EYEHEARTZOMBIES

A more-popular band than I usually feature, Saves The Day has been a favorite of mine for a long time. Off their new album, In Reverie, here’s Driving in the Dark

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Even with two busted knees and a broken arm, Dan found a way to tell the Chinese to take their business elsewhere. That, or he died and they never felt like following up on their investigation. Either way, we didn’t hear any more from them. They still controlled Chinatown, but it didn’t have enough action to interest our bosses anyway. Mostly just drug trafficking and some illegal gambling. We were more interested in booze, cancer sticks, prostitutes, and protection money. Those were the real money-makers. Not that we didn’t care about gambling, though.

Actually, we cared enough about gambling to send Max out to Vegas. He was sent to that jewel of the desert to run the accounting department of a casino. I can’t remember the name of it, but it was one of the older joints, farther back off the strip. They tore it down a few years after Max and my story ends, so you can’t go see it any more or anything. They sent him out as an accountant, but he was really more of a mole in there. They used him to get accurate counts, before any pay off or skim, of all the money that came in and went out. They wanted to make sure they really were turning a profit. And that helped them keep track of the skims, too. I’m not sure how many people got laid out ’cause of too big of a skim, but I know there were some.

It seems like things started going bad after Max left. He moved out there in August of ‘45, and come the middle of September, we get the first blow. James Camillo, the boss for Chicago’s west side, got killed. His girl did it to him. Shot him in the back of the head ’cause she thought he was boning some other frail. He was, but not the one she thought. She ended up killing herself, too. I’m sure someone would have been sent to take care of her if she hadn’t done that. She probably knew it, too. I’m sure that thought helped her swallow a bullet.

Ray and the bigger bosses, who I never knew — Ray was my only contact with the higher ups — wanted to put someone tougher and without a steady girl in Camillo’s seat. Ray turned to me and I agreed to do it readily enough. It was a step up. I wasn’t as high as Ray, who ran all of Brooklyn, but I was closer to the top than I had ever been before. I moved to Chicago at the end of September.

Chicago, as windy and cold as it is, was great for me. At first. I loved the town. It wasn’t as cold-hearted or towering as Manhattan, and it didn’t have all the street toughs, thinking themselves invincible, that the other borroughs are infested with.

There was one big problem, though. Chicago had been Capone’s sandbox. He wasn’t there any more, of course. He’d gotten out off The Rock in ‘39 and was in Florida now, dealing with Syphilis. They had learned, though. The town wasn’t very friendly to those of us with “alternative occupations.” I figured I could make it, though. Friendly or not, I wasn’t one to be trifled with. Or so I told myself.

The first problem showed up three weeks after I sat in my new desk. A beat cop, thinking himself a big man on the street, came in, sat down without asking, and said, “You’ll play $2,500 each month. On the first.”

I looked at him, surprised by the gall it takes to sit in front of a man’s desk, uninvited, and demand money from him. I had to keep myself from ventilating his forehead. That kind of insult deserved a bullet, to my mind. But he was a cop. And law enforcement the country over have to be given special consideration. Especially if they’re willing to take a bribe.

“$2,500?” I said, an eyebrow raised. “And what’ll that buy me?”

“A closed eye,” he said. “Look, just pay it. I don’t want to discuss this any longer.” He stood up, obviously ready to go.

“And…if I don’t?”

“You’ll get a knock on your door and a pair of bracelets every time we find a wino in the river or a hooker in a dumpster. We’ll arrest you for everything. You greaseballs don’t get a second look in court. Your whole operation’ll be behind bars in a month.” He sneered at me. He spat on the floor of my office.

I stood up and moved around the desk to stand in front of him. I was slightly taller, maybe an inch or two, and he seemed uncomfortable now. The closeness, or maybe the slight height difference made him nervous. “Alright, then,” I said. “I guess we’ll have to pay. Do we drop it off at the precinct or what?”

He smiled when I said we’d pay. “No, no. I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll come by and you can just give it to me.” I agreed and we shook hands and then left the office.

I didn’t bring much with me to Chicago. I brought a few suits of clothes, a couple of guns I was particularly fond of, and Manny. Manny was indispensable to me now. He was my eyes and ears. I called for Manny and he came over.

