by Lee Lamothe
Marko was pleased. An expansive Jerry Kelly was a thing to mine. “And, what, brothers, sisters, I guess?”
“Some tragedy there, Marko.” Jerry Kelly looked down at his stockinged feet. He affected a subtle squirm. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Sad Jerry. Sad Jerry Kelly.” Markowitz poured more cognac. He felt pretty okay. “We should be celebrating our upcoming success in this time of danger and adversity, pal, and here I am bringing up bad memories. I’m just glad you come from good working stock, like me. That you had a mom and dad, someone to give you a good grounding in life. Get you started right.”
“There was that, Marko. And there was good pals. Guys who … I don’t know, mentored? A little nudge here in the right direction, a bit of discipline, a bit of love.” He looked at Markowitz’s eyes with fondness. Nearly there, he thought. “Guys like you, Marko. Stand-up guys, guys willing to give another a chance, make a buck. Just cut a break when a break’s needed. It’s a bonding thing. It takes time, it takes respect. But it pays off in loyalty.”
Markowitz smiled with glum modesty. “I try, Jerry. Sometimes, it don’t work out that way. But when I can, I do.”
Pleased, Jerry Kelly had steered the ship in the direction he wanted it to go. “But it doesn’t always work, Marko. Like your pal there, Preston. I always heard about you guys, how back in the day you were like brothers. One for all and all for one. Blood brothers. But, then, driving up to the country with him, well, that illusion went out the window. That fucking guy, he’s gonna try to take the dough. I thought before: maybe, maybe not. I wasn’t sure. Now? Now I’m sure.”
Marko was confused. “Bobby? Fuck no. He doesn’t care about money. He makes a couple grand a week, maybe more sometimes, but not much and not often. If he had ten ems he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Bobby’s not about money. He’s half a fucking hippie.”
Jerry Kelly made his face doubtful and evasive. “Well … okay.” He looked away.
“Why? What? C’mon Jerry. Something happen?”
“The chick. The blondie. I said, hey, how’s Julia, she recovering from that Spicetown ordeal? He laughed and said he’s back to jamming her. I said, you know, Bullshit. He said it isn’t the first time he poached her off you. Whatever that means.”
“He’s bullshitting you. Fucking bullshit. Anyway, what’s that got to do with the money?”
“Well, Marko, think about it. It probably isn’t the money he’s after. It’s your money he’s after. I don’t know what you guys got up to that fucked your friendship, but I think this guy’s got a side you haven’t seen yet. Maybe jealousy, maybe something else. But the sense I get, and I admit I could be wrong, but my spidey sense is: he wants to fuck you up. Why, I dunno. But for sure, he’s got a hard-on for you.”
“Cocksucker. He said that?” Marko drained his cognac and got up unsteadily. “Fucking cocksucker.” He was weaving on his feet. “Jerry, Jerry, no matter what: he doesn’t get any money. I don’t give a fuck if it ends up with the cops, Preston doesn’t get a fucking dime. We’re gonna fuck him out of his end. I’m gonna fuck him out of Julia. And Zoe. I’m taking it all, his fucking life, that prick.” It wasn’t enough. He swelled with rage. Without thinking, he said: “In fact, Jerry, we’re gonna …” he made a bye-bye motion with his fingers, “… you know?”
“Marko, Marko,” Jerry Kelly said soothingly, “you say that now. A day or two and that old neighbourhood nostalgia will kick in. You’ll call me. ‘Jerry, Jerry, forget it. I was drunk.’ C’mon.”
“No. Fuck. No. I know that’s a thing with me, letting my emotions take over. Heat up fast, cool down fast. But I swear to you I want you to do it. I swear to you that no matter what I say later, you do it. Okay?”
Jerry Kelly stood and looped his arm over Markowitz’s shoulders and topped up his brandy snifter. “You been betrayed, Marko. Fact of life. I could tell you about betrayal, let me tell you, but I won’t. Too painful, those memories. Best to just let it go, pal. Move on.”
Markowitz shook him off and slammed back the cognac. “No, Jerry. When we’re done …” he again made the goodbye fingers. “Absolutely.”
“Well, okay, Marko. If you’re sure. This is a big step. You don’t want to wreck your soul and I’d hate to jeopardize our friendship.”
