A rough draft of a story, part 1 or something

Nothing fancy here, just a rough draft of a story. I wrote a novella, a really bad one years ago. Fiction has never been up my alley in terms of writing. But lately I’ve been getting the bug because we are starting to amp up work on our games and I’ll be doing a ton of dialogue. What this is then is an attempt to redo that novella. The first project we did last year was a prototype board game with a cyberpunk theme, and we came up with the fictional “Lotus City” because the board was roughly shaped like a flower.

So I decided to redo my story in the context of that place, with re-imagined characters. The original was not written in first person but this one is. It’s a really straightforward techno-noir story about one guy tracking down another guy. No bullshit, no point except that it’s fun to write hard-boiled dialogue about people smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor and punching things.

I wanted to post the first bit now since I’ve been foolishly writing it exclusively here. I haven’t edited it yet, this is about as raw as it gets, there are probably spelling and grammar mistakes because I’m a weirdo and prefer to go through and edit things by hand after the fact. If this turns into something I publish or do audio of or whatever, it will likely be edited and change a lot.

The Polaris Account

Washed up. Soaked to the bone, deteriorating like moldy bread chucked in handfuls on a pond full of disinterested ducks. The clean up crew is always one step behind, dutifully waiting for the order to clean up their mess.

I’m tired.

My piece is on the bar in front of me and I don’t even realize I’ve placed it there until Cowboy puts another shot of rye down in front of me and picks it up, cocks it, admires its silver purity.

“You should holster it.” He says, and I give him a glance like a puppy that’s just been kicked. “Should polish it too.”

He knows it has been a rough night. Rough for him too in other ways, but I doubt he has pulled the trigger on anything in a year or more. He points out the oxidized splatter near the chamber. I’m really not on my game today. It was a messy ordeal.

“It’s takin’ it’s toll, Caleb. Eventually that toll’s gotta be paid. I know. I’m payin’ for it in the here and now.”

He tells me what I already know, and future tense is implicit. Cowboy doesn’t know that I’m payin’ too, in the here, in the now. I never lost anyone that mattered to me. Or if they did, they mattered then, and once they set in the silence, they didn’t matter anymore. But loss hits me all the same, and it hits me so hard that nothing else seems to matter either. Take the shot, don’t take the shot, have another smoke, another fist fight in a rainstorm, another dumb kid dead because he wanted to impress his buddies, another corpse in the morgue - doesn’t seem to make a difference as I’m sitting there having the closest person to a friend I’ve ever had give me a lecture on keeping my gun clean. I lick my thumb and wipe the blood off my piece and have an irrational sense of guilt as I grind my thumb and finger together and it rolls off my skin in flecks. That kid couldn’t have been older than seventeen. Now whatever they don’t burn to ash is going to be wiped away with a beer soaked dish rag.

“They’re gonna come after you too, Cowboy.”

He’d heard it before, a hundred times. A thousand. My paranoia elicited a smirk. At first he had taken it as a warning but when the man never came calling, it became sad, and finally, quaint. Just some good ol’ fashioned Lotus City PTSD, the kind men build entire personalities around once the life has stomped them into the ground like a drill sergeant, wrung all the piss and vinegar out of their souls.

“Sure they are. Another shot?”

I couldn’t even be mad at him. If I did, it would prove that I really had lost my marbles. I couldn’t convince him, but had to convince myself things hadn’t gotten that bad yet.

“Why not.”

I didn’t drink it. I let it sit with it’s other friend in front of me until waiting for Cowboy to attend to some other reprobate, and then I split, but not before catching long haired goon clasp both in a steel mit and down them both at once. Nobody bothers spiking drinks anymore. They know everyone’s night is bad enough as it is.

Back into the rain, back onto the darkest street I’ve ever walked, a little nook somewhere between hell of the main streets and the invisible terror of alleyway quietude. My place. Cowboy’s place. The only place left for the obsolete to tuck their heads away and wait for their time to be over. Dawns on me that I’m still waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet, and I wonder for a moment if I actually want it too.

And then it does, and I get the answer to that question.

1

Little cubes stacked ontop of one another ebbing with neon advertisements, slapped together with cheap grey texture. Some of the better apartments in Lotus City. One of the few perks of being indentured. The kind of mid-life afforded only by those who do their time.

