THUGLIT Issue Fourteen

by Scott Sanders

  "Yeah. Let's do that. I thought you came off a bit too savvy in the Gotham City interview," said Jensen, "but no one else seemed to catch it. Otherwise, Vic Vincent was flawless as Enzo, the Bensonhurst mook." Jensen continued, "I thought the lines you gave me for the confrontation with Tony Dukes were a little too East Coast tough guy for me. I think I would have been better off playing a litigious pest, but I think he bought it."

  "He burned the place down," said Enzo. "Whatever you said was perfect."

  "Yeah, 'Zo, about that," said Jensen. "I thought you said the mob was just a fairy tale. That guy was a better actor than either of us, but he seemed pretty dangerous, like legit dangerous."

  "He's the real thing, the last of the old time Mafioso. You were talking to the devil himself," said Enzo, " You would have flubbed your lines and lost your nerve if you knew he was serious. You understand why I couldn't tell you, right?"

  "Good call. I would have been a nervous wreck. I never met a real gangster before," said Jensen. "'Zo, you have to tell me, who the hell is Mike Rinaldi?"

  "I'm Mike Rinaldi," said the man standing next to Tony Dukes and his associates in the doorway.

  Tony entered the room, walked straight up to Enzo and pinched his cheek. "Lorenzo, I always knew you were a smart kid. You and this Jensen—you both deserve Academy Awards for what you pulled. You fooled the whole world. You even had me going until that farmboy chef mentioned Rinaldi's name." Dukes balled his fists and tried to maintain a neutral expression as his friends escorted the network executive, Juan Carlos and the money man out of the room.

  "Rinaldi's a friend of mine. He's always been our guy. You two understand what I'm saying? He's our inside man in the pig pen. Mike locked a couple of beef stews up and everybody thinks the Italians are finished. Youse are pretty smart, but you ain't that smart."

  The chefs stared at each other with a look of terror as the color drained out of their faces. Jensen's breathing was shallow to the point of near hyperventilation and tears began to form in Enzo's eyes.

  "Relax," said Dukes with a wide smile, "I'm not here to hurt you—" then smacked Jensen in the face. "Does this look like a piss-stained suit to you?"

  "No," he stammered, "it doesn't"

  "Good. I'm here to rearrange your arrangement. Whatever your deal with each other is: I don't care. You got a new silent partner. My lawyer's gonna look over the papers and they'll say that The Testacchio Hospitality Group owns half of everything you two have your names on from now on. Don't like it? Too bad—this ain't the real world, this is Brooklyn."

  Grandpa's Place

  by S.A. Cosby

  Boochie talked too much.

  Carver sipped his tepid coffee and chewed his hash browns slowly as Boochie rambled on and on about his foolproof plan. His mouth moved so fast, his lips smacked together like hand claps in the chorus of an old R&B song.

  In Carver's experience, the belief in a foolproof plan was proof someone was a fool.

  "Look I've pulled over fifty jobs in the last ten years and I ain't never been caught. The last time I was inside was over a traffic ticket. A fucking habitual offender charge! Can you believe that shit? Ninety fucking days cuz I did a rolling stop and Johnny Law decides this is his day to be a fucking hero and pull me over. I hope he got chiggers behind his fucking balls. And this, oh my brother, this is a golden fucking goose of a job. Can you feel me? I knew that you could!" Boochie said. His thick and twangy accent gave everything he said a sing-songy lilt that was not altogether unpleasant. He sounded like a Baptist preacher getting tuned up to bring salvation to the righteous in a sweltering clapboard church.

  Carver looked across the table at his prospective partner in crime. Boochie was a tall, thin man with a mouth that was too wide and showed too many of his teeth when he smiled. And he smiled a lot. He had dusky tan that looked to be the result of many days spent toiling under sun instead of lying under ultraviolet lights in a tanning bed. His long stringy hair fell around his face like lank vines. A beard was trying to spread across his face without much success. His light green eyes danced in his skull like marbles in a child's toy. Boochie played the role of hayseed redneck to perfection. He even wore a white t-shirt with a small rebel flag over the breast pocket and the requisite Confederate ideology on the back. But Carver knew a keen animal cunning lived behind those glittering eyes. Oh, it was hidden in a fog of meth and cocaine-fueled mania, but it was there, lurking like a crocodile in a muddy river.

