Rough Trade

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Todd Robinson

  Fourteen Years Ago

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Sixteen Years Ago

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Fourteen Years Ago

  Chapter Nine

  Fourteen Years Ago

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Encore

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  ROUGH TRADE

  A Boo & Junior Gig

  Todd Robinson

  Also by Todd Robinson

  Dirty Words

  The Hard Bounce

  Fourteen Years Ago

  We were bored as fuck.

  Let me tell you something about monotony and summertime in a group home. The combination was dangerous. Overheat a bunch of teenage boys whose balls just kicked into overdrive and don’t give them a whole hell of a lot to do.

  You see where I’m going here?

  “Aw, the damn cue ball is gone again.” Ollie had his skinny arm elbow-deep into the corner pocket of the pool table in St. Gabe’s rec center, hoping the ball was merely jammed.

  “It’s gone, Ollie,” I said. In the week and a half since somebody donated the old table to St. Gabriel’s Home for Boys, six of the balls had wandered off into the general population. Not to mention the two cue sticks that had disappeared.

  Why the social workers thought billiards would be a good activity for a hundred or so locked up juveniles was beyond me. All it did was give us another means by which to arm ourselves. And they just kept replacing the goddamn balls.

  “Can’t you make us something?” Junior went back to dipping his sewing needle into the ink sleeve of a black Bic pen, then popping the ink into the skin of his forearm. He thought he could be a tattoo artist once he got out of The Home. He was working on his own self-inflicted piece—his first tattoo.

  Ollie scratched at the wispy peach fuzz that he was trying to cultivate on his upper lip. “I dunno. Maybe if I could get my hands on some resin.”

  Junior rolled his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “What?” Ollie asked, sliding his ridiculously oversize State-provided glasses back into his nose.

  “I was kidding.”

  Ollie shrugged. “I wasn’t.” Ollie was the kid who, in his spare time, wrote letters to the producers of MacGyver to point out technical inaccuracies he’d catch on the re-runs. The subtleties of sarcasm whipped by him most of the time.

  And Junior was about as subtle as a moustache on the prom queen.

  Me? I was the guy who was terrible with metaphors.

  Where were we?

  Oh yeah.

  We were trying to alleviate the tedium and boredom of life in a State home without resorting to violence or watching the Red Sox.

  Junior dipped the needle back into the plastic ink tube, then jabbed himself a couple more times with tiny intakes of pained breath. He claimed the tattoo was going to be a skull, but it looked like a chipmunk head with human teeth.

  I went back to re-reading the first ten pages of The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. It was the fourth time I’d read the tattered paperback. Library options were limited at The Home.

  Ever the power-nerd, Ollie began waving the pool cue around, making the ggggzzzzz sounds of a light saber.

  “Please stop that,” I said.

  “You dare speak against the Jedi, OBoo-Wan?”

  “Christ on a crutch, I can practically smell our reps drifting away,” I said. I was making a joke, but there was no overstating the importance of reputation at St. Gabe’s. Having a rep meant you got tested, or you didn’t. It meant you spent your days defending your turf, or lived with a reasonable amount of comfort until somebody grew the balls to challenge the throne.

  My crew, The Avengers (thanks again, Ollie), had managed to hang on to a certain respectful distance from the other caged animals despite the occasional prancing Jedi.

  But that shit could change in an instant.

  Ollie froze mid-ggggzzzzz, his hands white-knuckling the pool cue between his fingers. Only two things made Ollie freak out like that. The first one was sharks.

  The second was the newest predator in our pressure cooker of a zoo.

  Something locked in my chest and I turned, hoping to God that a great white had somehow made its way the forty miles inland to The Home.

  Instead, I found the face of Zach Bingham. He blocked most of the doorway as he stood in it, flexing his huge hands. Six feet four and two hundred and eighty pounds of mad dog.

  A sixteen-year-old mad dog.

  Zach took his time giving each and every one of us a solid glower.

  The shark’s eyes would have been warmer.

  “What?” Junior challenged Zach’s stare. As it stood, we had safety in numbers at The Home. Zach didn’t. All the crews at St. Gabe’s figured it was safer to keep Zach on the outside, despite him making one hell of a fuck-you-guy.

  And if the rumors were true, that fuck-you-guy could very quickly turn into guy-fucking-you.

  For that reason alone, the fear of being bottom-bitch to a gorilla, everybody tended to stay on the outskirts of Zach’s pathways.

  Almost everybody.

  There was one member of our crew who was running late for our failed billiards meet-up. The one member of our crew who even Zach knew better than to toy with.

  Twitch.

  Twitch pushed his miniscule body through and under Zach’s armpit. “Move it or lose it, Lumpy.” It was an easy bridge for the tiny pale psycho, who just so happened to be the tiny pale psycho on our side of the issues.

  Zach took a step back, allowing for Twitch’s entrance. Apparently, crazy recognized crazy.

  Twitch stood right in front of Zach, craning his neck up to look at his ugly puss.

  Zach had to nearly touch his chin to his chest to meet Twitch’s eyes.

  “What’s up?” was all Twitch said.

  With a smile.

