Free Jordan in the Time of Cold War by Seth Harwood Page B

chair and pushed past her out of the room.
    "Good," she said.
    "Good."
    I didn't stop in the living room; left my smokes on the coffee table next to the black chunk and kept going. Joe didn't need me for hours, but what could I do?
    The bar around the corner was called Anderson's. She'd know to find me there if she cared to look. All I had to do was stay sober enough to do what needed doing and hang tough.
    I drank two beers staring at the digital clock behind the bar. The fat bartender didn't give two shits as she poured shots to her meager customers and shoveled pints across the wood as chasers.
    "Damn motherfuckers!" Some assholes at the other end of the place had been fighting for a while about who would win the finals, going back and forth about the Lakers, Pistons, and Celts. Problem was, the guy who thought the Lakers would win didn't know what kind of trouble that could put him in around here. 
    I got up to walk it off, stepped out of the bar, and turned north on 3rd Ave. Joe said I'd find his guy in the 20s on the west side, at Billy's Topless. I knew the place, of course. Not too many sleazebags like myself who didn't. It wasn't my favorite, but I knew enough guys who made it their afternoon ritual that I'd been in.
    Took me close to an hour to make my way up and across Manhattan. I could've been there sooner, but took it slow. When I got there around 9:30, I saw they'd changed the sign. Just like that. Some city regulations had probably gotten upset about them being topless, and so now Billy had set an awkward "S" in the middle so it read Billy's Stopless. Well, good for everyone. None of us were planning to stop.  
    There were guys lined up before the stage, waving dollar bills in front of their face. Just like any other night. My guy was sitting at the bar and he was easy to make. Joe called him Cold War; told me I'd recognize him easy by the Gorbachev birthmark on his forehead. If he didn't have an accent straight off the Staten Island Ferry, I might've thought he actually was the old Russian bastard. That, and the fact he had a mustache, too.
    "Joe says you owe him money." I didn't waste time, just clapped my hand onto his shoulder, cut off his talk with the bartender, and laid it out. That was how Joe liked things done: clean and efficient.
    "That right?" He turned to face me and my hand fell off him. Had a gut on him, one real nice one, and a white polo shirt with a white Jordache jacket to match. "You his piss boy now?"
    This was where I should've hit him; how things were supposed to go. It's just that I hate to break up a good show. The girls on the stage had their G-strings stripped off and had dropped onto their backs to wave their legs open and shut. Who could resist? Maybe I was distracted.
    Cold War hauled off and hit me in the gut then and it flashed in my mind that I might not have been the right man for this job. Things with Delilah could've probably predicted that.
    Then Cold War stood up and took me by the arm, straightened me up to look him in the eye. He started to say something, but that was when I kneed him in the chestnuts hard enough to hurt one of the girls up on the stage. He gasped and tried to buckle, but I held him up, backing him away from the bar and into the john. Fuck if I had any choice in the matter. Like I said, if I didn't do this to him, next thing there'd be somebody showing up to do it to me.
    We went into the stall, the two of us, and I backed him into the wall. The toilet was an old one with the tank up above and a long chain to make it flush. I caught Cold War up under his fat chin between his neck rolls, and pushed his head back into the porcelain tank. Once I did it, and then again a second time, hard. I saw some blood trickle down behind his ear.
    "You hear me now?" I asked him.
    He nodded.
    "I don't care about the money. That's for Joe. What I'm here for is the beating. The money, you get that to Joe. Our business? That's just the blood."
    I took the gun from the back