The Bouncer

Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

11.

The drive out to Paradise was dark and quiet. Jill drove with the headlights and radio off, following the prompts from her phone. I sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead and trying to imagine what my father looked like now. I still had some old photos here and there, but I couldn’t quite picture him anymore—or, more accurately, I could picture parts of him. The smile, crooked and charming, the one snaggle tooth always exposed on the left. His fingers, long and dexterous, capable of concealing playing cards and coins. His nose, because as a little kid I’d been able to look straight up and be shocked and horrified at the sheer amount of bristling nose hair.

But it wouldn’t come together into a complete person. And I couldn’t even begin to age him up by fifteen years. I thought it wasn’t impossible that my father might walk past me and I wouldn’t even notice.

My phone buzzed, a new text from Lisa: What up doc? You OK?

Fine, I typed back. Taking care of some family business. How’s the 293?

Good. Marcus called 911 a dozen times yesterday. Cops came once, told us we’re blacklisted.

I smiled. That’s my boy.

Carrie and Ellie OK?

I hesitated a moment. Fine. Visiting a relative.

You home soon? This whole place falls apart without you. And you know you got friends here. We’re all worried.

Soon.

Kinda scary. The 293 is all alone here, no one else around. Wish our Bouncer was back.

I didn’t respond, and pocketed the phone. I loved that building. It wasn’t the shitty old apartments, the permanent smell of curry or something in the halls, the suffocating heat in the summer and the frigid chill in the winter. It was the people. My neighbors had become a family. I felt responsible for them; this was the longest I’d been away from home in years, and it weighed on me.

I let my mind wander. Sometimes at the 293 I woke up worried. I would lay in bed for a few hours and stare at the pipes snaking along the ceiling, and then it was time for the rounds, the endless list of repairs and requests, complaints and chit chat the other tenants needed.

Lisa, her apartment wallpapered with police department recruitment posters, shooting range targets, and photos of her uncles and cousins in uniform, needed her toilet snaked regularly. I had no idea what that woman put down her toilet, and I didn’t want to know. The Bekvalacs, always pushing pršunates on me, had a faulty thermocoupler on their gas-on-gas heat and it needed constant adjustment. Mrs. Pino, dark bags under her eyes, worked double shifts down at Carepoint changing colostomy bags and sometimes just needed someone to sit with Marcus and play games with him, stop him from filling the tub until it overflowed. Kid loved doing that for some fucking reason. Or Mrs. Cortês, eighty-six and still making her own coffee, just needed checking on because she once left the burner on her stove on for three days straight.

Or Ivan, who shaved his head every day and sometimes played Descendents records way too loud, was constantly re-arranging his son’s part-time bedroom, trying to win invisible divorce points with the ideal mystical arrangement of Ikea furniture.

Or the Quinones family, who had to communicate through their seven-year old daughter Loki because she was the only one who spoke English, and had a kitchen faucet that leaked unless the washers were replaced regularly.

Or Tony Butageri, seventy years old and sleeping off six decades of work on his hands and knees as a plumber. He’d apparently made a personal oath to never, ever do any plumbing work again.

They were a constant pain in my ass, and I missed them all. Coming home every night, walking out every afternoon, there was always someone on the front steps, and they always smiled, always asked me how I was doing, always thanked me for everything. I felt incredibly lonely, moving through the darkness in fucking South Dakota.

We found the access road precisely where Terry said it would be. It was covered in brush that had been tossed haphazardly everywhere; I thought it was probably pretty effective in obscuring it from the road. I hopped out and cleared enough away for Jill to steer the van carefully past.

The old Mine Road was a dirt track just wide enough for the van to creep along. After a few minutes we passed a wide clearing, an old gravel parking lot that overlooked the surrounding landscape. The Moon lit up the broken glass and crushed cans like jewelry; this was where the local kids came to get high and seduce each other. When I’d been seventeen, this was exactly the sort of place I would have been lord and emperor of.

Jill kept creeping along at five miles an hour with the lights off, the dirt crunching under the wheels. I forced myself to unclench my hands again. After a few more minutes we crested the top of the hill; the road continued to wind downward, but Jill stopped the van and let it idle for a moment.

Paradise was laid out below us.

There was no obvious or easy way down to the walls, but we had sufficient elevation to peer down over them and into one section of the development. There was no gate, but also no guards that I could see.

“Looks quiet,” Jill said.

I nodded. It sure didn’t look like a gangster paradise, a refuge from the law and vendettas. It looked like a deserted assisted living space. “Kill the engine. Let’s watch for a bit.”

We sat in silence. After a few minutes, I saw a pair of guards walk along the wall. They looked like every low-level grunt in a crime gang that I’d ever seen in Queenies or working a job: Slouchy, potbellied guys with beards and mustaches, rifles slung over one shoulder, cigarettes dangling from their lips. They chatted amiably as they patrolled, barely paying attention to their surroundings.

Situational Awareness. These guys had zero. They assumed no one would dare take on the Outfit, no one would dare piss off every organized crime group in the country. And they were probably right, but it didn’t change the fact that they were lazy.

I noted the time and settled back to wait.

There was no movement between the houses I could see, and only a few lights on. It was quiet; I could hear the wind swirling around us. I glanced at Jill, who appeared to be asleep, one leg propped up on the dashboard. I studied her for a moment. It was strange to know someone so well and yet not know them at all, really.

“I can see you, weirdo,” she said.

I smiled and said nothing.

My phone dinged softly. I glanced down and saw a photo of Ellie. She looked miserable—caught in a crying fit, face red, mouth open in a wail. I caught himself before I crushed another phone, but my whole body stiffened, my heart skipping a beat. For a moment I felt like my soul was leaving my body. I could feel her in my arms, her little warm body, so alive, so energetic. She’d been safe with me. Until she hadn’t been.

I took a deep breath, forcing the air into my lungs. See you soon, I typed.

I settled back and watched the town. I wondered what it was like to be trapped in a place like this. Step outside, get your head blown off, or a van rolls up and FBI agents jump out to arrest you. But then you’re 24-7 behind a gate, peering out through your blinds and all you can see is the asshole across the way peering back at you through his blinds.

Thinking of my father, I hoped it was miserable.

I glanced back at Jill.

Do it, Maddie!

####

Frank always wore loafers. He’d been a tall, skinny guy, and he’d moved with a snakelike smoothness that had fascinated me as a teenager. His skin was dark and seemed thick, somehow, hairy and heavy. He was balding and kept his hair shaved down close to the scalp, making his hairline look like a gray smudge all around his head. He’d favored loose, billowy khakis and no socks, bowling shirts and loafers. I’d never seen the man wearing any shoe that required lacing.

Frank was fastidious. Hanging out at Jill’s house was always surreal, her mother drinking vodka tonics in the kitchen while cooking—and Jill’s mom was always cooking—music in the air, loud, and Frank always primping in the bathroom. The man shaved twice a day and spent what seemed like hours studying himself in the mirror, snipping stray nose hairs and rubbing in lotions and Lectric Shave. I could still smell it. There’d been so much of it in the house it was probably still there, embedded into the molecular structure of the place.

Do it, Maddie!

The precise events that led to me being on Jill’s roof, holding Franke at the edge by the lapels of his bowling shirt were fuzzy. I’d lost some time.

After the fork incident, after she’d declined to come with me, she and Frank had settled into a new cold war. He didn’t come into her room any more, but outside her room was fair game, he’d decided.

There had been the months of Jill’s silence, her tight, self-hugging awkwardness, her bottomless anger and exhausting determination to never sleep in her own bed. There had been the late night calls for rescue, Jill sliding out a bathroom window and racing for the car, Frank shouting drunkenly from the front door, snarling and waving his arms. There had been the final, tear-filled breakdown when she’d admitted to being terrified, and there’d been the trip home for clothes and supplies and Jill fleeing up the stairs with Frank in pursuit and that’s when I lost a few minutes of time.

When I’d come back to myself, I was on the roof and the only thing keeping Frank from a very unfortunate fall was the quality stitching in his purple and pink bowling shirt.

And Jill, standing a few feet away, hugging herself. She’d looked at me and nodded. And said Do it, Maddie.

That day on the roof had been the start. I saw that now. Nothing had happened immediately. Nothing happened for a long time. I’d backed away from the roof and set Frank down. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I just walked away, leaving them up there, Jill calling after me. I went home to Uncle Pal’s and went to sleep. I went out that night with Jill and we’d gotten wasted, running through the park climbing trees, neither of us saying a word about what had happened. What she’d encouraged me to do. And so one and so on, for years and years.

But that day on the roof lingered. I found himself thinking of it a lot, usually when I’d let my temper get the best of me. I would stare down at my scabbed knuckles, head pounding from a hangover, and picture Frank’s terrified face. And after a while, after hundreds of those nights and mornings and blurry afternoons when I wasn’t even sure of the time, I started to think I needed to change.

####

“They’re circling back.”

I turned to look back down at Paradise, watching two guards stroll past going in the opposite direction.

“Same guys,” I said.

She nodded. “My guess is they just loop around their whole shift. Fucking jumbo softies.” She glanced at her phone. “Thirty-three minutes.” She chewed her thumb. “Too easy.”

I shook my head. “They don’t need much. This place is protected by, what did Mick call it—a consortium. Every big crime organization in the country guarantees this place’s security. No one’s gonna fuck with that. And the people here are hiding from shit. They’re free to go any time they want, right? It’s just that as long as they pay their rent, they can’t be harmed. Not by anyone connected, anyway.” I nodded. “Nope. These guards are for the occasional shitkicker or high school kid gets a hair up his ass to come cause some mischief. They don’t need anything heavier.”

She licked blood off her thumb where she’d torn a hangnail off. “Because no one would be stupid enough to piss off every fucking family, gang, and guild in the country.”

I nodded again. “No one’s that stupid. Or desperate.”

We waited. I dozed, forcing myself to think about nothing.

“Thirty minutes,” Jill said, her voice a rusty croak. “They’re not exactly Pinkertons, these guys.”

I shook myself alert. “That’s a lot of slack.”

She nodded. “I don’t think they’re gonna tighten up as the evening progresses, hoss,” she said, stretching. “You want to sit a night and make sure, or do we just go and snatch your piece of shit father?”

I thought for a moment. The guards might be back in half an hour, twenty minutes, or never—any time would be a risk. And every minute I waited was a minute my wife and daughter got further away. Properly, we would sit out here for a week, chart their routines, make notes. But I didn’t have time for properly.

“Go.”

“Hot damn,” Jill said, opening the door and swinging herself out, leaving the keys in the ignition. “Finally, some good fucking action.”

I climbed out of the van and soft-closed the door. I met Jill at the back of the vehicle and watched as she transformed, becoming all business, pulling the cargo doors open and rummaging in the bags we’d brought. That she’d brought; this was her area of expertise.

“Like old times, huh?” she said, voice muffled as she dug into the equipment.

Jill had been a thief for as long as I’d known her. It was little wonder the hobby had bloomed into a profession. As I watched her extracting a heavy mover’s blanket, a rolled-up, durable-looking rope ladder with heavy weighted ends, and two flashlights from the bags, I wondered what Jill Pilowsky might have been if she’d had a normal life. If she’d gone to college, drafted a resume, gotten a fierce haircut and a designer suit.

She dropped the stuff on the ground, turned back to the van, and emerged holding one of the Glocks out towards me. I reached out slowly and took it, feeling its weight. She didn’t ask if I knew how to use it. Shaking himself, I checked it over. No external safety. I popped the magazine and checked the spring, then slid it back into place. Pushing the gun into my waistband, I nodded at her, not saying out loud that I had zero intention of using it.

I grabbed the blanket and the ladder and followed her down the incline. The walls loomed up larger and larger; what had looked so inconsequential from up above seemed really high when we were standing at the base. It was dark and quiet, though, and Jill didn’t hesitate. She took the ladder and unrolled it. Picking up one of the weighted ends, she took a few steps back, judged the distance, then ran forward like a shotputter and launched the end up and over the wall; once it cleared the top gravity brought it down, pulling the rest of the ladder with it.

She tossed me a flashlight, stuck the other between her teeth, and picked up the blanket. She scrambled up the ladder in second, tossed the blanket over the wire, and was up and over in a blink.

I stared for a moment. What was it about the people who did nothing but drugs? They were always like Olympic athletes. Jill hadn’t eaten a proper meal in years and her only exercise involved carrying liquor bottles from the store. Yet the only sweat I’d seen Jill break was from a hangover, but she’d just scaled a wall like she’d been taking lessons.

I took a deep breath, put my flashlight in my mouth, and leaped for the ladder, praying I didn’t pass out halfway up.

The ladder felt insubstantial and flimsy, and it wriggled under me like a living thing—but it held my weight, and I was able to swing myself across the blanket and clamber down the other side. We were on a small island of overgrown grass between the wall and the road, everything silvery from moonlight. Jill held up a hand and rolled up her sleeve to read the house numbers she’d written there, along with a crude map. She turned slowly, glancing up and down, and then pointed up the street.

We took off at a run.

It was eerie. I remembered being seventeen and racing through rich neighborhoods at night with her—suburban islands of trees and blacktop that were just like Paradise. It was townhomes in rows, each identical—three stories, Juliet balconies, bizarre rooflines, dead and yellowed front lawns that were too small and too sloped to be anything but decorative, or the precise opposite of decorative. Each house had a driveway, but they were all empty—there were no cars anywhere, giving the street a strange, wide-open feeling.

This was hell.

The people living in Paradise might be safe from debt collectors and assassins, from revenge and arrest—as long as they could pay their rent—but the idea of living in such a place was horrifying. Never leaving. Being trapped with other people just as awful as you were. Trapped.

At the first intersection, Jill turned right. I followed.

The only sound was our breathing and the soft tap of rubber soles on the pavement. I began to see how run down the place was. The streets were cracked and crowded with potholes. The siding on all the houses was stained with mold and sagged. There were broken windows and garage doors that sagged outward like something was swelling behind them, pushing against the cheap hollow-body wood.

In the middle of the street, Jill stopped and turned. Hands on hips, breathing hard, she regarded one of the townhouses. I stopped next to her and squinted at the address: 83.

I looked at her and fifteen years fell away, shed like a snakeskin, and we were partners in crime again, in sync and communicating via subtle facial expressions and gestures. We ran towards the narrow alley between the houses leading to the backyards. It was like I was about to raid a medicine cabinet and then go pound some lite beers in the park with her.

The backyard was small and dead, a square patch of dirt with a rotten, half-collapsed wooden picnic table and a barbecue grill that appeared to be made of rust and dirt. There were lights on in the house. We ducked down and waited, watching, but there was no movement that I could see. Jill shrugged off her pack and extracted zip ties, duct tape, and the Glock. I left my gun in my waistband. One thing I’d learned bouncing at Queenies: A gun in the hand almost always went off, whether you wanted it to or not.

We walked to the glass sliders off the loose-stoned patio in complete silence. I leaned in close and peered through the glass; the kitchen was dark and empty. Jill reached out and tried the door, but it was locked. She stuffed the gun back into her own waistband and pulled a large folding knife from one pocket. Unfolding it with her teeth, she jammed it into the sliders’ simple locking mechanism and with one savage twist popped it open.

The slider didn’t want to move along its track. I put some shoulder into it and managed to get it open far enough to push through.