I look down at my naked body and the futility of the shower is apparent. Water’s cold, has been for months, and I’m just washing more water off, but it’s filtered through a cheap system and marginally less toxic than the acid that falls from the sky. I don’t even know how much of this body is actually mine. It has been stitched together again so many times, it’s hard to know how much of it is made of synthstuff. My memory is starting to go, as they said it would. But it’s never the bad parts that fade away. Anything akin to a nightmare likes to stick around, and the pills they put me on only stop them from cropping up during the day. I still have to live them all night.

The incessant tone of my comm breaks through the piddling of the weak shower head and I don’t even bother to twist the tap off before I walk out into the cold air and eye the screen for a moment before picking it up. The buzzing recorded voice on the other end says, “Please verify identity.”

“Caleb Lang, Janitorial, 032.”

It starts to ring, as though I’m the one calling them. Feels like I’m being gaslit into believing I’m the one who had the idea.

“Caleb, it’s Jack.”

Jack Crenshaw. The Dustman. Chief Custodian of the Janitors. My boss.

“Jack, good to hear from you.” I lied. “How’s the family?”

“Frank has been running circles trying to get his shit together as D.A. Going through a divorce, and his soon-to-be ex has been keeping the grandkids from me. She has gone ahead and made things personal, and is spreading a bunch of bullshit lies. You ever turn the news feed on, or are you being facetious?”

“I mighta heard something about it.”

I hadn’t.

“Well anyway, I don’t want to do this over the horn. I’ve been dragged into it now and there were media guys crawling around in here the other day. Don’t know who is listening to what.”

I get it, Jack. That classic paranoia.

“Send me the co-ords.”

“Sending now.”

The pier. It was always the pier. Jack never had time for a proper vacation, so maybe it was just his way of getting some time at the beach. Jack hung up so quickly I didn’t even hear the click. I hailed a dronecab. The rain had stopped but the air was thick with sulfurous egg smell. Even in a drone you couldn’t get a good view of the city. It flew in between towers and skimmed across the top of single story shops. But it was a quick twenty minute ride to the edge, where if you looked behind you, you could start to make out the flower shape of it, the super-structure in the centre standing out proudly among the mass of shit that lay below it - Obsidian Tower.

The dronecab lazily floated down to the cement docks below, and after a lovely stroll next to a body of water so black it looked like tar, I found Jack. He was sat with his back facing me right on the edge of the dock, legs dangling over, and his hair had gone totally white since last I saw him, what was left of it. I could see a trail of cigarette smoke rising in plumes from the front of him. Jack didn’t miss a detail, and so I know he heard me approach. But he didn’t even bother to turn around.

I sat next to him, looked out at the miserable black sea.

“Good day for fishing.” I mused.

“Were you followed?”

“How should I know.”

Jack held a yellow parcel in one hand, cigarette in another. He handed me the envelope. It was rare to get a hard copy of anything. Must be serious.

There was a file inside, and a photograph.

“Seth Fremont.” I muttered.

“Remember him?”

“Hardly.” I shrugged.

“What do you remember about him?”

I remembered that Kato had slugged him in the jaw once with enough force to dislocate it. There were two units of us back then, a million years ago it felt like, unit A and unit B, so creatively named. Kato, myself, Cowboy and a few others were part of unit A. Seth was part of unit B, and there had been a mixup with mission priorities. The mixup was that Seth apparently had some personal relationship with one of the perps we were after. There were very few times where our objective wasn’t executing someone, and when Seth showed up claiming that he had been sent as backup, Kato didn’t take too kindly to it and expressed his distaste in the way he best knew how, accusing Seth of deliberately blowing our cover to give the perp time to split.

It didn’t work. We had them dead to rights, and by the end of the night, snuffed them out along with five others. Seth was furious, went after Kato, and was reprimanded, spending two weeks in a detention centre. They kept him on a permanent leave thereafter.

Even still, my stomach dropped when I looked the file over further and discovered that there was a burn notice attached to it.

“Why?” I asked, ignoring Jack’s question.

“Classified.”

“Of course.”

I think Jack could sense the bitterness in my voice because his eyes softened for a moment. He let me absorb what I could from the file and then took a micro-torch to it, tossing the flaming parcel into the water. I could see the photo of Seth, long black hair, one completely white synth-eye as the flames ate through it and it sunk into the abyss.

How many burns had there been now? I had lost count at twelve. Now there were four - just four Janitors from the original two groups. Myself, Cowboy, Kato, Seth…the clock just kept ticking down.

Jack didn’t offer any assurance. He was a son of a bitch, but he wasn’t a liar. They had put him in charge, but he had never denied his position as a talking head. Someone else was calling the shots, higher up, and the shit rolled downhill. His whole family had been part of the LCPD boilerplate for three generations, and even their nepotism hadn’t afforded them any real power.

