”

“Fucking assholes,” Barnes said and released him with a shove. “Nice joint you run here, Malone.” He resumed dialing. I walked out of earshot and dialed a number of my own. Underdog picked up on the first ring. “Half an hour.”

I made Barnes drive us both to the loft. I didn’t want him out of my sight for a second. We left the bar right after the phone calls were made and got there fifteen minutes later.

Barnes had a set of keys to the loft, and he let us in. As he turned on the work lights, the door opened behind us. In walked Big Jack, looking like both feet were in the grave and he was just waiting for someone to close the lid. I realized it was the first time I’d seen him out of a suit. He looked like a normal human being in his jeans and T-shirt. A normal human being in inhuman pain.

“What is this all about, Mr. Malone?” When he looked at me, I realized how bad this was going to get. I was getting ready to drop the boom on his best friend. The best friend who had killed his only daughter.

Where the hell was Underdog?

“One of my contacts might have seen someone. Somebody at the squat the night Cassandra died.” Dammit. I’d had the dialogue all mapped out in my head, but nobody was following the script. Not even me.

“What? Who?” Donnelly reacted like my words were ripping out his lower intestines.

The shrill bleat of the intercom cut the question short. I watched Barnes. He looked like he could crack any second, shoulders bunched up tight, jaw clenched.

I slid my hand down toward my hip. Waiting for it. Sid’s Derringer fit perfectly in the seam between my thigh and my leg brace. Twitch had reloaded the gun with hollow points. No way would those just bounce off, he said.

Cop-killer bullets, he called them.

Underdog walked in the door looking scared shitless.

I looked back at Barnes a second too late.

“No!” he yelled, his gun halfway up before I could even process how badly I’d fucked it all up.

Two eardrum-cracking gunshots.

Two big holes exploded onto Underdog’s ratty denim jacket, the impact sending him sprawling.

Barnes had his gun up and aimed. Aimed right at Big Jack.

Big Jack Donnelly gripped a smoking revolver in his hand.

And had it pointed right at my face.

Barnes was supposed to crack under the pressure. I was counting on it. He would lose his shit and draw his gun and the truth would set us free. In front of the DA and an undercover cop, no less.

Now the only thing standing between me and a trigger-happy, lost-his-fucking-mind Big Jack was Barnes.

Barnes, who was pointing an empty gun in my defense.

At the bar, Twitch had pulled a bait and switch. Twitch bumped into Barnes and switched his gun with one of his own, for weight. Twitch then unloaded the gun and returned it to Barnes’s holster with a second drunken bump. There was no way I was going to let the scene go down with live ammo in Barnes’s gun.

Real fucking clever, ain’t I?

“Jack, please. I’m begging you. Put the gun down.” Barnes had his empty gun trained on Donnelly’s chest. He extended his other hand gently toward his friend. Slowly, Barnes was putting himself between Donnelly and me as I carefully moved my left foot back and hit wall. On one side were the windows, and on the other were the tall bolts of canvas. “Jack, listen to me,” he pleaded.

Unfortunately, Jack wasn’t home anymore. His face was the death mask of a lost soul. The skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth hung slack, as though he no longer possessed the strength to hold them in place. His eyes looked past the gun in his hand, through me, and into a deep nowhere. Tears streaked down his face, his nose running.

“I killed her, Danny,” he said in a soft detached voice. “I killed my little girl.”

Aw, hell no.

“Jack, it was an accident.”

If Donnelly noticed the gun Barnes was pointing at him, he didn’t seem to care about it any more than he did his running nose.

“I pushed her. I pushed her away, and now she’s dead.” He turned his face to Barnes but kept the gun square on me. “How could I do such a thing, Danny? How could I hurt my little girl like that?”

Fuck me.

It wasn’t the grieved ravings of a father’s conscience that I’d overheard at the cemetery that day.

It was a confession.

“It was a mistake. A horrible accident. You lost your temper. You’re under a lot of stress, Jack. Please, don’t make this worse than it already is.”

Instinctively, I’d put my hands up when the guns were pulled and the shots were fired. Other than Donnelly, I held the only loaded gun in play. But there was no way I could get to it without giving Big Jack ample time to blow Big Holes through me.

When Donnelly’s eyes finally focused, they drew on me with a dry fury. I instantly wished he’d stayed in La-La land. “Did you know?”

“Know what?” As soon as I asked, I knew what he was talking about.

Donnelly nodded his head loosely and shuddered a pitiful sigh. “You did, didn’t you. You knew about the disc. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.” He jabbed the air in front of me with the gun.

“I didn’t think you knowing about it was necessary.” All I could do was keep him talking, anything to keep his mind off pulling the trigger.

Barnes cut in again, his desperation intensifying. “It was an accident, Jack. She fell. Nobody knew.”

“Somebody did.” Donnelly waved toward Underdog’s body with the gun. Then his hands were at his side. My gun might as well have been in Malaysia.

But Barnes saw his chance. “Goddamn it, Jack. This shit is deep enough. I’m not going to jail for you! I’m sorry, Jack.”

He pulled his trigger on empty chambers. He dry-clicked it three more times in disbelief. “What the fuck?” Then he looked right at me, his face a snarl of rage. “You stupid mother-”

“I’m sorry too, Danny,” Donnelly said, and he shot Barnes in the face. Blood and brains sprayed across me. Barnes dropped face-down to the hardwood with a wet thump, jerked twice, and then was still.

In the fraction of time between Barnes’s blood spattering me and his hitting the floor, it all flashed through my mind in a rush.

I’d been shot over this already.

Kelly’s life had been threatened.

Junior was in a coma.

Underdog was on the floor.

Paul might be dead already.

Barnes sure as fuck was.

And Cassandra.

Even Sid’s gorilla mug passed through in that wisp of a second.

I saw my mother’s face.

My sister.

They had all died.

They were all dead.

Enough , my mind screamed.

Enough, enough, enough, enough.

ENOUGH!

In that same splinter of a second, the room exploded crimson.

My hand reached for the peashooter in my brace as Donnelly turned and fired at me. Slugs drove into the bolts of canvas with dull thumps, toppling them behind me. More bullets detonated into the wall at my back. Focusing my rage into as tiny a pinpoint as I could, I raised my pistol just as a heavy bolt of canvas slammed me on the back of the neck. As I fell, I fired my only two shots in the direction I hoped Donnelly stood.