THE FLINCH
MICHAEL BOATMAN
SONNY TROUBADOUR WAS waiting to cash what passed for his paycheck when Scrape Rifkin’s Cadillac Escalade pounded up to the curb and disgorged three hundred pounds of human sewage.
Sonny’s guts convulsed as he watched the rest of his day slide down the toilet.
Just what I goddamn need, he thought.
Sonny pocketed his check and cracked his knuckles.
The chronically discouraged patrons of the Windy City Cash-Rite Currency Exchange dropped to the floor as Norman Morris, aka Nomo, and L’Dondrell Witherspoon, aka O-gazm, burst into their midst.
“That’s right,” Nomo said. “I want every one of you ugly bastards to lick this dirty-ass linoleum. Keep your asses horizontal and I won’t have to shoot nobody today.”
Sonny remained vertical. Nomo noticed.
“You got a problem with yo’ knees, motherfucker?”
Sonny shrugged. “Knees are fine,” he said. “Just not goin’ down today.”
Nomo’s brow crinkled. “You ain’t what?” he said.
“What did he say?” O-gazm said.
“Big man say he ain’t gon’ eat no linoleum today,” Nomo said.
O-gazm gaped.
“Watch the heifer,” Nomo said, pointing to the manager, a big black blonde who peered out from behind her bulletproof plastic window. “She moves, kill somebody.”
Nomo pointed his Sig Sauer 9mm at Sonny’s forehead.
“Look like we got us a bad man here,” he said.
Sonny stared down the barrel of Nomo’s gun.
No kinda life for a man anyhow, he thought.
“He don’t look so bad,” O-gazm said over his shoulder.
Nomo’s gold teeth bounced pellets of ghetto sunlight off Sonny’s retinas. Notorious for spending other people’s money on his smile, Nomo sported the kind of dental retrofit that makes racist South African gold exporters sing “God Bless America”
“Who you supposed to be?” he said. “Black Superman?”
“No,” Sonny said. “But if you don’t shoot me in the next ten seconds I’m gonna take that gun and whip your ass with it.”
“Lord have mercy,” the manager moaned.
Nomo shook his head as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. His gaze flicked over Sonny’s shoulder to where the Scrape’s SUV sat rumbling at the curb.
“Five seconds,” Sonny said.
“I’m gonna …” Nomo stuttered. The tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth, moistened his lips, and darted back into its golden cave. “I’m gonna—”
Then Sonny rushed him.
Nomo fired high and wide over Sonny’s left shoulder, blasting a hole through the front window and setting off the burglar alarm. Then Sonny bitch-slapped the 9mm out of his hand.
“Hey! Hey, man—”
And that was all Nomo said, because his mouth was abruptly filled with Sonny’s fist.
“Yo! Yo! Yo!” O-gazm said.
Sonny grabbed Nomo by the collar and swung him around in a wide, staggering circle. The barrel of O-gazm’s Saturday night special jerked back and forth.
“Stand still, goddammit!” he said.
Sonny launched Nomo across the room like an Olympic shot-putter. Nomo slammed into O-gazm, and they both went down in a flurry of flailing limbs.
Sonny bent and picked up Nomo’s gun.
Sensing the ass-mangling trucking their way, the would-be bandits rose to the challenge, each according to his gifts: Nomo assumed a classic “Crane style” kung fu pose while O-gazm pissed his pants. Fifteen seconds later they resembled a half-assed reproduction of a lesser-known Picasso pencil sketch.
Sonny hauled the brigands outside and speed-plowed his right foot, size 16½, up their backsides. Nomo and O-gazm hit the Cadillac and crumpled, having been literally kicked to the curb. A second later, the street-side back door opened and the Scrape stepped out.
“Jesus,” Sonny said. “You look like shit.”
The Scrape looked … squeezed, like a half-eaten Florida grapefruit with its innards scooped out, leaving behind an empty bit of skin and a whiff of rotten produce.
I’m looking at the rind, Sonny thought. Man’s been sucked dry.
Looking at the Scrape made Sonny’s head hurt.
The Scrape squinted up at the sun like a groundhog that was shaky on the terms of its contract. Then he pulled a pair of designer shades out of the pocket of his imitation tiger-skin jacket.
“Fuck you,” he said. “You look like you could use some scratch, brah. You want a job?”
Sonny scowled. But then he remembered the daily spine-grind that was his post office gig, surrounded by gibbering sistahs who treated him like an adopted teddy bear one minute and a complete chowderhead the next, all under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Bobbi-with-an-i.
