The Bouncer Read online

  Also by David Gordon

  White Tiger on Snow Mountain: Stories

  Mystery Girl

  The Serialist

  DAVID GORDON

  THE

  BOUNCER

  A Novel

  Copyright © 2018 by David Gordon

  Cover design by Carlos Beltran

  Cover photograph © man: Spyridon Evangelatos/EyeEm/Getty Images; street: Konstantin Onishchenko/EyeEm/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: August 2018

  This book was set in 12 pt. Adobe Garamond Pro by

  Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2800-3

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6577-0

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my family and friends

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by David Gordon

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part II

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part III

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part IV

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  PART I

  1

  When the drunken football player went berserk and tried to steal a stripper, everyone yelled to get the bouncer. This drunk was huge, a redheaded giant. He lunged for the stage, grabbing and squeezing like a starving caveman at an all-you-can-eat buffet, then went straight for Kimberly, a tall blonde curved like a futurist Italian sculpture. He snatched her right off the stage, tossing her over his shoulder like King Kong. When a waitress protested, he swatted her away like a fly. The bartender, a buffed-up dude who CrossFit like crazy, punched him right in the gut. The giant just kind of blinked, as if he’d been distracted for a second by a passing thought, then creamed the bartender with one blow. Even when his own friends tried to take him down, he sent them flying, drunk out of his mind, screaming, “I don’t wanna get married!” It was a bachelor party gone very wrong.

  So Crystal, a new girl who had just moved to New York from Philly, ran off to find the bouncer, Joe, who was on a break, sitting in a back booth, drinking coffee and reading a fat, dog-eared copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. At first glance she was not impressed. He was cute, if you liked tall, lean, scruffy white boys, which she occasionally did, but as muscle he wasn’t much compared to the human mountains in black suits she was used to seeing at the doors of clubs. This guy was in jeans and old Converse high-tops, wearing a T-shirt that said SECURITY, but the giant was about four times his size. If the giant were a tree and you sawed him in half, then filled him with steaming bubbles, Joe and Crystal could both sit in his hollow trunk as if they were in a hot tub.

  “Hey, you!” she shouted. “The idiot! We need help!”

  Joe looked up, sort of smiling mildly, and folded the page of his book. Then he saw where Crystal was pointing. The giant was wading through the crowd, apparently hauling Kim off to his lair to eat later. Moving easy, Joe stepped right into his path.

  “Hey! You! Meat!” he yelled. “Over here.”

  The giant made a frowny face, focusing on Joe like a bull seeing a red flag. “Don’t call me that.”

  Joe grinned. “How about I give you a lap dance?”

  Grumbling, the giant tossed Kim to the side, and she crashed onto a table of Asian tourists. Then he made for Joe. Crystal felt a little bad as she braced herself to watch that pretty face get ugly. The giant hauled off and threw a punch, his fist coming down like a sledgehammer. But Joe dipped gracefully and, riding on the balls of his feet, stepped safely inside the swing. He kicked out, knocking the giant’s shin from under him. As he stumbled, Joe reached in to grab a point on his thick neck.

  “Ow!” Like a wounded monster, the giant howled in pain and tried to shake loose, but Joe just pinched harder.

  “Easy, easy, let’s walk,” he said, leading the bent giant along, groaning and moaning. The crowd parted and they went right out the door.

  Kimberly got up, slowly, with the help of the tourists.

  “Wow,” she said to Crystal. “Now that’s a good bouncer.”

  Crystal nodded. “I guess it pays to read up on idiots.”

  2

  Outside, on the steps of Club Rendezvous—QUEENS’ FINEST GENTLEMAN’S CLUB, CONVENIENTLY CLOSE TO THE AIRPORT—Joe and the giant now sat side by side. It was a warm summer night. The air felt soft and fresh, as if it had been trucked in from the country, and the planes overhead could almost have been comets. The giant was crying. His name, by the way, was Jerry, and now that he had crumpled, slumped over and sniffling, while Joe patted his back, he looked more like a huge pink baby than anything else. And like a baby he was sweet and not too bright, and capable of causing great damage without really meaning it.

  “I don’t know what happens when I drink,” Jerry the giant baby said, wiping his nose. “I lose all control. I’m not a bad guy. I love my fiancée.�
��

  Joe nodded. “I know, man. I’ve been there, believe me. Don’t be afraid to reach out for help if you need it.”

  Jerry looked over, tears shining in the neon. “Are you ever afraid, Joe?”

