Lucs in my face: “What happened?” Angry goatee and sharp slicked crewcut: I’m bigger, nearly six-four, but step back anyway.
“They were arguing—just a domestic—right near me, and he snapped her and … and before I could get to him he rammed her into the smoke machine. The sound … fuck—”
He grabs my shirt-front, silencing me: “This is what we do.”
I shrug him off and nod, straightening my shirt. “I know.”
He looks down at the sprawled body; the guy waking now, eyes flitting open and straining at the light. A kick to the side of the head and he is out again. “Take his foot” and we drag him down the corridor and the stairs at the end, the soft thud of his skull on each concrete step keeping beat with the muted, somehow-threatening music through the walls next to us. His head leaves a soft trail of blood. Raph walks ahead and unlocks the door at the bottom of the stairwell. I hear a car pulling up outside, then voices through the wood. A few steps from the bottom my boss pushes me away and reaches down to grasp the shuddering body, standing up with a hand on either side of the guy’s head, a raggedy-doll in his grasp. Lucs holds my gaze and then snaps his wrists, sending the guy’s arms and legs flailing to flap against the huge chest. A moist crack from the guy’s neck and Lucs lets the slide to the floor. I feel like I’m going to vomit.
Raph opens the door to waiting uniforms and a huge white van. Silent revolving lights on its roof spark blue and red eerily around the alley. One of the uniforms walks up, a cop: “This the fucker?” Lucs drags the to the van’s back-doors and throws it inside. A soft thud. The back hadn’t been empty. His partner closes the doors and they drive off, still without the siren, faces swiveling at me as they turn onto the street.
Lucs waits in the doorway, shirt flecked with blood. I look at the empty street and the fading ghostly lights and then back at him, my head spinning. The reek of the alley is like a cocoon. Nausea floods my stomach.
On the way to my post I stop at the staff toilets to scrub the blood off my face. I grip the sink and stare at the mess of flyers pasted above the mirror: amongst them are missing persons photos, a mix of male and female faces, mostly young. Someone has mockingly drawn moustaches on a few. The door opens behind me. Raph’s hulking brother Gabe. “We know you get this, David. We wouldn’t have let you in otherwise. You think this is any different from what you’ve done?” He stares at me for a moment then leaves.
The dark figures across from me now seem ominous, always on the periphery of my vision as I scan the Pit. The feeling that they’re all watching me, silent, unnerving, is greater than ever and my heart quickens. As much as I want to drop the two-way and rip off my shirt and leave, I can’t. The warning in Lucs’ eyes as he broke the guy’s neck is enough to stop that.
Old Max from the Terminal, where I first started bouncing, had warned me the security at the Metropolis were “hard cunts”; a tight-knit, dangerous crew. When I was still at the ratty Village sports bar I’d see them come in for a quiet drink, these huge refugees from the Meatpacking District dressed in black talking amongst themselves at the bar. I’d tense up, expecting them to cause trouble, but they never did, just stared at any patron stupid enough to come near. They were there the night I lost it, beat the fuck out of this asshole guido: some drunk gangster wannabe who told me he didn’t take shit from steroid meatheads telling him when to leave and then tried to pull a piece when I didn’t back down. All the shit I’d put up with, all the abuse and violence and threats working as a bouncer, all the shit from my father against Mom and me, became too much and I dropped him with a sharp left—the first time I’d ever hit anyone on the job, the punch feeling like it’d been pent up forever—then grabbed him by the throat and dragged him out to the back alley, and the guy had tried to fight back and I took the hit then splayed his nose across his face—actually feeling the cartilage disintegrate beneath my fist—and rode him to the ground, hitting again and again and again until his face was slurry against the cobblestones.
He’d lain there blowing bloody bubbles into the air and as I hunched crouched over his crumpled I could see nothing in his hand—it’d been a bluff, there’d never been a gun—and I felt my chest constrict, the world spin. I’d gone too far. I’d be going to jail. My life was over. I dropped to my knees, feeling the shock burn through me.
Then someone had grabbed me: one of the Metropolis guys—Mikhaels, Lucs’ second—and started pulling me away up the street as two cops ran around the corner. They’d paused and looked at Mikhaels.
Then one had nodded, letting him lead me away—trembling as the adrenalin wore off and the delusions of power faded—as they went on to the barely-alive man.
“This is how it works,” Lucs had said when I fronted before him at the Metropolis. “The cops look after us. We look after them. Way of the world. Work for us we make sure nothing ever comes of it.”
I’d never seen them go this far until now. They must’ve been holding back the whole time, waiting until I’d proven myself enough to be accepted into the crew. Until they could trust me. Now they’re showing their true selves: the real way of the world.
And Gabe’s right: it’s not like I can throw stones. It’s not like what I did’s any different.
But I sometimes wonder now how convenient it is Mikhaels’d been there that night, remembering him looking at me from across the bar just before I’d beaten the man; as if he’d instigated it somehow, his presence drawing out the darkness in me.
Maybe I just can’t confront the truth: that I’d nearly beaten someone to death. It’d be much easier to blame anyone but myself—
Dammit. There’s always too much time in here to think: an endless stretching of seconds, minutes, hours into meaninglessness; aided by the curtains shut against the outside sky, encouraging timelessness and the rejection of reality. Fuck it. The guy deserved it. He killed that girl. Lucs was right to snap his neck. The prick would’ve just bought his way out of it before some bullshit judge in a bullshit courtroom under a bullshit legal system. Weaseled his way to leniency as criminals always did. The system didn’t work so what choice is left?
But what’s really scaring me—and why I should’ve run as soon as Lucs turned his back after killing the guy, why I should never have come here in the first place—is that seeing Lucs deal out such justice makes me think of her. Of Lisa and that fuck Paul. My hands shake. Sweat rises on my face and across my back. Because I should have fucking—
A drunk is dancing with a chair he has dragged onto the dancefloor as if it’s his partner. He clutches it in his arms and pirouettes, then throws it onto the ground and awkwardly leaps over the seat. The crowd around him seem to enjoy his absurd parody of some forties musical star—even the muscle-shirted Greek guy takes the hit in the shins good-humoredly—and I’m roundly booed as I jump off my podium and grab the chair, handing it to Raph who has appeared from across the Pit to back me up. But I need the distraction of work. I push the drunk past the bar to the front door and he gibbers at me: “I was pretty swish out there though wasn’t I?” Infectious humor that catches me off guard. His eyes are dilated, oversexed on E’s as welclass="underline" he wants to touch me as I walk him out, feeling my shoulders through my shirt. I just shrug him off. He’s harmless.