Bobbi-with-an-i was a Jamaican ballet instructor moonlighting with the USPS until Baryshnikov died. The day before, he’d invited Sonny up to his place in Boy’s Town for “cocktails and career counseling.” Sonny was beginning to have serious questions about Bobbi-with-an-i.
Finally, Sonny remembered the disconnect notices piling up in his kitchen trash bin. His car, a brown Ford Fiesta with a death wish, was squatting in an impound lot on Randolph Street, banked for a D.U.I. he’d picked up a week earlier.
“Yeah,” Sonny said. “What do you need?”
By the time he was fifteen, Tommy “the Scrape” Rifkin had amassed a small fortune selling black market ordnance. By his twenty-first birthday, he’d taken over the local crack/Ecstasy/crystal meth trade, all while managing to evade select representatives of Chicago’s Finest.
This talent for skullduggery—plus an obsession with all things NASCAR that brought new meaning to the word autoerotic—had secured Rifkin’s induction into the South Chicago White Trash Hall of Fame.
The Scrape’s nasal whine complemented his lair: half trailer park chic, half ghetto-fabulous. A black leather La-Z-Boy sat between a framed poster of Malcolm X and a life-sized standup of Dale Earnhardt Jr.
“I need you to find my girl and bring her back,” Rifkin said. “It’s worth five large if you bring her back.”
Rifkin swiped at his forehead with a paper towel while Sonny picked his jaw up off the table.
Five large, he thought, trying not to drool.
“Yo,” Rifkin said. “You was almost the champ, right?”
Sonny tensed: people still recognized him three or four times a day, and it chapped his ass.
“Yeah,” Rifkin said. “I saw your style back at the Cash-Rite. You was a contender, bro. Don King called your right cross ‘an extinction-level cosmic smackdown from the Devil Hisself.’”
“That was a long time ago,” Sonny said.
“Bro, I remember the Champ chewin’ on your ear like it was yesterday,” Rifkin said. “Vegas o-six, right? Dude, that shit was disgusting.”
“Five years ago,” Sonny said. “Past is past.”
It was during Sonny’s last shot at the title that the reigning champ, a semihuman piledriver named Baron Flake, laid him low with a left-handed uppercut to the occipital that detached his right cornea. Sonny woke up to find Flake gnawing on his left earlobe, his demolished eye spitting blood, while faerie lights popped and fizzled along his optic nerve like a paparazzi assault from hell.
The hospital stay sucked and blew at the same time.
Afterward, Sonny attempted a comeback, but every time he heard the bell clang he would rush to the side and puke over the ropes. Finally, Sonny’s trainer, the inimitable Sharkey Washington, took him aside.
“My three-legged Pekingese got a better shot at a title bout than you do, boy,” Sharkey growled. “It’s over.”
Then Sharkey, who was the closest thing to a father Sonny would ever know, wiped his protégé’s secondhand breakfast off his polyester warm-ups and dropped dead from congestive heart failure.
“Ahem,” Rifkin said. “Yo, Troub, you with me?”
Sonny shoved his memories aside to consider the matter at hand: Rifkin looked wobbly as Commander-in-Thief of this shitty little outfit. His focus fluttered around the room like a fruit bat on steroids.
Why won’t he look me in the eye? Sonny wondered.
Rifkin noticed Sonny noticing him and—flinched. Nomo and O-gazm grumbled. Post–pistol whipping, the brigands looked surlier than ever.
Better close the deal now, Son, Sharkey advised from the Great Beyond, ’fore somebody separates this fool from his pointy little head.
But Sonny was curious.
“Why can’t you go and get her yourself?” he said.
“Mooother-fucker,” Nomo hissed.
O-gazm spat on the floor.
Rifkin flinched.
“Yo, Black Superman, you ask a lotta dumb questions,” Nomo said.
“Sit your stupid ass down, Mo,” Rifkin said.
Nomo backed down. The Scrape peeled another paper towel and went to town on himself. Sonny winced.
Sounds like sandpaper scratchin’ at dead wood.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Rifkin said.
Sonny agreed and decided that he was officially ready to get away from these people.
“Where was the last place you saw her?” he said.
Rifkin shook his head. “She stole something from me,” he insisted. “Two weeks ago. I need it back.”
“She s’posed to be dancin’ around the titty bars in the Loop,” Nomo said.
“What’s her name?” Sonny said.
“Her name is Harmony,” Rifkin whispered.
“Harmony Tremontane.”
* * *
Twenty-seven hours later, Sonny was standing in the main room of the Shakedown, an upscale gentleman’s club off Rush Street, waiting for another hardbody to take her clothes off and trying not to puke.
