Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  “Fine,” he says. “Let’s get the most pressing problem you have with me out of the way right now. Just promise to keep your mouth shut and I will hand over the money I pretended to give Macky.” He hesitates before saying, “And I will chuck in another thirty-five grand and some change to make it an even fifty.”

  He stuns me almost as much as he did when he wasted Macky.

  “Fifty grand.”

  “You heard correctly.”

  A lot of fuckin’ jack.

  So much fuckin’ jack that all thoughts of doing the right thing fly from my mind, as do thoughts of overdue notices and calls from debt collectors. These thoughts are replaced by images of me in Bellagio’s high-roller room in Vegas; I’m decked out in a tailored silk suit, a Cuban panatela’s stuck in the corner of my mouth and coked-up, sexually depraved women in tiny dresses stand at my side.

  “You got a deal.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do not take the money if you are the least unsure of your intentions.”

  “You’re not gonna get a blood oath. When I say it’s a deal, it’s a deal.”

  He works his mouth, his thoughts churning as if he wants to hammer down the understanding more completely, but doesn’t know how to do it without fouling the air with a threat. He doesn’t have to express the threat. It’s all right there behind his eyes.

  I say, “I have a condition of my own.”

  He nods but not in a way you would describe as agreeable.

  “Don’t ask me to do anything else for you. I’m going to tell Joe Sacci the same thing.”

  This concerns him. “You are quitting Joe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should let today blow over before you do that. Joe and his people might get the wrong idea.”

  “And whack me.”

  He bobs his head affirmatively. “You know the people you are dealing with as well as I do.”

  “Damn right. Donsky, his new number-one guy, is an asshole, and I hear his new bodyguard is much worse—Fecarotta is his name, but I’ve never met him.” Then something dawns on me. “Does Sacci know I was going with you to Macky’s?”

  He nods. “Yeah, but—”

  “But nothing, old man. Now the fucker’s got something else to hang over my head.”

  He smiles. “Calm down, kid. The only two people on earth who know you were at Macky’s are me and Chief, and Chief will say nothing. I will just tell Joe I changed my mind about having you along.”

  This takes a few seconds to sink in. “You can pull this off?”

  He shrugs. “What is there to pull off?”

  “If he knows Macky demanded that I be there today, it might not be as easy as you think.”

  Completely unconcerned, the old man waves off the thought. “Who cares what Joe knew this morning? Remember who I am to him. I will tell him my version of what went down and he has no reason to doubt it. Just act like nothing has changed, go about your business, and no one will care.”

  I nod. “I’ll give it a couple weeks before I quit.”

  “All right,” he says. “On that condition, I will give you the fifty K and expect you to do nothing else for me.”

  We nod at each other, and he finally digs in to his food.

  Another uncomfortable interval of silence passes between us. At least it’s uncomfortable from my end. One reason for this is the old man’s eating style—a study in anal retentiveness. He separates his burrito and rice and charro beans so they’re certain not to touch. Carefully slices the burrito. Cuts the burrito into four equal pieces. Dabs four dots of green tomatillo sauce on each piece, then four dots of red Tabasco. Cuts each fourth into eighths. He will eat seven pieces and not touch the eighth, as if leaving it in tribute to his pagan gods. Only then will he eat any rice, and will eat every grain before moving on to the beans.

  The primary reason for my discomfort: the old man hasn’t handed over my fucking money.

  “In my considerable experience,” I say as he’s slicing the last fourth of his burrito into eighths, “when a cop accepts an offer of cash in exchange for illegal services, the offeror immediately coughs up said cash unless otherwise agreed.”

  “I don’t want you to leave yet….Say, tell me how Nico’s doing.”

  This would be Nico Wang, an old family friend and the guy who got me connected to the Sacci Family. “Nico’s Nico, you know.” I check my watch again. “Look, I really have to go.”

  “You mean you have to leave here, right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have to?”

  “You could say it’s an urgent necessity, yeah.”

