The Price
Title Page
Chapter 1. My Old Man
Chapter 2. Benedict
Chapter 3. The Social Club
Chapter 4. The Way of Things
Chapter 5. Making the Nut
Chapter 6. Confession
Chapter 7. Getting Into the Swing of Things
Chapter 8. The Wizard
Chapter 9. Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams
Chapter 10. Opening Salvo
Chapter 11. Close Encounter
Chapter 12. Escalation
Chapter 13. Going Clubbing
Chapter 14. Jailhouse
Chapter 15. Hospital
Chapter 16. Apartment
Chapter 17. Meeting
Chapter 18. Gettin’ a Crew
Chapter 19. Going to War
Chapter 20. The Old Man
Chapter 21. Neither Here Nor There
Chapter 22. Out
Chapter 23. The World Outside
Chapter 24. Basement
Chapter 25. More Bad Things
Chapter 26. Tactical Error
Chapter 27. Running
Chapter 28. Kit
Epilogue
Prologue
Chapter 1
The Price
by Joseph Garraty
Published by Ragman Press LLC at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Joseph Garraty
http://www.josephgarraty.com
Cover Art by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Author’s Note
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
For Jeremy Simpson, who turned me on to some truly horrible reading material, lo, these many years ago, without which I wouldn’t have written nearly as awful a story.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Rose Fox, editor par excellence, for feedback both great and small, and for making this story much better than it would have been otherwise.
Thanks to J.H. Sked for additional feedback, moral support, and a whole lot of information on Russian firearms.
Special thanks, as always, to Evan Grantham-Brown, who reads all these things and makes them better.
Chapter 1. My Old Man
I used to be a nice guy, believe it or not. These days, your average nice guy wouldn’t be seen in the same county with me, but it wasn’t always that way. It just sort of crept up on me, and one day I looked around to discover that I’d become a hardened killer. By then I didn’t much care anymore—that’s what not being a nice guy means.
I didn’t put paid to my inner nice guy all at once, because that’s not how it works. I did, however, make a hell of a down payment the day I met Benedict and Lazzaro.
I guess I was about seventeen, and I was thinking black thoughts as I walked to my old man’s shop. The sky was a faultless blue, the sun shone benevolently down on all and sundry, and my hackles were up. Call me a pessimist, but in South Boston, days like that have always made me feel like God is saving up a real Old Testament–style smiting for later. Give me rain, give me screaming wind off the bay, give me sleet that comes in horizontal, driving so hard that it cuts skin, and I’ll relax, but give me a bit of sunshine and I’ll spend the whole day looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
That sense of unease boiled as I got closer to the shop. The usual afternoon foot traffic was too thin, and the closer I got, the thinner it got. I picked up my pace, assured myself that nothing was wrong, that I was overreacting, that everything was most assuredly fine—and then I started running.
I threw open the door to my old man’s butcher shop and dropped my backpack on the floor. There was nobody out front in the store—not a single customer, not my old man behind the counter, not Ma behind the register.
Something crashed in back, metal on concrete, and I heard my dad cry out.
I ran past the counter, banged open the door to the storage room, and lurched into the back just in time to see a heavy-browed cretin with a buzz cut and tiny, piglike eyes hurl my father across the room.
Dad saw me as he skidded across the floor. “Jimmy! Get out of here!” he gasped.
Self-preservation isn’t a strong instinct in my family. I charged the big bastard as he stomped across the floor toward my dad. I didn’t even make it halfway there. Another guy stepped out in front of me, moving in a swift blur. I didn’t see where the fist came from, only a sudden flash, and then I was on the ground.
It’s not like I’d never been in a fight—grow up in Southie, and fistfights are how you spend half your recreational time—but I hadn’t even dreamed of getting hit that hard before. It felt like the top of my head came off, and I lay there, twitching, the sight gone from my right eye and replaced with a throbbing purple smear.
The guy who decked me put his boot on my head and barked a couple of syllables in Russian. I didn’t know what the hell he’d said—“Shut up,” maybe, or “Hold still,” or the time-honored classic, “Fuck you”—but I held still. Somewhere behind me, Dad bounced off another wall.
“Where is money, fuckhead?” the ogre bellowed in heavily accented English. Dad muttered a reply or a protest, and then there were more noises.
I tried to move, but the guy standing on my head pushed harder, and I quit that real quick. They’ll stop soon, I told myself. They’re not gonna kill anybody. No percentage in that. I almost had myself convinced. The goddamn Russians came by every week for their protection money, and Dad paid up every time, even though it meant we lived closer and closer to the bone. Maybe the Russian goons had gotten squeezed from higher up, or God knows what else, but they’d showed up a day early this week. Of course Dad didn’t have all the money yet. It was all we could do to scrape it together on time, let alone a day early.