  Ollie kept his hands on the stick.

  Junior was as tense as a violin string, his eyes flicking over to me, then back to Zach. Under the table, he pointed at me, then pointed up.

  That meant hit ’em high.

  That also meant Junior was ready to hit him low.

  The next move was Zach’s.

  Instead, he looked us over one more time and growled, “Later.”

  He said it like a deadline.

  Twitch picked up a pool cue and smiled. “I got next game.” His namesake eyebrow jiggled with excitement.

  I looked at Junior. “Gonna be a long two years.” That was how long we had before Zach was legally unleashed back onto society. Junior and I still had three each, give or take.

  Junior hadn’t taken his eyes off the doorway. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” he said, wiping the pinpricks of blood and ink off his forearm with a paper towel.

  Twitch looked over the table. “Oh, man. Where’s the cue ball?”

  “There’s no cue,” said Ollie

  “Screw it.” Twitch pocketed the five ball and left.

  Chapter One

  “Tommy, the goddamn band isn’t my problem right now.” I stood in the middle of a blizzard while Tommy Sheralt, the owne
r of The Cellar, read me the riot act. You’d figure that Tommy would be a wee bit more sympathetic since he’d worked as a bouncer at the bar thirty years before, back when it was a jazz club and not the rock and roll shit-magnet that it was today.

  Normally, in my role as bouncer, the riot act went through me like poop through a goose. But in this case, the entire world had turned to a static-filled television screen and I was trying to make some semblance of order out of the eighty jackasses lined up outside for the show. Now Tommy also wanted me to keep tabs on the prima donna lead singer of The Kingly. Even if Jason St. John and his band were the darlings of the Boston music scene that week, he was still a grade-A douchebag.

  “If that little prick is too doped up to play, it’s gonna be on you.” The swirling snow stuck in Tommy’s white moustache. Most people thought he looked like a deranged Santa Claus. Unfortunately, the only thing he was delivering to me was pains in my ass.

  “How the hell is it on me? You’re the one who booked the asshole.”

  “And you run my security. Secure that dipshit.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to do, Tommy.”

  “Boo?” Junior called me from the doorway.

  A hipster dork in a Berkeley sweatshirt huddled in the cold. “What time do The Kingly go on? Open the downstairs, already. We’re freezing our balls off.” The whine in his voice set my teeth grinding.

  “Shut it!” I yelled at him. My balls were also in icy peril, but that didn’t stop the world from busting them.

  Tommy took another swig from his Heineken, easily already a half case in. “Send Junior to follow Jason. I don’t want him shooting up, popping pills, or whatever he does between sets.”

  “You can’t be genuinely asking me to send staff off on a mouse hunt. Not tonight.” We were already dangerously understaffed for the show, and he wanted me to give up Junior? Two of our weekend swing staff had come down with some hardcore flu. Who knew that repeated transitions from the doorway on a freezing Boston night into overheated crowds stuffed into The Cellar’s bacteria factory would be bad for your health?

  “I’m not asking.” With that, he walked back in to the awfully warm-looking bar.

  “Boo!” Junior called with more urgency, waving his arms in the doorway to catch my eye but unwilling to step outside into the snownado to get it.

  “What?” I snapped back as I marched into the bar’s foyer.

  “Jesus fuck. No more coffee for you.”

  “Sorry. I’m cold as hell and Tommy is in my ass.” I stomped my feet, trying to move warm blood into my toes. At that point, however, I didn’t think there was any warm blood left in my body to move around. Five more minutes and I was going to be singing songs from Frozen.

  Yeah, I know songs from Frozen.

  Blow me.

  Junior sniffed at me, his sinuses clear and unimpeded from being inside and away from the Arctic wasteland that Boston was becoming. “Yeah, well, you don’t have to snap at me. Here I was trying to be humanistical and shit.”

  “Sorry, honey. You want to switch off?”

  “Well, I was going to offer, but then you were a dick.”

  “I’ll be your best friend.”

  “You already are.”

  “Then I’ll add a cookie.”

  “No raisins.” Junior put his coat and mittens on. I could have made fun of the mittens, but I really, really wanted to warm myself up. Besides, he at least had mittens. All I had was my continued badass status and impending frostbite.

  “Wait a minute…” I said. Over twenty years of friendship and a decade of working together, and Junior had never before offered to switch out on a cold winter night. Mostly because he was pissy about me making fun of his mittens.

  “What?” Junior said with all the innocence of a fox with feathers stuck between its teeth.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Why does something have to be happening?”

  “We got a problem?”

  “Brewing,” Junior said, busted.

  “Goddammit. What the hell is going on now?” Junior wasn’t one to shy away from a situation in the bar. If anything, the opposite was the norm. I was missing something.

  Junior lifted his chin to indicate where the problem was. Even in the packed bar, I could see the issue at hand. Waves of tension were flowing forward from where two guys sat at the end of the bar.

  Kissing.

  Great. On top of everything else, I’d have to play Dick Police too.

  Junior didn’t bother hiding his disgust at their show. Personally, I didn’t like seeing anybody dry humping at the bar.