For a moment we stood in the kitchen. The smell was sub-optimal; it reminded me of the bathrooms at Queenies on a Sunday morning when Ramon and Bert failed to wash them down after closing—stale piss, smoke, the tangy bite of vomit. It wasn’t hard to see where the smell was coming from; the kitchen was a nightmare. Takeout food containers were everywhere, stacked on every available flat surface, on the floor, in the sink. The cabinet drawers were all broken, and the refrigerator door was kept shut with a piece of duct tape. Over the stove there was a toothless gap where the microwave should have been. Every step crunched under my boots. The whole place seemed to be moving in an insectoid wriggle, and I envisioned a billion squirming segmented bodies in the walls.

Jill put a finger to her lips and nodded towards the living room. Stale blue light flashed from a television, the sound of a laugh track skimming through the air like glitter. I took point, following the wall around, one arm bent backwards to keep a hand on the pistol as I moved.

As I turned the corner, the smell, improbably, got worse.

The carpet in the living room was an off pink and deep, a crunchy shag that hadn’t been shampooed in a long time. More garbage was strewn everywhere—plastic bags overflowing with it, piles of it in every conceivable place. Bottles had tipped over, liquor and beer and mixers soaking into the already-ruined carpet. The television was old—two decades ago it would have been the top of the line, a flat screen model with an enormous, bulbous back—and tuned in to the local public access channel, where a sweating, balding man in a red and white checkered flannel shirt stiffly recounted high school football scores with funereal gravitas.

It soaked the oft-repaired recliner in silvery light that flashed and danced. The recliner had been patched with duct tape in several places, and the lever controlling the recline and footrest had been replaced with a large wrench tightened onto the nut.

The old man in the recliner looked dead.

I froze at the sight of him. He was both obviously my father, Mats Renik, and simultaneously not him. My father had been vibrant, winking, always in motion, his dark black hair slicked back and perfectly combed. He’d been rail thin, his large nose and Adam’s Apple preceding him into every room by several minutes.

Mats Renik had never fallen asleep in a recliner his life. Mats Renik never slept. He was a restless man, always striving, plotting, sketching out plans and working stolen goods with tools at the kitchen table, or sipping a drink, or slipping out the back window onto the fire escape with a wave and a grin. When he’d sat down at home, after a bender, after being gone for days, he would make himself a drink and sing the same fucking song over and over again.

It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me! But my darling when I think of thee!

Even sitting down, my father had been a ball of noise and restless energy.

The old man in the recliner was fast asleep, his mouth open, his yellowed teeth crooked and ugly. His hair was thin and gray and stood up in random cowlicks the way old people’s hair did. He was too thin and wore a pair of cheap work pants and a blue shirt, both too large for him, which made him seem even more shrunken.

“Jesus Christ,” Jill said, dropping the duct tape and zip ties onto the carpet. “He’s fucking alive.”

The old man snorted and sat up with a strangled cry, his eyes opening. He started to settle back, then stiffened, leaning forward, his hands tightening on the chair’s arms.

“What—” He blinked rapidly, his mouth working. He looked confused. Time had taken my father and ruined him, made him old.

I stared, the anger welling up inside me a terrifying thing, an alien intelligence I didn’t understand, that I didn’t think I would be able to control. My hands were fists again, the knuckles creaking. “Hey pop,” I managed to say, my voice so tight and flat Jill glanced at me in sudden alarm.

Mats stared for a moment. His mouth worked, as if his teeth had gotten loose and he was trying to suck them back into place. His whole face seemed to twitch and undulate.

“What—Maddie?”

He sagged back into the chair and put a hand over his face. After a moment, I realized the old man was sobbing—jerking, shaking convulsions.

This was confusing. I looked over at Jill. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, flicked to me. She shrugged in confusion.

“Oh fucking thank god,” Mats Renik said between gasps. “Thank fucking god.”

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

10.

“What will you say to him? Your Dad, I mean.”

I shrugged. I was sprawled on the hard, aggressively stained couch, my arms spread along the back. The room was done in reds and oranges as if someone had wanted to hurt the eyes of anyone stupid enough to stay there; the carpet was a particularly offensive pattern of red octagons and orange circles, punctuated by green flowers of some sort.

“Nothing. If I can help it.”

There was a huge mirror on the wall across from me. It was tarnished and cracked in one corner, and I avoided looking at myself in it. All I saw was a shitbag who’d let his wife and baby girl be kidnapped.

“Dude, you have to come up with something. After what that son of a bitch did to you? You gotta script something ice cold. Or you’ll hate yourself.”

I looked at Jill. She was seated at the crummy desk, her boots up. A bottle of bourbon, still in the brown paper from the restaurant attached to the place, sat under the light. I estimated the bottle was half empty, and she still had a supply of ice in a bucket. I’d seen drunks like her plenty of times in meetings; they were clear and bright right up to the moment they fell over. This was the ?functioning’ part of ?functioning alcoholic.’

I looked down at my hands, scabbed and swollen. “If I say something to him, I make him real,” I said. “I kinda want to keep him a ghost, for a while.”

I’d considered a meeting. I’d even searched the burner for local groups. But meetings had never been my thing. I went for a while, met Miguel and absorbed the man’s wisdom, but I remembered that feeling of being trapped, the certainty that everyone in the room knew exactly what I was about to say. I couldn’t handle the feeling of exposure.

Now I wished I’d found one, gone and soaked up the bitter coffee and the country-song stories, because watching Pills sink into that bottle was just as nerve-wracking.

She swirled whiskey in her plastic cup. “You’re lucky you got rid of old Mats. I got stuck with Handsy Frank for fuckin’ years. Had to fucking stab him to keep him out of my room.” She snorted. “And Mom got mad at me because of the emergency room bill. She told me it took all her arts of persuasion to convince him not to press a charge, send me to juvie.” She lifted her cup into the air. “But he never came into my room again.”

“I remember,” I said, smiling. A fork. She’d stabbed him with a fork, in the meaty part of the thigh. Got it in real deep, using her freaky unexpected strength. I remember her showing up at Uncle Pal’s, red in the face, delighted, delirious, certain she was going to jail for the rest of her life.

And I’d pulled out the grimy old yellow envelope and I’d said, let’s go.

“Where? What?”

I showed her the money. “Let’s go,” I’d said. “Let’s get out. Head West, maybe. We’ll find a place to live, we’ll get jobs, we’ll get away from Frank and all this bullshit.”

And for the first time in my life, I’d seen Jill Pilowsky scared. Fucking terrified. She’d stabbed her stepfather in the leg with a fork and walked away bright-eyed and excited. Now she was paralyzed. The idea, so bright and alive for a second there, died in the air between us. My inheritance went into a bank a few years later, and a few years after that it paid for my wedding.

I tried to trace back how I’d lost track of Jill, despite the fact that she’d never been more than a half mile away. Despite the fact that we saw each other all the time. But that was still a drift, wasn’t it? There’d been a time when Jill Pilowsky’s voice woke me up in the morning, barking at me that it was time for a wake and bake, a time when I’d spent most days with her just wandering the earth, a time when I’d fallen asleep whispering to her on the phone again as Uncle Pal prowled outside my bedroom.

I knew Jill felt it, too. She knew I was keeping her at arm’s length, and I felt her anger beating against me like a hot wind, unspoken but potent. She was an anchor. I’d been swimming for years, trying to break the surface, and if I let her grab an ankle I’d drown. But there was no way to explain that to her. It was a language she hadn’t learned yet.

She laughed suddenly, sloshing whiskey into her cup. “Remember that show we saw in the City? I took that off-brand speed and thought I was having a heart attack.”

I nodded. “And for some reason you thought you had to keep moving or your heart would explode. Like a human version of that movie with the bomb on the bus.”

She laughed again, animated. “Man, that fucker in the mosh pit was pissed off. And he grabbed me, and, shit, you came out of nowhere and physically lifted him off the ground. I can still remember the fucking expression on his face. Bug-eyed in fucking shock.” She sipped whiskey. “I miss that guy,” she said, then shook herself and stood up. “We’re going to get Ellie back, Maddie. I promise you that. We’re going to collect your shitpeel of a father, haul his ass back to BC like cargo, and cash his old, skinny ass in for one adorable little girl. You got my word.”

She took her cup, opened the door, and stepped outside. I chose not to point out that she’d forgotten that my wife was also being held prisoner by gangsters. Everyone had their blind spots.

I stared at the bottle on the desk. I felt useless and heavy; I needed to be doing something, to be working towards the goal of bringing my daughter home safe. Sitting in a motel room was just wasted time, and made me want to burn the place down, to smash up all the furniture, to go back to the bar attached to the office and pick a fight with any six or seven randos who happened to be sitting around.

I heard my knuckles pop. A second later, the door opened and Pills breezed back in, leaving the door open behind her.

“Hey, yeah, you remember our good friend Terry from town who stood by and watched us get our asses kicked?” she said, dropping heavily into the chair by the desk. “He’s here.”

####

In the yellow light of the motel room, Terry was somehow thinner and more leathery than he’d appeared at the bar. I found himself mesmerized by the way his long, yellowed beard bobbed up and down as he talked.

“I didn’t like the way y’all were treated back there,” he said slowly, swirling whiskey in the spare plastic cup. “Not so much Billy—you look like you can handle yourselves well enough in a fair fight. But Batten makin’ it a not fair fight. That was fuckin’ bullshit, and I’m sorry for it.”

I looked at Jill. She pushed her lower lip out, her cheeks red and her eyes shining. “Ah, shit,” she said. “That’s okay. Wasn’t your fault, right? What were you gonna do?”

Terry nodded. “That bitch. You know, I known her all my life. But if I dare call her Evelyn, she bites my head off. Always Sheriff, she insists. Always with the chip on her shoulder. Everything’s racist for her. I slip up and call her Evvie, like in high school? I’m in the god-damn KKK.”

I didn’t say anything. I had a sense that Terry had come to talk. When the Terries of the world came to talk, it was usually profitable to let them.

“Fuck her,” Pills slurred, getting into character, stretching out her. “That cunt.”

Terry nodded and gulped down his drink. “But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how she’s tied up with those fucking gangsters out on 40. That Outfit has fucked this town three ways from Sunday and Evvie just don’t see it. Because it makes her a big swinging dick around here.”

“Fuck them, too.” Pills said.

Terry glanced up at her. “Y’all came here for them. That’s what’s got Evvie in such a state—you’re here to go after those fuckers in Paradise, and she’s charged to stop you.” He held out his cup for Jill to refill. “We’re not even supposed to say the word, Paradise. You let it slip and people give you a look, like some fucking mafia asshole is going to lean in from behind you and slit your fucking throat.” He watched her pour the whiskey. Then he stared down at his cup, jaw muscles bunching. “This place changed when they figured Paradise out. That old gated community got built forty years ago when there was a housing boom, everyone was going to be a yuppie. Place never sold all the units, and five years later it was empty. Then this investment group comes along and buys the whole place. We all figured, a mall, maybe, or a driving range. But they start renovating. Repairing. They make the wall higher. We never see anyone move in, suddenly there’s a couple dozen people living there. Armed guards at the gates. They never come into town, they send the guards. They’re assholes. Arrogant, never want to pay for anything, rough with everyone. They have everything delivered. Food, clothes—everything. No one ever leaves. The only people you actually see are the security guards.”

“How many of those do you see?”

He glanced at me and thought for a moment. “If I had to guess? Maybe two dozen. You see different ones in town. They don’t wear a uniform or nothin’, but you can smell ?em. Plus they’re always carrying. Long guns, handguns. They’re like a fucking militia.”

Long guns. “Rifles? Semi-autos?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Guns ain’t my bag, man. But, fuck them. You came here to hurt those bastards, and I came here to help you do it. This town was never anything great, but it used to be decent.”

Jill was leaning forward and grinning up at Terry. “Fuck yeah.” Jill was good at this, at the revival-tent hype hallelujah! bullshit. I half expected her to leap up and start running around the room, hands in the air as she shouted praise be!

“They order stuff from you?” I said suddenly, a memory clicking. “You said the guards come into town—they coming to pick up orders? They come to your place for liquor? Packaged goods?”

Terry nodded. “Yeah. They call in, then the muscle shows up. Everything’s marked by house number. I’ll get this order for number 70, this order for 72, like that.”

I licked my lips. He hesitated for a few seconds, rubbing his hands. “You get orders for cream sherry?”

Terry smiled. “What? Jesus … yeah, like fucking clockwork. I have to special order a case. Number 83 drinks that rotgut like water.” He shook his head. “Fuckin’ cream sherry. It’s like goddamn cough medicine.”

I looked at Jill. She was grinning. “Number 83,” I said.

“I told you about the old Mine Road,” Terry said. “I can guide you to it.”

I sat forward. “They don’t know about it?”

Terry shook his head. “Naw. This goes back, way back, deep magic kind of stuff. Can’t see it from the main roads; the kids keep a bunch of old branches and shit over the entry.” He sipped from his cup. “Sure, I’d bet Batten knows about it. But she knows the kids party out there, so she don’t pay much attention to it.”

“You’ll show us?” I asked.

Terry nodded. “Hell, yeah. You got a map?”

Jill shot her whiskey and stood up. “Do I have a map!” she said enthusiastically. Then she paused, looking around the room. She poked feebly around her possessions for a moment. “Well, fuck, no I don’t have a map. Who has a map? I got a phone.”

Terry held out his hand. “Good enough.”

####

“You believe him?” I asked, studiously ignoring the smell of whiskey. We were seated on the uncomfortable plastic chairs on the cracked concrete patio outside their room, shivering in the cooling air.

“You don’t?”

I shrugged. “It’s awfully convenient of him to come find us and offer that bit of information.”

She nodded. “It’s convenient when you don’t die in your sleep, too. If Batten or whoever wanted us dead or in prison, coulda been done already, pretty easy. I read him as a resentful cracker who wants to spit in the Sheriff’s eggs but doesn’t want to be in the room when she takes a bite. I think it’s a lot of trouble to go through just to lure us to some remote area and fuck our shit up.”

I chuckled. The smell of whiskey was killing me. The easy, relaxed way Pills was sitting was killing me. I knew the feeling, the dopey, warm feeling of a little too much booze, just sitting there sinking down into yourself. I missed it. I missed it so badly my hands kept twitching, like a dog having a dream while it napped on the couch.

Like every other addict in the universe, starting was the easiest thing in the world. The problem was stopping. That’s why I’d backed away from Jill. She might think it was because Carrie hated her—which was true—or because I didn’t want her near Ellie, which wasn’t. It was because all I heard from Jill was do it, Maddie. Do it, Maddie.

The rooftop flashed through my mind. The smell of tar and Lectric Shave. Do it, Maddie!

I looked at Jill. “Why are you here?” I asked quietly. “Why are you helping me like this?”

She looked down as if I was too bright to look at directly. “You always save everyone. You always saved me. So it’s my turn to save you.” She looked around and took a deep breath, pushing him aside. “Couple hours, it gets dark, we’ll head out there,” she said. “See what can be seen.”

She went back into the room. I sat there with the lingering smell of whiskey. I thought me and Pills had hit rock bottom together all those years ago. And then I’d left her behind there.

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9.

I watched Billy stalk towards me and thought of Louie Something.

For a long time I didn’t understand myself. Before my parents didn’t died and left me not an orphan, I’d always been terrified of disruption, of unpredictable events. My father was always in motion, always grasping and fidgeting, scheming. He was chaos in human form, as likely to be laughing and joking as screaming and pounding his fist on the table. We got rich one day, we were dead broke the next. I was his baby boy one day, I was a fucking leech the next.

