The Hard Bounce - [35]
“Nice hat.”
“Any headwear looks good on a man like me.” Junior hit the buzzer for Sidonia Sliva.
Sid’s voice replied from the console. “What?”
“Itsa pizza,” Junior answered in an Italian accent that would have embarrassed Chef Boy-ar-dee.
She buzzed us in. Either Sid never met an actual Italian before, or she was just too hungry to care.
One flight of creaky stairs up, I knocked on the door.
“C’mon in. The door’s open,” came the reply from inside.
So we went in. The apartment had the same reek as the store. It wasn’t as bad as the Dumpster incident, but it was still awful, like old meat and dirty underpants. My sinuses wanted to bust out of my head and run to the nearest aromatherapy clinic. How the hell could someone live in this?
Sid sat in a wide recliner, frozen. From the television she’d been facing, Homer Simpson said “D’oh!”
“Yo, Sid,” Junior said. “Dangerous habit leaving the door unlocked like that.”
Sid tried to leap out of her chair. She really did. All she managed to do was rock spastically from side to side. “What the fuck is going on here? What the fuck are you two doing here?” she croaked at us. She almost made it up into a half squat. I nudged her in the shoulder with the tip of my boot. Sid fell back with a thud into the recliner. The vinyl farted under the impact. I hoped it was the vinyl. She looked like a turtle who’d suddenly found itself wrong side up.
“Do you guys know who you’re fucking with? Who my business partners are?” Sid bellowed.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Colonel Sanders? He’s dangerous. Military background.”
“Fuck you.”
“Wait, I got it. You’re in with the McDonald’s Mafia, aren’t you?”
Junior was trying to find a place to put on his badass lean but couldn’t seem to locate a surface that wouldn’t ruin his pants. “Dude. Maybe we oughta think about this. That Grimace is a baaad mutha-”
“Shut yo mouth!”
Junior shrugged. “I’m only talking ’bout Grimace.”
“I can dig it.”
“Fuck you!” There still didn’t seem to be any fear in Sid’s voice. That wasn’t good. If anything, she was just getting more and more pissed.
“Well, I’ll tell you who she doesn’t know. Mr. Clean.” Junior picked up what looked like a leather handbag with eyes from behind a garbage pail. “Sid, your housecleaning skills suck.”
“Worse than yours?” I asked.
“At least I don’t have little piles of shit on my floor left by Free Willie of the canine set.” Junior held up the pudgiest chihuahua I’d ever seen. His tiny legs poked out from a body the same size and definition as ten pounds of cookie dough. His tail stub wagged happily.
The dog was the plan. Since we couldn’t very well threaten Sid physically, we had to threaten her dog. Looking at the cute little fat bastard, I felt guilt seep into my gut. I like dogs better than I do most people.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, scratching him behind his ears. His little tongue darted out at my fingers. Then tiny teeth gnashed where my fingers had been a moment before. “Hey!”
The fucker started snarling and snapping for Junior’s fingers too, but the dog couldn’t turn his neck far enough over his fat shoulders to get him.
“You let him go,” Sid said in a low and deadly tone.
“What’s the little guy’s name, Sid?” I asked.
“Put him down!” Sid didn’t try to stand again, but the armrests creaked ominously under her grip.
“Now, Sid. You don’t want to go yelling and get all the neighbors riled.” To my right, small stacks of DVDs sat on a bookshelf. Red stickers and all. “Because if the cops come, I’m gonna have to show them those discs you got over here, now won’t I?”
A flicker of fear danced across her eyes, but the fierce glow quickly returned. “Put the dog down,” she said.
“We will, Sid, we will. First, you to tell us where we can find the guy who stars in your videos.”
“I don’t know where he is. When I need the videos-” She cut herself off.
“What? You call him? Don’t suppose we could get that number, do you?” I was hoping we wouldn’t have to go any further than asking.
Sid didn’t say anything, but she looked frantically between the dog in Junior’s arms and me.
Damn it.
I nodded at Junior. The dog yipped in pain. Even though I knew Junior only gave him a tiny pinch on the hind leg, it still hurt to hear the little guy cry like that. I knew it hurt Junior even more to have to do it.
Neither one of us expected what happened next.
Sid started sobbing. Big, whooping sobs that sent her frame shaking like Jell-O on a paint mixer.
Junior and I exchanged guilt-ridden glances. This wasn’t us. Sid might have been a horrible waste of humanity, profiting from pain on video, but as far as we knew, she’d never hurt anybody.
Then the dog peed a yellow arc onto the floor.
“Whoa.” Junior held the dog over the wastebasket.
Sid covered her face with wide hands. “Puh-puh-leease. Let my dog go. I’ll tell you wuh-wuh-whatever you want.”
I leaned in close, the guilt making me nauseous. “That’s all we want, Sid.” I turned to Junior. “Put the dog down.”
I turned back just in time to see… Sid smiling through her fingers, then a fist the size of a canned ham bee-lining for my face.
