“A mental exercise. You see, your brain is filled with different muscles. Memory is a muscle, creativity is a muscle, organization is a muscle. You have to exercise these muscles or else they get weak.” Vinnie carefully stacked another layer of cards. “When I do this activity, I’m exercising my focus muscles, as well as my patience. It’s important to have focus in my line of work. I need to be able to think clearly, solve problems no matter how tense the situation. It gives me an edge.”
Samantha turned to the kitchen. “I should get myself a hobby…”
Chapter 31
When Vinnie Blue Nose finally checked his voice mail, he regretted not listening to it sooner. It was Miss Tina. Her voice sounded like she was in a panic, and Miss Tina was a gal who did not easily succumb to emotional outbursts. “Vinnie, you got to get down here. It’s Jimmy.” She didn’t have to say anything more than that. He could hear Jimmy Bozo in the background, yelling at the top of his lungs, drunk and disorderly. “He’s on a freakin’ rampage over here. Do you know how much this is going to cost me? You need to get the psycho out of my establishment right now.”
Vinnie put his phone back in his pocket and rubbed the tension building in his forehead. The Rainbow Gardens clown brothel was supposed to be under Bozo Family protection. It didn’t look good to have the boss’s son wrecking the place.
He stood from the couch and tied his red polka-dot tie around his neck.
“Where are you going?” Samantha asked from the kitchen.
Vinnie didn’t answer. He grabbed his gun and loaded it with laughing bullets.
Samantha set her drink down. “Is it Jimmy again? What did he do this time?”
Vinnie wouldn’t even look at her as he kissed her on the cheek and went for the door. “Don’t wait up for me. This could take a while.”
She didn’t yell or raise her voice, but Vinnie knew she was upset. She hated sleeping alone. As he left the apartment, he heard the splashing sound of a drink being thrown across the room.
Chapter 32
It was five years ago when Vinnie Blue Nose made capo. He was taken out to celebrate with the rest of the guys, drinking at one of the boss’s downtown strip clubs. Everyone was letting loose, turning the night into a carnival of debauchery. Hats Rizzo was on stage, getting spanked with a rubber mallet by a topless clown girl. Captain Spotty was lining the bar with shots, forcing his underlings to slam them down without using their hands. Even Jackie the Grump had a giddy smile on his face as he was taken into the back for a lap dance. Only Vinnie Blue Nose, the man they were all celebrating, restrained himself.
When the boss saw the sober look on Vinnie’s face, he called him over to his table.
“What are you still doing standing upright?” Don Bozo asked, pointing at Vinnie’s barely touched single-malt scotch. He was sitting in a booth with three members of the old guard—his brother and underboss, Uncle Jojo, and two of the well-established capos: Buggy Buttons and Lorenzo Laffypants. All four had half-naked girls wrapped around them, squeezing their big red noses against their cheeks.
“I’m pacing myself,” Vinnie said. “I’ve got things I need to do tomorrow.”
The old clowns laughed at him.
“Take tomorrow off,” Bozo said. “It’s your party. You should enjoy yourself.”
Vinnie nodded at the boss, but everyone could tell he had no intention of taking the next day off.
“What’s with kids these days?” Uncle Jojo said to the other men at the table. “They either don’t know how to enjoy themselves or they enjoy themselves way too much.”
Lorenzo chuckled. “And you didn’t enjoy yourself too much when you were their age, Jojo?”
Jojo leaned in and pointed at his old friend. “Hey, I was dependable, unlike the turks you got running numbers in your crew who think clowning’s just fun and games.”
“It is fun and games,” Lorenzo said, bouncing the pudgy clown girl in his lap as he laughed. “You think I would’ve gotten into this business if it wasn’t?”
“No wonder why your crew’s such sorry earners,” said Uncle Jojo. “They’ve only got you to look up to.”
“My boys do just fine.”
Vinnie smiled at the old men laying into each other, pretending to be amused by their banter. Laughing at a clown’s jokes, even when they weren’t funny, was a sign of respect. He couldn’t believe that he was actually one of them now. He was actually a capo. And he was the youngest to be promoted to such a high rank in the history of the Bozo crime family.