“I’ve wasted too many of our own guys, Jack. I don’t think I can hack another one.”

We both knew the words were empty. We both knew I was going to do what they told me to do. That’s how they had made us. Not with some subservient function programmed into our brains to make us unwilling slaves. But by giving us nothing else to do but whatever they asked. Even a potential burn wasn’t the real motivator for following orders. We had willingly given ourselves over to the machine because there was nothing else to shoot for.

I looked back at the tower. Kato was in there somewhere, pushing papers like a salaryman. Cowboy was in the dusk below, pushing shots and pints. But this was a simulacrum of a life I had never bothered to adopt because I knew it was as synthetic as that ugly eye in Seth Fremont’s skull. Just a minor distraction until the brass decided that even though we were obsolete, we weren’t obsolete enough that we couldn’t take orders.

“I’m retiring, Caleb.”

“Must be nice.”

“This is it for me, this is the last one. They don’t tell me anything, so I can’t tell you anything. But having done this so long I’ve developed something of an instinct for their treachery. That’s why I wanted to bring you out here. They might be listening - fuck ‘em. I’ve worked with you for fifteen years. Fifteen years of blood. Think that counts for something.”

“Didn’t start this way though. Started as a goddamn labor dispute.” I mused.

“I felt like…a bigshot when I was runnin’ the ULF. Not just larger than life, but like it coulda made some kind of a difference. I think it did. We put the cops under our boots for half a decade. More than anyone else has in the history of this fuckin’ wasteland. Weeded the corruption out at the root, and then when I finally sat my bony ass down on the throne”

Jack cooled down and a look dropped on him like he’d lost the major leaguers and his daughter, the bet.

“Nevermind. It’s Polaris Disorder.” He said, tapping on Seth’s burn notice.

The myth, the legend. That one crippling flaw of the Janitor program, that it turns ya into a psycho murderer sometimes. Something about rapid cell growth in the form of cancerous tumors of the frontal lobe. Moves to stage four in the course of six weeks. And a bunch of other bullshit nobody with any sense believes since we have never seen it happen to a single one of our boys, at least not how like they say it’s gonna be.

But my sense of dangling carrots being filled with razor blades had dulled over time. They said it would. They said a lot of things, and in our fervor as the soldiers of the Unified Labor Force, we didn’t heed the warnings. We were too caught up in blood and fury. A week after everything outside of the Janitor Initiative was absorbed back into the force, Obsidian started the construction of their obelisk at the heart of the city, like a big middle finger to everything we fought for.

Can’t win ‘em all.

“Caleb, let me ask you.” Jack said carefully, pausing for a moment to just stare into the surface of the water. “Would it have mattered why?”

It unnerved me a bit that Jack would say that. But I was being presumptuous. I presumed, for a moment, that he knew how bad that would cut. That something was tweaked in my brain, some wire crossed, some screw loose, some kind of deranged pride…well, Jack knows. He has seen the worst in me. It bothers me that it doesn’t bother me. I wonder for a second more about it.

”Yeah, it would have.”

I say it but I don’t know if I’m telling the truth or just saying it now that he has put the idea in my head.

He nods and his brow crumples.

“Good.”

I only get to hear Jack’s voice through a Comm after that, once, before he has an aneurysm and dies, in his bed, while watching late night news feeds.

2.

Marlon Brown.

He’s standing leaning on his convertible like an asshole at a joint called the Tiki Tavern and he is pissed, out-of-his-mind plastered. Marlon has a tendency of hanging out at the front doors of places that pay him protection money, pissing off the bouncers and putting his hands all over the girls. He’s got a white suit on, red tie, mirrorshades that would turn a sun beam into a laser, and he pukes his guts out all over his white shoes and then tries to keep talkin’ like nobody noticed. And it stinks.

I hop out of my scrapheap and admire the polish job of Marlon’s purring little white V8 Angel.

“This car is for chicks, Marlon.” I say loud just a couple feet behind him and his skeleton nearly pops out of his skin.

“Jesus. Caleb. You scared the bejeezus outta me man.”

He has a trail of yellow puke down the front of his tie. Digusting.

“What are ya doin’ here?”

“I hit three other places before this one. The third one told me about this one. Didn’t realize you had a new side hustle.”

“Yeah my brother, you like it? I’ve always had a thing for like, voodoo stuff.”

