Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
« Previous EntriesNext Entries »
At Max’s
April 9
Max didn’t live in the casino he worked at. He had a townhouse on the west side of Vegas, overlooking the Strip. They had taken me out to the desert west of Vegas, too, so one of the first places I came to when I reached town again was his house. Another farmer had picked me up. He had been taking his sheep through to some pasture he had farther upstate, but he had been willing to let me ride in the back with the sheep. The gun in my hand and the blood on my clothes seemed to make him a bit more accommodating than he would have normally been.
He dropped me off at the end of the driveway leading up to Max’s house. There wasn’t a gate or anything, just a rather long driveway. I walked up it, unchallenged, and banged on his front door with the but of the pistol. It was a Ruger. All black and compact. Wicked-looking, I had always thought.
No one answered my knock, so I knocked again. Still no answer. The door was locked, of course. What idiot hides in a house with an open front door? I took a step back and kicked at the door a couple of times, then gave up on it.
I walked around the house and found a few big windows that I could have climbed through. I didn’t want to risk getting cut, though. I saw that he had a second-floor patio, so I climbed up the trellis to it. Sure enough, the French doors leading into the the upstairs were unlocked. Who’s going to climb up a trellis just to break into a house?
I checked the upstairs. Just two rooms. The one I came into and a game room with a pool table. No one was in either of them. I took a step down the stairs and decided I’d do this the right way.
“Max!” I yelled. I waited for an answer but none came. “Max, answer me!” Still no answer. Well, I wasn’t going to keep yelling, give my position away. I walked slowly down the rest of the steps, my gun held at the ready. At the bottom of the steps, I could see into the living room on my right, and the dining room on my left. I couldn’t see any movement from the living room, and the lights were on in there. The lights were off in the dining room, so I stepped that direction. Better to check the easy hiding places first than get surprised from one of them.
I stepped into the dining room. A large table sat in the middle. Strange, since Max had no more family than I did. Maybe it was wishful thinking. There was a curio cabinet to the side that surprised me when I saw my reflection in the mirrored back of it. It held little glass figurines and crystal plates. I never knew Max had such a soft heart.
Through an arch to the left of the dining room was the kitchen. I stepped through the archway and jumped to the side, not wanting to be a framed target for long. I head a gun cock and I dove down behind the small island in the middle of the kitchen.
“Max!” I shouted again. “Max, listen to me. You don’t want to do this. Just give up now and I won’t have to kill you. Max!” No answer but the scuff of feet on the other side of the island. I stood up and stepped up onto the island, stepping on one of the bar stools that stood around it first. As soon as I set foot on top of the bar, I felt the wind of a twenty-two caliber pass in front of me. “Shit!” I yelled and dove back, falling off of the island counter top.
Max came around the side, a short-barreled shotgun in his hand. “Isn’t this how you do it?” he said, holding the gun up. “A .22 to the head. Isn’t that the professional way?” He aimed the gun at me and took another step closer.
I kicked at the gun, knocking it away from the center of my head, but he pulled the trigger when I kicked and the shot caught me in right shoulder. I felt the pain spread through me like a wild heat and I raised my gun and fired at him. He had ducked down when he fired, the shot taking a bit of the wind from his sails, and I missed him completely.
He ran from the room as I got to my feet, ready to fire again. He had to reload. His only held two shots at a time, but I had eight to begin with, seven now. He was mine.
He ducked through the archway and I was right behind him. I saw him run out of the dining room and around the staircase. I chased after him, rounding the staircase just as he yanked open the front door and ran out down the driveway.
I chased after, pausing for a second in the doorway to take a shot at him. It missed again, kicking up gravel and asphalt from around his feet. He stumbled and fell to one knee, but he regained his feet quickly.
I chased after and had almost caught him when he jumped in his car that he had left at the bottom of the driveway. He twisted the key in the ignition and it fired to life again, but I was close enough. I grabbed the door handle and pulled on it, yanking the door open. He tried to throw the car into gear and run off without me, but my finger was faster. Two shots to the head and Max slumped over into his passenger seat.
