Blood Red Turns Dollar Green Volume 2

by Paul O'Brien

  “Danno?”

  Danno stopped.

  “I want to help you,” Shane said. “You don’t need to get involved in this. I’d happily … tell me where Curt Magee is … ”

  Danno looked Shane dead in the eye, grabbed him by the jaw bone, and discharged a shot downward into his foot.

  The pain and shock took a split second to register – but when it did, Shane collapsed, screaming in agony.

  "You shot me. You fucking shot me,” he roared in disbelief.

  “For years I watched her leaving this house and I wondered where she was going. The next time I see you,” Danno calmly said as he pointed his gun at Shane’s head, “I won’t aim any lower than your face.”

  Shane covered up. Danno stood over him long enough to punctuate his dominance. He saw the broken flesh exposed through the disintegrated designer shoe and the blood beginning to gush from Shane’s mangled foot.

  “Now get the fuck out of here,” Danno warned as he re-entered his home and slammed the door.

  Danno already knew where Curt was. He didn’t need anyone else’s help to find him anymore. But he thought he needed someone else’s help in killing him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Madison Square Garden was the mecca. It was the spiritual home of the Garland’s wrestling company. Danno’s father ran there for years before Danno took over and did the same. Every month they would finish their traveling loop in the sold-out Garden.

  Every month except this one. Tickets for this one were slow to say the least.

  Ricky walked through the hushed backstage entrance on the ground floor. His shoes tapped along the concrete floor past the rubbish stacked high against the cold brick walls. Above his head a confusion of cables and pipes ran exposed in all directions.

  The crew had been in all day setting up and getting ready. There were wrestlers from all over the country above his head. And a whole lot of problems too.

  Ricky followed the corridor around to the right and saw a couple of forklift trucks drizzled with arena-hands taking a smoke break. Ricky nodded in their direction and walked up the ramp, tapping his hand off the battered railing.

  He took a sharp right and passed a train of pallets, still packed and waiting to be opened. The snugly wrapped silver piping followed him along the ceiling and large hanging lights lit the way. It was more like a boiler room than the most famous arena in the world.

  Another right turn brought him into the jaws of the large service elevator with the worn down floor. In it, Ricky felt small and insignificant. He knew that his time in the large box was probably going to be the only quiet time of the next few days. He pushed the button and the protective cage slid down across the opening. Two metal doors then engulfed the cage like a closing mouth and the floor began to shudder under his feet. The short journey to the backstage area began. This was going to be a hard day, with hard decisions to be made.

  All without Danno.

  The elevator came to a stop and the doors slid back into hiding. It was noisier now. The backstage area had the hum of people behind doors, laughing in distant hallways. Ricky steadied himself and walked from the elevator through the same double doors he had passed countless times before. He bypassed all of the open and half open doorways and walked directly down to the opening that led onto the arena floor.

  “Ricky?” Danno called from a half-opened door.

  Ricky stopped dead. Danno’s voice was the last he expected to hear, but was the one he hoped he would.

  He backtracked and peered around the door.

  “I think I’ve found him,” Danno said.

  “Curt?” Ricky whispered trying to drag Danno’s volume down a few notches.

  Danno nodded. He was distant and distracted.

  “How?”

  “We have to go,” Danno said as he passed Ricky in the doorway. “I have a cab waiting.”

  Ricky stayed still on his feet as Danno walked off.

  “Boss?” Ricky said.

  Both men were standing inside Madison Square Garden. It was a few hours away from bell time and only one of them had wrestling or business anywhere near being on their mind.

  “I can’t,” Ricky said.

  Danno walked back and looked Ricky in the face. “I said I found him.”

  Ricky was a loyal soldier – but he knew wrestling was wrestling and business was business. What Danno wanted him to get involved in was something completely different. Something he decided that he didn’t want any hand, act or part in.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Danno said. “They might have someone talking in there.”

  “Who might have someone talking?” Ricky asked.

  “The cops. I got word that someone has turned and is going to rat us out.”

  Ricky hardly even knew how to form the small word stuck in his throat. “What?” he finally managed.

  Danno turned. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  “On the way where?”

  Ricky marched after Danno and gently grabbed his swinging arm. “I’m staying here,” he said with his head bowed. “Unless you tell me that you don’t want me here. But that thing you’re leaving to do right now. I understand. But… ”

  “But what?”

  “That’s not … I’ve got … ” Ricky pointed down to the opening that led out onto the famous arena floor. “That’s what I signed up for. With your father before you. And with you.”

  Danno turned square on to his right-hand man. “You’re pulling out of this thing?”

  Ricky very reluctantly nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Ricky nodded again.

  “Well then, you’re a fucking faggot,” Danno said as he slapped Ricky across the face.

  Ricky immediately filled with anger. The outcome of years of trust and hard work and sacrifice in front of them both and it was down to this – an insult with his hand and an insult with his mouth.

  “I’m trying to understand,” Ricky said. “I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes. But if you ever raise your hand to me again you better have an ambulance waiting and not a cab.”

