Darwin's Nightmare

by Mike Knowles

  “You got predictable, and the machine made you pay. I knew people who got predictable and it cost them a lot more than a quarter. You know people like that too.”

  My hands gripped the sides of the game table hard. They slowly slipped away from the edges, sliding on human grease.

  “Don’t get mad. It’s a weakness someone will exploit. You need to be able to think without connection to your emotions. You need to be unpredictable.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do you want more quarters?”

  I nodded, and he slid one across the table. It left a trail in the grime. “I’ll keep giving you money to play, but you have to play my way. I want you to avoid all the ghosts. Don’t kill any of them. If you do, the money stops.”

  I played for hours that day until my eyes were bloodshot and my mouth tasted like the foul air surrounding me. I died over and over again at first, but the quarters kept coming — leaving trails in the grease as though they were snails. I watched the table and learned slowly to think ahead of one ghost, then two, then three. After too many hours I began to see the whole table at once. I followed each ghost with my eyes, learning how they moved. Soon I learned how they reacted, and then I survived them. They couldn’t touch me anymore. I made a choice not to let them. They floated nearby, but they never touched me.

  My uncle ate in silence as I navigated the tabletop universe. I finally looked up after logging my initials into the high-score position for a fourth time. My name was written in a vertical strip under the plastic tabletop. My uncle’s face had no grin this time. There was only a smile. “You played them all. They went everywhere you wanted them to go. You controlled them. You were the one in charge even though it’s their game and they had the numbers. You can manipulate any situation in your favour. You just have to play it without emotions — without connection.” He etched my initials into the table grease with his thumb. Then he got up to leave without saying another word.

  I learned to embrace living without connection or emotion. I lived my life disconnected, surviving the world by calculating every move. Then, in one day, I destroyed all of my work, following Steve across town on his homicidal visit to the Talarese residence. I did it because I saw two people connected. Two people who didn’t fight to stay below everyone’s radar. I remembered two other people who did the same. I refused to let the ghosts take two people who, despite my best efforts, I had connected to. Steve was the closest thing I had to a friend, the closest thing to human contact I had, and I couldn’t let that go.

  I had tried to manipulate the situation, to see every angle and fight the odds, but I hadn’t escaped unscathed. Our violence took too much, and left little to barter with. We had our lives, but I lost my work and my contacts. I spent my life avoiding relationships and connections, and now that life was a prison. I was a ghost on my own, my education slowly killing me.

  I never had a graduation. I always spoke of learning from my uncle as though it was an education, but there was no final commencement. There was no ceremony with cap and gown, just gunshots inside a strip club.

  I had spent years learning from my uncle, training to be like him. I learned from him, and people he knew who were like him. He introduced me to hard men and women who didn’t mind passing on what they knew to a young kid, and through them I developed. I learned from a small man named Rev all I needed to know about guns. He wasn’t a man of the cloth; he got his name from the old revolver he kept no more than a heartbeat away in an ankle holster. The little man showed me how to clean, modify, and fire every type of weapon on the street. I spent years in a gym learning from an ex-prizefighter turned enforcer how to really fight — dirty without remorse. Ruby Chu taught me how to grift and steal for months until I picked it up. I had done work-study with anyone who would take me, and it hardened the boy I was into something else. Something unlike everything I came from.

  I worked the jobs my uncle scored. No one knew me outside of the people I learned from, and they weren’t connected to the kind of work my uncle and I did. I never knew who supplied the work. I just knew that we worked every few months and that the jobs were always different: armoured cars, stores, even banks. Every few months I was told about a job and the planning started. I was never clued into the who or why, just the what and how.

  Robbing the strip club was just another new experience to me. I never knew why the Hollywood Strip presented itself as a target worthy of our notice, or why it had to be only the two of us. I was just told it had to be done, so I started getting things ready without question.

  We hit the club on a Wednesday. The second night of the week the club was open. I wanted to wait to do it closer to the big money nights, but I was overruled.

  The Hollywood Strip had a regular schedule. The club closed at two but the customers never rolled out until half an hour after that. Two weeks of surveillance told me the girls went next. They left through a series of doors coming from an addition built onto the side of the building. The girls came out scrubbed clean in track suits. They looked like they could be regular mothers and wives — if they weren’t out at almost three in the morning on a weekday. After the girls came the bartenders and bouncers; they left out the front door. The boss came out last with a final bouncer. The bouncer worked the floor inside and was first on the scene to deal with problems. He was big, well over six-five. His arms and chest were covered in soft flesh, which concealed a powerful frame. He looked like he was unnaturally strong his whole life, the kind of person who was a starter on the senior football team when he was only in the ninth grade. His back was wide — the width of two normal people — and his shoulders were piled high on his back muscles, making him look like he was constantly shrugging. The bouncer was big, but he was out of shape. His gut hung over his belt as though he were concealing a beach ball under his shirt. His head was bald, making the skin tags and lumpy growths on his face and scalp stand out. He was beyond ugly, and most people probably shied away out of equal parts fear and revulsion.