“Why don’t you guys take these lovely ladies into the back for some lap dances,” the boss said to his friends. “I want to speak to our new capo in private.”
The old clowns got up from their seats and escorted the women away. Before he left, Uncle Jojo stopped and turned to Vinnie.
“Congratulations, kid,” he said, patting Vinnie on the shoulder. “You earned it. Now don’t let us down.”
“I won’t,” Vinnie said.
“I know you won’t.” Then the old clown was led off by a frisky clown girl with raspberry-blue hair. Vinnie didn’t know if Jojo said that as a threat or because he actually had faith in the young clown’s abilities.
Vinnie sat down in the seat across from Don Bozo. The boss wasn’t fidgeting with his balloon animals, which always meant that he had something important on his mind.
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” the boss said. “Or, rather, someone.”
“Yeah?” Vinnie said, taking a sip of his scotch.
“It’s about my son, Jimmy. You know Jimmy, right?”
Vinnie looked across the club at Jimmy Bozo. The guy was at the bar, laughing so hard he was screeching, slamming whole bottles of tequila down his throat and licking salt from a clown girl’s stomach. Although they’d never worked together, Vinnie absolutely despised the guy.
“Of course.”
The boss looked over at his son, then back at Vinnie.
“I want him to be a part of your crew,” Bozo said.
Vinnie paused for a moment. Then he took down half his glass of scotch. That was the last thing he expected to hear.
He put his glass down, turned it clockwise a few times, then said, “With all due respect, why Jimmy? The two of us have never really seen eye-to-eye. I don’t know how he’d be able to get along with me or the guys in my crew.”
“Don’t take it personally. Jimmy doesn’t get along with anybody. He’s a self-centered brat just like his mother was. But someday I want him to take my place as head of this family. For that to happen, he needs to learn to show respect. He needs to be more like you.”
Across the bar, Jimmy Bozo was getting into a fight. Some frat boy from out of town knocked over his drink and Jimmy wasn’t about to let it go. He shoved the college kid and yelled in his face like a deranged joker.
“In a few years, I plan to promote Jimmy to capo,” Bozo said, his expression getting even more severe. “Not many people are going to like that, especially not my brother. He doesn’t think Jimmy’s got what it takes to handle that level of responsibility.”
Vinnie looked over at Jimmy to see the crazed clown still yelling at the frat boy. The situation was escalating and the boy’s friends came to his aid. One of them threw a drink at the clown and Jimmy went ballistic.
“That’s why I need you to take him under your wing. You’ve got to train him. You’ve got to keep him under control and show the rest of the family he’s showing signs of maturity.”
Jimmy head-butted one of the frat boys in the face, breaking the kid’s nose. Then he threw a pie at one of his friends. Before the college kids knew what hit them, Jimmy was breaking bar stools over their heads and kicking them in the guts with his size 20 shoes, giggling with delight as their blood sprayed across the floor.
The boss didn’t seem to notice or care about what his son was doing across the bar. It was so common for Jimmy to get into fights that it didn’t even faze him anymore.
He said, “It’s no
t going to be an easy job, but you’ve got to keep him out of trouble. You’ve got to teach him to show respect. Can I count on you?”
Vinnie Blue Nose finished his drink. Then he nodded.
“For anything,” he said.
Then he stood up from the booth and marched across the bar to break up the fight.
Chapter 33
When Vinnie arrived at the Rainbow Gardens clown brothel, Miss Tina was waiting outside.
“What took you so long?” she yelled at him.
A crowd of clown girls and their customers filled the sidewalk, staring into the windows of the historic downtown parlor.
“I just got your call,” he said. “Is he still in there?”
She didn’t have to answer that question. He could hear Jimmy’s voice echo through the building as he yelled unintelligible nonsense at nobody in particular.
“What do you think?” she replied.