Liùsaidh was worse. My mother never showed much emotion, it was always impossible to guess what mood she was in. But I worked hard to anticipate them anyway, to get in front of problems and make sure I was far away when all the signs of a dust up were there. There were rules, I was certain. They were changeable and invisible and written in obscure courtly languages, but there were rules, I was certain. If you learned those rules, you could make your life orderly. The crazier things got, the harder I worked to make everything calm and boring.

This is shit I figured out years later, sober and clawing my way back to that zero.

I also worked hard to keep calm myself. Calm was my spirit animal. In grammar school my friends joked that I was the Iceman, because I never showed much emotion. I had this sense that I was a counterbalance to my parents, that the crazier they were, the louder and more terrifying, the steadier I had to be. I learned to always clench down on myself, to hold myself still, to never react. I curated a poker face and worked hard not to let my temper take hold, ever. I refused to be Mats, who was driven by nothing but anger, a free-form rage at everything and everyone.

And then, they’d gone, and in the ensuing silence I could no longer hold it together.

There are fish I read about once that live at the bottom of the ocean, under tremendous pressure, but they’ve evolved to survive. To move around under a dense weight of water pushing at them from every direction. They push back hard enough to survive. But if you take one and bring it up to the shalows, it explodes, because it’s pushing back against a pressure that’s no longer there.

Little things set me off unexpectedly. At Uncle Pal’s house, I smashed the bathroom mirror when Aunt Mary informed me of the dire cereal situation in the pantry. On the bus one afternoon coming home from my new, horrifying school, a baby wouldn’t stop crying, so I’d screamed at the kid’s mother, calling her every name I’d ever overheard.

These moments came without warning, and they disturbed me, but I couldn’t seem to control them. One moment I would feel like himself, calm and in control. The next it would be like waking up, slowly coming back to myself only to realize I was punching a wall or screaming at someone.

I took to hanging out with Pills in the parking lot behind school, at the bike racks. We smoked and talked, complained and made fun of everyone, everything. I’d never had a close girl friend before, so it was a novelty. Pills was profane, with a mean streak a mile wide, just as angry as I was. There was a weird, inexplicable safety with her. Nothing offended her. It felt like nothing could make her think any less of me, and I loved that.

Everyone called the bike racks The Pit. I always assumed every school, everywhere, had a Pit where the delinquents hung out, smoking cigarettes.

There was this kid, a year older, a Junior, who hung out in The Pit. Louie Something, long curly hair, a nose of truly heroic proportions, always a ratty old army surplus coat. Something wrong with Louie, though no one could quite put their finger on it. He was genial, and usually cheerful, but always seemed to float just beyond normal, always a little off.

Louie cackled. Man, I can still remember always being a little irritated by that cackle, the way Louie would start off laughing like a hyena and then choke his own laugh off into a coughing, wet-sounding croak. This one day, in The Pit, Louie kept laughing, Over and over again, that wet, croaking cackle, like it was on a tape loop.

“Hey, yo, shut the fuck up.”

When Carlos Piata told someone to shut the fuck up, they generally shut the fuck up. He was a big guy, and loud, and pushy in a way I already found provoking, but I was just starting to do the math on people who used bulk and volume and aggressive assertions of both to steamroll other people. Carlos mainly used his bulk and volume to tell people to shut the fuck up, a campaign for silence that older, wiser Mads Renik could appreciate. Looking back, I washed I had a Carlos with me at movie theaters, or standing over me while I slept, making sure none of the cackling assholes around me sounded off.

That day, Louie didn’t shut the fuck up. He cackled. And Carlos, sensing a challenge, surged up from his seat on one of the steps.

“Yo, I said shut the fuck up.”

Louie cackled, nervously, like it was the only sound he was capable of making under the circumstances.

I don’t remember getting on my feet. I remembered moving in sudden jumps, like I was having a series of small strokes that stole seconds from me. When Carlos reached out to smack Louie—a smack, a soft, insulting attack—I grabbed his arm, spun him around, and punched him in the face as hard as I could.

And when Carlos went down, making a soft, wheezing noise like a balloon suddenly losing air, I followed him, dropping to my knees and hitting him again. Or so I’m told.

I’m also told that when Carlos’ buddies sprang into action, pulling me away and kicking and punching me, I kicked and punched back. I remembered a weird euphoria. It hurt, it was violent, but it was freedom, too. Pure, ecstatic freedom. When that fuzzy moment of pure violent joy passed, I was overwhelmed, three against one as Carlos rose from the dead and joined in. I curled up and put my arms over my head to protect myself.

And then realized I didn’t have to, because Jill Pilowsky had joined the game.

She leaped onto Carlos’ back and yanked on his ears so hard he screamed, spinning around, trying to dislodge her. His buddies left me and grabbed onto her, and the last thing I remembered before being in the principal’s office was surging up and crashing into them all.

####

I settled myself. You always let them come to you. Let them make mistakes. Let them be too eager. In my experience, defense always won when you were dealing with drunk, overconfident assholes, because they never planned ahead and had an inflated sense of their own power and competence. And any man who was still awake at sunrise after an evening spent in a place like Mikey’s was definitely working with exaggerated power and competence.

Billy came first, of course. He danced up with his fists raised, which I assumed was something he’d seen in a movie, once. He telegraphed all his moves with the shifting of his weight, so when he feinted low and then tried to nail me with a haymaker, I had already leaned back, letting the fist sail past my chin. Billy, overbalanced, stumbled into the bar while I spun away, slipped and landed on his face.

Sometimes, you could get assholes to beat the shit out of themselves.

I had an idea that Sheriff Batten might be happy to charge me with aggravated assault, and since she hadn’t just invented the charge I had to assume she was that special snowflake that drew some imaginary line between entrapment and simple deceit. So I wouldn’t be the aggressor. At Queenies, I’d had to follow the same rules. Even if I knew someone was a complete asshole, I couldn’t initiate. I couldn’t be the aggressor. I had to watch and wait for the other person to come at me. Bouncing was 99 percent letting assholes beat themselves.

Billy’s two friends came at me together, one from each side. I spun away and they stumbled into each other, pushing each other away and lunging after me, off balance. I kept dancing backwards, letting them chase after me, then I suddenly stopped. They both windmilled their arms and I reached forward and popped Beta in the nose—a tap with a little weight behind it. He went backwards, hands flying to his face, and for a moment I had some space around myself.

Billy tagged in, pushing through his two useless friends with a mask of blood on his face. I planted my feet and got steady. Billy had learned his lesson and came slow, watching me, careful. I knew that if I didn’t take the initiative I would lose. I was already tired, breathing hard. In another minute or so my arms would start to feel like lead weights. But I figured that was the idea. I either lost and wound up in the hospital, or I won and wound up in the county jail.

Billy’s friends skirted the periphery, plucking up pool cues as they went, careful to stay outside my reach. I kept track of them out of the corner of my eye, but concentrated on Billy. Billy was the only one of them that had any guts, that was clear. He was stupid, but he wasn’t afraid to come back in after getting his nose busted.

Billy danced around, playing for time until his buddies could assemble on either side of him; I saw my opening, the moment when I could have stepped forward and clocked Billy pretty solidly, laid him out. I let the opening slide past me. Batten wanted me to take some lumps, she obviously wanted to impress upon me that our safety and security relied on her good opinion of my decision making process. Putting the three shitkickers to bed might feel good, but would probably cost me on the back end when it came to the sheriff.

So I wasted some time and let them come at me from three sides, Billy faking it, dancing in but not getting close enough, his two buddies coming forward with the pool cues, swinging wild.

I went down, wrapping my head in my arms. They began raining down blows, hitting my back, my arms, my sides. I tried to make myself as small as possible, tried to absorb the blows with my shoulders.

“Come into my town,” Billy snarled, stepping forward to kick at me, “and talk shit to me, bro?”

Everything went black.

####

When I came to, everything was different.

I was staring up at a cracked cement ceiling, a skein of lines that widened out into larger fissures then narrowed down to spidery again. My head pounded with each heartbeat, and my back and legs ached with a steady, burning pain. The smell in the air was awful, like a full dishwasher that hadn’t been run in weeks.

“Looks like your buddy is wakin’ up, finally.”

I sat up and winced, the pounding in my head surging and filling it until I thought it might burst. Something caught in my back and stung me.

I took a deep breath, wincing again as something inside me stabbed me in the chest. I was in a jail cell. I thought the same contractors must build every local county jail; they all looked exactly the same. This one smelled a lot worse than usual, though, I had to admit.

Batten was sitting on a metal chair in the corridor outside the cell. The chair was tipped back against the wall as she stretched her legs out in front of her, feet propped up on the bars. She had a bottle of beer in one hand, her hat tipped back. Jill sat on the floor next to her, handcuffed to the cell bars.

“You regretting any recent decisions, my friend?” Batten asked.

“Maybe,” I said. I probed a loose molar with my tongue thoughtfully.

“Sorry things took a turn. I came into town and saw your fucking van, I kinda got sore about being ignored.” She shrugged, taking a sip of beer. “I might maybe have handled that better.”

I waved it away. “Bygones,” I said.

She laughed. “You’re a corker. I bet you think I’m six kinds of asshole.”

I waved again. I felt like one big bruise.

Batten studied me for a moment. “My daddy,” she said, taking a deep breath and leaning forward, the chair tipping back onto all four legs. “He moved here fifty-seven years ago. Came up from Georgia, had a job offer, working in the old bottling plant.” She shrugged. “We did okay. He rented a little house a few miles outside town, because no one would sell him anything. Every day, we woke up and there was a noose in the mailbox. Every damn day.” She shook her head. “The energy required. The disciplined hatred. Every damn day for fifteen years.” She looked at me. “We got called names a lot. On Mischief Night, teenagers would drive out to our house and throw eggs.” She sighed. “I enlisted and turned out an MP, and found I loved it. Police work. Isn’t so different in the army, really, and when I came home I thought I might make it a career. But I was informed that there were no positions available, and then they hired two new deputies.” She killed off the bottle in one fast gulp. “An offer came my way. The sheriff didn’t want to hire me? Fuck ?im. I could be sheriff. All I had to do was tow the company line.”

“You sold out,” Jill said.

Batten shrugged. “Maybe. All I know is, life’s better with some muscle behind you. Not too long ago if I went into Busby’s and ordered lunch, Terry would have spit in it. And maybe he still does, but they don’t fucking dare do it out in the open any more. And I enjoy the bowing and scraping.”

“You know who that muscle is, right?” I said, my voice a croak. My headache had settled into a deep, predictable groove in time with my heartbeat. “The Outfit is the worst fucks in the country. Killers, drug dealers, traffickers.”

Batten nodded, standing up. “Ayup, so I understand. And I figure, they were here before me, and they’ll be here after I’m gone. In the mean time, they don’t fuck around in the town, and that’s the oath I took.” She walked over to the desk a few feet away. “Now, I’m gonna take you to your vehicle. I’m gonna watch you get in, and then I’m gonna escort you to 41, where you can go north or south, as long as you go.” She turned back, a set of keys in her hand. “That sound good?”

I studied his hands. There was a big, black scab on one knuckle. As I looked at it, my hand began to throb in time with my headache. “Sure.”

“I’m gonna put the word out with the deputies and some of the local sheriffs,” Batten added, unlocking Jill. “If you or that vehicle turns up in town again, something unfortunate has to happen. Okay?”

I nodded again. “Got it.” I looked up from under my eyebrows at Jill, and our eyes met. I knew she was thinking about taking some crazy chance—jumping Batten, probably. But putting aside the fact that Batten looked like she might be a tougher fighter than her short, not particularly toned body indicated, it was the wrong move. Stealth was blown. Our presence had been noted, and anything we did would be immediately noticed. The smart play was to leave town, looking sheepish, and come up with a fresh approach, because we’d screwed this one up.

I shook my head, a small, microscopic movement. Her jaw tightened, and then she nodded.

“All right then, children,” Batten said, unlocking the cell. “I hope you have enjoyed your stay. Please don’t forget to answer the brief survey about your customer service experience when asked.” She stepped aside to let me squeeze past her, her hand on the butt of her weapon but evincing exactly zero fear. “And when you speak of me, remember that time I saved your lives.”

I stood for a moment blinking in the afternoon sun. Shielding my eyes, I scanned the street as Pills pulled her jacket on angrily. The town looked dead. Not a single other soul on the street. Batten stood in the doorway until we limped over to the van and climbed in side. Then she walked over to her SUV and got in, popping on the flashers just to be an asshole about it.

I put the van in gear. “Let’s find someplace to crash,” I said, head ringing. “Figure out what we do next.”

“Next?” Jill said, pulling her vape from her pocket and inhaling with what could be described as violence. “Shit, Maddie—you forget who I am. What I do. I steal shit for a living.” She started walking. “Next, we break in.”

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8.

We found a town about twenty minutes south on Highway 41. As the sun was creeping up over the horizon, we cruised down the wide, empty Main Street. Tidy-looking businesses lined each side of the road, their signage cheerful, the sidewalks swept, the potted plants watered and green-looking.

The only place open was a tavern called Mikey’s that had a small menu taped to the window next to the Budweiser neon sign. I recognized the distinct smell and sealed feeling of a bar that locked the doors at 2AM but let patrons stay, then ceremoniously unlocked the doors at 6AM when they fired up the grill. There was no music in the air and there was sawdust on the floor, a few old-timers barely conscious at the bar and a trio of shitkickers making noise by the pool table, a collection of empty bottles lined up on a shelf under the ancient cathode-ray television.

We took seats at the bar. The bartender was a skinny, leathery old guy with snow-white hair and a long, yellowed beard he’d tied off with rubber bands. He glanced at us with an expression of immense apathy for a long time, then slowly ambled over.

“Yeah?”

“Old Granddad, neat, beer back, whatever you have,” Jill said, taking off her jacket. Her T-shirt read We The Heathens with a list of tour dates.

The old man nodded and turned to me.

“Menu,” I said.

The bartender squinted as if this was an unexpected and unsatisfactory request, then bent down and retrieved a laminated sheet of paper from under the bar. He slid it in front of me and nodded.

“Ain’t no fries,” he said, his accent flat and broad. “Fryer’s down.”

I nodded and glanced down, absorbing the limited choices in approximately three seconds. “Coffee, eggs over easy, white bread toast,” I said.

The bartender seemed pleased by the speed of the order, plucking the menu back up with a nod of his head. “Comin’ up.”

I looked sideways at Jill. “You’re not gonna eat something?”

“You know how many calories in booze?” she said, stretching. “I gotta watch my girlish figure.”

I nodded vaguely, my attention drifting to the three shitkickers in the back. They’d taken notice of us. I knew body language and the invisible ether of bars and clubs, the taste of metal in the air when things were drifting towards ugly, the shifts in the air currents when shitheels suddenly noticed you and got that that mulish look that told you they thought you were looking down on them, and resented it, a resentment they generated all on their own, like a brain chemical. I could feel that resentment, that stupid, boozy anger, like microwaves against my skin.

The bartender brought over two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. “I’ll have one wit’ ya,” he said, showing us a set of green and yellow teeth. “Like folks who can take a drink in the morning and not faint.” He sloshed whiskey into each glass, picked up one, and clinked it against Jill’s.

“May we never get to hell but always be on the way there,” she said, draining the glass and slamming it onto the bar.

The bartender cackled. “Love it,” he said, shaking his head and pouring her another. “One beer comin’ up.”