  The bouncer walked the boss out every night. Together they punched in the security code and locked up. The owner, a tall Italian man with brown hair combed high on his head, would pull the doors twice after he turned the key, taking the repeated sound of metal on metal as proof the doors were locked. I had seen the owner up close several times when I was working surveillance. His sharp nose and flared nostrils sat below a pair or crazed eyes. His conversations were animated with anger and volume. He spoke constantly about himself, the trips he took, his athletic past, and repeatedly about his growing up in the neighbourhood without a father. He didn’t wear suits; instead he wore different warm-up coats adorned with international soccer logos and his name, Rocco, embroidered on the back.

  After three weeks of watching, we made our move once the last bartenders and staff drove away. The exterior of the building was painted black, making our dark clothes blend in. We leaned into a spot, between two pillars, used by a hot-dog vender every night until twelve. The cart was gone by the time we got there, but the space concealed us both from the door. The bushes in front of the walkway, which shielded the identity of clientele coming and going, protected us from the road. I held a heavy sap in my right hand, and I had to restrain myself from tapping it against my thigh while I waited. My uncle held a gun pointed at the pavement. His, like mine, was a reliable piece with no history. Guns were part of the job, but we rarely used them. My uncle thought guns brought too much heat, and they let the ghosts know where you were.

  We waited twenty minutes for the owner and his bodyguard to lock up. The mechanism on top of the door made a “ffff” sound, letting us know it was slowly pushing open. I heard the boss say in an angry tone, “I used to say what are those old fuckers complaining about? All they do is complain. But I tell you until you feel it you will never know. I can’t do anything anymore — I’m too tired. I don’t work out as much, and fucking — you can forget that.”

  A jingle of keys told me it was time to move.


  “I went to the chiropractor yesterday and he’s starting to work things out. The pain is out of my ass, but now it’s down my leg to my toes. I tell you it kills to move them, but you got to. You got to move them to get rid of the pain. Tonight I won’t get to bed until six, maybe later. That’s how long it takes me to relax so I can sleep. But when I was young like you I thought these old guys . . .”

  Rocco stopped talking when he saw me club the bouncer behind the ear. The ugly man’s hands dropped the gym bag he carried, but he didn’t fall. His knees wobbled and he shielded his head. I hit him again with the sap above the fingers he pressed against the first wound. He staggered again but he stayed up — out on his feet.

  “Into the club.” My uncle’s voice was calm; it made it seem like agreement was natural.

  We moved into the club without another word. My uncle was in first, covering the two men as they walked back through the door. When the door floated shut, I sapped the bouncer a third and fourth time behind each ear. His staggering stopped, and he went down on two knees before landing face first on the soiled carpet. I turned around and checked the street for anything strange before locking the door. It was then that Rocco got into it.

  “You two are dead.” His body shook with rage. “You disrespect me like this? Me? You think you two little fucks can rob me and get away with it? Do you know who I am? Do you know how long I’ve been here? Do you even know who owns this place? You’re gonna disrespect me like this? I’m gonna bury you.”

  “Let’s go to the office,” my uncle said, his voice still even and calm.

  “Fuck you. I’m not going anywhere. You think —” I cut him off, swinging the sap across his jaw. The blow was hard enough to turn his head and break some teeth, but not hard enough to knock him out. I shoved him through the club as he grabbed at his face.

  “This way,” I said, pushing the club owner, who was dribbling blood on the floor, in front of me. The locked door to his office read “Private.” We ignored the sign and the lock, opening the door with the keys the owner kept in his front pocket. Inside I saw several more locks and chains that would keep the door locked from the inside. I remembered wondering why this guy would need to be locked up so tight in this room. I guessed it was for entertainment. I found out later I was wrong.

  The room was done in dark grey. The carpet, walls, and couch were all shades of grey. The only interruptions to the grey came from the dark mahogany desk and the art on the walls, which was vibrant and colourful. Each picture depicted great athletic achievements in soccer and football.

  “Open the safe.” My uncle’s voice was still calm and even.

  To my surprise Rocco bent and began to open the large safe on the floor behind the desk. He held his jaw in one hand as he clicked the dial left, then right, then left again. He mumbled something that might have been a death threat through his damaged face, then swung the door open. The safe was full of money — a lot more than two nights’ take. I loosened the canvas bag on my back and got to work without being told. I worked fast moving the bricks of bills from the safe to my bag.

  “Now open the other one.”

  I paused for a second. Other one? What other one? I looked over my shoulder at my uncle. He stared at Rocco, who returned his gaze with his mouth open a little wider than the injury made necessary. My uncle cocked the gun and asked again. The club owner said nothing. My uncle walked closer to him and put the gun to his knee. “Open the other one now or I take the knee. After that it’s the other one, then your balls.”

  I had never known my uncle to do anything like this. Usually he hired a crew so that we never needed anyone to open safes for us. Tonight we had done everything strange. We came on a weird night, and we had no safe man when it was apparent that my uncle knew there would be two safes. Rocco shook his head, and the gun went off. I stared at the two of them until my uncle yelled, “Get the money, boy!”

