Todd Robinson - The Hard Bounce

“Fuck your mother,” I offered back, and I downed my shot.

“May I continue?”

When Audrey was out of earshot, I lowered my voice. “Cade…”

“Mr. Cade wanted his nephew to capture the girl in an inappropriate situation. A situation he could use for leverage, were Mr. Donnelly to be elected mayor.”

“And you don’t see where that’s fucked up?”

“I’m not justifying it. I’m just telling you what happened.”

I swallowed a swelling lump of disgust. “She was fourteen. Fourteen fucking years old.”

“Fourteen-year-olds have sex every day, Mr. Malone. I’m not here to debate the proper age for sexual activity to start. But that was all the DVD was supposed to be. Unfortunately, Derek was a weak and confused young man, and he made a second DVD to sell. I was at Sid’s for the same reason you were. Mr. Cade wanted me to recover the other discs, but you interrupted my recovery.”

“And you shot at me.”

Blanc smiled at me again. “I shot around you. I had no reason to kill you. I didn’t have to miss.”

“Gee, thanks. You’re a fucking prince. We done?”

“You feel bad, don’t you? About the cop?”

That stopped me. I felt like a fly caught in a web as it was built around me.

“You shouldn’t. Barnes is no loss to this world.”

“How do you know?” I was the only person left alive from the loft except Underdog, and I couldn’t see him relating the story to Blanc.

“Knowledge is power.” Opening his gold cigarette case, he took out a long, dark cigarette and tapped it on the case. “Don’t worry. I won’t light it in here.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

“I received a phone call,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I had been keeping tabs on Barnes all week. He was working both sides, as you may or may not have known. We weren’t sure how much we could trust him anymore, recent circumstances being what they were.” He paused when he saw me fighting to process the new information he’d tossed on my lap. “He thought you were stringing them for more money. If at all possible, he wanted to avoid more deaths. At least, deaths he would have to dirty his hands with. You played it well, Mr. Malone. The only reason he didn’t kill you himself was your aggression. With you putting him on defense, he couldn’t take you out, not knowing fully all that you had on them.”

“He wanted you to do it,” I said, stunned.

“I told him to clean up his own messes. Either way.”

“Donnelly wasn’t going to be a problem for you or Cade anymore.”

“Smart boy,” he said, tapping his finger on the tip of his nose. “How do you think Mr. Cade has remained so untouchable for all these years? Who do you think led us to Cassandra, so that Derek could make his little movie?”

A chill ran through me. “You telling me it was Barnes? Barnes set the whole thing up?”

A nod.

“Why?”

“Mr. Barnes had his own weaknesses, or shall we say tastes? Mr. Cade makes these tastes his business. As I said, knowledge is power.”

Nearly the same words Donnelly had dropped on me the first time we met.

Blanc went on. “Let me ask you a question.” He leaned in and looked me straight, eye to eyes. “Assuming you watched them? The DVDs.”

“Yeah. I saw them.”

“Did you notice anything about the cinematography, so to speak?”

Then it hit me like a thunderclap between the ears. Why hadn’t I noticed it? How the hell could I have missed something so simple? It was literally right in front of my face on the screen.

The camera panned.

Somebody else had to be in the room, in the closet behind the two-way, moving the camera.

Blanc saw understanding dawn on my face. “Bright lad,” he said. He opened his black leather billfold, placed a twenty on the bar, and stood to leave. “Be seeing you,” he said, crisply pulling the creases from his coat sleeves. As he walked out, he lit his smoke with the lighter that would have cost me two weeks’ wages. Over the flame, he gave me a warm parting smile and a wink.

With his dead eye, of course.

I opened the door to the office one Saturday afternoon. On the floor sat a folder with my name on it, slid under the door. No other markings on the front.

I knew what it was.

Still wasn’t sure that I wanted to see what was inside.

I opened it…

… just a bit…

… just a peek.

There was a picture of a woman on the lower left side. I forced my eyes to not look at it directly, squeezed them shut and looked up as I closed the folder.

She was a woman now. She’d made it that far. I swallowed hard. The lump that had swelled there didn’t want me to.

Sliding my thumb under the fold, I pushed the top page up just a bit.

Just a bit…

There was the name at the top.

Last name: Malone.

First name: Emily.

Middle name: Madeline.

I took a deep and shuddering breath as I realized that I’d forgotten her middle name.

I didn’t know her anymore.

She didn’t know me.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with a good goddamn reason why she would want to.

I wiped moisture from under my eyes as I touched the flame of the Zippo under the corner of the folder. I watched it burn away, felt the flames touching my fingertips. I let the fire burn me, I let it hurt…

… just a bit…

… before I dropped it in the metal wastebasket.

Goodbye, Emily. Hope your life’s as good as I imagined-as good as I hope it has been. Shit, I hope it’s been even better than that.

Better than mine, baby girl.

Then the fucking fire alarm went off.

OR, you can blame the following people I’m about to thank for the book you just read. Your choice.

First and foremost, thanks go to my agent, Stacia Decker. It took a long time to get this book into hands that cared for it, and she stuck with it and busted her ass to make it so. Ben LeRoy and the staff at Tyrus Books-you’re the good hands. Thanks for that.

My family-you support what I do, even when you don’t necessarily get what I do. Sorry, Ma. Love ya.

To my wife Allison-you’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met, and you’ve been strong enough to stick by my ass. I love you. To my little man Sam-you’re not going to be reading this for a long time, but I hope daddy makes you proud when you do.

To those readers who made it this far-hope you dug it, and I appreciate the time you chose to spend with this book. Deep thanks go to you, since without you, I’d be screaming stories to the air and that would just make me a crazy person. Thanks for being a reader.

TODD ROBINSON is the creator and Chief Editor of the multi-award winning crime fiction magazine THUGLIT. His writing has appeared in Blood & Tacos, Plots With Guns, Needle Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Strange, Weird, and Wonderful, Out of the Gutter, Pulp Pusher, Grift, Demolition Magazine, CrimeFactory, All Due Respect, and several anthologies. He has been nominated three times for the Derringer Award, thrice shortlisted for Best American Mystery Stories, selected for Writers Digest's Year's Best Writing.