  “When we arranged the time of the meeting with Macky yesterday, you said you had to stop by and see Nico real quick, then you were free all day, that you had the night off.”

  Cornered. Never a good idea to back me into a corner.

  I down my mug of beer and try to pour a refill from the full pitcher on the table. The mug overflows and my hand’s so numb I can’t feel the moisture.

  “Frankly, I don’t have anything else to say to you. One could even say I’m becoming uncomfortable in your presence.”

  His eyes become round and moist and innocent, like those of a disappointed child. “That saddens me more than you know. I was hoping to recover enough of your esteem that you’d go to the ball game with me today.” He pats his breast pocket. “Dodgers and Giants, two tickets in the lower level, third-base line. I even lined up some girls for after the game.”

  “A ball game? Whores?” I look away and bite my lip to keep from laughing. “If you think dangling a whore in front of me is going to get me to a ball game with you, you’re even more deranged than I thought you were. It just ain’t gonna happen, old man. Today, tomorrow, nev—”

  He throws out his hands, beseeching me. “C’mon, Leo, gimme a break. What’s the matter with you? I—”

  “What’s the matter?” The way I laugh reminds me of the way mad scientists cackle in old movies. “What’s the matter?” I stand too quickly and become light-headed in the process, have to place both hands on the table for support. Reeling, feeling the room tilt, I slur my words. “You’re a fuckin’ killer, man, that’s what’s the matter. You kill everybody who gets too close to you.” I jab my thumb into my chest. “So me? Me? I’m not gettin’ any closer to you than I have to.”

  He stands slowly and leans across the table, his expression as slack as a dead man’s. “So, that’s it. Your mother.”

  I clench my fists and place them on the table before me for support. “I cannot believe you’re stupid enough to bring her up.”

  “You are stupid for even suggesting what happened to her was wrong.”

  “Gimme the money now, or I’ll turn in your ass the instant I walk outta here.”

  He shakes his head. “Never a good idea to pass money in public, kid.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Fine,” he says, and takes the envelope from his breast pocket and tosses it on top of the untouched basket of tortilla chips.

  I snatch the envelope, taking some tortilla chips along with it, gauge the thickness and heft of the package and know for a fact the old man’s count is light. “There’s not fifty fuckin’ K in here. Where’s the rest?”

  “Not with me.”

  I stand as straight as I can and my equilibrium slips off the charts. Can’t even feel my scalp when I run my fingers through my hair. “Shit,” I say, and list so completely to my left I have to grab the edge of the table with both hands. My stomach churns hot acid up my esophagus. I swallow, burp. “When’re you gonna give it to me?”

  Dead silence.

  The word “Fuck” tumbles from my mouth before I half stumble, half walk away from my father like the building’s on fire.

  Babe

  Fathers and sons have spent worse days together. Consider the day the Menendez brothers used a 12-gauge shotgun to blow the top of their old man’s head off. Closer to home, con
sider the day I snapped the neck of my father’s German shepherd and he cornered me in the garage and welted me head to toe with a razor strop. Better yet, consider the day I returned to said garage four years later, the day I found my father working under the belly of his ’71 Buick Electra and kicked the jack out from under the front bumper, causing that old metal whale to land full force on his chest cavity.

  These thoughts mount a full-scale attack on my psyche as I sit impatiently in my Caddy, drumming my fingers on the wheel while stuck in game traffic on North Mission. The red light at Sunset is within view and Dodger Stadium is to the left of that, but I am not headed to the ball game. It is no fun flying solo to a ball game, especially after your son has slighted you.

  I mean, c’mon, put yourself in my position: You take out a hood who has threatened to break your son’s legs over a lousy gambling debt. Then you agree to pay said son fifty grand to do nothing but keep his damn mouth shut about it. Now, is a simple “Thank you, old man” too much to expect in return?

  Fuckin’ kids, man, Christ.

