“Help yourself,” motioned Derrick.
When he had left the room, Greg turned to his mother. “Mommy, when I’m all gwown up, I wanna have big musscels like Uncle Boone.”
“I’m going to have to get going,” Boone said when he came back into the room. “Work.”
“Everything okay?” Jennifer asked.
“Yeah, everything is fine.”
“Give me a minute,” said Derrick. “I’ll get my keys.”
“Can I come wiff you daddy?” pleaded Greg.
34.
5:45 P.M.
“You do me a favor, okay kid?” Gossitch asked Boone as they walked down the street in the oppressive humidity of the afternoon. The two old men seated on the sidewalk in lawn chairs looked like they had always been there. “Do us both a favor and keep?”
Boone just nodded.
Gossitch had picked him up at 125th Street and drove them into Queens.
“Buongiorno, Signor,” Gossitch greeted the old men, both of whom smiled up at him.
“Salve, Franciso.” One of the two, his hands resting on the handle of his cane, replied. The other man nodded and smiled.
“Fa caldo, no?” Frank asked and the other man, still nodding, rasped back, “Fa brutto tempo.”
Boone followed Gossitch through a nondescript screen door and a small vestibule which let out onto a vast room with a pool table, a bar, and a couple of fans spinning overhead.
There were five other men in the social club aside from themselves.
“Frank.” Dickie Nicolie was wearing spotless white tennis shoes and a black track suit. He wore a gold crucifix on a chain on his neck. He held his hands out and embraced Gossitch.
“Dickie. How’s the family?”
“Well. All things considered. And you?”
“I can’t complain.”
“Frank’s guy.” Dickie nodded to Boone, who nodded back.
“Frank, can we talk?”
“That’s why I’m here, Dickie.”
“Great, come on over to the bar. Dooles’ll fix us a drink. Hey, Dooles—Frank, what are you drinking?”
“Whatever you’re drinking.”
“Dooles, give us two Makers Mark.”
“Boone,” Johnny Spasso announced by way of greeting. Inside the social club Spasso had taken off his microfiber rain coat. Two pistols hung butt-out under his arms in a dual shoulder rig. He leaned on a pool stick.
“Spasso.”
“Sully, Carmine, you guys know Boone, right?”
“Sure we know Boone.” Sully was chewing on a toothpick. “Don’t we, Carmine.”
Carmine snickered.
“Wanna play some eight-ball, Boone?” Sully’s invitation lacked any semblance of warmth.
“Nah, I don’t play fag games.” He looked at Spasso. “No offense to you.” He meant it. Spasso nodded.
“What’d he just say?” The toothpick looked like it was going to drop out of Sully’s mouth.
“Take it easy there, pal.” Boone held up a hand. “Sorry about that. My doctor says it’s my tourettes. I can’t help myself. Sometimes I just blurt shit out.”
Spasso smirked.
“Thanks, Dooles.” Dickie picked up one of the two whiskeys on the bar. The bartender, Dooles, moved down to the other end of the bar and busied himself with something.
Gossitch sipped his whiskey.
“What’s going on, Dickie?”
“Frank, let me cut to the chase, yeah?” When Gossitch nodded, Dickie continued. “What do you know about this broad your guy—Jay—is dating?”
Gossitch cocked an eyebrow. This was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had talked to him about Jay’s choice in women.
“Not much really. He hasn’t been coming around a lot lately.”
“Since he started seeing her?”
Gossitch thought about it before he answered. “Yeah, maybe, sure. My guys are big boys, Dickie. You know what I mean? I don’t make them bring their dates home first.”
Dickie laughed. “I know how you are about your crew, Frank.” The mobster turned to lean his back against the bar, spreading his hands to encompass the room and the men in it. “I’m the same way about mine. Protective, right? Like a father.”
“There something I need to be protective about, Dickie?”
“Nah, it’s just…” Dickie faced the other man. “Look, Frank. How long we known each other?”
