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  To his credit, Alex didn’t run.

  He tried to help his partner, pulling him out from under the fists raining down.

  He got him stood up, at which point they tried to escape their attackers together.

  They didn’t get far. Suit went down in the snow again. Then Alex hit the ground next to his boyfriend and rolled into a ball as the boots rained down.

  Behind me came a sound of fist-on-flesh. Another skin flew through the air and out the door as G.G. followed. “That’s the last of the brawlers.” The big man was wild-eyed and panting from the adrenaline rush. “What was that about?”

  Junior spat onto the sidewalk. “Fuck ’em. It’s a lesson that needed learning, right, Boo?”

  I felt sick as the mob tired itself out beating the helpless men and scattered like roaches as sirens roared into the square. I could see blood dotting the snow around their unconscious bodies.

  I’d had the option of at least protecting Alex. I’d had his salvation in my hands. I could have easily dragged him up the back stairs and locked him in the office until the free-for-all had died out. I could have saved him the beating rather than tossing him.

  I wasn’t all that sure I would have done any of it.

  And it didn’t make me feel good when I realized that.

  ***

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Junior was righteously put-off by his tagalong assignment on Jason St. John, lead singer of The Kingly. The band had finally gotten on stage for their first set, Jason well into his rock star douchebag routine, and I was trying to both placate Junior and dodge the line of questioning from the cop with the notebook.

  “Excuse me, can that wait a minute?” The young cop was trying to sort out how two semi-conscious homosexuals wound up ten feet from the door of the club. “So you’re saying that the fight was outside.”

  “I’m not saying it was a fight at all. The two who got taken away in the ambulance got the unholy fuck beaten out of them.”

  The cop leveled his glare at me. “But they were inside the club. That’s where it started.”

  “I’m saying that those two were deliberately inciting a dangerous element that was inside the club. I told them to cut it out or leave. They were followed outside.” Sometimes it disturbed me how practiced I was at telling the cops only as much truth as they needed to hear. Since part of my job was to keep the club out of danger from lawsuits and legal issues, I had to walk a delicate balance when you considered that the rest of what I did opened up the club to lawsuits and legal issues.

  The Tightrope of Bullshit, Junior calls it.

  “Are any of their attackers still inside?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  “Nope.” I knew the names of some of the brawlers, but I wasn’t getting myself or The Cellar involved any more than I had to. Playing dumb was the best way to accomplish that.

  I play dumb real well.

  The cop handed me a card with the precinct information on it. “If you see any of them, give us a call.”

  “Sure.” Just for shits and giggles, I took the card. The cops were going to have better luck calling the Madame Vesuvia Gypsy Fortune Hotline for information.

  The cop left and I sat on the barstool by the door. I could feel Junior seething behind me. “Say it.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit or not, Tommy wants one of us to go.” I rubbed my sore leg. The cold seeping through my clothes jammed dull rods of pain into the place where a piece of my leg used to be. The place where a bullet made a beeline through my thigh less than a year before. I kneaded the area above my knee to indicate to Junior why I wasn’t the best candidate to be tailing anybody through a goddamn nor’easter.

  Junior’s face pinched up as the sense within my words stung him. During the same timeframe of my unfortunate run-in with a bullet, Junior had played chicken with a midsized sedan and lost. Lost badly. As much as my injury hadn’t healed entirely, Junior was left in tougher shape. He’d recovered all right, but had dropped a lot of muscle during his recuperation, making him the most expendable staff member and he knew it. He was still a bruiser, but he was now a good fifteen pounds lighter than me and had two good legs on him to boot.

  Almost on cue, Tommy came off the main floor and walked over to us. “You’re gonna follow Jason, right?” he asked Junior directly.

  “I got him,” I said quickly, “but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  Junior’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say anything. In the split-second that Tommy asked the question, I decided it would serve the night better to give Junior a bit of his tough-guy dignity back and fuck my discomfort. Besides, most of the crowd that remained post-brawl were just fans of The Kingly. And they were more of a chai latte than coffee and whiskey crew.

