by Aaron Cohen
The racket makes Manny’s head hurt. He stands up and looks down on them. Pathetic.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “You tell me where Cecil and the midget are, and I’ll call you an ambulance. Deal?”
Manny thinks that sounds pretty reasonable.
“Okay, okay,” Owen says. “They went to see a guy named Ben Costa, some old mobster.”
“Oh yeah, I know that guy,” Manny says. “He’s got quite a rep. I wonder what they want to talk to him for.”
“Look, I don’t know,” Owen says, panic and pleading now in his voice. “Now just call the ambulance! I’m bleeding like crazy here.”
“Alright sure,” Manny says. “A deal is a deal.”
He pulls out his cell phone and presses the 9 button. He is about to press the 1 button when a bullet tears through his left lung. Taking a breath has suddenly become impossibly painful.
He looks down at the woman. She has her left hand on her bloody thigh wound and her right hand holding the smoking .38.
“Don’t bother,” she says. “I’ll do it myself.”
She fires four more times, emptying the gun.
Manny reflects on his age, how his skills have grown rusty, how when he was younger he wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave a gun so close to a crazy bitch he had just shot.
He wonders who will attend his funeral, and what kind of food will be served. He is hungry. He thinks about buffalo chicken wings and waitresses in short-shorts and tight tank tops. He dies just slightly happy.
***
Luke, Cecil and Artie sit in Ben’s living room, not saying much. Everyone is tired and thinking about what’s to come next. They are waiting for Ben to get dressed. He wanted to change out of his track suit before heading out to his second favorite strip club.
“The ladies appreciate a little class,” he had said.
They appreciate $20 bills a little more, Luke had thought.
Luke’s cell phone rings. It’s Jerry.
“Hey Luke,” Jerry says, sounding stressed. “Something bad happened out here at The Oasis. And I think your uncle might be in trouble.”
“What happened?”
“These guys in black suits, real assholes, they’re after that midget and the old guy. And they know your uncle gave them a lift to Vegas.”
“How would they know that, Jerry? Who would have told them that?”
“Not important. What is important is that I just called your uncle and he’s not answering. These are bad guys, Luke. Really bad guys.”
Luke hangs up and stands. “We’re out of here. Uncle Owen is in trouble, because of you two.”
“What did we do?” Cecil asks.
“You jumped in the back of my uncle’s truck,” Luke says.
“We’re sorry, Luke,” Artie says. “We didn’t mean to pull you into this.”
Luke speed dials his uncle Owen. No answer. He tries his aunt Beri. No answer. He tries the office phone. No answer. Shit!
He’s got to get home, right now.
Ben walks in, now wearing a different track suit, this one made of soft red velvet with white strips running up the sleeves. The jacket is unzipped enough to show off a healthy patch of graying chest hair. He’s wears three gold chains, a pinky ring, and a little oil in his slicked-back hair.
It’s been a while since he’s had a boy’s night out or enjoyed the company of loose women. Most of his friends were too old or too dead to enjoy going out. Getting old sucks. He is looking forward to this little field trip. That’s why the look on Luke’s face depresses him so much.
“Lay it on me, kid,” Ben says. “What’s going on?”
“Whoever wants that memory stick is on our trail, and now Uncle Owen isn’t answering his phone.”
The loose women would have to wait a while. No matter. At least Ben had a reason to get out of the house. If he watched one more episode of Oprah, he might sprout a vagina.
“Ah, Christ,” Ben says. “Let’s take my car. I’ll drive.”
Chapter Thirteen
Luke’s house, his uncle’s house, the house he had grown up in, has been invaded. Five cop cars with lights flashing blue are parked on his street. Yellow police tape stretches between the tall palm trees in the front yard. More than thirty spectators stand in the street and neighboring yards, almost all of them holding up cell phones with cameras, making their own little movies. There are two photographers, with real cameras with big lenses, taking pictures. No TV cameras yet.
Where are they? Luke thinks. This is their kind of scene. Must be on the way.
Cops in desert beige uniforms are everywhere. Three take notes as they talk to people in the crowd. One takes pictures of the front door, and whatever is just inside the front door. Two others mill about in the front yard with no clear mission. One of them is drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
Has this been going on so long that someone had the time to bring out coffee?
Ben, driving his giant Cadillac Escalade, slows and parks down the street from the chaos.
“Kid, this doesn’t look good,” Ben says. “I don’t know if you should…”
“Fuck that,” Luke says, opens the door and steps out.
He heads toward the cop nearest him, a cop leaning on his black and white, reading a paper.
Bored? Nothing better to do? Why don’t they just order a few pizzas and a keg and make a party of it?
“Hey,” Luke says, and the cop looks up. “What’s going on? What is all this?”
“What’s it to you? Can’t wait to see it on the news?”
“This is my uncle’s house. I live here. This is my home.”
“Are you Luke?”
Why do they know my name?
“Yeah,” Luke says cautiously.
“Well then, you should talk to the detective. This way.”
They elbow their way through the spectators, many of whom seem put out that Luke is getting escorted into the scene while they have to stay behind the police tape. Luke feels them looking at him, feels like he should hide his face. He feels exposed.