It wouldn’t do them any good to really hurt my old man, but the sounds were unbearable—meaty thuds and stifled screams—and they seemed to continue endlessly. I’d fallen facing the door, so I couldn’t even see what was going on. “This isn’t fair!” I said, and, miracle of miracles, the guy took his boot off my head.
And kicked me in the gut.
While I gasped and wheezed, the prick put his foot back on my head.
About then another guy came in through the door, a sharply dressed man with a nice jacket over an awful gold shirt. He twirled a baseball bat with unintelligible markings carved along its length, and any thoughts that this might still be okay vanished from my mind. These guys were going to do some permanent damage this time, I thought, maybe trash the whole place and put me and Dad in the hospital.
Turned out I hadn’t yet learned to appreciate the nuances of inter-gang warfare.
The thug standing on my head didn’t even move, he was apparently so intent on watching my dad get pulverized. The guy with the bat crossed the room in half a dozen easy steps, wound up, and bam! The pressure on my head disappeared and the thug went down like a sack of shit falling off a truck.
I flopped over, looking for my dad. The big guy was holding him up by his shirtfront, but at least the pounding had stopped. The big guy registered the newcomer and dropped my dad to the floor. He clenched fists the size of toasters.
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I didn’t give the new guy much of a chance, baseball bat or no, but my bigger concern was my old man. I tried to get up and fell right back down, dizzy and shaking.
Then I saw the man who’d come in behind Southie’s answer to Ted Williams. Long black overcoat. Red scarf draped over his shoulders. Long, graying hair, and a thin, neatly groomed line of beard along the edge of his jaw. There was something casually ugly twisting in his eyes, like smoke rising from a burning corpse.
The big guy launched himself across the room, but the fight was over before it even started. The guy with the overcoat waved one hand in the air and mumbled something. There was a flash, too bright to look at, and the giant Russian dropped to the ground. He didn’t move.
I stared through the afterimage on my retinas.
“Goddamn Russians need to learn to stay off our turf,” the baseball-bat guy muttered to himself. He turned to Overcoat Guy and pointed at me. “This him?”
“Yes. Check on Mr. Pecatti.”
The guy with the bat went to help my dad get up, and Overcoat Guy walked over to me.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, still gaping up at him. “That was amazing. How did you do that?”
“Just tricks,” the guy said, but his faint grin suggested otherwise. “All easy stuff. Stuff you can learn, if you want. I’m Benedict.” He held out a hand.
I reached up and took it.
* * *
When I was a little kid, I talked to things. Probably all little kids do that at some point or other, but I had to get a bit older before I realized that when other kids talked to their toys, the toys seldom answered back.
Before these facts of life and others made themselves clear, though, I talked to everything. My blanket was an early favorite, as was a big yellow plastic dump truck I liked, but anything was fair game. It gave me a good feeling, and it was undeniably handy. I convinced the dining room table to walk over to the kitchen one day, so I could get up on the counter and play in the cabinet. I never lost things, because I’d sing little nonsense songs to them, and they’d sing back and help me find them. I heard Ma tell one of her girlfriends one day about me singing the blue dinosaur song. I think it went like this: “Blue blue dinosaur, where did you go? I want to play today, blue blue dinosaur,” or something equally clever. Ma said she walked in from hanging the laundry, and there I was walking in circles in the living room, singing the blue dinosaur song. She told her friend that it was the cutest thing, but in the middle of the third repetition, I stopped abruptly, stumbled on my stubby, four-year-old legs, turned a hundred and eighty degrees and ran straight to the couch, where I pulled off the cushions, pushed my arm all the way down in back, and pulled out a dust-covered blue triceratops. Ma laughed with her friend. “Ain’t that the funniest little game?” she asked.
Game, hell. I was looking for my damn blue dinosaur, and if it hadn’t answered me with an inane song of its own—“I’m over here, in the couch, please come over and get me out!”—I’d never have found it. Probably a good thing Ma didn’t see it that way.
Anyway, that all seemed normal to me at the time. Until Mister Bear came along, things only spoke when I spoke to them, and I didn’t think too much of it. Mister Bear, though—he was a special case. Looking back, I realize he wasn’t even a bear. I’m pretty sure he was a ratty Grover doll, but my aunt Carolina gave him to me when I was too young to know any better, and I promptly named him Mister Bear. Kids.
Mister Bear was my buddy. I took him with me everywhere, especially after my parents forcibly parted me from my other best buddy, my night-night. Bad enough I had to carry a ratty Grover everywhere, but dragging that tattered, dirt-stained blanket around with me all the time was too much for them to tolerate. Once I got to be three or so, they did what all parents do and took Night-Night away despite the tears, and did their best to cheer me up. I bet that works pretty well with most kids—the ones that can’t hear the blanket crying to them from the trash.
Ma says I spent weeks mourning, but I can’t remember that too well. I just remember that there was no way in hell I was going to let Mister Bear out of my sight after the great Night-Night tragedy. My folks tell me I took him with me to the dinner table, and I’d scream my head off if I couldn’t see him from my high chair. I slept with him, ate with him, and I have it on good authority that Mister Bear was there with me during every individual potty-training event. Best buds, like I said.