Only after his blood began to pool in the leather passenger seat did I realize just what I had done. I had gone against the bosses’ wishes. I had killed another mid-level boss, a semi-made man. And I had done it when I didn’t have to.
Killing the two goons was nothing important. They were threatening my life and I had every right to kill them for it. They weren’t anything in the grand scheme of things. Max was, though. He was involved in the Mob’s bookkeeping. He ran a casino. His death would be investigated to the highest degree.
And I had broken the rules. As a company man, that was the worst of the problems.
I went back into Max’s house after shutting the car off. I sat down on his sofa and called Ray.
“Yeah, kid, what’s going on?” Ray sounded relaxed. He was probably a couple of sheets to the wind and enjoying his evening.
“I, uh…I fucked up, Ray.”
All of the ease dropped out of his voice. “What do you mean you ‘fucked up’? What the fuck did you do?” He wasn’t yelling, but he was upset.
I told him the story. The kidnapping, the drive, the two goons. How I had escaped from the rope, killed the two thugs, then chased Max back here. How I had tried to get him to come out, to give himself up. How he had fought back and how I had ended his life with two to the head.
“You weren’t kidding, kid. You really did fuck up.” I could hear him sit down and sigh. “Look, I can’t really do much for you. I’ll go to the bosses, plead your case. But I know what they’re going to say. They’ll say you should have stayed out of it. They’ll probably get me for letting it get this bad. Damn it, why didn’t I see it before? I could have sent him somewhere else. Or you. You’ll work anywhere. I could have sent you on to San Diego or Mexico City.”
“Ray, Ray. Don’t worry about it. You couldn’t have seen it. None of us saw it until it was too late. I’ll take care of myself, don’t worry. I can get away. Do you think you can help me with cops and judges, though, if I don’t?” I hoped the fear didn’t seep into my voice. I’m sure it did, though.
He sighed again. “No, kid. I’m sorry, I don’t think I can. That’ll be up to the bosses. The only judges I have any pull with are right here in New York. You’re on your own.”
I thanked him for talking to me. I’m sure it was dangerous once he knew what had happened. I hung up the phone and paced around Max’s living room. I finally decided to head back to the Flamingo and get some stuff together. I could probably get a car off of Sonny, and if not, I had money saved up that I could get out tomorrow to buy a car with. I needed to get out of town as soon as I could, though.
That week went by with nothing special happening. I stayed pretty quiet and low-key, just watching the tables in the back of the casino and standing as bouncer at the lounge door. A couple of fist-fights broke out during matinee shows where drinks were half price. I made sure they left with more bruises than they had given each other, but that was about it. I was trying to come up with a plan to get back at Max, so my mind wasn’t really on my job.
The next Monday I was bouncing at the bar again. The bar maid was swamped, it was another matinee, and she asked me to take the trash out to the dumpster. There was a door to the back alley through the kitchen, which was shared between the lounge and the restaurant. I grabbed both of the large black bags and hoisted them out over the bar. I backed through the swinging kitchen doors and a chef’s aide opened the back door for me. It closed behind me and I walked over to the industrial-sized dumpster in the alley. I lifted the lid and threw the trash bags in.
About that time a car came screetching into the alley and stopped just short of me. Two huge men climbed out. I saw the car rise on it’s springs when their weight came off of it. They grabbed me, one on each side and threw me into the trunk of the car. It sped out of the alley as fast as it had come in.
The trunk was small. I’m not the largest of men, but I’m not the smallest either. I had to bend my legs at the knee so I could fit inside without my neck and back bent in half. I tried to kick the trunk open, but the inside had been resealed with metal. I couldn’t find the latch because it was buried behind some of the metal plates. I was stuck in here until they let me out. Wherever they let me out, I’d come at them fighting.