“Don’t know. Long time.”
“Yeah, a long time, and you know, what we do, it isn’t all that much different is it?”
Gossitch didn’t disagree so Dickie continued.
“It’s a question of scope, right? I mean, your guys work for you, they answer to you. My guys work for me, they answer to me. But, see Frank, one way in which you and I differ? I also answer to those above me.”
“Where’s this going, Dickie?” Gossitch placed his glass on the bar.
“You seen Johnny, yesterday, at that…that…I don’t know what to call it. Well, that broad your guy is dating? She was doing some work for us.”
“You mean…?”
“She was the other woman at the shoot. The one no one found.”
“The fluffer,” surmised Gossitch.
Dickie looked into his whiskey. “She calls herself Tatianna. I met her, once. Beautiful broad. Exotic, from eastern Europe or some shit. But strange, definitely strange.”
“Strange how?”
“Can’t put my finger on it. Now, that’s not all that odd in itself. A lot of girls who get involved in the industry are off their rockers. Either when they get started, definitely when they’re finished. It’s the nature of the business.”
“You think Jay’s girlfriend is somehow, what? Responsible for the murder of those men?”
“Murder? Frank, you saw it. It was a massacre…and no, I don’t know that she’s responsible. What I know is that this broad was supposed to be on scene and guess what? She’s gone.”
“Maybe she didn’t show up for work.”
“Possible. But that’s where I’d like to ask you for your help. Could you talk to your guy? Find out about his woman? See what he says? The family would appreciate it.”
“I’ll talk to Jay, Dickie,” said Gossitch. “But I’ll talk to him because I value our relationship, you and me. Not for the family, no disrespect intended.”
“None taken.”
“That other woman, the ‘Swallows’ one, her man ever turn up?”
“My people are on his trail now,” confided Dickie. “He’ll turn up. They always do.”
Gossitch nodded. They always did.
“Hey, I heard this joke,” Sully said to Carmine and Johnny.
“Yeah, what’s that?” Carmine, his arms crossed, asked.
“How many muscleheads it takes to screw in a light bulb?”
“I don’t know, how many?” Carmine snickered, looking at Boone.
Boone said, “I heard this one before.”
“Yeah, you know the answer to this, huh?”
“Yeah. One, because the other twelve are busy fucking your sister.”
Sully’s face went red.
“You walked right into that one, Sull.” Spasso sank a striped ball. Carmine declared, “That joke ain’t even funny.”
“What else is going on?” Gossitch asked at the bar.
“Ah, these fuckin’ Feds,” sighed Dickie. “They’re gonna RICO me.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“They got anything can stick?”
Dickie shook his head. “You never know, right? Gotta hope not.”
“What’s the—” Gossitch looked up, “administration got to say about that?”
“They trust me, Frank,” said Dickie. “I earned that a long time ago. If I gotta go away, they’ll take care of me, of Maryann and the kids. I’m just getting kind of old to think about going away for any extended period of time, you know?”
“You’re the last of a dying breed, Dickie.”
Gossitch held up his glass. “You’re a man of honor.”
“Thanks Frank.” Dickie tapped Gossitch’s glass with his own and both men drank. “Coming from you, that’s something.”
“Hey, Boone,” asked Carmine. “It true steroids make your dick shrink?”
Boone shrugged. “Don’t know. Why don’t you ask your wife?”
“Boone thinks he’s a tough guy.” Sully cracked his knuckles.
“Yeah, he’s really tough in here.” Carmine nodding over his shoulder to the men at the bar. “Wonder what he’s made of out on the street.”
“Anytime you fags want to play,” invited Boone. “Let me know. I like to play.”
Spasso shook his head, considering his next shot. “You guys…”
“Boone, let’s go.” Gossitch clasped Boone on the shoulder. “Johnny, always a pleasure. Gentlemen.”
Sully nodded to Gossitch and said, “Hey, Boone, we’ll see you later, okay?”