Innards were never the same after that last bout, Sonny thought. His stomach rumbled in agreement. These days, a night spent partying with a pint of Jim Beam always preceded a morning spent clutching the ky-bowl with one hand and a bottle of Maalox with the other.
Seems you just about livin’ on J.B. and Maalox, Son.
Sonny shook Sharkey’s voice out of his head, but he was staring at the bar, and his mouth was watering.
Focus, he reminded himself.
The dancer onstage swept up her cash and ran off to a smattering of applause.
“This next young lady joins us after a whirlwind national tour of Oh! Calcutta!” the announcer said.
You gotta be kiddin’, Sonny thought.
“Men, let’s get it up for—Harmony Tremontane!”
Sonny’s focus snapped toward the stage.
The music started. The red curtain parted. Sonny stopped breathing.
She was more than beautiful.
Earlier, Nomo had told him that the Scrape’s woman was a slag: skinny, with faux-luscious breasts that looked ludicrous on her shriveled frame. But this Harmony Tremontane was tall, with lithe brown legs that swept her across the stage. Her thighs were full but taut. A red-gold Afro framed her face like a halo made of sunfire.
“I’ll be … damned,” Sonny whispered.
If anyone could steal something from a freak like the Scrape and survive, it would be a girl who looked like that.
“Yep, that’s her,” one of the bouncers volunteered. “Harmony Tree-mon-taaane.”
The bouncer was wearing a black T-shirt with the words “Does Not Play Well with Others” emblazoned across his seventy-five-inch chest.
“I heard she did pornos out in La-La Land before she blew into Chi,” the bouncer said. “Very talented. You feel me, Troub?”
The bouncer held up a hand in a high-five gesture, but Sonny was in no mood for camaraderie. Besides, he advocated rough disemboweling for anyone over thirty who didn’t have time to say “Chicago.”
“But ain’t nobody gettin’ within a mile of that tonight,” the bouncer said. “She’s with Block Tokomatsu.”
High-Five pointed a sausage-thick finger toward a table near the stage. Seated at the table were five of the biggest human beings Sonny had ever seen.
Block Tokomatsu was a half-Japanese/half-Samoan player down from Milwaukee. He’d done a stretch out at Marion State Correctional on a murder-2 convic, plus stints here and there for all manner of antisocial activities.
Block Tokomatsu regularly beat the melanin out of scores of brothers for light exercise. He doled out ass-whippings the way the Pope dispensed benedictions at Christmas: he was the Supreme Pontiff of the Righteous Beatdown.
“Hey, Black Superman.”
Sonny turned to find Nomo lingering like a bad fart.
“That’s the homely bitch right there.”
Homely? Sonny thought. Who’s he looking at?
“Hold on a minute,” Sonny cautioned. But Nomo whipped out his wireless and pushed Send.
“Yo, she’s here,” he said. “At the Shakedown. “He nodded, twice, and disconnected. He glared at Sonny with reefer-enriched rancor.
“Scrape say you better do yo’ job,” he said. “Else I’m gon’ handle you like I shoulda handled your big ass back at the currency s’change.”
Do it, the Troub urged in Sonny’s mind. Just reach over and pop that neck like a chicken bone.
Sonny savored the fantasy for a moment and decided it wasn’t worth the shit storm that would follow. He needed to be shut of this crew like nobody’s bid, but there was still the matter of five-large-plus-expenses to settle before he could call it a night.
“I’ll get her,” he rumbled, certain that this was all going to end badly. “And the word is ex-change, idiot.”
While Nomo tried to figure out if he’d just been insulted, Sonny advanced toward the black leather hillock that was Block Tokomatsu’s back.
Let’s do this.
James Brown was extolling the virtues of being both Black and Proud via the state-of-the-art sound system. The DJ worked two turntables with one hand and a hard drive with the other, a digital rain dance that filled the Shakedown with hip-hop thunder. Relentless rhythm jiggled Sonny’s organs as he sat at a table behind Tokomatsu and his cronies.
How the hell am I supposed to get her past all those big Samoans? he wondered.
A bevy of the prettiest dancers adorned the Block’s table, laughing too loudly, casting fox-eyed glances in the Block’s direction even while they flirted with his lieutenants.
Tokomatsu looked oblivious to the cold war of sexual innuendo being waged around him. He tracked Harmony’s every move, his eyes flickering between her and the main entrance the way a nervous pimp guards a hooker with her original teeth.
What have you gotten yourself into? Sonny thought.