  Tommy looked back to me. He didn’t give a good goddamn who went, so long as somebody stayed close to his Friday night investment. “Just make sure he’s back here a half hour after they finish the first set.”

  Historically, Jason St. John had a bad tendency to get doped up between sets. In times past, Jason had disappeared between sets for unacceptable amounts of time that would piss off the audience. Sometimes, he didn’t return at all, like he did last summer at The Middle East—at which point the club’s owners had to return the ten-dollar cover to the crowd of over six hundred. As a rule, club owners aren’t keen on handing back six grand that they already had in their pockets.

  A pissed off crowd was also not what a club wanted.

  The Kingly had a bad rep at all the venues as a result, but they still put asses in seats.

  “You sure?” Junior said after Tommy walked downstairs. “How’s your leg?” he asked, a little ashamed.

  “It’s fine,” I lied. I really needed to rest it, but Junior needed the show of confidence more.

  “It’s still bullshit,” Junior said, cracking his knuckles.

  “Part of the job, my man,” I said.

  Sadly, it was.

  The music in the basement built to a crescendo, the crowd’s energy matching the rise. The song stopped suddenly and the audience erupted. I put on my black fleece hat and walked down the stairs. G.G. stood at the bottom, huge arms folded, watching the crowd for misbehavior.

  “Damn, Boo. These white boys ain’t half bad,” he said.

  “Why do you have to bring white into it?”

  “Because they’ll never be half as good as Earth, Wind & Fire.”

  “Fair enough.” I scanned the crowd for Jason. I couldn’t find him in the milling mass. “You see Jason?” I figured G.G. might have a better vantage point, being six inches taller than me.

  “Who’s Jason?”

  “The skinny jerkoff who just finished singing.”

  “He left the stage and went up the back stairs before the last note ended.”

  Dammit. I limped my way through the audience, hampered by my size and gimpy leg. I found a pocket of space and went up the back stairs fast as I could. In my delusion, I’d hoped that the nor’easter might deter Jason from leaving between sets. No such luck. I opened the metal back door and saw him trudging over a drift at the north end of the municipal parking lot behind the bar.

  I guess “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” applied to junkies as well as to the post office.

  Tailing someone isn’t as easy as you’d think, even aided as I was by the blinding snow—note the word “blinding.” The flakes stuck in thick clumps to my eyelids and icy water stung my eyes as they melted. Tommy was damned sure going to give me a hazard bonus after this crap.

  I followed Jason onto the ass-end of Newbury Street, where he made a right going to Brookline Ave. He never looked back once, the needs of his mission giving him something else to worry about. He would have spotted me in a heartbeat, the two of us being the only pedestrians on that length of real estate. On Brookline, he made a left. If I was a betting man, I’d have laid money that his destination would b
e on the stretch of clubs off Lansdowne. I’d have been right too.

  While it was easier to lose myself in the small masses of people on Lansdowne, it was also easier for him to blend in. Why couldn’t this asshole be four inches taller? For that matter, why couldn’t I?

  As I was about to lose him for good, I saw the top of his greasy hairdo walk into Raja, one of the many trendy lounges that had been infesting my Boston for the last ten years. Lounges that liked keeping guys like me off the premises by charging twelve bucks for a whiskey.

  I followed him into the spacious bar, incense punching holes in my cold-stuffed nose. The place was done up in bold crimsons and dark wood, blood-hued curtains hanging off the walls, Mediterranean style. Groups of expensively dressed patrons reclined on oversized gold silk pillows. Stuffed with baby seal fur, no doubt. The Raja was a startling contrast to the lead-paint nouveaux style of The Cellar.

  Jason was beelining for Ian Summerfield, who sat at the bar he owned—Raja only one of the few he supposedly had a piece of. The British ex-pat sat resplendent in a suit that I might have been able to afford if I took a second mortgage out on the house I didn’t own. Without any evidence other than the gossip that floated bar-to-bar, I knew Ian had supposedly bankrolled his bar investments with the massive amount of narcotics that he funneled through them.