Jill picked up the glass. “You want that breakfast, Maddie, better start flirtin’.”

When the bartender returned with a pint, I forced my hands to relax, forced my face into Cheerful Neutral. Drunk assholes who thought they were somehow owed entry were easy to trigger, so I’d learned to be bland, to appear polite even when I was shoving them out the door.

I decided to see if I could trade a little on Jill’s charm. “We got lost,” I said with a little laugh. “How we ended up here. Got roused by the sheriff up by some weird gated community.”

“Oh, ayuh, Paradise,” the old man said with a nod, laying set of plastic silverware on the bar, wrapped in a paper napkin. “I wouldn’t head back up there, I was you.”

“Why not?”

“They ain’t friendly,” he said, leaning in close. “And they got protection. You wouldn’t be the first to come back from there all banged up and afraid to say a thing about it. Or not come back at all.” He straightened up, smiling. “’Course, that never stops kids from takin’ dares about being up there, heading up the old Mine Road.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, and waited. When people wanted to talk, it was best to let them.

“Sure, sure,” he said, leaning against the bar and rubbing his nose. He had that leather-skinned roadie look to him, a guy who’d lived hard in a very narrow lane. “Paradise used to be a mining town, yanno. Fifty years ago. The old mine road leads from its ass end to the old Phillips Mine. Most folks don’t even know the road’s there. But fucking teenagers who want a place to get drunk and fuck? They’re fucking brilliant in their own way, huh?”

I nodded. Behind the bartender, the three shitkickers were approaching us, and I had a sudden intuition that I was never going to actually eat that breakfast.

They were in classic flying-V shitkicker formation, the lead shitkicker—Shitkicker Alpha—leading the other two. Alpha was tall and skinny, unwashed-looking in a way that probably worked for him—long greasy hair and a white t-shirt that had seen better days and rode up, exposing his abs. He was like a wasted 60s rock star before all the bloating. He flashed an easy smile when he noticed me watching his approach, a casual monster used to being in charge.

Beta and Gamma, on the other hand, were fatter and dumber, that was obvious from the fact that they were following Alpha around. But stupid could kick you in the balls when you were down, as I’d found out the hard way, so you had to factor them in. Beta had red hair and a lingering rash of acne, a reminder of his almost-certainly awkward high school years. Gamma was a damp sort, sweaty, open-mouthed, wet-eyed.

“Well, sweetheart, you sure are a sight for sore eyes,” Alpha said, smiling at Pills and acting like I didn’t exist. “If you’re lookin’ for a party, you found it. This bar never closes.”

“And I bet you never leave,” Jill said, leaning back. Alpha’s eyes went straight to her chest. “Based on the smell.”

He smiled, cocking his head a little as if uncertain what he’d just heard. “How’s that?”

“C’mon, Billy,” the bartender rumbled. “Leave ?em alone.”

Billy held up a hand in the bartender’s general direction, but didn’t turn his head. He kept his dancing eyes on Jill. “I’m being perfectly nice, Terry,” he said. “She’s the one being rude.”

I kept all three in my field of vision, turning around. I knew better than to show any sort of agitation. Every confrontation I’d ever been, every bounce I’d had to make, had been this endless dance of fake smiles and affected relaxation, right up until you were ready to throw down. “That isn’t exactly true,” I said. “She was just minding her business, and you interrupted her.”

Billy waited a beat, then turned and smiled at me, holding up a hand like he had with the bartender. “Bro, I’ll get to you.”

Bro. Why every asshole in the world called me bro was a mystery for the fucking ages. I didn’t react. I was studying the guy’s body language; in my experience there are Tells for every level of a confrontation. It starts off nonverbal—posture and stare. Then it gets verbal, vulgar and insulting, trying to provoke, because people didn’t think straight when they were provoked. Then came an invasion of personal space, an attempt to dominate without crossing the physical barrier. And then would come the Touch, usually gentle, mocking. And all of these escalations were preceded by tiny movements, shifts in weight.

I’d seen a thousand guys like Alpha Billy try to provoke me at Queenies. They all thought that a lifetime of easy bullying made them tough, made them smart.

When Billy reached for Jill, I lunged forward, the stool clattering away as I intercepted his arm and jerked it towards me, slamming my forehead into his nose.

I staggered back, vision flashing purple, and then had the satisfaction of seeing the Alpha stumble backwards, blood gushing from his face, and fall, hard, on his ass.

Jill danced back, clapping her hands and erupting into a peal of unsteady laughter. In my head, I heard her say do it, Maddie! and I shivered. Zero kept drifting.

The other two helped Billy up. He wiped blood from his mouth and shoved them aside, surging towards me. I braced himself, bringing my hands up.

“Hey!”

The voice cut through the air with authority, the sort of voice that was used to being obeyed. Everyone froze in place.

“Ah, shit, Sheriff,” Billy said, licking blood. “This asshole deserves it.”

“Shut the fuck up, Hopkins.”

Sheriff Batten stood just inside the door, her beat-up old hat still on her head, her hand still on her sidearm grip. I wondered if she walked around like that, ready to draw down at a moment’s notice. So far hers was the only dark-skinned face I’d seen in this little shitburg, so that would actually fall under the category of prudence.

The old guys, who’d been watching the altercation with increasing enthusiasm, all stood up and moved towards the back of the bar as if a meeting of the Right Honorable Old Bastards, Lodge 49, had been called. I looked back at the Sheriff.

She sighed. “I told y’all to step the fuck out of town, didn’t I?”

I nodded. “We stopped for breakfast.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t believe I said ?get the fuck out of town, but first grab some breakfast, see the sights, scrape a knuckle on some local idiots.’” She pulled the cuffs from her belt and gestured at Jill. “C’mere, missy.”

Jill affected shock. “What?” She pointed at Billy. “These assholes were harassing me, sheriff.”

Batten nodded. “Billy Hopkins was born to harass. It’s all he fucking does. I said come here.”

Jill looked at me. I did some quick calculus. We had no friends in town, and Batten was the law in the room. I nodded, then added a shrug.

With a sigh, she walked over to Batten. “I’d like to know what I’m being arrested for?”

Batten grunted, taking Jill by one shoulder and spinning her around. She bent an arm back with professional skill and slapped one cuff on her wrist. Jill swung her other arm behind her, but Batten ignored it, instead turning and tugging Jill back to the wall, where she threaded the other cuff through the metal arm of a wall sconce.

“No one’s arresting anyone, honey,” Batten said. As Jill spluttered, tugging at the sconce, Batten walked to the front door and slid the deadbolt in place. The dry click of it was suddenly very loud.

She turned and pushed her hands into her pockets. “The official report will state I arrived with the altercation in progress,” she said. “So, Mr. Hopkins, if you don’t mind—let’s get it in progress and show this man the fucking sights.”

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

7.

I took over the driving for my own health and safety. Back on the road, Pills drove with bags of chips and jelly beans in her lap, popping one or the other into her mouth with robotic regularity, washing them down with sips from a large metal water bottle that I suspected had something other than water in it. I felt caged. I wanted to be moving, to be doing things. Trapped in the passenger seat, I studied Pills just to have something to do and to stop myself from smashing everything in sight. Driving was better. At least I could imagine some of my energy was being pushed into the van, urging it on.

She didn’t look good. Her hair was unwashed, and formed a greasy black cloud around her face. Her skin looked yellow, her eyes red. One leg jerked up and down nervously as we drove, one hand constantly drumming on the armrest. Her clothes looked like they would stand up on their own. When had I last paid attention—real attention—to Jill Pilowsky? Now that I was paying attention, I thought she looked unbelievably tired, as if she hadn’t slept in weeks.

It reminded me of The Summer of Frank.

Frank had come into the Pilowsky home mysteriously. The way Jill told it, he was, initially, a smell—Lectric Shave, literally the poor man’s aftershave. Suddenly it was everywhere. Jill wasn’t a stranger to new and vaguely distasteful men suddenly appearing at breakfast; she’d learned that monosyllables and vague gestures at lady problems and vaginal discharge worked well enough to shut them up while she stared at her phone pretending to text with the many interesting and delightful friends she didn’t have. But she wasn’t sure how to handle a ghost. It was weeks before Frank appeared in the flesh.

Frank didn’t walk with the pinched, hungover shame of the other guys. He swaggered into the kitchen and talked. And talked. He called her Legs and Cutie and asked her questions without seeming interested in her answers, made jokes without seeming to care if she laughed, and stared at her in a direct, assessing way without seeming to care if Loretta Pilowsky noticed.

For the record, Loretta did not notice. Or if she did, she considered it one more asset in her campaign to keep Frank around.

Frank thought he was hilarious. Everywhere she went, Frank was there. She realized that even when he wasn’t physically there, she could smell him. Lectric Shave. It got into everything. Her clothes, the furniture, her hair. No matter how much time she spent out of the house, with me, getting lit in the park or crashing on the floor of my room, Uncle Pal and Aunt Mary scowling, whispering, she could still smell Frank. No matter how many showers she took. Or didn’t take, letting her hair get greasy, working up a serious funk, a grit on her neck.

It didn’t matter to Frank. He loved an audience.

She shrank. She dried up. She had deep hollows under her eyes. She slouched and stared and ate junk food like they were power ups in a video game. And I had to just sit and watch it.

“You’ll just make it worse,” she said, when I suggested I try to make Frank go away. A week later, we both tried to make Frank go away.

Do it, Maddie.

I thought of all the times Pills had called or texted me and I’d ignored her. Carrie hated her, so it was best not to bring Jill up at home. Best to let things go to voicemail. Had she stopped leaving messages? I thought so. You stop returning calls, people stop bothering. Eventually your gravity spins you off into a whole other galaxy, and then the number stops showing up in your recents, and then you find yourself thinking of the person a decade later, wondering where they are.

But every time I called her to play backup for me, she answered. Every time.

####

The highway stretched out and grew sparse. 78 turned into 24 turned into 202 turned into 80, a wide swath of blacktop pushing us west, the seams in the road hitting the wheels in a steady, hypnotic rhythm.

In Iowa we took Route 35 north until we hit 90, then turned west again. Just over the border from Minnesota, dark, blank fields on either side, Pills turned on the dome light and consulted her phone and a wrinkled paper map covered in her shaky notes, side by side.

“We’re gonna be on some pretty sketchy roads,” she said. “Take 229 to 29. About an hour.”

I nodded, putting the van in the left lane. It handled like a brick with three wheels, but we’d had about an hour to scrounge up a ride since Trim had refused to loan out the Blue Ruin for such a long time, visibly shocked that we’d even ask. The more time you spent with Damien the more you realized he was a man who lived in a pretty elaborate internal simulation of real life, complete with its own physics and rules of polite behavior. He was middle-aged and despite talking endlessly about his old friends, two guys he’d planned a robbery with, he didn’t seem to have any contact with them any more—or any other friends aside from Jill, if she counted. But it didn’t seem to bother him.

It was three o’clock in the morning, which suited me fine. I wanted to get a look at the town when everyone was asleep.

The emptiness freaked me out. I’d spent my whole life in a dense, crowded city, sweating bullets in the summer and freezing in the winter, the walls so thin every noise made it through. The darkness all around us made it feel like the world was being rendered in real time by our headlights, everything else a void. There had been nights during high school and immediately after, before the fall, before Carolina and Elspeth and the grind of being a person, when Pills and me had spent our evenings driving around in her old beater Taurus, nick-named The Boat, just trying to beat lights and buying beer wherever we could. But the city had been filled with light and sounds and other people, no matter how late it got. Driving through South Dakota was like driving off the edge of the world into darkness.

Half an hour in, Pills roused herself and began blurrily giving directions, sending us through a maze of roads that got narrower and less universally paved as they went. I wondered what she’d been taking and how much, how fucked up she was, if she could even read the scrawl on the map.

“Left,” she slurred.

I let the van cruise to a stop at the crossroads. There was nothing. A pair of stop signs, some power and telephone lines. To the left was a dirt road stretching off into gloom. It was so quiet the click of the turn signal was like a clap in my ear.

I hit the gas and turned the wheel, and then we were bumping down the road at a good clip. It started to grade upward, the darkness pulling at us as we climbed, the van’s engine grumbling about the elevation as we headed into some low hills. After a few minutes, I saw lights drawing closer. We turned up a long driveway marked by a relatively new PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. Thirty seconds later we pulled up outside what looked like a standard-issue gated community with haphazard landscaping—a few shrubs, a few bare trees, a lot of bare, brown dirt. The stucco wall stretched off into the darkness. A new-looking chain-link rolling gate blocked the entrance. I idled the Van and leaned forward to peer through the windshield. I could see a small, brightly-lit guard booth just past the gate, and the road continuing up into a neat row of trees. I couldn’t see anything else.

“Looks like the most boringest place on earth,” Pills yawned. “Except for the barbed wire.”

I angled my head. A curl of barbed wire snaked along the top edge of the wall. There was no sign, no identifying feature at all. A few scattered lights beyond the tiny guard house inside the gate was the only indication that this was a real place where people lived.

“Not exactly standard issue—”

Headlights bloomed to my left, and then the familiar red and blue flashers of law enforcement. I squinted into the glare, hands tightening on the steering wheel. A moment later, a car door opened, and then someone was walking towards us.

The figure resolved into a tall, dark-skinned woman in a tan and brown uniform, wearing a banged-up trucker-style hat with a gold star on it. She smiled, one hand on her sidearm as she gestured to me to roll down the window.

I did, noting the SHERIFF HARLEE COUNTY on her badge. The name plate pinned neatly above it read BATTEN.

“Evenin’ folks,” Sheriff Batten said. She had a cheerful twang to her voice, and a triangular face framed by deep smile lines. She was compact and held herself well, someone used to being physically in charge of most situations. “You might not be aware, but this is private property.”

I forced himself to smile. Rule numero uno with police was, if they were willing to play it polite, let them. “We’re a little lost, Sheriff.”

I watched as she did the traditional neck-crane. Her eyes roamed the interior of the van, lingered on Pills for a moment, then returned to me. “Where you folks from?”

“Jersey.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh.” Her hand was still on her sidearm. I didn’t let himself look, but I was willing to bet money that the strap was off. The safety, too.

Eye contact, I thought. The secret to every confrontation was eye contact. You had to control the space, the speed, and the shape of the interaction. I kept my smile in place and heard my knuckles pop as my hands tightened on the wheel.

“If I ran these plates,” the Sheriff said, looking down at the front fender, then sliding her eyes back to me with a playful little smile, “would they come back stolen?”

“I sure hope not,” Pills said. I didn’t react. I hoped fervently Jill was joking.

The Sheriff turned and leaned forward slightly, eyes roaming the interior of the van again. Then she made a tsking noice with her mouth. “All right, folks, free advice time. Turn the fuck around. Get the fuck unlost, and don’t let me see y’all up here again, you hear?”

That smile again. It was wide and friendly, a real shiteater of a grin. I had a momentary, insane urge to lift one hand off the wheel and pop her in the nose. Even seated, without leverage, I was certain I could put her on her ass and bust her nose wide open. For her part, Batten’s eyes told me she knew what I was thinking, like I had a thought bubble over my head. It was a truth universally acknowledged that being a dirty cop didn’t necessarily mean you were an incompetent cop. Experience told me that the reverse was true—the sharp ones got tired of risking their lives for peanuts.

Instead, I nodded. “You got it, Sheriff.”