“I hope so,” said Boone. “Johnny.”
“Boone.” Johnny shot and sunk another striped ball.
35.
7:00 P.M.
Boone met the old black man in a park a few blocks from the record store. He’d have rather they’d met at the store itself so he could have checked out Keisha’s ass.
It was a humid August evening and there were a few people in the park. Young men shooting hoops, older men and women sitting around small concrete tables with checker and chess boards etched into them. In a little bit when it was less humid there would be more people.
The old man sat at one of the tables. He was turned in his seat, facing the park, his back to the towering chain link fence. He sat with his cane across his knees in his windbreaker. Boone didn’t understand how old people could be cold on the hottest of days.
“Blind.” Boone greeted him as he sat down across from the man.
“Mr. Mojo himself,” the old man smiled behind his sunglasses.
“What you got for me, pops?”
“Never one much for pleasantries, was you Mojo?”
“How’s that fine daughter of yours?”
“Okay, maybe we skip those then.”
Boone watched a guy on the court shoot and miss. “Lot going on in this city of ours.”
“Sure is.”
“You bring your cards?”
The old man turned in his concrete chair to face the young man.
“Yeah.” There was a little surprise in his voice that Boone would ask. “Why, you want a reading?”
“I don’t believe that shit. But…I don’t know. Yeah.”
The man across from Boone reached into his jacket and produced a deck of oversized cards.
“Let’s hear the question first.” He laid the cards face down on the concrete table between them.
“It’s not so much like it’s a question but…” Boone tried to put his concern into words. “It’s more like a dream I been having. Dreams.”
“These dreams bothering you enough for you to ask me about them.”
“Shit, nothing bothers m—yeah, alright, I guess they do.”
“Tell me about them then,” invited the old man.
“I see this guy on his back on a beach. Thing is, this beach—there must have been some crazy battle there. Everything’s burnt and black. There’s bodies in armor everywhere, but they ain’t bodies—they’re bones. I mean, like entire skeletal systems and parts of them scattered all about…and this guy? He’s on top of them.”
“What kind of armor? Kevlar?”
“No, I mean like, antiquated shit. Like, not even medieval shit. Real old shit. Roman or something, I don’t know.”
The old man prodded. “Go on.”
“The sky’s all black except for the sun. And that sun, Blind, it’s red, crimson, like blood. Something big and nasty rises up, spreads its wings, covers it up…”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. That’s it. That’s the dream.”
“You been reading too much Terry Brooks.” The old man shook his head.
“Who?”
“Forget it.” He picked up the cards on the table and laid them down one at a time, forming three separate piles. Boone turned in his chair and leaned back against the fence, the chain link sagging behind him. He watched the ballers while the old man laid the first pile on the second, then that larger pile on the third. An ambulance or police siren screamed by somewhere in the distance.
“You know,” said the old man, “the thing about sacred geometry,” he referred to the cards as he shuffled and cut, “this shit been ordering our lives in all aspects, from architecture to art.” As he spoke he dealt out six cards, face down. “Math everywhere, you understand? Music, light, the stars, our bodies. Look at those buildings out there,” he nodded his head off towards the skyscrapers. “Lot of math went into those suckas.
“So, what we got here, is a man worried—”
“I don’t know about ‘worried’—” Boone tried to interrupt but the old man talked right over him.
“—man worried about a dream plaguing him. And in the dream he see another man, don’t know it himself or someone else, right? And this man lying there, but he ain’t dead right? And he lying there on top of all these other dead motherfuckas under a dead sky with a bleeding sun.”
“I didn’t say the sun was bleeding,” corrected Boone. “I said the sun was like blood red.”
“Querant ain’t supposed to interrupt the diviner, Mojo.” The old man shook his head. “And then this dragon-like thing kind of rises up and blocks out that sun and the dreams over. Like that.”
Boone didn’t say a word.
The old man reached out and turned the cards over, then turned in his own seat so that his back was to the fence again.
