by Tod Goldberg
“I gave you back your phone,” I said. “Why don’t you go ahead and make that call? I’m happy to wait. And while you do that, I’ll have my man Finley here make a call, too, and by the time you’ve hung up, Julia Pistell’s throat will be slit. Nice girl, by the way. Ever met her? Sweet as can be. Yeah, we got her down at the Ace Hotel. She thinks she won a contest through her college. How long you think it will take the police-and not the ones on your measly payroll-to put her dead body and your house together?”
“Who?” Killa said. And when Junior didn’t say anything, he said it again. “Who?”
“Nice you brought your owl with you,” Sam said from the sofa.
“Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said. “I’m trying to think.”
I caught Father Eduardo’s eye. He looked… impressed. But this wasn’t anywhere near over yet.
“You said your name is Solo?” Junior said.
“That’s what I said you could call me,” I said.
“What’s the nature of your business, Solo?”
“My business? You could say I take over distressed companies and then, when they’re profitable, I sell them. Why, you looking for an investor?”
“I guess I’m trying to figure out why you’d align yourself with someone who has a history of selling his partners out.”
“Align? You think this is an alignment? Father Eduardo works for me. You think you’re the only person who ever tried to blackmail someone?” I said. “I understand you want to utilize Father Eduardo’s existing infrastructure to run your business-would that be correct? I know you came in with this revenge-and-reward business, but the truth is that you see a good business model here. Right? Let’s just be honest, businessman to businessman. I’ve done pretty well here, haven’t I?”
“Eduardo is a Latin Emperor,” Junior said. “He may think he serves someone else, but he serves us first. That’s the oath. And he owes me much more.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen the documentaries,” I said. “There was even one you were in. Did you see that one?”
“No,” Junior said.
“Yeah, showed your picture, and then someone with a blurred-out face spent about twenty minutes talking about how you were the toughest SOB in the world and how you ran this and that and the other thing. But, shit, I just thought you looked like a guy who needed some nice Pottery Barn furniture and some chenille rugs.”
I winked at Junior, because when you wink at people, it’s a sign that either you’re insane or you know they’re insane and it’s cool, really.
“Thing is,” I said, “Eduardo has a new boss now. You have a problem with him, you take it up with me, and we’ll see what can be worked out without you getting killed.”
This made Killa laugh. He had an odd sense of humor. But Junior wasn’t amused. “I. Am. Owed.” Each word Junior said was its own sentence.
This day was not going as he had planned, I suspected, and I also suspected he wasn’t used to being challenged. I also had a pretty good idea that if pushed hard enough, he’d try to do something stupid. We hadn’t checked them for guns, but I was sure they were strapped. Or at least Killa was. In a moment, however, Fiona would be here to defuse that problem, if need be.
“You’ve got an outdated business model that needs some tweaking,” I said. “That counterfeiting business you were trying to pull is example A, Your Honor. And this idea that Father Eduardo owes you something? You wipe that clean from your mind. You go to that happy place you live in, with those nice sofas and pieces of art and that gazebo. I really liked that gazebo, Junior. You ever seen his gazebo, Killa?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Killa said. “Who the fuck are these guys, Junior?”
“Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said. Junior inhaled deeply and then tried to relax. “Eduardo belongs to me,” he said to me. “You must understand that.”
“Sure, sure,” I said. “You think I haven’t been in a prison or two? So he snitched you out. Big deal. He fell in love with the Lord-what did you expect? Let’s just get beyond revenge and deal with the tangible, okay? Everything you see here? That’s me. Father Eduardo and I made a deal. He had dreams, and I had means.”
“You are not involved!” Junior said. It was as if I wasn’t even speaking. Junior had his own script, and here I was interrupting it. He thought this was going to go down one way, and here it was, an all-new set of circumstances.
A rational man would change his tack.
A rational man might excuse himself and set up a new meeting at a later date.
A rational man might even just have his muscle pull out his gun and kill everyone. And Killa did have a gun. He walked like a guy with a bad knee and a gun shoved into his tailbone. Sam had noticed this, too, and was keeping a laser focus on Killa’s every move.
I’d spoken rationally thus far to Junior, and it frankly hadn’t done much to defuse the situation. Junior was quick to boil. The problem with speaking rationally to criminally insane people is that at some point, no matter how much sense you’ve made, they just won’t be able to process what you’re saying.
We’d already reached that point and had been talking for only about three minutes. So, when that point of stasis arrives, you need to get down to the level of your opponent, ponder what his next move might be and then make it before he did… which is why, during the second or two it took Junior to process what I’d just told him, I decided to shoot Killa in the knee with my big shiny gun.
Except it wasn’t a gun, of course. It was a paintball marker. But instead of paintballs, I’d filled this gun with rounds of a mixture containing primarily lortropic acid, which is a particularly voluble acid when it hits things containing water, since it actively repels the substance, which is why it works so well when you’re refinishing your deck. There wasn’t enough acid in the round to do much damage, apart from eat away a patch or two of skin, but when combined with the force of the shot, I knew in all likelihood the round would go right through Killa’s pulled-up sock and into his skin, where it would burn and sizzle and be plenty dreadful to look at, which is part of why I decided to do it.