  "I mean, if Cutter Farkir tells you it's legit then Becky-bet-your-panties, it fucking legit," Boochie said before he killed his cup of coffee in one twitchy gulp.

  "And dangerous," Carver said softly. Boochie rolled his eyes comically and waved the waitress over for more coffee.

  Boochie looked at the big man sitting across from him. Carver was solid slab of a man. Hard bulky muscle on top of more bulky muscle. Deltoids the size of bowling balls. A neck a bull would envy. A clean-shaven head that gleamed in the sunlight seeping through the blinds of the little diner on Cary Street where they were meeting. Boochie wondered if he was really bald or just shaved his head to look more intimidating. If so, it was working. Carver had some ink on his arms. A battle-ax on his left forearm and a lion wearing a crown on his right bicep. They had the shaky edges and blurred lines of prison tats. The black t-shirt Carver was wearing could barely contain his wide arms.

  Shit, if the light hits him just right he could pass, Boochie thought. Carver's complexion was somewhere between cream and ecru. His light gray eyes were incongruous with his skin tone. His eyes betrayed his indeterminate ethnicity.

  "Well, hell man. Everything we do is dangerous. Cutter's boy told me you worked with Skunk before. I know that shit was dangerous," Boochie said after the waitress filled his cup.

  "My uncle set it up. I was just there for support. Anything Cutter is involved with tends to get heavy. That's all I'm saying," Carver said.

  "Well, yeah, I mean—you know how he got his name right? But shit, man…when I tell you the cut you gonna get, you gonna say, 'Boochie it's worth the risk.' Look man, we stick to the plan we will all be jerking off on top of silk sheets for at least a year," Boochie said.

  Carver had heard the story of how Marcel "Cutter" Fakir had gotten his name more times than he liked to remember. The son of an exchange student from Ghana and the patriarch of the family that took her in, Cutter had risen from humble beginnings to become the biggest drug dealer in (and nominal crime boss of) the Mid-Atlantic. Unknown to most law enforcement, but a fearful legend to the dope boys, gun clappers, and pros like Boochie and Carver, Cutter Farkir was the Keyser Soze of the East Coast. A whisper on the wind—a hushed tale in the back of a dark nightclub, he was half-man, half-terrifying.

  The way the story went: one time, some guys in Cutter's crew tried to skim some money off the top in a chop shop he owned. Cutter got wind of it and he invited the two main culprits to a hotel party in Richmond. Booze, blow and bitches were plentiful and free. The two culprits got drunk and high and passed out.

  When they woke up (according to the story), they were lying on an embalming table in a funeral home that had Cutter as a silent partner. He had them tied to the tables. Stripped naked. Cutter was there. Staring at them with his cool impassive brown face. Jace and Tony, the two chop shop operators, begged and pleaded and finally cried for their lives.

  Cutter was unmoved. Once they had finished their blubbering, he opened the door to the embalming room. Jace's fifteen year old daughter had been escorted in along with Tony's alcoholic mother.

  "When you run with a crew, you supposed to be like family. I treated y'all like family and what do you do? You steal from me and then lie to my face about it. Nothing hurts like family hurting you. I think it's time you knew what that feels like," Cutter had said in that whispery, scary-ass voice of his. So two of his heavy hitters put their guns to the head of Jace's daughter and Tony's mom. Then they put a couple of straight razors in their hands.

  Marcel Fark
ir had made those women cut Jace and Tony from their feet to the tops of their heads with a slight detour through their junk. It took Jace and Tony an hour to die. Jace's daughter jumped in front a city bus a week later. Tony's mom, who was already a few bricks shy of a load, went completely bonkers and ended up locked in Eastern State Hospital.

  Ever since then, people called him Cutter.

  "So…you in, big man?" Boochie had asked, grinning like a toothpaste commercial.

  Was he in? Carver knew the answer to that as soon as Boochie had sat down across from him. For guys like him, was there every any doubt?

  "Yeah I'm in," Carver said.

