Pigs

by Daniel James

  Grace and Fitzy were mute.

  Roach rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking like he wanted to grab Isaac’s and Fitzy’s beers and drink away the conversation. To hell with sobriety.

  He held Isaac’s stare. “I don’t give a shit who these guys are. We can find out when they’re dead. You said the wolf came at you with a cattle prod, but they all had guns, so we know they want you alive.”

  Isaac felt his back being pressed to the wall and was ready to fight if the situation called for it. “We can draw them out. Let them come for me.”

  “And bleed the answers out of those motherfuckers.” Roach was getting a fire in his belly. “First we’re going to need a secure place to get our bearings. You mentioned calling in a favor. Well, I do have one. Monahan owes me. He’ll give us shelter, help us until we figure out the best way to handle this thing.”

  Isaac had a flashback of Monahan—patron saint of the desperate and endangered criminal—singing his praises after he secured him a staggeringly attractive jewel in another distant life.

  “Even if you’re bait, you’re going to need a new piece.”

  Isaac looked ambivalent. Yes, he wanted to deal with these killers. Yes, he would happily intimidate them and take great satisfaction in inflicting harm on them if forced. But could he terminate another life, other than Wyndorf’s?

  “We need to get this right, Curt. I’ve only got one more kill in me, and we both know who I’m saving that for.”

  “Then we better find Wyndorf before the wolf does. Don’t sweat that for now, though. We need to get going.” Roach adroitly tied his hair into a ponytail and stood up. “I don’t want my bar getting shot up. It just passed the health inspection. Fitzy, Grace, start the car.”

  The pair hopped to his command. Grace kissed her girl goodbye then followed Fitzy out to his black Mercedes-Benz C220. It was starting to get dark out, neon signs, street lights and headlights warming up for the cold closing fist of night.

  The four of them sped away in the high-end car, unaware that by the time they’d reached the end of the road, an Audi had caught their scent. Further back, behind the wolf, a silver Range Rover fell into line.

  Safe House

  “It’s just fucking awesome to be riding with you. I could blush, I swear. I’ve been a wheelman for enough names in my time—Roach, obviously—but now to be driving the both of you? It’s like driving Jagger and Richards, or something. The Parkway Bank & Trust job you pulled. $70 mill. Your Marshall Pierce jewellery heist. $53 mill. Those two are my personal favorites, but you guys are a living highlight reel showcase.”

  Isaac begged to differ, but allowed Fitzy to run at the mouth if it meant he kept his focus on the road. Now he knew why Grace had graciously given him the shotgun seat with a mischievous smile. Punk, Isaac thought, knowing she was sitting peacefully in the backseat with Roach, who was haggling over the phone with Monahan for the nearest haven off the streets.

  “The way you carried those jobs out. The precision, the control. Like a damn military unit. I wish I could have drove for you back then. I’m a damn good driver.”

  “If you can drive like you talk, I don’t doubt it,” Isaac answered, silently begging for him to let the radio, or even sweet silence, dominate the journey.

  Fitzy chuckled, patting the wheel with his ham-like fists as if trying to coax some laughter from the leather. “I hear ya. I know I talk a lot, it’s what I do when I’m excited, but I’m quiet when I need to be, ya hear? You like this sweet ride?” Isaac grumbled assent. “I borrowed it from an old friend back in Charlestown,” Fitzy went on.

  To his credit, Fitzy was very efficient at yammering away whilst smoothly slipping and dodging in and out of lanes. “Must be a kind friend,” Isaac said.

  Fitzy’s grin was more like a gurn. “I say friend—he’s really just some guy I grew up with in Southie. Mitch “Dopey” Roscommon. He used to be small time, working for the O’Connell family, and I was more, ya know, freelance. We’d keep runnin’ into each other. He’d ask for tax from a sideline I had going, I’d give him a drunken slap in Whitey’s; he’d shoot my car up, I’d fuck his sister. Just small tit-for-tat stuff, ya know? I actually quite like the guy. Wouldn’t dream of wasting a bullet on him. Not even the skin off my knuckles. Anyway, he’s a mid-level guy now with a nice new home in the South End and a Benzo, and last time I checked our scoreboard I owed him one, so I drove back to Boston and boosted this. Stupid design flaw in the vehicle, if you ask me. Would have been a little harder to steal if I’d had to hotwire it from his driveway. But keys and locks are just too old-fashioned now, I guess.”

