Johnny Wylde Read online

  Jimmy Wylde

  By Marcus Wynne

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 Marcus Wynne

  Dedicated to my son, Hunter Wynne

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter One

  “Jimmy, get that silly motherfucker out of here before somebody beats him to death,” Big Dick said.

  I slid off the beat-up stool just under the peeling sign that said BOUNCER SITS HERE, and rubbed the small of my back where the scar tissue from a chunk of mortar shrapnel rubbed against my spine.

  The silly motherfucker in question was a pudgy white boy squeezed into a too tight plaid sport coat. The kind that hid behind body fat and thick glasses until his fourth or fifth beer, when his latent death wish asserted itself in big talk. Big talk is something you earn the right to do in my bar.

  Or, actually, Big Dick’s bar, since Little Dick, his daddy, had died in a shooting four years ago. That was before my time here in the great white whale of Moby Dick's.

  Silly Motherfucker: “I don’t care what anybody says. Bush is a BIG FUCKING IDIOT. Period. This war…”

  Gigantic trucker, Gary Null: “You a veteran?”

  Silly Motherfucker: “No. What’s your point?”

  Gary Null, six foot two Viet Nam vet with a 173rd Airborne patch, Combat Infantryman Badge, and master blaster jump wings proudly displayed on his beat up green field jacket: “Then you should just shut the fuck up about this war.”

  In a deceptively quiet tone.

  Part of me wanted to let it run, and let Fat Boy aka Silly Motherfucker get the schooling he was asking for. Big Gary was just the man for the job. But Gary was good people, a fellow paratrooper, albeit a generation older, and Big Dick’s rules were iron-clad -- except when he made an exception: ALL participants in a fight get eighty-sixed. No ifs, no ands, no buts.

  And getting 86d from Moby’s was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  Which is where I come in.

  I eased up on the big man. “Gary, how you doing, brother?”

  “Jimmy,” Gary said.

  Fat Boy turned away quickly when he saw what was coming down.

  “Everything all right, Gary?” I said.

  “No problems with me, Jimmy. This guy…”

  “Don’t need to say a thing, brother. Just leave it alone.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  The big man turned back to his drink, hunched his shoulders. Thieu, the tiny Vietnamese bartender, picked up his beer glass, thicker around than her tiny wrist, and topped it off expertly from the Leinie tap.

  “Free for you, Gary. Thank you for no trouble,” she said.

  Gary glanced at me, at Fat Boy, back at Thieu. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  “You good man, Gary. Drink beer,” Thieu said, smiling with everything but her eyes.

  But that’s Thieu.

  Which left Fat Boy.

  “Hey bud,” I said. “Come over here, will you? Bring your beer, I just need to talk to you for a second.”

  “I’m not allowed to speak my mind? This is America last time I checked…” he started.

  I just laughed and held up my hand. “Hey, no worries, dude. Just come here for a second, 'cause I need your help with something. There’s somebody on the phone and I think they’re asking for you.”

  That always gets them.

  “Oh,” he said. He picked up his drink and followed me to the end of the bar where the house phone sat.

  “What’s your name, bud?” I said.

  “Joe. Joe Konner.”

  “What do you do, Joe?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  That stopped me short. “What do you write?”

  “Romance novels.”

  “Get the fuck out," I said. "Really?"

  We stood at the end of the bar.

  I had to laugh. And I decided, just for that, I wasn’t going to kick his ass. There was too much hurt little boy looking out of him.

  I his drink and set it on the bar.

  “Joe, listen to me. You’re working out some stuff in a place you shouldn’t be working out in. You’re out of your lane, you follow me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look at this as material, friend. You were three words away from getting your ass kicked by a guy who’s killed more humans than you’ve had sex with. In your entire life. Go home, sleep it off, and you’re welcome to come back and try again. But if you insist on indulging your death wish in here, somebody is going to take you up on the offer, and I might just let them. Go home, Joe. Cool out. Come back tomorrow and buy Gary a drink and keep your opinions to yourself. All right? Cool?”

  His façade of bravado flickered, and he toyed briefly, with the thought of challenging me. It was in his eyes, his shoulders. But he came to his senses, and I think he sensed that I saw what he really was, a fat little boy crying out for some attention, the need to be taken seriously, even if it meant taking a beating.

  He went quietly out the side door, my favorite place for taking people out. Less ruckus at the front that way. I let him go, and then turned and surveyed my domainMoby Dick's: A long battered bar, the top acrylic yellowed with age, spilled booze and cigarette burns, with a selection of coins and bills from all over the world trapped beneath the surface; the front peeling green paint flaking down over the tarnished brass rail; chipped wooden tables and light chairs, light for a reason, so nobody would get killed when they got hit with them, the same reason (besides that it’s cheaper) Big Dick got rid of the glass pitchers and replaced them with plastic. You can still get a glassing in Moby’s, but at least you won’t have your skull fractured by a heavy glass pitcher like one yo-yo did a few years back.