  Seeing that he and Jason knew each other—the twenty-something hipster rocker douche and the middle-aged poseur bar impresario—leant some weight to the gossip.

  Ian had an obscenely filled cognac glass in his hand and was conversing with another nattily dressed individual. (I only used the words “resplendent” and “nattily” where Ian and his cohorts were concerned.) His eyes caught Jason moving across the floor, and I thought I could detect a slightly disgusted eye roll from the Englishman.

  He leaned to the other side and spoke into the ear of a bar bimbo in a scoop-backed dress. She nodded and stood, her pink martini lifted off the bar as she moved away from the upcoming conversation that, no doubt, Ian didn’t want her to hear.

  She turned and nodded to him, a half smile on her ruby lips.

  My insides turned as cold as my outsides when I recognized both the smile and the lips it played across.

  Chapter Two

  A lot of things suck in my world. For the most part, my top three have been the New York Yankees, tartar sauce, and catching my dick in my zipper.

  But goddamn, I had a new number one with a bullet…and I can’t even put a name to it. It was the feeling that donkey-punched my soul when I realized that the bar bimbo hanging off the arm of Boston’s biggest—rumored—peddler of fancy-pants pharmaceuticals was somebody I gave a lot of fucks about at one point.

  The bar bimbo was my ex-girlfriend, Kelly.

  Well, technically, she wasn’t my girlfriend.

  It’s complicated.

  Most would say we’d merely spent some time touching each other’s naughty bits. It was a little more than that.

  At least I thought it was.

  For me it was.

  Like I said…

  Complicated.

  Either way, holy bouncing Buddha on a pogo stick.

  In that moment of chest-seizing shock, blackness swarmed in from my left. For a second I thought I’d fainted, until I realized that the blackness was solid.

  “Hey, Boo.” Marcus Beauchamp stood right in my line of vision.

  “Hey, Marcus,” I said through teeth clenched tight enough to press a diamond. “Didn’t know IronClad was taking contracts at drug dens now.”

  The big boss and chief of IronClad Security folded his thick arms. IronClad was one of the main competitors to my and Junior’s own 4DC Security. And by competition, I meant like The New England Patriots were competitors with the Kippy’s Diner Pop Warner team. IronClad did security for hoity-toity rich people clubs, visiting heads of state, and major corporations.

  4DC? We followed two-bit junkies around in a fucking blizzard.

  At least our name was cooler, even though we ripped off “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” from AC/DC.

  So, nanny, nanny boo-boo on them.

  Marcus sniffed and ran his finger along the lapels of his own natty suit. Christ, was everyone natty? What the hell did natty mean, anyway? “You still working in that flea-infested rock club, or you here to bother my patrons for some loose change?”

  I went to step around him. “Excuse me,” I said, not really giving a flying fuck if I was excused or not.

  In case you haven’t figured it yet, we didn’t like each other very much.

  He placed a thick hand flat on my chest. The excusing didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon.

  I looked past Marcus’s shoulder to Kelly. Ian’s hand trailed dangerously low on her hip as she walked to a banquette on the end of the bar. The edges around the room were starting to flare red. I wasn’t the jealous type, but if that hand had touched ass…

  Marcus saw me looking and pulled one of the curtains down over the doorway. “Unh-uh. No peeking. Why don’t you hit the pavement before somebody in here thinks we’re operating a homeless shelter.” He swept a gesture toward my clothes.

  I looked down at the worn sweatshirt and jeans I’d purchased late in the last millennium. At least my Army-Navy pea coat was pretty new. And my fleece hat was straight-up Tar-Jay, bitches. “I’m keeping an eye on Jason over there. He’s playing at The Cellar tonight and we don’t need him skagged out on your boss’s products.”

  “I don’t give two shits if you’re keeping an eye on your mother’s fat ass while she sucks my dick.”

  The crimson edges to my vision flared a little sharper. Right around Marcus’s head.

