I wanted to tell Donald to shut his mouth, to just be quiet and let me handle it, but I maintained my composure.
“I know Claudia.” The tall one with the tattoos looked me over. He was flying on something and having a hard time keeping his eyes in one spot.
“You know where I can find her?” I asked.
“What you want with her?”
“I need to talk to her about a mutual friend who—”
“You got any money?” He shuffled his feet, his movements jerky and spasm-like.
“That depends,” I said. “You got any information?”
Tooley stepped forward. “You even know where the fuck you are?”
I gave a smart-ass smile right back to him. “A toilet?” If we were going to make a move for the door, I figured this was as good a time as any. “Whatever—forget it.”
I turned to leave and Donald did the same, but the man at the door didn’t move.
Donald raised his hands. “Look, what—what’s all this about?”
“Shit,” the man said, “you just got here.”
“There’s no reason to get into all this, it’s completely unnecessary, we—you don’t understand, we’re not—there’s no reason to make more of this than we need to. We’re not children here.” Donald looked from one man to the next, the words tumbling from him like he had lost all control of them. “This is absurd. We don’t want any trouble, we—”
“Then what the fuck you doing here? This place is all about trouble, ain’t you heard?”
His friends laughed.
Donald looked as frustrated as he was frightened. “Fine, you want—your friend asked if we had any money.” Donald reached for his back pocket and smiled, like doing so would somehow set everything right. “If it’s just a matter of cash then—”
“If we want your money we’ll fucking take it.” The man motioned to the backroom with his pool stick. “Usually a couple pussies like you cause trouble and we lock the door, take them out back and have a little talk. You see what I’m saying?”
Donald looked to me, his face screaming: Do something. But I wasn’t exactly sure what there was to do. The only thing I knew for sure was that eventually Rick was bound to become impatient, worried, or both, and when he joined us we’d have the definite upper hand, but there was no telling how long that might be or what might happen between now and then.
“Just throw them out, Tooley.” The bartender sighed. “Fuck it.”
Tooley and the other man narrowed their distance from us, book-ending us slowly but brazenly. “Tell you what. Since Mick wants us to give you a break, if you say you’re sorry and ask my permission, you can go.”
I kept my hands down at my sides but clenched them into fists. Ignoring the tight feeling in my stomach, I looked at the curtains and blinking beer signs in the small windows on the front wall, then back into his dark depraved eyes. “Fuck you.”
“This is insane.” Donald turned toward the door. “This testosterone-fest has gone far enough, we’re leaving”
The taller man blocked his path.
With disturbing casualness Tooley reached out and brushed his fingers along Donald’s cheek in a gesture that seemed almost tender. Donald reared back as if the fingers had been flames. “Get your goddamn hands off of me.”
I waited, knowing that if the man moved just a bit closer to Donald I’d have a clean shot at him. In my mind I saw my fist crash into his face and knock him to the floor. Rick, I thought, where are you?
“Last time I was in prison I had a little faggot bitch looked a lot like you,” Tooley chuckled. “Used to give it to him every night. Fucking queer loved it.”
“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” Donald said.
Both men looked at him quizzically. “What the fuck he say?” the tall one asked.
The main door screeched as it was pushed open.
I had never heard a more welcome sound.
Through the smoke and dim lighting, someone hesitated just inside the main entrance, glanced casually in my direction then walked toward the bar. The others saw him too. Only difference was, I knew who it was.
The three men seemed unsure of what to make of this latest development, and stood silent and staring. Rick strolled into the bar, a slight grin on his face. “Well now,” he said smoothly, hands on hips, “what’s all this then?”
I was certain I would never again laugh at one of his heroic poses.
“We’re closed for a few minutes, bud,” the bartender snapped. “Take off.”
“No problem, bud.” Rick gestured in my direction, then in Donald’s. “But these guys are with me.”
“So?”
“So the three of us are gonna walk out of here. You guys got no problem with that, right?”
Tooley gripped his pool stick with both hands, swung it slowly down by his feet like a pendulum. “What if we do? Then what?”
Rick’s grin slowly faded. “Then I kick your ass.”
“That’s enough of all that.”
The voice distracted everyone. It was a deep, raspy voice belonging to someone who smoked too much. It had come from the back, and we all turned toward it in unison.
In the smoky doorway to the back area was an enormous woman in a bright flowery muumuu. Her considerable feet were forced into a pair of flimsy flip-flops, puffy skin and toes strained to the near exploding point beneath her weight. The woman’s hair, styled into a sort of bouffant-gone-wild, was dyed jet-black, though several renegade strands of gray survived along her temples. She wore heavy, powdery makeup, gobs of eyeliner and mascara, and her plump lips were painted a brilliant red. When she parted them with a smile they revealed stained brown teeth too small for her otherwise huge face. She leaned on a thick walking stick that appeared to have been carved from gnarled wood, and waved a chubby hand at us. “You come on back here and have a talk with Mama Toots.” Waddling around with great effort, the woman started back into the area from which she’d come, but before disappearing into the smoke and darkness, she looked back over her shoulder at the other three men. “Leave them be.”
The bartender immediately returned to his duties, wiping down the bar as if nothing had happened, and Tooley and the tattooed man drifted away from us and joined their friend at the bar.
“What the fuck was that?” Rick asked under his breath.
“You got here just in time,” Donald said. “Let’s get the hell out of—”
“Watch my back,” I said, already moving across the room. I could hear Donald scolding me but I kept moving. I hesitated in the doorway; saw a pool table, a boom box sitting on a small counter area against one wall and a row of booths along another. The lighting was worse here, the air just as stagnant and smoke-filled. The woman had somehow managed to cram herself into the last booth and now sat watching me.
Rick remained in the doorway like a guard, arms folded over his chest and one eye on the bar. Donald accompanied me a bit deeper into the room, if for no reason other than to convince me to leave, but by the time I reached the last booth he had fallen silent.
At close quarters the woman was even larger than she’d first appeared. She had to be at least six feet tall and well over four hundred pounds. “Who are you?” I asked.
“Who am I?” A burst of roaring laughter bellowed forth, jiggling the mammoth breasts beneath her muumuu. “Who am I, he says. Maria Tootrachelli, that’s who I am, but don’t nobody call me that. I’m Mama. Mama Toots.” She flashed her brown teeth again. “This is my place.”
“We didn’t come in here to cause trouble, lady, we just—”
“I heard all that,” she said in a gravelly baritone. “Have a seat.”