The Hard Bounce - страница 80

“For chrissakes, Twitch.” On top of everything else, Twitch was a master of sleight of hand-pickpocketing and the like. We’d all learned a lot of shady shit at The Home. But while the majority of us fought for the rest of our lives to erase the fucked-up habits The Home carved into us, Twitch continued to hone his long after his release. Then something hit me. “Wait a minute, how did you get in here?

Twitch smiled, and his eye jumped again. “The miracles of technology. Ollie made it in ten minutes.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a perfect Massachusetts license. “I told them I was your twin brother.” I looked closer. The name on the license read Marcus Malone. The birth date matched my own.

“And they believed this?”

“The more ridiculous the bullshit, the harder it is to disprove. What were they going to say?”

He had me there. “I’m very disturbed that worked.”

Twitch shrugged. “I’m a disturbing guy.”

“True that, Marcus.”

As Twitch stuck the license back into his pocket, the butt of a pistol peeked out from his waistband.

“Your dick is out,” I said.

“Oh, shit.” Twitch pulled his shirt back over the gun. “That reminds me, watch your hands.”

“Why do I have to watch my hands?” I said, suspicious and weary.

“I got a present for you.”

Uh-oh. Twitch and his goddamn presents.

“Look under there.” Twitch nodded at the pillow, excited to give me his gift. Twitch only gets that excited about weaponry.

With more than a little dread, I reached underneath. My hands closed around something metal, and I pulled out a snub-nosed.38. I hate guns. I’ve always hated guns. Twitch knew that.

“You like it?”

I let my glare be my answer.

I held the gun out to him on open palms, barely able to hold it in my quaking hands. “Take it with you.”

“Hey, you know the saying. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Didn’t you say there was a cop right outside my door?”

“First of all, if a nutjob like me can make my way in, anybody can. Second, how do you know it wasn’t a cop who capped you in the first place?”

Good point. Then I remembered the scarred face. “I don’t think he was a cop.”

Twitch plucked a corner off the green Jell-O brick and sucked it wetly into his mouth. “You ever see the guy before?”

“Never, but I think I know the wheres and the whys.” I filled Twitch in, including names. If there are two things Twitch does well, one of them is keeping information to himself. The other is causing havoc. He sat and listened, his only response a rippling eyelid now and then.

Then I got to the point where I got shot. “I opened the door and a guy in a suit has a gun to my face, and he had-”

“Wait a minute. A suit?” He stopped mid-chew on a Jell-O grape.

“Yeah.”

“Aw, shit.”

“What?”

“Suits aren’t good.” Double twitch.

“Why?”

“You’re planning on shooting somebody, they’re going to bleed, right?” He was explaining it to me like I was in kindergarten.

I remembered the serpentine path of blood across my hardwood. “I guess so.”

“Well, they are. Why you gonna wear a suit and get blood all over it?”

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t like what he was implying.

“You don’t wear a suit unless you know what you’re doing, have good aim, and know what’s gonna come squirting out where and when you pull the trigger.” Twitch made a gun with index finger and fired with his thumb. “In other words, you’ve probably done it lots of times before.”

“I still don’t get it.” I couldn’t imagine Snake having the juice for a pro.

“It’s not for you to get. You’ve been warned. The note was a scare tactic.”

Fucking worked. The side effect was that it pissed me off, too. “When I get my hands around that one-eyed fucker, I’m gonna pull out his good eye with my teeth.”

Twitch stopped chewing, his eyelid fluttering like a hummingbird on meth. “You say one eye?”

Shit.

“Don’t even tell me he had a blind eye.”

“Why do I get the distinct impression you’re going to make a bad day worse?”

Twitch’s baby-pink skin went light pink, which is as close as he gets to going pale. He ran a finger across his temple. “And a long scar along here?”