Free 06 - Vengeful by Robert J. Crane Page A

skinny, heavily tattooed, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and clearly scared shitless by the sight of someone crashing into his house without announcement. I knew from what J.J. had sent me that this bartender’s name was Charles O’Shea. He didn’t look Irish to me, though sometimes it’s tough to tell when someone’s scared shitless.
    He bolted for the archway behind him, where I could see a dining room, and I caught up with him before he got more than a few steps, seizing hold of his naked shoulders and shoving him roughly into the waiting arms of Augustus, who had followed behind me. He grabbed the guy with a little nervous gusto, like he was afraid he was going to get caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
    I walked over and stubbed out the cigarette with my boot on the carpet, but I doubted it was going to cost him a security deposit since by the look of the place he’d lost that a long time ago. There were holes in the walls, probably a hundred dollars' worth of stereo equipment that looked like it had been dragged right out of the seventies surrounding one of those old-school widescreen TVs, the sort that weighs tons because it has to project the image on the front of the TV like a movie theater exists inside the huge contraption. “The hell?” I wondered, looking at it all. “Is this some kind of mania for vintage or do you just not have the money for a modern flatscreen?”
    “Picture’s better on this,” he asserted, surprisingly defiant for a guy who was being held in something close to a submission hold whilst nearly naked by a pretty tall man, while a humorless woman picked over his choice in electronics.
    “Yeah,” Augustus said, “and eight tracks sound better than CDs.”
    I eased closer to the guy and caught sight of the fear in his eyes. “You know who I am?”
    He blinked, looking left and catching sight of Zollers. “No,” he said sullenly.
    I didn’t even need to look at Zollers to know he was lying. “That was a rhetorical question,” I said. “Everyone knows who I am.”
    “Try to pretend like you don’t enjoy it,” he scoffed, with way more courage than I would have had in his utter-lack-of-shoes.
    “Hey, I know this guy,” Augustus said, turning Charles’s head to look at his face in profile. “This is your brother’s bartender.”
    Augustus was an honest man, and while that wasn’t a fault, it certainly cost him a little trouble this time as I not-gently-at-all ripped Charles O’Shea the bartender out of his loving embrace and put the bastard through his own glass coffee table. His ashtray got caught up on the metal frame and followed a second later, delivering a nice thump and a load of nastiness to the back of O’Shea’s head and leaving a knick on his scalp the length of my forefinger.
    I dragged Charlie up and slammed him into the drywall with about a hundredth of the force and a millionth of the rage I had available on hand. His eyes squinted shut in pain, then opened just a sliver experimentally. “I’m still here, dipshit,” I said, and rammed him into the wall again. Lightly, I swear. If he died of this, it’d be from embarrassment or an undisclosed heart condition, because these were my version of love taps. “I am not a figment of your imagination.”
    “What do you want?” Charles asked, two steps past panic.
    “Not interior decorating tips,” I said. I tried to decide if I should just steal his memories here, in front of everybody and ruled it out. I caught a knowing look from Zollers as he made his way over to lean against the wall so I could see him plainly even as I held Charles an inch or so off the ground against it. He knew what I was thinking, knew what I’d done, and knew I was ashamed of it. Partaking of someone’s memories, their soul, it always felt like something dirty to me, like something I should hide from. I had an easier time knowing that there were pictures of my blurry, naked ass streaking across the skies of various