It was the type of situation John Lowry knew he should avoid.
He was at Rafferty’s Bar in Passaic; one of eight patrons left, which could be considered a healthy number since it was two thirty in the morning. Lowry remembered a football coach named Herm Edwards saying, “Nothing good ever happened after two A.M.,” but in truth Lowry was aware of that long before Edwards said it.
Plenty of bad things had happened to Lowry at that time of the morning over the years, and almost every one of them was Lowry’s fault. He had a temper, maybe the shortest fuse of anyone he had ever known, and alcohol made it even shorter. Rafferty’s Bar, not surprisingly, sold alcohol.
So though Lowry had long ago resolved to avoid situations like this, he had frequently ignored that resolution. But the reality was that showing discipline, while always a weak point for Lowry, had suddenly become far more important than ever before.
It was going to take a year, maybe longer, but he was going to be rich. Not just rich, incredibly rich. Never work again, never worry again … that kind of rich. In fact, his visit to the bar that night was ironically a celebration of the events of that day.
He had proven himself to the people he needed to impress, the people who would become his partners. They would supply the money, the organization, and the expertise. But he was absolutely essential to the process, as he had demonstrated today.
The other irony is that Lowry was acting honorably. He saw a couple arguing in a booth. The woman looked scared of the guy, and as it turned out, she had a right to be.
He was a big man, at least as big as Lowry, which meant he was very big. Lowry was six-four, two forty, and although the guy was sitting down, he looked to be just as tall and maybe even heavier. The difference between the guy and Lowry was that the guy had some layers of fat, and Lowry did not.
Lowry was in outstanding shape because he worked at it. He started his adult life as a boxer, but after winning only twelve of twenty fights, he realized that his possessing knockout power in both hands was not going to be enough. He exited the fight game and never looked back, but he took with him a strong workout ethic.
Lowry liked working out, liked how it made him feel. The guy in the booth clearly did not share that view. He obviously liked eating; liked how it made him feel.
As Lowry watched from his vantage point at the other side of the room, the guy suddenly reached across the table and smacked the woman in the face. Not with anywhere close to full force, but enough to draw some blood at the side of her mouth, and more than enough to make her cry.
And way more than enough to piss Lowry off.
So he went over to the table and said to the guy in a controlled voice, not at all slurred from alcohol, “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, asshole. You’re going to stand up and get out of here. She stays.”
The guy stood up, but was not inclined to obey. Instead, he was inclined to say, “Why don’t you try and make me leave?”
Lowry’s voice remained calm. “I’ll give you one more opportunity to make the right decision. You can walk out or be carried out. It’s your choice, but hurry up. I don’t want to spend more time with you than I have to.”
The woman, no longer sobbing, said, “Randy—”
It was impossible to know what she was going to say because Randy said, “Shut up, Carla.” He then turned back to Lowry, his fists already clenched, and said, “Beat it, dipshit.”
Lowry’s short fuse was thereby lit, and the short right cross followed seconds later. It landed a little too perfectly. In the ring, with gloves on, it would have accomplished its mission and hurt the opponent, probably even knocking him down or out.
In this case, in Rafferty’s Bar at two thirty in the morning and with no gloves on, it drove Randy’s chin and nose up into his head, puncturing his brain and sending him back into his seat in the booth.
Dead.
The police arrived within minutes, and Lowry was taken into custody. He knew all too well he was going down for this; people must have seen him throw the first and only punch. Carla certainly had seen it all. Lowry could be going away for a long time.
In the blink of an eye, it had gone from being the best day of John Lowry’s life to the worst.
Copyright © 2020 by Tara Productions, Inc
Excerpt from Animal Instinct copyright © 2021 by David Rosenfelt
