A Firing Offense

TWENTY-TWO




WHEN I PUSHED open the heavy door to the Wall, they were blasting Led Zeppelin IV through the speaker system.

The place was one big unfinished room, with a couple of pool tables, pinball and video machines, scattered chairs, and a bar. Some of the people that night looked to be underage. It was difficult to pick out the patrons from the employees.

Charlie Fiora was standing outside the service bar area and recognized me as I entered. He said something to his sidekick, who then looked at me and grinned. I walked across the concrete floor to the bar, where I took a seat with my back to the wall on a stool in the corner.

When the bartender was finished ignoring me, he dragged himself down to my end. He was tall with long brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, which gave the probably false impression of intelligence. I ordered a bottle of Bud and gave him three on two. He didn’t thank me but accepted the tip.

I drank the beer and looked around. There were no windows. The area that had once housed the service station’s bay doors had been bricked up. The decorations were sparse but effective. Tiny white Christmas lights laced the walls and bar mirrors. Posters, replicating album covers of groups like Siouxsie & the Banshees and the Meat Puppets, hung on the cinderblocks. Styrofoam Flintstone Building Blocks were spraypainted and glued to the ceiling to better the acoustics and insulate the noise. Tie-dyed bedsheets hung like inverted parachutes, and held in their pockets still more Christmas lights. Fiora was nothing if not resourceful.

The crowd here was the dark side of the myth of healthy, bronzed surfers out for clean fun and the perfect wave. The young people who lived in beachtowns like this, long after their peers had returned to school for the fall semester, were strangely joyless hedonists, bitter poseurs who were capable of unrepentant violence.

Fiora was staring at me and I could feel it. I got up and walked across the room, past the pool tables and pinball machines, and into the men’s room.

There was one sink, two urinals, and a stall. I stood at one of the urinals and peed. Above me on the wall were two lines of graffiti: “Michael Stipe sucks my pipe” and “Any friend of Ted Bundy’s is a friend of mine.”

I washed up and returned to my barstool. There was a pretty young blonde in a powder blue sundress standing next to Fiora now. Fiora whispered something in her ear. She looked at me and smiled, then kept her eyes on me as she kissed him on the cheek. They both laughed.

I ordered another beer. They were now well into the second side of the Zeppelin tape. A loaded kid sitting next to me said to his friend on the right, “I’m tellin’ you, dude, the way to get a babe to like you is to make her drink.”

I began to read the cassette titles that were racked behind the bar. There were hundreds of them, arranged alphabetically. When I was finished doing that, I looked at my watch.

Bonham’s drum intro to “When the Levee Breaks” kicked in, followed by harmonica. I finished my beer, got up from my stool, and walked back into the men’s room.

I rewashed my hands. I was drying them with a towel and looking in the mirror when Charlie Fiora and his buddy walked in behind me. I threw the paper in the trash and turned to face them.

Fiora had removed his cap, making him appear less boyish. In the blinking Christmas lights his tan skin was drawn tight. Veins popped on his biceps below the rolled-up sleeves of his T-shirt. His right fist was balled.

“All right, ace,” he said. “What do you want?”

I glanced quickly at his skinny little partner, who was struggling to look tough, then back at Fiora, whom I addressed.

“Tell your girlfriend to beat it,” I said. “Then we talk.”

The kid took half a step towards me out of pride but stopped short. I thought I saw the beginnings of a grin at the edges of Fiora’s mouth.

“Go on, Robo,” Fiora said.

Robo left after giving me one more hard stare. Fiora and I studied each other for a minute or so. The music was thin and distorted, coming through a cheap speaker hung above the mirror.

“I told you earlier what I wanted. Kim Lazarus is in town with two guys and I want to talk to one of them.”

“You some kind of cop?”

“Private,” I said. Fiora relaxed.

“Then why don’t you just get the f*ck out of here?” he said.

“I could make trouble for you, Charlie. I know Kim sold you some shake, and I know you’re dealing it out of this bar.” I shifted my weight to my back foot.

“You want some more?” he said, and pointed his hand very close to my bruised face. I was tired of him and all of it. Most of all, I wouldn’t be touched like that again.

I grabbed his outstretched wrist and twisted down, and at the same time yanked him towards me. Then I kicked him with my back foot, pivoting the heel of my front foot in his direction and aiming two feet behind him, as I connected at the bottom of his rib cage.

The sound of it was like that of a hammer through a carton. He veed forward, coughed once, and opened his eyes in pain and surprise. I stepped behind him, one hand still around his wrist, and with the other pushed down violently on his elbow.

His face hit the floor before the rest of him. A sickening sound, like stone against stone, echoed in the bathroom. When a puddle of blood spread between his face and the floor, I knew he had broken his teeth on the concrete.

“Where are they?” I growled. I had pressure on his arm and held it pointed at the ceiling.

“Beachmark Hotel,” he said, and coughed convulsively, adding more blood and phlegm to the floor.

“Where in the hotel?”

“I don’t know the number,” he said, and I believed him. But I pressed harder on his arm. “Last room on the right. Oceanfront.”

“Floor?”

“Second floor.” He made a gurgling sound.

“Repeat it,” I said, and his answer was the same. I let go of him and stepped away without looking back. I pushed the door open and walked quickly across the main room.

Fiora’s friend was shocked to see me emerge first. He moved back from my path and stopped against the wall. I felt numb, and a foot taller at the same time. Robert Plant was shouting the blues.

I walked over to the blonde in the blue sundress, took the bottle of beer out of her hand, and drank deeply. I put my other hand behind her neck and pulled her mouth into mine. When she began to kiss me back, I pushed away.

Then I was out of the bar, out in the cool and wet air. I got into my car and watched my hands shake before I tightened them around the wheel, then laughed for no reason. I pulled out of the lot and screamed down the strip, to pick up McGinnes, and, from there, to get Jimmy Broda.


“WHAT’S GOING ON, MAN?” McGinnes said, and looked at me strangely as I entered our room.

“You turn in the room key yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get going, then.”

We were out on the street quickly. I unintentionally caught rubber pulling out of the lot. I felt McGinnes’ stare.

“I guess you got your information,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“There’s blood on your shirt,” he said.

“I know,” I said, pressing down on the accelerator. “It isn’t mine.”