I felt for the gun I always had inside my jacket, then I remembered that I had taken the jacket off while I was in the lounge. It was the middle of August and the air conditioning was wonking out on us again. It worked, but not as well as we’d like it to. We had fans running in most of the casino, but the area where I had to stand didn’t get much circulation. I had taken my jacket off and laid it on the stool beside me. I hadn’t picked it up again when I had taken out the trash.
So, I was unarmed. In a trunk. Going God knows where. Great.
I tried to keep track of the twists and turns that the car made once I realized I didn’t have my gun. A left, a right, another right, a third right, and then a left. That meant we were going back the way we had just come. A second left, a pause that must have been a stop light, then two rights and a left. I gave up after that, knowing I’d never be able to keep up. I’d just trust to the fact that Las Vegas stands out like a hooker in church to find my way back.
I rode in the trunk of that car for hours, it seemed. There wasn’t any light so I couldn’t see my watch. I kept bumping my head against something hard and metal behind my head. I assumed it was the back of the trunk, but then it moved and I heard a rattling noise.
Reaching behind my head, I found a metal toolbox. I opened it’s clamshell lid and felt around inside, blind but with questing fingers. I stabbed myself on a screwdriver, and found a smallish ball peen hammer in the bottom of the trunk. A screwdriver and a hammer would be my weapons. Like I said, I would come out fighting.
The car drove for what seemed like hours more, then finally stopped somewhere. I heard the ignition cut off and both doors open. Obviously we were at the end of the little trip. I heard voices coming toward the back of the car and a key enter the trunk lock.
The lid popped open. I had squinted my eyes, expecting strong sunlight to come screaming in at me, but it didn’t. It was dark out. That meant we had been driving for at least six hours. Probably going around in circles, but I was still lost. I was also stiff from being folded up in the trunk for so long. My plan of throwing myself at them and killing my way free suddenly seemed a lot more foolish. I tucked the screwdriver into my back pocket, though, hoping they wouldn’t find it.
Looking up from the truck, I saw three faces. The two closest were the two burly men that had kidnapped me. I didn’t recognize the third one right away. They lifted me bodily up out of the trunk and carried me to a tree near the car. We were parked in the middle of a strand of trees in the middle of the desert. There were maybe six or seven trees total, all rather stunted and small. They tied me to the largest of them, then stepped away and I finally got a good look at the third man.
It was Max.
“You bastard!” I coughed at him, my mouth as dry as the desert around me. He just laughed at me. He turned around and walked back to the car. One of the big men followed him. The other stayed to guard me.
I could see Max and the other guy talking. These guys were huge. The more I looked at them, the more certain I was that they couldn’t possibly be naturally that large. Their hands would have wrapped around my thigh easily. Their mouths looked like you stuff live chicken into them with room to spare. They were gigantic.
“Hey,” I croaked to my guard. “Hey. Give me a drink. Throat’s…dry.” He brought over a canteen of water and poured some over my face. What managed to run into my mouth just enraged my throat and mouth and my thirst doubled. No, tripled. I gasped and asked for more, but he just ignored me.
Max’s other guy finally came back over, and they started mumbling between themselves. They looked at me, then looked back over at Max. He just sat in the car, waiting on whatever was going to happen.
They talked for awhile longer, probably ten or fifteen minutes. I had slipped the screwdriver out of my back pocket and had started working at the rope they had tied me up with. It was some of that annoying nylon rope. Relatively thin and it just gets tighter and thinner the more you mess with it and pull at it. I tried not pull at the rope, but just dig away threads and snap them with the screwdriver. After ten or twenty minutes I had eaten through about half of one of the strands of rope wrapping around me.
They stood there talking some more. By now I had picked up a word or two of what they were saying. Max wanted them to kill me. Apparently one of them thought they should get do it and get it over with. The other seemed to doubt whether it was a good idea to kill a made man, even with the orders of another boss. So Max had been telling them he was a boss. Oh well, he could die like a boss, then. Something bloody and unflattering would do nicely.
