Red
We take the pickup truck, ’cause nobody wants to sit on a bike for hours on end for a stakeout. Bron drives, and I sit in the passenger seat, window open, hand out the window. I open my fingers and let the wind move through them, letting it caresses the calluses and the old scars and the new cuts. I watch the passing scenery, the tight-packed buildings, the graffiti-covered walls, moving swiftly by. I see men and women hunched over in doorways, passing around brown paper bags; and all through this I cannot help but think of Christina, wondering if today she’s helping men and women like these. I grind my teeth, feeling an ache in my jaw, wishing the ache would travel into my skull and blot out my thoughts. I feel that anger resurfacing: anger aimed directly at Christina. I don’t want to be angry at her; I don’t want to be anything at her.
Bron stops the car in an alleyway opposite and down the street from the Englishman, where we can watch the entrance, see who’s coming in and out. Bron drums his tribal-tattooed fingers along the steering wheel, humming to himself, and I just sit here, trying to ignore the way he looks at me out of the corner of his eyes. All this past month, Bron has been sensing that something’s the matter with me. His chameleon’s face changes from concerned to impatient and back again, all whilst we watch each other out of the corners of our eyes. I find myself wishing I was with one of the other men, one of the less concerned men.
I light a cigarette and dangle my hand out of the window, watching the smoke, thinking about how it dissipates into the air just as easily as my relationship with Christina dissipated into nothing. Relationship…I can’t help but smile at that. We never had a relationship; goddamn, I need to get a hold of myself.
I’ve half-smoked the cigarette when Bron says, “What’s going on with you, man?”
I don’t reply at first, hoping he’ll just let it drop, but I feel his eyes staring into me. “The fuck you mean?” I respond.
“The fuck I mean?” He laughs, but there’s little humor in it. “All this past month, you’ve been gazing starry-eyed into the distance, as though you’re someplace else, doing something else. It’s that girl, isn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve been at parties, turning away all the clubs girls; with you it’s easy to notice when you consider what you’re normally like. A goddamn pussy hound.”
“A pussy hound? That sounds strange coming from you, Mr. In Love All the Time.”
I laugh, but Bron doesn’t laugh with me.
“If the unpatched show up today, we need to be focused.”
“I haven’t let anything slip this past month,” I say, with a hint of defensiveness in my voice.
“I know that,” Bron says. “But you haven’t been completely focused, either.”
“How would you know? You’re not a mind reader. I really wish you’d stop with this heart-to-heart shit. It’s tiring.”
I smoke my cigarette down to the filter, throw it to the ground, and then light another one.
I feel myself grinding my teeth, anger moving through me. First Christina rejecting me, and now Bron nagging me like he’s a woman and not a six-foot-tall enforcer. People are so damn complicated, it seems to me. They never just do what you expect them to—what you’d like them to.
I watch the bar, watching the entrance as day drinkers walk in and out, a few old men with caps and suits which looks like remnants of the past, caps pulled low over their ears and shoes shiny, and a couple of groups of women, arms linked, cackling loudly into the afternoon sunshine. I wait for an unpatched to walk in, or out. The question of how to spot an unpatched was a difficult one at first…after all, they’re unpatched. But when you’ve worked as an enforcer for long enough, you learn to notice patterns. And one of the patterns is the arrogance of the unpatched, the way they swagger, the way they talk, and also their habit of unnecessary violence…. all of which would result in a volatile, dangerous club, if they were allowed to form one.
“Red,” Bron says, as though he’s been repeating it for a while.
“What?” I reply.
“I get if you don’t want to talk about it, but could you at least goddamn listen? I’m saying that if you can’t have her, you need to forget her, otherwise she’s going to be haunting you for years.”
“Haunting me? A woman, haunting me? I barely fuckin’ know her, Bron. Leave off with this horseshit.”