The advantage was that the acid would actually cauterize the wound so, on balance, I was really doing Killa a favor.
Plus, my real plan was to sever his medial collateral ligament, or at least crack his patella. It would depend on how accurate the gun was. And that would help him in the long run, too. You can’t be much of a gangster if you can’t run after or away from people.
So, just as Junior was opening his mouth to respond, I slid my gun beneath the desk and with a single pop that didn’t sound like a gunshot (which is good, because a gunshot is pretty distinctive and loud and tends to bring in uninvited guests) dropped Killa to the ground in a screaming mess.
“My knee!” he bellowed.
Sam walked over to where Killa was writhing, knelt down, put a hand on Killa’s head to keep him still, and proceeded to pull a nice, little snub-nosed. 357 from his belt, which he handed to me.
Junior didn’t move. He just looked at Killa with something less than amusement. Killa’s knee was cut open in a two-inch gash that was, as predicted, bubbling but not really bleeding. A clean shot. Mostly, Junior seemed confused.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Junior, “but I don’t allow guns in here. It’s a church, you know? And I found his tone very disrespectful.”
“You shot me!” Killa said.
“Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said.
“Does that burn?” Sam asked.
“It’s eating my skin!” he said.
Junior kept his eyes on Killa, but said to me, “It is eating his skin.”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s got five minutes until it hits bone, so he should be fine provided we reach some kind of accord in, oh, four minutes and thirty seconds. He’ll want some time for the antidote to work its way into his system.”
“What did you shoot him with?”
“Trade secret,” I said.
Junior finally pulled his eyes fro
m Killa and looked over his shoulder at Father Eduardo, who, amazingly, seemed pretty content with everything. It was all working out perfectly, and perhaps he saw that.
The only problem thus far was that Killa’s burning flesh smelled. The acid really wasn’t going to eat away at him until it hit bone-it would only burn off a few layers of skin, and, mixing with blood and the oil in his skin, would cause a lot of visual fireworks, but no real permanent damage. His destroyed ligaments were more his own fault than mine. They would have popped at some point. I just brought the future forward for him.
“Here’s what I want,” Junior said. “I need the printing plant. I will pay no fee for it. It will be mine. Eduardo can still print his newspapers and his flyers and no-drug pamphlets and everything else he wants. But I need the operation from midnight to six daily. There is no negotiation.”
“Really?” I said.
“Really,” Junior said. “Or else I kill Father Eduardo’s nephew.”
14
The element of surprise is really an issue of controlling morale. Shock your enemy, and you can expect that a feeling of hopelessness will descend upon him. He will begin to feel vulnerable both mentally and physically. His training, both mental and physical, will come into question. He might even turn on his leaders, thinking they are incompetent for not knowing what to expect in the heat of battle.
Not killing all of your enemies is actually an advantage, since the myth of your power will ripple throughout the ranks of your enemy and then you have the mental advantage. A spy feeds off this advantage, because once you’ve defeated an enemy from the inside, it’s much easier to defeat him from the outside.
The problem for Junior was that he probably wasn’t aware of this maxim. Or maybe he thought he was surprising me.
He wasn’t.
Maybe he’d surprised Father Eduardo, but since he was the one who used to control the Latin Emperors’ message, maybe it was an old tactic brought back for a good cause.
The one person who was surprised was Killa, since Junior had just put a death sentence on his son with Leticia.
“What?” Killa said. He didn’t quite have the language skills of his brother, but in this case there really wasn’t much to say. His boss had just said he was going to kill his son. And then there was the issue that the skin on his knee was bubbling away.
“You heard me,” Junior said to Killa. “Your son belongs to the Latin Emperors, and if I decide he dies, he dies. That’s just how it is. You have a problem with that?”
Killa didn’t know what to say. That was clear. He looked from Junior to Eduardo and even to me. He looked afraid, helpless-all the things you’d want your enemy to look like after launching a surprise attack. That Killa worked for Junior showed the level of depravity in the situation. Everyone was expendable. “He’s just a kid, Junior,” Killa said. “He’s not part of this.”
“Are you part of this?” Junior said.
“You know I am,” Killa said.
“Then he’s part of it,” Junior said. “You ready to have him die for this? Aren’t you ready to die? Because I know I spent a lifetime in prison willing to die for this, so you better be willing.”
It was actually rather fascinating to watch the skewed reasoning of men, particularly powerful men, and here on display was the old school and the new doing battle over what was, in essence, the future of the gang. They needed this place for the long-term survival of their clan. But bringing in a kid was a level of devotion I wasn’t familiar with and wasn’t comfortable with. I knew we needed to protect Leticia, but hearing Junior threaten the kid’s life in front of his father was a nihilism that told me all I needed to know about Junior: He knew this was his chance to make it. What “it” is to anyone is a good question, but for Junior, a man who’d spent thousands of days behind bars, clearly this was a chance at the life he felt he deserved.