“Manny, I need you to get me some dirt on a cop.” I gave him a description of the guy. “His name is Mallory. Dumb fuck didn’t take off his name tag when he came in. Get me everything you can.” Manny wrote down the name and said he’d do his best. He left and I went home for the night.

Another couple of weeks went by. We paid Mallory off at the first of the month. Marked bills, in sequence. The most dangerous kind for bribes and bank robberies. I hoped he’d get caught with it before we decided to do anything to him. Manny still hadn’t brought me anything really useful.

James Mallory was an Irish Catholic like every other God-forsaken cop in Chicago. He was married to some mouse named Julia and they had a menagerie of a household. Some six kids, four dogs, two cats, and, if Manny could be believed, a snake. Sounded more like a zoo than a house to me. But nothing dirty. At least, nothing other than the buy-off money. He didn’t drive a new car, didn’t live in a new, big house. Didn’t even have a gold watch or a set of gold pens. The man was soap.

Manny, though, wasn’t have as good of a time in Chicago as he did in New York. Mallory had caught him spying, twice. The second time, he and a couple of other street walker cops beat him with a tire iron and a beer bottle. Cut him up pretty bad. We put him in the hospital for a month and he came out with a nasty scar on his right cheek. We sent him on to Las Vegas, some place we thought would be quieter.

After that, I left Chicago. I didn’t leave ’cause of him beating Manny. That was already taken care of. Two guys were waiting on Mallory when he got back to the police station that night. They picked him up off his feet in the locker room and carried him into the showers. When they finished with him, one whole wall of the communal showers had to have new tile put in. I heard that something like six whole pieces of ceramic tile were removed from his head in the hospital that night. He didn’t die, but he never came asking for money again, either.

No, I left ’cause of the body. No one outside of the Mob is supposed to know where any of the bosses live. As I was a boss now, I was protected by that clause. Someone must have found out, though. That, or someone on the inside wanted me out.

It was a Friday night. I had been out with some girl, I don’t remember her name, but I remember she had mountains like I had never seen before. The dress hung off of her front like a tablecloth. I took her out for a night of dancing and drinks. We ended up drunk and at my place. She slipped out of the dress and the rest of the night was spent in bed, tangled in the sheets.

I woke up around four in the morning after hearing some sort of thump in the living room. The Mob had actually bought me a house here in Chicago, on the outskirts of the west end, and to hear something in the house was more distressing than it would be to you. I had guards. They were supposed to patrol the outside all night, from an hour before dusk to an hour after dawn. If something got in, they let it or it snuck past. Neither option was particularly appealing.

I climbed out of bed, and from halfway under the dame, and wrapped a robe around me. I also picked up my snub-nosed revolver and slowly opened the bedroom door. No sounds, but that didn’t mean much. I closed the door behind me, not wanting the girl to wake up, come out, and have me cap her in the dark. I went down the hall toward the living room. The place was quiet and still. I didn’t like that stillness. Something was going on, I was sure of it. I stepped into the living room and flipped on the light switch.

After Mallory’s head renovated the police showers, we got a lot of heat from the cops. Especially from the District Attorney. He’d barge into one of our warehouses at least once a week on some weak suspicion of drugs or gun trafficking, a warrant from one of the many push-over judges in town, and a gaggle of pimply-faced policemen, fresh out of the academy. He never found anything, but he had been very vocal about his raids. Said they were “riding the city of organized crime and the last vestiges of Capone’s era.” The man had a serious ego problem.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy to find the DA’s body in my living room. He’d been shot and stabbed, a couple of times each, and was laying face down in a small pool of blood just inside one of my windows. I sat down on the couch and stared at him, trying to decide what do to.

Normally, we hide a body. We throw it in the lake or the river, or we bury it somewhere. If we’re pressed for time, we use a dumpster or just toss it into an abandoned house. How a body ended up in my place was beyond me. None of my guys would have done that, I’m sure. They’re not morons and even the dumbest of them knows that you don’t shit where you eat.

I called up Frank and Paul, the two guys that watch the front gate, and asked if they had seen anything. Neither had. They also said they hadn’t heard anything from any of the grounds guys either, the one patrolling my property. No one had seen anything, none of them would have brought in the body, so how the hell did District Attorney Lester Vance end up in my living room?

