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That made them guffaw.
Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to grin right back at him. “Thank you, waiter.”
The smirk dropped, but perhaps having already decided he’d got a better hit in, Tattoo turned back to the girl. Removed from what little protection the bar had offered, she suddenly found herself surrounded as they boxed her in, like dogs hunting a doe.
“Now come on, love.” Top Knot sang, with an attempt at my accent that would have made even Keanu Reeves wince.
“Yeah, why are you being like this?” asked a heavier man with a pock-marked face, wearing a red trucker’s t-shirt under a leather jacket.
“You’re safe with us,” promised the third of the group, a thinner, hawk-faced man with bleached blonde hair and dressed in jeans and a faded brown leather jacket.
Salt and Pepper reached out to draw slow, intricate patterns up and down her arm. “All we want is one little drink.”
“See?” Tattoo Sleeves barked, stepping closer, as good as pinning her against the bar. “Come on, be nice for a change and have a drink with us. You never know. You might like-”
“I said no!” she snapped, her voice hot with anger as she shoved him back, her small hands slamming against his barrel chest as she tried to force her way through. “Just leave me alone will you, alright? I don’t want to have a drink with you. I just want to do my job-Ah!”
Her words fell away in a gasp of pain as a big, tattooed paw collared one of her wrists and wrenched her around.
“You bitch!” the man growled, wrenching both her arms behind her back. Her face twisted with pain as he forced her hands at such an angle it forced her back ramrod straight. “Who do you think you are? Don’t you know who I am? I’m sick of your stuck up attitude, you little Eskimo whore.” He was bending down to speak into her ear, but he was so drunk on anger and booze, his voice carried all around the room. My hands fisted on the tabletop. “You should be grateful they even let your kind in here, rather than keep all you Indian animals chained up on that piece of shit reservation.”
“Roy! That is enough!” Debra barked out, storming over to them. “Let her go now!”
She had been staying out of the fray, not approving, but knowing she had to let the new girl figure it out for herself. Such things were part of the job, after all. Desperate or not, if she couldn’t handle the odd few handy punters, this clearly wasn’t the job for her, but this had gone too far.
“Shut your mouth, Debbi, you’re just jealous we’re not after that loose cunt of your-”
Tattoo Sleeves, or rather Roy, was so distracted by his own rambling, he didn't hear me get up from my booth. Neither did any of his cackling troop of baboons see me approaching until I’d picked up the glass of coke he’d backwashed.
The dark, frothy contents hit him square in the face, effectively putting a stop to the shit spewing out of his mouth.
The silence seemed to drag on as all the eyes in the room turned on me.
Holding Roy’s wild gaze, I put the glass back on the table where he’d left it. “I’m sick of hearing you talk.”
“You know what I am?” he snarled in a voice that was suddenly distinctively Russian. Pissed off Russian, if there was any other kind.
“Drunk. Stupid. Ugly all day,” I offered, even as I felt my insides knot and writhe like snakes. Of all the bloody bully boy pissheads in this whole goddamn state, why did it have to be Russians?
“I’m the guy that’s gonna rip your fucking face off.” The mix of his north-west American accent spoken in the Russian voice made him sound like a mafia bad guy in a politically incorrect 80s action movie. His fluent command of English grammar, however, suggested he was a born and bred all American, rather than the thousands of Russian-born immigrants that came into the states every year.
Of Washington state’s near eight million population, nearly five hundred thousand were descendants of Mother Russia.
In hindsight, that might have made my choice to hide out there rather questionable, given my less than stellar history with the Russian Mafia, but then it wasn’t something they were likely to plaster all over their ‘Evergreen State’ postcards, was it. They needed to keep a few surprises for the guidebooks.
“Oh?” I forced a pleasant smile. “Well, till then, the lady said no. So it’s time to go.”
“She’ll be saying a lot more by the time I’m done with her,” he sneered and looked down at the girl, whose arms he still pinned behind her back. She just stared at me with wide, terrified eyes. She didn’t even seem to notice that the coke rivulets had now started running off Roy’s face into her thick curtain of dark hair.
“Maybe, but not today.” I dropped the act. Time to get serious. “No means no. She’s not interested. So shut up and fuck off, because if I have to listen to any more filth come spewing out your cunt mouth, the next thing out of it will be your teeth.”
“Yeah? I’d like to see you tr-”
His taunt died in a loud, wet smack as my fist smashed into his jaw. It wasn’t my best, but it got the job done. Caught by surprise, he reeled backward, releasing the girl to clamp his hands over his mouth. The girl turned and ran between two of the encircling bodies and Debra pulled her close, out of the line of fire.
The troop just looked amongst themselves, unsure what to do next.
When Roy’s hands came away, they were a wet and sticky red. He spat a mouthful of blood to the floor, and a rather yellow tooth bounced under a table, out of sight. He glared at me in unchecked fury, his face going as red as the blood dribbling out of his chops. “Motherfucker, you knocked out my fucking tooth!”
