NO Quarter (28 page)

The crowd heard it, understood it, and let loose a wave of cheers and applause. Dunk turned his back when his solo was finished. The band carried on, making their competent music. But from that first number, Dunk’s sax became the centerpiece, and the cheers were for him. He knew it. He swaggered about, blew his notes in fabulous, effortless combinations. His band mates paid the price for him. He stood taller atop their crushed egos, and knew that too.

He strode off the stage during the number that finished the set—his last solo done, so why hang around? He dropped into the crowd, marched toward the bar, absorbing the enthusiastic congratulations. On stage, Clamjaphry-minus-one rolled through the finale. The singer said something that got lost in a blare of feedback, and it was over. They started meekly disassembling their equipment.

Was this why Sunshine had hooked up with this dirt-ball? Sunshine had always opted for lousy boyfriends, but Dunk was more rancid and repulsive than the worst choices I’d ever known her to make. The draw, the lure—Dunk’s very evident musical gifts—had that proved the seduction that drew her into the relationship?

Dunk leaned against the bar, letting people buy him beers. I edged a hesitant step towards the crowd, but I soon realized I wouldn’t be able to get a word in, much less get near him. Dunk shed his arrogance on all around him, and some of the crowd actually got a kick out of it, buying him more beers, lauding him as a celebrity. Girls pressed in around him and he preened for them. He seemed particularly interested in one slender blond who had long hair that hung to her waist. The girl hovered near him, one bare shoulder peeking out from an artistically tattered red T-shirt. I was surprised to find myself fascinated with her bare shoulder and tight jeans. Something about her looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Not until she turned around. She wasn’t just familiar—she was Alex, disguised in a blond wig, extra makeup, and very tight jeans.

I barely stopped myself from yelling her name, from lunging forward into the crowd to get to her. What was she doing here? I was terrified and furious, all at the same time. She turned, saw me, and winked. Then she turned back to hanging on Dunk’s every word.

I gritted my teeth and waited. After far too long she left the crowd at the bar and wandered out the door. I wanted to go after her, but I knew that the moment I did it could compromise both of us, and I might lose my chance at Dunk.
What did she think she was doing?

Dunk continued to hold court at the bar. I continued to wait—and to fume.

Eventually all those free drinks caught up with him, and he broke for the rest room, carrying his sax with him in a dirty pillowcase.

I followed in after, and in the interval Dunk already had a joint lit. He leaned back into the corner, the pillow case between his booted feet, holding the smoke in his lungs—this after guzzling four or five large draft beers bought by his adoring fans. His eyes opened, dreamily, and still he managed to sneer.

“That was a hell of a performance,” I said.

He blew the smoke from his lungs.

“Suck my dick.”

“You should get yourself a record contract. You deserve one.”

“Yuh gahdamn right I do.” He took another toke. We were the only two in the bathroom. A urinal gurgled. He exhaled again. “So, suck my dick.”

“I think you played
...
”

I let it go, seeing what he meant. His dirty-nailed free hand had dipped into his roomy cargo pants. He pulled his half-hard cock into the pale light. He leaned his shoulders harder into the corner behind him, then thrust his hips forward.

I wanted a conversation with this loathsome gutter-punk, wanted to coax information from him, but I certainly didn’t want to deal with
this
.

I started shaking my head, turning away.

He said, “Wai’,
you
. Yeah, dude
...
yuh were at
...
I saw
...
”

I watched him put it together, thinking,
Shit
.

“
...
that picture
...
Su’shine’s drawing. Offa the door. You took it! Di’n’cha?
Di’n’cha, motherfucker!
”

He didn’t make for an especially threatening figure, his cock still hanging out, the joint still pinched between thumb and finger. I remembered—briefly—Mitchell in Sin City’s toilet, and didn’t dwell on it. KO-ing Dunk wasn’t going to accomplish anything. It might spoil things later on, and I couldn’t risk it.

Still, I wasn’t going to get anything I wanted now.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I raised my hands, turning again, exiting, hoping the beer and pot would muddle his head, wipe out the memory, give me the chance to approach him some other time, some other place. Which meant tonight was a bust.
Dammit
.

I slid out through the bar, heading for the door, ticking grimly over whatever other useful ways I could spend the night, unwilling to waste time that might get me closer to the identity of Sunshine’s killer. I wondered if I was leaving him behind, here—
Dunk
...