Miss Tina was a majestic clown. Statuesque. Her emerald-green hair styled into a tall beehive, her long eyelashes stretched all the way up her forehead, her lips like shiny ropes of red licorice. She’d been the madam at the brothel long before Vinnie was in the clowning business. And although she was in her late fifties, she was still drop-dead sexy.
She said, “The son of a bitch has gone crazy. You’ve got to get him out of there.”
“I’ll handle it,” Vinnie said, stepping through the crowd of half-naked women.
The madam stayed where she was, smoking a long clove cigarette, trying to keep her cool around her employees. “And while you’re at it, get rid of the body, too.”
“What body?”
But he didn’t hear a response. The sound of an air horn blast drowned out her voice, shattering the windows and sending shards of glass over the crowd. Vinnie crouched down as he went in.
“Step right up, folks! Welcome to the Bozo Family circus!” Jimmy screamed as Vinnie Blue Nose crept into the brothel’s lobby.
The place was a mess. Broken bottles were all over the floor. Chairs were overturned. A frightened clown girl hid beneath one of the tables as the mad clown shot up the place. When she caught sight of Vinnie, she begged him for help with her eyes.
“I’ve got a joke for you, boys and girls!”
Jimmy poured a bottle of whiskey down his throat, then smashed it against the floor. He pointed his 12-gauge air horn at the bar and fired, blasting a hole through the front.
“What’s blue and red and running for his fucking life?”
When Jimmy looked through the hole, he saw a cowering blue-haired bartender. The man cried out when he saw Jimmy’s sinister smile beaming back at him.
“Give up?” Jimmy laughed. “It’s John, the asshole who had the nerve to tell me I had too much to drink!”
As the bartender ran for the door, Jimmy fired his air horn. The blast went over the bartender’s head, shattering a row of vodka bottles. Jimmy was thrown off balance and he fell onto his back, blasting a hole in the ceiling.
Plaster rained down on Vinnie’s blue suit as he stepped forward.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Jimmy?” he asked, lighting a blueberry cigarette. “Yer a capo now, for chrissake.”
When Jimmy saw his old boss, he chuckled and pointed his air horn at him while still lying on his back. “You! I’ve got some words for you, Blue Nose!”
Vinnie kicked the air horn out of his hands.
“You’re a disgrace, you know that?” Vinnie said, picking up the weapon and shoving it in the back of his pants.
He looked over at the clown girl hiding beneath the table and nodded at her to leave. She hesitated only for a second before she bolted for the door.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Jimmy moaned, getting to his knees. “You think you’re better than me, don’t you? You think you’re better than everyone.”
“And you don’t?”
Jimmy staggered to his feet. “I’m going to wipe that smug look off your face.”
Vinnie grabbed a bucket of ice from the bar and dumped it down the back of Jimmy’s collar.
“What the hell, asshole?” Jimmy cried as the freezing water hit his white clown flesh.
“You need to sober up,” Vinnie said. “The cops will probably be here any minute.”
The clown shook the ice out of his suit. “I don’t have to do jack.”
At first, Vinnie didn’t see the body Miss Tina was talking about. He saw the blood sprayed across the floor, but no corpse. He had to follow the blood trail around to the back of a booth to find the poor sap crinkled up like an old newspaper under a mound of broken furniture.
“What happened here?” Vinnie asked.
Jimmy Bozo looked over and snorted. “He pissed me off.”
That’s what he always said whenever he killed somebody for no reason.
“So you murdered him?”
“He was disrespecting me. What do you think I’m going to do, just take it like some kind of vanilla fruitcake?”
Jimmy turned away and took a hit of laughy-gas.
“Maybe if you were a more respectable person then people wouldn’t disrespect you so much. This is the third time this year you pulled this shit.”
Vinnie turned the body over. The guy’s face was completely obliterated by an air horn blast. He went into his wallet and pulled out an ID. When Vinnie read the name, the cigarette dropped from his lips.
“Shit…,” Vinnie said. “You damn idiot, Jimmy…”
The clown prince looked up at Blue Nose. “What?”
Vinnie shook his head. “You really messed up this time.”
Jimmy staggered forward. “What?”
“Don’t you know who this is? You just killed Pierre Beaumont.”
