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

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

PART ONE

Chapter 01

“Hey Maddie.” Perry’s voice was tinny and crackling in my ear over the noise of the bar. “Need you up front.”

“On my way,” I said. I could barely hear my own voice. Which was fine, since I usually didn’t have much to say. Talking just got me into trouble.

The crowd didn’t want to make room for me, but I was used to making my presence felt. The trick was to always stay to just the right side of polite. Most of the guys crushed in by the bar or on the edges of the small dance floor turned, outraged, and then hesitated. I wasn’t maybe the biggest guy in the room, but I was well-known.

It was a big night for Queenies. The bar had been here as long as anyone could remember. It might have been the original structure around which Bergen City had grown, the dirty pearl in that filthy oyster. When I’d been a kid it was a neighborhood place where all the Irish and German men lost their paychecks after work, a front for the Spillaine Mob that everyone in the neighborhood regarded with affection. In recent years it had reinvented itself under Carroll Mick’s benevolent ownership, posing as the closest thing to a nightclub we had. We attracted every connected asshole in the region because it still had that Spillaine shine, and the Spillaine name still meant something around here even if they’d lost most of their territory to the Puerto Rican and Dominican gangs.

I nodded here and there as faces rose up out of the gloom. I’d always been a solitary drinker, myself, and didn’t really understand wanting the crowd, the noise, the trouble. I’d liked Queenies like it had been, the sort of place where you could walk in at any time and find a seat at the bar, and recognize each one of the dozen faces that turned to look up. But Queenies was progress. It was louder and shittier, but it made a lot more money, and Mick had to feed his silent partners, and his silent partners needed to kick up to the younger criminals who’d taken over the neighborhood.

We had a system going.

At the front door, Misha greeted me with a curt nod. He was almost as tall as me, and bigger in the shoulders. With his hair in a long, dark braid and the scar over his eye he looked like the meanest asshole you’d ever met. He was a teddy bear, but he knew how to act. No one got past Misha.

“Boss,” he said, stepping aside to let me through.

Outside, the air felt icy cold and refreshing after the sweaty heat of the bar. Perry, bald head gleaming, stood with his clipboard in front of two guys in shiny, off-the-rack suits that I found personally offensive. The psychology of a man who walked into a store and saw that cloth and thought, yes, I’d like to wear that all over my body, was suspect. If you couldn’t trust a man to buy a suit, how could you trust him with firearms? Or money? Or access to the closest thing the Heights neighborhood of Bergen City had to a nightclub?

I put a hand on Perry’s shoulder. “What’s up?”

“Yo, bro, are you the man?”

Perry glanced at me, eyebrow up as if to say You seeing this shit? I looked at the guys. They were typical Queenies Weekend Nightmares. Coked up to the gills and puffed up because they had some distant connection to someone, somewhere. There would be a name they expected me to recognize. There would be an intimation that if I knew what was good for me, I’d let them in, I’d let them paw the waitresses and piss on the floor and do blow right there at the bar and say nothing.

I never knew what was good for me. My vast empire of debt and frustration was a testament to that. I thought of my old sponsor, Miguel, and thought One fucking day at a time. And Miguel would always say with a bitter laugh, yeah but our days got fifty, sixty hours in them. And I would say Amen.

“Yo, you the man or what?”

He was young, hair slicked back, his immense wealth on display in the form of several thick gold chains and a chunky watch, several rings. His shirt was unbuttoned and his chest hair was offensive. His pupils were the size of dimes and his face was sweaty despite the cold. He was grinning. Grinners were always a problem. When you’re freezing your ass off and grinding your teeth outside Queenies and thought this is delightful, I shall grin your calibrations were off.

His buddy was a mirror image, an inch shorter with the same ledge of a forehead shadowing his eyes, but with thicker eyebrows. He stood there grinding his teeth, staring at me. They could have been brothers. Maybe they were. The Grinner and The Grinder.

I molded my face into the expression I called Cheerful Neutral, designed to be no expression at all so as to keep even the most murderously stupid people calm. “Depends,” I said. “What do you need?”