I continued to dig at the rope that was holding me to the tree and finally I felt the last thread of it snap. As the rope began to unwind and fall off of me, I stood up, throwing the rest of it away and leaped onto the back of the thug closest to me. I landed on his back, one arm around his neck and I heard him grunt from the impact of my hundred and eighty pound body hitting him full in the back. With the other hand I drove the screwdriver into his eye. I felt it punch through the eye socket in the back and bury up in his brain. He twitched and started to fall to the ground. I jumped off of him, letting the screwdriver fall with him.
Max yelled from the car, “What the fuck is he doing loose?! Kill him, you idiot!” and I could see him scrambling with something inside the car. Probably a gun, but I didn’t have time to see if it was.
I rummaged in the dead man’s jacket and found a gun holstered under his left armpit. I pulled it out and fired three shots point blank at the other thug, who was just turning from looking at Max to look at me again. One hit him in the stomach, one in the chest, and the third in the head. He fell over backward, spewing blood in a crimson rainbow as he went. I heard him gurgle once and then he was silent from then on.
Max had been watching what I was doing and realized he couldn’t do anything against me. He jumped to the driver’s seat of the car and thumbed the key in the ignition. It started and he threw it into reverse, trying to run me down. I rolled to the side and fired a shot into the engine. It didn’t hit anything important and he threw it into drive. The car shot forward and bumped across a bit of desert to the deserted miner’s road they had brought me out on. I fired at the car until it was out of range and I was out of bullets. I knew where he was going, though.
I threw the gun away, took the gun from the second guy and started walking back toward town.
The next day I called Ray first thing in the morning and told him what Manny had told me.
“Come on, kid. There’s no way that Max’s that stupid. Why would he risk getting a professional hitman like you after him? That’s just crazy,” Ray tried convincing me. I wouldn’t buy it.
“No, Ray. He’s crazy alright. Max thinks I’m here to upset his casino and his operations here. He thinks I’m here to stuff him in some back room doing taxes. That or put him in a hole in the desert.”
“So we’ll just explain it to him. Surely he’ll understand,” Ray said. I was starting to think he was going deaf and senile. Did he not see the trouble that this all was? Didn’t he realize that Max couldn’t be explained to? He had to dealt with. And I wanted to do the dealing.
“Ray, I’ve already done that. I told him months ago that I wasn’t here for that. I explained to him that I was just here to make up for my fuck up in Chicago. He said he understood, but apparently he didn’t,” I was getting really tired of explaining this all to Ray. I just wanted him to say “OK, kid, go get ‘em.” Well, really I’d like him to use my name or something. “Kid” was getting really old. It was alright when I was thirteen, but now, almost forty. It was a little irritating. “Just let me deal with it, Ray. Give me permission to deal with him. I won’t even go after him. I’ll just deal with whatever he throws at me. I’ll convince him of the error of his ways. Just say OK, Ray.” I prayed under my breath. Oh sweet Mary, just give me Max’s blood.
The other end of the line was silent. I heard some shuffling and a drawer open and close. I hear Ray clear his throat. He wasn’t going to let me. I knew it. He’d say “Sorry, kid (again with the ‘kid’), we just can’t have any fighting in the ranks.” and that’d be the end of it.
Ray cleared his throat again. “Sorry, kid,” he began, “we just can’t have any in-fighting. Let us deal with Max. You just keep doing your job. OK?”
I muttered something that must have sounded like agreement and he hung up the phone. For the first time in my life, I wished that I wasn’t part of the Mob.
I didn’t hear from Manny all that day. Around seven-thirty I got tired of waiting and tried his house again. He wasn’t home, but his wife, Belinda, answered.
“Is Manny there?” I asked.
“No. Manny no aqui,” she said.
“Oh. Can you tell him to call the Flamingo when he gets in? The Flamingo?”
“Si. El Flamingo.” And she hung up.
