Badd Motherf*cker: Badd Brothers (3 page)

Alaska?

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

2

Sebastian

Where are the fuckin’ cruise ships when you need ’em?
 

I wiped down the bar for the forty-seventh time in the last hour, staring out at my bar, which was dead as a doornail, deader than a graveyard and a ghost town put together. Not a damn soul in the bar and it was seven in the evening on a Saturday. There should be fuckin’
somebody
wanting a goddamn drink. But no, hadn’t been one stinkin’ customer since we’d opened at four. Usually the bar was hopping, or at least had a decent crowd, even on week nights or stormy days. I’d blame it on the rain, but that didn’t usually stop people from needing a drink or six. Shit, most of the time it made it busier, not deader.
 

I should just close. What was the harm? Wouldn’t be anybody in anyway.

But I couldn’t do that. Badd’s Bar and Grill was struggling enough as it was, so if I had any hope of keeping Dad’s bar alive, I couldn’t afford to close early. Dad may be gone—three months in his grave—but no way I was going to let his bar go under, too. I’d been doing my damndest, but one guy to run a whole bar wasn’t ideal, and meant I’d seen a decrease in business, simply because I couldn’t keep up with the demand, so people went elsewhere.
 

I’d been raised in this damn bar. I learned to walk going from table three to four. Kissed my first girl in the alley behind the place, bedded the same girl in the storeroom in the attic, got in my first fistfight right out in that parking lot.
 

I wasn’t going to let the place close. I’d struggle along somehow. Keep it afloat, even if it wasn’t the hot spot it had once been. Maybe I just had to bite the bullet and hire somebody to help out. Hated the idea, since in all the years I’d been alive, we’d never hired a soul outside the family, and I hated the idea of breaking that tradition.

I’d been hoping there’d be some kind of windfall after Dad died, you know? Like, an inheritance or something. I figured Dad had been doing okay all those years, figured he’d have money saved. Guess not. Don’t know how he managed not to save anything, since he lived in the bar and rarely ever left it, and when my brothers and I were younger we all lived above it. Mom cooked the food, Dad served the drinks.
 

Then, when I was seventeen, Mom passed and I took over the food prep. I’d get home from school, tie on an apron and start slinging burgers and fries and chicken wings. It was my first job and now, ten years later, this bar was the only job I’d ever had. Dad let me help with the books when I was twenty, let me split the shifts with him—three days a week for him and four for me.
 

I knew the business had been struggling for a while, but in the last few months since Dad died things had really taken a nosedive.
 

I did my best to keep things afloat but it didn’t help that I was the single employee. I cooked, bartended, bussed, mopped, swept, and worked open to close, four p.m. to two a.m. seven days a week.

The frustrating thing was that even though I had seven brothers to my name, not one was around to help.
 

That’s right, there were eight of us. Mom and Dad had raised eight boys in the three-bedroom apartment above this bar—four of us to a room in double bunk bed sets. When Mom died Zane had been fifteen, Brock thirteen, Baxter twelve, Caanan and Corin the identical twins ten, Lucian nine, and Xavier, the baby of the tribe, had been seven.
 

Ten years later, Zane was off being a Navy SEAL somewhere, Brock was playing football in the CFL and was being scouted for the NFL, or so he claimed, Baxter was a stunt pilot traveling the country doing airshows, Canaan and Corin were touring the world with their hard rock band, Bishop’s Pawn, and Lucian was…well, I wasn’t entirely sure. He’d left the day he turned eighteen and hadn’t come back, hadn’t so much as sent a damn postcard. I figured he’d taken the money he’d made working on fishing boats from the time he was fifteen and was just sort of bumming around the world like a damned vagabond. That was like him, brooding, lazy, and just inherently cool. Xavier had gotten a full ride to Stanford from soccer and academics, and there was talk of FIFA scouts watching him…on top of think tanks or some shit like that. Then there was me, Sebastian Badd, the eldest, stuck in goddamned Ketchikan tending a dead-ass bar, same as I’d been doing since I was seventeen.
 

All of my brothers were cool and good-looking and successful, and I was a fucking bartender.

Not that I was bitter, or anything. I mean shit, I was the best-looking of the lot, after all.