Harmony finished her number six feet up the “fireman’s pole,” her legs spread wide, toes peaked in an exquisite dancer’s “point.” She slid to the floor, gathered up her cash, and vanished behind the red curtain. The lights changed and the mostly male audience erupted into a barnyard cacophony.
A flash of silver drew Sonny’s focus down to the waistline of one of the Block’s lieutenants. A quick glance around the Samoans’ table confirmed the sinking sensation in his gut.
They’re all strapped, he thought.
Brute force was not going to get him around the Block.
Gotta think, boy, Sharkey might have said. Can’t punch your way outta every fight.
Sonny gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.
Sixty seconds later he borrowed a pen from a passing loser, scribbled a note on a cocktail napkin, and handed it to one of the uglier waitresses along with a twenty for her troubles.
Two songs died before the waitress returned and Sonny learned that his night was about to get a lot more complicated:
Dear Shithead,
Do the world a favor and blow your goddamn head off.
H.
Gotta do this the hard way then, Sonny thought.
You don’t “gotta” do anything, Sharkey said in his head.
Sonny waved the ugly waitress over again.
“J.B. straight,” he said. “Make it a double.”
The waitress nodded and waddled off.
A few minutes later, Sonny was staring at a tall glass of the straight medicine, and marveling at how the overhead disco lights made the ice cubes twinkle.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, even though it was July.
He emptied the glass and gestured a cute little Korean import over.
“Buy me a drink?” the stripper said.
“Private dance,” Sonny rumbled. He got to his feet and the stripper’s eyes brightened.
“Ooohh, you’re a big one,” she said. Then she smiled, straightened Sonny’s collar, and led him into the back room.
Red lights and naked women were everywhere.
In the corner off to Sonny’s right, two strippers were dancing for a man and his date, a redhead with no lips.
“Like redheads,” Sonny said. Meanwhile, the animal crouching behind his eyes stood up and tugged on the bars of its cage.
Wish Flake was here now, he thought, recalling the human piledriver and his unholy uppercut: the red thunderflash that blew out the last candle on Sonny Troubadour’s cake.
Feed him his own damn ear he was here right now.
Sonny sat on a red velvet chair and the stripper started to gyrate. “My name’s Douglas,” she said. “Twenty dollars for one dance?”
“Okay,” Sonny said.
He reached into his wallet and gave over.
Then Harmony glided past his cubicle.
Sonny shoved Douglas out of the way and stood up.
“Hey, Hercules, no rough stuff!” she chirped.
“Sorry, Doug,” Sonny said over his shoulder.
He crossed the room in four strides and headed Harmony off at the bathroom door. She almost bumped into him before she looked up.
“Well?” she said.
Sonny grabbed her around the waist, swung her over his left shoulder, turned, and froze: about two dozen fake fornicators frolicked between him and the door.
“Move!” Sonny bellowed.
Strippers and suckers scattered like roaches.
One girl screamed, then they all chimed in. High-Five, the bouncer from the front, appeared and blocked Sonny’s path.
“Freeze, asshole!”
Sonny uncorked a right cross that lifted High-Five out of his shoes and put his lights out before his ass hit the cheesy red carpet: the Troub was open for business.
Move, he commanded. Move-move-move.
Sonny kicked the exit door open and lunged into the alley. The woman hanging over his shoulder remained silent. She didn’t struggle or scream.
Too scared, Sonny thought.
When Nomo saw Sonny chugging toward him, he dropped his cigarette and jumped into the driver’s seat. Sonny threw open the back door, tossed Harmony inside, and dived in on top of her.
“Goddamn, Black Superman!” Nomo said. “You take yo’ work serious!”
A hail of bullets peppered the right side of the Cadillac. Sonny whirled to see the Block and his lieutenants stampeding toward them, firing as they came.
“Drive!” he shouted.
Nomo jammed the accelerator and laid a smoking trail of burnt rubber across Rush Street. He blew through a red light and headed toward State Street.
“You’re goin’ the wrong way!” Sonny said. “Rifkin’s place is on the West Side!”
“Rifkin don’t want Tokomatsu heatin’ up his territory,” Nomo shouted. “I’m takin’ her to another spot!”
Sonny squinted as the headlight glare from the Block’s black Mercedes shrank his pupils. Adrenaline burned the alcohol haze from the surface of his brain. The fighter’s focus that once helped the Troub inflict brain damage on dozens of opponents cleared Sonny’s head in an atavistic attempt to save his ass.
“You better drive like your nuts are on fire!” he said.
