Todd Robinson: The Hard Bounce

“If you get me to her, there’s more. Cassandra’s not in any trouble, despite the cop. You’re working for 4DC now. You know what that means?”

“Uh… no?” His eyebrows met in confusion.

“What it means is you’re representing me. You’re representing Junior, here.”

Junior waved his hands in protest. “Oh, no, no, no. This little shit ain’t representing me.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re representing us. Nobody else needs to know. Anybody asks, you’re just wondering where Cassie’s gone off to. Got it?”

“Got it, boss,” he said with a crisp salute. He smiled so wide I thought the corners of his mouth would meet in the back of his head.

As he ran down the stairs, I yelled after him. “And if you use that money to buy weed, I’m gonna break your shins.”

I looked back at Junior, whose face was a mask of amazement. “Was that a hundie you just gave that little prick?”

“Yep. We’ve got a gig.”

I ran Junior through the basics, since basics were all I had. He sat on the corner of the desk and chewed his lower lip as he mulled the information. My fingers massaged the ache that roosts inside the lumpy cartilage of my nose when I think too much in one day. I’ve had my nose busted six times-one on Junior. Believe it or not, that bothers him competitively.

After a long silence, Junior said, “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Man, that’s not a lot to start with. A picture and a pothead.”

“True that.”

“This isn’t what we do.”

“I know, Junior. I told them that. They still want us to try. If they want to hand out money, why not to us?”

Junior thought that over. “That is a shitload of money, though.” He drummed his fingers, tapping out a cadence with the letters H-A-R-D tattooed across the knuckles of his scarred right hand. He rubbed his other hand, the one with C-O-R-E across it, over the pocket where he had deposited the twelve-hundred I’d just handed him.

The picture of Cassandra sat on the desk. Junior stared deeply at it, jaws tight. “Boo?”

“Yeah?”

“Who the fuck is this girl?”

We closed the bar at two, and Junior and I hung out shooting pool while the bartender counted out the receipts.

I nursed a beer and bourbon, since all us tough guys drink bourbon.

Well, almost all of us. Junior placed his plastic cup of wine on the lip of the table while he lined up his shot. The only vintages served at The Cellar could probably strip the barnacles off Old Ironsides. Plus most of the iron. I never understood his taste for it, but it was all he drank.

Junior viciously smacked the cue ball off the nine ball. With a hard clack, the nine and the cue bounced off the rails and both dropped. “Shit.” Not only did he scratch, but he was playing solids.

I took the stick and smoothly banked the cue off both bumpers without hitting any balls. “Shit.” Fewer people got as much as we did for our four quarters. If one of our matches ended in less than a half-hour, we were unusually hot.

Luke, the night porter, rattled the front locks. Somewhere between his sixties and his early hundreds, Luke had been the clean-up man at The Cellar ever since its doors opened twenty years earlier.

He looked over at me and beamed his five-hundred-watt smile. Luke had the darkest skin I’ve ever seen on a man, which only served to make his smile all the brighter. His face bunched up in a way that made it look like his wrinkles were smiling at me too. “Mr. Boo. How goes it?” he said with a tip of his faded Red Sox hat that looked like he bought it when Ted Williams was in Little League.

“It goes, Luke. It goes.”

He looked over at Junior. The smile dimmed a bit. “Junior.” A smaller tip of the hat.

Luke stopped calling Junior “Mr.” after Junior accidentally let loose with one too many curses while Luke was in earshot. That was Luke’s one serious and unforgivable pet peeve. All I needed was one good tongue lashing from him. From then on, I turned on my filter when he walked in.

“Luke,” Junior said, lifting his glass.

“Good night?” Luke asked me, while seeming deliberately to not ask Junior.

“A little slow. Day was busy after the game.”

“Those Sox. God bless ’em,” he said with a warm chuckle. “I’m just glad I got to see ’em win a big one. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Heck Luke, I never thought I’d see the day.”

He laughed like it was the best joke he’d heard in a while and clapped me on the back. “Aw, you gots a long ways to go, youngblood. You might see a couple more.”

“You’re gonna outlive all of us Luke, you know that,” I said.

“Lord willing, Mr. Boo. Lord willing.” Luke slowly shuffled back into the kitchen to get his mop and broom. The sound of his little radio came through the swinging doors. Same station every night-a preacher giving his late-night sermon to the airwaves, presumably in the hopes of converting the sinners who were still up and listening at that hour. I gave him no mind, of course.

I swallowed my bourbon and poured another. I made two hash marks on our monthly tab under the register. “What are you drinking?”

“White,” said Junior. There were only three kinds of wine in the bar anyway. White, red, and pink. I grabbed him another bottle from the ice bin, made another hash mark.

Luke came out from the kitchen, mop in hand.

“Hey, Luke?”

“Yeah?”

“If you were looking for a girl, where would you start?”

“C’mon, Mr. Boo. You trying to tell me that you having a hard time finding girls?” He laughed at the very idea. Junior laughed too, but not in the same way. I was strangely flattered that an elderly black man would think me irresistible to the opposite sex.

“Never mind.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Boo. They always come along.” The whole left side of Luke’s face winked at me as he worked his way down the back stairs.

Junior was still laughing. “He don’t know you too well, do he?” Junior handed me the stick. It was the last intact stick in the house, so we had to share.

“What if it isn’t her father who’s looking?” I said. I dropped the cue ball again, but actually managed to knock in one of my own.

“Who else would be?”

“C’mon, Junior, don’t be a dumbass. What if…” I thought for a second. “What if she’s a runaway from New Bedford or something and some assho-someone took her in and was using her to turn tricks? She leaves him, he loses revenue. He wants her back.”

“Where does the cop fit in?” Junior knocked in another one of mine. “ Shoot .” He was getting better at not cursing around Luke, whose presence forced us to edit out 90 percent of our pool banter.

I gave him a look as I handed him his wine.

“Okay, okay, so not every Boston cop is on the up and up.” He poured the wine in his cup, then straightened, excited with a new idea. “The girl. The skinny chick.” He snapped his fingers. “Kelly! Where does she fit into your little runaway hooker theory? She a coworker?”

Good point. She didn’t fit in. We both knew some girls who worked that biz. She wasn’t… well, she just wasn’t. “Fine, I’m just saying, before we hand a kid to anybody, I want to make sure that we’re handing her to the right people.”

Junior took a sip of his wine and smacked his lips. “So riddle me this, Batman. There’s gotta be two hundred PIs in Boston. Why us? This whole Little Girl Lost in the Big City shit? Been there, done that in at least a dozen books that I read.”

“And you’ve only read seventeen books.”

“Hey, three didn’t have no pictures. Two of those didn’t even have pictures of titties.”

“What was your point?”