And, don’t get me wrong, I loved the bar. It was home. It was my entire life. The hard part was that I’d never gotten a chance to do anything else. When Mom died it had been left up to me, as the oldest, to help Dad. I’d managed to get my high school diploma, but only barely. I’d been too busy cooking, bussing tables, and washing dishes to care about tests or homework. I worked so my brothers didn’t have to—during the week at least.
 

Dad always gave me Saturdays off and made whoever was around help out. Usually that meant Zane, Baxter, and the twins, since Brock always had practice and Lucian and Xavier were too young to be of any help. Saturdays meant dates for me. I’d take my earnings from the week and cruise the town on my bike—a chopped Harley Dad and I worked on every Sunday—and go scouting for chicks. Didn’t usually take long to find someone to kick it with for the evening, since I had Dad’s size and looks and Mom’s chill confidence and calm demeanor.
 

Well, most of Mom’s calm demeanor; I had Dad’s temper in there somewhere, and these days it wasn’t hard to bring it out of me. I guess I was mad because I had to run this place on my own. Back then I’d been bored and full of anger over Mom’s death and had been as ready to fight as I had been to fuck, and I’ve always been damn good at both.
 

Nowadays, the only fighting I did was to kick out the odd drunk. The fucking was a constant, since even though business hadn’t been great, Badd’s Bar and Grill still had a reputation for having a good-looking bartender who poured strong drinks and was always DTF if you were half-decent looking and had a nice rack—the good-looking bartender being me, obviously.
 

Ketchikan, being a popular destination for Alaskan cruises, almost always had a constant stream of tourists looking for a “local spot” to drink—which meant fine-looking honeys only in for a day or two. These easy hook-ups had a built-in escape clause: they knew they were leaving, I knew they were leaving, so there was no mess, no hurt feelings, no awkward morning-after chit-chat.
 

It was a good gig.

But it was the only gig I’d ever had. I had no idea what else I could do, what else I might be good at, what else I might want to do. I tended bar and fucked hot tourists, it’s what I did.
 

It was
all
I did.

Today, I’d spent almost an hour daydreaming and being pissed at my brothers, and still no one had come in.

“Fuck it,” I said, and poured myself a stiff scotch.

Stiff, meaning a rocks glass full to the brim with Johnny Walker Black Label.

I circled around the bar, sat down by the TV, and turned on ESPN, leaning the high-top chair back with my feet flat against the bar-front and sipped my scotch watching last night’s replays and highlights.
 

Maybe two hours later, I was on my second glass, and still hadn’t seen a soul.

Then the bell over the door chimed.

I hoped it was a pretty tourist, maybe a redhead with a nice set of tits, or a blonde with a fat, juicy ass.
 

What I got was Richard Ames Burroughs, the attorney in charge of executing Dad’s will: three-piece suit, slim leather briefcase, oxford shoes, slicked, parted hair, glasses that could appropriately and not ironically be called “spectacles”, and a tendency to literally look down his nose at me. He also had a tendency to act like the stools and bar top were infected surfaces, as if he might catch fuckin’ crabs or something.

Trust me, bub, I wash that bar down enough that there ain’t a single germ on the damn thing.

Richard Ames Burroughs stepped carefully across the floor—which was still clean from when I’d swept it before opening—and shuffled beside me. “Mr. Badd.”
 

“Name’s Sebastian,” I growled.
 

“Sebastian, then.” He pulled out the stool beside me, brushed it off with a napkin, and then set his briefcase on it. “I have your father’s will.”
 

I slugged my scotch. “He’s been dead three months, Dick. Why are you bringing this to me now?”
 

“You can call me Richard, or Mr. Burroughs, if you please. And it was part of his will that it not be read for twelve weeks after his death. I do not know why, as he didn’t choose to offer a reason.” He paused, opened his briefcase. “I’ve sent copies to each of your brothers, or, at least, those for whom I could locate a physical address. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Your father was very specific that he wanted me to wait three months before reading the will, and that you were to be the last one to whom I read it.”
 

I pushed the sleeves of my thermal Henley up past my elbows, baring forearms covered in the ends of my full-sleeve tattoos. “Okay, well, that’s fuckin’ weird. What’s the damn thing say, then? Let me guess: I’m broke, he was broke, the bar is forfeit, and I owe a bunch of money I didn’t know Dad owed.”

