Crush (2 page)

The club was called the Nocturne. On the intersection of Melrose and Clinton. It was one of those nightspots with no sign out front, so you had to be cool enough to know about it to even know about it. Inside, all was darkness and colored lights and blaring music. Gorgeous young girls and buff young boys trying to convince themselves they were having the time of their lives. The décor was blood red and velvet—Queen Victoria meets Sacher-Masoch—with walls upholstered in brass-studded scarlet leather. The bar itself was a mahogany monstrosity that the owner lifted from some
Gold Rush ghost town. It dwarfed the pretty bartender behind it, but Crush, stationed at the east end, was big enough to make even that huge bar look pint-size. In his black T-shirt, fit tightly over his bulging muscles, he faded into the décor, not blending in with the wall but looking like he
was
the wall. His clean-shaven head had a nasty scar running from above his left eye, across his skull, to the back of his neck, like a racing stripe. Only his startling blue eyes made Amelia think that there was a human being behind the barrier. Crush made no extraneous sounds or movements. Like a good bouncer, he made sure you didn't notice him unless he wanted you to.

The bouncer's eyes took in everything that was going on around him. The gangbangers at the back booth, pounding Cristal. The blonde with the hungry eyes sitting by the bookshelf filled with prop books. The underage boy hitting on the underage girl under the chandelier. The bone-thin network exec and her wing woman at the banquet, trolling for love. The hooker by the men's room, also trolling for love, though she didn't know it. The sad drunk at one end of the bar, lost in the world of his shot glass. The confident loser at the other end of the bar, chatting up the bartender as she topped off his mojito. The Latina girl with the God-given ass, attracting too much attention on the
dance floor for her boyfriend's comfort. Crush's eyes saw them all and gauged their potential for trouble, like a gamer watching the life-bars over characters in a video game.

The guy hitting on the bartender did a drumroll on the bar and said he'd be right back after he drained the snake.

The bartender sighed, watching him go. “Five years ago, I was so pretty that guys like that were afraid to talk to me,” she said to Crush. “Now I'm just pretty enough that guys like that
want
to talk to me. I hate that.”

Crush nodded but didn't answer. He and the bartender had the kind of friendship that meant they didn't have to talk. That's the kind of friendship he liked.

Crush had a real name (it was Caleb Rush), but not many people used it. The bartender had a name, too, Catherine Gail. It was Gail who got Rush the job at the club. She was in her mid-thirties, with long black hair shot with a streak of gray, sharp features that got better with age, and a magnificent scar on her lower lip that made men want to take her home and marry her.

Gail was a taekwondo master “slash” bartender. Everybody was a “slash” something these days, Rush reflected. Who could get by on just one job? He himself had several. It was a “slash” kind of world out there.

Rush had gone through quite a few martial-arts teachers in his day. He picked things up quickly, so the instructors loved him at first. Then they'd get
threatened and try to kick his ass. That wasn't a good idea. Rush had hurt a lot of martial-arts teachers.

But with Gail it was different. She was calm, wise, centered, and very Zen. Sort of like a hot version of Master Splinter from the Ninja Turtles. And Rush worshipped her. To most people, he seemed a tough man, but he was humble and obedient when he found someone he truly respected. That had happened once or twice in his thirty years. Those thirty years had been spent in odd ways, doing odd things. Many of them were things that Rush would rather forget.

On the dance floor, the girl with the God-given ass was displaying her gift a little too aggressively, and one of the other dancers was staring at it—he'd have taken a bite out of it if it had stopped moving long enough for him to get his teeth on it.

All at once, God-given Ass's boyfriend was in front of the other guy, claiming his turf. “Are you looking at my girl's butt?!”

“It's looking at me! That butt's calling my name!”

The boyfriend threw a punch at the dancer. His fist stopped mid-swing, blocked by a huge hand, Rush's hand. He had covered the span of the room in the time it took the boyfriend to wind up his punch. Rush twisted the wrist back with the kind of pressure that made the kid think his thumb was about to snap. With his other hand, Crush grabbed the ass-staring-dancer by the throat, hitting a particularly painful Kallaripayattu pressure point, and hauled the two kids out
the side exit before most of the people on the dance floor even knew there was trouble. It was because of moments like this that the club owner paid Rush in cash and never bothered about things like withholding taxes or checking his past employment history.

Rush shoved them out into the night air. Ass Girl joined her boyfriend without missing a beat, asking him where they were going now. When Rush came back into the club, Gail was staring at him, like she was about to give him notes on his technique.

“Well?” Rush asked.

“Took too much effort.”

“I'm not in the dojo.”

“You're always in the dojo, Crush. When are you going to learn that?”

Amelia had watched all this from the safety of a corner in the club with breathless amazement. The bouncer was everything she'd heard he was. He would do fine.