There would be a name, and I needed to hear it before any decisions could be made. Because sometimes it was a name you had to pay attention to.

The Grinner leaned forward. Perry shifted his weight subtly. “Bro, what I need is to get inside. You the man who can make that happen, or am I wasting my fucking time?”

I waited on the name. Looking at them, I figured it would be Brusca or the Golden Cross. But these guys were nobodies. The suits told you the story. I’d bet my life on them being shitheel enforcers, dealers on the side to make their weekly nut. I smiled my professional smile, an expression reserved for assholes and police officers.

“What’s the count?” I asked Perry.

He glanced at his clipboard. “238.”

I nodded, looking back at the pair. “Sorry guys,” I said. “Fire code.”

“Fire code?” The Grinner said, his smile curdling. “You serious, bro? Fire code? You know who I work with?You wanna find out? I walk away, I come back with an army, bro.”

I nodded. There would be no name, apparently. Apparently, I was supposed to let these two in based on their intimidating physical presence and the powerful force of their cologne.

No one knew true exhaustion until you got sober and had to deal with fucked-up people. There had always been gangsters at Queenies, and there’d always been assholes like The Grinner and his friend, The Grinder. Whether it was back in the day with the Morning Star Gang, old Irish bastards with Abban Spillaine on top, or the Denaros when they’d moved in, Brusca and the new blood—some things never changed.

“My advice?” I said. “Hoboken’s got a lot of bars. Go find one there.”

The Grinner’s smile froze. I kept The Grinder in my peripheral vision, because instinct told me he was the one barely keeping his shit together. When he moved, I was ready. I sidestepped the lunge and twisted to his side, letting him skip past me by a step, overbalanced. I wrapped one arm around his neck and lifted him up off the ground. It wasn’t hard. He was a balloon filled with cocaine and attitude.

For a moment I stood there, with the smaller man’s legs kicking in the air. Perry had stepped forward, ready to intervene if I needed him.

The Grinner relaxed, suddenly, glancing at Perry and putting his hands up. “All right, all right, bro, don’t get your panties all bunched up. C’mon, let him go, we’ll be outta your hair.” He sketched something in the air with two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

Jesus Christ I hated this guy.

I dropped The Grinder and gave him a light shove, making him stumble into his friend. He turned and glared back at me, hands still clenched. Grinner pushed his hands into his pants pockets, still beaming as if this was all in good fun between friends. I had a sense of what was happening a second before Perry shouted “Knife!” and The Grinner lunged forward.

I tensed, bringing my arms up, ready to parry the blow. The Grinner didn’t raise his arms or lunge forward. He just stepped in close, pushing his face up into my airspace. His cologne made me regret so many life decision all at once I didn’t know how to react.

“Not here, bro, naw, not here,” he said, smiling. “Not with all these people. But I got you. When you ain’t expecting it. I got you. You see it. You know what I’m talking about. You see it.”

I didn’t look down at the blade. I didn’t ponder how this genius had expected to get it through the metal detector. Geniuses never revealed their secrets.

I leaned back slightly and flashed my arm up, popping The Grinner in the nose. I didn’t have the leverage to make it really hurt, but it staggered him back a step, off balance, giving me the opportunity to rear back and land one sloppy haymaker on him. Which felt good. It always felt good to lay into people, to use my weight and height to make them feel me. It was something I used to do all the time, just for kicks, and it had fucked my life from front to end but I still enjoyed it.

Life was all about those simple pleasures. A perfect cup of coffee. A hot shower. Beating the tar out of someone who absolutely deserved it.

Be present, Miguel used to say. Your life might suck, but be there. Own every moment.

Meetings. I’d gone religiously for a while, and they’d worked, I supposed. But they drove me crazy, too. All that exposure, all these people listening to you, expecting confession. My skin crawled every moment I was there. They told you not to trust it when you felt stable, that this was when you regressed and fucked up. Keep going. It works if you work it. But I couldn’t stand it, after a while. The way people stared at you when you said your piece, the limp way they applauded your humiliations and horrors.

This was better than working the program.

