He stopped at a club called Sailor Randy’s, an indooroutdoor multiplex that featured two outside bars flanking a crabgrass garden. Some Mexican was hosing down the patio, and Harry got mad because he didn’t understand English. The kid twisted the nozzle on the hose, cutting off the water, like he was about to launch some back and forth finger alphabet, but Harry got spared by a guy drinking out of a plastic tumbler.
Harry liked the looks of him, rumpled and bony, but with a potbelly that bulged over his jeans. His hair was going extra thin on top, but he wasn’t trying to hide it, just brushed it straight back from a savage widow’s peak and left it long on the back and sides. He looked like somebody who rode a Harley and hung out in titty bars. Not exactly the type Harry was friends with, but he liked his chances with him a lot better anyway than with some linen-suited redhead suffering facial spasms.
The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Bryce Peyton,” he said. “What sort of work were you looking for?”
Odd name, Bryce. It reminded Harry of a hustle he used to run out of the joints on Ludlow Street, with a dope fiend chick named Sam. The marks were straight off the train from New Haven, these suckers, fine arts majors acting hip on the Lower East Side, khaki pantsers who would’ve been burned by anybody anywhere, then slapped around a bit for their trouble. They usually had names like Bryce.
Harry bluffed his way through all the experience he had in the security field. Peyton called it.
“I bet you got plenty of experience cracking heads,” Peyton said, “but that’s not what I’m after. Tell you the truth, you’re a little small to be a bouncer.”
Harry didn’t argue. The other guy inevitably compared himself to you. Peyton had him by an inch or two, and Peyton wasn’t really somebody you’d think of as a big guy.
“If I stick a walkie-talkie in the mitt of somebody six foot eight, I got sheer intimidation on my side. Maybe the guy hasn’t fought with anything more than a lobster special in fifteen years, but then again, he hasn’t had to. You hear me knocking?”
Harry wondered whether it was too soon to weigh in with the name, but after this first trip down the strip, he figured Bryce Peyton was the employer most likely to hire a guy like Harry Healy. Or Harry James. James. Harry told him he was down from New York, which impressed Peyton, that he’d been working for a guy named Frankie Yin. Maybe Peyton had heard of him.
“Sure. Who hasn’t heard of Frankie Yin? From the Wonderland on Second Avenue. That’s a mighty rugged crowd he caters to.” He started laughing and loosened something that was sticking to one of his lungs. “Nothing scares me quite as much as a stockbroker wearing a dress.”
Harry was about to tell him to take his job and stick it up his ass, but his thinking would run this way whenever his pride was taking a beating.
Peyton emptied his tumbler with two swallows, and when he exhaled, Harry caught a blast of the vodka inside. What was it, noon? This guy’d give Manfred a run for his money.
Shit. Manfred. Harry was trying to forget about Manfred and the hole in the back of Manfred’s head, Manfred bloody on the floor in his bloody bathrobe.
Peyton said, “I can tell if I’m gonna like somebody within the first five minutes of meeting him, and I like you. You strike me as somebody who could use a break.”
He was going to keep talking, but a hacking fit turned his face scarlet and kicked up the louie crackling in his chest. He hawked and spat but missed the crabgrass, and a quivering blob of brown landed on the Mexican’s pressure-cleaned flagstones. When the coughing subsided, Peyton patted his pockets for the pack of cigarettes he must have forgotten inside.
He caught his breath. “And in this business, that fucking Chink is a legend. If you’re good enough for Frankie Yin, you’re good enough for me. We’ll start you tonight around ten.”
Bryce Peyton turned out to be a decent enough guy, and he paid cash out of the drawer at the end of a shift, but Sailor Randy’s was the cheesiest joint Harry had ever set foot in. He had to be at work by six on Monday, for the drive-time promotion put on by a classic rock radio outlet. Broadcasting live from the club, an on-air personality exhorted listeners to get themselves over to Sailor Randy’s to collect scads of useless shit, visors and bumper stickers emblazoned with the station’s nickname. The Storm. They arrived in herds the minute their bosses let them go, guzzling Peyton’s rotgut cheapies, caterwauling over lyrics they knew by heart. Harry endured his tenthousandth listening of “Carry on My Wayward Son” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” two overwhelming favorites of the Broward County workforce. Tuesday was Dress to Kill night, which encouraged all manner of local hag to climb up on stage and flash her tits, while no-assed fat guys, Peyton’s cronies, hooted from the floor.
The only bouncer Harry had any respect for was Palmero, who everybody called Big, or when he wasn’t 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.