“Fuck my soul.” He took up the cognac bottle and rinsed his mouth, grimacing from the burn along his gum line. His lips trembled. He calmed himself. “Okay, enough of this shit. First things first. I need you to get some manpower together. Whichever way Preston wants to do it, we’re going to have to move the stash to a place where we can get it sorted out and down here where he can get at it, to ship it out. So first, get some minions lined up and we’ll take it from there.”
“I got some slave labour I can round up to do the sorting. But I think we’re going to have to do the move out of the stash, maybe a couple of disposable guys we’ll lose on the way out.”
“Let’s not go nuts, here, Jerry. We start littering bodies around and we’re going to draw heat. Just get some guys we can stoke up on crank so they don’t care where they are, don’t care what they’re doing. We’ll leave ’em stoned by the side of the road.”
“You’re the boss, Marko. What about a place to sort and count? And where are we going to stash it in town? While it gets boiled? You got any ideas?”
“Yeah, maybe. I think.” Markowitz realized Jerry Kelly had manipulated him into rage. He became careful. “Leave it with me.”
After Jerry Kelly left, Markowitz sat in the basement, his mind a cocked gun. He pounded on the cognac. The mean little boys upstairs were thumping and running. Angel screamed at them. The biker rumbled. The pit bull’s claws clattered.
How had he ended up in business with a Jerry Kelly and looking forward to the demise of a Bobby Preston? A Bobby Preston he just took a fucking hit out on. At what point did Bobby Preston become dead to him, and Jerry Kelly such an integral part of his life? This, he realized, was the poison of the dope trade. Paranoia replaced friendship and history, and a mild dislike evolved into a burning desire for an open body, a head piped through and through with bullets. Bobby Preston was Zoe’s old man and Marko truly loved Zoe; how would he have liked it if someone popped his old man for reasons he couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t even begin to evaluate? Of course, it was all about Julia Gurr. Marko went away and when he came out Bobby had Julia married up and had Zoe. It’s like the prick looked around the big Marko store and said, Hey, this is Marko’s and I’m gonna have it, fuck Marko. And casting him out of their lives because of dope, that that was the ultimate betrayal, to be cast out. He could have survived with Sunday night dinners, old stories told around the pot roast. No talking shop. No judgments. It was their shared history and he had no one to share it with. Preston had robbed him of his past and his loves and betrayed him by judging his sin. And now he wanted the money. Marko remembered the slicing into his thumb, solemn oaths to never betray, to always stand up, even when one of them was wrong.
Markowitz simmered. He had to straighten up. Forget Preston. Forget Julia. Forget Zoe.
He was now certain Jerry Kelly had worked him, had plans for him, ghastly things that would end with Jerry having a whole lot of dough and Markowitz hanging upside down, trying to explain to Pavo how things went wrong, talking with his tongue flapping through a hole in his throat.
Avoiding that particular fate was the challenge. And he had to come up with a plan, a variation of his own.
Chapter 16
Jerry Kelly spent the rest of the night interviewing slaves. Long-haired old burnouts, speedsters, pasty-faced skanks with grey teeth wiggling in bloody gums, running noses, and vacant faces pitted with sores.
“Twilight zone,” Jerry Kelly told Marko Markowitz the next morning over breakfast at Dean’s Open Kitchen, his eyes red-rimmed from trolling all night through flop houses and crash pads, kicking scarecrows into alertness, dangling the tasty prospect of unlimited crank just a few miles away. The chose
n skeletons were finally assembled, ushered into a van, driven to a farm, and locked in the barn. “They were just in pieces, these folks, and I gotta admit I felt kind of sorry for them, mostly. We got ten of them, and between them all they’ve got about two working veins, sixty open running sores, and half a brain. I got ’em on ice until we need them.” He thumbed deeply into his eyes. “Fuck, I think I got a contact high, just talking to them. Anyway, where we going to put them to work?”
“I’m thinking Chyna Lily’s. I heard she’s got a good crop this year.”