“Don’t worry about my drivin’!” Nomo hollered. “You just keep Ol’ Yeller in check!”
But Harmony was staring at the tenements whipping by. Nomo wrestled the Cadillac down the entrance ramp to a fuck-you chorus of blaring horns. While panicked drivers swerved and collided as Nomo shoehorned the Cadillac onto the expressway, Harmony studied her nails.
Nomo thumbed a red switch on the steering wheel and ignited the illegal afterburners in the Cadillac’s engine. The ninety-second “bum” that followed punched Sonny into the leather seat cushions. Nomo left the black Mercedes on the far side of a snarl of crushed metal and bleeding citizens dwindling in the distance.
“He’s wrong, you know,” Harmony said.
“What?” Sonny said.
Harmony smirked. “What’s mine is mine.”
Sonny winced. He shook his head at the bloom of pain that blossomed behind his right eye.
“You his woman?” Sonny said, trying to distract himself.
Harmony sucked her teeth. “I’m nobody’s woman, fool.”
“You ripped him off.”
“I don’t steal.”
The girl’s eyes flashed.
Sonny shrugged. One thing was certain: once the Scrape had Harmony back in his camp, he’d never let her leave with her skeleton on the inside of her skin.
Harmony shifted, moved closer—Sonny was uncomfortably aware of the heat from her body—and something, a squiggle of quicksilver, shimmered in the woman’s eyes.
“What’s—” Sonny said. “Your eyes …”
“You want some of this, fighter?” Harmony whispered. She reached up behind her neck and undid the straps of her bikini top.
“Hey,” Sonny said. “Hey now …”
Harmony let the top fall. “You’re the same as Rifkin,” she said.
She’d been pretty a moment earlier, but the woman who faced Sonny now might have danced for kings instead of kingpins and dope slingers.
“Your eyes,” Sonny said. “What are you doing?”
Sudden, murderous desire ambushed his common sense. En-flamed, stupid with need, he reached for the stripper.
“What the hell are y’all doin’ back there?” Nomo said.
Sonny’s hand halted a hair’s breadth from the stripper’s thigh. Then something inside him flipped over and he puked onto the floor of the Scrape’s Cadillac.
“Heeeyyy!” Nomo screeched. “Hey, motherfuckahhhh!”
“What …” Sonny gasped. “What happened?”
The air inside the Cadillac was suddenly too dry to breathe. Sonny’s vision doubled, then trebled, Harmony splitting into triplets as he watched.
Nomo screeched. “Rifkin gon’ have my ass behind this, you big dumb bastard!”
“Hush,” Harmony snapped.
And something happened. Nomo shut his mouth and turned around. His head slumped forward onto the steering wheel.
“Hey,” Sonny moaned, guts burning. “What’s goin’ on?”
Harmony was staring at him as if he’d just appeared out of thin air. Her clothing was completely intact.
“I—I—” Sonny stuttered.
He looked out the window.
They were sitting in an abandoned grocery store parking lot, but Sonny didn’t remember leaving the highway.
“Lady, who the hell are you?” he said.
Harmony’s smile slashed a bright afterimage across Sonny’s vision, like lightning gouging the spectral flesh of midnight skies.
“That’s easy, Andrew,” she said, though he’d never told her his real name. “I’m your dream date.”
It was then that Sonny noticed two small crystal vials dangling from a leather string tied around the woman’s neck. She fingered the vials as she spoke.
“Why don’t we go someplace quiet?” she said. “Where I can show you what you’ve been dreaming about.”
Sonny swallowed, cleared his throat. “Skank,” he said. “Parasite.”
“Oh?”
“You’re Rifkin’s whore,” Sonny snarled. “Or Tokomatsu’s. Either way, from what I can see, you ain’t worth the trouble.”
Harmony laughed. The vials around her neck chimed. To Sonny, the chiming sounded like screams.
“We’re not so different, you and me,” she said.
Sonny shook his head, tried to clear his vision. Nomo slumped across the front seat like a marionette with its strings cut. The black walls of the Cadillac pressed closer, stifling Sonny in leather and chrome.
“You don’t know … anything about me,” he said.
“I know you smell more like a distillery than a man,” Harmony said. “But it’s the smell of blood that made you what you are.”
“Shut up.”
“I know you sometimes wish that boy from New York had killed you dead rather than made you into the thing I’m lookin’ at now.”
Harmony’s fingers stroked crystalline peals of anguish from the vials, each note an accompaniment to the agony in Sonny’s gut.
