Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

  “Stop,” Carl said. The sandwiches fell out of his shirt and tumbled to the floor, leaving sticky pieces of bread and deli meat splattered at their feet. “Don’t scream.”

  “What do you want!” Lisa was reeling. Why had she not trusted her instincts and brained this creeper with a frying pan? “What!” She backed herself into the kitchen and her hands found the light switch. She flicked it on. Carl continued to follow her slowly into the kitchen. Lisa looked to her left, and almost smiled at her set of cooking knives dangling from their magnetic strip on the wall. The knives had been organized by length, with the smallest starting at the left. She reached for the two at the far right.

  Carl stopped. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” he said gravely.

  “Don’t you take another step,” Lisa growled menacingly. “Or you’re going to be a water fountain.”

  Carl backed up. “I didn’t come here to hurt you,” he said flatly. He stared into her eyes, and Lisa was again cold. Her kitchen felt like the inside of a walk-in freezer. “I just came to help you.”

  “Listen buddy,” Lisa said, “I don’t care how well you tip. If you want to really help me, you can get your ass out of my kitchen, because right now you aren’t doing either of us any favors.”

  Carl stared at her from the other side of the doorway, then he turned his head to his left, inspecting the bare wall. “That’ll do it.” With that, he spun and headed for the door. The entire back of his head was misshapen and clumped with blood. Lisa gasped.

  Carl turned to regard her one final time as he opened the door. “By the way, thanks for the food.” The door chime rattled as he exited. Lisa flew around the counter and flipped the lock. She wanted to scream for help, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to be opening that door back up. And then something struck her as odd. The parking spaces in front of the line of shops were empty. Where were all the cars for the Rudy’s crowd?

  Lisa dropped the shade on the door and turned her view back to the bar. She realized for the first time that she was sweating profusely, and shaking. She looked down at the carving knives in her hands and half-forced a laugh. Stumbling over to the counter, she laid the knives down. She put her head in her hands for a few moments. When she lifted it up again, her eyes caught the emerald glow of the clock sitting on the left side of the bar back. The clock. He was looking at—

  Before her thoughts could put much else together, there was a rumbling explosion followed by a violent earthquake inside Lisa’s restaurant. The lights blinked out, and dust fell from the aged ceiling tiles, which in turn collapsed to the floor in large, square segments.

  Lisa felt a heavy object strike her forehead, and just before she blacked out, she thought she caught the scent of something wonderful cooking in the air.

  “Miss. Miss, are you alright?” Bright lights blinded Lisa’s eyes and for a few moments she felt queasy and disoriented. And then she wanted to be sick. Luckily the feeling passed, and her vision began to clear. The air was rank with smoke, though Lisa could not really smell it through the plastic facemask she was wearing. She was sitting upright, looking at a scene of disaster.

  “She’s around! Sarge, she’s coming around!” the man in yellow standing beside her bellowed. Another man came running toward Lisa. He too was dressed in the heavy yellow jumpsuit that most of the other hurrying figures were sporting. The man’s hat was blackened with soot, and the badge emblazoned on his shirt read District 14 Fire and Rescue.

  “Ma’am, are you alright?” Lisa tried to nod, but found that her neck had been fixed into place with a brace. “We believe you might have gotten a concussion, but we’re still waiting for the EMT’s to get here. Can you wiggle your fingers and toes for me?” Lisa did it. “Good, listen, the State Trooper over there is going to need to ask you some questions, but if you don’t feel up to it, I’ll just tell him to meet you at the hospital.”

  “I’m fine,” Lisa said through the plastic oxygen mask. She reached up and removed it. Barring a killer headache, she really didn’t feel too bad. “What happened?”

  “I’m going to let him fill you in,” the sergeant said, and waved over the man in the funny looking hat. Before he could though, Tonya Leescrumb came rushing to Lisa’s side. Tonya was Rudy Leescromb’s wife, co-proprietor of Rudy’s.

  “Oh, Lisa. Thank God you weren’t hurt.” She grabbed Lisa’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Tonya, what happened?”

  At this, Tonya burst into tears. “It-it was Rudy. He and Jim Russell were havin’ a spat in the back room over rent that was due, and,” here she struggled again. “And Rudy shot him. He shot him!” she pleaded. She stopped a moment and her tears glistened in the strobing overhead emergency lights. “And the new delivery guy was there, too, darling. The guy saw the whole thing, and Rudy lost it. Just lost it, and shot him too.” By now she had begun to ramble and the words coming out of Tonya’s mouth were more like an urgent confession. “And he came to me. Told me to clear out the bar. I did it, but he wouldn’t tell me why ‘till everyone was out. Then he showed me what he’d done. I called the police first chance I got. He busted the gas valve in the freezer, and told me he was gonna burn the evidence.” It was at this point that she began to wail.

  The large patrolman came to pull her away from Lisa. It was then that she saw Rudy sitting in the back of the police cruiser. Lisa hardly heard the patrolman’s questions when he returned to speak with her. Her only thoughts were of Carl, the strange, cold and bleeding man who had apparently been in two places at once, though only capable of speech in one, and how his intentional delay had saved Lisa’s life. Fumbling in her front pocket, Lisa pulled out the crumpled but whole hundred-dollar note, and, despite the heat emanating from the mostly charred building, felt cold wash over her for the third time that hour.

  Table Stakes

  Things never quite seem to work out the way you expect them to.

  Take, for example, the man sitting across the table, grinning at me like a patient shark. His name is Donatello Santorelli, but answers only to Didi, or the Iron Beak. But don’t let the ridiculous name cause you to laugh. Either of them. The last guy to make that mistake is floating from an anchor at the bottom of Lake Sinai, and he I promise you he is not a lonely man.

