Rowdy (Marked Men #5)(59)
“What brought the sister here if she has a man back home?”
Dixie came scurrying by as I turned around on my stool and leaned my elbows on the bar as Asa stopped by my side. Her eyes were big and she sounded rattled.
“Those guys are out of control. They had one pitcher of beer and they’re acting like it was twenty. They threw two of their pint glasses on the floor and one of them tried to grab me when I told them I wasn’t bringing them any more. I’m not serving them anything else.”
Asa reached out and patted her on her arm. “You don’t have to. They aren’t going to be here for much longer.”
Asa had always come across as mellow and sort of unhurried, so it was slightly alarming to see a tic working in his jaw and his normally calm gaze glinting with molten sparks of anger.
“Do you need me to do anything?”
I wasn’t just going to sit there while he tried to tangle with an out-of-control group of drunken kids that outnumbered him.
“No. I got this.” He laughed a little and copied my pose. “I used to be them.”
I made a face. “That bad?”
“Way worse, actually.”
“I don’t think I would’ve liked you very much before those bikers beat your ass, Asa.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Not too many people did. Anyway, finish telling me about the sister?”
“She always had a knack for finding the worst kind of guy to spend time with. From the looks of her, this one took it too far. There is no way her father could’ve missed it and I think she might’ve finally had enough. What’s the use in being loyal to a family that’s going to stand by and watch you be hurt and not do anything about it?”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, and the fact I may or may not have acted like I was smacked in the face with a bag of bricks when I saw her sure as shit didn’t sit well with Salem.”
“Gotta be hard for Salem. She has you now but she thinks your sister still has a piece of you from back then. That’s a pretty twisted tapestry of history, present and future, she’s looking at.”
“Poppy doesn’t have any piece of me other than sympathy and maybe a big chunk of regret. Seeing her today made that really clear. I was shocked to see her and worried that she was all black and blue, but that was it. The way Salem works me up, the way she just understands me . . . I never had any of that with Poppy. Salem was always the one that I gravitated to, I was just too young and too scared to understand what it meant back then.”
Asa made a noise of understanding and then pushed off the bar as one of the guys in the group picked up a pool stick and swung it at the head of one of his friends. The other guy drunkenly ducked and lunged at the attacker’s legs. In a split second they were rolling around on the floor in a tangle of arms and legs as fake fighting turned into real fighting really fast.
Asa moved in the direction of the brawl with a determined gait and I quickly followed. The boys were rolling around on the floor, fists were flying, and blood was pouring out of mouths as swearwords and garbled threats punctuated heavy punches. Asa got ahold of the kid that had started the entire mess and tried to pull him off his buddy. One of the other kids in the group moved toward Asa and I just shook my head and told him, “You don’t want to do that, friend.”
The kid looked at me like he was considering his chances of taking me on, when I got distracted by Asa dropping a long string of swearwords. The kid he had pulled off the obvious loser of the boozy tussle had turned his rage onto Asa and was giving my friend a hard time. Asa had the kid by the back of the neck and one of his arms cranked up between his shoulder blades, but whatever the kid had been drinking had numbed the pain and he was giving it his all to get loose. He threw his head back and tried to head-butt Asa and threw his legs back trying to kick the much taller and much more sober man.
“Knock it off, you little shit.” Asa gave the kid a shake and looked at me as I bent down to see how the other one was faring. Not too great if his snoring and bloody face was any indication. “All of you are done here. Everyone move toward the front door.”
The kid he was wrestling with broke free by throwing his body forward and surprising Asa enough that he let him go and the young punk fell face-first on the floor. The guy rolled over on his back and looked up at us with baleful eyes.
“Fuck you. I can buy and sell this bar a hundred times over.”
Asa looked at me and then looked back at the mouthy kid who had worked his way up to his knees.
“Well, until your name is on the deed, you and your friends can get your happy asses outta my bar.”
A couple of his cohorts walked up behind the kid and helped haul him to his feet.
“You gonna make me, Opie? You put your hands on me and I’ll sue you, I’ll sue him.” The kid pointed at me as I lifted an eyebrow at him. “I’ll sue every single motherf*cker in this place and I’ll have you arrested for assault. I know my rights.”
I grunted as Asa took a step forward. “Watch yourself.” I wasn’t sure the warning was to the kid or to Asa, either way I could see this situation going even more into the toilet any second.
“I’ve been to jail, you little shit. More than once. So what else do you got?”
By now a couple of the other guys in the group started to see some reason and a couple of the regulars had made their way over to see what the ruckus was about. The odds were a little more even now, but the kid in the center of it all was glaring at Asa like he was his own personal archnemesis.