I decided to try his work again. He was there and the receptionist put me through. “Hello, this is Manny.” His voice had changed a lot from that job years ago in New York. I hadn’t seen him since Chicago, but I didn’t remember him sounding like that. He had grown up in the year or so since he had come out here. It was probably from the shit that cop had put him through in Chicago. An attack like that’ll mess up anyone.
“Hey Manny. It’s me. I need your help.” We exchanged pleasantries for a bit, then he asked what I needed help with. I related the story of the car trip to him. “Really I just need to know who gave her the gun. Whoever did that was the one that wanted me dead, I’m sure. That’s not something you’d trust anyone with. Think you can help me out?”
He didn’t say anything for awhile. “Where can I meet you at? Your place? The Flamingo? Or should we meet somewhere else?”
“No, the Flamingo should be fine. When are you coming by, Manny?” I was a little scared at how urgent he sounded. I was excited, too, though. I felt sure he already knew who it was that was behind it all.
“Alright. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Meet me in the lounge. Get a good table. You know how I can’t stand to miss Sinatra.” And he hung up.
I went down to the club about ten minutes later. I had packed a gun in my old docker’s clutch and wanted to be able to check out the place thoroughly before Manny and I had our little talk. I found a table in the middle front and staked my claim to it with a little “Reserved” sign. I sat down a few minutes before Manny was supposed to get there and ordered us a couple of drinks. Vodka and tonic for me, gin for Manny. I didn’t know if he liked gin or not, but it didn’t really matter. We were there for business, not drinks.
Manny showed up a few minutes later, twenty minutes after we had talked exactly. He glanced around rather nervously, then sat down and gulped his drink.
“OK, I have to tell you all of this quickly,” he said. “I already know who did it, but what I have to say is that you need to just forget about it. You can’t do anything against him and it’s pointless to even try. They don’t allow in-fighting and if you report it, he’ll just get sent somewhere and taken care of. You won’t get your revenge. And if you go after him on your own, you’ll be out. They don’t like in-fighting. They won’t help you or keep you out of jail or anything. Trust me, just forget about it.” Manny looked around nervously again and gulped the rest of his drink.
“Hey, whoa, slow down, man. What’re you talking about?” I didn’t like the flighty look in his eyes. He was way too nervous.
“Max, man. Look, he planted the gun on the girl. He’s scared of you. He wanted you taken out. He’s a moron, though. Giving a gun to a girl like that. I’m surprised she didn’t shoot herself taking it out of her purse. He got drunk that night and was talking about how he would run his place however he damn well liked. Said there wasn’t anything the bosses could do about it once he took out their bulldog. He wasn’t counting on you coming back, obviously.” Manny waved to a passing waitress and ordered another drink. “What’s wrong? You haven’t touched yours,” he said, pointing to my Vodka tonic.
I took a sip, in shock. Max? Max had tried to have me killed? Did he really think I was there to take over his casino? God, the man was more deluded than I thought. Planting a gun on Joy wasn’t just wrong, it was stupid, like Manny said. She didn’t know what to do with it. And now she was dead. Max was responsible.
Manny, of course, was right, though. I couldn’t go after Max. Not on the surface at least. I’d have to be sneaky and devious like he had tried to be. That’d be hard,though. He’d be watching twice as closely now that I had made it back. And if he saw me here with Manny.
“Hey, when’s Blue Eyes coming on?” Manny asked.
“He was here last night. You missed him,” I answered, caught up in my own thoughts.
“Damn.”
I stood up and thanked Manny for the information. I dropped an envelope with five hundred dollars in it onto the table and walked away, weaving through the crowd so no one got a great look at me. Once I was out of the lounge, I slumped against a wall to think.
My friend from childhood. The guy I had protected against bullies. This guy was going to come back after me for being in the same town as he was? This ass was going to try and take me out just because he thought I was a threat to him?
The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. And the angrier I got, the more I started not caring if the bosses wanted in-fighting or not. I was going to get my revenge.