“You drink to kill the despair, but you can’t,” she said. “You was bigger than this. Once upon a time you held power in your hand, power that set you above other men. Then the world moved on, left you bleedin’ in that ring, half-blind, too old and too stupid to get up.”
“Stop,” Sonny said.
Harmony leaned over and placed her left index finger on Sonny’s knee. “I can change all that,” she said. “I can take you to a place where the dead dance in fields of blood-red violets. Where the air is black with power and the earth is seeded with ashes.”
Sonny shook his head. But he was standing at ringside and watching himself bleed.
“I—I don’t want to seel,” he whispered.
“Oh, but you do,” Harmony said. “I know that too.”
Sonny hovered, a dark Icarus above the ghost world in her eyes. Then his wings took fire and he fell, burning, into its swirling atmosphere, captured by the gravity of her gaze.
“Let’s go.”
He had nothing left to lose.
* * *
“Don’t touch me.”
They were lying on Sonny’s sofa in the living room of his one-bedroom apartment. The stripper stretched her leg over his chest and straddled him.
Some instinct warned him at the last instant, and he tried to sit up. The woman set her hand at his throat and Sonny sensed the power to gut him tensed in her fingers.
“I know what you want,” she said. “The smell of your dreams makes me want to puke.”
Harmony reached back and undid his belt. She yanked at his pants as she held him down. Sonny bucked, trying to throw her off. Her nails cut deeper into the flesh of his throat.
“We are alike,” she breathed. “I’m a survivor too.”
The pupil of her right eye bulged outward, eclipsed both iris and sclera. In their place, a black orb shone wetly. There was a sound like the ripping of muscle, and a shock of red hair burst from her scalp.
Harmony clamped her fingers over Sonny’s mouth, tore his flesh, and mashed his scream against his teeth.
“Be still,” she moaned.
The taste of blood filled Sonny with manic strength. He freed his right arm and struck her across the chin. Harmony brushed aside his attack, held him down as her face ran like heated wax.
“You want to be with me, fightin’ man?” the thing whispered. “I’ve been alone for soooo long.”
A white tongue the length of a man’s arm slid out of Harmony’s mouth and dived between Sonny’s lips, filling his mouth with the taste of ashes. He gagged, grasped the thick stalk, and bit down, trying to sever it.
Then something exploded in the hallway.
A high, bubbling scream pierced the red clouds in Sonny’s mind. Pain beat back the shadows in his head. Harmony withdrew the tongue and spun toward the sound as the front door exploded off its hinges.
Nomo staggered through the doorway, clutching at the red hole in the center of his chest. Then he fell behind the sofa and the Scrape stepped into the room.
“Dude,” Rifkin growled. “I’m gonna fuck-you-up.”
Indeed, the shotgun he carried—a twelve-gauge Mossberg Bullpup with a twenty-inch barrel and walnut pistol grip—testified to the whole congregation that Mama Rifkin’s baby boy had come to set things straight.
But playing spine-tag with Teflon-jacketed armor-piercing minimissiles was not on Harmony’s “to do” list that night. She fixed Rifkin with a glare that would have given Siberia terminal freezer bum.
“Put that down, Thomas,” she said.
Rifkin blinked, stumbled backward, and said “Daahh.”
Sonny noted the scraps of white powder clinging like fresh leprosy to Rifkin’s sad mustache: the Scrape had apparently snorted enough coke to make Condoleezza Rice sing “The Dreidel Song” at a Nation of Islam celebrity fundraiser.
“Shut up!” Rifkin howled. He lifted the Bullpup. “Me and Coco Chanel are callin’ the shots, y’hear?”
Whatever magical influence Harmony normally wielded was gone, cock-blocked by redneck rage and third-rate Peruvian go-go powder.
“Baby, I’m gonna kill you, then him, then myself if you don’t get up off him right now,” Rifkin said.
Harmony got up, leaving Sonny exposed with a German tank ventilator aimed at his sack.
Sonny got to his feet.
“Yeah, punk,” Rifkin crowed. “Ain’t no dodgin’ this smackdown. You feel me?”
Sonny nodded. “I feel you.”
Rifkin smirked. “Damn right, you washed-up mother—”
Sonny charged.
At the same time, Harmony grabbed the Bullpup by the barrel. Coco Chanel blasted a basketball-sized hole through the ceiling and scared the holy hell out of Mrs. Gupta-Sung-Jefferson, Sonny’s landlady, who lived upstairs.
Then Harmony grew a third arm.
Sonny braked hard as the stripper clutched the shotgun with her right hand, Rifkin’s throat in her left, and Rifkin’s balls with a third hand that was attached to the arm that extended out of her lower back.