  Joe laughed a short, hard laugh. “Jerry, I wake up in terror every damn day.”

  “Really? What could you be afraid of?”

  Joe paused for a moment, considering. He scratched his chin, staring up at a plane that, unbeknownst to him, was bound for Venice. He smiled and turned back to Jerry. Then the law arrived.

  Really the law descended. All at once they were there, from all sides, guns drawn. It was a full-on assault, SWAT in body armor coming around the building, grunting and barking orders; black SUVs full of Feds pulling up like clown cars and haircuts spilling out; NYPD uniforms screeching in to block traffic and secure the parking lot, like the overpriced security guards they often were.

  “Hey, hey, take it easy,” Joe said, calm but loud, hands raised but very still otherwise. “Everything’s cool. We’re unarmed.”

  Really terrified now, Jerry looked at Joe and then raised his arms as well.

  SWAT moved in, patting them down, still grunting. “Clear!”

  The sirens, though silenced, still throbbed redly, and the headlights peeled back the shadows to expose Joe and Jerry in the white glare. They blinked in blind confusion.

  “We’re okay,” Joe called out. “False alarm. We don’t need any help.” Joe didn’t know who called the cops, but it had to be some citizen freaked out by the fight. This was Gio’s place. Gio’s kind of people do not call the cops. They call Joe.

  Agent Donna Zamora stepped up. She was in a windbreaker marked FBI, with her hair up under a cap, also marked FBI, and with her badge on her belt—basically an outfit that says, Don’t accidentally shoot me, but still she somehow made it look good.

  “Thanks for coming,” Joe said. “But we’re doing much better now.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” she said, amused. She holstered her gun.

  Joe smiled, and she noticed he had nice eyes, also somehow amused, though it was hard to say at what.

  “Yeah,” he went on. “It was just a misunderstanding. We don’t need your help after all.”

  Now she had to laugh. “You’re right. There is a misunderstanding.” She held up her cuffs. “We’re not here to help you. We’re here to place you under arrest.”

  And as he stood, helping Jerry up and turning around to let her cuff him, she heard him laughing, too.

  3

  The phone woke Gio. It was his cell, his work phone, a disposable he changed frequently, not that he said anything that mattered on the phone, but it was still smart to keep it separate from the phone he used to call his wife, text his kids, take pictures of fish they caught on his boat. Nor was it the landline, which basically just his relatives and in-laws used, and at this time of night—Jesus, it said two fucking A.M. on his bedside clock—would have to mean somebody dead or in the hospital. Carol groaned beside him.

  “Whazzut?”

  “Nothing, baby, go back to sleep. Just work,” Gio said, patting her shoulder and carrying the phone swiftly into the master bath. She would be up in four hours to meditate and do her Pilates before waking the kids. He shut the door carefully behind him and sat on the toilet lid. The marble tiles chilled his feet.

  “What?”

  The voice was Fusco’s. “It’s me. We need to talk.”

  “Now?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “I’m on my way. See you there.”

  He pressed the red button and made a mental note to toss the phone as soon as he was away from the house.

  Gio was a gangster. A mobster. A third-generation high-ranking professional in the field of organized crime. But if you saw him, or met him, or spent time at his home in a leafy, quiet part of Long Island, on a big parcel of land—a huge but very tasteful white shingle house with an immense lawn, an organic vegetable garden, and a pool—you would never think it in a million years. Carol, his wife, was a child psychologist with her own practice now that the kids were getting big. His kids were typical American kids in all the good and bad ways that implied—cute, smart, dumb, happy, lazy, spoiled, lovable. Their idea of a gangster came from rap videos, and the only person his son wanted to whack was his math teacher. They thought Gio ran the family business, which he did, but they knew only about the legitimate half: a sprawling real estate empire, mainly commercial but including some apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens that had become very valuable lately; a heavyweight investment portfolio comprising a wide range of blue chips, tech funds, foreign investments, bonds, even some chunks in hedge funds and venture capital; a highway and road paving company, a trucking company, and a general contracting business, all run by cousins and nieces and nephews, under his oversight; and a few old family legacies, like the seafood restaurant that all the kids had to work at during the summers and that they all hated—that he, too, had hated when he worked there, boiling shrimp and wiping up red sauce—and that was worth more for the waterfront land it stood on than anything else, but that his widowed mother would kill him over if he ever sold it or changed one Sinatra picture on the wall. Her grandfather had started it when he arrived in America. Giovanni was named for him.

