by P Mulholland
Her hand was running over her small round stomach as if she found it calming. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. She looked like she was suffering after a large meal of undercooked chickpeas. Chickpea curry, undercooked by Brydie O’Neal when she was fifteen was a memory, I’d rather forget. Other memories of her, I kept in an imaginary box under my bed. Now and again, I might pull one of those memories out to practice target shooting in my mind…or something else.
Brydie O’Neal was the last person in the world who I thought would pair up with an Austin, let alone a spoilt fucking brat, like Jake. Let’s face it, he’d dump her once he got bored with her like his older brother did with his whores. And then the Stray could go back to her wild ways again.
“Haven’t you got a home to go to?” I said to Brydie or Stray Cat, my father’s nickname for her since she was dumped on our doorstep at aged ten. I had other nicknames for her as well, but I kept those to myself.
“I was about to leave,” she said.
“You know where the door is.” I then addressed Farrah “Where’s Isaac?”
“In his office.” Right. Where else would he be?
He frowned and looked me up and down curiously, when I stepped inside his home office. The large TV was on, a replay of the Bears against the Rams.
“You’re not going soft on me are you, boy?” he said, as soon as I took a seat.
“No.”
“Your mother said you went on some spiritual awakening to unleash the Indian in you or some bullcrap.”
“It awakened only dead spirits. And the correct term is Native American or if we’re going to be tribally accurate Cree.”
He screwed his face up and waved his hand at me. “I don’t want to hear anymore. Some things are better left in the ground, if you catch my drift.”
Or lying in the bottom of the lake. “There’s no drift to catch.”
“I gave your mother a better life,” he added, “in a beautiful house. All the things money can buy.”
I sighed, stuffing down my frustrations to the pit of my stomach where they’d fester, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I failed to see what snatching my mother from her childhood home in Quebec had to do with my experience in a fucking sweat lodge.
“Anyway, while you were dancing in your teepee, Doyle paid Peacock a visit.”
“And?”
“The Luciano scum aren’t admitting to smashing your car up. Only your apartment. They ordered to do it by the New Yorkers. They’re the problem.”
My apartment was broken into and received extensive damage, approximately four months ago and my car that I left parked outside my apartment building had the windows smashed and tires punctured over a week ago. Being in the security business, I had access to surveillance cameras and erected them inside my apartment. They were destroyed like my furniture, but I still managed to recuperate footage. It was the same guys who left a package on the Elite Security Service doorstep. They were idiots sent from Luciano Security, our biggest competitors in Chicago. This occurred shortly before we got hit properly, courtesy of a Costa Rican minister seeking revenge, who organized heavies from a New York faction. As it turned out the Lucianos were also intertwined with the New Yorkers, so we took it personally that after years of a truce, we were back at war again.
However, after scanning the footage of my car getting smashed up in a violent, drunken rage, I quickly identified the attacker and crossed it off as an enemy attack. Even though, I was curious to know the motive behind the rage, I wasn’t concerned about it. Isaac mustn’t know the truth about this one. I’ll sort it out myself in my own time.
“So, what’s got the Lucianos so uptight?” I asked.
Isaac paused a moment to watch the game, even though he’d already seen it. “I guess it’s got something to do with the way you dealt to Bernardo after the glass doors were shot in.”
I shrugged, casually. “Bernie has become a very good liar.”
“Son, he wasn’t lying, he honestly knew nothing about it.”
“How do you know?”
“Peacock said.”
“Fucking Peacock. You can’t trust that two-faced turncoat. One minute he’s betting on black, next he’s betting on red. I can’t keep up with him. He’s part of Luciano’s division and yet he’s whispering in Doyle’s ear for a price. It won’t be too long before the Stray’s fishy friends are nibbling at his flesh at the bottom of the lake.”
“That would be a shame, ‘cos he’s a good mole.”
“But whose side is he really on?”
“Is the Stray still here?” Isaac asked. His left eye twitched. I figured he was hiding from the women, just I like I did. Or to be accurate, one particular woman, his baby sister who he still felt guilty about. He didn’t even need to confess his guilt, I could see it written all over his face, not to mention the newly formed twitch. The whole situation could’ve been handled so much better. Our actions were all in the past, however the consequences were in the present. The Lucianos and the Malones were at war again.
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City Slickers
Broken
Cold Blooded
The Fixer
The Boss
Kingston Valley U
The Knight
The Rook
The Pawn
The Saint
