The Bouncer

1. 21.

“There’s a child seat back there,” I said, turning back to the front. “And toys.”

“I didn’t have time to do a background check.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I had to get Carolina and Elspeth, and whatever damage I had to do along the way to that goal was okay. I accepted it. I took it on preemptively. And with Jill Pilowsky as my one and only soldier in this private little war, I had to accept the fact that some serious collateral damage was going to be trailing in my wake.

Staring out at the city as we drove through it, I apologized, silently. But then, the city had taken my family, in a sense. The city had bred the Spillaines. Made them fat and greedy. And maintained the final fading flicker of their power, so they could kidnap a child to use as a lever, and get away with it.

I looked down at my hands. Fists again, knuckles white and creaking. I forced myself to unclench.

The Spillaines owned a sprawling old Victorian-style house up on a hill overlooking the train tracks funneling into Bergen Terminal like black threads. There was a wrought-iron gate around the grounds, but grounds was too fancy a word. Like everything else about the Spillaines, it was spoiled and reduced. The house had once been the grand triumph of some middle-class overachiever, some lucky asshole who made soap or toys or imported tea and made enough of a pile to buy a plot of land and build a ridiculously oversize house on it. A hundred years later the Spillaines bought it, or took it from them in a bust-out, maybe.

The house itself was all minarets and balconies. Every light seemed to be on inside as we drove up, stopping a block away. There would be an alarm system, of course, and cameras, of course. And some kind of guard presence, of course. But they’d put Carrie and Ellie in their own house, which spoke to the reduced circumstances of the Spillaines in general. And my stupidity that it hadn’t been my first goddamn thought.

“Just like old times,” Jill said, twisting around to rummage in her bag. “Breaking into some rich asshole’s house.”

I nodded. “Except we can’t cut and run, things go bad. I’m not leaving here without them.”

“I know.”

Her voice sounded small and tired. She came up with two more G21s, courtesy, I assumed, of our reluctant partner Damien, paying off the worst business deal he’d ever made in his life. She handed one to me and I checked it over.

We sat for a few minutes, watching. Jill vaped, filling the car with a sweet smell and a haze, hotboxing us. I counted six guards roaming the exterior. They weren’t very disciplined; there was no schedule I could see. They just seemed to wander, talking to each other, rubbing their hands against the cold, trading cigarettes.

“We come around the back,” I said. “From the track side.”

She nodded. “Sure. Find a way to a second-floor window.”

“Alarm system?”

“These assholes?” She smirked. “The Spillaines are fuckin’ delicate. Of course they’d have some fancy alarm. So, misdirect.” She pointed to the northwest corner of the house. “Basement window there. You’d have to get on the ground and wriggle through, but it could be done, and it’s the obvious place. I chuck a rock through it. Everyone converges there, looking for the idiot who did the obvious, idiot thing. You crack a window in back, no one notices. The alarm’s already triggered, everyone’s crawling over the other side.”

I nodded, slowly. It was a terrible plan, but I was down deep in the seconds, my eyes on my shoes. There was no future to worry about. “All right. Let’s do some recon.”

####

The rear of the house backed up to a narrow strip of dirt that sloped away suddenly and steeply to the tracks running by below. Standing there was dizzying; one wrong step and you’d go sailing out into the nothing. With the wind pushing around me it was easy to imagine, and my heart pounded.

The only way up to the balcony that I could see was an old rainspout held to the house by ancient rusting brackets. I checked the timer set on my phone and slid it back into my pocket. I took hold of the spout and gave it a solid tug; it shook and rattled but seemed to be pretty well attached.

I took a little leap and began to pull myself up. The metal straps groaned and stretched, feeling my weight. Halfway up, one of the straps popped off the wall, sailing off into the darkness as the spout shook and trembled under me. I grunted, straining to pull myself up faster.

Throwing one leg over the railing, I crept onto the balcony. I hadn’t fallen to my death—no doubt I wouldn’t have been the first body to turn up in Bergen City’s shadowy ass—so I was already streets ahead. I pulled my phone out. One minute to go.

I waited. It was peaceful. Quiet, dark. The wind and the open air, New York City a mile away, glittering and tiny. I stood tense and rigid, breathing hard, forcing myself to wait. If I moved too soon, I’d fuck up any chance of seeing my daughter again, my wife. Who was probably not my wife any more, if I knew Carolina and her general tolerance for shit that put Ellie in danger. And thanks to dear old Dad, that was me. I was the danger.

First things first.

I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. A moment later, the distant sound of glass shattering, and then the muffled noise of a keening alarm. I counted to ten, rocking on the balls of my feet. When I heard shouts, I knelt down and tried the nearest window. It wouldn’t budge, so I twisted away and elbowed it, smashing the pane and reaching inside to carefully undo the latch.

There was no change to the alarm. I figured somewhere on a screen a second red light was flashing, but it would be hard to notice. Pushing up the sash, I climbed inside.

It was instantly hot. It felt like the heat had been turned up as high as it would go. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness for a moment—no sense in running blind and falling down the stairs—and counted doors. Six. I turned to the nearest one and tried the handle. It turned easily, revealing a dark bedroom. The furniture was old—a cast-iron bed frame, some heavy wooden dressers—and every fabric had a heavy sheen to it. I was reminded of my grandmother’s house, distant in my memories but vivid in the surfaces I remembered touching—and not enjoying the experience.

I backed out. Down below, the sound of heavy footsteps.