  “Dino-tech,” Grace added from the back seat.

  “All I had to do was some grade-school-level iPad tinkering to amplify the key’s fob signal from inside Mitch’s home, and boo-yah! I was away.” He chuckled with a machine-gun cadence.

  Isaac humored the loquacious racer, growing impatient with Roach’s prattling to Monahan. “Does Mitch know you took it?”

  “Not directly, but I’d like to think he knows in here.” He patted his Celtic-clad chest. “I might even swap the plates back and return it to him after this. I’m sure he’ll laugh about it.”

  Isaac was slowly starting to realise that Fitzy was not playing with a full deck, and wondered if Roach was slipping in his vetting process. The last thing he needed right now was allies who were too flaky and goofy to make a stand against their shadowy enemy.

  Finally, Roach ended his conversation. “He’s got a free place in Chatham, South Saint Lawrence Avenue. We’re to go there and wait. His guys will watch over us until he arrives.”

  Fitzy’s jaw-wagging energy was redirected to his quick hands and reflexes as he moved them with a bit more purpose, silently cutting left at the intersection and gliding through the chains of traffic with crisp, judicious ease, heading back toward I-90 East.

  Four cars back, the wily Audi proved just as competent in its maneuvers. Three cars behind it, so too did the Range Rover.

  They arrived thirty minutes later, finding a reserved parking spot waiting for them outside the safe house. Isaac had pulled only the one job for the wealthy racketeer, so he was unfamiliar with Monahan’s level of protection. From outside, the three-storey graystone looked unexceptional in terms of security measures. However, closer inspection would reveal the front door to be composed of bullet-resistant fibreglass with a wood veneer finish, and the iron-barred windows couldn’t help but offset the normalcy.

  They took the porch’s wide stone steps and Roach rapped on the raid-proof door. The heavy curtain to their right twitched and Isaac was sure an eager, suspicious eye was glaring at them through the peephole. The door opened soundlessly and Roach led them in, Grace and Fitzy bringing up the rear. Neither the doorman nor the gunman at the bottom of the staircase to their right offered to take their coats or indulge in any such pleasantries. In fact, their hard stares were distinctly unwelcoming. Wearing a shoulder rig and a loosened tie, the goon by the stairs blew at the steam of his coffee and trudged back up to his post.

  The room off to their left was a large open-plan living room and dining room separated by a wide archway. Isaac noted four more guys occupying a card table in the latter. They wore black trousers, dress shirts in various colors and ties. Isaac gave them all a quick study and considered that if working conditions were as bad as their faces suggested, then they should probably start a union. He also took note of the several electronic eyes installed throughout the spacious, cold lobby, and deduced that the man upstairs was probably watching and recording them right now.

  The doorman was as large as the front door and looked just as physically dense, his bald pate gleaming in the light from the wall sconces. He quickly patted Isaac and Roach down, not being shy about it, as a second dour-faced triggerman left his seat at the communal poker table to perform the same action on Grace and Fitzy.

  “How long will Monahan be?” Roach asked, mid-pat down.

  Grace and Fitzy were compli
ant as their inspector, wearing an ugly, almost reflective purplish-blue shirt, removed their handguns, his burning cigarette glued to his bottom lip.

  “He’s on his way,” the bald wall rumbled unhelpfully.

  Having passed the security test, Baldy and Smokey returned to their card game at the green felt table in the dining room, leaving their unwelcome guests free to sit or roam about the open lobby and parlor. It looked like Monahan was aiming for some sort of faux-cabaret aesthetic with the bare limestone walls, soft light and black cherry-colored divan couches and beanbag box seats. Isaac flopped down onto a box and stared at the floor between his shoes, something he’d had a lot of experience of doing in Menard—if not the floor, then the walls and what might lie beyond.

