Fight Song A Novel - By Joshua Mohr Page 0,40
all manners,” Ace says.
“Are you excited for the show tonight?” Coffen asks her.
“No matter whether me and Ace are fighting,” Kat says, “I never miss a French Kiss concert. They are incredible, and Ace loves playing music so much.”
Bob is impressed with Kat’s commitment to Ace even when they’re fighting—fighting to such an extreme that he’s sleeping at work. “You are a good woman,” Coffen says. “Sometimes people who you want to support don’t want you around them. Sometimes they say that their Norwegian coach is the only team they need.”
“What?” Kat asks.
“Let’s cool it with the moping,” Ace says to Bob. “We’re here to live a little, right?”
Soon, Tilda saunters into the bar. She sees Coffen right off because the place is pretty empty. He’s hunkered alone at the bar. Ace and the other members of the French Kiss contingent are all backstage putting makeup on one another’s faces, getting into their facsimiles of Kiss characters.
Bob has switched from beer to vanilla vodka.
And he’s well on his way to being intoxicated. If intoxication is like putting on a pair of pants, Coffen has one leg in for sure and is now working the other through.
Bob is so happy to see Tilda. Can Coffen call her a friend? He’s going to. She chose to come here and spend time with him and that’s what friends do, after all—they enjoy each other’s company. Or so Bob’s heard around the water cooler.
Tilda’s wearing a cotton tank top and tight jeans. Muscles galore. Tanned muscles making lumpy stacks on her shoulders. She could be a cage fighter. In fact, Coffen doesn’t know for sure that she isn’t a cage fighter, so the first vanilla-vodka-atrophied idea that escapes his mouth is “You ever kill a man with your bare hands?”
“Always wear gloves because these days with all the DNA technology, killing with your bare hands is like signing a confession.”
“Is that a metaphor?”
“Which part?”
“The whole thing.”
“Sure,” she says.
“I need to believe you haven’t killed a man with your bare hands.”
“Then why’d you ask the question?”
It’s here that Coffen decides to enlist this bawdy Taco Shed confidant into Schumann’s kidnapping ring. Why would he do such a thing? Why involve anyone else? Simply put: He’s telling her because he’s buzzed and feeling useless and like an outcast, a looming divorcé, a weekend dad destined to fail his kids (and that’s not even to mention the terrifying prison dad hallucination), or to be replaced by somebody new, someone like Gotthorm—a man of strong body and mind, one blessed with a severe, Nordic bone structure, one well over six feet tall who can breed a platoon of bloodthirsty Vikings. This avalanche of panic isn’t all that’s going on inside Bob. Add to this the scene he’s recently witnessed at Korean barbecue: the boy who’d been so cruel to Ace suddenly saying that Ace Frehley is a genius; the boy meeting Ace somewhere near the middle, compromising, extending an olive branch of sorts. Will that smart-ass kid do everything in his power to put Ace through the ringer during his teenage years? No doubt about it. But it was touching to see some effort from the boy tonight. Maybe that’s all anybody’s really after: effort. A stab to meet in the middle. All of this piles on Coffen’s shoulders, plus the simple fact that there is a kidnapped sorcerer outside and Bob has no idea what to do next.
And so Coffen spills the beans to Tilda: “I’m tangentially involved in criminal activity this evening.”
“Guess you’re not the prude I pegged you for.”
“You know how you used to think I was a cop?”
“I’m still on the fence.”
“Really?” Coffen says, his feelings growing even more wounded. “Why?”
She nods. “I have trust issues. And if you are a cop, we’re back standing on the fertile soil of entrapment.”
“What if I was to say that I can prove I’m not a cop right this very second beyond any reasonable doubt?”
“That sounds like something a cop would say. Are you drunk?”
“Probably,” he says, taking another swig of vanilla vodka, “and I’d like to let you in on my crime, if you’d be interested in such information.”
“I’m listening.”
“What we did was—”
“Wait, who’s ‘we’?”
“I’m talking about me and Schumann.”
She smiles mischievously. “Schumann’s here?”
He takes her out front to Schumann’s SUV, which is still parked in the same spot as before, which was where Schumann had promised to leave it while Bob went back in the bar to formulate some kind of crackpot plan to deal