The Grinner went spinning into the small crowd waiting their turn, scattering them. He hit the pavement and lay there, out cold, the ridiculous little switchblade bouncing away towards the curb.

Hand numb, wrist aching, I turned to look at The Grinder. He was chewing his lip as if trying to work out what he’d just seen. “Drag your friend at least a hundred feet away from this bar or I will come out here with a baseball bat,” I said. I turned to Perry, who was trying to hold back laughter but not putting much effort into the project. “You good?”

Perry knuckled his forehead with a grin. “Good, boss.”

I turned and stepped back into the bar. Here I was, winning hearts and minds one successful customer service interaction at a time.

####

“VIPs,” Misha said in my ear. “The Broker and a trio.”

VIPs were the bane of security’s existence because they did, actually, have some juice to throw around. For example, The Broker, Abban Spillaine’s only son. We called him The Broker because he dressed in expensive, fitted suits and liked to carry around a leather portfolio as if his business powers were so potent deals might spring into being around him at any time.

His name, remarkably, was Merlin. The name inspired sympathy, because no one could walk this earth named Merlin and survive unscathed, but The Broker was one of those people who made it impossible to feel the softer emotions. Most of the emotional reactions Merlin Spillaine inspired were of the ?punch in the face’ variety.

I didn’t say anything. VIPs weren’t my problem. Tish, the hostess, would have to find a space for them, because The Broker was on Mick’s short list of people who always had a place. The Spillaines weren’t much of a force in Bergen City any more, but they still had some old contracts, and they were still Mick’s partners. A little shit-eating came with the territory.

I watched them roll in, following Tish with her one stripe of blue hair, her black blouse purposefully one size too small. The Broker was decked out in a pinstriped three-piece, walking proof of my private conjecture that suits—even tailored ones—only benefited thin people. He looked like a small, tasteless sausage—a link you found in the back of the freezer when moving out of an old apartment, gray and lifeless.

He was young, maybe my age. His dark hair had been shaved down on the sides and left long on top, and his skin was so white it was almost like marble, like alabaster.

He was accompanied by Patsy, Pin, and Rubes. The last two always gave me the impression they regretted not paying attention in school; they were flabby, loose-jointed white guys with sweaty faces and limp hair. Always vaguely unhappy. They gave the impression that even their orgasms were accompanied by hangdog looks and grunts of disappointment.

Patsy was a mountain. He was maybe six and half feet tall, shaped like a planet, almost an albino and hairless. He regarded everything with the same blank expression. It was easy to imagine Patsy, with his shovel hands and wet mouth, methodically murdering things in his spare time.

As I watched them cut through the crowd, The Broker looked at me and waved, smiling.

I didn’t wave back. Know your place, I thought. Guys like Merlin Spillaine smiled at you to stir things up.

He said something to Pin, who nodded, looking at me. Then they were swallowed by the crowd as they claimed one of the sad leather couches and glass tables that passed for Queenie’s VIP section.

Experience told me that The Broker would order a single bottle of mediocre vodka, to be polite, go to the bathroom sixteen times in the first hour, and hassle the ladies until someone made the mistake of complaining.

“Mish,” I said into the mic, “Get ready for a cleanup in aisle four.”

“Copy that,” Misha responded. “You getting friendly with our boy? He asked me specifically if you were working tonight.”

I looked over at the VIP section again, but couldn’t see The Broker. “No,” I said. “Maybe he just wants to feel safe.”

####

I sipped water with a slice of lemon in it, about as adventurous as I allowed myself to get when it came to beverages. Around me, Queenies settled into the too-bright business of shutting down. With the house lights on, it was just an old bar, the floor worn smooth from a million shoes, the bar worn smooth from a million shots slid along its length, the walls covered in ancient photos and nostalgia. The servers and bussers scrambled around, cleaning and setting chairs on tables. The lights always made the place look like shit. Queenies was a spot that relied on mood lighting and alcohol for all its charm.

Not unlike myself.

Things had gone better than expected. The Broker had left after just half an hour, taking Patsy with him but leaving Pin and Rubes. That was fine. Pin and Rubes weren’t much trouble under normal circumstances. They sat on the couch drinking with the steady determination of doomed men, looking like two stranded turtles, flipped onto their backs, their stubby legs waving in the air.