“Lord knows that’s exactly what one would expect, a filthy place like this,” Richard said, plucking a folder from his briefcase. “But I think you’ll be rather surprised.”
 

I lowered my stool onto all fours, set my scotch down, and stood up to tower over the slimy pencil-dick lawyer. “Listen to me, pissant: you come in here talkin’ shit about my fuckin’ bar, I’ll crush you like a goddamn cockroach.” I crossed my arms and flexed to prove a point: my arms were thicker than his legs. “So how about you say what you came here to say and I won’t knock your fuckin’ Ivy League white teeth down your skinny little chicken neck.”
 

I was coming across a little…aggressive, maybe, but he creeped me out and made me feel like he thought he was better than me, and that pissed me off.

He paled, stumbled backward a few steps. “No need for threats, Mr. Badd, I simply—this isn’t—
ahem
. As you say, I’ll get to the particulars of the will.” He opened the folder, shuffled papers, adjusted his spectacles, read in silence for a few minutes, then replaced the papers in the folder but didn’t close the folder. “Your father managed to save quite a large sum of money, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

I blinked at him. “He…what?”

“Your father owned this building outright and lived above it, so he had very little by way of bills except the overhead of the bar, which he kept to a minimum and, for many years, it seems this bar was quite successful. He was parsimonious, and used only small amounts of the profits. He spent remarkably little, as a matter of fact.”

I nodded. “That makes sense. So how much did he leave, and who to?”

“To whom, you mean,” Richard said.

“Don’t correct my fuckin’ grammar, you fuckin’ dork,” I snarled. “How much, and
to whom
?”

Richard blinked at me for a moment, and then he cleared his throat again. “
Ahem
. Um…he left a sum total of two hundred and ninety thousand dollars to be split even between the eight of you Badd brothers. Not a fortune, but a sizable sum. Plus the deed to the bar, but that’s not part of the two-ninety being distributed per the will. As for the distribution itself, well, that’s where it gets a little more complicated.”

I growled. “Complicated? What’s that mean? What’s complicated about who Dad left his money to?”

“Well, usually in circumstances such as these, the monies are distributed equally amongst all parties, or in favor of one or another of the deceased’s issue, which usually leads to arguments and lawsuits, but that’s neither here nor there, in this case.”
 

I twirled my hand in a circle. “Get on with it, Dick. What’s the short version for us poor uneducated folks?”

He sighed. “It means your father left specific instructions which must be completed before any of the funds can be released.”

“Instructions?”
 

Richard nodded. “Caveats is the legal term applicable here. It means neither you nor any of your brothers get any money from your father’s estate until the terms are fulfilled.”

“So? What are the terms?”

He quoted from the will: “‘Before anyone gets a cent of my money, all seven of my wayward sons must return to Ketchikan, Alaska for a minimum of one calendar year, and spend that year living within reasonable proximity to Badd’s Bar and Grill, and they must contribute a minimum of two thousand working hours in Badd’s Bar and Grill during that time.’”

I had to sit down, then. “The fuck?”

“It means your brothers have to come back to Ketchikan to live and work here for one year. The two thousand hours figure is based on a forty-hour work week in a calendar year of fifty-two weeks.”

I tried to get my brain going. “So…what else does it say?”

“It names each of your brothers and their likely locations of residence. It awards you sole ownership of the bar, upon signature of the deed, and awards you—and only you—ten thousand dollars. The rest of the money will be split evenly between the eight of you, which comes to…thirty-six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars each.”

“So the ten grand to me…”

Richard consulted the will. “‘To my oldest son Sebastian, I leave ten thousand dollars outside the parameters of the execution of the will’s preceding terms, as a minor reward for his faithfulness over the years to me and to Badd’s Bar and Grill.’”

I choked up. “Minor reward…
shit
.” I blinked hard, went around behind the bar and poured more Johnny, slugged it down facing the grimy mirror behind the rows of bottles on the back wall. “Minor reward for my faithfulness. A fucking lifetime I’ve spent back here, and I get ten fuckin’ grand.” I had to laugh. “Jesus, Dad.”