  The early week night regulars, the crew that settled in at the same tables every night, paid no attention at all. Being low-pro is one of the criteria for being a competent door man/bouncer/cooler/security, whatever you want to call what I did in here. I like to think of it as exercising my interpersonal communication skills in a high-stress environment, as one of the psychiatrist-counselor types I’d had occasion to interface with once said to me in a previous life. I took satisfaction in bringing those skills to bear in here. Most guys in my position would be happy crashing heads off the bar and throwing people out into the street. The problem is that most guys in my position never encounter any type of serious bad guy, who might get a hard on about that kind of treatment, and come back with his friends or a shotgun when your shift was done.

  Yeah, okay. I’m overqualified for this shit.

  But it keeps me in beer and cigarettes. Occasionally I even get laid.

  Deon Oosthuizen waved a skeletal hand at me from his usual corner table, in the gunfighter’s position, back to the wall and a clear line of sight (and fire) to the front door and the bar. He and Big Dick sat together. Big Dick, as always, was perched in a surprisingly dainty fashion on one of the spindle leg vinyl back seats. He looked as though someone might snatch him up out of the seat. His dad, Little Dick, used to do that. LD used to snatch BD by the scruff of his neck and fling him out when he was a kid. Little Dick was always hanging around here. What kid wouldn’t find be fascinated in a bar? Booze, smoke, sleazy women to dote on him, big men to fetch cigarettes for, and the chance of making a buck or taking one off a drunk. Hell, it was a kid’s playground.

/>   “Oi, oke, you handled him well,” Deon said. His Afrikaans accent always became pronounced after a beer or six. He was well into his second six already. He didn’t look like he’d been drinking, except for a more brilliant sheen to his ice blue eyes set deep in a long, thin, white face topped by an unruly helmet cap of lank black hair. Deon was thin to emaciated, testament to his remarkable physiology, since he ate enough and drank enough beer to render your usual ectomorph grossly obese.

  To the trained eye, there’s more to Deon than a thin South African huddled in the back corner of a rough bar. On his right hand there was a pad of callus and a series of long scars in the web of his hand, between his thumb and index finger. Someone who knew about such things might recognize the scarring of a very serious hand gunner, someone who shot a lot with automatic pistols in a high hand grip that would on occasion catch the flesh on the recoiling slide.

  As would his seating selection, but any fight savvy devotee of rough bars likes to have that same position. The 5.11 tactical pants he wore, favored by cops and federal agents and SWAT teams, those might be a clue, but lots of people wear cargo pants, and lots of them wear baggy denim shirts out over them, and not necessarily to conceal a handgun or two and a set of magazines, and a knife or two. Sometimes three.

  But I see those kind of things, and so does Deon, which is why in the way of bars we had a sort of friendship.

  “He’s a writer,” I said. “Romance novels. Who’d have thought it?”

  Big Dick laughed. His literary taste ran to the sports page and whatever he found on the floor of the crapper when he went in there. “Fuck a writer.”

  “A fuck would serve him,” Deon observed. “Serves me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Thieu walked me over a Negra Modelo with a wedge of lime cut small and pushed down into the bottle. She handed it to me without a word or a smile and went back to the bar. I watched her go, her angular hips falling into the round hardness of her ass, and thought about how long it had been since a fuck served me.

  I tipped up the Black Lady and took a long, cold draught. Here was one woman that never said no in the middle of the night. She and I had a long, long relationship.

  Not just on the rocks, either.

  “I would like to talk some business with you, oke,” Deon said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  Big Dick looked at the two of us. “You know you’re not supposed to have your fucking guns in here.”

  “You see a sign to that effect, Deon?” I said. “Conspicuously displayed in public view?”

  “No, oke.”

  “Did you hear the owner of the public establishment directly saying that he is unwilling to allow any specific individual to carry his legally owned handgun properly concealed in accordance with his lawful concealed carry permit?

  “No, most certainly not, oke.”

  “I wonder what any such owner of any such public establishment might do if one of his best customers and his whole security staff decided that he was full of shit, and took their business elsewhere?”

  “Good point, oke. I might wonder too.”

  “What do you think, Dick? Think there’s some mileage for a well served owner of a public establishment to worry about things that don’t concern him?”

  “Damn well concerns me if I got a couple of gun nuts slinging lead in here. Wouldn’t be the first time and I been there, done that. As you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. Little Dick had been killed in a shooting, behind the bar, arguing with a customer who came out of nowhere and, after the killing, went back to wherever he came from, for the law never found him. “Don’t worry about it, Dick. You know me.”

  “I know you?” Big Dick said, standing. “Nobody knows you, Jimmy. Till it’s too fucking late.”

  He walked off, went behind the bar and disappeared into the office.

  “He’s sensitive,” Deon observed.

  “Right. What’s up?”

  “Bit of work. Interested?”

  I tipped up the Dark Lady, sucked her dry, regarded the empty and the sad slice of lime left in the dregs. Set it down on the table.

  “Do I have to kill any one?” I said.