I just can’t the guy. Not for any particular reason. Sometimes people have a scent, in this case it’s vomit, sometimes more subtle. They just rub you wrong and I exchange pleasantries as long as I can before I want to put my fist through the back of Marlon’s head.

“I’m lookin’ for Seth Fremont. His file says he hooked up with you at some point after he left the Union. But he found a machine to irradiate his tracker until it failed and he blipped off the radar.”

I could tell Marlon was lying, and he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet.

“Yeah well, that amigo and I have been on the outs for a year. Exactly the same time he dropped off everyone’s radar.”

I smiled. “If you see him around, let me know.”

I decided to walk the street for awhile as the rain started again. Black painted alleys and towers so high you could barely see the sky around them. We really did fight, Jack. We fought for something great. The height of the towers makes me crane my neck and my head starts spinning. I drop to one knee.

“You okay buddy?”

There’s a guy behind me. He’s got a pushcart made of scraps and he’s wearing a coat that looks like terrier hair. The rain pisses off the edge of his brimmed hat.

“Yeah I’m alright.”

Before I can finish my sentence, he has a gun on me. Little black boxy printed piece good for one shot before a reload, which won’t be enough unless he’s a good shot with a horseshoe up his ass, and he’s shaking.

His lips are dry, he opens them to speak, I don’t let him.

I deke and twist back in the other direction faster than he is has seen anyone move before, so fast that he fires where he thinks I am before finding out quickly how wrong he is, and in a split second my palm has knocked the makeshift pistol out of his hands and clanking down the wall and I’m standing beside him, facing the opposite direction he is.

He doesn’t move an inch.

“Now why would you go and try something like that?” I ask him.

He lets out a sigh and stands there for a moment while the shock wears off.

“Beer money.”

Two minutes later we are heading down the street to the Empty Bottle throwing back bottles of beer. I’m nostalgic, and it’s lucky for him - any other night I’d have popped him on the wall like a water balloon.

“I’ve seen your face” he says two beers in, only thing we’ve said to eachother since I told him I’d buy him a drink.

“I used to patrol down here.” I tell him and leave it at that.

“Never knew that. Seen you around, but never knew that.”

It takes me a second to piece it together, but I get the picture - never knew I was a Janitor.

“Well, now you know. See why it’s a good idea not to screw with people?”

He shakes his head. “Nah man, I never wanted anyone to get hurt. Didn’t want no one to get hurt.”

His eyes are ten thousand miles away, staring a hole right through the middle of the Earth with how wide they are. I never expected it to be a sane conversation.

“You looked like a guy who needed a break.”

Someone turns up the media feed.

“Is it a CRIME to be HIGH at WORK? No! Not according to our great constitution. Not according to the heroes who died to give us our eternal freedoms as the shining star citizens of our beautiful Lotus City, ever precious flower of the desert!”

Barry Dean, self-made Lotus City millionaire. A sold-out punk who converted revolutionaries into zealous cultists. Fighting against the man while he has his other hand on your dick.

“When I take three hits of Simulacrum and come on stage, what LAW am I breaking?”

An audience member pipes up.

”The Drug Control Ordinance Act.”

“WRONG. I’m violating an unjust law that goes against our essential freedoms…”

Barry Dean, co-founder of The Rezario Group. The same group Fremont joined when he split from the Janitors.

“You guys recognize the building?” I ask, to anyone who isn’t in another galaxy.

The old man I bought the drink for piped up.

“The Southern Coalition Recreational Center.” He murmured.

Someone once told me that if a crazy bum on the street sounds like they are rambling, you listen. There is a sixth sense that develops on the street, a street sense. That they are so in tune with the real world that they can predict things before they happen.

Bullshit, it’s usually soliloquies about raping hookers and getting vengeance on cops.

But it is true that the homeless know where shit is.

I drop a chip on the counter for the bartender, and pat my new friend hard on the shoulder. “Put his next three on my tab.”

“I don’t do tabs.” I hear from behind me as I open the door and walk back out into the rain.

3.

I’m a professional, y’see. And I don’t get distracted like a cat chasing after a shiny object. I still had some unsettled business.

My hand strikes out as a rocket around Marlon’s neck as he steps into the alley for a cigarette. I grind his head up the brick wall as a couple chunks of stray hair is pulled out, and his sunglasses are half off his face.

I hear the usual dialogue tree. “What the fuck, man? I didn’t do anything! Don’t hurt me, I got a two hundred credit chip in my jock!”

I deal with it the same way I always do - I beat Marlon to a ragged pulp until his tongue swells and stops screaming.

