Excerpt
CRUSH
Chapter One
The first time Amelia saw him, she didn’t think of him as a person so much as an obstacle. Cold eyes and muscles, he was standing in a corner of the club, like a piece of the furniture. Only larger.
The bouncer. No need to wonder why they called him Crush—his hands looked like they could squeeze the air out of her windpipe in a second.
The club was called the Nocturne. On Melrose at Clinton. It was one of those night spots with no sign out front, so you had to be cool enough to know about it to even know about it. Inside, all was darkness and colored lights and blaring music. Gorgeous young girls and buff young boys trying to convince themselves they were having the time of their lives. The décor was deep red and studded velvet—Queen Victoria meets Sacher-Masoch. The bar itself was a mahogany monstrosity that the owner lifted from some Gold Rush ghost town. It dwarfed the pretty bartender behind it, but Crush, stationed at the east end, was big enough to make even that huge bar look pint-size. In his black T-shirt, fit tightly over his bulging muscles, he faded into the décor, not blending in with the wall, but looking like he was the wall. His clean-shaven head had a nasty scar running from above his left eye, across his skull, to the back of his neck, like a racing stripe. Only his startling blue eyes made Amelia think that there was a human being behind the barrier. Crush made no extraneous sounds or movements. Like a good bouncer, he made sure you didn’t notice him unless he wanted you to.
The bouncer’s eyes took in everything that was going on around him. The gangbangers at the back booth, pounding Cristal. The blonde girl with the hungry eyes sitting by the bookshelf filled with prop books. The underage boy hitting on the underage girl under the chandelier. The bone-thin network exec and her wing-woman at the banquet, trolling for love. The hooker by the men’s room, also trolling for love, though she didn’t know it. The sad drunk at one end of the bar, lost in the world of his shot glass. The confident loser at the other end of the bar, chatting up the bartender as she topped off his mojito. The Latina girl with the God-given ass, attracting too much attention on the dance floor for her boyfriend’s comfort. Crush’s eyes saw them all and gauged their potential for trouble, like a gamer watching the life-bars over characters in a video game.
The guy hitting on the bartender did a drum roll on the bar and said he’d be right back after he drained the snake.
The bartender sighed, watching him go. “Five years ago, I was so pretty guys that like that were afraid to talk to me,” she said to Crush. “Now I’m just pretty enough, guys like that want to talk to me. I hate that.”
Crush nodded but didn’t answer. He and the bartender had the kind of friendship that meant they didn’t have to talk. That’s the kind of friendship he liked.
Crush had a real name (it was Caleb Rush), but not many people used it. The bartender had name too, Catherine Gail. It was Gail who got Rush the job at the club. She was in her mid-thirties, with long black hair shot with a streak of gray, sharp features that got better with age, and a magnificent scar on her lower lip that made men want to take her home and marry her.
Gail was a Tae Kwon Do master “slash” bartender. Everybody was a “slash” something these days, Rush reflected. Who could get by on just one job? He himself had several. It was a “slash” kind of world out there.
He had gone through quite a few martial arts teachers in his day. He picked things up quickly, so the instructors loved him at first. Then they’d get threatened and try to kick his ass. That wasn’t a good idea. Rush had hurt a lot of martial arts teachers.
