Ken Bruen - Pimp

Jo took his turn at bat and knocked out Larry’s dentures, said

“Need to focus, ol’ man, he just told you our names.”

Definitely not Mexican. Cuban? Toothless now, he mumbled, “What yah want, asswipe? There’s nothing in the house, no valuables. If you want to pay some credit card bills, be my guest.”

More glaring from Bev. Shit, she was scarier than Mo and Jo. He knew if she wasn’t bound and gagged she’d be tearing into him, going, “Why’re you joking around with them? You trying to get me killed?” Always criticizing him, taking the opposite point of view.

Mo moved over to the bookcase where an open Sam Adams was resting, took a large swig, belched, said, “This shit is good.”

Sam Adams? Larry drank Schlitz. Who the hell had been to the house drinking Sam Adams? Wait, was Bev cheating on him?

Then Mo crouched down, almost friendly, close to Larry’s ruined mouth, said, “You owe our boss seventy-five large, not including the vig.”

Larry managed to move into a sitting position, said, “Fucksake, why didn’t you just ask instead of all this Get Shorty nonsense?”

Jo asked, “Who’s Shorty?”

Mo laughed, said, “You see, Larry, you see what I have to work with?”

Larry thinking, There’s a .357 Magnum in a drawer near where the brew had been resting. If he could make his way over...

Mo said, “Lookin’ for this shit?” and dangled the Magnum off his pinky.

Fuck.

Then Mo sucked on the end of the bottle, making annoying noises, asked, “Where’s the cash at, my man?”

“Cash? You must be making a mistake, I’m the last guy on this block who has cash.”

“That’s not what the boss be sayin,” Jo said.

“The boss?” Larry said. “Who’s the boss? Please tell me it’s Tony Danza and this is all some fuckin’ joke.”

“Y’all think you funny,” Mo said.

“Y’all?” Larry asked. “There was only one of me, last time I checked.” Larry smiled.

“That’s what’s goin’ on?” Jo said to Larry. “You laughin’ at us, man? You think we clowns?”

Larry said, “Look, Puerto Rican Joe Pesci, first of all, I don’t know who the fuck you are or what the fuck you want from me. I’m Larry Reed the movie producer, not Larry Reed the millionaire. Second of all, you seem like a smart young fellah, you think I really would keep that kind of dough here?”

Mo raised his hand and Larry flinched. Mo smiled, said, “Relax, man. Trust me, if I really wanted to hit you, you wouldn’t have time to duck.” Then cold cocked Larry, said, “See.”

True enough, Larry hadn’t.

Jo said, “I look Rican to you?” Then, “If you ain’t got the green, we gotta be mean.”

The fuck was he talking about?

This: “We gonna take your wife with us, have us all a party and you can get her back when you bring us the seventy-five K.”

“Bring it. Bring it where?”

“You find out,” Jo said. “And you call the cops, you find your wife in the L.A. River with the rest of the dead fishes.”

He stuck out his long tongue, looked like Gene freakin’ Simmons, and gave Bev a porno style kiss over the bandages, and then he and Mo lifted the chair.

“Whoa, the fuck you doing?” Larry said, upset that they were taking the club chair he’d paid two hundred forty-nine bucks for at Crate & Barrel, then it hit that they were taking Bev away with it. He fought off the thought of, Take the cunt, she’s all yours , and went with, “Hey, where the hell you takin’ my wife?”

He felt like he was in a movie — he was the good guy, the hero with a set of skills. They were fucking with the wrong guy. He was ex-CIA, ex-DEA, ex fuckin’ something .

At the same moment, Jo fired the Magnum and pain exploded in Larry’s thigh. In agony, he looked down at the bloody gash, just glad L-Rod wasn’t harmed.

Then, still like he was in a movie, a horror flick now like the shitty ones he used to make in the seventies, he watched the guys carry his wife out of the house.

The way Bust happened:

Paula Segal, tired of her career as a midlist crime fiction writer, had written a draft of a Max Fisher true-crime story called The Max that had gone nowhere. Her agent told her that the book was too dark, too unrelenting, and would never sell to a “big five” publisher, so she paid a company a few hundred bucks to format it, paid another couple hundred for a cover — a mocked up image of Max’s infamous mug shot — and put it online herself with a new title, Max Fisher: Uncensored .

It sold sixty-four copies, and that was after hours of tweeting and blogging and, okay, begging . Paula didn’t get why the book wasn’t taking off, why Tarantino wasn’t calling. Wasn’t self-published supposed to be the new black? She thought this was the book that would propel her to the next level, but instead it had solidified her rep as a has-been, a loser.

Paula had her faults — she was addicted to coke and sex, just to name two — but she’d always been an optimist, especially about her writing career. She’d always believed that somehow, someway, she’d make it to the top. She’d be the writer with thirty backlist books at Barnes & Noble, obnoxiously taking up half a shelf, and other writers would whine, It’s so unfair, why won’t my publisher give me the Paula Segal treatment? Yep, Paula believed it was only a matter of paying your dues, kissing the right asses, going to the right Mystery Writers of America events, buying enough drinks for Otto Penzler, and, oh yeah, writing good books, and her career would eventually skyrocket.

Well, that fantasy was as dead as an independent bookstore in Manhattan. Four long, unpublished years went by. Agentless, at the end of an inheritance from her grandmother, and living on a Facebook friend’s couch in Williamsburg, she was questioning everything. With all her whining and bitching she felt like one of the fucking Girls . Maybe she wasn’t a good as she thought she was, maybe she’d never had a serious chance of making it and had been kidding herself all along. Maybe she’d let the early success, the award nominations and a few nice words extracted from a mediocre Marilyn Stasio review in the Times go to her head, and it had been the all-too-common case — in the literary world — of early ripe, early rot. It had been ages since that Barry Award nomination for a book in her P.I. series at St. Martin’s Press, when she’d been on top of the world.

As a last-ditch effort to salvage the Max Fisher story, her career and — who was she kidding? — her life, she emailed her literary idol and old friend Laura Lippman, asking Laura if she would appreciate the honor of co-rewriting her self-published true crime book as a novel. In her delusion, Paula seriously believed Lippman would have to be an idiot to not jump at the chance and was shocked when Lippman ignored her notes, which, in retrospect, was not all that surprising since the last time she’d seen Lippman at that B&N in Manhattan, security had to remove Paula from the store. Bounced from a bookstore — oh, the irony!

But Paula didn’t give up trying to contact Lippman. She friended her on Facebook under a fake name — Megan Abbott. She knew Lippman had blurbed one of Abbott’s books and would accept the request.

Lippman did but only to IM: I know who you are and if you don’t stop harassing me, I’m calling the police .

Paula IM’d back, but Lippman had already blocked her.

Well, looked like the Lippman bridge had officially been burned. The last kick in the balls, Paula saw that Laura was co-writing with Reed Farrell Coleman. Coleman? Seriously? That guy truly had no shame, was there anyone he wouldn’t co-write with? Was he through writing with the Irish guy, the friend of Colin Farrell? What the fuck ever.