  And the couple on hand was going for broke. Even at the other end of the bar, I could see their tongues dancing like a pink pair of tangoing eels.

  “Those two are heading into Painsville. Population: them,” Junior said, shaking his head.

  Like I said, I didn’t give a damn who was trading fluid. But I could see that the chromosomal match of the two was making Junior’s skin crawl.

  And Junior wasn’t alone. Some dangerous looks were shooting the lovebirds’ way from the surrounding crowd.

  The Cellar happens to be the biggest scumbag bar in Boston, complete with a high level of tolerance for behavior that would be frowned upon in polite society. Cursing. Fighting. Drinking until you puked. All of those were pretty common. We didn’t encourage the latter two, but they happened.

  A couple furiously making out at the end of the bar wasn’t unacceptable.

  But when you were two dudes?

  And that bar was The Cellar?

  It was suicidal.

  “We’re gonna have to do something,” I said.

  “All yours,” Junior said with finality.

  “Rock-paper-scissors?”

  “No fuckin’ way. Frankly, I’m inclined to let the lions have ’em.” He lifted his chin toward the mob of non-progressives forming by the pinball machine.

  Junior had never been much of a humanitarian.

  It was like watching a Discovery Channel show. The predators slowly gathered around the prey. Three different factions of skinhead, normally divided on the principals of who to hate the most, were milling behind the couple. The discussion over how to most successfully beat the crap out of the lovers had apparently unified them.

  Jesus.

  “Fine.” I walked through the tight crowd, keeping my eyes on the action soon to be at hand if I didn’t hustle. If the situation went fubar, people were going to get knocked over.

  I stood close enough where the lovebirds should have noticed me. If they did, they didn’t let it interfere with their making out. “Excuse me,” I yelled, so as to be heard over the blaring jukebox.

  The two stopped mashing on each other to slowly turn their gazes on me, burning with attitude. “Is there a problem?” the smaller one asked. He was wearing a muscle shirt and had more gel in his hair than most boy bands.

  “Guys…seriously,” I stammered. “You’re gonna have to cut it out.”

  The other guy had on a clean-cut suit and looked mildly embarrassed, but the blaze of self-righteousness burned white-hot in the smaller one. He was a guy used to having things his way. “You have a problem with us? Is that it?”

  “No,” I sort of lied. “But this isn’t the place.”

  “C’mon, Alex. Let’s go.” The Suit took Alex by the hand and stood up from his barstool. I allowed myself some hope that they would leave of their own accord, and that would be the end of it. At least Suit seemed to know what time it was. And that time was to go.

  Alex was having none of it. “What? This isn’t the place?” He stood, but only so he could waggle his finger closer to my nose. “We need a place? You want to put us in our own place? Jawohl, mein Fuhrer.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  I desperately wanted to grab Alex’s finger and twist it until he cried, but I could feel the heat of the mob’s hatred burning behind me, rising in equal measure to Alex’s indignation.

  “
Alex, this is ridiculous.” The Suit had picked up on the vibe. He grabbed Alex’s arm.

  Alex violently tore himself away. “No! No. I want to hear this.”

  I breathed deeply through my nose and tried to keep my temper and my voice even. “Listen to your buddy, Alex. You’re opening yourself up to a world of trouble right now.”

  Alex laughed right in my face. “What, from you, tough guy? Do you know who I am?”

  Oh, that old chestnut.

  Under other circumstances, I’d choke the laugh from his throat. He knew it too. He savored waving the meat in front of the chained pit bull.

  Enough.

  I’d had enough.

  “No,” I said. “But I’m sure I’ll read in the newspapers who you used to be.”

  All it took was a step back and a turn around.

  The hooligans knew what that meant.

  All hell was about to break loose. And I’d just signaled the go-ahead by giving the lovebirds my back.

  Before I took step one, the sound of a pint glass shattering hit my ears. Some girl to my left screamed.

  Alex screamed.

  I turned back to see The Suit bleeding from a half dozen places where the glass had cut him. Alex’s scream was cut short by the right fist of a Nazi skin burying itself deeply into his stomach. As he dropped to the floor on his knees, a boot from a punk rocker caught him right in the jaw.

  “Call the fucking cops,” I yelled to Audrey behind the bar.

  It was an all-out donnybrook. I grabbed at shirts willy-nilly and shoved them toward the door. Junior met them halfway and both he and G.G. ejected the fighters into the Square. The Suit tried to run. As he turned out the door, I saw two more skins tackle him to the ground, out of my line of sight.

  I grabbed Alex and lifted him off the hardwood. He had an awful big mouth for a guy who couldn’t have weighed more than a buck ten.

  “Please,” he pleaded. Tears ran down his terrified face, mingling with the blood and snot running down his nose. “Help us.”

  “I tried, you stupid prick.” I hauled him through the bloodthirsty crowd, half of which didn’t even know why they were swinging fists.

  Welcome to The Cellar.

  When we hit the doorway, I pulled his ear close to my mouth and said, “You better run your legs faster than you do your mouth.” I then chucked him into Kenmore Square, trying to throw him behind the hate-filled mob that was beating on his boyfriend.