I called Ray. It was five in New York and I knew he was an early riser. Sure enough, he was up and he listened to my problem. His advice, as usual, was great.

“Someone’s trying to plant it on you, kid,” he said. “Just get the body out of your house and then figure out how it got in.”

I knew how it had come it. It came in through the window. I could see blood smears on the sill and frame. I just wanted to know who.

I called Frank again, and one of the patrol guys. I think it was Mikey. They came and I told ‘em to dump Mr. Vance in Lake Erie and weight him down with something. They took a couple of heavy tow chains from the garage and left with the body wrapped in a blanket. They must have hidden him pretty well, ’cause I never heard tell of anyone finding it.

I called a taxi for the broad, telling her I had some family coming for the day and she needed to leave. She protested, some bullshit about “I love you” and “I want to meet your family.” I don’t have time for that mushy crap, so I patted her ass out the door and got back to brass tacks.

Paul’s shift was over, so I asked him to come up to the house before he went home. He did and I asked if he’d seen any new people around the place. Not suspicious, but just people that weren’t normally there. He mentioned the dame I’d had that night, and another guy. Some guy named Jimmy that he said was affiliated with the bosses back in New York. Or Vegas. He wasn’t sure. Said the guy had mentioned both.

I asked Ray about Jimmy when I called him back later that morning. He hadn’t heard of him, but he said that wasn’t hard, since there were a lot of guys working in the two cities now that he didn’t ever deal with.

“Kid, we’re moving you on,” he said at the end. “You’re going to Vegas. You leave tonight. We’re gonna set you up as security for another of our hotels. The Flamingo. That’s one of our places. Bugsy’s running it. Into the ground, I hear, but that’s another matter. Anyway, you hop on a plane this afternoon for Vegas and I’ll see to it that this DA gets taken care of.” He hung up the phone after I said alright.

So, I did. I packed up my things again. They had only had me in Chicago for a couple of months before I was moving again. Seemed kind of fishy to me, them moving me so suddenly and for such a little problem as a dead DA. But I was a company man. I did what I was told.

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Ray, of course, didn’t like the sound of that at all. He set Manny on it that afternoon. Manny works quick. One of the best things about that kid. He was twenty-five or so by this time, but I still thought of him as a kid. Probably always will. Manny came by the next morning. He had found out what we wanted to know.

“Yeah, I found him,” Manny said. His accent was still there, but it had thinned a lot. He rarely spoke Spanish now, but sometimes he’d forget a word. “He’s working for the slanties.”

“Say what?” I asked. I knew he meant the Chinese, but I didn’t think they’d dare to take on established operations like ours. Their organization was relatively new and weak.

“The slantines. The Chinese. They paid him to find out what he could about us — about you guys — and the money is on a hit when he does. These Chinese, they’re fucking crazy, man. One of ‘em yanked another guy’s eye out just for looking at his whore of a wife. You don’t want to mess with ‘em, new or not.” Manny didn’t really look scared, but he looked like he’d have rather not found out that fun tidbit.

“It’ll be alright, Manny,” Ray said. We were meeting in his office, he was sitting behind his mahogany desk with his fingers under his nose, in an upside-down V. He looked at me. “Feel like some work?”

“Sure,” I said, not sure what I was agreeing to do. Whatever it was, it would be the hell out of sitting around, waiting on the chinks to do something to us. “What do you want me to do?”

Ray thought for a second or two longer, then leaned forward and motioned me closer. I got up from the chair I was sitting in and walked over to his desk. He looked down at the blotter for a moment, then looked up at me. “I want you to find this Dan. Manny, you’re going to help him. I want you to find him, and give him a message for those yellow-skinned bastards. You communicate to them, as clearly as you can, how we don’t like people checking us out. We don’t like people planning hits on us. Especially in our own city. You make sure he convinces them of that.” He sat back in his chair and looked at us. Mostly at me. I knew exactly what he meant. Go rough up Dan, ruin his day, and make sure he could get back to the Chinese before his ticket ran out. Make sure they knew it was us that did it and what would happen if they got cute again. Standard job, really.