  Deon smiled, and tilted his glass in my direction. “Only if we get lucky, oke.”

  “Well then. We got the talking part done.”

  We laughed together, a dark sound in the bar, and everyone looked at us, then turned away.

  Interlude

  Here’s a little secret about killing the virgins will never know.

  There is a Mark of Cain. It’s invisible to the civilians, all the polite sheep who wander peacefully through their day, concerned only with punching the clock and getting home to mama and the kids, shutting the door, and putting out of their minds any concerns about the wolves among us.

  I’m a wolf. Me and my brother wolves, we can see the sign, the Mark of Cain. We can smell the blood on one another.

  The scent of a killer. The look in the eye only the initiated will ever know.

  Killing a human takes you into another country.

  Killing dangerous humans for work, as a warrior, a soldier, a cop, a hired killer --that’s the ticket into a special fraternity.

  Your life is different once you cross that line and step through that dark door.

  You lose an essential innocence when you’ve snuffed out a life. No matter how not-innocent you might have thought you were before you pulled the trigger or inserted the knife or tripped the switch or swung the blow.

  You’ll never look at anyone in the same way, and all the rest of us who’ve done the same will know you.

  We’ll smell it on you.

  And you’ll know the secret we all know.

  It wasn’t really all that hard to do. And the next time, not only was it easier, but it might even have been a little…fun.

  I found that to be true.

  After the first two or three times.

  Chapter Two

  “Put it in my ass if you want to, Jimmy,” Lizzy said. “There’s some KY in my purse.”

  She’d already taken off her clothes. She turned and braced herself on my dresser, and looked at me in the mirror.

  She was so white. Whiter than milk, albino white. Long red hair fell across her back like a wing. Lean and hard bodied. Long legs. The most phenomenal breasts money could buy. Brilliant blue eyes -- large, strangely predatory -- gleaming as she watched me in the mirror stand behind her and study her as though she were up on a stage. Lizzy danced for a living. It was a good one. $800 bucks a night being an untouchable goddess up there in the light, on the stage, surrounded by fat and pathetic losers who held up folded ten dollar bills for the moment she bent before them and they tucked it into her thong.

  She wasn’t a whore. I’d kill anyone who called her that.

  But she whored for me.

  For $200 each time, twice a month, she came to my apartment, smiled, touched my face, took off her clothes and let me do whatever I wanted to her.

  “This way I’m not your girlfriend, Jimmy,” she said. “This way you don’t owe me any feeling.”

  “What if I wanted you to be my girlfriend?” I said.

  Her face -- except when animated with her professional smile -- was flat and lifeless except for the luminous blue pool of her eyes, where something dark swam and looked back at me.

  “You don’t want a girlfriend,” she said. “You don’t even want a friend. You’re my friend, Jimmy. But I’m not yours. We have a work relationship. There’s some karma in that.”

  “Fuck a bunch of karma,” I said.

  That got a genuine smile out of her, a rare thing on her smooth, unlined face.

  “Watch out that karma don’t fuck you,” she said.

  So I looked at her ass, round and hard and white, gleaming like the marble ass of a beautiful faun I’d seen in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. I’d never fucked her in the ass.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “If you want to. It
doesn’t hurt me if you use the KY.”

  She stepped away from the dresser, teetering in the high heeled Manolo Blahniks she favored, her breasts swaying just the little that the best saline implants allowed, and bent to her purse, sweeping back the mane of red hair from her face as she rummaged through her bag.

  “Here,” she said, offering me a tube. “Use this. Do you want me to put it on you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. My cock throbbed against my belt and zipper. “Put it on me.”

  She came to me, knelt. Swept her hair back over one shoulder. Didn’t look up at me.

  “Do you want to keep your pants on? Should I open it, or do you want to take them down?”

  “Take them down.”

  She unhooked my gun belt, unsnapped my pants, slid them down to pool around my ankles, then eased my cock out of my boxers and slid them down. She had long fingers, a strong hand, a crooked scar on the back of her right hand. She squeezed me and I pulsed in her fist. Lizzy opened the tube and pressed some clear jelly into her hand. She took me in her hand, the cool jelly a distraction. She stroked her hand up and down the length of me, taking her time, rubbing her thumb over and over my inflamed glans.

  She recapped the tube and set it aside. Turned back to the dresser and leaned on it. Pulled her hair back over her shoulder, leaving the white, smooth, muscled expanse of her back and ass bare for me.

  “Go ahead, Jimmy,” she said.

  I stood behind her. She watched me in the mirror. She reached around and took my cock in her hand and guided it to her ass.

  “Gently,” she said. "Please."

  My knees trembled. I pushed into her hard. She gasped, tightened around me, then relaxed. She stared, expressionless, at me in the mirror.

  I gripped her hips firmly, thrust deep into her. Her thighs rippled as I ran my hands down her legs then over her hips, held her tight, thrusted hard.

  It was over quickly for me.

  I held her to me as I shot and shot inside her. My face in the mirror didn’t look like me. It didn’t look like anyone I knew. She watched me come.