  Danno stood in front of him defiantly.

  Ricky continued. “And if you don’t stop this path you’re on, you’re going to pull everything down with you. Your life and my life.”

  Ricky wanted him to stay. He wanted Danno to honor the business. The thing that was still alive and they could do something about. The thing his father built before him and the thing that was handed to him as a gift. A near hundred-year-old gift.

  Danno turned away and walked for his cab. He didn’t want to go either. But he felt that he had to live up to his promise. Even if it meant changing who he was.

  If Ricky wasn’t willing to help then Danno needed to make contact with a man who would.

  The city had already made the white bandages stained and dirty. Shane Montrose dragged himself up the stairs of his shitty hotel. Every step was a cruel and painful heave. There was a lump missing from the side of his foot and apparently several of the smaller bones were broken from the sheer velocity of the shot.

  It was hard to tell the full extent of the damage without getting an x-ray – and it was hard to get one of those without going to a hospital. He knew he didn’t have time for that.

  There was a doctor Upstate who was very friendly with professional wrestlers. Every town had such a doctor. Someone who liked big cash money for a ‘call-out’ and access to his prescriptions book.

  But even the shady doctor warned him of the dangers of not going to an emergency room. Shane instead left with a clean wound, a tight dressing and a pocketful of sedatives, barbiturates and a little bag of powder completely off the books.

  All he wanted to do was to get to Curt Magee.

  He unlocked his door, triple locked it from the inside, and staggered back onto his noisy sprung bed.

  The pain was excruciating.

  He thought in all his years of wrestling, and all the injur
ies that such a life brings, that he developed a significant pain threshold.

  Maybe the only thing that kept him moving was that threshold.

  He rattled around in his pocket looking for the pills. For the first time in his adult life he was calculating on how not to get too stoned. Even in intense pain he had to keep his wits about him.

  He threw his arm out and slapped around the bedside locker, looking for his watch. In doing so, it slid like a snake onto the floor.

  “Fuck. You. Fuck … ”

  The rough sound of his phone ringing startled him into jolting his own foot. It took him a couple of seconds to digest that his phone was ringing.

  His phone was ringing.

  Shane grabbed the phone. “Hello?”

  “Shane?” the scared sounding voice asked.

  It was Curt Magee.

  Shane moaned in discomfort as he pulled a gun from his drawer and checked the chamber.

  “Tell me where you are,” Shane said in his most faux sympathetic voice.

  Danno felt the neglected roads underneath him and heard the blaring of the car horns in front of him. His checkered taxi’s windshield wipers were doing all they could to beat away an open New York sky.

  The 8772 bus pulled into traffic and chugged out a cloud of black smoke as it struggled to keep up.

  On the backseat with him was a discarded newspaper that read:

  FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats.

  The whole country was working each other. Power grabbing from the top all the way down. He wished it was still that simple for him. For a split second he forgot the stomach churning events of the last few days and remembered a time when his business was all about the pieces on the board. He loved to move them around, look for the openings and make his move.

  Danno Garland wasn’t a killer. Or, at least he wasn’t born one. But he knew he would have to be one at least once more before his own judgment happened.

  He got out of the cab, overpaid the grateful cab driver and walked into the park. Around him people scurried for his vacated ride, shielding themselves from the rain with anything they could put above their heads. Jackets, newspapers and umbrellas.

  Danno didn’t notice the weather or didn’t care.

  Across the street Nestor Chapman sat in his unmarked car watching Danno.

  “Any sign?” asked a voice over his radio system.

  Nestor picked up the phone-shaped receiver and placed it to his lips, but didn’t answer.

  “Are you there, copy?” the voice asked again.

  Nestor again didn’t answer. He reluctantly put the receiver down and opened his car door.

  Danno walked the pathway and scanned passers-by to see if they were his contact.

  “Danno,” Mickey Jack Crisp said from a park bench.

  Danno recognized the frame. The outline of his hair. His long, thick sideburns. Danno immediately knew that he was looking at the man who buried Proctor after he put a bullet in his head.

  And that was who he was looking for.

  Danno had only seen Mickey in the dark field a couple of nights previously when he held Proctor King on his knees.

  “Are you Mickey?” Danno asked before approaching.

  Mickey nodded. He seemed totally at ease with the torrential rain hopping off the bench under him.

  Danno walked closer. “I want you to help me kill this man.”

  Danno passed Mickey an oversized envelope from his coat with Curt’s details and a stack of cash in it. “I just need you to bring him to me. And I’ll do the rest. I have a chartered plane. It’s all in there. Let’s go.”

  “Now?” Mickey asked.

  “Yes. Now. You got a problem with that?”

  Mickey seemed torn. “I can meet you in a couple of hours. I just have to finish something first.”

  Danno looked at him suspiciously. “It’s now or I go and get someone else.”

  Mickey’s mouth was full of questions but Danno just walked on.

  Nestor watched from a distance.

  Mickey drove the beaten up brown Plymouth into the rain. Danno was silent beside him. He noticed Mickey’s shoes were mucky and the floor of the car was the same.