“He’s with it,” Killa said, though he didn’t sound all that affirmative. “He’s with it. Just get me to the hospital, Junior, because I’m gonna lose my knee, man. I know it.” He’d begun to bargain, which wasn’t a good sign. He was actually going through all of the stages of mourning right in front of us.
“Adrian,” Father Eduardo began to say, but then Sam started to get up, so he quieted down. He knew his role well. He also knew that his brother was suffering.
“Everyone settle down,” I said. “Even if you kill the kid, what does that matter to me? What’s the use? You hurt Father Eduardo? You think that matters to me?”
“Same use as all the dead bodies Eduardo put into the ground thirty years ago,” he said. “It’s good for our family. That’s the only one that matters. I’m going to guess the good father doesn’t want a dead kid on his hands, because I will make it look like his doing. And that you best believe. I lose; he loses. That’s the new rule. I’ve got ways to make this happen. That you best believe, too.”
“Right,” I said, “you’ve got cops. I know. We all got cops. But, really, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m happy to give you the plant from midnight to six. I get twenty-five percent of what you print.”
Junior pondered for a moment. “Ten percent.”
“This isn’t a negotiation,” I said. “I just gave you the terms. And you employ your own guys. I’m not compromising my operation here with your three-fingered technician.”
I let that sink in, let him know I knew so much more than just the basics, that I was in on the minute details, too.
“He won’t be working for me anymore,” Junior said. “Or for anyone.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I get final approval on your plates, too. You running the U.S. Mint through here, I don’t want it to be a half-assed job. We all go back to prison if you’re making that skunk money I saw at the hotel.”
I let that sink in, too. I’d infiltrated all aspects of his life, and now he knew it. Maybe it was a surprise, maybe it wasn’t, but it couldn’t have been good news for him.
“Deal,” Junior said.
“And from now on,” I said, “I control your security operations. We got into and out of your life in two days. We know everything about you, and we’re just businessmen. Right, Finley?”
“Business is our business, big man,” Sam said.
“That’s not happening,” Junior said.
“You work with me,” I said, “you work with me. Or you’re going to be a liability, like Killa here.”
A moan rose from the floor, where Killa was likely counting toward the five-minute mark, which was when he thought he’d see himself from the inside out. He was also likely considering the fate of his son, maybe himself.
“How much time has elapsed, Finley?”
Sam looked at his watch. He had no idea how much time had passed. Neither did I. “Four minutes and seventeen seconds. Eighteen. Nineteen.”
Even though the acid that was currently biting into Killa’s skin repelled water, the amount of acid was so insignificant inside the paintball that the best antidote was water, or a flush of water.
“Go ahead,” I said to Sam. He got up, opened up the small fridge in the corner of Father Eduardo’s office and came away with a bottle of Evian, which he dumped on Killa’s wound.
“There,” Sam said. “Unless you’re the Wicked Witch of the West, you should be fine now.”
“I’d go see a doctor, anyway,” I said. “Since you don’t have any ligaments in your knee anymore. And you’ll probably get gangrene from the wound, too.” Killa whimpered something that sounded like “Thank you,” but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.
The truth was that he probably wasn’t in terrible pain from the shot or the acid. The torn ligaments would hurt and make it hard for him to walk, and he’d never play pro football again, but nothing that had happened to him was particularly torturous.
Killa was experiencing anticipatory pain. It normally happens to people in the middle of combat. A person gets nicked by a piece of shrapnel, sees that his flesh is torn and bleeding, and thinks he shou
ld probably be in terrible pain, even if he isn’t. So he acts as if he is. The human brain doesn’t realize that you look like the toughest man alive; it just realizes that you should be in pain by virtue of visual evidence, and the next thing you know, you’re prostrate on the floor, clutching your knees to your chest and sucking your thumb.
I regarded Junior again. “Those are the terms.”
“You protect me, then,” he said, “but you leave the rest of the Emperors out. I’m not opening my books to you.”
“Fine,” I said, because it was precisely what I wanted. “What else?”
“I thought you made the terms?”
“I do, but you could do this without us,” I said. “You’re paying a twenty-five-percent tariff on your product just because it’s easier for you. So you tell me what other low-down shit you want to do, and I’ll tell you if it’s possible.”
“You’re a smart man, Solo.”
“No,” I said. “I just got here first.”
“I need an office,” he said. “People see me working for Father Eduardo, they’ll think he turned me. They’ll think the LE are dead. I need that.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“I don’t kill the boy,” he said.
“Kill the boy,” I said, “and I’ll kill Julia Pistell, and then you’ll have two murders on your plate. So I ask again, What’s in it for me?”
The truth was that I needed to get Junior in the building. If this was all going to work, I’d need him to not just be counterfeiting money here in the middle of the night; I needed him to be in an office, doing the business of the Latin Emperors. It wasn’t legal for the police to bug the church, but I’m not the police.
With twenty-five percent of the counterfeit money even for one day, I’d be able to put that bogus cash directly into the hands of someone who could make a difference, someone who would bypass the beat cops on Junior’s payroll.
Someone like the mayor.
