The Hard Bounce - [37]

Be casual and lie, lie, lie.

We walked through the room like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Unfortunately, we were felt neither good, nor bad. Just dazed, pale, sweating, and blood-covered. I moseyed up to the bar right next to Barnes. I can mosey real well when I try.

“Ice, please.”

Barnes stared straight ahead and sipped his Heineken. He was playing it casual too, and pulling it off better than we were. You try to be casual when your face has been pounded into tuna tartar.

“So,” he said in a chipper tone. “Should I even bother?”

“Cut myself shaving,” I said.

“Fell down the stairs,” Junior said.

“I fell down the stairs while shaving.”

“Poor bathroom design,” Junior said with a snicker.

“Funny,” Barnes said, taking a sip of his beer. “Got anything for us?”

Junior and I just looked at each other. The bartender brought me a bar rag filled with ice. I pressed it against my broken face. Heaven. Barnes waited for a response.

Junior looked at me. “You know? I like it better when they send in the girl.”

“Me, too. Seems less obvious for us to be talking to a broad-any broad-than Mr. Trying-not-to-look-like-a-cop, here.

“True. Wasn’t discretion supposed to be a big factor?”

I shrugged. “I thought I heard them say that. And look at you, using a big-boy word like discretion.”

Junior beamed. “I know, huh? Being around all these classy edjamuhcated people must be rubbing off.”

“Osmosis.”

“Like Donny and Marie Osmosis.”

Barnes snorted, shaking his head. “Thought so. You two fuck-wits have five more days.” He tipped the last of the beer into his mouth.

“Five? You guys said two weeks.”

“The two weeks were conditional. We both assumed you might have idea one before today. You got five more days.”

I pulled the ice from my face, the terrycloth a Rorschach in crimson. “Fine. Won’t even need that many. Wanna bet we can name that tune in three?”

Barnes snorted again as he got up and walked out. He didn’t dignify my bravado with a response. He didn’t have to. My bluff sucked. I didn’t believe me either.

Chapter Eleven

“Sid’s Vids,” came the voice over the phone. The voice was unmistakably Sid’s. She sounded a bit fuzzy, but alive. Dead women answer no telephones.

I hung up the pay phone outside the bar and sighed with relief.

“What happened?” Junior asked. Dark saddlebags camped under his eyes, matching my own. We’d spent the night in the office, pacing and smoking like mobile forest fires, wondering on Sid’s fate and consequently our own.

“Sid lives,” I said.

Junior sagged noticeably without the weight of Sid’s possible demise riding him. “Thank Christ. Man, I would not want to go down for having killed a broad. Even if it was an accident.”

I agreed with him insomuch as Sid wasn’t the person we wanted to damage. She was strictly a cobblestone on our road to Snake. I tried not to let my evil imaginings linger too long on what kind of damage I would inflict once I got my hands on that chickenhawk piece of shit.

Bad things.

“We gotta look at the DVD,” Junior said suddenly.

I shook my head. “No. No way am I watching that shit.”

Junior chewed off a piece of his thumbnail and spit it to the floor. “If you got a better idea, lay it on the table and we’ll go with it.”

I didn’t have any better ideas. We didn’t want to tap Sid again. One look at us, and she would opt for the shoot-first, ask-questions-later scenario.

Junior continued. “Whether or not it’s our girl in the movie, there might be something there that could clue us to where the guy holes up.”

The idea wasn’t bad. I just had no urge to watch kiddie porn even if it gave us an address, business hours, and directions from my front door. “It might have been shot in a studio, Junior. It might be in somebody else’s apartment. Shit, after what we did to Sid, the guy’s probably halfway to Mexico himself.”

“And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry fucking Christmas.”

“Give me a sec,” I said.

“We’ve been through this all night, bro. We’re at the end of our options here. I don’t wanna see what’s on that video either, but if it’s gonna help put twenty-five thousand rocks in my hand? If it could help us get the kid away from that freak?”

The bottle in my hand was almost half empty, and since prayer was never my strongest anchor, I took one last pull. “Let’s go.”

A fist-sized lump swelled in my throat as Junior slid the first DVD into my machine. The player closed silently and hummed. A few seconds of blackness, then slow focus from the dark.

A man sitting on a white cushioned chair, completely naked but for a snake tattoo coiling down his arm and a black leather mask covering his head. The S &M kind with the zipper over the mouth.

A soft knock sounds. The camera pans over to the door, the lens passing over the windows. Heavy black curtains cover the glass.

“Come in,” the masked man says.

I listened for anything familiar in the speech pattern. Snake’s voice was a low baritone with a slight touch of local accent. Quincy, maybe? Beyond that, nothing.

A girl walks in the door.

Not Cassie. This one’s around the same age, though. Too young. Way too fucking young.