  Maybe Leo will ultimately come around and maybe he will not. Either way, for now I resolve to shove thoughts of him to the recesses of my mind. My goal for the rest of the day is to enjoy life and savor sweet freedom, for tomorrow I may well lose one or the other, and to do these things I must shake off the aftereffects of the hit. Killing another human so up close and personal is an intimate act of such tremendous intensity that the only way to recover from it is to perform the only other act that is similarly intimate and intense—the act that creates life rather than destroys it: sex.

  A huge Nissan SUV edges out of my line of sight and there, to my right, standing on the corner of Via Las Vegas, are the women I had planned to meet with Leo after the game.

  They readily agreed to meet me early—for a price.

  The tall, willowy one is named Maggie, a fair-skinned, green-eyed sweetheart who is over thirty, but passes for twenty, and has hair the color jarred honey becomes when the morning sun dances off it. Maggie’s so-called madam is an old friend of mine who goes back to my first days as a made guy with the Balboa Family, and had Maggie waiting for me at the Four Seasons the day I returned home from San Quentin. Maggie has since become like a dose of heroin I must mainline on a daily basis.

  The short one with raven hair I have never met. She appears to be even younger than Maggie and is supposedly Asian, though her Jackie O sunglasses make her race difficult to confirm. I specifically ordered the Asian for Leo because the wiseguy grapevine has it that he is drawn to women of exotic races.

  Maggie is dressed casually in designer jeans, high heels, and a clingy white tank top, and is obviously braless (I told her our first night together that her smallish tits really turn me on, and she hasn’t worn a bra in my presence since). The other woman wears a halter top and denim miniskirt. Though she is short, she has comparatively long legs—thighs to her fucking armpits, as the saying goes—which makes me skeptical of her racial origin. Both women are buff and tanned, and their hair and makeup and nails are tastefully done, and they could be easily mistaken for UCLA girls who have just downed flaming margaritas at El Compadre or belted back cum shots at the Frolic Room, and are waiting for their boyfriends Biff and Lake to pick them up for the game.

  They notice me as I turn right onto Via Las Vegas, and both smile and wave as I park by the curb across the street from them.

  Maggie says, “Babe!” and trots over. She leans into my open window, throws her arms around my neck, gives me a wet kiss, then noogies my nose with hers. “Oh, Babe,” she says, “I’ve missed you sooo much,” and gazes into my eyes in a way you would describe as “longingly.”

  This show of affection may or may not be heartfelt.

  One obvious reason for my uncertainty is that she is a working girl and will say and do what needs to be said and done in order to keep living in the manner in which she has become accustomed.

  And I would be fine with this.

  The thing is, I am beginning to suspect she truly digs me above and beyond our business relationship—is falling in love with me, if you will (or thinks she is)—and is chasing the universal dream of all hookers, the one of landing a financially secure man to rescue her from the carnal drudgeries of her life. It is the subtle things she says and does: the way she expresses concern over my high-calorie diet (we eat one meal together almost every day, usually at landmark joints that serve burgers and steaks, ethnic); the starry-eyed way she stares at me after we have screwed, all flushed and giggly, seemingly surprised at her euphoric postcoital state; and the chatty text messages she sends me 24/7.

  Could be, too, I freely admit, that my conceit has overwhelmed my common sense and I have fallen for the oldest act in the world. Maggie is a part-time acting student, after all (or claims to be), and her madam said she specializes in providing the service known as the “GFE,” or “Girlfriend Experience,” meaning she is an expert at pretending she genuinely loves her john.

  If she truly desires to elevate our so-called affair beyond business sex, I will be concerned. She is a rare catch and would make a fine companion, at least for a while. My concern is how the life I live would ultimately impact the one I would share with her. The one wife I took got caught up in my world and turned against me. A whore never has.

  My curiosity over her true feelings was one reason I did not cancel the supposed Asian I had originally planned for Leo.

  The women walk to the other side of the car.

  Maggie tells me to sit tight and opens the back door for her friend, slams it shut after her. When Maggie slides into the front passenger seat, the leather seat welcomes her superior ass with a teasing rustle and a soft phoosh as she settles in.

