Marion had nothing. The gig was up. She knew it. Cutter sat back down and picked up his paper as if his problem child, Marion, ceased to exist. A few minutes later, wrapped in a black sarong and matching flip-flops, Marion was at the back door. She pushed the silver metal bar across it that said FIRE EXIT ONLY in faded red letters. The alarm hadn’t worked in years, and the metal door swung open with ease. She stood in the gravel parking lot out behind the club and lit a cigarette. Only four left in the pack. At least she was in a comfortable pair of shoes. That thought made her smile. She knew it was the remaining drizzle of speed in her brain making her look at the bright side, but it wasn’t going to last. Nothing good lasted.
She tossed the butt onto the gravel, crossed the lot, and looked into the back window of the beat-to-shit Bonneville that Barb and Tim had given her, to see her seven-year-old son curled up and sleeping under a pile of her clothes. He’d ripped open the trash bags of stuff in the backseat to make himself a comfortable place to sleep. Marion thought he looked like an angel—a homeless angel. What was that she’d thought about nothing good lasting? Simon was good. He would last. She watched him like that for a moment more, when a second pair of eyes appeared next to her in the window’s reflection.
“Where you going, girlie?” Louis grabbed her shoulder and spun her around hard enough for the bones in her neck to crack, then shoved her up against the back quarter panel of the car.
“Goddamn, Louis. Take it easy.”
“I take it however I can get it,” he said, and squeezed her shoulder harder. “I know you ain’t looking to roll out early without saying good-bye.”
“It ain’t like that.”
“Well, then, tell me what’s it like? Because I can tell you what it looks like to me. It looks like you’re trying to skate on the two bills you owe me, and I told you I always get paid.”
“And I told you I’d pay you on Friday.”
“Oh, yeah? How you gonna pay me with no job?”
“That’s my business, now get your fucking hands off me.”
“Bitch, who you think you’re talking to?” Louis delivered a haymaker to Marion’s soft belly that folded her in half. Louis stepped aside and she immediately fell to the gravel. While she gasped for air on her knees, he snatched her purse off her shoulder and dumped it out on the ground beside her. He shuffled through the makeup, bits of paper, car keys, and loose change, and found the folded wad of bills wrapped in a pink hair tie. All ones and fives.
“This ain’t gonna cut it,” he said. He stuffed the money into his pocket and lifted Marion to her feet. She tried to speak but could only cough and wheeze for air. “I guess we gonna have to come to some other kind of arrangement.” He spun Marion around backward and shoved her up against the hood of a Dodge pickup. She tried to fight him while still trying to breathe, but Louis twisted her arm back and behind her, pressing her face down on the truck while he went to work on the sarong. Behind them, at the back door of the club, Todd laid the bag of chicken wings he’d promised Marion on the ground and quietly slipped back inside.
“I told you I could make this all romantic-like,” Louis said, after he tossed the sarong and the ripped thong to the ground, “but I think this is the way you wanted it, ain’t it, girl? You like this rough shit, don’t you?”
Marion was only able to grunt out three words in a croaked whisper. “Don’t . . . do . . . this . . .” She tried to slide out of his grip, but he pulled up on her arm to the point she thought it might snap.
“Yeah, girl, swing it for me,” Louis said, unzipping his fly.
Marion didn’t see the beer bottle hit Louis in the back of the head, but she heard the hollow thud of impact and watched it bounce to the ground beside her. “Owwww. Shit!” Louis let go of her arm, and she slid to the ground, landing hard in the gravel.
The boy stood about ten feet away with another empty bottle in his hand. Louis was still seeing stars when the kid slung the second bottle like a Major League pitcher. His aim was a little wide and he missed the man standing over his mama, but he hit the side of the truck, and the bottle shattered like a bomb. Shards of busted brown glass went flying and both Louis and Marion covered their faces. “Get away from my mama,” the boy yelled, and balled his tiny fists up and raised them like a boxer.
“Well, look at this little fucker,” Louis said, rubbing the growing welt on his shaved head. “Shorty here want to play like a man. Come here, shorty. You can watch what a real man does to a whore that don’t pay what she owe.” The kid was only sixty pounds if that, and tiny even for a seven-year-old, but he stood his ground and dug in, even when Louis produced a knife that caught every bit of the light from the streetlamp. Marion started to stand and rush him but was barely on her knees when the back door of the club busted open and Big Moose, the club’s bouncer, a three-hundred-pound bruiser with jowls like a bullmastiff’s, walked out into the lot. Todd followed behind him, and last, Cutter himself, toting a pump-action shotgun.
“What in seven hells is going on out here?” Cutter hollered across the lot. Louis slipped the blade back into his pants and made his hands easy for Cutter to see. “This bitch owes me money, man.”