  "Solid! So when can we go to your Grandpa's place to check it out?" Boochie said before finishing his coffee.

  'Tomorrow. We can drive down to Gloucester together," Carver said calmly.

  Inside, he was anything but calm. The last time he had been inside his Grandpa's barn, the old man had been beating him with a sock filled with a bar of soap. It had been hotter than the devil's asshole that day in August. The old man was pissed about something. Or maybe he wasn't pissed about anything. Maybe Carver looked too much like his mother—the mother that had dropped him off with his grandparents and then started sucking on a crack pipe for the next twenty years. His mother had disappeared and saddled the old man with a grandson he didn't want from a daughter he didn't love.

  Carver could close his eyes and see that dirty white sock as it cut through the air. He could feel the sting as the bar of soap made contact with his back. It would flatten out a little bit, but it carried enough momentum to send electric jolts of pain through his young body. He could see the old man's face, teeth bared like a wolf, sweat pouring off his forehead like a whore in church. Carver shook his head.

  "You can tell me the deal while we drive down," he said.

  Boochie smiled. "Cool beans and rice. When we get back, we can meet the other two fellas we gonna be using. Like I said, we gonna be set after this one brother. Pretty soon you gonna be using ten dollar bills for toilet paper!" Boochie said, laughing.

  "Yeah," Carver said softly.

  Boochie explained the hows and the whys as they drove out to the sleepy little hamlet of Gloucester County, Virginia the next afternoon. They were riding in Carver's tricked-out Honda Civic. The car was painted an iridescent dark blue with purple highlights, windows tinted almost dark enough to be illegal. Carver wouldn't let Boochie drink from his portable coffee mug in the car, so his jitters were only at Level 7.

  "So there is a combination vape shop and title loan place down here. But really, it's a front for some Russian guys that have been trying to move in on Cutter's territory. Why they wanna poke that bear with a stick is beyond me, but whatever. So Cutter got one of their crew to talk. I don't even wanna know how he managed that. Come to find out that every Thursday, Ivan Drago and the boys run their profits from a bunch of highly illegal cash-based shit through this little vape shop. Like eight or nine million dollars worth of illegal shit. As the guy told me, 'It would please Mr. Farkir if those profits disappeared.' So they got the best blagging man in the business—that would be me—to make that money go bye-bye," Boochie said.

  Carver tapped the touch-screen of his iPod and suddenly Rick Astley's plaintive baritone began to pour from the speakers. Boochie raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment on Carver's taste in music.

  "So we taking the vape shop," Carver said.

  Boochie shook his head, "Naw. Cutter must not be ready to go to war with these Russian cats just yet. See, every Thursday, an armored car comes through and picks up the vape shop's money, along with a bunch of other businesses on that route. The last stop is the O'Connor's Hardware Super Store. We gonna hit the armored car. That's why we need your barn. Cutter's man said he knew a guy that had done some work back in the day who had a place in Gloucester. You're the guy. We hit the car, we chop up the money in the barn, and the Russians think they are the victims of some bad luck. Meanwhile Cutter cuts into their working capital. Get it? Cuts?" Boochie said.

  "I got it. Guys like that don't believe in bad luck. How do we know this won't fall back on us?" Carver asked.

  Boochie grinned. "Look, this thing is between the Russians and Cutter. We do this right, nobody ever knows it was us. Other than that, all I keep thinking is; not my circus not my monkeys."

  Carver guided the car through blacktop roads that got progressively more and more narrow. Finally, after what seemed like hours to Boochie, they turned down a desolate gravel lane. Carver guided the lowered car over potholes and uneven terrain with a practiced skill. After one more soft curve, they came to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a huge red barn. The barn was leaning on the everlasting, but didn't seem to be in danger of collapsing anytime soon.

  Boochie and Carver got out of the car and waded through thigh-high milkweed and honeysuckle to reach the barn. Carver pulled a ring of comically large keys out of his pocket and opened the ancient lock. He swung the doors open with such force, Boochie thought they were going to snap the rusty hinges.

  The barn was cavernous inside. A few shafts of sunlight slipped through holes in the roof. The scent of summer wafted up Boochie's nose—the sharp, earthy smell of things that had begun to return to the earth in the dark corners of the barn. Not rotting, just transforming.

