to Fort Lauderdale, pinching the last drag out of a Kool 100. She was a dishwater blonde with ears that winged her skull at 45 degree angles, and she told Harry she didn’t have any vacancies.
“That’s not what it says on your sign.”
“It says Spring Breakers Welcome. My guess is the last time you were inside a classroom, Gerald Ford was president.”
“Jimmy Carter,” Harry said, “but I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. My money’s as good as any college kid’s.” He was holding a twenty dollar bill on the counter between his thumbs.
“I’ll tell you right now, that’s not gonna get it,” the woman said. She had a diamond of acne on her right cheek, pimples she’d been picking at, a furious fuchsia bomber on her chin.
“Okay,” Harry said. “What’re we talking about here?” He went into his pocket for a fifty and laid it over the twenty.
The woman looked at the bill and she looked at Harry. “How long did you plan on staying?”
“I’d like to pay for the week.”
“And what name did you plan on using?”
“I’m Harry James,” Harry said, getting used to it.
The woman stood and slid Harry’s seventy bucks into a pair of brown corduroys washed and worn so many times that the nap had gone flat at the knees and the ass, a plum of an ass, wide and thick and high. Her navel was exposed under a white halter and she was wearing a silver chain around her belly. Too bad about her skin.
“You know, Mr. James, it isn’t about money.”
“It never is.”
“That’s not what I mean. I can tell you got trouble. You look like trouble from across the street, and if there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s somebody else’s trouble. My name’s Darlene,” the woman said finally. “Please don’t ask me for anything.”
South Florida’s News Leader kicked off a telecast with Manfred’s murder, and the story made the papers a few days running, in paragraphs of shrinking size. The reports said police had no suspects at that time. Which may or may not have been the case. Law enforcement only leveled with the media when it served their purpose, and Harry wasn’t setting his clock by those guys.
There seemed to be an inordinate amount of cops in this town, but that could’ve been his imagination. Harry spotted them cruising the wide streets and held his breath, not looking at them, forcing himself not to look away, either. Then the Manfred story lost steam, and nothing happened.
Harry tracked the Lauderdale strip, two boulevards that right-angled the ocean, and skipped the places that looked too small or too hard-core local to hire out-oftowners. He thought he’d give Myrtle’s a shot. Its antiseptic scent threw him, its cool dim interior. The place was supposed to be a supper club, but there was no stage and no dance floor Harry could make out, and with its tight-assed fuss of tables and chairs, the joint looked like a cafeteria.
Harry poked around until he found the manager processing words in her office. Glazed in the green glow of her computer, she had auburn hair. She was wearing a beige suit and glasses. She said most of their security people were off-duty police officers, but Harry could fill out an application if he was interested. She sent him into the cafeteria with a pen. As she turned her head to face the screen, Harry saw her right eye flutter with a nervous tic.
Okay, for a residence he could provide a fleabag motel. He couldn’t think of a single reference outside of Frankie Yin, and he couldn’t remember Frankie’s phone number, never knew his address. He didn’t recall graduating junior high school. He passed the sixth grade with flying colors, but that seemed to fall into the grammar school category, an academic milestone the application ignored. And hadn’t she mentioned they employed off-duty cops? Harry folded the form and stuck it in his pocket. He left the pen on the table, and held the door as it was closing, so he wouldn’t make any noise on his way out.
He stopped at a club called Sailor Randy’s, an indooroutdoor multiplex that featured two outside bars flanking a crabgrass garden. Some Mexican was hosing down the patio, and Harry got mad because he didn’t understand English. The kid twisted the nozzle on the hose, cutting off the water, like he was about to launch some back and forth finger alphabet, but Harry got spared by a guy drinking out of a plastic tumbler.
Harry liked the looks of him, rumpled and bony, but with a potbelly that bulged over his jeans. His hair was going extra thin on top, but he wasn’t trying to hide it, just brushed it straight back from a savage widow’s peak and left it long on the back and sides. He looked like somebody who rode a Harley and hung out in titty bars. Not exactly the type Harry was friends with, but he liked his chances with him a lot better anyway than with some linen-suited redhead suffering facial spasms.