  “This is Ronni, without an E,” Maggie says to me.

  I flash her a smile through the rearview. “I am Babe, Ronni, with an E. Pleasure to meet you,”

  Ronni reaches from the backseat to pat my shoulder. “Hi ya, Babe. What’s shakin’, hunk?”

  My gaze hardens. “Hey, you sound like a Jersey girl. You are supposed to be Asian.”

  “Maaan, you dinky dau or what?” Ronni nudges her Gucci sunglasses down to reveal her eyes. “I’m a hundred percent Asian. Mom’s Vietnamese and my old man was a Nip.”

  I nod approval.

  She smiles, nods back with a wink, and fingers her shades back in place.

  Maggie flips down the vanity mirror behind the visor to touch up her lipstick. “Where are we picking up your son?”

  Here goes: “There is not going to be my son now. Now it is just us three.”

  She halts the lipstick midstroke and slowly turns her head to me. “Just us three,” she says, nothing in her voice.

  I knew she would be jealous. I knew it.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He just called to say he had an emergency to tend to. I did not want to ruin Ronni’s plans on such short notice”—a shrug—“so…”

  “You didn’t even know Ronni until a minute ago.” She throws the lipstick into the open purse in her lap, shuts it with a brisk snap, and glares straight ahead. “How could you possibly be concerned about her plans?”

  “I figured she was a friend of yours, and a friend of yours is a friend of mine, right?”

  “Me and Maggie just met,” Ronni says from the back, rummaging inside a purse that seems half the size she is, “but I can already tell we’re gonna hit it off.” She looks up. “I can tell the same thing about you, too, Babe.” She tilts down her glasses, winks at me again in the rearview. “So, you know, all the pieces fit. I’m cool with a threesome.”

  “I bet you are,” Maggie says.

  Ronni’s expression is confused, pained, when she looks up to address Maggie. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m a prostitute, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “Something bothering you?” I say to Maggie, trying with limited success to keep my voice smug-free.

  She turns her gaze out her window, and my thought is the window will frost over if she does
not avert her eyes from it soon. “You took me by surprise, that’s all.”

  I pull away from the curb, make a careful U-turn, wait for traffic to clear for my right turn on Mission, and head toward Little Tokyo.

  We roll for a while, listening to radio music, before I say, “Now that you have had time to let it sink in, you as cool with a threesome as Ronni is?”

  She takes a deep breath, exhales, and finally looks at me. “If I do it—and I’m not saying I will—but if I do, we’ll have to set boundaries, rules.”

  Ronni is back to rummaging through her purse yet again but looks up to say, “Boundaries? Rules?”

  “Yes, boundaries and rules,” Maggie says.

  I say, “What kind of boundaries and rules you have in mind?” I have been curious about this very thing myself, having never participated in a threesome before. My lack of experience in this regard is the other reason I did not cancel Leo’s date; having just pulled eight years in prison and all, I felt entitled.

  Ronni addresses Maggie. “Oh, now I know what you mean. Like, whether I go down on you or you go down on me?” She shrugs. “I dunno, what are you into? I can go either way.”

  Oh man, I think.

  “God, Ronni,” Maggie says.

  “What?”

  Maggie crosses her arms in a huff and works her mouth while the wheels grind inside her head. Something finally seems to occur to her. Smiling meanly, she flares her eyes at me then addresses Ronni. “You can do anything to me you want, but you can’t lay a finger on Babe unless I say so. I have to approve anything you do to him, in advance.” Back to me with a look of triumph: “What do you think about that?”

  I know she wants me to be jealous, but for the life of me cannot see why I should be. “Hey, doll, like I said, this has always been about you.” I reach for her hand.

  She smacks it away. “Yeah, yeah,” she says, and turns her head to the backseat. “Ronni, you good with that plan?”

  Ronni smiles. “Fine with me, lover,” she says, and begins to unscrew the top from a silver vial.

  Maggie turns to me. “And the price is the same for each of us,” she warns, “no discounts, not today.”