She looked to see if I was serious. “Apartment? What apartment?”
“The one I rented this morning,” I said importantly. “Gotta have a place to stay, you know.”
Sasha frowned, and I saw the wheels start to turn. “That was thoughtful, Max, very thoughtful. Can we afford it?”
This was fun. I grinned. “Yup…my job pays pretty well.”
She looked genuinely surprised. “You’ve got a job?”
“Sure do. I’m the bouncer at a nightclub called Betty’s.”
I watched her absorb and process that piece of information. She looked up to where the bandana and hat covered the top of my head. “I like the fashion statement.”
I almost said, “That isn’t a fashion statement, it’s a disguise,” and realized my mistake. I nodded wisely. “Thanks, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“A very good idea,” Sasha said seriously. “I hope you’ll continue to think along those lines.”
I winked broadly. “Don’t worry, Mary. I will.”
Sasha rolled her eyes at the sound of the phony name. “Good. See that you do.”
I was about to respond with something witty when the bed interrupted. “The patient is tired. The patient is tired. Please leave now. Please leave now.” I felt a buzzing sensation under my butt. I stood. Joy ran to join me.
“Okay, okay. I’m leaving, already. Take care of yourself, Sash, I mean Mary, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The kid smiled, held up a hand, and let her head fall back against the pillow. She managed to look pretty in spite of the eyepatch, pasty skin, and nonexistent makeup. Sasha was tough, you had to give her that, and I felt a sense of almost fatherly pride. I forced myself to leave.
The next couple of days developed into an almost pleasurable routine. Get up, shower, dump the fast-food containers left from the night before, drink two cups of Americano at the local expresso stand, visit Sasha in the hospital, and walk to work. Something I took seriously.
After some rather arduous thought, I discovered it is possible to handle most troublemakers without resorting to violence. The first step is to look intimidating. That’ll control about seventy or eighty per cent of your typical barroom yahoos right off the top. That’s why I took to wearing black leathers, chrome-plated chains, and a semipermanent sneer.
Of course, some drunks are talkers rather than fighters. Nine times out of ten you can bullshit them out the door, and as Betty likes to say, “Why fight if you don’t have to?”
Still, real honest-to-god barroom brawlers like to fight, and build their reps on how many bouncers they wax. The best way to deal with them is to launch a preemptive strike that is so unexpected, so violent, that they never have a chance. The trick is to sort them out from the rest of the crowd, and that’s what I was working on when trouble arrived.
The whole thing started about four hours into my shift. A few thousand miners had just come off duty, and two or three hundred of them had decided to spend some of their hard-earned pay at Betty’s. It wasn’t long before we had the usual number of arguments, squabbles, and scuffles. I sorted them out and took a break by the bar. Then something unusual happened. A set of honest-to-god, dyed-in-the-wool corpies walked through the doors, looked around, and headed for a recently vacated table.
I was clear across the room when they entered, but it was easy to tell who and what they were from the way they moved, and the greyhound-thin zombie that tagged along behind them. It didn’t take a genius to know they’d attract trouble. After all, miners have a tendency to blame corpies for everything from pressure leaks to the quality of their sex lives. I moved in and tried to see their faces, but the combination of smoke and heavy shadow made it difficult.
Nothing happened at first. The corpies ordered drinks, argued amongst themselves, and laughed at private jokes. Their zombie sat on the floor, rested her head against someone’s thigh, and stared into space. I wondered what she was thinking, if she was thinking, and how she’d wound up the way she was. I was still thinking about that when Betty came along.
“The rounds,” as Betty called them, were something she was known for. They were her personal touch, the way she made her club different from the rest, and built a loyal clientele at the same time. Such was her beauty, and the personality that went with it, that everyone wanted to know and be known by her.
Betty started by the autotellers, worked her way down along the bar, and drifted out onto the main floor. A robo-spot tracked her progress. Smoke eddied as it drifted through the light. Canned music thumped in the background. Betty knew the regulars, hundreds of them, and called them by name. All the rest were addressed as “honey, sweetie, or darling.”
“Murphy, nice to see you tonight…Rawlings, nice earrings. Where’d you get them? Hello, sweetie, welcome to Betty’s. Lopez, behave yourself tonight, Max is getting tired of throwing you out…”
And so it went until she approached the corpies. I tensed, hoping things would go well and sensing that they wouldn’t. She addressed their leader. He had his back turned in my direction. Her voice was husky sweet and carried over the noise. “Hi, honey, how are you tonight?”
“Horny as hell,” came the answer. “Why don’t you sit on my lap?”
I saw Betty frown and was already in motion when she replied. “Thanks, sweetie, but not right now. Some other time, maybe.”
I was halfway there when a hand grabbed Betty’s arm and pulled her down. She struggled but he held her down. “What’s the problem, bitch? You hard of hearing or something? I said sit on my lap.”
I approached from behind, looped the garrote around his neck, and pulled the handles in opposite directions. He let go of Betty and reached for the wire. She stood and I released the handles. The garrote fell away as the man turned in my direction. That’s when I realized that we’d met before.
It was Curt, the same Curt I’d called “pretty boy” back on Earth, though his looks had deteriorated since I’d blown half his nose away. The docs had done a good job on him, but it would take time and more operations before anyone called him “pretty” again.
I waited for him to recognize me, but the disguise worked. You could see it in his eyes. He didn’t know who the hell I was outside of some jerk that he wanted to hurt. Yeah, Curt was pissed, seriously pissed, and he started to rise. I hit his already damaged nose, felt it break, and grinned.
“Max! Max! Over here!” I turned to find that one of Curt’s bodyguards was on his feet. He was struggling to peel Joy off his face with one hand while reaching for his gun with the other. I measured the distance, kicked him in the balls, and watched him go down. That was a mistake.
The third corpie, a woman this time, executed a textbook-perfect spin-kick and hit me in the side of the head. I stumbled backwards, felt the zombie hit the back of my knees, and fell over backwards. The floor hit hard. The corpie was still celebrating when the bartender sapped her from behind. She slumped to the floor. I got up. The room tilted, swayed from side to side, and stabilized. I turned to the bartender. “Thanks.”
He shrugged and slipped the sap into a pocket. “I did it for Betty.” I nodded my understanding.
Some of the regulars grabbed the corpies, roughed them up, and carried them towards the doors. Curt, supported by a miner on each side, held his nose with one hand and pointed towards me with the other. Blood dripped off his chin. “Mgmpf!”
It didn’t make sense, but I understood. He planned to kill me, or have me killed, whichever was most convenient. I shrugged. So what else was new? The bastard had tried to grease me for months now.
The miners split into teams, vied to see which group could throw their corpie the furthest, and cheered their scores. It would have been fun to watch, except that a group of drunks had corralled the zombie and were pushing her around. She offered no resistance and bounced from one person to the next. She had a nice figure, and at least two members of the crowd were taking unfair advantage of that fact.