The Hard Bounce - [49]

Day three. Pouring rain. And I mean pouring. The rain fell in solid sheets around the car, and gray rivers ran down the gutter. Junior and I made a game out of guessing what would come bobbing by next, caught in the current. You’d think it would have been a nice relief from the stifling heat, but just an inch of open window and my entire right side would be drenched immediately. With the windows closed, the humidity built up in the car, fogging up the glass and giving us zero visibility.

“This is retarded,” Junior said, wiping the condensation off the inside of the windshield with a napkin. “We wouldn’t see the guy if he was doing a cha-cha on the hood. Let’s do this tomorrow.”

We’d only been in our spot for an hour, but Junior was right. I sighed. Day three and zip. Wasn’t even noon yet, and the day was in the shitter. “Fine. I’m just going to take a piss and get smokes. You want anything from inside?”

“Cherry Coke.”

“Got it.” I got out, head down, and ran into the store as fast as I could.

Our bribed counterman pressed the button from behind the counter, opening the lock on the bathroom door. Under the fluorescent lights, my skin had taken on a lovely jaundice, dark bags pooching under my eyes. I sighed at the living dead in the mirror. He sighed right back at me. I took a wonderfully extended piss and walked out. The bell on the door dinged as someone else came into the store. I grabbed Junior’s soda and headed to the counter.

“Two packs of Parliaments,” I said.

The clerk put the cigarettes on the linoleum counter next to the soda, then he nodded at whoever was standing right behind my shoulder. “Pack of Reds?”

“You got it,” came the reply. All the hair on my body shot up straight into the air. I’d heard that voice before.

The clerk passed over a box of Marlboros. Put the pack into a hand. A hand that was on the end of an arm. An arm with a snake tattoo curled around it. The hand dumped a few bills and some change onto the countertop.

Slowly, I turned my head and looked into a pair of blue eyes, drops of rain hanging from his thick eyelashes. His long, too-black-to-be-natural hair hung wetly around his head. Given the time, I probably could have counted each pore on his nose. He had thinner features than I thought he would. He looked about twenty-five. He’s too young, my mind said. He looks too… normal.

He flipped me a quick, cursory smile. “How are ya?” he said and walked out. The bell sounded again.

A snapping of fingers next to my ear brought me back. “Yo, bro? You with me here? You paying for the smokes and Coke or what?” I put a bill on the counter, grabbed my items, and walked to the door, numb with disbelief.

Junior was out of the car, standing in the downpour and wearing the same thousand-yard stare I was sporting. I walked over to him and stood at his side. I opened my mouth, but Junior beat me to it. “Please. Please, dear God, tell me that’s who I think it is.”

“It’s him,” I said. We watched him walk through the front door to an apartment building that sat at ten o’clock from the front door of Papa’s Empanadas. Once he was inside, Junior grabbed the duct tape we’d brought with us off the car seat and the two of us bolted across the street, oblivious to the traffic zipping past us in both directions. A car passed close enough to nip the back of my pants leg.

Snake hadn’t used a key to get in the first door. He’d just pushed it open. I hoped it wasn’t a double-door foyer with the lock on the second door. It wasn’t. It was just one door with a busted lock.

Snake wasn’t in the lobby, but the elevator was on its way up. We watched the numbers climb to the fifth floor and stop.

“Gotcha, fucker,” I said.

We rode up to the fifth floor. Our original plan was to knock on each door with a pitch for the Church of the Divine Ascension until we got to the right one. I was thankful we didn’t need the shtick. Instead, we just followed the wet footprints on the tiled hallway to apartment 506.

“And here we are,” said Junior, a bit breathlessly. “You want the honors?”

I knocked on the door and waited, heart pounding like a bass amp. A shadow passed over the peephole in the center of the door and something snapped in my brain. I actually heard a pop inside my head.

The world exploded red.

I pressed myself flat against the wall opposite the door in the thin hallway. With the wall bracing my back, I kicked at the lock full-on. The dry wood around the bolt shattered like a Saltine. The sound of the heavy wood bashing onto meat and bone was orgasmic to my ears.

I charged through the open doorway. What I lacked in panache, I made up for in sheer momentum. To his credit, Snake was still standing. It probably would have been better for him if he’d gone down. His eyes were rolled halfway up his skull, and his nose looked like somebody had stuck an M-80 inside a nostril and lit the fuse.

I decked him with every muscle, every pound, focused into the tip of my fist. His wiry body went airborne, launching clear over the couch behind him. When gravity resumed its grip, he crumpled on the hardwood and slid across the floor all the way into the far wall. His trip came to an abrupt end when the back of his head crunched into the scuffed wood molding. I didn’t care if it was the molding or his skull that had made the crunch.