Bron sighs, shrugs, and then turns to the bar. Good, I reflect, ’cause I was getting angry there. He’s hitting way too close to home: way, way too close. He’s hitting right on the sore spot where Christina lingers, still lingers like some kind of parasite. He’s right; she is haunting me. But I can’t admit it. Again, I feel that anger, anger aimed like an arrow at Christina. I feel my fist clench, my teeth grinding, a pulsing in my temple. I put myself out there like a fool. I hear my voice, pathetic, like a teenager: “Ooh, do you want my number? Ooh, please take my number.” I want to jump back in time and take that too-eager man by the throat and smash his head into the desk. I want to punch the wall. I want to take a sawn-off shotgun and blow a hole in something. I want to take a Desert Eagle handgun and blow several holes in something. I just want to forget. Why can’t I just forget about the green-eyed social worker? Why can’t I just forget about the woman who pushed me away?
“Red,” Bron says.
I feel myself about to snap at him, but then I see what he’s gesturing at: two men, swaggering into the Englishman, wearing leather jackets without patches on them. They could be just two men swaggering into a bar, but there’s something about them, something about the way one of them shoves the door open with his shoulder and the other casually flicks his cigarette stub not onto the ground outside the bar, but onto the floor inside the bar.
I nod. “Let’s go.”
We climb out of the car and walk toward the bar. As we walk, I feel myself letting go of this bullshit, letting go of the anger, letting go of all this stuff going around and around my mind. This is my business; this is the work I can lose myself in. It feels good to have Bron at my shoulder. It feels good to be on a job. It feels good to be focused. Bron and I stop for a moment outside the door, and then we nod at each other; Bron pushes the door open and we walk in.
The two men sit at the bar. One is tall, lean, with a mop of grey-brown hair which hangs lankly down to his shoulders, wearing big cowboy boots which look completely ridiculous. His face is tired-looking, his eyes a dim shade of brown. I’d say he was about fifty, maybe older. The other is around my age, short and fat, with a podgy cherub-like face. But both of them are packing; I can see the outlines of their weapons beneath their leathers. That’s new for the unpatched. Before, they were a rabble of gunless men walking blindly around the city. Now, they are becoming a cohesive unit…with Jordy at their head. If we can find Jordy, end him, I’m sure the rest will disband. Or, at least, they’ll be so disoriented they’ll be easier to take out.
“I said I wanted ice, old man,” the lank-haired one snaps at the bartender, who is about ten years older than him. The bartender’s fear is plain in his lined face, and in the way he hurriedly takes Lank Hair’s drink and goes to the ice bucket. “How hard is it to get some ice?” Lank Hair says, grinning and turning to Cherub. As he turns, he sees me and Bron, and his smiles dies. “Oh,” he mutters.
“Oh,” I echo, pacing across the bar and standing over the two men. Behind me, I hear Bron locking the door. I glance to the bartender, and then nod toward the back. “Go take a break.” He quickly scurries out of the bar.
When Bron returns, the two of us just stand over the men for a few moments, watching as they realize the situation they’re in. They don’t go for their weapons; they know who we are, and they know that would only turn this situation to violence damn quickly.
After a long pause, a pause we let stretch out so they know just how much shit they’re in, I say: “We want to know where Jordy is. Where he lives, where he eats, where he sleeps, where he pisses, who he fucks. We want to know where that fuck is, alright?”
“Why?” Cherub mutters, his voice quivering. “He hasn’t done anything to you.”
“He shot one of our pledges,” Bron says, voice quivering too, but for a different reason and with a darker quality. “Could have killed a boy who hasn’t even crossed him. Your boss is a fucking psychopath. And he’s dealing heroine. Dealing heroin in Faithless territory. You don’t think that’s doing something to us? You don’t think that makes us want to have a conversation with the man?”
Bron and I take off our leathers and lay them over the backs of chairs at the bar, all while the two men look wide-eyed at us.
“We’re going to have a talk,” I say, “and then you’re going to tell us what you know.”
“We don’t know where he lives,” Cherub says. “Really, we don’t.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Lank Hair mumbles. “We don’t know that much about him. He isn’t seen that much. He really isn’t. He’s like a ghost, man. He’s like a ghost.”
“Stand up,” I say, taking a step back. “I won’t fight a man when he’s sitting.”
Lank Hair watches me to see if I’m serious. When he realize I am, he stands up, taking off his own leather.
“At least you’re doing it fair,” he mutters, holding his hands up.
When we’re all facing each other, the scent of violence in the air, we start fightin’.