  “Watch your mouth, Marcus. I’m warning—”

  Marcus laughed. “This isn’t your house, Malone. It’s mine. Besides you falling depths below our dress code, we have instructions to keep you, specifically, out of here.”

  What? “Huh?”

  “You heard me.” Marcus rolled his shoulders, readying for me to make a move that wasn’t verbal.

  “You want me out, you’re going to have to do better than that, Marcus. .” I let the challenge hang on my words. I walked past him and grabbed a handful of hanging curtain.

  Marcus’s hand closed around my neck and shoved me back. When I hit the wall, the blood rushed into my head and the world went red. I braced my back against the wall and slammed my knee into Marcus’s sternum. When he doubled over, I brought the knee back up into his skull, pressing his head down to amplify the impact. Something went crunch and Marcus dropped sideways, his grasping hand pulling down the whole kit and caboodle of curtain on top of him. The room gasped and there I was. As grand an entrance as a fuckwit could make. I took a step forward, ready to grab Jason by the scruff of his neck and drag him back to The Cellar by force.

  Instead, I pitched forward and belly-flopped onto the floor.

  Note to any tough guys: Don’t knee somebody twice with your bad leg. All the motivational rage in the world won’t make a bad leg behave.

  I crashed down face-to-face with Marcus. Blood gushed satisfyingly from his smashed nose and his eyes were slightly crossed. “You shouldn’t talk about my mother.”

  It was the best I had.

  Two more nattily suited mooses—meese?—broke through the initial paralysis that accompanied sudden violence and launched themselves toward us. A quick assessment of the situation told me they weren’t coming to take my drink order. Favoring my newly re-injured getaway stick, I hopped furiously toward the exit. The better part of valor, and all. As I burst out the door, I stole a glance back and caught Kelly’s eyes.

  I wished I hadn’t. Beyond the obvious surprise and curiosity, I saw a sea of sadness in them, even at a hundred feet. And a good dose of pity.

  Even outside, I wasn’t safe from Marcus’s stampeding goons. If somebody had gotten the drop on Junior inside The Cellar like I did with their homie, they wouldn’t have been in the clear until I couldn’t chase them anymo
re—which, in my current state, amounted to about six feet.

  A cab pulled up in front of Raja, the door opening. I hobbled around the other side and jumped into the open door before the exiting passenger shut it. One of Marcus’s moose—meese?—spotted me in the cab, yelled for his buddy.

  “Kenmore Square, please,” I said. Always room for politeness.

  The cab driver turned and looked at me. “Are you kidding me here? Kenmore’s around the corner.”

  “What are you, Magellan? Drive.” My two pursuers burst out the door. “Drive. Drive!”

  The first moose yanked the door handle of the cab, pulling hard enough to rock the car noticeably.

  Joke was on them. I’d locked the door. Clever man.

  Then he opened the passenger door on the front, swinging a huge fist wrapped in a pair of chromed brass knuckles at the partition. The plexi held, but boomed as the meaty fist ricocheted off.

  Calmly, I slid open the partition, reached through the window, and grabbed the moose’s wrist. “Kenmore Square, please,” I said a second time, a lot louder.

  “Holy Jesus!” the cabbie yelled, flooring the pedal just as another moose was running around to the passenger side with a piece of rebar in his mitts.

  The cab sprayed dirty snow into the face of the second moose as we dragged his partner down Lansdown.

  Halfway down the street, I let go of my attacker’s wrist and watched as he hit the slush-filled curb. The cab gave a slight buh-bump as it rolled over his ankle.

  As I looked back, the guy sat in the dirty snow, clutching his foot and screaming like a death metal singer who’d stepped on a Lego. Looked like I’d made one more successful assault on IronClad, via cab-on-tootsie.

  Score one for the good guy.

  I barely had enough time to breathe a sigh of relief at my own survival as the cab made the two short lefts and pulled up in front of The Cellar. I figured I’d have the rest of the night to breathe all the sighs I needed.