She nodded and stepped back from the van, but didn’t return to her vehicle. I put the van into reverse, still smiling, and spun us around. I watched Sheriff Batten fade back behind us, framed by light. She’d just been sitting there in the dark, the fucking sheriff. I wondered whether she’d been elected first and then bought by the Outfit, or if it was the other way around.

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6

I called Lisa while Jill drove us back to her place. There was no time to waste—Ellie and Carrie had already spent three hours as prisoners.

“Maddie?”

“Hey, Lisa, I—”

“Jesus, Mads, are you okay? Are Carrie and Ellie? What the fuck is going on?”

I took a deep breath. “It’s better if you don’t know. I just need you to tell Mrs. Pino I can’t help her with Marcus this week—I’m really sorry, but I just can’t. And tell Tony I won’t be able to help him with the furniture like I’d promised. Maybe Luis Quinones has some time.”

“Mads—”

“And tell Mrs. Bekvalac I’ll help her with Andy next week. Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Mads,” Lisa said. “You need help, you know all you have to do is say the word. And I know you need help.”

“Thanks, Lisa,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few days.” I hung up, thinking or I won’t be back at all.

We pulled into the parking lot of Jill’s building and I followed her up to the apartment. Trim wandered in from the bedroom, still wearing his tattered bathrobe, eating from an enormous plastic bowl. He gave every appearance of a man who had not left his squalid apartment in years. Or removed his robe.

“Hey guys,” he said with his mouth full. “What are you two lovely examples of the public school system up to?”

“Need some help, Damien,” Jill said, grabbing a green bag and heading back into the bedroom area.

Trim made an “O” face at me, and smiled. “Sounds like an adventure!” he said. “What can Trim get for you, Ms. Pilowsky?” He made the face again. “Don’t let me find out you two are plotting crimes again!”

“Guns!” she shouted. “We need a couple of guns. And some info, if you have it.”

“Guns and info,” Trim said, stepping around me with exaggerated caution and heading into his grimy kitchen. “Specifics on the guns?”

“Niners,” Jill said, walking back into the room with the bag on her shoulder. “An M&P or a double-S P938. No fucking Glocks.”

I blinked. I knew Jill was a full-time criminal, but I’d imagined lightweight stuff—a little pot, a little light thievery. “Jesus,” I said. Timelines were scrambled. You could spend time with someone, like, all the time, every moment of your life for weeks, months, years. You could entwine your timeline with them so thoroughly future time-traveling scientists will have an impossible job of unscrambling things, and it doesn’t matter. You drift, your paths diverge, and they become strangers.

Trim put the bowl on the counter and mimed jotting down notes on his hand. “No … fucking … Glocks …” He leaned down and opened the oven, pulling out a baking sheet with four gleaming pistols on it. “I got Glocks.”

“Shit.”

Trim placed the tray on the counter. “G21s, full size 45s, 13 round magazines.”

Jill nodded. “I’ll need two on credit, an extra mag for each.”

Trim nodded. “Sure, sure. Credit, sure. Of course. What’s money anyway but a societal construct? Fine. You’ll owe me, assuming whatever it is you’re doing with these guns is totally safe and your continued survival despite doing things with guns and having a long-standing reputation as a girl who never met a recreational drug she didn’t adore is assured. Fine. You said something about information? Trim lives to serve.”

I exchanged a glance with Jill as Trim bent down and produced two magazines from a kitchen drawer. Then I turned back to him. “You ever hear of a place called Paradise, South Dakota?”

Trim began assembling a surprisingly complex cocktail from the bottles sitting on the kitchen counters. “It’s my retirement plan for when I want to finally commit suicide.” He picked up his glass and held it up to the light, squinting at its content, then paused. “Wait—are you idiots going to Paradise? Paradise South Dakota?”

When a man like Trim knows more than you do, it makes a man reconsider his opinion of himself.

“You’ve heard of this place?” Jill asked.

Trim blinked several times rapidly, then tipped back the glass and swallowed its contents. A second later he convulsed, eyes bulging, and he turned to spit the drink into the sink. For a few seconds he hung there, coughing and groaning. Then he turned and leaned against the sink, eyes red and watery. “Yeah. I used to fence for a guy who bought in. Showed up here one night covered in blood and saying his life was over, told me if he didn’t make to Paradise, South Dakota before the morning he’d probably be dead.” He pulled a hand over his face. “Shit, I wonder if Roscoe is dead.”

I glanced at Jill as she nodded her head in an exaggerated way and wagged her eyebrows as if to say, oh, Roscoe’s dead all right. “What can you tell us about it?”

Trim thought for a moment. “It was a while back, but I remember a few things. One, everything beyond the initial phone call had to be done in person. Like, you call and say, whoopsie, I fucked up and some kind of organized crime fatwa has been issued against me, I need a shitty condo in a ghost town. They say, great, we have a one-bedroom with mold and several ghosts, come on down. After that, no more calls, you just have to show up with your buy-in—and that had to be cash. Everything, cash. All the details handled in person.”

“He say how much it cost?” Jill asked.

Trim shook his head. “But he had a fucking suitcase of cash.” He mimed the size of the case. “You do the pseudo-math. A lot.”

“How was he supposed to make contact once he got there?” I asked.

“Drive up to the gate, give your name, he said.” Trim shook himself and went back to the counter, picking up a bottle and pouring its contents into the glass. “They either invite you in or shoot you in the head, I think.”

I exchanged another look with Jill.

“All right, Trimbo,” Jill said, gathering up the guns and ammunition. “We got a long way to go and a short time to get there.”

Trim offered a salute. “You’re gonna do what they say can’t be done.”

####

Jill drove for the second time in a few hours, which was a testament to how fucked up I was. Normally, I refused to let Jill drive me anywhere. Even when she was sober, which was infrequent, she drove using what appeared to be about fifteen percent of her attention, constantly checking her phone and fiddling with the radio, exclaiming over dogs being walked on the sidewalk, and driving with the wheel between her knees while she did other things.

The cargo van was just a metal shell with wheels. It smelled like bleach, which was always a bad sign. Nothing good ever required bleach. Jill had scrounged it up from her vast network of drug addicts and parole officers, working several phones at once until someone finally agreed that they owed her a favor.

My phone buzzed. Turning away from the cargo van’s grimy window and the view of Route 78 streaming past, I glanced down and swiped my thumb on the screen. A text from an unfamiliar number turned out to be a photo of Elspeth, scowling at the camera. There was no message.

A pulse of rage swept through me. My hand spasmed, and the phone suddenly bent, the screen cracking with a loud pop.

Jill glanced over. “You still doing that, huh?”

I closed my eyes. As a kid I’d done hand exercises, stretching my fingers, training my hands to throw a split-finger fastball because I was gonna be in the Hall of Fame. It had unexpected side-effects. “I’m gonna need a new phone.”

“No sweat. I got like fifteen in my bag.”

I went back to staring out the window. I thought about getting back to zero. Twenty-four hours before, I’d had a family, a shitty apartment, and a shitty job. And I’d felt sorry for myself. I’d felt like a loser, thirty years fucking old and nothing more to show for it. And now I was racing and scraping to get back to that, to claw it all back. I remembered the old dude in high school, pushing a rock up a mountain.

I started to think about my mother and father, and my hands balled into fists again. So I forced myself to think about my hands instead.

My hands got me the scholarship. I remembered sitting in the hallway of Uncle Pal’s house, on a little cushioned bench right inside the front door, and my uncle telling me that they’d arranged for me to attend Bishop Carlbus Prep.

“We wanted to help more,” Pal had said, hands pushed deeply into his pockets. “But your da makes it difficult.”

All I did these days was remember the weak sauce shit adults had told me when I’d been a kid.

Uncle Pal’s house had been dizzyingly nice. Mats and Liùsaidh had us living in a series of places—apartments and houses, all run down, all temporary. Some had no heat, others no hot water. Most had bugs of one sort or another. One had a whole family of possums living in the ceiling. Pal’s house was all dark wood trim and deep, plush carpets, everything kept dust-free and gleaming by an army of cleaning people. It felt clean and permanent, and I remembered being uncomfortable and itchy in it.

“Coach Hanson spoke for you,” Pal said, smiling. “He showed them video of you.”

Uncle Mick had paid my Little League fees, conspiring with Coach Hanson of the Queenies Royals. I remembered my father, who regarded any flow of cash to be his by right, was livid, but it was done. Coach Hanson had played Triple-A ball, and he took the game far too seriously to be coaching a bunch of twelve-year olds, but he watched me work out at the first practice with the expressionless intensity that intimidated the kids and their parents alike, and took me aside afterwards.

“You got hands like shovels, kid,” he said. “And you’ve got arm strength. You know how to throw a forkball?”

I didn’t, but I learned. And I practiced. And I started lighting up the opposing hitters, sending them into embarrassing corkscrews, off-balance, bats flying.

Good times. From below zero, they looked impossibly distant, now.

Presented with a baseball scholarship to Bishop Calrbus that covered the full ride—not to mention a kinda-of, sort-of veiled threat from Carroll Mick—Mats had no option but to give me permission to attend, though his sneering contempt for a Jesuit institution and education in general was palpable. Years later, after my parents had not actually died, I remembered the look in Uncle Pal’s eyes when I lost the scholarship and got booted out of BCP, having shown up to practice and games still drunk from the night before one too many times.

Maybe, I thought, I’d had this whole thing wrong. Maybe that had been zero. Maybe zero was really decades in the past, forgotten, lost. Maybe it was so far back I’d never see it again. And maybe I wouldn’t recognize it if I did.

####

After Bergen City’s grit and heat disappeared behind us, we stopped at a convenience store. I took a moment to text the unknown number from the burner Jill had given me, and then watched as she purchased a heroic number of snacks, carrying them in her arms to the register and dumping them onto the counter without ceremony.

I looked back down at the phone. Keep her safe, I typed. I’m coming for her.

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5

For a moment it was just me and Jill. She was sprawled on the floor, blood covering her face from her upper lip over her chin. She was breathing loudly through her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she gurgled, coughing. “I tried to—”

I nodded. I stared at the seat where the Broker had been. The silence of the place was horrifying. The apartment was small and never quiet, filled with Carrie and Ellie’s voices, their movements, just the sense of their presence.

“Mads?”

Lisa. I heard them coming into the apartment, all of my neighbors. Then Lisa was next to me, kneeling on the floor. “Maddie? You okay?”

“What happened, man?” Ivan asked.

“Is Carrie okay?” Mrs. Pino asked.

“Maddie?” Lisa said, putting her hand on my arm. “Maddie, talk to us.”

I swallowed. I was angry. Angry at everything, and everyone. Angry at my neighbors, who didn’t stop this. Who were here when Spillaine’s people got here and didn’t stop them.

“You know everyone in this building loves you,” Lisa said, whispering. “You hold this building together. When they started tearing down everything on the block, half of us were gonna move, just get out, but … I don’t know, man, you make it seem possible. Whatever’s going on, say the word and you got neighbors will stand with you.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” I managed to say. The words came from far away. Outside, the sun was rising.

“Maddie—”

“Lisa,” I said, grabbing her arm and looking at her. “Get everyone the fuck out of here.”

She winced, and I forced myself to let go. She stood up. “Okay, okay, Maddie.” She stood for a moment, rubbing her arm, then turned away. I heard her soft voice in a half dozen whispered conversations as she herded everyone out of the place, their concerned voices fading away.

Then it was just me and Jill again. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m fuckin’ sorry, Maddie.”

I nodded. I felt like I was filled with lead. A moment before I could have torn the whole place apart. Now I slumped in the chair and didn’t think movement was possible. I thought of Ellie. She was a special kid—everyone thinks their kids are special, but Ellie was the sweetest, quietest, happiest kid on the planet. She just giggled and smiled her way through every day. Everything delighted her. She had none of Carrie’s hard edges or my rage, none of our bad moods.

Ellie, naming things. She liked to name things. She would run up to you with something, some random thing that had attached itself to her sticky hands via magic and the weak forces of the universe. She would hand it to you and smile and declare it was a baba. Or a jujuter. Or a bingleberry. And then she would laugh uproariously and run off on her tiny legs.

The idea that she might be spoiled, damaged, by these assholes sent a surge of anger through me again. I stood up, knocking the chair backwards.

I walked over to the sink and knelt down. Opened the cabinet and peered inside. The cleaning supplies, the little red bucket, the extra rolls of paper towels were all there. Had not been touched. I nodded, stood up.

“Come on,” I said, reaching down and grabbing Jill’s arm to pull her up.

“Where are we going?” she asked, dragging an arm across her bloody face.

“To go see my Uncle Mick.”

####

I remembered Carroll Mick, Uncle Mick, waiting for me after school. Taking my bookbag and walking with me. Fourteen years old, I wasn’t sure how to roll with it. On the one hand, only babies got picked up and walked home from school. On the other hand, despite his bowling shirts and enormous pot belly, Uncle Mick was a legit gangster, which was cool.

“Kid, your parents,” Mick said. “They’re gone.”

Later, I wouldn’t remember how I got all the details, the burned-out car, Mats and Liùsaidh identified from dental records. The rest of the day—and most of the days to come—were a blur. But I remembered Mick saying they’re gone.

“Your aunt Mary and your uncle Pal are gonna take you in,” Mick went on. “You’re gonna stay with them, at least for a while.”

I remembered being confused by it all, but recognizing the tone in Mick’s voice, even though he’d never heard it before. The tone was Serious Business, the tone adults used when they didn’t want any wiggle room around what they were saying.

“How long?” I’d asked, thinking of Uncle Pal’s small house that smelled like licorice, and the plastic on the furniture. “How long do I have to stay with Uncle Pal and Aunt Mary?”

Everyone named Mary. Mary, Elizabeth, Anne. All the girls with normal names, all the men with these ridiculous Danish names.

“For a while, kiddo,” Mick had said. “Because, like I said, you parents, they’re gone. And they ain’t comin’ back.”

After all the excitement, all the people I had to deal with, all the arrangements I had to make, I asked Uncle Pal if I could go back to the apartment. The latest shithole Mats and Liùsaidh had called our home. Alone, I said, I want to pick up some things, and have a moment to myself. I was still Mads Renik, Remarkably Mature Child who hadn’t inherited his parents’ insanities, so Uncle Pal agreed. Drove me there and waited in his big boat of a car, told me to take all the time I needed.

I walked through the place. It was a glorious mess, as always. No one in my family considered housekeeping to be a virtue.

I walked around in a daze. We’d only lived in this tight, hot place for a year, maybe thirteen, fourteen months. But it felt like home to me. I had my own room, for a change, and I’d spent a lot of time decorating it. New York Mets posters on the walls, pity me. Some books, lined up neat on the windowsill. My little twin bed, crisply made.

As I walked around, I realized I didn’t really want anything.

I went into their bedroom. It was as small as mine, but they’d gotten a full bed in there, just big enough for the two of them to squeeze onto. My parents slept like animals, on top of the covers, sprawled, panting, mouths open. I walked around picking up the cheap jewelry and putting it down again, my father’s odd collection of pretty stones, his chains with crucifixes, his cufflinks despite not owning any suits.

The drapes. Somehow, I noticed how the drapes had been hemmed—ugly black thread, too thick for the job. An unsteady, hackish job, and one of the threads already working loose. And I noticed something peeking out from the loose hem, something working its way out. I tugged at the thread, bored, numb, and worked the hem open to reveal money. Cash. A wad of bills.

