around, The Gila Monster. He held down a day job at a hospital, a 6’5” ex-lineman from the U of Miami who was currently looking down both barrels at four hundred pounds.
Palmero handed out assignments at the beginning of a shift, and Harry usually got stuck at the small bar by the bathrooms. He was supposed to keep an eye out for rowdies hassling the bartender, and the unisex toilets, which were one hole each, to make sure people went in alone. If somebody stayed inside too long, Harry’d have to go after them with his key. He’d find some tenderfoot passed out with vomit on his shirt, and then the kid would have to be bounced. Puking was not allowed at Sailor Randy’s.
By the start of his second week, the Spring Breakers landed and Harry was earning every pink penny of his one hundred nightly dollars. He had never seen so many kids in the same place at the same time, blown out on booze and hormones and the stupidity of feeling immortal. Tuesday’s Dress to Kill contest attracted the usual assortment of cycle sluts, but the less weathered collegiate competition hot-wired the room with a different kind of tension. The two finalists were last week’s winner, a biker broad who stripped off her tank top to reveal thunderous, surgically untainted breasts, and a sorority sister emboldened by baybreezes and the whistling crowd. The college girl was prettier, and, for the record, had nicer tits, full and round, but firm, with a slight upward curve and quarter-sized nipples that looked rouged from where Harry was standing. The reigning queen’s subjects left her high and dry. Not only was she dethroned by this show of non-support, actual boos peppered the lukewarm applause.
She sent a few bitchy words the college girl’s way. The college girl, flushed with victory and all that vodka, made a couple of remarks, too. Some hair got yanked and a slap landed, but the winner was no match for this grizzled veteran of dressing to kill, and before she realized what she’d gotten into, she was catching a beating. A frat boy trying to break it up absorbed three quick rights from a guy twice his size and twice his age. He spit one tooth out of his orthodontically corrected thirty-two.
Harry grabbed a big drunk kid around the biceps and muscled him toward the door, but the entire security crew was inside, and there was nobody to hand him off to. A biker pulled a buck knife. Harry let go of his man and cracked the biker on the jaw, blindsiding him just below the ear. The guy belly-flopped to the concrete and bounced, out cold. His knife skittered across the floor. One of Bryce’s whacko bartenders clobbered a frat boy with an unopened fifth of gin, a shot worthy of any cowboy movie. The kid went down. The bottle didn’t break. The bartender ran off, one eye bloody, fifth of gin held high.
Head-up on a brass-knuckled biker who threw a hissing right, Harry blocked it with his left. He kicked the guy twice in the same shin, and once in the balls. He caught a left that backed him up, and the knucks came in again, a roundhouse. He ducked, digging his right into a jelly gut. His shoulder stayed in place, but a hard left connected, and Harry’s ass touched down. He sprang back up.
He didn’t come out of nowhere, because Big Palmero never came out of nowhere. It took him too long to get where he was going. But he was moving quick for him, quick like a landslide, and snatching that brass-knuckled fist at the wrist, Palmero pushed his palm straight through the guy’s elbow, snapping the arm clean at the joint. The biker hit the floor and cradled his crippled limb, screaming.
No shots were fired.
The cops blew in behind helmets and masks and billy clubs that went whap whap whap. Harry vaulted the bar he was supposed to be watching and stayed right there until they cleared the club and Peyton came over to vouch for him, which Harry needed, in spite of his black t-shirt with the periwinkle lettering of Sailor Randy’s logo.
Harry ducked everybody with a camera.
The melee was front paged in the
Harry would almost have been all right with all of it. Almost. But the next night he had to listen to Peyton’s juiced-up blockheads, whose conversations were usually restricted to how many big plates they could squat, crowing about their heroics. Like they’d achieved something. It made Harry sick to think he’d been on their side, right there with them, C-note-a-night muscle in a classic mug’s job.
The chicks Bryce Peyton employed as bartenders weren’t at Sailor Randy’s because they were especially skilled at mixing cocktails, or because they could handle a bunch of customers all at once or had the kinds of personalities people were willing to shell out money to be around. They were there to preserve the myth of the beach bunny as ideal woman, modern version: bottle blonde where nature fucked up, sun-tanned, cap-toothed, tattooed and pierced.
Agatha stuck out because she was none of these things. Big Palmero handled the introduction. It was early. Bryce had just turned down the lights, and Agatha was toweling lime juice off her fingers, getting ready to go. Harry asked her if people called her Aggie.
“With a name like Agatha,” she said, “they better.”
Harry told her it was a nice name, though what he meant was it was an old-fashioned name, and if he had a daughter, he sure as shit wouldn’t be naming her Agatha.
“Double double, toil and trouble,” Agatha said. “It sounds like the name of one of the weird sisters.”
With the possible exception of Bryce Peyton, who could surprise you with the things he knew, Harry would’ve laid ten to one that he and Aggie were the only two souls in the place who knew the line was from
Her hair was light brown, and her dark eyes were bright with intelligence. She had a nice, compact body, and the shape of her legs looked great, even in her jeans. She stepped down the bar to pour two drinks, and Harry pictured her walking away from his bed at the Wind N’ Sand, panties riding high, baring one cheek of her ass.
“You don’t seem like Bryce’s type,” he said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Why’d he hire you?”
“Because he trusts me,” Aggie said.
“You know him a long time?”
“Eight years. We worked together at a place called Mead’s. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts there now.”
“So you’re local.”
“Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” she said. “But you’re not.”
“I’m from New York.”
“The city so nice, they named it twice. Why on earth are you here?”
“I needed a change of scenery.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “What’s your story?”
“Let me take you out for breakfast, and I’ll give you the condensed version.”
The bar accumulated a handful of customers, waiting with bills in their hands. Standing money, Peyton called it. He was glaring across the dance floor, his eyes locked on Harry’s, his arms spread wide and his palms turned up. Harry made a gun out of his hand, and fired it by pushing down his thumb. Right you are, boss.
“I thought you had to close,” Aggie said, reaching for a bottle of Midori.
“Not tonight,” Harry lied. “Listen, I gotta make it look like I’m working. I’ll catch up with you later.”
As a matter of fact, the toilet cop always had to close. So if he was going to see Aggie after work, he needed somebody to cover for him. This was going to be tough. He had no friends on this crew, and everybody hated closing.
The first guy he hit up was Tommy, no last name learned or cared about. He was looking a tad tender from Tuesday night’s festivities, though his left eye had started to open a bit. Tommy was a good bet. This was his only job, and the most important thing he had going the next day was polishing up his tan.
“Dude,” Tommy said, “you serious?”
“Like a capsized cruise ship.”
“I can’t,” Tommy said. “It’s Thursday night.” Like if it had been a Monday or a Friday, Tommy’d be happy to oblige, the muscle-bound closet-case.
That led Harry to William-Not-Bill, a puppet-legged blockhead with Cuban blood and a prizefighter hairdo, spiky on top with rat-tails curling out the back. When Harry asked him for the favor, Not-Bill wanted to know if
