Pimp by Ken Bruen Read Free Book Online Page B

with just a look, the way a wolf looks at you before he attacks.
    “A wolf doesn’t need to growl, Mr. Dunne,” Max said.
    Dunne seemed confused, went, “Excuse me?”
    Max didn’t feel like explaining it to the wannabe. He’d find out soon enough.
    Max was steel on the outside, but he was a bit nervous. He knew because, shit, his hair was melting. If this guy bought the company, Max would be richer than fuck, Caymans here he comes. Dressed to impress—a suit from Lagerfeld, shoes by some Italian hairdresser, and an appropriate air of humble submission. Gotta be up front with the bullshit, right?
    It had started not bad, ultra-dry Martinis, a zing to the olives, lots of chat about summering in the Hamptons. Precious wasn’t the first to call Max “Maxie” because Mr. Dunne had gone, “So Maxie, may I call you that?”
    Max, not above brown-nosing for a deal, said, “Mr. Dunne, you may call me anything your heart desires.”
    Puke, right?
    Dunne had smiled, the smile of a Great White, all teeth and ice. He went, “The thing is Maxie, your company is actually quite a good fit for my portfolio.”
    Who except Patrick Bateman can say
portfolio
with a straight face? Max smiled in what the self-improvement tape swore was a winning way, humor tinged with gratitude.
    “But see the problem is…”
    And the muthah made Max wait, asking, “Wanna hazard a guess as to what the problem is?”
    Max had no idea, said, “I have no idea.”
    And Dunne was on his feet, near yelling, “See, that’s the problem right there, you have no idea, about anything. The problem, Maxie, is you. I wouldn’t take your company for a stale bagel if you were the lox, if you get my drift.”
    Max had excused himself to take a leak, on the verge of apoplexy. The bathroom was gigantic and that made Max even crazier. He did some five or so fast lines, well, ok, maybe a tad more. The voice in his head, the one true voice, going,
The fuck you saying to me? Yah fink
. Brit tones slipped in when Max was overwrought. He continued,
You think you can talk to me like I’m some kinda
… He was lost for a term, then thought:
minion…
?
    But this was before Max’s ultraviolent drug-dealing days, when he let the bullets do the talking, so to get his revenge on Mr. Dunne he took a more subtle approach.
    The day after the lunch powwow he sent the secret video he’d shot of Dunne on one of their nights on the town a few weeks earlier. Max always knew that to get ahead in the business world you needed the ammo for extortion ready in hand, and he always prepared in advance. The footage had been taken mostly in the fantasy room at Stringfellows and showed an increasingly wasted, bare-assed Mr. Dunne getting spanked by various strippers. From a contact/mole Max knew at Dunne’s company, he obtained—for a price, and what a price, but it was worth it—the email addresses of Dunne’s entire client list. He then anonymously sent the video off to them in a group email with the subject heading: NICK DUNNE TAKES A BEATING. A few months later, Max was adding Mr. Dunne’s clients to his own portfolio.
    Moral of the story: Nobody fucks with The Max and escapes unscathed, and he’d ruined enough lives to prove it.
    Now, with a gun halfway down his throat, the same Fuck-With-The-Max-The-Max-Will-Fuck-You-Back-Harder attitude boiling up in him, Max knew he was going to give Precious and her friends some payback—it was just a matter of when and how. First, he had to get out of this mess. Unfortunately there was a how to be figured out here too.
    Then it came to him.
    Max had had a heart condition for, like, ever. His cardiologist had told him to lose twenty pounds or else about eighty pounds ago, and yet Max was still alive and ticking. Maybe coke and PIMP was like Drano for the arteries? Anyway, he always carried heart pills with him, just in case, and he’d had so many episodes by now that he knew more than enough to fake one.
    He held his breath to make his