The next two doors opened to similarly empty, dark rooms. The smell of dust and disuse was a story of a too-large house for a dwindling family. The Spillaines might have run the city, once, with distant cousins traveling from the old country to coalesce around Abban’s power base, but they’d shrunk to two men. It was easy to imagine the two of them rambling around this creaking, sinking place, kicking up clouds of dust wherever they went.

Shouts, below. A loud, hollow boom, then running feet. Getting louder.

I threw myself flat against the wall and waited. When you had a Runner at Queenies, some guy determined to get in via brute force, timing was key. If you let him slip past you, if he tore free of your grasp and got inside, it was chaos. You had to hang back like you were waiting on a fastball, ignore your instincts and take one more half-second before you swung.

My brain said move and I waited one more half-second.

A figure turned the corner off the stairs just as I lunged forward, arm out straight. I clotheslined him cleanly, and his feet left the floor as he flipped horizontal and fell on his back with a rattling impact, making the old floorboards jump.

I dropped onto him, smothering the gun in his hand. I wriggled one arm around his neck and rolled until he was on top of me, waving the gun around ineffectively. Up close his dark skin was rough and sandpapery; he smelled like sweet cigars and sweat. I squeezed my arm around his neck as he slapped backwards at me. I listened to his choking attempts to breathe and concentrated on my own—deep breaths in and out.

I stared up at the ceiling. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at: An attic access trap door, a hinged square. You pull it down, a ladder unfolds and you can get up into the attic space.

Someone had put a clasp and a lock on it.

My new friend began to kick his legs, trying to use his body to throw me off. But he had no leverage. He was a turtle on his back and I was the shell. I held on; the worst thing I could do was let go too soon. Time froze as I waited for him to pass out, and I spent this infinite moment staring up at the attic access and listening to shouts from downstairs.

It was too easy. But it made sense.

When he went limp, I rolled him off me, took his gun, and searched him quickly, just patting him down. I stuffed the gun into my waistband with the Glock and stared up at the trap. It was just a little too high up; stretching myself, I could just barely brush the tips of my fingers along the bottom of the lock.

I turned and pressed myself against the wall again, then leaned out to check the stairs. They were empty, so I dashed across the landing to the three doors at the end of the hall. The first was another bedroom, this one in use—the bed a mess, the smell less dust and more body odor. The furniture was the same old stuff I’d seen in the other rooms.

Down below, the shouts resolved into clear! repeated over and over again, by several voices.

The door at the end of the hall opened to reveal a linen closet.

“Hey!”

I whirled, yanking the G21 from its place against my skin. Jill sat on the window sill, one leg in the house.

I grimaced, shaking my head, and pushed the gun back into my pants. The voices below told me that the guards were about to reset and make a tour of the place.

“Jesus,” I hissed, leaving the final door unexplored and walking back towards her. “I almost shot you.”

She nodded, climbing inside. “I figure that’s how I die, right? Shot in the face by Mads Renik. It is foretold. I got them chasing their tails down there.”

I pointed up at the attic access. “Can you get that open?”

She squinted at it. “You could pop that with a hammer.”

“I don’t have a fucking hammer.”

She sighed. “Give me a boost,” she said, pulling a black bag from her back pocket.

I took hold of her waist with both hands and lifted. She didn’t weigh anything. Under the layers of clothes, there was hardly any Jill there at all. It felt strange to be touching her. We’d never been touchy-feely, even back in school. We’d spent so much time together, and we’d shared so much on a miserably intense intimate level, but we’d done so with a buffer. Always, a buffer.

I lifted her up. She pulled a few tools from her little bag, stuck it under her arm, and began to work the lock.

Down below, there was a gunshot.

We both froze. Shouts and the sound of running feet floated up from below. “Chasin’ their own tales,” she muttered, straining up to the lock with renewed attention. A moment later, it clicked open and she snatched it from the clasp. She took hold of the handle and hung on as I let her down, pulling the trap down with her.

A set of folding stairs slid down, narrowly missing her as she ducked to one side. I pulled the Glock and mounted them, inching my way up carefully. There was a light on above us, along with that sense of presence, of someone occupying a space.

I poked my head up over the opening, and ducked down on instinct as something flashed by where my head had been.

“Carrie?”

There was a moment of silence. Then she appeared, crouching down. She looked like hell—face drawn, hair pulled back in a messy tail. She was wearing the clothes she’d had on the day before, plucked, I guessed, from the bedroom floor under gunpoint.

“Maddie?”

I scrambled up. When I reached the top of the ladder, Ellie was there, giggling, and I grabbed onto her and hugged to me so tightly she cried out, pounding her little fists against me. Carrie grabbed onto me, and for one second, one moment, we were just perfect. We were just everything.

Then Carolina pulled away and slapped me, hard, across the face. “What the fuck did you do?!”

I blinked tears out of my eyes. “Come on,” I said gruffly, “we gotta go.”

I climbed down and held my arms up. Carrie handed Ellie, who laughed and gurgled as if it was all a grand adventure. Jill stood fidgeting awkwardly as Carrie descended, holding one arm with the other.

Carrie glanced at her as she took Ellie back, then looked at me, her face blank. I nodded at the window, and she lost no time turning and heading for it.

“Be careful,” I said, taking Ellie as she climbed out. “Head left. Stay out of sight.”

I handed my squirming daughter through, then froze, the unmistakable sound of a pump action shotgun snapping through the hall.

I turned my head. An old man wearing a red smoking jacket, his white hair a cloud of chaos on his head, stood in the final doorway at the end of the hall. He looked like he’d been asleep. He had a big, crooked nose that looked red and swollen, and ink-black eyebrows.

“Hullo, Mr. Renik,” Abban Spillaine said, and squeezed the trigger.