Wasn’t there that saying, Don’t fuck where you eat? Well, I was about to do exactly that. I was in for a shit night anyway. I was in for a shit day tomorrow. I was in for a shit week if you asked me. At this point, what the Hells would do to my brother and me was anybody’s game. We could lose our money. We could lose our bar, and therefore, I could lose what was left of my sex appeal. The forties were knocking on my door, but I was willing to go a few more rounds before I counted myself out.
I made my move at closing time. I washed half her tables, picked up the empties, and asked about her tips. She said she did okay.
“Anything good for a night out?” I asked.
“Not really,” she replied. “Besides, I got bills to pay, just like everybody else.” She reached inside her purse. “Mind if I light up in here?”
“It’s closed. Sure. How are classes?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed and glanced up.
They never do. “How about a drink then?” I asked.
She said, “Sure,” as she blew out some smoke.
I walked next to her behind the bar. I poured her something old-school, a Fedora, a drink nobody knew about anymore. “Here. Taste this,” I said.
She was leaning back against the bar, her short dark hair in line with her sharp chin, the cup of her breast just a shadow in the dim light. I looked straight into her eyes. She looked back and frowned at me sideways. With the faintest pinch of the lips, she dared me to flirt. I smiled slightly. She took a sip and didn’t seem to like it. That was the plan.
“Sugar and whiskey?” she said, wincing.
“Don’t like it?”
“Not really,” she admitted. I was one-for-one.
“Maybe I’m an old fool, but I like it.”
“Come on now! When was this drink invented? The twenties? You’re not old enough to drink this!” she joked. “You’re what? Thirty-five?”
“Thirty-three,” I lied.
“See?” she said, taking a drag of her cigarette. “You’re not that old.” I was two-for-two.
“Then show me what you young mixologists are into these days.”
She tapped her ashes on the counter, bowed her head sideways, and accepted the dare. “All right, let’s see what we can come up with.” She grabbed Taylor’s Velvet Falernum, added some green Chartreuse liqueur, pineapple juice, and lime. I already knew I was going to fucking hate it.
I took a sip. “Not bad. Not bad.”
“Right?”
“What else have you got?”
“Let me look.” She turned back to the bar and leaned beautifully on her back leg.
Eyes on the prize, I thought. Eyes on the fucking prize.
I started scrolling through the bar’s iTunes account. I wasn’t gonna fuck with her taste in Lady Gaga, and she wasn’t gonna fuck with mine in Pantera, so I started flipping through the songs, hoping to find an in-between. I glanced at her. She was already moving despite the silence in the bar, her loose leg stomping softly to the steady beat of a song she had in her head.
It was my job now to figure out what that song was.
The Killers? No — the Killers would make me seem old. The National? Maybe, but they were as exciting as watching fucking paint dry. Metric? I was gonna have to go with Metric. Metric was good fuck music no matter what anyone my age would say about it. “Gold Guns Girls” was too fast, but “Gimme Sympathy” was just right. I put in on. The first few notes filled the vast empty room.
“I love this song,” she said as she looked at me. She put some ice into a glass. “Get hot,” she started signing. “Get closer to the flame...”
I was three-for-three.
She flipped a few bottles and handed me a glass of her concoction. At this point, I didn’t really care what was in it, so long as it had alcohol. She kept singing, then poured herself a glass. I’d had two beers earlier, and I knew she had done a few shots before last call with some guy who thought he’d get her home by getting her drunk. We were just tipsy enough; it was starting to be fun.
On our fourth drink, Lana Del Rey started playing. I couldn’t have planned it any better. Lana Del Rey was the kind of music that kept you awake while dreaming about twenty-three-year-old girls named Sophie-Andrée, who’d fuck their bosses at the end of a shift.
I approached her from behind, pressing myself against her back, locking my hands around her hips. She didn’t seem to mind so I dove in further. I smelled her hair, felt her smile as I started kissing the nook of her neck. She turned around, smiled, and started kissing back. I grabbed her thighs and lifted her dress. She pulled it higher to get comfortable.
She wore black-laced Brazilian panties. Goddamn did she look good. It looked like a freaking heart at the bottom of her flat belly. A freaking heart around her ass, up to her thighs, and down inside her legs.
I swear to God — it was the most beautiful sight in the entire fucking world.
I kissed her again, lifted her, and sat her on the edge of the bar. I pushed myself against her. She moved her hair out of her face. I ran my hands inside her dress and down her back. I pulled her toward me. Then she forced me toward her. She grabbed my arms, scratched me, and kissed me. Then she looked at me and said, “I got condoms in my bag.”
The sex was good but I hadn’t slept; I probably wouldn’t have anyways. It was nine in the morning. I was having coffee and a cigarette on the way to my car.
The meeting with the Hells was scheduled for ten. I needed to pick up Julien before that and drive all the way up to Rivière-des-Prairies, because when you’re in trouble with these kinds of guys, you walk the extra mile.
Julien, being the idiot that he was, had no idea what kind of trouble he had gotten himself into. Maybe the Bloods had used him and his dumb wigger friend to poke around foreign territory. Because if Julien didn’t actually know any Bloods, why would the Hells take his word seriously?
I found Julien at Davidson Park, where I had expected him to be. He was playing his fucking guitar in the shadow of the project buildings. No one else was there except two old drunks who lived in the homeless shelter down the street.
“Hey, Richard!” he shouted, playing a god-awful riff that was so out of tune it could have been experimental rock. “I’ma play a song for you, Richard.”
“It’s okay, Julien. I don’t need a song.”
“Ahhh, come on!” he slurred. “Hey, did I ever show you my girl? Let me show you my girl.” He flipped the guitar and flashed a duct-taped photo of a young Filipina lying on a beach in paradise.
“I don’t need to see your girl, either.”
“Ah, come on, man! I’ma play you a song, all right?”
“You know about drugs?”
He stopped and looked at me in a snap. “Yeah! YEAH!” he said excitedly. “Ah shit, man! Ah shit! I knew it was coming. I fucking knew it was coming. Shit, man!”
“You want to sell at the bar?” I asked.
“Yeah, man! I’m your guy, man! You know? Anything you want I’ma keep it tight, you know? Shit’s gonna be tight.”
“And that guy you know?”
“Yeah! He’s a Blood, man! In Laval. A full-patch Blood, you know?”
A full-patch Blood, I thought. What an idiot. “He’s serious about this? This Blood. He seriously wants to sell in Hochelaga?” I asked.
“Yeah, man, he’s fucking taking over. He said he can get me anything I need. He can get me weed, he can get me fucking coke, some GHB for the ladies, some E if you need it, peanuts — anything, man. Sometimes he just gets me this bag of pills, man. I fucking pop them and I don’t even know what’s in them.”