Sonny’s headache reached down, pulled his lower lip over his head, and spiked it to the nape of his neck: his bad eye was transmitting a sight that a man fighting to stay sober should miss. Something like a cross between Beyoncé Knowles and Kali the Hindu Goddess of Destruction was giving Rifkin the nightmare “reach-around” of all time.
Sonny’s left eye, however, still perceived Harmony as she’d been back at the Shakedown: somehow, luscious dancer and tongue-raping grief freak were one and the same.
“Please—give it back,” Rifkin whispered.
Harmony dug her nails into Rifkin’s throat. In seconds, stripper and slinger were covered in blood.
Harmony’s tongue lashed out and double-wrapped itself around Rifkin’s throat. Rifkin turned purple and Coco Chanel clattered to the floor. Harmony hoisted the Scrape over her head and body-slammed him hard enough to crack Sonny’s synthetic wood floor. Then she shook him until his mullet sprinkled white flakes like a snowstorm over Minneapolis.
An evil sound issued from Rifkin’s backbone—
Crack!
—and his foot shot out and kicked the shotgun across the room. Coco Chanel slid to a halt at Sonny’s feet.
Harmony dropped Rifkin while Sonny retrieved the shotgun. And before even he understood that he’d made his choice, she pounced, her face melting as she came for him.
Coco Chanel coughed and punched Harmony in the throat. The stripper struck the far wall and stuck. Sonny had five seconds to realize that he had not been dismembered; then Harmony slithered up the wall and disappeared in a patch of shadow near the ceiling.
Then the lights went out.
“Shit!” Sonny hissed.
He spun, trying to separate the woman from the shadows over his head. Then, sound, a sensation like a million fire ants strip mining his bones, filled the air. Something in Sonny’s head ripped open, and blood filled his bad eye. He screamed and dropped Coco Chanel.
The hag-thing dropped out of the shadows and landed on his back. Sonny windmilled around the room, smashed into the walls, knocked over furniture trying to dislodge her.
“One way or another, fightin’ man,” she hissed.
Pain detonated against Sonny’s spine as her tongue pierced the skin at the base of his skull. The tongue burrowed, widening the tear in his flesh.
Gotta stop her, boy! Sharkey shouted. Sonny felt the tongue shudder, a sandpaper rasp against his backbone.
“Stop her, booyyy,” Harmony said.
Sonny dropped to his knees.
The shotgun lay a few feet away. Sonny reached for it and fell on his face. The thing on his back plunged its proboscis deeper.
Sleep, the Troub thought. Be nice to just lay down.
Don’t be stupid, Sharkey argued. You lay down now and whatever’s left to get up, it won’t be Sonny Troubadour.
And because he knew Sharkey was right, Sonny stretched out his right hand, his joints creaking, and reached for the gun. Something in his shoulder popped and gave way: Sonny stretched further, touched cool wood … and snagged it.
He rammed Coco Chanel up and over his left shoulder, felt the barrel penetrate soft flesh a second before he pulled the trigger. Then Coco Chanel spat thunder and hag-slapped Harmony across the room.
Sonny leapt to his feet, his breath a dry heave, his bad eye sifting the darkness. Harmony lay against the doorjamb, her face a ruin. Her stiletto heels gouged twin ruts into the floor as she pushed herself halfway up. Then she uttered a thick grunt, and the back of her head dragged a red arc down the wall.
The lights flickered back on a second later.
Sonny touched the wound on the back of his neck and winced. Then he went to check on Rifkin.
Sonny had seen dead before, but the Scrape made Latin look lively. He looked like a man who’d slipped in a puddle of discount tomato paste, suffered a heart attack, and shat himself before dying from terminal embarrassment.
Sonny watched the last of his five-thousand-plus-expenses soak into the floorboards of the apartment he could no longer afford.
Then the Scrape sat up.
“That hurt, you bitch!” he hollered.
Sonny joined in: the two of them screamed like Billy Graham and Charlton Heston at a prison gangbang.
“Dude, you’re freakin’ me out!” Rifkin said.
Sonny shut his trap.
“Vials,” Rifkin said.
“Huh?” Sonny said back.
“Crystal vials. You didn’t blow them up, did you?”
Harmony slumped against the wall like a blow-up doll whose glory days have come and gone. A single vial lay nestled in the petrified valley of counterfeit cleavage rapidly deflating beneath her bloody halter top.
Sonny heard that tiny scream again, clearer this time.
It was coming from inside the vial.
“Well?” the Scrape said.
