Hard Stop by Chris Knopf Page A

scanned the crowd for targets of opportunity.
    The bartender who’d seen Iku sidled up to me at the bar and put his hand on my forearm.
    “There’s the dude,” he said. “Over there next to the pole. White shirt. Heineken.”
    I watched him for a while. He was apparently there alone, leaning on the pole and looking out on the dance floor, but otherwise disengaged. He had short brown hair and a few days’ growth of beard. He was slight, just shy of delicate—Iku would have been close to his height in her bare feet. But he wasn’t a bad-looking archetype of the generic young professional class.
    “What do we do now?” asked Amanda, shouting in my ear.
    “I don’t know,” I yelled back.
    The guy stayed put through a half dozen musical segments—I don’t know what else to call them—strung together with the non-stop thump of the underbeat. Then he put his empty bottle on a table and headed for the men’s room. I told Amanda to save my seat and followed him.
    A short line formed at the door. I stood behind him until we were through and waiting for vacancies at the urinals along the wall. It was a good time to take out the picture of Iku and hold it in front of his face.
    “Hey, Bobby.”
    He whipped around.
    “Get away from me,” he said in a strained whisper. “What are you doing?”
    “Looking for your girlfriend. What are you doing?”
    He pushed past me and plunged back into the crowd. I followed him across the club floor to the main entrance. He maneuvered his way through the oncoming flow and shot through the door. When I got outside he was already partway through the parking lot. I ran after him.
    “Hey, just want to talk,” I called, which had the effect of shooting him into a full run. I saw him point something at a row of cars and the lights inside a Volvo sedan lit up. By the time I got there he was in the car with the engine running, his headlights blinding me as the car pulled out of the parking space and tore down the lane. I turned around and ran for the entrance to the lot, zigzagging through the rows of cars, hoping to cut him off at the pass.
    Which I didn’t quite do, but as he squealed out onto the street the headlights from the other cars lit the rear of his car and I could make out the license plate. I pulled a pen out of my shirt pocket and wrote the number on the inside of a pack of matches.
    A man and a woman I’d nearly plowed over on my way across the lot came up behind me.
    “What was all that about?” the woman asked me.
    “That guy hit my car when he was backing out. Didn’t even bother to look.”
    “Fucking Volvos,” said the man, as if that explained everything.
    When I got back to the bar Amanda asked me how it went.
    “It went out the door and down the road. In a big hurry,” I shouted in her ear.
    “Interesting.”
    “You think?”
    “Did he say anything?”
    I told her what he’d said, as best I could above the noise.
    “Odd,” she said.
    “I got his plate number. I think.”
    “So what do we do now? All this shouting is hurting my throat.”
    I looked around the inside of the club, which was now filled with young bodies and energetic foolishness.
    “We dance,” I told her, pulling her out on the floor and holding her in a traditional slow dance embrace, contrary to the pace of the music. It was the only kind of dancing I knew how to do, though empirically speaking, it was also the best.
    We left after that, which I was happy to do. I was never much for nightclubs, and they made even less sense at this stage of the game. Amanda always looked great to me, but looked best when I could hear her speak, when she was animated by the conversation, whatever the content.
    I cashed in my rain check for the outdoor shower before we went to bed. Cleansed by the steaming water, the pinprick stars overhead and the proximity of the sacred Little Peconic Bay, I slept hard. For once the swarm of bitter wives, alienated daughters, conniving plutocrats and light