Kev just wasn’t. He was as likely, today or tomorrow, to give it all away to a stranger he met on the street.
Bruno figured he should cut the guy some slack. He was brain damaged, after all. Something had to give. But it was like watching somebody set hundred dollar bills on fire. It made Bruno’s ass twitch. It came from growing up on the uglier side of Newark. Bruno liked a big, wide safety net. Lots of soft, puffy financial cushions under him.
Kev was happy to dance on a wire over the lion cage.
Like those poker winnings. Tens of thousands of bucks every night, stuffed through the letter slot of whatever charitable organization happened to be on his walking trajectory. Crazy shit. But he loved the guy. Goddamnit. Right now, he wished like hell that he didn’t.
“He’s barkin’ up the wrong tree,” Tony said heavily.
The words startled Bruno out of his unhappy reverie. “Huh?” he said, grumpily. “What tree?”
“Looking for this Otterman fucker,” Tony clarified.
“Osterman,” Bruno corrected.
“Whatever. Looking for some lily-white scientist prick is a waste of time. Brain experiments, my hairy old ass. He was tortured by a professional. It takes practice and a hard stomach to do what they did to him. That says career criminal. That says mafia. Believe me, I know.” He glanced sidewise at Bruno. “So should you, kid.”
Bruno shrugged that off. He disliked references to the mafia turf wars his mom’s boyfriend Rudy had been embroiled in when Bruno was a kid. Bruno’s Mamma, too, by association. Thinking about it made him feel like shit, so he tried hard not to. Tony had run away from the life himself, decades before, to the war in Vietnam. He’d never gone back.
“A scientist could hire career criminals to do his dirty work,” Bruno argued. “The mafia aren’t the only ones who can figure out how to hurt somebody.”
Tony waved that away with a big, bolt-knuckled hand. “He should be looking through military records of special forces troops reported missing in action in August of 1992. Or checking out mug shots of mobsters operating in Seattle. I’m tellin’ you, he was special ops, undercover on a domestic mission. He got on the bad side of some big criminal organization, and they decided to take him out. Simple.”
Bruno grunted. “Nothing about Kev is simple. I saw what happened when he saw that photograph.”
Tony made a hawking sound in his throat. “Fuckin’ coincidence.”
“Kev was a scientist,” Bruno asserted stubbornly. “Ever seen his bathroom books? Biochemistry, aeronautic engineering?”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Come on. Give me a fuckin’ break. A fuckin’ scientist, trained in eight different styles of martial arts?”
This was a decade-old argument, and totally pointless, but Bruno’s innate cussedness made the words pop out. “I know you think any guy who ever went to college is a pussy, but the opposite is just as improbable. It’s as likely that a scientist would learn martial arts as it is that a Navy Seal or a Ranger would study theoretical physics for fun.”
Tony shook his head. “That kind of fighting ain’t for fun,” he said darkly. “A guy doesn’t train like that unless he has to, to survive. Kev ain’t no fuckin’ dilettante. He was a career fighter. Remember Rudy?”
Goddamn Tony. Like Bruno’s mood needed another crushing blow. The last thing he needed to think about was the day Rudy had gone after Mamma. He’d gone after her a lot. But that day, he hadn’t stopped.
That time, she’d died. Head injuries, a ruptured liver, a broken rib that perforated her lung. Other stuff he couldn’t even bear to think about. And Rudy got away with it, on a bureaucratic technicality related to how the evidence was collected. Rudy had connections with the local don. He was protected by corrupt police. He was untouchable.
But Bruno had witnessed him hitting Mamma on countless occasions, and Bruno was set to testify at the trial. So Rudy and two of his mafioso henchmen had flown out to Portland, to simplify things.
They’d concluded that the best time to nab Bruno was early morning, at his uncle’s diner, where he went to eat breakfast before school. Nobody on the streets, the uncle asleep in the apartment upstairs. Just the kid, eating his eggs with the fucked up retard who lived out back. The guy who mopped floors and washed dishes for Tony. The one who couldn’t talk. How fucking convenient was that.
Bruno remembered every minute of that morning with weird clarity. He’d pounded at the door of the diner at five in the morning, until Kev got up and let him in, like always. He’d perched at the counter, talking a mile a minute while Kev cooked and served breakfast. Three eggs, over medium, with lots of pepper, grilled ham, white bread toast with big, gluey globs of grape jelly.
Then Rudy and the two other guys burst in. They grabbed him off the stool. Rudy wrenched the locket Mom had given him off his neck, the one he wore day and night. He dragged Bruno toward the door.
What happened after was like an action film sequence, viewed from an upside down artistic angle, bent over, arm torqued, screaming bloody murder. A dinner plate hit one guy with lethal precision on the bridge of the nose like the fucking Frisbee of death, and the man smashed into the curved glass of the pastry counter, ass wedged into the cream pies. Blood, glass, rice pudding, coconut custard everywhere.
Then Kev flew out, transformed. Bruno was dumped when the storm hit. He rolled under the table and watched. Big eyed. Slack jawed.
It wasn’t a fair fight, even with the knives the other guys held. Those guys couldn’t land a blow. Kev ducked, swerved, evaded every assault with casual grace. Sent Rudy spinning back with a kick to his face that sent him reeling over a table, arms flailing. Seized the other guy who was rushing him, flipped him like a doll. Sent him flying headfirst through the front window. Rudy’s bellow of challenge blended with the shattering crash, but his headlong rush ended just like the other attacks. A flurry of motion, a flip, a twist, a thud, and Rudy was on the ground on his side, arm broken, his own knife protruding from his ass. The fork Bruno had used for his eggs was stuck in Rudy’s groin, standing up grotesquely. Rudy curled in on himself, screaming and pawing at the red spreading on his crotch with his uninjured hand.
Tony heard the window. He came running down in his shorts and undershirt. He looked over the carnage, yanked the weeping Bruno out from under the table, looked him over and gave him a whack upside the head. He gave the wheezing Rudy an unfriendly nudge with his toe. He gave Kev an assessing look.
“Next time, don’t fuck the window,” was his laconic comment. “Them bastards are expensive. Now help me take out this trash.”
Bruno and Kev helped drag the bleeding thugs though the kitchen, to the alley where Tony’s pickup was parked. Bruno timidly asked if they should call the cops. Tony gave him a look. “Got a death wish, kid?”
Fair enough, after what had happened back in Newark.
Tony ordered them to hose down the bloodied sidewalk, and hang a CLOSED FOR REPAIRS sign. Then he’d driven his pickup away.
That marked the moment Bruno stopped following Kev around out of curiosity, and started to do it out of hero worship. Tony changed his attitude toward Kev, too. He’d started staring at him, whenever his back was turned. Wondering what he had back there, quietly washing his dishes. And if it was a time