A few more minutes work, and I’d undone the whole set of curtains, and a pile of bills lay on the floor. My parents’ emergency stash, wrinkled currency—nearly two thousand dollars, once I’d sorted and counted it. I found a used old envelope, a sickly yellow color, and pushed the money into it. Folded it over and pushed it into my pocket. My inheritance, I thought. It was perfect: Soiled old money, hidden badly.

Fifteen years and change later, I thought about the words while Jill drove the Ruin over to Queenies in the dull morning light. They’re gone, Mick had said.

Not, they’re dead.

####

Queenies was open. Mick never actually locked up; he let the staff hang out as long as they liked, and in the morning the Prostate Gang showed up to drink coffee and read newspapers. Mick usually lingered, going home around nine or ten and showing up again in the afternoon. He liked to say that Queenies gave an old retiree something to do.

He was at the bar, reading glasses perched on his nose. All the old duffers were cackling at something, a roar of old-school laughter. I walked past them briskly. Jill trailed me like exhaust. I imagined her leaving bloody footprints on the floor as she sniffled and gasped, trying to breathe through her own blood.

“Hey, kid,” Mick said, laughing as he looked up at me. “What’s—”

“I just had a visit from Abban Spillaine’s kid,” I said. “He broke into my apartment and took Carrie and Ellie.”

The old man stared at me. Carroll Mick came up a stevedore on the old docks, and he had the wide, bulky build of a man who’d once been made of muscle. His face was a box, jowly now, dominated by the caterpillar-like eyebrows that were still jet black even though his thin, long hair was slat and pepper.

He stared at me for a moment. Then he glanced over my shoulder. “All right!” He shouted, looking around. “Everyone out. Bar’s closed.”

There was a dull roar of protest. Mick stabbed out his cigar and stood up from the stool with a grunt. “Out!” he shouted. “Every fucking one. We’re shut.” He turned to me. “My office. Get her cleaned up. We’ll talk.”

I studied him for a moment, then nodded. I took Jill by the arm and led her towards the back. She moved like a rag doll, shuffling along without complaint. I brought her to Mick’s tiny office crowded with papers and ancient coffee cups. I pushed her down into one of the chairs facing his enormous old metal desk.

“Be cool,” I snapped. “Be quiet.”

She nodded, holding up one hand as if to ward me off.

Mick walked in. “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “Let me talk.”

“The Abban kid has my daughter, Mick,” I said. “I’ll fucking talk.”

He jabbed a finger at the chair next to Jill, his fleshy upper arm jiggling. “Sit the fuck down and listen!” he snarled. My hands clenched and unclenched. Then I sat down.

He nodded, and dropped into the big chair behind the desk. He took a deep breath and dragged both hands down his face. Then he leaned back, chair creaking. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

I wanted to rip the desk off the floor and smash it to pieces. Instead, I took a deep breath and told him the basic story.

“Merlin Spillaine,” Mick said unhappily when I’d finished. “Fuck, I thought Abban decided to freeze him out, force him to do his own thing.”

I glanced at Jill. She frowned and mouthed the word Merlin?

“Are my parents alive, Mick?”

He scowled, looking at his fingernails. Then he sighed. “All right, kid. I’m sorry.” He looked at me. “Yeah. As far as I know, they’re alive.” He looked away. “Your dad asked me to keep you in the dark, because of this exact situation. I’m sorry, Maddie. I saw the wisdom of it when you were fourteen. Maybe I was wrong.”

I worked my mouth, but for a moment I couldn’t make any words come out. I’d pushed any thought of Mats out of my head the moment I identified it, or tried to. My mother, too, who I remembered as a darkly cheerful monster, a woman who had something cutting to say about everyone the moment they left the room, a woman who was never particularly impressed by anything, who was always dissatisfied, everything cheap and ugly. A woman who somehow magically made it very, very obvious that she would say something cutting about you the moment you left the room, as well. I remembered never being settled with my mother. Always on edge.

But with Mats, there’d been Queenies.

Liùsaidh had a nick-name for everyone, and her mean-spirited nick-name for her husband was Mats Renik, The Celebrated Genius of Queenies Tavern or, more often, just The Celebrated Genius. Mats spent a lot of his time at Queenies, soaking up cheap drinks and making deals, borrowing money, laying bets, and accepting freelance burglary jobs. He enjoyed lecturing everyone there, imagining himself well-read and erudite. My father had once glanced in the general direction of a library, and that combined with his fascination with documentaries on cable TV made him think he was a self-taught genius.

Sometimes, Mats would scoop me up and take me along. I remembered the thrill of walking into a place like Queenies, usually reserved for adults, and being greeted with solemn politeness by Carroll Mick and the others. The bartenders doted on me, giving me all the free sodas I could drink, and the other afternoon patrons would press quarters into my hand for the video games and the jukebox. I would sit and sip my sodas and watch my father make the rounds, and if things were going well Mats would often glance over and wink, or even call me over to be introduced.

At Queenies, I’d felt settled with The Celebrated Genius.

“Where’s Paradise?” I finally croaked.

“It’s a town,” Mick said, pulling a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer and setting it in front of himself. “In South Dakota. Called Paradise.”

Next to me, Jill pulled out her phone and did a decent imitation of Jill Pilowsky, aged sixteen, in Algebra II.

Mick produced three not particularly clean glasses in another drawer and slopped whiskey into them. He passed the glasses to Jill and me. I stared down at mine for a moment, jaw bunching, breathing in the peaty smell. Then I slid it over to Jill, who took the extra step of pouring its contents into her own glass.

“My father’s been hiding in South Dakota for fifteen years while I thought he was dead,” I said slowly.

“Your father and your mother,” Jill added.

Mick picked up his glass and studied it in the dusty light of his windowless office. “Shit, kid … I don’t know what to say. I thought I was protectin’ you. Your parents … ” He sighed. “Listen, your parents were no good for you, you know that, right? You know it. I knew it. Everyone knew it. And when they pulled that stunt, Maddie, Jesus fucking Christ—they couldn’t have thought for one fuckin’ minute it would fool Abban Spillaine. Or anyone.” He laughed. “Shit, they hired local. From Spillaine’s crew!”

“Fooled me,” I said, thinking back to that day. They’re gone.

Mick looked down at his glass again. “Shit, sure. The point is, I figured they might not be dead right at that moment, but in a day or three, Abban was going to put together a crew of hard cases, go after them, and then they would be dead. It was a whatyoucallit—a formality. I didn’t see the point in stretching it out for you.”

I nodded without taking my eyes from the glass in front of Pills. “Paradise.”

“A town. Was a ghost town, some mining operation out there, company built this place for its workers, and then it limped along for a while after the mine shut down. Then got abandoned. So the Outfit bought it.”

Jill held her phone up to me. The map showed a dot in a field of green: Paradise.

I frowned. “The Outfit?”

“A consortium. All the gangs in the country, meeting in the middle. New York, Chicago, L.A., Kansas City, Miami. Each family’s got a rep, they get together, they make truces, they pass resolutions, fund a fucking budget, they set rules. Keeps things civil.” He drained his glass in one muscular motion. “Paradise is a shared place, every major operation in the country owns a piece, gets a share. It’s a safe haven. You buy in and pay the rent, you can’t be touched.” He shrugged. “Your ma and da aren’t the only people hiding out from execution orders in Paradise. It’s fucking lucrative.” He snorted. “Fucking brilliant. You push a button on someone, you have to pay. Then they pay to hide out in Paradise. Everyone pays. It’s a criminal’s dream.”

I tried to piece it all together. I knew, better than most, that organized crime was run like a shitty company. You had the C-Suite, the dons and the jefes and the bosses. You had your middle management, like Carroll Mick. You had your floor workers, who took the bullets and ate the shit in exchange for low, unreliable wages. There were tax deductions and layoffs. The idea that the idiots and sociopaths who populated most crime outfits could pull their shit together long enough to make a deal like that was incredible.

“They can’t be touched,” Mick said. “Mats got wind that his fucking idiot kabuki with that burned out car didn’t go over like he expected, so they bought in. And in there, they can’t be touched. If Abban or Merl went after them, the Outfit would come after them with everything they got. There’s so many truces and agreements in effect to make Paradise happen, something like that would trigger a goddamn world war. And it makes so much money off the rents, no one wants to see it go. They can’t be touched.” He shrugged. “As long as Mats and Liùsaidh are current on their rent.”

I nodded. The fury I was feeling was like electricity inside me, but I wasn’t sure who to be angry at. Mick? He’d taken care of me, and what he said made sense. Mats and Liùsaidh? Sure, but I’d been angry at them for so long—for being shit parents and for leaving me—that it was an organic shift.

Merlin Spillaine. The fucking Broker had touched Elspeth.

“Where is it?” I asked. “You know exactly?”

Jill flashed me her phone again, but I ignored her.

He leaned back and stared at me, folding his big hands over his belly. “You go out there, you’ll wind up dead,” he said.

“Oh, fuck you, old man,” Jill snarled, waving her glass around and sloshing whiskey everywhere. “They got Ellie. You’d sit here on your ass? Go fuck yourself.”

Mick’s hangdog eyes slid to Jill for a second, then back to me. Hidden in their depths was a judgment on me for being the sort of person who brought Jill Pilowsky into things despite her consistent poor performance. “I can get you there,” he said. “Paradise is fortified—no one gets in or out without a pass. Some of the people in there got multiple contracts out on them. You’re gonna need help. A team. Some real soldiers.”

I nodded. “I got Pills.”

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4

I charged, hands balling up into fists. I didn’t get more than two steps in before gravity shifted in a strange way and the floor sawed away from me as someone plucked me up by my coat collar and casually tossed me against the wall.

I saw stars and hit the floor. For a moment my limbs wouldn’t respond to my commands, which were all variations on kill that asshole.

With a screech, Jill flew into the kitchen and leaped up onto Patsy, the enormous man who’d just given me my physics lesson. Small, wiry, and stoned out of her mind, she clambered onto his back and wrapped one thin arm around his thick neck. The big hairless goon was wearing a big overcoat and baggy pants and a shirt made—incredibly—for a much larger man. For a moment, all I could hear was the ringing in my ears and her soft grunts as she had what seemed like zero impact on the big man’s existence. She was like a single fly annoying an elephant, and Patsy endured it stoically, with the occasional grunt and twitch.

“Maddie,” The Broker said, snapping his fingers. “You still with us?”

I climbed to my feet and swayed for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

He brightened. “Good! Good. You gonna behave, Maddie? Because even with that bitch makin’ him miserable, Patsy here can still teach you another lesson. Though it’s his sacred habit that if he has to teach you twice, he breaks something.”

I nodded. Jill started to breath heavy as she continued to try to make Patsy notice her. He finally reached up behind his head to try and catch hold of her, but it seemed half-hearted. Like he was making peace with the idea that this was his life now, that for next few decades he would do everything with a tiny woman slapping at his face.

“You should know,” the Broker said, holding up his phone so the huge screen faced me, “that if you do actually manage to so much as touch me despite Patsy’s efforts, it won’t go well for them.”

I stiffened. Adrenaline washed the ringing and buzzing away, and I vibrated with barely-controlled rage, my knuckles popping as my hands balled into fists. On the screen Carolina held Ellie. Carrie’s face was wet, and she clutched our daughter to her so tightly it looked dangerous.

I swallowed a ball of bile and forced my hands to relax. “Okay,” I said.

He brightened. Patsy finally managed to grab hold of one of Jill’s arms and plucked her off his back like she weighed nothing, dashing her down on the floor hard enough to make everything in the kitchen jump.

“Ooh,” she slurred into the floor. “Fuck.”

“Good! Have a seat.”

His cologne was powerful stuff. It tickled my nose and made me want to find out if it was flammable. I’d never had the pleasure of getting to know Merlin Spillaine personlly, but I was an Asshole Sommelier, thanks to my shitty parents, my lively orphanhood, and my time working at Queenies. I saw all kinds at the bar—the wannabes, the could-bes, and the dangerous sorts. They were hard to tell apart, sometimes, but I’d cracked the code. The wanna-bes were forever telling you what they were going to do, and never doing it. The could-bes never said a word, playing it close to the vest, but did plenty. The dangerous ones did both.

He was the dangerous sort. It was the high-octane quality of his muscle—Patsy wasn’t cheap. It was the professional approach—quiet, patient, waiting for me in my own fucking apartment.

“My father’s Abban Spillaine,” he said. “My father used to run this shit town. Used to be pals with your creaky old friend Caroll Mick, too. Better said, Mick used to work for my Dad, back in the day. Only reason he’s got that dive is because pop gave it to him, gave his blessing.”

I didn’t say a word. The kid was right. Abban Spillaine was the last of the old legends, the head of the Morning Star Gang that had once pretty much ruled Bergen City. All the Irish gangs had dried up, been supplanted by new blood, but Abban still had some pull because he still had a list of judges and cops in his pocket.

I remembered Carroll Mick talking about Abban. Mick and his buddies called themselves the Prostate Gang, all of them over sixty and some in their eighties, tough guys who needed canes and prescriptions to get through their days. I’d always thought of Abban as one of them, a frail old guy with a fancy cane and a habit of getting out of breath any time he moved.

“All right, so we understand who I am in reference to you,” the Broker said, leaning forward. “I am the sun in the sky and you are another bug crawling along the ground. Okay, good. We understand each other.” He glanced at the chair across from him and kicked it out from under the table. “I said, have a seat.”

Forcing myself to breathe, I sat down like a lead weight dropping from a vast height.

“You’re doing great,” he said. “Really spectacular. This won’t take long.” He leaned forward. His breath smelled like bubblegum. “My father is a great man, but he got old. He let things slip. He let the fucking animals nibble away his kingdom.”

I didn’t say anything.

The Broker leaned back. “Now I got the keys to the kingdom. It’s a fucking shrunken kingdom, but I got plans. It’s not too late to put my family back on top where it belongs. So I went over the books, looking for crumbs. And I found a thread and started tugging at it, and your father fell out.”

I didn’t say anything. Mats Renik was at the end of a lot of fucking threads. When the man died half the criminal economy of Bergen City took a hit.

“There’s a lot of red with your father’s name on it,” the Broker said. “It’s a big number, not because your dad was a big dick, but because he was a fucking master at being a shitheel. Let me tell you, he was good. A grade-A grifter, him and your mother. They were masters. So what Mats did was, he went around to every bank in town at the time—my father’s, the Puerto Ricans, the Joon-Hos, the Bianchis—and he hits every single one of them up for a big loan. Takes the murderous juice on each one, smiling. No worries. Tells each one a different story, a different tale of woe. And he walks away. And when he gets baked in that Caddy, it sells. Everyone knew Mats Renik was gonna get murdered eventually, right? And here we are, fifteen years later, and they’ve all still got this stain on their books.”

I tried to control my breathing. Miguel used to say, don’t worry about shit you can’t control. Even at the time, shivering from the desire to get high, I understood that some people found comfort in the idea that they were powerless. But I wanted to ask him what you did when suddenly you couldn’t control anything. What would an astronaut do if she got shot into the inky black, low on oxygen, spinning out into the infinite with no thrust, no way to change her velocity? What can you do aside from scream?

The Broker sighed. “You believe that shit? Your dad, man. A legend.” He shook his head. “Then I have a bright idea. Like I said, my father let things slip, but I’m taking it back. I’m taking it all back. And to do that I need to remind people who the Spillaines are. And so, I need money.”