The cop lifts the yellow police tape and ducks under. Luke follows.
The front door is open and Luke can make out a big, black shape a few feet within the house. As he gets closer, he realizes he’s looking at large man, a large dead man sitting against the wall in a pool of dark red blood that coats the entryway to the house.
There are foot prints and wheel tracks in the blood. There has been a lot of stomping around in it. He can make out the gleaming white tile underneath the red, white tile that his aunt had picked out about ten years ago, and that Uncle Owen had installed himself during a fit of home remodeling.
Luke feels faint.
“What happened?” Luke asks, trying to not puke.
“Shoot out,” the cop says. “Your aunt and uncle were carted out, which is why all the tracks in the blood. The CSI guys were pissed.”
“Are they okay?”
“The CSI guys?”
“My aunt and uncle!”
“Oh yeah, they’ll be fine,” he says. “Both shot but nothing life threatening.”
Luke breathes a sigh of relief.
The cop calls into the house: “Hey detective! I’ve got a guy here you’re going to want to talk to!”
“I’ll go around through the side door,” a voice calls back. “Give me a sec.”
Luke looks at the blood, and then at the dead man in a black suit, his eyes still open, a red stain covering his chest, four black bullet holes grouped around his heart.
Who the fuck is that and why did he come to my home?
Luke knows Aunt Beri killed him. She is an incredible shot, thanks to her days on the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police. She was a bad ass and everyone thought for sure she would be the first female sheriff elected in a city where women were mostly known for being able to serve drinks while wearing six-inch heels.
But then she fell in love with Owen. With his semi-shady record, it meant she’
d never have a long-term career in law enforcement. For Owen, it meant staying on the straight and narrow, eventually cutting all ties with The Organization, but no big loss, he wasn’t all that happy tending to idiot gangsters and worrying about cops. He took his money and opened a landscaping shop, and as Las Vegas grew like a weed in the 80s and 90s, so did his business of pulling weeds, though he insisted on calling it “landscape architecture.”
Luke goes to the gun range with Aunt Beri all the time. Her shot groupings are always tight little shredded holes surrounding the heart and forehead. The man on the floor had clearly been unaware of his aunt’s skill with a gun.
“You must be Luke,” asks a voice from behind him.
Luke turns and sees a stout guy in his 40s with a shaved head and beer gut straining against his not-quite-white-anymore dress shirt. The guy has on a cheap brown suit and a maroon tie with what looks like a coffee stain in the center of it.
“I’m detective Jones,” the man says and extends his hand. “I know this must be very traumatic. Why don’t you sit down?”
Luke wants to take his hand and give it a polite shake, but the world spins. He loses his balance and tips forward. Jones’ catches him gently and stands him back upright.
“It’s okay, son,” Jones says. “It is quite a sight if you aren’t used to it.”
“What the hell is going on?” Luke asks.
“You have some place we can talk in private?” Jones asks.
***
Ben, Artie and Cecil watch from the Escalade. They watch Luke stumble into the cop, and the cop stand him back up.
“Uh-oh” Ben says. “Looks like a detective wants to be friends. We’ve got to get Luke out of there.”
“How would we do that?” Artie asks.
“Why would we do that?” Cecil asks. “We can call him a lawyer from right here in the comfort of this absolutely fabulous vehicle.”
“Because you don’t leave behind a member of your crew,” Ben says.
“Is that part of The Code?” asks Artie.
“And by the time a lawyer gets here, the damage will be done,” Ben says.
“Then whatever can we do?” Cecil asks. “All these police officers are making me exceedingly nervous.”
“I have an idea,” Ben says.
***
Luke walks around the side of the house with detective Jones. They go through the side gate, past Owen’s prized rose bushes, now in full bloom, red, pink and yellow.
“You live out here in the pool house?” Jones asks. “Seems nice.”
“It is,” Luke says. “I…”
Luke can’t quite say what he is actually thinking, that he had spent the last few years hating his pool house, feeling like a prisoner of obligation to his uncle, resenting the fact that he often felt more like an employee than family.
They walk around the kidney-shaped pool with a hot tub tucked into the far end. The faint smell of chlorine hangs in the air along with memories of barbecues with the neighbors, glorious bouts of pool volley ball with his friends, and applying suntan lotion to Suzy Johnson’s back a mere hour before Luke lost his virginity to her. He was 16. She was 21 and he has thought about her every day since.
They head toward the pool house with its glass walls and surrounding palm trees. From the outside, he can see his bed, kitchen, couch, TV and framed gangster movie posters.
He can remember the day he moved into it, the day after his 18th birthday party, schlepping his boxes of comic books, DVDs and video games to his “house,” the place where he would declare himself an independent man. He remembers making decisions he had never made before, like what kind of art to hang in his living room. It seemed like an important decision at the time. His living room would be where people would determine what kind of adult he was, who he was as a person. What did he want to tell them?
He thought about prints of art classics, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rembrandt, perhaps mixed in with some more challenging modern art pieces filled with lines and blurs and blotches, pieces they talked about in his art appreciation class. He wanted to look smart and deep, mostly for the scores of women he was planning on bringing home, but he also didn’t want to look like an ass with art that you needed to attend an appreciation class to appreciate.