“Yep, I heard that. Primo. And a lot of it, too.” He put down a piece of toast, all business, folding his hands like a schoolteacher, and expounded. “I think, Marko, Chyna is under-capitalized and not using her assets to their fullest potential, you know? She’s got like a million acres and outbuildings, two with hydroponics, one for storage and another, a great vast thing, is standing empty. She’s got electricity off generators, and running well water. If someone was to buy some beakers and Bunsen burners, a couple of sacks of chemicals, who knows what the right evil chemist could brew up in a smouldering cauldron? And it’s isolated. Remember, a pound of crank makes about six pounds of waste, and it stinks, so the problem of disposal is solved. If there’s a fire, no one outside knows about it; you just let ’er burn to the ground, get some morons up there and raise another barn.”
“But you don’t want to be excavating for the foundation, though, Jer’. I’ve heard you definitely don’t want to be digging around up there.” He smiled. “Might run into some old pals, you know, folks you knew in better times.”
“You think?” Jerry Kelly dreamed into his future and nodded definitively. “I think Chyna’s groovy graveyard is an urban myth. I’ll prepare a business plan for me ’n her. A fair partnership where both parties work in harmony for the greater good for all. It’s the corporate way of the future.”
“You thinking about making Chyna yours, Jerry?” He smiled in an encouraging manner. Guys had been trying to piece off Chyna Lily’s legendary dope action for years; some vanished and were assumed to have become fertilizer that flavoured her next season’s crops; others experienced extended runs of bad luck that usually ended with them in the bucket.
Hooking Jerry Kelly to Chyna Lily could be the greatest revenge. “Well, she makes a lot of dough, no question. Doesn’t spend any, just stashes it someplace.”
“She’s a dyke, I hear. I like dykes, you can talk to them. They understand the brutal unfairness of life, but also the possibilities.”
“Well, give it a shot, Jerry. Can’t hurt to ask, eh? But wait until we’re done our thing, okay?” He made a pensive face. “I always liked Chyna, but I never understood why she quit folk singing and left the city to live in the woods, being that she’s afraid of animals. Dogs, cats even, birds, and bees. Especially snakes. She gets high, she freaks out: snakes all over me, she says, eek.”
“Snakes, you say. Brrrr.” Jerry Kelly nodded. “So, what next?”
“We have to get the dough from the stash to Chyna’s place. Then we have to do the sorting and counting and squeezing and bundling. Then we have to get the dough down here in reach for boiling, then to the Presto, and, hopefully, he’ll be ready to move it, fast.” Marko sighed in faux exhaustion. “I have to expose myself, a little bit.”
“Don’t worry, Marko. You’re covered.” Jerry Kelly didn’t blink, didn’t look away. He recognized, in others, the shifty look of greed and took pains to erase them from his own words, his tone, his visage. He had no specific plan for Marko’s future, but he believed it would involve more-or-less equal components of darkness and wetness and, for himself, a prize.
“You know, the other day Presto asked me how come I’m not worried about getting taken off. I told him: no problem, I’ve got Jerry.” Marko ignored his breakfast and drank at his coffee, a half-smile on his face. “Jerry, I said, Jerry protects me.”
“What’d he say?”
“He laughed and said, ‘Oh, right, and who protects me from Jerry?’”
“Oh, the douche nozzle.” Jerry Kelly laughed, a small bitter lyric of sounds. “I thought we might become friends.”
“Question is, do I? Can I?”
“I’m your man, Marko. You know that.” He crossed his heart. “Loyalty is my north star.”
“You know, there’s more than ten million up there, Jerry. I got dough belongs to a lot of people. Ten million of anything is a lot of whatever it is. If it was the other way around, I wouldn’t blame you for having doubts about me. So, I thought, how can I be sure? I can get the money out of the stash to the slaves, and I can get it someplace down here where the Presto can get at it. I assume the Presto can get the money over the border and stash it up someplace for Pavo’s cousin to get at it. With the Presto, Zoe being in the switches, I can be sure of him. He ain’t going to fuck me. But, and forgive me for this, but how can I be sure you’re my true bud?”
Jerry Kelly mimed a convincing ponderance upon this, as though tone deaf to treachery’s siren song. “Don’t know, Marko. How?”
“That was the question. And you know what? I solved it. What I did, Jerry, was I told Pavo’s cousin I’m retiring, that I sold the contract to you. Jerry Kelly, I said, is a master fucking criminal, Jerry Kelly bought up the contract. Guaranteed. I said you’ve got all the money and I’m out of it. Of course, they said if Jerry Kelly fucks up I’ll have to carry the weight, on account of I vouched for him. No problem, I said, but I’ve got faith in Jerry-boy, an evil criminal genius.”