“Bone. Thought dat was you.”

I recognized Werewolf, recognized Firecracker to the left, slightly behind. Cooks from the restaurant, I’d worked with them fairly often, always as a set. They were good workers. Whenever, on those busy swamping shifts that sometimes came up, they stayed on top of it and got the waiters their orders, and treated me particularly well, I always passed them a part of my tips—money I
wouldn’t have made without the speed and efficiency with which they banged out those plates.

It was Werewolf—solid shoulders, strong limbs—who’d addressed me. It would have to be, since Firecracker—a wisp by contrast, taciturn, mildly albino flesh—rarely made the effort to overcome his speech impediment for more than a word or two. Nevertheless, he grinned a timid hello at me.

“Guys,” I waved. “What’re you doing here?”

“Came see de show,” Werewolf said. His West Indies’ heritage gave him his accent and his flesh a pleasant, creamed-coffee hue. “You?”

My head lifted slightly, but sharply. “I came out looking for some crystal meth. You know anybody selling it?”

Good cooks, friendly guys, and we had a good professional relationship, but I’d never seen them outside work. They weren’t of that same low caste as Blitz, our dishwasher. I couldn’t coerce anything from them under any circumstances.

Werewolf’s dark eyes stared a moment into mine, then shifted to Firecracker’s pink ones and stayed there. The two seemed to commune. I waited.

Firecracker’s thin, whitish lips twitched into a grin once more.

“
...
yi-yi-yeah,” he said.

* * *

Excerpt from Bone’s Movie Diary:

The single most depressing movie I’ve ever seen is
Slacker
. Director Richard Linklater’s 1991 queasy voyeuristic glimpse into the go-nowhere, do-nothing, smugly aimless world of slacker youth leaves one in a kind of lethargic shock thinking how it will be when these kids are running things. It’s a low budget indie & very effective in its way, but I would rather eat a plate of spoiled shrimp than ever have to see it again.

There was nothing to be done about showing up two nights running at the Stage Door, which wasn’t my normal prowl. Last time, I’d hit around eight in the evening, then again at about two o’clock. I was of course hoping to stumble on Jo-Jo—or should I say, José Munoz?

I’d ordered my dinner in tonight, Chinese food that I ate with chopsticks while I listened to some Shostakovich violin concertos. Then I spent a little while limbering up in an exercise not unlike the one I used to teach my sword students to use in warming up for a match. At the height of my club’s enrollment, I’d had twelve pupils. It had remained an informal thing for the years I’d kept it active.

It was a healthier social alternative to the bar scene. I never charged fees for my lessons, but I passed the hat whenever we rented equipment or fencing space. Mostly, we banged steel on various back patios around the Quarter, I imparted my knowledge of the sport as art, and we generally had a fun time.

Yet I’d shut the club down. I’d backed a step further into a kind of self-imposed state of inactivity. Why was that?

The limbering and breathing exercises, of course, helped to center my mind.
When I was ready I put on some appropriate clothes, a comfortable amount of weaponry, and headed out. It was before midnight, a time of night I hadn’t yet tried the Stage Door. Maybe I could find out Jo-Jo’s work schedule at least, and thereby figure out when he was mostly likely to show.

Who did I find when I got there? Guessed it in one.

“Maestro!” the Juggernaut called out, coming toward me from the pool table. For one awful second I thought he was going to hug me, but he settled for shaking my hand with his giant paw.

I’d scoped him from the street but had come in anyway. He was definitely a nuisance, but he was still technically on our suspects’ list. I would suffer his company if it meant I could establish for sure he hadn’t killed Sunshine.

“Jugger,” I said with a seriously fake smile, “good to see you.”

He liked that. “Let me buy you one!”

It was the least he could do. I sighed, resigning myself to hanging out with the big man for a while. I’d already done my visual sweep, and Jo-Jo wasn’t among the patrons. There was only one Court of Two Sisters waiter, and he sat at the bar talking eagerly to a redheaded tourist girl who’d wandered in off Bourbon. I didn’t know the bartender.

“Sorry I had to split last time,” I showed him my cell phone. “Got an urgent call, and I had to go.”

Jugger handed me my Irish. “That’s okay. What do you do anyway? For a living.”

“Free-lance accountant. Good job, but it keeps me on call a lot.”