The waitresses counted out the tips, bills emerging from bras and pockets, augmented by packets of powder slipped to them by grinning goons in too-tight shirts. Mick, sitting behind the bar going over the receipts with his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, didn’t pay any attention. He was fully insured through the expensive graces of Abban Spillaine, who paid tribute to Esmundo Brusca. The cops weren’t going to bust down the door.

Me, I just kept my head down. I’d had enough excitement for a lifetime.

“Maddie.”

I glanced over at Mick. He’d been my Uncle Mick back in the day, a better and more present uncle than my actual Uncle Pal, a better and more present everything that my father, Mats, may he never rest in peace. When a man gave you a job after drinking and thieving your way through the better part of a decade, you owed that man some respect. I picked up my glass and walked over to where he sat behind the bar. His eyes flicked to the glass as I set it down in front of him and slid onto a stool.

“Got a job for you,” he said without looking up, licking one finger and turning the page in the old-school ledger he used. “A drop.”

I suppressed a yawn. I was tired down to my core. “Tonight?”

He looked up at me over his glasses. His eyes were watery and Mick had gotten rounder and more slump-shouldered, but he was still strong as an ox. His hair was still mostly black, and he still greased it and combed it back like he had forty years before, cat-calling the girls. “Gotta be tonight,” he said in his cigar-burned voice, the low rumble of a dormant volcano.

He slid an envelop across the bar towards me, thick and rectangular. A yellow sticky note on the outside had an address. I took it and made it disappear inside my jacket. “All right.”

“Hey,” he said as I turned away. “Don’t bring that girl in on this.”

I affected confusion. “Who?”

Mick had a great hangdog, jowly face that conveyed bland irritation perfectly. “Pilowsky. Don’t be cute. I know you still run with her. Don’t bring her in on this any more.”

I nodded. “Okay, Mick. Got it.”

“Thanks, kid,” Mick said. Then he looked at me. “Say hello to The Shrew and the little one for me.”

I smiled. “I’ll give ‘em your best.”

I waved my way out into the night, pulling my jacket close against the chill and walking into the darkness. Queenies wasn’t in the best, most prosperous area of Bergen City. Developers had been circling the neighborhoods for years, buying up lots and condemning them, forcing people out. Then the money had dried up in that mysterious way money had, and now half the town was empty lots and abandoned buildings, and half the streetlights didn’t work. Anyone who could had gotten out, and maybe that had been the point all along.

Walking, I thought about getting back to zero.

I’d been good at school. I’d been good at baseball. There’d been a scholarship, a way forward, a way to leave my crazy father and my crazy mother behind. And then they’d died, and I sank. And it had taken me ten years just to get back to zero. Just to get back to stable.

I turned a corner and felt the usual sense of open space where there shouldn’t be any. I’d never gotten used to the missing buildings, the demolition from a half dozen development projects that had stalled, leaving a mass of empty lots around 293 Howell Street. For years we’d watched every other building on the block vanish, and knew our time would come. And then the crash and everything just stopped on a dime, and The Two Nine Three was still standing. The yellow brick building rose up six floors from the street with a single working streetlight directly in front of it, everything around it dark and empty. Someday the economy would spike upwards again, and the developers would reappear like imps, and new buildings would finally sprout up. Until then, I supposed I just had to get used to living in a bubble of empty urban space.

Two people were sitting on the front steps.

“Oh, man, it’s late if Maddie’s home,” Ivan said.

“Be cool,” Lisa said with a laugh. Everyone called her Lisa Lisa.

“Want a blast?” Ivan asked, holding out a tarnished flask.

I shook my head, pausing at the bottom step. “That kind of night, huh?”

Lisa scowled. She was wearing an oversize white T-shirt and cut-off sweats, clothes you changed into after a long day. “My mother called today,” she said. There was no elaboration necessary. Across generations and cultures, the phrase my mother called today reverberated with portent and danger. People burst into tears upon hearing it, even if it was spoken in other languages they could not understand.