  “This place looks like it can’t decide if it’s a whorehouse or a safe house,” Grace said to Fitzy. The pair of them took up positions near the thick vermilion curtains to keep an eye on the street outside. Neither the upstairs guard watching the house’s perimeters through a bank of screens nor the card table of complacent killers filled the young enforcer and driver with a whole heap of confidence.

  Roach took the box seat opposite Isaac, hearing one of their babysitters curse and fold his hand.

  “What’s room service like in these places?” Isaac asked, looking at how his friend’s face had aged and wondering what stories each deepening wrinkle and gray hair could tell him. He assumed Roach had at some point pondered similar queries about him.

  “I’ve not been in this particular resort before, but I’ll be sure to leave a review on TripAdvisor.”

  “You done a lot of work for Monahan?”

  “Bits and pieces. After Janine passed on, Ludlow pulled back from the life for a good while there. Between her death and your sentence, the guy was verging on becoming a recluse. I had to keep busy, though. I missed her too. And I missed you, brother. I was hurting. Had to stay busy or go stir crazy.”

  “I shouldn’t have been so harsh, distancing myself the way I did. It’s just, for the first time, with Maggie and Will, I saw a future I never thought possible for me.” Isaac thought he saw a flash of burning indignation in Roach’s eyes, but if it was there then it was extinguished quickly.

  Roach nodded solemnly. “You’re a better man than me. Maybe I can’t change. Diane was always there, and I always went the opposite way. I needed the work to keep my mind off the fact that my only real family was either dead, or not answering my calls, or locked away. That’s when the bottle really became a problem for me. But I was still functional to an extent, getting some more hands-on, rough work from our new host. Eventually, Ludlow picked up his phone again and it was business as usual. Sobriety and armed robbery. Yeah, I’m a selfish prick, but at least I own it. That’s got to mean something, right?”

  Grace dropped onto the divan along the back wall, with something on her mind. “We’re getting our gats back, right? Last time one of Monahan’s monkeys patted me down, the motherfucker kept it.”

  “You were itching for a fight.”

  “He was running his mouth, and he scuffed Fitzy’s ride. Guy was a prick.”

  Roach softly patted the air to calm her. “You’ll get it back when the boss gets here.”

  “For when the big bad wolf comes scratchin’ at the door?” Grace was trying for amicability but Isaac’s wordless glare took the mirth out of the cocky jibe.

  Isaac focused on Roach. “What I said before: when it comes down to it, if I can wound this guy and we get some answers out of him, someone else will have to finish him off.”

  Grace looked confused. “You don’t wanna blast the wolf back into the woods?”

  Isaac paused, already sensing further hassle. “I’m a thief, not a killer.”

  Amazement remoulded Grace’s perplexed brow. “You mean you, big-time bagman, have never popped your cherry?”

  “Once.” Isaac took a breath. He would have preferred to reminisce about one of his and Roach’s big scores, but what the hell, he had no place else to go. “An armored car guard. It was one of my first jobs for Ludlow. I got sloppy, and he tried to take advantage of my mistake. He reached for his gun. I didn’t have a choice. And I shot him.” His eyebrows knitted in a despondent frown. “Before we left, I saw he had a picture of his daughter on the sun visor. She was only a kid. Sweet-looking thing.”

  Grace wasn’t particularly sympathetic. “Sounds to me like it was his own stupid-ass fault. It wasn’t his money, why take the risk?”

  “The why isn’t the point. I took that girl’s dad away from her.” Isaac’s posture had become tense at the talk of the murder, the corded vascular muscles in his forearms bunching up like ropes. “I’m not going to destroy any more families.”

  “Such nobility.” Grace smirked.

  “Look darlin’, have you got a problem?”

  The card players heard the word ‘problem’ and forgot about the pot of cash mounting on the table, their cutting stares boring holes into their bellicose wards. Fitzy watched the guards at the table and understood why the five of them had disarmed their house guests. Frayed nerves and the spectre of death had a way of coloring the moods of hunted men and women.

  “Shit, I’m only playin’,” Grace grinned. “No need to get tense, I run my mouth. I read up about it, it’s a coping mechanism. There you go, now you know you can kick my ass in poker.”

  Isaac smiled thinly, which Grace almost celebrated. “That’s better. We’re on the same team, let’s all chill.”

  The guards continued their game.

