Dead Cat Bounce Read Online Free PDF

When the voice stopped ranting, his dad brought the phone back, opened his eyes, and started speaking again, this time in Russian, which Jonah couldn’t understand.
    With his father’s attention now elsewhere, Jonah looked surreptitiously around the trading floor to see if there were any other kids.
    The ugly man was right. There weren’t.
    Now he felt really bad. He sat there, trying to be invisible, listening to his father speaking in Russian, watching him trying to rein back his temper, imagining the hateful eyes of the other traders on his back, imagining them talking about him.
    Suddenly, a voice behind him boomed, “What have we here?”
    Jonah hunched his shoulders in fear.
Oh, no
, he thought,
another horrible man about to tell me I shouldn’t be here
.
    “Are these Neanderthals being nasty to you?” the voice roared. “I heard some grunting as I was passing Drizzlers’ Den and thought I’d come and find out what the commotion was about.”
    Jonah carefully spun his chair around and looked upward. All he could see was a huge mustache: thick, black, and waxed to a sharp point about three quarters of the way across each side of a broad face. There was more to the person, but beyond the fantastical mustache it was impossible to take in anything else at firstglance. The mustache began to move as the voice boomed again. “And if your dad won’t do anything about it, I will.”
    There were eyes too now, looking straight at him, dark and cold below a high forehead topped by an aggressive crew cut, also black.
    “What would you like me to do? Shall I
biff
them?” The word “biff” was accentuated, and the man raised two very hairy fists and held them in front of his face like a boxer. “I will if you want. Trust me. My word is my bond. It’s the only way to treat bullies, to fight back.” He threw two fast punches into the air. “Biff, biff!” he exclaimed and dropped his hands back down. “You’ve probably been told that.”
    Jonah found that he was inadvertently nodding in agreement, although he’d actually been told the opposite over the years.
    “But you normally don’t have to. Just
look
like you will.”
    The mustachioed man turned away and raised his fists once more. “Oi! Rock. Gravel. Want to pick on someone your own size?” he growled.
    Jonah looked up to see that it was now the two ugly men who were cowering, trying to hide behind the glass partitions.
    “See what I mean? Drizzlers all the way through. Say boo to them and they’ll run a mile. They’re like a loud fart that doesn’t smell. Noisy but nothing dangerous, eh?” The man paused for a second, apparently pleased with his analogy, humor in his eyes.
    Jonah turned back to face his father, holding back a snicker, when all of a sudden he heard a loud “BOO!” from behind him.
    He spun his chair quickly back around.
    The large man was roaring with laughter and pointing at Rock and Gravel. “Did you see the looks on their faces?!”
    Jonah glanced in the direction of his father’s desk mates to discover that they were in fact visibly shaking. He gave up holding back his snicker, now impossible to contain, and burst out laughing himself.
    “Very good, sonny,” the man said, straight-faced once more. “You didn’t even jump. Impressive. There aren’t many lads of your age who wouldn’t bat an eye at all the hubbub here. Certainly not anyone who would end up with this lot. Maybe you should come with me and join my band of Whistlers, eh?”
    Jonah didn’t know what a Whistler was, but if they were like this man, joining them sounded like fun. He shifted his eyes to see if his dad was paying attention, but he wasn’t so Jonah took a closer look at the man who’d so easily silenced his tormenters. He now had a big grin on his face, and a set of teeth had appeared from beneath the mustache. They were immaculately white and straight at the front, and as the smile grew wider it revealed a glint of gold on the sides. Below the