Manny, though, hadn’t been on the front of this stuff in awhile. His old man had died and Manny had taken his informer business big time. He just collected information, now. He had eyes and ears everywhere, bringing him rumors, taking pictures, tailing people. You couldn’t fart in this city without Manny finding out how it smelled and what you’d eaten that had given you gas. He was everywhere here. He opened his mouth to complain about the job, then thought better of it. He knew Ray and he knew me. He knew we weren’t going to let him bite it on something like this, and if he had to get a little closer to flying bullets than he liked, well, that was just too bad. The money would make up for it.

He got up and we walked out the door together. I tapped him on the arm, motioned for the back door and we went out into the alley behind the office front. I pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one, flicking the match head with my thumbnail. That first draw on a cigarette; I always loved that feeling. A rush of warmth in your lungs and head.

Manny hunkered down near the door and looked up at me. “This going to go OK? I’m gonna come back, right?”

I looked down at him, saw how scared he really was. Manny was never one for being around violence. He nearly puked when I finally told him what all had happened that day with Simon. He just couldn’t handle it. “Yeah, it’ll be alright,” I answered him. It would, too. I’d make sure of it.

He looked at me for a second, then nodded and never spoke of it again. He trusted me, which I was glad for. I trusted him, too, which I was doubly glad for. You keep those you trust around you. A man you can’t trust is a man you’re better off not having anywhere near you. It just leads to trouble.

I pulled a couple more puffs off the cigarette and tossed it aside. It bounced once on the blacktop and then fell into a pile of beer bottles. “Let’s go,” I said to Manny and we went back inside. I got my coat and we left through the front door. Manny and I climbed into my car, a deep blue sedan with smoked windows, and we drove back to my second place. The place where I keep the guns and other things I might need. We went inside and I got Manny a nice, small, easy-to-handle revolver. Just in case. I picked up a couple of pistols and a baseball bat. I also grabbed a rather wicked-looking knife as a last thought. Eight inches long and serrated on the back edge. If nothing else, pull that on a guy and watch him fill his pants. I rolled out a map of the city on a table, too.

“Alright, Manny. Show me where this creep lives.”

He pointed to an intersection in Queens. “Right there, man. He and his dame, some whore he paid to live with him, I bet, have an apartment right there. No security. Well, a night watchman, but he pays more attention to the hookers walking past the front door than he does to anyone come in it. No worries.” He still looked nervous, but his voice didn’t shake and he was actually starting to look excited.

“Alright,” I said, and we left. We climbed into my car again and rolled toward Queens. It was about six in the evening, so traffic was kind of heavy. Took us almost an hour to get to Dan’s apartment. We parked two blocks away and I told Manny to stay with the car. He got out and stood next to it, watching up and down the street. He was nervous as hell, but he tried to hide it. If I hadn’t known him, I wouldn’t have seen it at all. That kid was a good actor when he needed to be.

I walked up the street the two blocks to the apartment complex. “The French Fox” it was called. What the hell kind of name is that for an apartment building? Especially one that was in as bad of shape as this one. Bricks were missing from the walls, the alleyway was piled three feet high with garbage bags, and the fire escapes looked rusted through. The front door, and most of the windows, still had all of it’s glass, though, so it wasn’t a complete roach motel. I walked past the doorman, who was checking out a fur-encrusted working girl that was strolling past the front door. Manny was always right.

Dan and his lady lived on the fourth floor. Apartment 4D. I buzzed the call and heard a woman’s voice say “It’s open.” I got in the elevator and pressed the four button. I regretted it almost immediately. The doors clanged shut with a grinding noise and the car began to lurch upwards, a half-floor at a time. Just when I was starting to feel sick, it reached the fourth floor and I stumbled out. Definitely taking the stairs down.

I looked left and right, found apartment 4A on my left and 4M on my right, so I went left. Third door on my right was 4D and I knocked three times. No one answered the door, so I turned the knob and walked right in. Bad fucking idea to just leave the door open. Dan wasn’t a smart guy, though, in case you hadn’t noticed earlier.