  Boochie put his hands on his hips. "It's perfect. Come on. Let's get back to Richmond and get with Willie and Bundy. We got to get the plan down perfect. This is like studying for the SAT's. Except there ain't a chance of catching a bullet with your face at the SAT's. I guess, I mean I been out of high school for a while," Boochie said.

  Carver thought that Boochie talked so much and for so long that he just kind of overwhelmed you with his verbosity. In fact, he was talking so much and so fast that he never even noticed Carver holding onto the door of barn so tight, his knuckles were turning white. He never noticed the way Carver was glowering at the barn. He looked like a man who had just found out his chowder contained cow shit.

  Boochie turned around to see if Carver had laughed at his joke. A smart-assed comment died in his throat when he saw the big man's face.

  "Alright, well, let's get back and start going over the deal," he said without his usual jovial panache. He walked past Carver and got in the car.

  Carver stood silently at the entrance of the barn for a full minute. He stared into its shadowy depths for a long time, just stood there letting the sun beat down on his bald head. Staring into the darkness. Looking into the past.

  Finally, he closed the weathered red doors and locked them quickly. He got in the Honda and turned the car around in a lazy circle until they were facing the old driveway.

  They drove back to Richmond in silence.

  Carver met the other two guys the next day. Wilson was a small, quiet man that looked like he was five seconds away from offering you a double indemnity policy. His sleepy blue eyes hid behind a bushy pair of graying brown eyebrows.

  Bundy was a breakfast biscuit away from a heart attack. Short and squat like a fire hydrant, he was almost as loquacious as Boochie.

  They were sitting in a tiny, dingy hotel room on the city's north side that served as Boochie's temporary home away from home. Bundy sat in a decrepit chair that seemed to cry out in pain every time he adjusted himself in his seat. Wilson stood against the hotel door sipping something out of a paper cup. Boochie was sitting on the bed and Carver sat in the other chair. A small weathered table had been pulled to the center of the room and Boochie ran it all down for them again.

  "Everything in this is about timing. We have a lot to do, a little bit of time to do it," Boochie said as he leaned over the table. He was staring at a rough outline of the hardware store parking lot and the front sidewalk of the store.

  Carver stared at the hand-drawn map and pointed to the crudely drawn door next to the main entrance. "What's gonna stop the guard from coming back out and popping off at us?" he said.

  Boochie smiled. "I got it covered. We
block the door with one of those door braces. You know the kind that goes up under the doorknob with one end and presses against the floor with the other one. He won't be able to move that fucker. By the time he finally gets out, we will have been sipping mai tais in the Bahamas for a week," he said in his hyperbolic way.

  "I got him covered if he does come out," Wilson said. His eyes had a dreamy faraway look.

  Carver recognized that look. It was the look of a man who didn't mind getting his hands bloody.

  "Well, this will be my last work, so let's make it count," Bundy said, wheezing asthmatically. "Shit, boys like us—we are a dying breed. The guys who do the hard work…we're dinosaurs, man. All the boys nowadays are doing identity theft and Spanish Prisoner scams on the internet. Fuck it all. I'm gonna do this last work and then I'm gonna run a Thailand sex-tour scam."

  Boochie laughed, then swiveled his head to look at the rotund robber. "Yeah, and then you will be bored out of your mind within a fucking week," he said.

  Bundy shrugged his shoulders. "Yeah, you're probably right, but at least I will be alive. Getting fatter and making hay without carrying all the time. I'm telling you Booch, this type of work—it's like being pay phone repairman. It's a vanishing trade," Bundy said, a sadness in his voice.

  "Well, we pull this one off, you can retire in style," Boochie said.

  Carver pulled a flat black cell phone out of his pocket and glanced at it. "I gotta take this. I'll be right back," he said.

  Boochie watched the big man brush past Wilson and step out of the room. When he was sure he was out of earshot, he turned to Wilson.

  "I need to know you can handle this, that you can handle him. I ain't trying to fight that big sonofabitch," Boochie said. His voice was low and as calm as the surface of a mountain lake in autumn. All the hick was gone out of his voice.