I didn’t have a job and didn’t need one, but that wasn’t common knowledge around the Quarter. If Jugger started asking around, people would probably say something like, “Is
that
what he does? Free-lance accountant? Sounds right to me. I always thought he was fast with numbers.”

He nodded his big shaved head. “Hey, how about a game?”

“Sure.” It beat sitting at a table with him.

He gruffly shooed away the guy he’d been playing when I came in, and started re-racking the balls.

I didn’t really understand why Jugger was so determined to be my buddy. Maybe I’d impressed him by making that fair call on the game he’d shot with Willie last night. He probably didn’t get a lot of people contradicting or standing up to him. Whatever, tonight he was treating me like his lifelong pal.

I broke, and nothing dropped. He picked a tough carom with the seven and the four that would have left him near perfect to run the table if he made it. He didn’t. I decided on solids, and started putting them down, though I still wasn’t giving him my best game. With his temper, who knew how he would take to being drubbed too badly?

He regaled me with more of his delightful stories about the mayhem he’d inflicted, both on the Inside and out in the World. He was nothing but proud of the things he’d done. Every ass he had kicked, every face he’d bashed in, each bone he’d broken, belonged to some guy who “had it coming.” No exceptions. He told me yet again about the poor dude who had “messed with his bitch.” I nodded along to it all, shooting my game, keeping one eye on the doors.

“Only reason I got bagged this time was ’cause a guy ratted on me to the cops. They were doing their extra patrols for New Year’s and he sent them after me. I hadn’t had time to wash off my hands, and they stopped me on the street and backtracked to where I’d left that sumbitch. I guess it’s a good thing after all I didn’t kill him.”

“Yeah. Good thing.”

If the assault had been around this New Year’s Eve, then the Juggernaut had served roughly six months. That sounded like a reasonable sentence.

“My little bitch kept begging me not to kill him.” Jugger laughed, sinking the nine, then the fifteen. He lined up on the eight. “If’n he hadn’t I probably would’ve broke that guy’s neck.”

He put the eight ball into the corner pocket.

If
he
hadn’t
...
referring to his “little bitch.” Well, that certainly settled the Juggernaut’s sexual preference
...
or did it? Alex had suggested that Jugger might be bisexual, something that simply had never crossed my mind. One of the lingering handicaps of being hopelessly heterosexual, I guess. Even so it meant Jugger was definitely at least half gay.

“As it is, that snitch is definitely gonna pay. Too bad he ain’t ’round here. Got some gris-gris with his name on it.” He laughed again, obviously taken with the great comedy of it.

The Bear had told me about Jugger being into guys, but confirmed information is always better than just information. It was why I’d done that hopefully sly consult with Lynch in the Mystic Den earlier. That visit had turned Jo-Jo from hot suspect into red-hot suspect. I now also knew that the two recent black ex-cons the Bear had mentioned only in passing had done time for check fraud and grand-theft auto. Those weren’t inherently violent crimes, so it lessened the chance that either of them had tagged Sunshine.

I racked for another game.

That was when the circus blew in.

I had Jo-Jo spotted even before the bartender hailed him by name. He was with two guys who were still wearing their green Two Sisters jackets, and he had a leggy, curvy blond wired to his arm. She nuzzled his shoulder and stared at him adoringly. With a complexion even more olive than mine, short curly black hair, and soft matinee idol features, I could see why he wouldn’t be hard on any woman’s eyes.

He had apparently already changed out of his work getup, was sporting slacks and a stylish shirt. His grin was bright and confident. It was almost as if the blond was simply part of his ensemble.

The group gathered up some beers at the bar and retired to an empty table toward the back of the place.

“Your shot, Maestro.” Jugger had broken the rack, power-slamming his cue and scattering the balls everywhere. It was just one of those freak things that nothing had dropped.

I focused quickly on the table, kicking myself a bit for having been so obviously distracted.

I’d gotten a good study on Jo-Jo in those seconds I’d watched him cross the bar. I’d seen his type before and wasn’t fooled by the pretty boy facade. He
smelled like hard streets and jail smarts. Slender and graceful, he’d be fast as lightning in a fight. I could get a
very
good idea how someone would handle himself, simply by observing his gait. Jo-Jo had played rough games all his life. That he had survived to what I guessed were his mid-thirties meant he’d learned how to take his opponents down quick. He didn’t have the body bulk to stand up in a prolonged brawl.

