Hood No. 1

by J.M. Thomas



  Hood

  No. 1

  By

  J.M. Thomas

  ~~~

  Copyright 2014 The Cosmic Empire Publishing

  Hood

  No. 1

  When the Four Corners first began its descent into anarchy, there were words spoken by influential people to take back the night walks, plans to fortify the law enforcement charged with maintaining order, and even thought of calling out the National Guard. Concerned people and government watched, and the chaos grew evermore dangerous and seemingly endless. Four Corners was the intersection of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, and decades of decay, apathy, and the strongest ruling the intersection and the neighborhoods beyond left it a place better to abandon than figure out a solution. There were no solutions for the Four Corners, and a cop volunteering to try to help had two things happen: a psych evaluation and an internal affairs investigation. There were bad places across the country, and then there was the Four Corners.

  Why did people stay? They had nowhere else to go. No matter how bad the neighborhoods became, they were still affordable. Well-intentioned colonial efforts, the wealthy thinking they could afford to build projects for people to live in, had to deal with the crime following the colonists. Escape was not an option. Honest living was not available. Selling services to the main criminal element provided a chance at income and might keep them safe. It might not, of course, but it did provide a chance.

  Four members of Brandy Di Pollo’s gang waited in the shadows behind one of the three auto dealerships left in the neighborhood. Two cops passed by on their hover steeds, painted jet black and much slower than their military counterparts due to heavier armor, but didn't notice those hiding. Five minutes later, Di Pollo was the owner of half a dozen brand new SUVs.

  That is how things went in the Four Corners every single night.

  So many took the quietness of Paul Ventura to be thoughtlessness, but those who took the time to understand him better saw the strength of the thought behind his silence. An idea he had, which had never been shared with anyone, of course, was too many spoke when listening might be a wiser course of action. From his brother Pete to his best friend Michael to the woman he would one day supplant as chief arbiter of justice in the Four Corners, all had the ability to hold an audience, to persuade men to follow, and to simply shout down any opposition. Paul Ventura watched and learned, and he took away two things: volume isn’t the nuclear bomb they thought it was, and keeping one’s mouth shut increased the odds one might survive. He lived through more of it than anyone knew.

  “You’re going to be in bed all fucking day,” Michael Wallup said.

  Paul was alone in his bed with his hand on the pillow Elizabeth had once used. He had not yet opened his eyes, and he mused only of his empty stomach and the absence of her.

  It wasn’t until he heard the shells being slammed home into the shotgun that he opened his eyes, and before him he could see in his partner how the day was planned to unfold. Weapons meant violence, but he knew Wallup never went into a fight he couldn’t get out of. It did not mean Wallup always prepared to keep Ventura safe.

  “Get the fuck up.”

  Another shell. Wallup wore nothing but white athletic socks. What was the hurry? "Whatever you have up your sleeve can wait," Ventura said. A mistake.

  Wallup kicked at Ventura’s right knee sending blinding pain through his body. In the time it took Ventura to catch his breath, he wondered about the quality of friends he had chosen to surround himself with.

  “Jody’s deliveries are due in half an hour. If we miss them, you’ll have to figure out how we’re going pay Brandy Di Pollo."

  The mental image of Jody Stallen, late 60s, owner of a local food market who always gave Ventura a bag of lemon drops when he was a kid, entered his mind just before the blood lust games of Brandy Di Pollo.

  “Is Jody going to be there?” They’d hit the market before, and Ventura had participated but never with Jody around. He couldn’t stand the thought of robbing a friend.

  “He’s sure to be, given the fact you’re fucking around and not ready to go.” Ventura sat up. He shook his head.

  “Then it will have to wait until tomorrow.”

  The fully loaded pump-action shotgun shoved under his chin finally convinced Ventura to get up and dress. Brandy Di Pollo wasn’t going to wait until the next day.

  The robbery went wrong from the second they forced their way into the loading dock. The truck driver, and his apparent friendship with Jody, caught the first round from Wallup’s shotgun. It made a terrible mess, and the driver crawled in pain toward the door with pink goo oozing from the hole in his chest.

  There was a look of anger on Jody’s face when he looked to Ventura, but it gave way to a plea for mercy. Ventura took his 9mm and prepared to do the deed before the shot gun rang out once, twice more.

  Ventura jumped back.

  Jody fell to the ground and put the clipboard with the truck’s manifest over his ears, as though it might help ward off the violence. Wallup ripped it from his hands.

  “Bananas? You made me kill him because of bananas?”

  Jody looked helpless and fearful of the rage in Wallup’s face. “I ought to just kill you, too,” Wallup said.

  Then Ventura sprang into action. As much as his gimpy leg would allow, he hustled over to Jody and got between him and Wallup.

  “You can let him go.”

  Course words between the two were few, and they came only from Wallup to Ventura. It caught Wallup off guard.

  “You want to save this banana peel asshole.”

  “I just hope I’m here to see what you have coming to you,” Jody said. Wallup painted the wall behind Jody with the shop clerk’s brains.

  “You fuck.”

  That got Ventura a blow to the head, opening an enormous gash on the forehead, just before Wallup left the two to face whoever or whatever found them.

  Brandy Di Pollo, as a young woman, would have been attractive. As she became an older woman, she tried to keep her beauty; everything she tried went wrong. Some might call her a hag; others might call her ugly, and most did what they could to keep from meeting her eyes. Her lieutenant, Paul Chavez, did not have that luxury.

  “So we’re supposed to catch him and turn him over and that’s it," Di Pollo said.

  Chavez nodded.

  “They used the word ‘demand.’ She knew the man for a long time, she said, and Wallup had no cause to kill him.”

  Di Pollo was polishing her own hover steed and didn't even look up.

  “You tell her he’s ours, and that is that.”

  “She said she would come after him.”

  “Then we have our own little war on our hands. She can’t have him, and you don’t need to waste your time telling her. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Only a fool attempts to find reason in a dream, and while Paul Ventura was no fool, he did find the taste of lemon drops in his mouth as his body was moved around in the darkness. Twice he suffered wounds bad enough to visit a hospital, and he always thought paramedics had a peculiar way of speaking—addressing him, but not addressing him. The first time his left knee was in so much pain, he could not be certain he was still alive. The second time came when Wallup shot him, as an example for having failed to cover the escape they had planned. The gunshot wound was potentially mortal, and when he was able to keep his wits about him, he marveled at how proficient they were.

  In the darkness now with no voices, no lights, just streetlights and stoplights passing by now and again, all he could do was taste lemon drops. Twice, the vision of Jody entered his mind, the vision of someone he once counted as a friend, but he chased it away both times.

  What happened was not what Ventura
wanted to happen, but with the gash on his forehead bleeding into his eyes and memory of Wallup that morning, he knew there was little else that could have happened.

  Silence. Blood. Lemon.

  Then there were the two words that nearly caused him to wet himself—Mary Vernon.

  If he were being taken to Mary Vernon, he had no chance of surviving the evening.

  It was best to pass out again.

  How much time has passed? He ran his hand over his forehead. There was no bandage, only the crust of a large scab. It had been more than a few days, and he had no idea where he was—only that he was alive. He took a look around—streaks of filth on the wall, globes from the ceiling not white but green with some sort of algae. He thought it best not to look at the bed, lest he start dry heaving at what was probably filth.

  That’s when he felt the hunger again. His immediate memory included only starving and getting the shit kicked out of him by his best friend.

  At the edge of the bed down near his feet there