Remember how I said I convinced the table to stretch its legs one time? Well, it wasn’t too tough to make the same suggestion to Mister Bear, and, since he was a friendly sort, he obliged. He’d get up on those spindly, blue-fur-covered legs and totter around the room, singing with me, his gaping black Muppet-mouth flapping along with the words. I got a huge kick out of that. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been that happy even once since then.
I’d dismiss the whole Mister Bear thing as the typical childhood imaginary friend thing if, one day, I hadn’t been bouncing on the couch with him, doing the Mister Bear dance, when Ma walked in. She took in the scene, her eyes got real wide, and she screamed. Then she fainted.
I started to cry, but Mister Bear put a stop to that.
“Your mom’s fine, Jimmy. She’ll be up in a minute,” he said, giving me that cockeyed stare of his.
I wiped my eyes with little fists. He’d never talked to me like that before. “What?”
“She’s fine. But we gotta be more careful. She’s not gonna understand, she sees me walking around and shit like that. That just don’t fit with the way she looks at the world.”
Ma groaned.
“Okay, Jimmy—here’s what you do. Just put me over on the other side of the couch so she don’t see me when she gets up, and go over by her. She probably won’t remember anything—she probably won’t want to remember anything, which will be good enough—and we ain’t gonna remind her. After this, though, boy-o, we gotta lay low. Got that?”
I guess I got it okay, because I followed the instructions. Ma got up, looked around the room with wild eyes, and, with no Mister Bear visible from where she stood, she told me she was going to lie down for a while.
After that, Mister Bear and I were a lot more cautious. Ma got real agitated when he was around, so I left him in my room instead of bringing him to dinner and all that, and I suppose my folks regarded that as a healthy sign.
I think Mister Bear kept me from getting in real trouble when I was a kid, and maybe kept my folks out of an asylum, too. He had lots of pretty good advice for me, that’s for sure, like the time he told me to stay put during all the yelling. I was probably six or seven by then, and Mister Bear was not in good shape, but he was my best friend just the same.
“Don’t go out there, Jimmy,” he said. He was sitting on the corner of my bed, leaning against the headboard and messing with the pink bulb of his nose.
I couldn’t make out the words, but there was a lot of shouting coming from my parents’ room. I hesitated at the door. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s happening?”
“Your ma thinks your dad’s fucking the girl who works the counter, and she’s pissed.”
“Um. What does that mean?”
“Never mind. Just sit tight.” He rubbed at his nose again. “Goddammit, Jimmy, you about got my fucking nose tore off. I’m gonna look really stupid without a nose.”
And so it went. The shouting died down, eventually changing into other noises. I didn’t understand those, but Mister Bear said I would one day, and he assured me that they meant everything was going to be fine.
I got older and started spending time with other kids, and between my time away from the house and the need to “lay low,” as Mister Bear put it, we talked less and less. By the time I was twelve or so, he’d mostly stopped talking, and so had everything else. Still, I never lost anything, and sometimes I knew things I had no business knowing, as though somebody or something had whispered secrets in my ear.
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I didn’t forget, though, and when Benedict helped me off the floor and gave me his cryptic promise— “Stuff you can learn, if you want”—I wasn’t surprised. It was like I’d been waiting for it for years.
“I’m Jimmy,” I said.
The guy with the baseball bat strutted over, my old man limping behind him. Dad tried on a smile, grimaced through split lips and a mouthful of blood, and nodded at Benedict and the other guy. “Thank you,” he said. He meant it, I could tell, but he said it haltingly all the same, and not just because his mouth was busted up. He wasn’t an idiot, and neither was I, and we both knew these kinds of favors weren’t really favors. He was probably wondering if the street tax had just gone up.
“You’re welcome,” Benedict said. He inclined his head toward the other guy. “Frankie, help Mr. Pecatti upstairs. He probably ought to lie down.”
Dad shot a frightened glance from Frankie to me to Benedict.
“It’s okay,” Benedict assured him. “I’m gonna talk with your son, and you’re gonna go lie down.”
Dad thrust out his chin, but his voice trembled as he spoke. “How much do you want?”
“We don’t want nothin’,” Frankie said. “We’re just sick and fucking tired of the goddamn Russians giving fine outstanding citizens a hard time.”
Nobody in the room believed that, but Dad looked down at the floor. “Sure,” he said. Frankie started to lead him away.
I took a step after, but Benedict’s voice stopped me. “No,” he said. One word, quiet as a drawn knife, but it got me to stop and turn around. “We need to talk, Jimmy,” Benedict said, and he fixed his blue-gray eyes on me. Again, I thought of something ugly coiling and twisting behind his gaze. I didn’t move.
“Yeah. Okay.”
He led me out front, back around the counter. He flipped the Open sign to Closed and locked the front door.
The Price Page 1