  “How did you start working for Roach?” Isaac asked her.

  Grace’s dangly earring flashed gold as she raised her head up like she was preparing to dive into the story. “I’m from K-Town. I don’t think I need to ask if you’ve heard of the Vice Lords?” Grace didn’t. People on both sides of the law knew of the Almighty Vice Lord Nation, one of the biggest, oldest and most ruthless gangs in the city. “Or the Mickey Cobras?” Isaac listened intently, interested in where Grace was going with this. “Right, well, I wasn’t in either of those. Instead I grew up getting my ass beat and trying not to get blasted any time I left the house. I spent so much time avoiding people for fear of getting shot that most of my friends were dogs. Paws can’t pull triggers,” she snickered.

  “Except you,” Isaac added.

  “Right, “cept me. But I did know a few kids, all scared and abused losers just like me, tired of living with nothing, no future for any of us. Time was running out. If we didn’t join a crew, we’d wind up dead. Some guys from the A.V.L.N. and Black Disciples were starting to pressure us hard. We wanted the paper, nobody else would pay us more, but if we did join we’d wind up dead too. So the nine of us had the brilliant idea to form our own gang, some weak-ass outfit that didn’t even have a name.” She attempted to smirk at the memory like it was some coming-of-age misadventure, but an earnest shadow drained it of its humor. “Shit seems funny now, but I was only sixteen, and Wrecks, the brains of the crew, was only nineteen. Wrecks, he got this wise idea to sneak in and bust a Mickey Cobra dope stash we knew about, sell it off quickly and jet out of K-Town, out of Chicago, go anywhere else. Stupid kid fantasy. We had a few gats, ones we found from some fools who got themselves dead. At first we all thought the plan was suicide. Fucking bonkers. But Wrecks wouldn’t let it go, made it sound like a good idea. We knew the guys who guarded it, big mouths with little brains, always high in those dust clouds. In the end we all started to believe our own hype. And we did it, thought we were fucking ninjas. Made off with bricks of herb, it was beautiful. Those bricks were freedom to us right then, they unlocked the chains pulling us toward prison or six-deep plots. We didn’t get around to selling it. Wrecks and the crew all started turning up dead. Quickly. And the Mickeys had their stash back. It was a dumb fantasy but now I had to make that shit a reality. I needed to get out of K-Town and fast. I needed money, and I knew about Conway’s place. Word on the street. I talked myself into goin’ there, so sweatin’, freakin’, expecti
n’ to get cut down any minute. I ran from my block, tellin’ myself that I had to be prepared to do any stupid shit which would pay me quickly. I had to look legit when I got there, but dumb-ass me was too panicked to realise I had zero rep and was lacking a dick. Anyway, I get in there, and I see this wasted dude about to get into it with a few jacked-up dudes, and for some reason I jump in. This white guy might have deserved gettin’ his ass beat, I don’t know, but I thought if anybody in there was going to take me seriously they would need to see something good. So both of us fought our way outta there before we got swarmed. I was swinging bottles, stools, ashtrays, kickin’ guys in the nuts, whatever I had to do.”

  “I think I can guess who the lightweight was.” Isaac flicked a glance at Roach who held his hand up, owning his reputation as the drunken asshole.

  “Man, he was so grateful I stopped him from getting fucked up, he offered me a job.”

  “So you took it,” Isaac wryly surmised.

  “I took his damn hand off and got my ass away from K-Town.” Grace hacked up a pretty laugh. “Never looked back.”

  “Like a fairy tale.” Isaac smirked. “This would be about the time you stopped going to Conway’s?”

  Roach gave a soft chuckle. “I’d say that’s accurate.”

  “Hey, this him?” Fitzy asked the room.

  The confirmation came from the top of the stairs in the foyer. “Boss’ here.” The guard with the brown leather shoulder holster had the door open before Monahan had come up the porch steps.

  Mr. Monahan walked into the parlor, a large man with dark, neatly combed hair and a ruddy face, a gray overcoat draped over his shoulders. He primly greeted Roach, nodding at his party, and lastly, allowed his eyes to settle on the subtle alterations to a familiar face. “Isaac Reid. You made it out of the clink in one piece.”