He smiled. “I went to college,” he said. “Business. So I know numbers. For money, I start digging. Like I said, crumbs. That’s what my fucking father left me to work with. Okay, he had to earn his way, so do I, that’s fair. So I start digging. And I come across this. I come across Mats Renik, genius, in everybody’s books. Small numbers, medium numbers—but a lot of them, and long overdue.” He smiled, putting his hands up. “So I buy them. I buy all your father’s shitheel debts. Pennies on the dollar, because who wouldn’t want to dump an ice cold debt on some idiot?”

“My father’s dead.”

The Broker leaned forward. “Is he?”

All the air in the room seemed to turn into hot gelatin.

“See,” the Broker said, lifting one gloved hand up and tracing some unknowable pattern in the air, “the day your father and mother—that last week, they racked up a shitload of debts. They hit every shark and numbers man in the neighborhood, and a few outside the bubble, too. They ran up a shit ton of credit. A shit. Ton.” He waved his hand around lazily. “And then poof! they got all burned up. Which was convenient.”

I realized my hands were fists again.

“My father’s dead,” I said tightly. “My mother’s dead. I’m an orphan.”

The Broker’s face pulled into a comical frown as he nodded. “It’s all very tragic. Except, they’re not. They pulled a grift, Maddie. They ripped off every shark in the city and then they bought a get out of jail free card and took off.”

I shook my head. My brain was full of static. “No.”

The Broker nodded. “Yep. So, the deal is, the debt is live. It’s retroactive, too, which means the juice on it is fucking major.” He pointed one finger at me. “Your dad stole from us. From a lot of people, but we own the debt now, so from us. You got a couple of options.” He stood up. “One, you can scrape up the cash and make the debt right. But, seeing as you’re a shithead working as a bouncer at a shitheel bar, I doubt you’ve got the assets for that. Sorry.”

He shot his cuffs. “Two, you can go get me Mats Renik. Go bring your father back to face his music. Bring whatever’s left of the money he took from us, and I’ll consider a public execution as payment in full. It’ll show everyone around here that the Spillaines are back in business and not to be fucked with.”

He began walking to the front door. I didn’t turn to follow him. “Three,” he said, “you can do nothing and we’ll kill your family. It’s up to you, Maddie. You got a day to figure it out.”

My hands were white-knuckled and trembling. I wanted to tear the kitchen apart with my bare hands and beat him to death with a table leg. I thought of Carolina and Ellie, her terrified face on his screen. “Wait!” I said, pushing the words between my teeth. “Wait,” I repeated, trying to breathe. “I don’t know any of this. I don’t know where he is.”

The Broker snorted. “Oh, we know exactly where he is. That’s the problem. Go ask your Uncle Mick. He’ll tell you. Your father’s in Paradise.”

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3

The dry click of the hammer froze everyone in place for a moment. Jill, laughing unsteadily, climbed off the new guy and sank back onto her ass.

“Oh my god,” she gasped. “Your fuckin’ face!”

Everyone except the new guy moved, surging out of their chairs, guns leaping to their hands, everyone shouting. I put my hands up in an effort to survive the next thirty seconds or so.

The new guy remained on the floor, shook.

“What the fuck?”

Silence. The door banged shut, and Ricky walked in. He was a middle-aged guy with a shaved head, wearing a nice but not too-nice overcoat, a thick gold chain loose around his neck. He looked around, and everyone lowered their guns. He glanced at me, then at the new guy, then at Jill. Then back at me. He studied me for a moment, considering.

Softly, the new guy was trying to compose himself, sniffling and breathing hard. I imagined him furiously reviewing college applications he’d never finished, job offers from relatives he’d sneered at, a simple life with an early bedtime that had seemed kind of boring until ten seconds ago. I didn’t blame him.

Finally Ricky finished his equation. “You got something for me?”

I nodded, reaching into my jacket and pulling out the brick. I handed it over. He opened up the envelope and peeked inside, then nodded. “All right. We good. Get the fuck out of here.”

Jill popped up and walked with me. She ran ahead and opened the door, then ran to the car to do the same, all manic energy. It was a dark energy I recognized.

Jill had been a thief for as long as I’d known her. The third day after I’d met her at school, she’d invited me to a party. I’d gone to her house and she’d climbed out the bathroom window, then led me on a long walk through the dark streets as the neighborhoods got nicer and nicer, richer and richer. Finally we’d arrived at a large colonial-style house where a real rager was shaking the windows and bloating the place with teenage sweat and dense bass lines. Kids had spilled out into the street. A few girls were frantic in the driveway, where one of their friends had passed out, her party dress riding up over her thighs.

I remember thinking, there are people who are invited to parties like this, and there are people who have to crash parties like this, and now I know which one of those I am.

Instead of going in through the front door, Jill led me around back, where she took a ladder that was lying on the ground and set it against the house. She beckoned me to follow and climbed up to the second floor. When I got there, I found a window looking in on a bedroom. Inside, the music was muffled, but I was anxious and worried. I remembered feeling exposed.

Jill remained calm, though. She began going through drawers, looking under the bed, investigating the closet. She stole big and she stole little. Cash disappeared into her pockets. Trinkets that caught her eye, too. She was careful and methodical; she didn’t speak, communicating to me via gestures and expressions. We slipped out and ran off, and half an hour later the cash she’d snagged bought us a six pack of beer and a bag of chips.

It became our thing. Every couple of days she’d call on me and we’d go raid a place. She was smart—she chose parties because they provided cover; someone discovered something missing after a party, it could have been anyone. And we were invisible. We never went in through the front door, so no one even remembered them being there. And kids who threw parties while their parents were away were usually unenthusiastic about pursuing any investigations. And she scouted: She always knew the layout, how she would get in and out, the rooms she would hit. She brought any tools or materials she would need, and my role was mainly to be good company and lend a hand here and there.

It was great fun, back then.

####

“His face,” she said dreamily, sipping her beer.

Pirelli’s was a shitty diner, but it was open and never crowded. I sipped my coffee and grimaced. It was terrible. But bottomless. This is what old age did to you. At fifteen I was happy with everything. At thirty I was in a constant state of disappointment and dissatisfaction. The drugs, of course, might have had something to do with being so fucking happy as a kid.

“Don’t ever pull that shit again.”

She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. “For fuck’s sake, Pills, you could have gotten us killed.”

She pouted. “You used to be fun.”

I slammed my fist on the table, making her—and everyone near us—jump. “I used to be high as fuck all the time,” I said, keeping my voice steady by force of will. “And angry as fuck all the time. Jesus Christ, I got ten grand of Mick’s money in my pocket, we’re in one of Brusca’s cash drops—what the fuck were you thinking?”

She looked at the table, surly. “He was a dick.”

Jill Pilowsky’s crusade against the dicks of the universe was legendary. She was determined to leave the world a better place than she’d found it through violence and intimidation.

I sighed. Taking a deep breath, I reminded myself that I couldn’t let the old Anger, which I always thought of as a capital-letter entity, win. The Anger had fucked up my life—well, my fucking parents had fucked up my life. But The Anger was what kept shouting do it! DO IT! in my ear.

Do it, Maddie. I shivered.

I had a lot of experience with self-control. First of all, I was named Mads. A family name, a traditional name, and a name that led almost automatically to the nick-name Maddie which in turn led to schoolyard taunts and the same tired insults over and over again. I took the names, because I’d seen my father, Mats, stagger home with a bloody nose and bruised ribs far too often. And then Mats would sit in the living room with a fresh glass of beer and he’d sing old songs at the top of his lungs, in love with the world.

So fare thee well, my own true love! And when I return, united we will be!

Mats Renik, the Celebrated Genius of Queenies. The simplest rule I could follow in life was the Mats Renik Law of Opposite: Just always do the opposite of your father, and you’ll be fine.

Then there’d been baseball. I knew now that the world was full of lanky teenagers who could spin up a fastball in the nineties and strike out sixteen-year-olds, most of whom would never figure out how to make it do something more. But at fourteen, armed with a scholarship to Bishop Carlbus Preparatory School, I’d entertained dreams of being the next Jacob DeGrom, and coach Pirelli at BCP was a guru of repetition and training. Diet and exercise. Practice and more practice. I applied the Law of Opposite. And so I gave up burritos and pot, basement keggers and lazy Saturdays.

After that awful hot August afternoon when some fat cop with a pornstache and a personal odor somewhere between Funyuns and sweet-tip cigarillos sat me down to explain that my parents were dead, were more accurately now melted into the upholstery of a borrowed Cadillac found burnt out under an overpass near the 287 on-ramp, the Law of Opposite had been repealed. I free-fell out of Bishop Carlbus, out of school entirely, out of everything and into meth and coke, Adderal and Oxy, whiskey and the occasional wine cooler. For variety.

And then, crawling back, I’d had to give it all up all over again. You start to see how life is all echoes and reflections. It was repetition and training again. Go to the meetings. Drink the bitter coffee and eat the stale pastries. Spill my guts, then go out and drink more coffee and eat greasy slabs of eggs and buttery toast until my hands shook and my cholesterol was dangerously high. Had to stop smoking, because every cigarette tasted like whiskey with a beer chaser, and my hands shook even more. I had to do a factory reset on my phone to purge all the phone numbers.

Well-meaning assholes sometimes wondered why I didn’t get my GED, go back to school. Meanwhile I was going to two, three meetings a day, becoming intimately familiar with church basements and public school auditoriums, the burnt-coffee smell of the former and the jock strap stink of the latter. And every day I’d controlled himself, every day I’d walked past bars and parks where I knew you could score, stayed awake after sleepless nights in my car, alert for police patrols.

All that just to get back to zero. I didn’t go to meetings any more, but I knew I’d probably find myself there again eventually.

“I’m thirty-one years old,” I said, keeping my voice level. “I don’t have a fucking high school diploma. I work as a bouncer and a sometime courier for a broken-down old gangster owns a bar. I got a two-year old kid and a wife who won’t be amused she finds out I did this or that I took you with me. Help me out here.”

She nodded, dragged her arm across her nose and wiped her eyes, looking away. “I’m sorry. Okay? It was stupid.”

“All right.”

She looked back me, eyes rimmed red. Then she smiled slyly. “How is the Shrew, anyway?”

“Don’t call her that.”

They tell you, in the programs, to avoid romantic relationships for a year. They tell you that you’re too unsettled, your sobriety too fragile. They tell you that circumstance generally means that anyone you hook up with in that first year is also working the program, and the worst thing two addicts can do is get involved before they’re fully baked. And it’s even worse if you’re attending the same meetings.

Carolina wasn’t attending the same meetings. She wasn’t even in the program. I met her on my first day working the door at Queenies. She was behind the bar, a short, skinny woman with dark hair patterned with slashes of blue, a sleeve of tattoos running up one arm, an ability to pour a dozen shots of tequila in one graceful motion, with minimal spillage.

I’d watched her from afar. I knew that she would never pay me a moment’s attention. I watched her whirl and spin, pour and slap. I watched her do shots with customers with a grin, and felt a pang of loss because I’d burned that pleasure circuit so badly in myself there was no going back.

My first night, Carroll Mick had obviously given me an easy shift to get started, to get acclimated. Only a couple of hard cases to 86, no serious crowd control issues to worry over. I had ample time to admire her, ample time to convince myself there was no way. When the goon made a grab at her, a clumsy lunge across the bar, there was an alternate universe where I rushed to her rescue and was her hero. It wasn’t this universe, which found me halfway there when she side-stepped the asshole, took hold of his ear, and walked him down the length of the bar as he winced and bleated, thick arms waving in the air. When she was finished depositing him at the front door, the whole place erupted into applause, and she turned the walk back to her post into a strut.

And when she’d looked at me, I’d realized I was staring at her with a goofy smile on my face, and she smiled back. There was no bolt of lightning or moment where I knew it was love. It was only later, when we were established, when she was pregnant and we were married, that the moment became clear. By that time, I felt like I knew Carolina Mueller better than anyone I’d ever known in my life, with the possible exception of Jill Pilowsky.

Jill softened. “How’s Ellie?”

I smiled a little. “Adorable. My one comfort is that she doesn’t appear to have inherited any of the Renik genes.”

Jill picked up her beer again. “Mats and Liùsaidh sure did a number on you,” she said, peeling at the soggy label.

I nodded. “Funny thing is, I knew they were useless when I was a kid. Fucking knew it, and was okay with it. Mats would drink every dime away and get caught up in these stupid schemes, get arrested. Ma would disappear for days, for weeks, then show up again like nothing happened. I raised myself, and I was doing a good job of it.”

She nodded. “The prep school,” she said. “You were going to be a big deal.”

“And then they got themselves killed, and fucked everything up.”

“You ever tip to what they did?”

I shook my head. Being burned up in a dumped car was a message. It was a button, pushed with determination and prejudice. “Mats was always scheming,” I said. “He thought he was a genius. He thought he could get over on everybody.”

The waitress slid two platters onto the table: A cheeseburger for Jill, a BLT for me. A plate of fries in the middle. It was ancient custom when Jill helped with my occasional minor-league criminal jobs.

She raised her beer. “To useless fucking parents, and the damage done.”

####

I’d once tried to explain Mats to Carolina.

“Imagine someone really smart,” I’d said. “Like, a genius. Can do complex math in his head, remembers everything he reads. Now imagine they’re funny, too, and kind of charming.”

“So, the opposite of you,” she said with a snort. She traced one finger along my chest. “Sounds awful.”

I’d smiled. I remembered smiling. “Now imagine he’s a degenerate gambler. Imagine he’s a drunk. Imagine he drinks this sweet wine, cream sherry—tastes like sugar went bad—by the fucking bucketful—won’t touch anything else. No whiskey for Mats, no beer, no regular wine. Cream fucking sherry. He never holds a steady job once in his whole life. But he’s so fucking charming people keep giving him second and third chances, even people he already owes money to.”

“So … an asshole.”

The smile had disappeared, and I’d nodded, feeling the old corrosive Anger singing in my veins again. “Now imagine he tells you he can’t bear to stay in one place, that he’s a wanderer, so he disappears for weeks at a time and leaves you with your psychopathic mother, then comes home with his pockets full of hundred dollar bills and bottles of pills and your parents disappear for a couple of days and you have to feed yourself and go to school all on your own.”

Carolina said nothing.

“And somehow, when teachers and neighbors call CPS and people show up to investigate, he charms them. He sings and he dances and somehow—some fucking how—the report always leaves him in charge. And he has this power everywhere. People who should punch him in the nose just smile and wave their hand—”

I remembered lifting one tired arm and waving my hand around in a lazy pattern.

“—and say, that’s just Mats. Good old Mats, the celebrated genius of Queenies.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” I’d said. She wanted to get it. Everyone wanted to understand. But unless you’d grown up with Mats and Liùsaidh, you couldn’t.

####

The drive back to The 293 was silent. Jill nursed the last beer as she drove, and I was too tired to admonish her. I was so tired I bit my cheek to keep myself from falling asleep. I figured there would be fallout from Brusca in the morning, but I’d worry about it then.

“We got a problem,” Jill said as we cruised to a stop outside my building.

I turned and followed her gaze. The front door, thick glass, had been smashed in. The vestibule door hung open on warped hinges. Lisa Lisa and Tony Butageri stood outside, talking animatedly.

I was out of the car and moving fast before Jill could say another word. Vaguely, I heard the other door slam shut.

“Maddie!” Lisa shouted as I passed them. “Wait—!”

I burst through the smashed door and bounded for the basement door. I took the stairs two at a time and almost rolled down the last few, crashing into the wall. I righted myself and ran past the storage areas and the breaker boxes.

My apartment door was open.