He went with the gangster movie posters because he loved those movies, stories of flawed men who fought against the system, who broke the rules, lived lives of wild abandon, and though they ended in tragedy, they nonetheless seemed more heroic and human to him than movies about “heroes.”
The crime stories and their flawed characters appealed to something that teased him from the back of his brain, the idea that the fix is in, the system is corrupt, those in power are in it only to accumulate more power, that anyone who loudly proclaims noble intentions is pursuing something sinister.
And so up went the framed mob movie posters, and he was happy with them. They made him look slightly rebellious, maybe a little dangerous, and surprisingly to him, like a film buff, which he really didn’t consider himself to be. But that didn’t stop him from bagging no less than five film majors from UNLV, and all he had to do was throw out some bullshit comparing Scorsese to Coppola and gangster realism versus mobster romanticism.
Luke realizes he is about to walk into his sunlit shrine to gangster movies accompanied by a detective investigating why a dead man dressed a lot like a gangster is lying in a pool of blood in the house he grew up in.
He opens the door and they enter.
“Nice place,” Jones says, glancing at the posters, the kitchen, the living area, scanning the place. “You mind if I sit down?”
He heads over to the black leather couch in front of the TV and flops into it without waiting for permission.
Luke stands, looking at Jones, not sure what to say or do. He can’t get the image of the dead guy out of his head. The guy looked asleep, leaning against the wall like that, like he’d been drunk, decided to sit down and then passed out. But his eyes stayed open. He wasn’t sleeping. He stared into nothing. He was after Artie and Cecil.
Those fucking idiots. What am I mixed up in?
“What happened here?” Luke asks the detective, trying to sound cool, trying to have the calm of the innocent.
“Come on, kid,” Jones says. “Have a seat. We’ve got things to talk about.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ben has to admit, he is having fun. A few hours ago, he was just another old man holed up in the house where he’d eventually slip in a bathtub, break his hip and slide away into that good night. Now he is out and about, taking risks, looking to spring a new friend from the cops’ clutches.
The kid, Luke, seems like a good enough guy, young enough to still be dumb, but smart enough to know he doesn’t know everything. One of the things he doesn’t know is cops. When a cop is nice to you, when he pats you on the shoulder, when he tells you a joke (and cops often have great jokes), that is a cop looking to get something out of you.
When they want information, want you to incriminate yourself, they don’t beat you with phone books and rubber hoses (well, not often). If you are a wise ass, they might tune you up for the fun off it, but when it comes time to gather evidence, they are as charming as high-priced gigolos.
What they do is ask about your family, ask you who you think did it, ask for your help in a way that makes them seem helpless and you feel superior and smart. If you are feeling smart in the presence of a cop, shut the fuck up and wait for your lawyer.
Ben leaves the Escalade and makes his way through the crowd, up to the front, where he gets a look at Manny’s bloody corpse.
Poor old Manny, past his prime, got old, got sloppy. Nice piece of work on him though. Clean shots to the chest. Someone won an argument with no chance of appeal or revenge.
To do what he needs to do, Ben cannot be seen. Yet, he also needs to be close to the action for it to achieve the desired effect. It is going to be tricky. He slips to the side of the crowd, walks over the lush green lawn
to edge of the neighbor’s yard. This is about right.
He looks over at the SUV, where Cecil is now in the driver’s seat. They make eye contact and Cecil nods, letting Ben know he is ready.
***
“So kid, you tell me, what do you think happened here?” Jones asks Luke, who sits on the edge of his couch, leaning forward, his hands on his knees, coiled, ready to spring up and out at any second.
“I…I have no idea…you tell me,” says Luke, looking confused. “How would I know?”
“Did you know the victim?”
“The dead guy? No. Where are my aunt and uncle?”
“In the hospital. They were shot, but they’re going to be all right. Looks like your aunt shot your uncle. And the dead guy…” Jones looks at his notes “…Manny…He shot your aunt.”
Luke tries to process that but can’t. It makes no sense.
“Why? My aunt is the nicest lady in the world.”
“Well, probably because she was going to shoot him. She plugged him four times right in the chest. Do you know why Manny was here?”
“Like I said, I have no idea. This is all crazy. My aunt and uncle run a lawn mowing business.”
“It says ‘landscape architecture’ on your uncle’s card.”
“Yeah…Same thing.”
“I’m told, and you correct me if I’m wrong, that your aunt and uncle had a couple guests at the house today.”
“Yeah. So?”
“And those guests might have had something to do with today’s tragedy?”
“Who told you that?”
Jones looks down at his notepad …“The dead man is an employee of Empire Gaming. He was here to inquire about a piece of stolen property that is in the possession of a dwarf named Artie, who seems to have stolen it.”
That’s a lot of information for a guy who just got here. How would he know any of that? Holy shit, the cops are involved.
Luke feels a chill.
“Artie? I don’t know an Artie.”
“You’re a bad liar kid. Try again. Why would your aunt and uncle feel the need to kill a guy looking for that piece of property?”