  I got back to work, moving less methodically than I would have liked. The club owner rolled on the ground, mumbling in Italian at us both. My uncle held the gun to the other knee as blood and cartilage spilled onto the floor.

  “Obay. Obay. I’ll do it,” he said through his battered mouth. Rocco dragged his body across the floor. My uncle kept his gun against Rocco’s knee the whole way. Rocco opened a mini-fridge in the corner and ripped out the shelving. Leftovers from the buffet splashed out from inside the fridge. The club owner had shrimp on his shirt as he worked his hand deeper inside the fridge. I heard a squeak, and his hand came out with a black bound book. My uncle took the gun off his knee and took the book. Rocco sagged onto the floor. His head stayed in the fridge. My uncle balanced the book on the gun in his hand; his left hand flipped through the pages.

  “Motber fubber,” was all I heard before my uncle’s chest exploded red onto the ceiling. I threw the canvas bag at the fridge and drew the gun from behind my back. I pulled the trigger four times, putting bullets into the side of the fridge and the man’s chest. I dropped the gun and ran to check my uncle. He had no pulse, and his chest was not moving. For half a minute I panicked, looking frantically around the room for help that was not there. Something caught my eye and challenged the panic. I looked into my uncle’s face and saw that it was blank — completely without expression. I stared at him and realized that he had done something different; he didn’t plan this out, and it got him. The ghosts caught up with him in this dingy strip club. I refused to let the ghosts get me too. They had killed enough of my family. I put the book that lay beside his dead body into the duffle full of cash and put it over my shoulder. I picked up my gun and used a tissue from the desk to wipe it down as I walked out to the entrance. I found the body of the bouncer where I left it — face down on the floor. I pressed the gun into his palm, waited five seconds, and then I walked back to the office. I put the gun down under the desk and stowed my uncle’s pistol behind my back. I picked up my uncle’s body and walked out of the club past the body of the bouncer still on the floor.

  An hour later in a remote part of the city, I burned the car we took to the job with my uncle in it. Once the car had charred, I used the switch car to push it into a murky pond. It wasn’t a proper burial, but it was much more than other members of the family had gotten. I drove home with the money, the book, and no idea what I was going to do.

  I rose the next day and without thinking went to my uncle’s coffee-shop office. The newspapers detailed the man-hunt for the ugly bouncer who was wanted for questioning about a murder at the Hollywood Strip as well on several outstanding warrants. There was no mention of other blood at the scene or a ballistics discrepancy. They must have been saving that as a way to identify the real killer.

  On my third day in the shop, an older man joined me at my Pac-Man table, sitting down with a coffee and a doughnut. I stared up at him from the newspaper and watched as he dunked his doughnut into the coffee. I glanced around the room and noticed that there were a bunch of empty tables, but this old guy had chosen mine.

  “Help you, old man?” I asked.

  Between bites of doughnut the man spoke. “I gotta tell you, kid, you are a hard one to find. That uncle of yours told me nothing of how the job was going to go down, and when he botched it like he did I thought he ran out on me. But I got wind of a partner he used, and a place they held meetings in. Lucky for me I know the owner so I just had to wait for you to pop up.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m the guy you owe something to,” the old man said in a cold voice. He went on without waiting for me to respond. “It’s like ants. You know ants, kid? No? Well, ants bring everything back to the hill — it’s their job. You found some tasty sugar and you’re sitting on it. What’re you trying to do, make your own hill?”

  “I don’t know you, ant man,” I said, confused.

  “I set up the job you pulled. I gave you all of the details. Now it’s time for you to give me my cut.”

  “This is some grift. You figure me here alone means my partner is
dead, so you try to move in. I don’t know you, old man, and I’m not buying any of this. Who are you, anyway?”

  He took another bite of the doughnut and looked hard at me. “I don’t explain myself to anyone, ever, but you’re young, kid, so I’ll give you a heads-up. My name is Paolo Donati. The place you robbed was mine. I set it up.”

  The name shocked me. On the street Paolo Donati was all kinds of trouble. He was primed to become boss over the whole city. A red flag went up in my head. Something was off.

  “If you are who you say you are, then why use us? You got plenty of people who work for you, why not use them?”

  He put the last bite of doughnut into his mouth and looked out the window. He licked his fingertips and then spoke as he probed his molars with his index finger. “Like I said, it’s like ants, kid. Most anthills have more than one queen. You know that? More than one? Well, if the ants see one queen is not able to function they will feed the other. Eventually it will die while the other takes over.”

  I didn’t follow right away. It didn’t matter because he continued, “That guy in the club was working for me, and it turned out he was trying to build his own anthill . . . without me.”

  I got it almost immediately. “He was screwing you out of money and doctoring the books. You used us so no one in your anthill would find out someone was taking advantage. Using us kept you secure in your position.” I felt like an ass speaking about anthills, but the man across from me wasn’t kidding.