“Read ‘em to me, Mojo. And tell me which ones upside down”
Boone looked at the cards and read the title of each out loud. Some of them were reversed, upside down. When he was done the old man nodded.
“The first card—the dodecagram reversed—that’s the twelve-sided polygram. Man’s worried, don’t know what he’s caught up in but knows enough to know he’s in over his head. More goin’ on than a man can see, see? Man been having these crazy-ass dreams—” he nodded towards the second card, “the spiral, signifyin’ an unfoldin’. You’re in the beginnin’ of a process, Mojo, somethin’ too early for you to really understan’, but somethin’ gonna play out one way or another. The patterns of your future? They gonna unfold on they own. You can’t rush ‘em. Gotta be patient, no matter what that cost you. Understan’ me?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, launching himself into the third and fourth cards. “That man on the beach, the line reversed, meanin’ separation. You or he done things, acted in a way that events are playin’ out roun’ you—again, whether you know it or not. And you, or this guy, you gonna have to let go of things in life because of what been done, dig? Growth got a price tag. Always do.
“But then there’s this, right?” the old black man referred to the fourth card, which was blank. “Card unmarked, upright. Means potential. Your situation is open, even though that sky is dark.”
“If I’m caught up in something bigger than me,” Boone wanted to know, “then how’s my future open?”
“Because there’s always volition, Mojo. Even when your back’s to the wall, you can always choose. What most important for your future? For any man’s? The decision he make in the here and now. Get it?”
The old man nodded towards the fifth card without looking at it. The card depicted two triangles of different sizes joined at one end. “Discontinuous proportion, the bleeding sun. Means they’s things goin’ down roun’ you, goin’ on for you, that’re tied to other factors you ain’ even begin to consider. Shit you ain’ even ‘ware of. Means come correct and pay attention, keep them eyes and ears open. Don’t miss the details. Sometimes, Mojo, it’s them little things like that, the key to all the big shit ‘round us.”
The bask
etball game had broken up and the men playing dispersed. One walked past where Boone and the old man sat, craning his neck to see the cards on the table. Boone, hulking in his flannel, his calves bulging between his work boots and cut off shorts, glowered and the guy picked up his step.
“The final card,” the old man said. “The octogram, stands fo’ cooperation. That winged thing in your dream’s sky? Sometimes you gotta work with others. A thing too big for one man alone. Sometimes when we walkin’, the key to the next step is another person, get me?”
“I heard every word you said, but I don’t know…it still sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.”
The old man sighed, resigned to the younger man’s skepticism. “Call it what you want, you the motherfucka’ asked me about the cards. But do you well to remember, jus’ cause you don’ believe in somethin’, don’ mean somethin’ don’ believe in you. Hear me?”
“No, not really,” Boone looked to the sky. “What you got for me on that other thing I called you about earlier?”
The old man was collecting his cards. “What you know about chthonios, Mojo?”
“I know I can’t even pronounce that shit. That’s all I know.”
“Somebody wasn’t paying attention in school when they were discussing mythology.” The old man shook his head behind his shades. “Comes from the Greek. Means under or in or from the earth. Jung talkin’ ‘bout man’s ‘chthonic spirit’, said lust, envy, deceit, all these vices dark aspects of our unconscious. Could realize itself in one of two ways. The positive way, its what animates you and me and the birds and the bees and all that shit ‘roun us.”
“But we’re not here to talk about the positive way, are we old man?”
“Nah, we’re not.” The old man slipped his cards back inside his jacket. “Negative manifestation, it’s a spirit of evil, intent on destruction. What do you think about that?”
“Jung huh?” thought Boone. “I don’t believe in psychoanalysis or any other bullshit religions.”
The old man ignored him. “You ever heard of Erinyes? Eumenides?”
“Eumenides a philosopher or some shit?”
“No. In Greek myth they were called Eumenides or the Erinyes. You might have heard their name in Roman myth, though. Furies.”
I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Page 15