“So?” Jimmy giggled. The laughy-gas was kicking in.
“So there’s going to be war if Le Mystère finds out about this.”
“He’s not in Le Mystère. The prick isn’t even a clown.”
“But he’s still related. His uncle is a damn captain. His cousins are the Juggler Brothers.”
Jimmy froze. Even after another hit of laughy-gas, the smile disappeared from his face.
“Yeah, those Juggler Brothers. And if they find out you killed their cousin, they’re coming after you.”
As he went silent, Vinnie wondered if the clown prince finally understood the severity of the situation. The Juggler Brothers were the most deadly soldiers in the French clown family. With their cousin dead, they would stop at nothing to get revenge. And Vinnie had no idea if he would be capable of protecting the sorry excuse for a Bozo.
“We have to get rid of the body,” Vinnie said. “Nobody can find out you were the one who killed him.”
Jimmy was sobering up fast. “But what about all the witnesses?”
“Despite the damage you caused, Miss Tina and her girls are loyal to your father. They’re not going to say anything. Hopefully, none of their other customers was from the French side of town.”
As the two clowns moved the body, taking it out the back to put it into the trunk of Jimmy’s clown car, they didn’t see the man watching them from the shadows on the second-floor balcony. Pierre Beaumont hadn’t come alone that night. His friend was upstairs, having some fun with one of Miss Tina’s girls, when Pierre got into the fight with Jimmy Bozo. He was already on the phone with Pierre’s cousins by the time Vinnie got there. The Juggler Brothers were on their way.
Chapter 34
The first day Jimmy Bozo joined the Blue Nose crew, there was already trouble. Jimmy was born a clown and didn’t respect anyone who wasn’t purebred, as he called it. Half clowns and humans who became clowns later in life by taking Happy Juice to alter their DNA were considered lesser by his standards. But Vinnie and his crew didn’t come from clown families. They had to earn their clownship. They had to prove they were worthy of wearing the nose.
“But what about your father and Uncle Jojo?” Vinnie Blue Nose asked Jimmy. “They’re not purebred. They had to take Happy Juice just
like we did. Nobody from their generation was born a clown.”
They were working a birthday party for some senator upstate. Don Bozo owed the politician a favor and so he sent Vinnie’s crew in to show his guests some Little Bigtop–style entertainment. A group of Miss Tina’s girls were also in attendance as well as some of Buggy Buttons’s best comedians. Vinnie, Jimmy Bozo, and Captain Spotty were hanging around the bar outside, keeping an eye on the clown girls as they flirted with the senator’s wealthy friends.
“That’s different,” Jimmy responded. “They were the original clowns. There wasn’t any Happy Juice until after they were born.”
“But there wasn’t any Happy Juice until after I was born, either,” Spotty said. The cockroaches crawling in and out of his sleeves freaked out the passing party guests. “I just took it thirty years later than your parents did.”
Spotty and Vinnie had been ganging up on the clown prince all day, trying to get him to admit that his prejudice wasn’t justified. But no matter what they said, Jimmy would not open his mind.
“You see, that’s why we’re not equals. You didn’t grow up as a clown like I did. You weren’t a clown as a child. You didn’t go through clown puberty. Unless you’re a purebred, you have no idea what it’s like to be a true clown.”
Jimmy set his drink down on the bar.
“Not even my father understands,” he said.
Then he walked away to join the company of his two purebred associates, Tickles and Spanky. Although he was forced to work under an impure capo, all the guys who worked under Jimmy were born clowns. He made sure of that. And not a single one of them got along with the rest of the Blue Nose crew, even those of a higher rank.
“What the heck are we going to do with that kid?” Captain Spotty asked.
Vinnie looked over at the hobo clown, then back at the untouched drink in his hand.
“We’ve got to teach him respect,” Vinnie said.
“And how do we do that when he holds us in contempt?”
“He won’t listen to us, so we don’t tell him how to behave. We show him. Respond to his immaturity with absolute professionalism. He’ll eventually realize that our way makes him money and his way makes him broke.”
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