“I saw my kid today,” Ivan added. “And he told me my apartment’s shithole.” He raised the flask. “So I’m drowning my sorrows. Here’s to 293 Howell Street, officially a shithole.”

I snorted, looking up at the yellow brick of the building. “So that’s what I’ve got to look forward to with Ellie, huh?”

Ivan shook his head. “Not if you don’t get divorced. The secret ingredient to my kid’s attitude is the former Mrs. Blanko.”

They chuckled. I glanced at Lisa. “How’s your ceiling?”

She nodded. “Holding up. Thanks for jumping in there. I talked to Mrs. Quinones about her son falling asleep in the bath and flooding my apartment, and she told me he’s been smoking dope in there. I told her the only reason I wasn’t all over their ass about the damage was because you came in and fixed the place up.”

“So dope smoking in the tub is what I have to look forward to,” I said.

“No worries,” she said. “Marcus called 9-1-1 again. A cop car cruised by to tell us they were blacklisting the address, so smoke all the dope you want.”

I sighed. Marcus was Mrs. Pino’s boy, twenty-five but like a little kid in the head. He was sweet, though he was stronger than he looked and could be rough to deal with. He liked me, though, and I figured I’d get a call tomorrow to come down and have a talk with him. “I thought cops were supposed to take shit like that in stride. Protect and serve and all that.”

She held up her hands. “Hey, when I graduate the academy, that’ll be me.”

I nodded. Lisa wanted to be a law enforcement professional so badly she’d bought all the gear already. She had her own body armor and a brand new Glock 19. It was a little disturbing. I stepped past them. “Lemme know if you need any more help.”

Lisa nodded, accepting the flask from Ivan. “Will do. See you tomorrow? I’m working table service at Queenie’s.”

I nodded. “See you then.” I grinned. “Stop telling everyone there you’re gonna be a cop. It upsets the regulars.”

I left their laughter behind, walking through the cracked outer door, the small vestibule, and the stout inner door into the building proper. Lisa and Ivan were good people. All of my neighbors were good people. Honest people. They were all living there for the low rent, making it day to day. We took care of each other. Shit, there was no one else around—fucking literally.

I walked past the mailboxes and Mrs. Pino’s door. Opening the door under the stairs, I went down to the basement, past the fuse boxes and water heaters, the grubby little storage stalls. Two doors in the back, one leading out to the wild backyard, the other the tiny apartment snuggled in the rear. I let myself in. I didn’t have it half bad. It was four rooms, but it was cheap to begin with and I got half off for doing repairs and other maintenance. When you were crawling out of a train wreck of a life, shit like this looked like winning.

I turned the key carefully and tip-toed in. I reached into my pocket and extracted a wad of filthy cash, my share of the tips. I knelt in front of the sink and opened the cabinets, carefully pulling out the cleaning supplies and lifting the bottom. In the hollow behind the toekick was a metal security box. I opened it and added the cash to the pile already in there, then quietly put everything back the way it was.

Retirement planning, poverty-style. Carolina called it her ?Fuck You Money.’ The amount of fucking we’d be capable of with this amount of grubby paper was nominal, but you had to start somewhere.

I scribbled a note to Carrie and left it on the kitchen table. The bedroom door was closed. I pictured them in there: Ellie sprawled in her crib like a skydiver, her tiny body twitching, her chubby legs kicking. Carrie wrapped up in blankets like a mummy, her head a tiny spray of hair. I didn’t go in, because Carolina was the sort of woman for whom sleep was theoretical, and an opened door brought her surging up out of the sheets, demanding to know who was there, what was going on, why was Ellie crying? I’d long ago given up taking any risks when it came to my wife’s sleep.

I crept out of the apartment, locking up behind me.

I went out the back, cutting through the overgrown, jungle-like yard and hopping the ancient, rusted chain link in the back. It was dumb, maybe, but I didn’t want anyone in the building to know about my extracurriculars. They would understand, I was sure. We were all hustling to survive. But they didn’t need to know.

Thinking of what Mick had said, I went to go find Jill Pilowsky.

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