George Pelecanos - Firing offence

“I should be asking you that, Joe.”

“A bar is a bar,” he said, “and anyway, that scene is over with. I wouldn’t fit in if it were happening.”

“Yeah, but this place?”

“If I remember right, you were some kind of art major in college, Nick. I’ve seen your ads in the Post, and let me tell you, you cut out pictures of television sets very artistically.” We laughed uneasily.

“How about a shot,” I said, “and pour one for yourself.”

“Sure, Nick,” he said, and looked at me as if I didn’t need one. I looked over the railing to one of the bars near the dance floor. McGinnes was standing very close to a girl twenty years his junior, talking to her with his mouth very nearly on her ear. Her companion, a pretty young blond boy with a wedge haircut wearing a white mock turtleneck, was standing on the other side of her gripping a beer bottle, angry but timid nonetheless.

Joe Martinson pushed a shot glass towards me and picked up his own. I looked in my glass and then up at him.

“Bourbon,” he said.

“Rail?”

He frowned an of-course-not and said, “Grand-Dad.”

We did the shots, and I finished my beer before placing the glass back on the bar. A couple walked by me, whispered to each other, and chuckled. Martinson slid a fresh Bud in front of me and I took it by the neck.

They were playing some Pet Shop Boys now and the dance floor was packing up. Lee was with a group of friends at one corner of the floor, pointing up at me and smiling. I raised my beer to them, and one of them laughed and said something to Lee, who winked at me, then turned back to her friends.

I fished the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put the graduation picture on the bar, pushing it towards Joe Martinson.

“You recognize this guy?” I asked.

“No,” he said without thought.

“How about this one?” I placed the doctored, bald-pated photo of Jimmy Broda on the bar. He looked it over and shook his head.

“I don’t know him. What’s his story Kssho?”

“A runaway I’m trying to locate. I think he’s hanging with skinheads. Thought you might have seen him.”

“Not in this place. They don’t even let those guys through the door anymore, after they came in one night and pushed some gays around. That was one time I took the side of the bouncers here.”

“Where would they hang out?”

“Depending on who’s playing, either the Snake Pit or maybe the Knight’s Work on Eleventh, in Southeast. But they’ve pretty much stopped going to the Knight’s Work-the Marines down there were kicking the living shit out of those guys on a regular basis.”

“You know any names, people I should be talking to?”

“Not a one, Nick.”

I put the photos in my jacket and looked back over the railing at the floor below. I noticed some movement from the right side of the room. A bouncer was pushing through the crowd, heading for the main bar. The DJ had begun spinning the twelve-inch version of Big Audio Dynamite’s “Hollywood Boulevard.”

I looked to the center of the bar. McGinnes had his hands on the blond boy’s chest, bunching up his turtleneck and breathing right up in the kid’s face. Martinson yelled something to my back as I moved towards the steps.

The stairs were a blur. I was on the dance floor, the strobe light stylizing the rapidly scattering partners as it synchronized its patterns with the song’s drum machine.

I was vaguely aware of large bodies converging from the left and right, and as the crowd parted, I saw the redfaced blond boy, unhurt and on his ass. McGinnes had turned back to the bar to resume his drinking.

A big guy with something like an ax handle in his upraised fist brushed by me and moved for McGinnes’ back. I swept him with my right foot, and he went down to his knees, dropping the weapon as he fell.

I was grabbed almost immediately from behind in a bear hug. McGinnes had turned and realized what was happening, an apologetic look on his drunken face, accompained by a slightly sad grin that told me what was inevitably going to go down next. Nevertheless, even as he sensed another bouncer approaching him from behind, McGinnes futilely lunged for the steroid boy whose arms were around me.

McGinnes was dropped with a kidney-shot before he could get near me. The one I had tripped was up and walking towards me, a tight sneer on his chiseled, Aryan face.

I thought, as he took a wide stance and drew back his fist, how easy it would have been to drop him with a front kick square in the balls. But in those few protracted seconds I had decided that there was no way out of the club that night without being pummeled, that I might as well take it, and that McGinnes and me, we had it coming.

The lousy prick went for my nose, but I turned my head and went with the punch, catching it high on the cheekbone. The sound of the blow must have sickened the man holding me, and I was released. Then I was pu KThe punchshed from behind with the momentum of a wave, pushed as if my feet were off the floor. McGinnes was being moved similarly, covering his sides and face with his arms from the potshots that the bouncers were taking as they pushed him forward. Many in the crowd were yelling and laughing, the first sign of spontaneous joy on their faces that I had seen all night.

McGinnes was shoved out the door first. He tripped down the steps and fell to one knee on the sidewalk. I kept my balance as someone gave me a final push, walked down the steps, and helped McGinnes up. He mumbled, “I’m sorry, man,” and I could see that he really was, and that he was in some pain.

His pants were ripped at the knee, exposing a clean scrape beginning to redden with blood. I said calmly, “Let’s just walk,” and we did, crossing the street like two gentlemen to the occasional jeers of the spilled-out bar crowd behind us.

Lee was leaning against my car, fist up to her mouth and tears in her eyes as we approached her. “I can drive,” I said, and indeed the events of the last few minutes and the cool night air had made me feel somewhere near sober. We slid into the front seat with Lee in the middle. I turned the ignition key and drove slowly down the block.

I headed east. McGinnes found a beer under the seat, cracked it, muttered “Jesus Christ,” drank, and passed the can. Lee handed me the can after having some herself. We drove in silence for a few blocks. McGinnes, whose right ear appeared to be larger than his left, chuckled as he turned his head my way.

“Well,” he said, “we showed ’em.”

“That we did, Johnny.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, “you sonofabitches really showed them.”

She was laughing through her tears and we joined her, a release that had McGinnes alternately coughing, spitting out the window, and laughing some more. He cried, “Irish bar!” as if there were no other choice.

Lee kissed him on the cheek and then me on my mouth. I continued driving east.

We parked on the corner of North Capitol and F, in front of Kildare’s, McGinnes’ favorite pub. He almost exclusively drank there now, though at one time his bar had been Matt Kane’s on Thirteenth and Mass, until Kane died and McGinnes began complaining about the place being full of “wine drinkers and ghosts.”

We entered and crossed a crowded room where a tenor was singing, passed the main bar, and arrived in the back room, where a few tables were empty. A waitress directed us to a four-top. We must have looked like accident victims, though no one here seemed to take notice.

The place was all muted greens and mahogany. A geezer with a long gray beard, his cane hung over the back of his chair, drank dark beer methodically, closing his eyes with each sip. A couple of young Scots sat near us, discussing rugby as they washed down their ham sandwiches with mugs of ale.