I stopped just outside and listened. Then I stepped forward.

The Broker sat at my kitchen table. He had a glass of water in front of him.

“Mads Renik!” he said, smiling. In my peripheral vision I saw someone step out of the bathroom, behind me and to my right. “Have seat. Let’s talk about your father.”

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

2

I knocked, waited a few seconds, then pounded on the door with authority. A moment passed, and then the deadbolt was undone and the door opened as far as the chain inside would allow.

Two green eyes, puffy and crusted with unfortunate mascara, squinted out at me. “If it ain’t The Mad King, in the fuckin’ flesh.”

The Mad King. Jill had called me that a lot during high school.

“You straight?” I asked.

“Not since Althea Ramirez kissed me in eighth grade,” Pills said. Then she sighed. “Straight-ish. What’s up?”

“Work.”

“What do you need?”

“Company, mainly,” I said. “But a second set of eyes. It pays, a little.”

She bit her lip. “One minute.”

She walked away. A moment later, a pair of blue eyes replaced hers. “Mads. Good to see you.”

I nodded. “Damien.”

“I have a nick-name, Mads,” he said.

I nodded. “I will never call you by that ridiculous, self-awarded name.”

The door shut. A moment later the chain was undone and it swung open. Damien was wearing an extremely fluffy pink bathrobe. His hair was unnaturally blonde and spiky, and he had the bloated, breathless look of someone who hadn’t thought deeply about their diet or level of exercise. I was conscious of being one of those born-again sober assholes who’d started eating right and doing push-ups and so thought he’d solved the mysteries of the universe, so I’d learned not to start conversations about someone else’s lifestyle. They never went well.

He swept an arm and said “Welcome!”

I stepped inside. The apartment was a one-bedroom I always thought of as a Divorced Dad Standard. It opened into a combination kitchenette and living area that ambitious real estate agents would call ?open concept’ with their fingers crossed behind their backs. It was sparsely furnished and filthy, with ancient take-out containers piled on the kitchen counters and empty bottles and full ashtrays everywhere.

I contemplated Damien. Some men gain nicknames through feats of strength and heroism. Some gain nicknames through squalid, humiliating acts of self-debasement. And some men, like Damien, acquired nicknames through the simple expediency of asking you politely to use the name of their choice, which in this instance was, for some goddamn reason, Trim. This struck me as a name someone thought was pretty cool when they were stoned in high school.

He looked awful; his skin was waxy, he was barefoot, and the hair was a little extra for a middle-aged guy living in a shitty apartment in Bergen City with a girl he’d met because she sold him drugs.

A stack of papers, eye-level on a bookshelf, caught my eye. They looked like they’d been typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. I leaned over and glanced at the top page:

?Pica’

how much lip balm have I eaten, do you think

gumming up the works

combining with crayons and pennies consumed over years

forming a machine of random purpose

powered by the wave-like undulations of my

bowels

Trim thought he was a poet. The two things Trim told everyone he met was that he’d once robbed an office, and that he was a poet who someday planned to spark revolution with sixteen perfect lines of verse.

“So,” he said, pushing his hands into the frayed pockets of his robe, “did we come here to measure our criminal exploit dicks, or is Jill the Pill finally coming to her senses about the sexual proposition I made to her—” he paused to make a show of doing calculations in his head “—twelve years ago?”

From the other room, Jill deadpanned “That’s why I brought Maddie.”

Trim threw himself into an old, dusty-looking couch and picked up a video game controller. “So what are we plotting? Crimes? Are we plotting crimes? I hope it’s a robbery. That’s my specialty.”

“Do not tell that story again!” Jill shouted.

“Did she tell you I once organized a robbery?” Trim said. “I’m hard core.”

“No time for this bullshit,” I said.

“Boy, did you come to the wrong place,” Trim said. “Bullshit is pretty much what I do.”

Jill emerged from her room in her usual uniform: Black jeans and boots, black too-big leather jacket she’d stolen from a party ten years before. Her shirt said SINCERE ENGINEER. Her hair looked like she’d cut it herself using a kitchen knife and a toaster as a mirror, the white streak hanging over her left eye. She looked fucking haggard. When I’d met her, we’d been sixteen years old and I remembered thinking she was the hottest girl I’d ever seen, her dark skin flawless, the white streak so goddamn cute. Now she looked faded and stretched tight, like everything inside her was too hot, cooking her from the inside out.

She walked over to Trim. “Keys.”

Trim began fishing in his robe’s pockets. He pulled a huge automatic handgun from one and set it casually on the coffee table. “There’s a rental fee.”

Jill snorted. “That piece of shit? You should pay me not to bring it back.”

He produced a set of keys and held them out. “The Blue Ruin is a classic. It’s also going through a complicated period in regards to its wiring, so none of the idiot lights mean anything. Be careful.”

She grabbed the keys and whirled, stalking towards me. Jill Pilowsky walked like she was angry at the ground. It was intimidating.

“When was the last time you slept?” I asked. “Last month?”

“Sleep’s for closers,” she said. “Come on.”

“Have fun committing crimes!” Trim shouted.

Jill shut the door with an irritated grunt. “I don’t know how you stand that guy,” I said.

She shrugged as we walked down the hallway. “He pays the rent. Like, literally: It’s his place, and he lets me crash.” She sighed. “And there’s a weird charm, I gotta admit. He grows on you. So, what’s the job?”

“Delivering a brick,” I said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

We headed down the dark, narrow stairs. “Carrie know you’re still calling me in on these things? She’s not my biggest fan. Meaning she thinks we used to fuck and she thinks we still fuck.”

I didn’t answer, because Jill was right on all counts. We walked to The Blue Ruin, a rusted and sagging old Nova, the late 1970s clinging to it like moss, and climbed in. It was never locked. Trim liked to say it was because of his fearsome reputation as a crime lord, but the truth was some cars simply couldn’t be stolen. Thieves would get in and just feel silly about the whole thing. Damien could leave it running with the keys in the ignition somewhere and come back a week later to find it untouched. It was the sort of car that people would return to you if you abandoned it in their neighborhoods, a nasty note left under the windshield wiper.

It started up surprisingly smooth. On the radio, they were talking about some town where the kids had all gone crazy and started tearing everything apart, taking down street signs and setting buildings on fire.

“Where to?”

“Down by the tunnel.”

She put the Ruin in gear. Bergen City on a cold night was calm and quiet, lights blazing from windows. I felt the weight and bulk of the envelope in my jacket and imagined for a moment I was still seventeen, eighteen years old and we were headed to a party. Some City University party where Jill would make a scene and distract everyone while I broke into the bathroom and cleaned out all the scrips. We’d pre-game in the car listening to NOFX and show up raging.

As we drove, I thought it was incredible that for three years, maybe four, I’d seen Jill Pilowsky every day, and spent most of that day with her. We’d meet up before school to smoke a bowl and sit together in most classes. We ate lunch together, we napped through fifth and sixth periods, we sat in the park until it was dark, we raided each other’s fridges and sat in each other’s basements, ignoring and avoiding our parents and guardians. My basement, when there was one in the shitty building we were in, was better, even if it was a dirty shared space. At her house her stepfather Frank was forever coming down the stairs to get beers from the fridge, always making a show of counting them, always making a joke he obviously thought was hilarious, always studying Jill in a way that made her quiet, that made her stare at the carpet. A fucking cliche.

At my house, we were always alone. My father making the rounds at the bars and clubs, laying bets, rolling over debts, running whatever grifts and cons he could manage, my mother always out with someone else, sometimes for days or weeks, until Mats went to retrieve her, throwing punches while she cackled, a sheet wrapped around her, or until she got kicked out and came home, humming, red hair up in a messy-but-precise way, scrubbing the kitchen like a real person, like a normal mother. Or what I imagined a normal mother was like, having had no direct experience.

We smoked and drank and talked, and talked, and talked. She’d showed me the cuts on her arms and told me she didn’t know why she did it, she didn’t want to die, not really, and the cuts weren’t going to do that job anyway.

We’d kissed, once, a long, lingering touch. I’d rolled on top of her, and I could remember the light feel of the hairs on her face, soft and invisible but not to me, not in that moment.

And then she’d burst into tears, wracking, anguished sobs, and that had been that. Fucking scarring. You don’t come back from that. I’d rolled off and sat hunched over, miserable, until she crawled the one foot over to me and pushed herself into my lap, her arms going around my neck, her face pressed into my shirt, her body quaking with every fresh wave of tears.

We’d never kissed again.

“All right,” she said. “Why am I here, your highness? What’s tonight’s adventure?”

“Mick and Queenies, you know he’s got silent partners.”

“If you’re telling me that Queenies, a bar that’s been in continuous operation in Bergen City since the 1500s, is connected to organized crime, I refuse to believe it.”

“Fucking hilarious. Mick’s 49 percenter is Abban Spillaine. This goes back to when the Spillaines ran this town. But the Spillaines run shit, now. Abban’s eighty years old and he’d basically retired. Esmundo Brusca and the Dominican syndicate have carved up everything. The Spillaines can’t really protect Mick, so he cuts Brusca in on the side.” I put one hand out the window to feel the cold air.

This is secret. The Spillaines—who are thugs in nice clothes who think because they murdered their way into money they’re a rare breed—wouldn’t be amused if they found out about Mick’s side deal. It could start a war. This was always how it was with criminals; they were worse than high school kids, insanely jealous. Mick knows if he uses someone connected to pay his tax to Brusca, word would get back to Abban Spillaine, and there would be very many tear-stained diary entries and he’d find himself disinvited from all of the Spillaines’ birthday parties.

“You’re not a soldier, but you’re an idiot,” Jill said. “You’re doing a soldier’s work without the hazard pay.”

I nodded. “Mick’s been good to me.” I looked at her. “And that’s why you’re here.”

“Yayy!” she sing-songed, steering the boat onto Kennedy and heading downtown. “This is a paying gig, right?”

That was my girl. “Of course. You’re in for a note.”

She nodded, pulling out a vape and sending a cloud of sweet smoke out the window. I cleared my throat. “I heard about Frank,” I said.

She didn’t say anything for several seconds, her eyes on the road. Then she nodded. “Yup. Frank, he dead.”

“You go to the funeral?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Her mouth worked, as if words were trying to worm their way out. “Lydia called, of course, and asked me to. I told her the same thing I said ten years ago. You stayed with that piece of shit. She can continue to go fuck herself.” She drove with white knuckles for a bit, then suddenly laughed. “She told me I’m in that motherfucker’s will, which is hilarious, the idea that guy has anything to give. Or that I’d want it. He can eat alllll the dicks.”

I smiled a little, remembering a conversation. “He’s down there right now with a conveyor belt of dicks being shoved into his mouth.”

She smacked the steering wheel, a little too animated, too manic, too charged up to be sober. “Fuckin’ right.”

We drove in silence, then, imagining Jill’s dead stepfather eating all the dicks the universe had ever created. No traffic, we slid down Bergen City’s gullet and turned left on Newark, then took the turns as they came, worming our way close to the Tunnel. I read out the address again, and she found her way to a an old brick warehouse, broken windows and a single light over a battered metal door. The rusted sign outside read O’Harrihan’s Pest Control. If I had any respect for the humor and self-awareness of your average criminal, I would have been impressed. As it was, I chalked it up to coincidence.

“O’Harrihan,” Jill said, opening the car door. “That sign is fifty years old if it’s a day.”

I patted the brick in my jacket and nodded. “Hang back,” I said. “This is supposed to be friendly.”

She nodded, pulling what looked like the world’s tiniest gun from her jacket and checking it over.

“Jesus, did you make that yourself? From a bar of soap or something?” It was delightful.

She held up the peashooter. “The Mosquito has served me well, hombre. She’s like me: So small big strong idiots like yourself never notice her, but she has a mighty roar.” She shoved it back into place and smiled at me, wide and bright, offering up a big thumb’s up. I’d made many mistakes in my life, but I’d never underestimated Jill Pilowsky. I’d known her for fifteen years and I still checked my pockets every time we were in the same room.

Everything was still. You could hear the tunnel traffic a few blocks away like ocean waves, but otherwise we might have been alone in the world. I pounded on the door. In the stillness it sounded like shotgun blasts.

A moment later an enormous man in a balloon-like winter coat opened the door. I remembered him from previous visits. He was round and breathed with his mouth open. Everyone called him Choko and he had a lot of gold in his teeth. He glanced at me, then at Jill, and jerked his head by way of invitation.

Inside was a tiny little entryway area, then another doorway that opened up to the cavernous interior. It was dark and freezing, just like outside. A few dozen feet inside a couple of folding tables had been set up under the one light bulb burning. Four or five guys sat at them, counting enormous piles of cash. They would grab a stack with rubber-gloved hands and run it through a counter, write down the result, then hand it to the next guy who did the same thing. Then they handed the stack and both numbers to the guy at the end of the table. He made an entry on his laptop and pushed the stack into a garbage bag.

There were six garbage bags already tied off and stacked off to the side. The problem with being a criminal wasn’t that it didn’t pay well. The problem was it paid too well. Curiously, money was usless when you didn’t have enough and equally when you had absolutely enormous amounts of it.

“Where’s Ricky?” I said, loud. In my experience you had a few seconds after you walked into a room to set the tone. If you stood around waiting to be noticed, people thought you were a punk.

A new guy, wearing a luxurious-looking cream turtleneck and a pair of tight leather pants, his arms and neck inked up in bold, comic book colors, stood up. “Ain’t here. What you got?”

The counters didn’t pause, but they all looked at each other, and I got that hinky feeling. I smiled. “I’ll wait. When’s he back?”

The new guy walked around the tables and came towards me. “What you got? I’ll take it. Ricky’s not here tonight. I am.”

I nodded. The two keys to dealing with criminals were: Remember that they will always rob you if they thought they could, and never stop smiling. Smile even if they’ve stabbed you in the balls. “Nah, I’ll wait. Ricky knows I’m coming.”

Now the new guy glanced at Jill. I’d sown the seed of doubt—maybe I did know Ricky, maybe I was expected. Maybe robbing me blind wouldn’t be a great idea.

I followed his gaze. Jill was just staring at him, her posture relaxed. “Hola chica,” the new guys said, grinning. “How you doin’?”

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” she said.

His smile took over his whole face, and almost made him charming. “Oh, okay, it’s like that, huh?” He gestured at me. “Well, what if I take whatever your boyfriend’s holding? You talk to me then, I put him on his ass?”

The other guys laughed, and the new guy turned to throw a grin at them. I kept smiling.

Jill, never one to pass up an opportunity to throw a chaos grenade into any situation, smiled brightly. “Let’s find out!”

The new guy looked back at me. “Problem is, I don’t know you,” he said. “So I don’t trust you.”

I nodded. I could have explained that I only dealt with Ricky because that’s who I was told to deal with, that Mick’s arrangement with Brusca was off-book so we didn’t offend anyone, that as a result the participants were kept to a minimum. But I didn’t bother. Instead, I said “Problem is, you don’t know me. Which means Ricky don’t trust you.”

Mission accomplished: That pissed him off. He glanced at the counters—who didn’t pause or bat an eye—then started walking towards me. I dropped my hands and spread my legs to get a better center of gravity, but before he took three steps Jill moved. She leaped, sweeping his legs out from under him, then straddled him as she reached into her jacket.

I took a half step forward, reaching out towards her. “Jill! Don’t—”

She pulled the peashooter, pushed it into the new guy’s face, and pulled the trigger.

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