  Another reason you would not think of Gio as a gangster is that he had worked hard to achieve the appearance of an upstanding citizen. He’d been to college and business school, even interning on Wall Street. He had, since he stepped up, shifted his family’s focus from the old and still vibrant world of gambling, sex, extortion, and loan-sharking to more contemporary and less colorful crimes, like Internet credit card fraud, stock manipulation, and money laundering. He wore suits from Brooks Brothers, not silks from Little Italy. He drove an Audi. He played golf with doctors and judges. He even went vegetarian for a couple of weeks once when his cholesterol spiked and his wife freaked.

  But Gio was still a gangster. And when he drove out to the Parkview Diner to meet NYPD detective Jimmy Fusco, the compulsive gambler who fed him information in the hope of paying down his constantly growing debt, and learned that his club had been raided because someone had reported the hand jobs that were occasionally on sale in the VIP lounge, his first thought was: I will find the fucking rat who dimed me and pull his goddamn tongue out through the gaping hole I slice in his throat. Not to mention the money he paid out monthly in bribes.

  “What the fuck, Jimmy?” he asked Fusco as they sat in the idling Audi, in the back behind the diner, with Fusco’s city-issued Chevy parked nearby. “I’m supposed to be immune to this shit, the money I spend.”

  Fusco shrugged nervously. He was dying for a smoke but knew that wasn’t allowed in Gio’s car. “It’s not my fault, Gio. I swear. There’s nothing I can do. It’s federal. You know, because of ices.”

  Gio made a face, head shaking. “Ices? My trucks? This is about Italian fucking ices and soft serve? Okay, they sell some weed and maybe a little coke off the trucks”—he held a finger up—“but never to kids and never near schools. I’m adamant about that.”

  “No, Gio.” Fusco spelled it: “I-S-I-S. You know, terrorism. The whole city is on high alert.” He saw outrage in Gio’s eyes and shrank back in his seat, though there was nowhere to go.

  Gio’s voice was flat. “You think I’m a terrorist? You think I have anything to do with those pieces of shit?”

  “No! Never. Of course not.” Fusco waved his hand, as though trying to cool Gio off. “And neither do the Feds, really. It’s not like you specifically. They’re cracking down on everybody.” He took a breath. “I mean, you’re the furthest thing from a terrorist, we both know that, but with all due respect … what about illegal gun sales? Drug profits going all over the world? Money laundering? Illegals being smuggled in? Undocumented sex workers?” He winced again, fearing another outburst. “Look, it’s a new world. They have intel on known terror suspects planning something in New York. And until the fear leve
l subsides, or the cops and Feds get some results, everyone—you, me, everybody—is going to be under pressure.” Fusco sighed and reflexively put a cigarette in his mouth. “And like it or not, people talk under pressure.”

  “Don’t light that in here.”

  “No.” He took it out of his mouth. “I wouldn’t.”

  Gio took a breath. He was calm again. Thoughtful. “So,” he said, now with a tight little smile, “who talked about my club?”

  4

  In lockup, Joe was making the best of it, sitting on a bench, chatting with his new pal Jerry and the other, more familiar faces in the overcrowded holding cell. They were packed in like commuters on a rush-hour express, but with a stainless steel toilet in the middle. It seemed like everybody got busted tonight: a Chinese betting parlor, a Russian brothel, a crack house in the Bronx, a chop shop run by Dominicans uptown, a warehouse of stolen goods—jewelry, cameras, and other electronics—handled by guys in yarmulkes in Crown Heights. Everyone was swarmed with cops and Feds, then led away in cuffs, loaded onto buses, laboriously processed, and dumped behind bars to wait. The whole town was here. It was like a class reunion for organized crime.

  And everyone said the same thing: The heat was on. Every kind of law—federal, local, state—was cracking down on every sector of the New York underworld, trying to flush out hidden bogeymen. Which they were not going to find. It was a monumental waste of time. Everyone in the cell knew that, and so did everyone outside the cell, at least up to the rank of captain. But until they satisfied the media and the politicians that they were serious, and calmed the panicked populace; until the taxpayers and voters—neither a group much represented in here—stopped seeing suicide bombers under their beds and the world’s attention moved on to something else, nobody was getting any business done. In other words, Joe was out of a job.

  Jerry was nervous. “Joe, I’ve never been arrested before. You know, pulled over a couple times, but never like this.” He scanned the crowd. “Are all these guys criminals?”