Read Online Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle by Peter Pavia - Free Book Online

been working for a guy named Frankie Yin. Maybe Peyton had heard of him.
    “Sure. Who hasn’t heard of Frankie Yin? From the Wonderland on Second Avenue. That’s a mighty rugged crowd he caters to.” He started laughing and loosened something that was sticking to one of his lungs. “Nothing scares me quite as much as a stockbroker wearing a dress.”
    Harry was about to tell him to take his job and stick it up his ass, but his thinking would run this way whenever his pride was taking a beating.
    Peyton emptied his tumbler with two swallows, and when he exhaled, Harry caught a blast of the vodka inside. What was it, noon? This guy’d give Manfred a run for his money.
    Shit. Manfred. Harry was trying to forget about Manfred and the hole in the back of Manfred’s head, Manfred bloody on the floor in his bloody bathrobe.
    Peyton said, “I can tell if I’m gonna like somebody within the first five minutes of meeting him, and I like you. You strike me as somebody who could use a break.”
    He was going to keep talking, but a hacking fit turned his face scarlet and kicked up the louie crackling in his chest. He hawked and spat but missed the crabgrass, and a quivering blob of brown landed on the Mexican’s pressure-cleaned flagstones. When the coughing subsided, Peyton patted his pockets for the pack of cigarettes he must have forgotten inside.
    He caught his breath. “And in this business, that fucking Chink is a legend. If you’re good enough for Frankie Yin, you’re good enough for me. We’ll start you tonight around ten.”
    Bryce Peyton turned out to be a decent enough guy, and he paid cash out of the drawer at the end of a shift, but Sailor Randy’s was the cheesiest joint Harry had ever set foot in. He had to be at work by six on Monday, for the drive-time promotion put on by a classic rock radio outlet. Broadcasting live from the club, an on-air personality exhorted listeners to get themselves over to Sailor Randy’s to collect scads of useless shit, visors and bumper stickers emblazoned with the station’s nickname. The Storm. They arrived in herds the minute their bosses let them go, guzzling Peyton’s rotgut cheapies, caterwauling over lyrics they knew by heart. Harry endured his tenthousandth listening of “Carry on My Wayward Son” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” two overwhelming favorites of the Broward County workforce. Tuesday was Dress to Kill night, which encouraged all manner of local hag to climb up on stage and flash her tits, while no-assed fat guys, Peyton’s cronies, hooted from the floor.
    The only bouncer Harry had any respect for was Palmero, who everybody called Big, or when he wasn’t around, The Gila Monster. He held down a day job at a hospital, a 6’5” ex-lineman from the U of Miami who was currently looking down both barrels at four hundred pounds.
    Palmero handed out assignments at the beginning of a shift, and Harry usually got stuck at the small bar by the bathrooms. He was supposed to keep an eye out for rowdies hassling the bartender, and the unisex toilets, which were one hole each, to make sure people went in alone. If somebody stayed inside too long, Harry’d have to go after them with his key. He’d find some tenderfoot passed out with vomit on his shirt, and then the kid would have to be bounced. Puking was not allowed at Sailor Randy’s.
    By the start of his second week, the Spring Breakers landed and Harry was earning every pink penny of his one hundred nightly dollars. He had never seen so many kids in the same place at the same time, blown out on booze and hormones and the stupidity of feeling immortal. Tuesday’s Dress to Kill contest attracted the usual assortment of cycle sluts, but the less weathered collegiate competition hot-wired the room with a different kind of tension. The two finalists were last week’s winner, a biker broad who stripped off her tank top to reveal thunderous, surgically untainted breasts, and a sorority sister emboldened by