“What are you having?” She flicks a half-second, strained smile in my direction.
“Two shots of your strongest. And Gin and tonic. On the rocks.”
“ID?” She asks. I fish it out and she nods. “Alright, one sec.”
I wait. I’m the only one here without a pot-belly, and the women are starting to notice. Good. That’ll make this much easier.
The bartender comes back with my drinks, and I down them as quick as I can.
“Whoa there,” A man to my left says. “You’re awfully young to be drinking that hard.”
“You’re awfully nosy for someone that old.”
He laughs, but it’s not an offended laugh. It’s amused. I look over at him – a tweed suit covers a considerably hefty frame. I recall him walking behind me on the sidewalk. He isn’t fat - in fact quite the contrary. He has broad shoulders and muscles gone slightly to pasture. He sits perfectly straight, but with an easy demeanor to it. His right index finger and the tendon attaching to it in his arm are very well-defined; classic indications of trigger-finger. Military, without a doubt. His hair is white and sparse, and his mustache faint. Dark eyes glitter over at me.
“People only drink like that for two reasons – to remember something, or to forget something,” he says.
“Aren’t you just full of tautologies,” I scoff. The gin and vodka burns on my tongue. The women are moving, and I’m picking my target carefully. It has to be someone stupid enough to assume the worst of me. And that means any drunk man will do.
“It’s a girl, isn’t it?” The military man asks. I don’t dignify him with a response. “Is she pretty?”
I swirl the leftover ice in my glass and remain silent.
“So she’s ugly. Must be absolutely hideous.”
“No,” I snap. “Not that it matters, but no.”
“’Not that it matters’?” He presses. I pause. He’s goading me into talking, but the alcohol is hitting me fast and I have nothing left to lose.
“She’s pretty. I suppose.” I wince. “It’s not that she’s pretty. She’s pretty but that isn’t all she is.”
“Of course not. Otherwise she wouldn’t have you here, drinking and tongue-tied.”
I slide my glass back to the bartender and face the man. He’s faintly smiling, hands wrapped around a bourbon ice. His silence is somehow more irritating than his words, so I break it.
“Men like to categorize women.” I curl my lip. “Into convenient little boxes like ‘hot’, or ‘cute’, or ‘beautiful’. It’s easy for them. It’s never been easy for me.”
“So this particular girl,” the man leads. “She’s none of those?”
“She’s all of those,” I say, a little too quickly for my own liking. “And more than those, and at the same time she’s none of those. She is exactly herself, no more and no less. But saying that now is pointless.”
“Did she dump you?”
“She told me to stay out of her life.”
“And so here you are, stumbling into a backwater bar to start a fight with someone just to vent all that out.”
I narrow my eyes at him. His smile remains.
“I’ve been alive long enough to know the face of someone looking for a fight. And I know the face of someone who knows what it’s like to fight.”
The man’s dark eyes suddenly become unreadable.
“And most of all, I know the face of someone who, deep down in a part of themselves they won’t admit to, enjoys fighting.”
I glare at the bartop, the shined wood reflecting my face. The man stops smiling at me, and takes a sip from his brandy before speaking again.
“You see it sometimes, in the guys. Most of us in the army don’t like what we do, believe it or not. We join for the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, of order. Not for the blood. But every once in a while, you see a real piece of work come through. And they like the blood. Some of them are better at hiding it than others, but it always comes out.”
“What are you saying?” I snarl.
“I’m saying, son, that you’re a monster,” he says evenly. “And you hate what you are.”
My fist connects with his jaw before I can stop it. The ice is gone. The poise and calm, rational demeanor I’d kept myself leashed with vaporizes in an instant and he’s pushing back, shoving me by the shoulders outside, and the bartender is yelling something, and the drunk idiots are hooting and hollering, taking bets, following us as we stumble into the night air. I step in a puddle as I duck under the man’s right hook. It’s so powerful the air trailing behind it makes an audible ‘thump’ noise. He’s huge. He is taller and wider than Leo, and I don’t have a bat. He lunges for me, and I throw a trashcan between our path. He kicks it aside, and it crumples against the wall like a tin can.
And for the first time since I saw Isis on the floor with blood around her head, I feel fear. Real, true, cold fear that reaches into my lungs and pulls them up through my throat.
I put my fists up and step around another right hook, but he slams his knee into my chest and I can’t breathe, the world reduced to flashes of white and red and pain. I can barely hear the crowd whooping over the sound of my own surging heartbeat. Someone tries to break us up, but the man shoves them away and lunges for me, and suddenly my feet aren’t touching the ground, his fist in my collar as he lifts me above the cement. Our eyes meet for a split second, his curiously empty of emotion, and he throws me aside. Stars pop in my eyes, and my back hits the brick wall with a sickening thud. I try to scrabble to my feet, but my legs are pained jelly.
The man leans in.
“No one can tame the monster for you, son. Not your parents, not a girl. Not a college or an institution. Only you can do that.”
I spit at his feet, the saliva bloody.
“What do you know about me?”
“Blanche told me a lot about you.”
“Should’ve figured you were one of her goons.”
“Don’t mistake me. I’m not one of hers, and I trust her as far as I can throw her. Which isn’t far, with the way she’s been putting on weight recently.”
I scoff. The man leans back and offers me his hand up. The bar crowd is long gone, the excitement over for them. I glare at his palm, and ease up onto my feet by myself. Every bone in my body screams for me to stop moving, to inject morphine, to roll in bandages, anything to stop the pain.
“I heard about what you did for the Blake family. Word travels fast in the criminal justice circuit.”
“So?”
The man reaches into his jacket and hands me a card. “When you’re ready to use the monster constructively instead of destructively, you come see me.”
He’s gone before I can snipe at him, and I’m alone in the alley with my aching body and bewildered mind. The card is simpler than any I’ve ever seen – simpler than the Rose Club cards, even. And that’s how I know it’s seedy, underworld business.
Gregory Callan
VORTEX Enterprises
I nurse my wounds long enough to get up enough energy to make it back to my car, and collapse. The booze hits my bloodstream, and I welcome the warm relief as it dulls the pain. But with the dullness comes the realization I went looking for a fight. I, Jack Hunter, actively went searching to engage someone in a fight. And now I’m hurt, and buzzed, and my mouth tastes like blood, and all I want to do is go back to that night at Avery’s, to that absurd sea-themed room, to the bed with Batgirl in it, to Isis, to an Isis who confessed to me with tiny, stuttering, shy words, that she liked me, to a moment when everything was simple. Her and I. Her and I in a room, alone.