After my initial lapse, I refused to let myself even glance at Jo-Jo’s table for at least four innings. (For you pool neophytes, an inning is how long a player holds the table before missing a shot, or winning or losing the rack.) At this point in the hunt I didn’t want anyone to notice that I had more than a passing, casual interest in the man. As for Jugger, I figured any outside observer would realize
he
was the one interested in
me
.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about scoping Jo-Jo too hard.

When the chunky brunette came charging in off Toulouse, every head turned. I cranked around and focused. She was in a huge huff, heaving big breaths that lifted her ample breasts. Her fingernails were out like claws, and her teeth were bared. Every Quarterite has seen this woman in one form or another, and every Quarterite would know what was coming.

“Jo-Jo! You fucking motherfucker cheating
bastard
!”

Jugger straightened up from his shot, leaned a big hip against the table and watched.

The brunette went straight for Jo-Jo’s table like a locomotive. The blond was instantly on her feet, stepping forward. The two guys in the green jackets wisely pushed back in their chairs, knowing that a “cat fight,” if not bloodier than a brawl between men, is still usually nastier.

As for Jo-Jo
...
he sat there and let the blond intercept the brunette. He looked rather put-upon and saddened by the spectacle, though. Being fought over by two women might appeal to the male fantasy mentality, but the reality is unpleasant.

The jukebox was playing its normal rowdy music, but I had no trouble hearing the two women.

“Bitch! Getcher hands off my man!”

“He ain’t your fuckin’ man, bitch!”

There was a lot of that, plus a lot of arm-waving and confrontational body language. In the end, it really didn’t look much different from a man-to-man fracas. Guys did exactly the same thing
...
at least, until somebody finally threw a punch. I waited along with the rest of the bar to see if this would go that far. Even the bartender was obviously reluctant to intervene.

Abruptly Jo-Jo stood, marched past both women without looking or saying a word, and walked out the doors.

The brunette spun, went after him, and a few seconds later we could all hear the screech of her voice receding as she followed him down Toulouse Street. The blond, her teeth bared, visibly shaking, sat back down and glared at Jo-Jo’s empty chair.

End of round one.

The Juggernaut laughed almost as hard as when he’d talked about his New Year’s assault, then went back to the game. He was shooting a good game, but had his two wedged in behind the eight, so I knew I’d get another shot this rack. Even though the rest of the bar had now turned its attention back to whatever they were doing before, they were actively seeming not to eavesdrop on the quarrel. There was a very good chance it wasn’t over yet. We’d all seen variations on this waltz too many times before. This was why I’d felt no burning need to go shadowing after Jo-Jo when he did his walkout.

Sure enough, our Latin lover came back in alone about five minutes later and made a beeline for the blond. Bending over the table, he leaned in close to say something into her ear. Before he had a chance to say more than a few words, the blond popped up and did her own march-out, her shapely legs stiff, her red-lipsticked mouth set in a tight line.

Jo-Jo watched her go, then sat down looking tired and vaguely disgusted. He picked up the beer he had abandoned earlier and took a long swallow. His two green-jacketed friends had since migrated over to the bar.

Round two.

Jugger started telling me about a guy a few years earlier who had tried passing an IOU at a card game he sat in on. I had the sneaking feeling I knew how the story came out. He interrupted himself when the brunette came back in, face stony, mascara running down from her eyes. She walked up to the table and stared at Jo-Jo without saying anything. He looked back at her but, probably wisely, didn’t offer any words.

She drew herself up with barely-contained, furious dignity, spat noisily on the table in front of him, then turned and swept out of the Stage Door, her head held high.

Round three.

Jo-Jo sat quietly, staring at nothing in particular. With slow, careful motions he drank down the rest of his beer.

He was going to head out, having absorbed all the public humiliation one man could reasonably stand. I wanted to follow. If he went on tonight to
get himself good and plastered, as seemed likely, he might be susceptible to a little friendly bar chatter from a stranger.

“Bitches,” the Juggernaut growled. We were on a new rack. He slammed a shot into a corner pocket so hard the ball rattled and popped back out onto the table. “They’ll always mess you up. Punk shouldn’t have let them get away with that shit.” He sneered in Jo-Jo’s direction.