  “Rain destroys everything,” Mickey said.

  Danno wasn’t so sure.

  “What’s the smell?” Danno asked.

  Mickey decided to elaborate. “I don’t have anywhere to stay up here. I was just supposed to come to town and do… ” Mickey didn’t finish the sentence. He knew Danno knew what he meant. He was supposed to come to New York and kill Proctor King. “And then I was supposed to head back to Florida … ”

  “Florida?” Danno asked.

  Mickey nodded. “Some other things came up so I hung around. Bottom line is I slept in the car.”

  Danno knew somewhere in the back of his head that Mickey was from Florida. He just forgot.

  He thought about the note that was left under his door.

  There’s a heatwave coming up from Florida. Make sure and cover up.

  He looked back as far as his fat body would let him to see if they were being followed. Mickey could sense his sudden jumpiness.

  “You doing okay, man?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Danno said as he adjusted all the mirrors to let him see the angles from behind.

  Now Mickey was getting jumpy too. “Is there something happening here that I should be aware of?”

  Danno shook his head. Unconvincingly.

  “You need to tell me what’s going on here or I’m turning this car the fuck around Danno,” Mickey said.

  Danno thought about where to start and what Mickey needed to know.

  “They’re tailing us.”

  “Who is?”

  “The cops,” Danno answered.

  Now Mickey started to panic. “Why are they tailing us?”

  “When we get to the airport, you drop me off at the terminal and go and park. I have a plane waiting for us,” Danno said as he took back Mickey’s envelope and wrote out the hangar number on the front of it.

  “And then what?”

  “You drop me off, park the car and meet me there. If you get there and I don’t, I still want you to go do what we’ve discussed. Only difference is, I want you to hold him there, alive. I’ll make my way to you when the time is right.”

  Mickey was about to argue all the legitimate issues that would raise.

  “I’ll give you an extra hundred grand. And tell Little Terry the same. Hundred each.”

  “Who’s Little Terry?”

  “My pilot.”

  Mickey could hear in Danno’s voice that Danno wanted to do the dirty end of Mickey’s job for him, again.

  “If we get split up, my house phone number is in the information I gave you,” Danno said.

  “Deal,” Mickey said as he put out his hand. Danno obliged. Mickey’s firm response gave him some hope.

  “But don’t let the cops look through this car,” Mickey said.

  Danno nodded. Mickey made sure to look Danno in the face so Danno would understand how serious he was.

  “There’s a couple of things in this car that could get us both in some trouble.”

  One week before the murder.

  Texas.

  Tat-tat-tat on the window. But there was no answer. The large waiting man tried again. Tat-tat-tat. Nothing. He checked his watch and took a couple of steps back to look up at the top windows.

  He was outside a nice house. Big, but not huge. Certainly owned by wealthy people though. It was freshly painted with colorful flowers in the window boxes outside.

  “Hello?” the visitor called. “Hello?”

  He walked around the side of the house and cupped the ground floor window. It was quiet inside. No signs of life. The place was well kept and orderly.

  “Hello?”

  He could see through to the kitchen. It certainly seemed empty.

  Crystal Montrose held her breath in the broom closet of her kitchen. She didn’t have time to
warn her five year old daughter to be quiet and she could hear her little footsteps on the stairs.

  “Mommy,” she called.

  The little girl was frightened by the sudden quietness downstairs. She knew her mother was usually singing, watching loud TV or talking up a storm on the telephone.

  “Mom?” she said as she warily looked into the kitchen.

  Crystal couldn’t move with fear. She tried to ‘shh’ her daughter but she knew her voice was too low to matter.

  “Mommy?”

  She could hear her little girl’s voice begin to tremble. Crystal prayed that the man outside was gone.

  The scared little girl walked into the kitchen doorway and saw her mother, with tear stains on her cheeks and her finger to her lips, direct her back up the stairs.

  But it was too late.

  The back door burst open with a terrifying crack as the intruder kicked the door in. The little girl screamed and ran frantically up the stairs. Crystal tried to follow her but she was pulled back by her intruder who had two handfuls of her hair.

  “Where is he?” the man shouted.

  “I don’t know,” she screamed as she tried in vain to fight back.

  “You tell him that if I don’t see him within seven days that I’m going to find you and set you alight.”

  Crystal turned away in terror and the man let her go. She ran upstairs to try and protect her little girl.

  “He has one week to get me my money,” the man said calmly from the kitchen before he left.

  His throat was raw from too much smoking and his hands were shaky from too much coke. Shane Montrose was coming back home after two weeks on the road.

  And Texas was a huge, awkward state to travel by car. He’d been to Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Twice. He would now come off the road for a day or two and then hit some smaller ‘spot’ towns in between the loop of Houston, Forth Worth, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Twice. He had the names of the towns and cities playing around in his head like a continuous record.

  He was getting too old to be struggling with a state so huge. Most of his colleagues were trying to get to San Francisco. Small trips, great weather and home every night.