He’s laying there in his own blood and I take a drag of my cigarette sat down next to him and watch his blood flow in with the river of the rain.

“Now, what was that you were saying about not having seen Seth Fremont?”

He gags, and he groans. And then he says,

“I know Seth joined the Rezario group.” He says, like it isn’t old news.

I slap him, hard.

“Alright, alright. He joined the Rezario Group, and eventually made his way up the ranks and they anchored him with a spot on the board, but refused to make it public. But he split after that, and no one has seen him since, I swear to the Great Gazoo I’m not holdin’ anything back.”

“Well Marlon,” I say and get off my soaking ass. “If it’s a swear to the Great Gazoo, I’d hate to call your bluff and be embarrassed.”

I didn’t like Marlon. In fact it felt pretty damn good to slug him in the mouth. But I was on duty, not vacation. And I felt a bit bad after what I’d done to him because he was gonna have a nasty scar on his forehead, split so far open you could damn near see his skull.

“If you remember anything else, you know who to ring.”

Little pieces stitching together like they were was what I lived for. There was no real satisfaction in killing a man. It came with lots of thoughts about little pieces - little pieces of family, of lineage, of ones left behind who would forever curse your name if they knew it, the thought that karma was right around the corner waiting to rip your guts out for the kind of chaos you wrought into the world. All because of purpose, and meaning, a delusion of heroism, of making the world a better place.

Most people weren’t too comfortable with being happy in their own shoes, but I was. I could suspend disbelief just long enough to pretend that we had made a difference - we did get scum off the streets. We stood and watched in horror as Shinerfreaks ran at us like rabid dogs, adrenaline pumping so high that they could snap your neck with one hand if you let ‘em get too close. Kato’s gun firing, the smell of freshly popped gunpowder popcorn. Then silence, a guy curled on the ground with stiff fingers and horror in his face, and in his eyes you can see the human there staring back at you, trapped behind those same eyes like they were an undersea prison. You shot a junkie, a low-life, but the person you shot wasn’t him, it was some demon that had ripped control of his mind away from him, and you were exorcising it with perfect hatred and mathematical precision.

It was okay, because they weren’t human anymore.

Just like us.

I don’t look back at Marlon. He’s in rough shape but he will sleep it off and be back to his aggravating himself the next morning. Wrong place, wrong time, but I would have found him sooner or later.

It was time to find Barry Dean, leader of the Rozario Group, and I knew exactly where to go.

4.

This place is full of the stink of sycophants.

The lights are too bright for one thing. They want to keep you awake through their hours of self-help prattle and packaged idealist nonsense. It’s seasoned like a conference meeting, but it looks more like a geek expo. Everyone looks lost and pathetic and desperately seeking guidance in the latest money trend, because there aren’t enough credits to go around and they are hungry, but also because they didn’t learn the first six times someone screwed them over that no one is here for charity and they aren’t offering an transaction of equal value.

A hologram of Barry Dean is high above me in the main hall. The glowing words of wisdom “Tell ‘em: Stick it up their Ass!” reads like the gospel of wasted techno-junkies who still sit around strumming a cheap guitar and dreaming about making it big next year when they turn 47.

But Barry isn’t gonna be here among the rabble. He’s big time now, Mr. Fantastic, the most notorious Boost-head in Lotus City. Jail for two years for tax evasions were the real fuel on the fire, boosting his presence double-time over night. He leveraged it as an opportunity calling it an “attack on free speech”, an idea only the most vapid aging desperado’s would buy. But they bought in, and they bought in hard, and Barry was their heartthrob hero of the everyman.

There is a club down the hall and techno music is pounding through so hard the walls are shaking. I’ve got my aural implants so I turn the input down a touch and walk into a gymnasium painted sloppy with black paint, neon graffiti all over the walls glowing like a neutron star and a 1:1 ratio of fat balding men and young hipsters from some other event and they have a clear and defined space between them. But Barry won’t be here either, because then he’d have to mingle with the nobodies.

Sure enough there is an open greenroom behind the two-foot high technically-counts-as-a-stage. And Barry is there, and he’s got his arms around one girl who would look more dressed up in her birthday suit, and what looks like a skinhead bodyguard, slick non-synth dark grey suit to give it away. There is a magenta cord between two gold painted aluminum poles between Barry and I go to step over it but two goons step in my way, same suits as the guy Barry is buddying up too.

“I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Dean.” I tell them.

“Mr. Dean has no appointments scheduled.” The one to the left of me says, his face like a stone golem.

“It’s a top secret appointment.”