“Marko, not such a good plan.” Jerry Kelly feared no individual or individuals. But he was aware of the persistent nature of well-structured organizations, of the ruthlessness required to maintain one as long as the Colombians had. “Fuck, Marko. Fuck.” He had a thought and casually asked, “How much is Pavo’s? Out of it all?”
“Jerry? Jerry, c’mon. I tell you that and you go, Oh, okay, I’ll rip the whole load and deliver Pavo’s share to him, go south with the rest, fuck everybody else that’s got a piece in there, let them make lampshades out of Marko. I’ll tell you, Jerry, it isn’t worth your while, really, once you take Pavo’s end out. Stay square, be cool. You’ll make enough, playing it straight.”
Jerry Kelly made a face of apprehension. “Fuck. This could end badly, Marko. Stuff beyond my control happens, I’m fucked.” He didn’t actually care about the money. Anarchy was for the here and now. If anarchy made profit, it wasn’t anarchy.
“I was constrained by time. I got enough worries to worry about.”
“This changes things, Marko. I’m going to have to have some control during this thing. I don’t want my beating heart ripped from my body by some fucking Juan because someone else fucked up. And a bigger end because I’ll be operating in a supervisory capacity.”
“You get Presto’s end. All of it. That’s after … You know?” He waved bye-bye. “I’ll insist on having a guy at the border crossing and that guy’ll be you and me. We play it square, I’ll take Zo’ out of there, hook up with Julia, and you do what you gotta do with Presto.”
“Fuck, Marko. I thought you’d change your mind, when the booze wore off, in the friendly light of day.”
“I thought about it, just saying fuck it, bygones, bygones. But no, not this time. This time …” He wiggled his fingers. “But, and I mean this Jerry, he goes, but no fucking around. Nobody walks the dog.”
Legend was that Jerry Kelly had once abandoned a recalcitrant minion deep in the bush, beaten bloody, his feet shackled and his hands handcuffed to the chain collar of a massive deranged Rottweiler he’d starved and given a meth enema.
Jerry Kelly hung his head. “That pit bull thing, that’s just an urban legend, Marko. My enemies trying to put me in a bad light with everybody. Jealous of my success. How they lie.”
“Jerrrrrry …?” Marko wagged his finger. “Woof.”
“Well, fuck, Marko, the guy … Let’s just say, he deserved it if anyone did.”
“Anyway, do the thing w
ith Presto, but no games. I mean it. Just turn out the light. I don’t want him to …” Markowitz looked sad but determined.
“No problem, Marko. That pit bull thing, I was a younger guy then. I matured since.” He lowered his face to the plate and licked up egg yolk with huge swirls of his tongue. When he looked up he had yellow smeared on his nose. He smiled brightly. “What about after, what’s the future hold for you, for the pale chick?”
“Julia? I’ll rescue her like I did after Spicetown. I think I might still got a shot, there, after. Soothe her down, take her on a holiday. I retire after this. I got some dough laid by, not nearly as much as I wanted to have, but enough if I do it right, and you send me a little now and then … Anyways, I’ll show her the good life. She needs it, after those fuckers in Spicetown. And she’ll need it more when Presto winds up with a ditch on his head.”
“Life. Life after Spicetown.”
“She got into the shit, Jerry. I had a chance to help her out, after, so I helped her out.”
“And she winds up back with him.” Jerry Kelly shook his head in disbelief. “Heartbreak is our constant companion, Marko.”
This contained a little too little subtlety. Markowitz’s voice turned a little cool. “Okay, get your crew together. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go do some work. We’ll take two of the healthiest slaves up for the heavy lifting into the Cessna. Don’t fuck this up, Jerry, don’t get fancy.” He stood and dropped some bills on the table. “This thing is worth ten million bucks, my nuts, and your fucking head.”
Watching Marko lumber from the diner, Jerry Kelly knew his wisecrack had given him a peek. He’d be careful now, but only careful about the money. Marko’s problem was that even if he recognized Jerry Kelly as an agent of anarchy, he didn’t understand anarchy. Marko, the linear thinker.
If Jerry tries this to get all the dough, I’ll do that.
If Jerry does that to get all the dough, I’ll do this.