It was dark inside, all of the lights were turned off. I could hear a hum coming from a room further in the apartment. I was in a small entrance hallway with a closet door on one side. The end seemed to open into a kitchen and through the kitchen I could just make out a couch and houseplants. Must be the living room. I pulled one of the pistols out of its holster and held it down to my side. I walked down the hall and peeked around the kitchen. Formica everywhere. Yellows and greens, made murky by the darkness of the apartment. I could hear the humming a bit louder now, from the living room. They must be listening to the radio. I walked through the empty kitchen and stood in the opening in the wall that led into the living room. It was one of those one-big-room jobs, so there wasn’t really a door from the hall to the kitchen to the living room. I could see another hall, to my right, that must have lead back to bedrooms and the bathroom. That hallway was dark, too, so I didn’t see anything down there.

I coughed, once, and didn’t see any movement in the living room. I could see the radio, though, it’s dial glowing slightly in the dim room. It didn’t shed enough light for me to see anything else about the room, but my eyes had adjusted by now and I could just make out a shape on the couch. “Hey,” I said, louder than the cough. “Hey. On the couch.” Nothing. No movement, no noise. I took a couple more steps toward the couch. Standing on the other side of the coffee table from the couch, I could see it was a mouse. She was laying on the couch, bare-ass naked, with a long pipe laying on the floor beside her. Passed out from opium. No wonder Dan was involved with the Chinese.

She had to have been the one to answer the intercom, though. Must have caught her just before she passed out. Lucky me. I hoped Dan wasn’t in the same shape. It’s hard to impress a message on a poppyhead.

I turned toward the second hallway and started walking down it. There were two doors, one on each side, and one at the end. I opened the one on my left first, holding my gun higher in case Dan had any firepower of his own, and some crazy ideas of what to do with it. The first room was a bedroom, empty and dark. I left the door open and went to the room across the hall. Same story there, too. Another empty bedroom. I could see booze bottles all over the floor and bed, though. They were drunks and junkies. Great.

Leaving that door open, too, I went to the door at the end of the hallway. I could see a light on under the door. Somehow I didn’t notice that before. Oh well, better to have an open door at your back than a closed one. Especially if the closed one might have an opium-crazed “detective” behind it. Those private eye types are dangerous, I tell you. They get a gun and get their nose in places it don’t belong, and then they try and shoot their way out. You make a lot of enemies with a nose and a gun.

I opened the door and had to turn away. The light was so bright after being in the dark apartment. A second or two later, when I didn’t feel I was being blinded by the sun, I looked back. Dan was in there, passed out on the shitter. I put my gun back and took out the baseball bat. I had rigged up a bit of a holster for it inside my trenchcoat. Held it inside the coat without me having to use my hands. Useful little invention, that.

Raising the bat, I tapped Dan with my foot. I kicked him in the shin. Nothing. Didn’t move at all. I tapped him on the head with the bat and he jolted up. “Wh — What?” His eyes were glazed and he looked around, bleary. He finally settled on me and came to a bit more. I heard his piss let go when he saw the bat in my hand. “What the fuck are you doing here?” He spoke more clearly than I would have thought possible. Opium isn’t good for motor skills.

“Teaching you who to spy on. You tell your chink friends to keep their rice-loving asses in Chinatown.” I smacked him hard across the mouth with the bad. The wood thwunked on his cheek and he spun around a quarter-turn and his head hit the wall. I smacked him in the arm and he shook. I whacked him again the arm and heard the bone snap. A black welt appeared almost instantly where the bone had broken and I smacked him again in the ribs. He fell forward off of the toilet and a horrendous smell rose after him. He apparently had fallen asleep while taking a dump. Drugs really foul up your shits. The smell was horrible and I held an handkerchief over my face with one hand. I whaled on him a time or two with the bat, a shot to the groin, another to the head. I stuck my head out in the hall, took a deep breath, then used both hands to beat the ever-loving crap out of his knees. When both were bloody and bruised, I quit and ran back into the hall.

I hurried back to the living room, hoping the smell wouldn’t catch up to me. I didn’t do anything to the naked woman, she was fucked enough as it was. I left the apartment, closing the door behind me. I hurried down the stairs and out the front door, where the doorman was now talking to some other dime-girl. This one dressed in a velvet dress and six-inch high heels. He didn’t even notice me.

I trotted down the street to the car where Manny was still watching both ways at once. He saw me coming and climbed in to the car. I popped open the trunk, threw in the bloody bat, and then I got in the car, too. We drove away and never saw or heard from Dan again.

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