Barry looks over at us, momentarily distracted by the handful of flesh he is handling attached to the chest of his gal pal. He sees my face. His hand drops down exposing the poor woman’s breast, and he pauses for a moment, locking eyes with me. Then he nods at the big guys and they let me pass through. My leg locks on the ribbon and one of the gold poles falls over with a hollow clang.

He’s still lookin’ over at me as I approach the table, and he whispers something in his friend’s ears and they both split. Just you and me, Barry boy.

“You’re here to ask about Seth, aren’t you?” He says, eyes off me now, poking around nervously ‘til he finds his cigarette case. He puts one in his mouth and offers me another and I take it.

Clove. Absolute bullshit, just as fake as he is.

“I’m here to ask about Seth.” I say as I light his dart for him.

He takes a drag, blows it out, slow and dramatic. “He told me this was gonna happen.”

“What did he tell you?” I ask, betraying my puzzlement. “How did he know?”

“Did they tell you why they want him dead?”

They did, but I don’t tell him.

“Not my job to ask.”

“It’s the Rozario Group. It’s more than a fad, it’s a movement. I said that from when I started out, this was going to become a movement. We were gonna change things around here, and we have, and now Obsidian, who owns your asses, wants to put their foot down on us. But it’s not our ass they got, no my friend. We got theirs. And everyday I wake up and I look in the mirror, and I pretend it’s them lookin’ back at me, and I say-”

”Shove it up your ass. I saw the sign.”

He’s annoyed.

“STICK it up THEIR ass.” He corrects me.

“Well whatever.”

He burns through the faux-fag like it’s the last drag he will ever have and lights another and it smells like a goddamn potpourri party. I don’t even stick mine in my mouth a second time, it just burns in between my fingers and makes me sick to my stomach.

“The fact that you can sell out and hunt down your own guys is disgraceful, Caleb. Real disgraceful.”

I lean back and entertain his criticisms. I’m intrigued.

“You fought in the trenches with Seth. For the same reasons I do, but with gunshots and bloodshed and your lives on the line. My life is on the line now, too. So don’t tell me I can’t know what that’s like. I got people with crosshairs on my head every fuckin’ day of the week, just waiting for the right time to pull the trigger. And those fingers are gettin’ itchier each and every day. And the fact that you are out here trying to put a bullet in Seth is the proof. I never harboured him, I never kept his work with us a secret. Nobody ever asked. Because after he left your group, he was a nobody to them. He served his purpose, so they threw him out, like he was trash. Like the other Janitors they disposed of like trash. Like they’re gonna do to you one day, and yet here you are, pulling those triggers for them.”

I let him finish. I pull out one of my cigarettes. The genuine article. Crisp white paper. Freeze dried tobacco. The finest of the finest that Lotus City has to offer, so fine there ain’t even a fancy name on the label.

I light it and take a drag and blow it all around me to drown out the clove-stink of synth-trash, and I slide closer to Barry and put the barrel of my gun in his crotch so hard it feels like he’s getting a colonoscopy.

“Jesus, calm down Caleb. This is a public place. You answer to the cops now. You don’t got a license to kill anymore.”

“I’m not gonna kill ya Berry.” I shove the gun in harder. I can see his eyes shifting, considering calling over his goons. He looks me in the eyes and changes his mind.

“You’re gonna pull some triggers for me.” I tell him. “You’re gonna come with me to my car. You’re gonna hop in the trunk, and I’m gonna take you down the road to a nice quiet little place. And if you don’t co-operate, I’m gonna get you in there by dragging you out of this bar by your nuts and blasting every suit that steps in my way until this place becomes a butcher-shop.”

I can see the hate in his eyes, he’s fuming. He’s shaking a bit and I can tell he wants to pull his own piece and pop me right in between the eyes, and that for a moment he doesn’t even care that I’m about to pop his balls into jelly.

But Barry is nothing if not streetwise. He isn’t sharp like he used to be, that punker energy has been sucked up and dropped under a thick heap of tax forms and autographs and all the time he has spent lying through his teeth and the fatigue being a fake son-of-a-bitch eventually brings on. But he knows who he is fantasizing of screwing with, the stories from Seth and from the media about who I am and what I’ve done, and he knows they are all true, so his he rethinks his strategy.

“Meet me outside, out back. Ten minutes. I’ll be alone.”

I pull my gun away from his junk and he relaxes a bit and now the post-adrenaline shakes start. I walk past his goons, pick up the pole and fix it up before I head back out the front entrance.