“One of ’em is gone,” Sonny said. “The other one is—”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Rifkin banged his fist on the floor, each expletive provoking a mushy pop from his backbone. Then his spine gave way with a soggy lurch and his torso compacted a full two inches: Rifkin folded like an all-black revival of Oklahoma and slammed face-first into the floor.
Sonny’s guts did the Hokey-Pokey, and he let fly for the second time that night.
Outside, car doors slammed. The police probably wouldn’t bother to show up till sometime in the early A.G. (After Gentrification), however, so no one was worried about them getting in the way.
Rifkin pushed himself up onto his knuckles and glared at Sonny from a vast puddle of blood.
“Bring that shit over here, goddamit,” he snapped.
Then one of his hands slipped, and he fell on his face.
Sonny heard the crack, but he didn’t believe it.
“Owww!” Rifkin screamed. “By dose!”
Sonny wiped his chin and zipped up his pants.
“You’re pathetic,” he said.
“Hey!” the Scrape shouted at the floor. “I’b dot bayin’ you da backdalk me, dickwad!”
“Keep your damn money, man,” Sonny said. “Just pull yourself together and get out.”
Rifkin snorted. “Hey, genius, I’d love do, but she broke by friggin’ deck and I can’d ged ub!”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Sonny said.
Rifkin screamed. The lightbulb over Sonny’s head flickered.
“All right, look,” the Scrape snapped. “There’s half a million dollars cash in by trunk. Gib me the vial and it’s yours.”
Sonny’s brow furrowed. “What’s in it?”
Rifkin rolled over and spoke to the ceiling.
“Harmony feeds off the real part of a man, the part that means you. She keeps it stashed in those vials.”
Some kinda fucked-up testosterone vampire, Sharkey grunted. Like my first wife.
“She told me that without my essence I’m doomed to wander the earth forever,” Rifkin said. “Like the living dead, or the Wandering Hebrew or some shit like that.”
Man gave you a second chance, Son, Sharkey opined.
Sonny cursed the day he let Sharkey lift him out of the gutter. Then he tossed the vial to Rifkin, who thumbed it open and inhaled like Marion Berry on a new crack pipe.
“Mmmmhe murmured. “Guess one’s as good as another. Right, Troub?”
A second later, however, Rifkin shot to his feet, clutched his head, and painted the air with a fusillade of the finest Japanese profanity since Emperor Hirohito woke up on that fateful morning in 1945 and read in the Tokyo Sun that his monthly golf trip to Hiroshima had been postponed.
The Scrape made a sound like a yellow cat being strategically peeled. Then Mrs. Rifkin’s gift to the dope trade fell dead to the floor.
Something flitted at the edge of Sonny’s vision. He whirled, Coco Chanel at the ready.
Harmony’s body was gone: The rump-shaker from Planet X had returned to the Great Beyond.
* * *
When Sonny stepped onto the sidewalk, he was greeted by half of the Samoan National Sumo Wrestling Team. Tokomatsu’s men were pointing enough firepower to repel the French Navy at Sonny’s Afro.
Tokomatsu stepped forward, his left hand raised.
“She dead?” he said.
“Don’t know,” Sonny said.
“Mmmmph,” Tokomatsu grunted. “Rifkin dead?”
“Yup,” Sonny said.
The Samoans observed a moment of silence. Then Tokomatsu hawked and spat on the sidewalk.
“Well, that’s somethin’,” he said.
Sonny noted that Tokomatsu avoided making eye contact. Testing a theory, he took a small step forward. Tokomatsu winced and took a step back.
The Samoans rumbled, and Sonny recalled that Rifkin had imbibed Tokomatsu’s essence before he kicked.
“You saw,” Tokomatsu whispered. “You saw what she was.”
Sonny shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Tokomatsu considered his shoes. Then he shrugged.
“Yeah, brah,” he said. “I don’t think nobody knows.”
And Sonny recognized the new thing in Tokomatsu’s voice. It was the same thing he’d heard in Rifkin’s voice the day before: the Flinch.
Tokomatsu glanced over his shoulder. “I could kill you now,” he said. “You know?”
Sonny nodded. “I know.”
Tokomatsu nodded. “I could use an intrepid brother such as yourself on my team,” he said. “You want a job?”
Sonny took a deep breath. “Thanks,” he said. “But I got some schemes working.”
Tokomatsu shrugged. “All right then.”
The two men shook hands. Sonny even managed a smile.
“All right then,” he said.
But his gaze never wavered from the back of Rifkin’s Cadillac, still idling at the curb.