TWO

B
ack in the club, the underage girl was sipping her drink and wondering why there were chunks in it. The pretty studio exec was happily explaining to her wing girl the difference between a starter marriage and a bad first marriage. (“You know it's a failure going in!”) The drunk at the east end of the bar was asking his shot glass what was wrong with his brain. And Amelia was watching Rush as he took his station again, standing by the bookshelf right next to her.

Amelia's clothes were casual, but stylish and clearly expensive. She'd found that balance between looking perfect and looking like she wasn't trying at all. This was what everybody aimed for and few people achieved. She was cool and easy, and that hungry look in her gray-green eyes only made her more desirable. Her hair was blond (this week) and hung carelessly upon her shoulders.

What those eyes did was scan the room. They looked the club over in much the same way Rush's eyes
did, looking for something, just like he looked for trouble. But when they scanned to the left, her gaze kept landing on Rush's belt buckle, right there at eye level. Well, maybe not his belt buckle. But in that general vicinity. She'd look away and look back again, and every time her eyes would land on the bouncer's crotch, she'd smile a little broader, like she found the situation just plain funny. Pretty soon she was going to have to start laughing. He had a cell phone on his belt buckle, the old-fashioned flip kind. The phone on his belt buckle started blinking. She pretended to be laughing at that.

“Your crotch is blinking,” she said.

“It happens,” he said, not even looking down at her. His eyes were on the crowd. Three grab-ass jerks were trash-talking girls as they went into the ladies' room. Were they going to be trouble? Rush felt the scar on his head itch—his “Spidey sense” was trying to tell him something.

“Could be family,” the girl said, still watching the blinking phone.

“Don't have a family.”

“Poor orphan boy.”

She snatched the phone from Rush's belt holster. He let her take it. She pressed “answer” and held it to her ear. A pretty ear.

“Hello.”

“You're a girl!” said a young man on the other end of the line.

The young man was named Zerbe, and he was
Rush's brother. Sort of. Zerbe always called Rush just before midnight. That's when the walls started closing in on him. Usually Rush didn't answer, and Zerbe would leave him a rambling message. Sometimes Rush would pick up and tell his brother to leave him alone. But to have a girl answer? That made Zerbe's week. Hell, that made Zerbe's month.

“I know I'm female,” she agreed. “What's the bouncer's name?”

“You don't want to know him,” Zerbe said. “You want to know me. What's your name? What are you wearing? What's your favorite movie?”

“Don't get out much, do you?”

“I never get out. Lemme talk to my brother.”

Rush was listening to Amelia's side of the conversation, but his eyes were on the underage girl with the underage boy. The girl was looking sleepy—her head kept lolling back, then jerking awake. The boy was talking a mile a minute.

“Here,” Amelia said.

“I didn't answer it,” Crush said.

“I did. He says he's your brother.”

“That's his opinion,” Rush said, grabbing the phone. “What's up?”

Zerbe didn't want to tell Rush about the walls closing in—that was old territory—so he just asked him what was going on there.

Rush read him the room, starting with the gangbangers. “C-Los and his tank are in back. Some assgrabbers
by the ladies'. Maybe a rope master in the lounge.” He looked down at Amelia and said, “a pickpocket at the bar.”

“Not the work shit, the fun shit. Remember fun, Caleb?” Zerbe was the only one who called Rush by his first name—he'd earned the right—and even he only did so on rare occasions. “Tell me about the girl. Her voice sounds blond—is she blond?”

Rush looked around for the underage girl and her pursuer. They were gone. He tossed the phone back to Amelia.

“You talk to him,” he told her, then moved off to where the young couple had been sitting. A busgirl was clearing their spot. He stopped her and checked out the girl's glass. A swirl of bluish backwash remained in the bottom. He hurried out the door, vaulting over the red-velvet rope that kept the hopefuls at bay, and ran into the parking lot.

Back inside, Amelia took a picture of herself with Rush's phone and sent it to Zerbe. He was right. She was blond. In her early twenties, with the kind of hair that made him want to bury his face in it and the kind of green eyes that he wanted to look at him in the morning without a tinge of regret in them.

Zerbe asked her to marry him. He was joking, but he wouldn't have turned her down if she said yes.

She laughed. It was a nice laugh. “Why don't you come down here?”

“Can't,” he said. “Did you ever see one of those
movies where they keep a brain alive in a jar?”

“No.”

“I'm a brain alive in a jar.”

Zerbe scratched at the spot he could never quite reach under the electronic tether on his ankle and asked her again if she'd marry him.

“No,” she said, as nicely as you can say that. “Have your brother call me.”

“He won't.”

“Sure, he will,” she said. “I've got his phone.”

And the line went dead.