The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Bryce Peyton,” he said. “What sort of work were you looking for?”
Odd name, Bryce. It reminded Harry of a hustle he used to run out of the joints on Ludlow Street, with a dope fiend chick named Sam. The marks were straight off the train from New Haven, these suckers, fine arts majors acting hip on the Lower East Side, khaki pantsers who would’ve been burned by anybody anywhere, then slapped around a bit for their trouble. They usually had names like Bryce.
Harry bluffed his way through all the experience he had in the security field. Peyton called it.
“I bet you got plenty of experience cracking heads,” Peyton said, “but that’s not what I’m after. Tell you the truth, you’re a little small to be a bouncer.”
Harry didn’t argue. The other guy inevitably compared himself to you. Peyton had him by an inch or two, and Peyton wasn’t really somebody you’d think of as a big guy.
“If I stick a walkie-talkie in the mitt of somebody six foot eight, I got sheer intimidation on my side. Maybe the guy hasn’t fought with anything more than a lobster special in fifteen years, but then again, he hasn’t had to. You hear me knocking?”
Harry wondered whether it was too soon to weigh in with the name, but after this first trip down the strip, he figured Bryce Peyton was the employer most likely to hire a guy like Harry Healy. Or Harry James. James. Harry told him he was down from New York, which impressed Peyton, that he’d been working for a guy named Frankie Yin. Maybe Peyton had heard of him.
“Sure. Who hasn’t heard of Frankie Yin? From the Wonderland on Second Avenue. That’s a mighty rugged crowd he caters to.” He started laughing and loosened something that was sticking to one of his lungs. “Nothing scares me quite as much as a stockbroker wearing a dress.”
Harry was about to tell him to take his job and stick it up his ass, but his thinking would run this way whenever his pride was taking a beating.
Peyton emptied his tumbler with two swallows, and when he exhaled, Harry caught a blast of the vodka inside. What was it, noon? This guy’d give Manfred a run for his money.
Shit. Manfred. Harry was trying to forget about Manfred and the hole in the back of Manfred’s head, Manfred bloody on the floor in his bloody bathrobe.
Peyton said, “I can tell if I’m gonna like somebody within the first five minutes of meeting him, and I like you. You strike me as somebody who could use a break.”
He was going to keep talking, but a hacking fit turned his face scarlet and kicked up the louie crackling in his chest. He hawked and spat but missed the crabgrass, and a quivering blob of brown landed on the Mexican’s pressure-cleaned flagstones. When the coughing subsided, Peyton patted his pockets for the pack of cigarettes he must have forgotten inside.
He caught his breath. “And in this business, that fucking Chink is a legend. If you’re good enough for Frankie Yin, you’re good enough for me. We’ll start you tonight around ten.”
Bryce Peyton turned out to be a decent enough guy, and he paid cash out of the drawer at the end of a shift, but Sailor Randy’s was the cheesiest joint Harry had ever set foot in. He had to be at work by six on Monday, for the drive-time promotion put on by a classic rock radio outlet. Broadcasting live from the club, an on-air personality exhorted listeners to get themselves over to Sailor Randy’s to collect scads of useless shit, visors and bumper stickers emblazoned with the station’s nickname. The Storm. They arrived in herds the minute their bosses let them go, guzzling Peyton’s rotgut cheapies, caterwauling over lyrics they knew by heart. Harry endured his tenthousandth listening of “Carry on My Wayward Son” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” two overwhelming favorites of the Broward County workforce. Tuesday was Dress to Kill night, which encouraged all manner of local hag to climb up on stage and flash her tits, while no-assed fat guys, Peyton’s cronies, hooted from the floor.
The only bouncer Harry had any respect for was Palmero, who everybody called Big, or when he wasn’t
