Paul Levine - Riptide

“Shitface there can carry the ball,” the sergeant said, moving his head in the direction of the prone Winston Hopkins.

Hopkins whined something unintelligible.

Lassiter said, “Winnie, want to grab your dainty Italian briefcase and pretend it’s a ball?”

Hopkins shook his head and mouthed the word “no.”

“He’s taking a medical redshirt,” Lassiter said. “Probably has fumbleitis anyway.”

The sergeant was still in a three-point stance, head up, waiting for some imaginary quarterback to call the signals. “Then it’s just you and me, Mister Linebacker.”

Lassiter studied him, planning to keep talking until the sergeant returned to Planet Earth. But the man’s eyes were glazed and his breath was coming hard. A little extra baggage around the waist, maybe 250, but a meaty chest and granite shoulders, arms straining against his government-issue shirt, epaulets stretched tight.

Lassiter moved close and stood facing him, legs spread, arms hanging slightly in front of his body, knees flexed. No one cheered.

“Let the record reflect we have taken a short recess,” Lassiter said to the court reporter, who looked at her watch, and dutifully recorded the time of the break.

“Jake, I don’t think you should…” Stuart Zeman was saying, fiddling with a Lady Justice cuff link of gold, black onyx, and diamonds.

“Fifty-two, gap tough rotate,” Lassiter heard himself say, signaling a short yardage defense.

“Set, hut-hut-hut…” the sergeant intoned.

“Stand ‘em up!” a voice thundered in Jake Lassiter’s mind, Coach Shula shouting instructions from a distant sideline.

“Hut-hut,” the sergeant barked, then fired out straight and low.

Lassiter squared up and delivered a shoulder-high blow with open palms. His wrists howled with pain, but he stood the sergeant straight for a moment. It wouldn’t last. Using his weight advantage, the sergeant ducked low, put a shoulder into Lassiter’s gut, and slammed him into the cushioned wall with a thud.

Lassiter grunted, shook it off, and said, “Okay, you win.”

“Again,” the sergeant said.

Zeman groaned. Hopkins whimpered. Lassiter shrugged as if to say why not. This time, the sergeant fired out and hooked an arm around Lassiter’s elbow — offensive holding — and was about to drive him in the general direction of Key Largo when Lassiter slid to the right, caught the sergeant off-balance, and slung him sideways against the wall. The crash left two Frederic Remington originals dangling cockeyed.

Sergeant Ferguson picked himself up. “Enough bullshit. Hand-to-hand, commando style.” He spread his legs wide, bent his knees, and put his hands on his hips. The Kiba-dachi, an attack position.

“Not one of those,” Lassiter said, shaking his head. “What ever happened to good old American punchin’ and wrasslin’?”

From somewhere on the floor Lassiter heard Hopkins squeaking. It sounded like son of a bitch the way Donald Duck might say it.

“Now, Claude,” Stuart Zeman was saying. “This will complicate the settlement conference.”

The sergeant gestured in the general direction of his lawyer’s carotid artery. “Shove off, Zeman. You’re one of them. You want forty percent of what I get. I’ll give you forty percent of the big one’s nose and forty percent of the little shit’s tongue.”

“C’mon, Sarge,” Lassiter said. “Let’s talk this over.”

“Except talk isn’t cheap for you jaybirds, is it?”

“Hey, I’m on your side. Let’s just — “

Ferguson feinted with a Kizami-zuki jab, then followed up with a Oi-zuki lunge punch that caught Lassiter in the solar plexus. He doubled over, gasped, then came up hard, catching Ferguson’s chin with the top of his head. The sergeant staggered back a step, then the two men tied up like a couple of professional wrestlers.

The sergeant took a step forward and Lassiter a step back; the sergeant moved his right foot to the side, and Lassiter moved the same direction with his left.

“Personally, I always preferred a waltz,” Lassiter said.

“Linebacker, I’ll hurt you!”

The sergeant worked a hand free and boxed Lassiter’s ear, once, twice, a third time, until the lawyer heard the Bells of St. Mary’s. Then Lassiter pulled back and stomped on the sergeant’s instep and hooked his right fist into the man’s gut, followed by a looping left to the jaw. The sergeant didn’t fall all at once. He just rocked back two steps, his legs wobbling, then slumped to the floor. He wasn’t hurt, not physically anyway. He had snapped, snapped from watching his wife die of a disease hatched in her mother’s womb, snapped from having a piss-ant kid in a custom-made shirt ridicule him, a kid whose idea of a tough day is to lose at squash.

Emboldened, Hopkins finally stood up. Holding his throat, he managed to squeak, “We’ll prothecoot for atthalt.”

“Shut up, jerkoff!” Lassiter ordered.

Zeman was still frozen to his chair. He cleared his throat with a lawyerly harrumph. “I suppose this dashes any prospect of settlement.”

“Sethelment?” Hopkins squealed.

The silk-suited plaintiff’s lawyer ignored him. “Jake, if you want to cancel tomorrow’s mediation, it’s all right with me. Let things simmer down. If you seek sanctions, I’ll understand.” Zeman cleared his throat again. “Noting that the hour is growing late, and with my Ferrari parked vulnerably on Biscayne Boulevard, perhaps we should adjourn.”

Lassiter shook his head. “No sanctions, no postponement. Keep the mediation on. Give us your settlement demand. We’ll make an offer.”

“An offer?” Hopkins stammered. He was moving now, keeping his distance from the sergeant. “No! This guy will crack on the stand. He’s a fruitcake.”

Lassiter narrowed his eyes and took a step toward his associate. “Hopkins, you don’t know people and you don’t know the territory. You’ve got no heart, and you’ve got no soul. In short, Winnie, you are Grade A, prime-cut partnership material. You really fit in with the gazoonies who run this high-rise whorehouse.”

Hopkins stiffened, his eyes fluttering, searching for a rejoinder. “Mr. Tuttle won’t like the way you put that.”

“Maybe not, but he’ll sure love it when you smooch his lily-white ass.”

Clever, very clever, Lassiter thought, figuring he just cost himself another ten grand.

Violet Belfrey walked arm in arm with Samuel Kazdoy, her heart doing little hippity-hops as they approached the front door of the theater. It was shortly after noon, and she’d been his shadow since dinner in his apartment the night before. Violet held her breath as the old man unlocked the front door and wobbled up the stairs to the mezzanine. She’d have to do some damn good acting, but Violet had been pretending for men all her life, and a look of shock can’t be any harder than the cowlike moans she’d perfected at age fifteen. Get ready, she told herself, it’s Academy Award time.

“What’s this?” Samuel Kazdoy asked, looking at a trail of coupons on the top steps, not yet comprehending. The office door hung open on one hinge, leaning against the inside wall like a drunk at a lamppost. Kazdoy switched on the lights and the scene unfolded. The file drawers were open, metal latches twisted out of shape. A handful of coupons remained, strewn across the floor like confetti. The clock, a memento from a 1948 convention of box manufacturers, lay shattered on the floor, its hands stuck at two-fourteen.

“Oy vay!” the old man wailed. His knees buckled and he caught himself by clutching the desk.

“Tarnation,” Violet said, raising the back of one hand to her mouth the way she imagined Bette Davis would do it. “Who woulda done this?”