  You see, an extensive amount of damage to Didi’s face, including his nose, was inflicted by a group of thugs when he was only a child. Though the men were trying to get to Didi’s father, mob boss Salvadore “Papa” Santorelli, they maliciously disfigured the young boy to such an extent that the only way to salvage the shape of his face was to bolt in a steel plate that ran from the base of his eyes to where his jaw connected at the hinge.

  I’m not a doctor. Don’t ask me how the hell they managed to do that. All I know is that the technology was at least forty years old. Nowadays, they could probably reconstruct him a new face—and he’s certainly got the money for it—but, personally I think he keeps it to scare the living shit out of his enemies.

  Which brings us back to the situation at hand. How did I manage to wind up on the opposite side of the furious gangster’s private poker table in the back of the Mz. Cue Pool Parlour? Well, my friend, I wish I could tell you that it was all a gross misunderstanding. But that, it certainly was not.

  “Listen Didi, this is all just a gross misunderstand—”

  “Shut your hole,” Didi rasped. When he spoke, it was without the use of an average nasal passage, and therefore hissed choppy air through his words like an irascible Darth Vader. “I’ll listen when I damned well want to listen. You, on the other hand, have no such luxury.”

  I simply nodded and lowered my eyes to the green felt of the table.

  “You know why you’re here. And I won’t hear a word otherwise. Understand?”

  Again I nodded, daring to clear my throat. The poker room, tucked away into the furthest depths of the building, smelled like a cigar graveyard, and was dimly lit by a single hanging bulb. As in any dependable facility used for illicit gaming, t
here were two doors: the main entry that led into the pool room, and the emergency door, which had seen its share of use by many a worried gambler when word was passed that the cops were making a raid. It was this door that I cast a hopeless glance at when I thought of what Didi might have in store for me.

  “You’ve been my horse for almost three years now, Nelson.” Didi used his toothpick to scrape something out from beneath his fingernail, before plopping it back in his mouth. Disgusting.

  “Four,” I coughed. The stare that met my eyes could have cut glass.

  “The point is that I’ve staked you the money you needed to make a living. I backed you financially, and your pool skills have made us a lot of cash.”

  He wasn’t lying. Although by us, he meant that eighty percent of all of my winnings went right into his pocket, as per our mostly one-sided agreement. Didi was an investor at heart. He set up illegal games and tournaments for professional pool players who traveled from across the nation to compete. Me, I was his ace in the hole.

  I always played in it, but he wasn’t stupid enough to let me win his tournament more than once. It would have been bad business to scare off the competition. Usually, Didi just set me up to make some major upsets on games that he’d bet extraordinary sums of money on. In this way, he had been able to make more money than the guy who actually cashed out in first place, or his financier.

  Didi latched onto me early, and I had since made him a much wealthier man. My dad was an old-school pro, who had taught me more about the game at ten-years-old than most guys knew by the time they were thirty. Billiards, one-pocket, eight-ball, nine-ball, straight; I learned them all. And I learned them well. Eventually, I knew so much that my old man got jealous and tried to keep me away from the spotlight. Looking back, I’m sure my dad had been training me to do precisely what I was doing for Didi, but just couldn’t stomach the fact that I was better than him. I bailed when I was sixteen, running across five states, and just skimming enough from local dive bars to get by. It’s hard to find money games when you can’t get into the good places on account of being underage.

  It was when I was burning through a rack at Mz. Cue’s during the dead morning hours that I was spotted and approached by the Iron Beak, and literally made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Chicago became my home.

  That was four years ago.

  As you can imagine, using my finely-tuned talent in order to make someone else money started to get old fast. Didi didn’t waste much time putting me into small hustles, like a lot of guys would. That can only last for so long in one city, before people start to recognize you and you wind up with your fingers bent into funny shapes. No, the Iron Beak had something much more lucrative in mind for me.

  Last night was Didi’s biggest game of the year. All of the big guns were in town for it, road players and touring pros, alike. Most people don’t know it, but almost all professional pool players, even the ones on television, make their livings gambling.

  Which was why running illegal tournaments had always been so profitable for Didi. Every six months or so, he hosted an all-night tournament at the Mz. Cue, during which, many hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash changed hands. And, as with all highly competitive games, the heavy rollers were right there in the thick of it. Those are the guys who don’t play the game themselves, but rather relish in high-stakes betting over various players, one of whom they were usually backing financially to compete. As a player, it helps to not have to come up with fifty thousand dollars for an entry fee on your own, or to have to worry about throwing it away if you lose.

  But it really sucks to ship a huge percentage up the line to the man taking the financial risk. And also, some guys were a little less understanding to losing fifty large on a pool game than others. Those are the risks you take, I guess.

  Anyhow, I had been approached two weeks ago by a man named Sammy Delacroix, who ran the next biggest game this side of the Rocky Mountains. Having only met the man in a handful of Didi’s tournaments, I was surprised that he knew who I was, and where to find me. In the back of his limousine, Delacroix expressed that he had a certain dissatisfaction with my boss, and had a great interest in taking my employer’s territory off his hands. His offer was to allow me to walk away with one-hundred percent of the tournament winnings if I simply made my impossible loss look believable.

  Losing my fifty-thousand-dollar entry fee was small potatoes for Didi compared to the premeditated side-bet that Delacroix had challenged him that night. The plan for the Iron Beak’s ruination rested in his pocketbook, and he had been none the wiser.

  Having been seriously thinking about flying the coop for a while now, I took the offer. I must have been out of my gourd.

  “You know how much money you’ve cost me, Nelson,” Didi rasped. “Now, I only have one question for you. How are you going to pay me back?”

  I shifted in my chair. “Didi, I wish I could give you—

  Apparently he had not been expecting an answer, because he continued, “You’re not. You and I both know that you couldn’t make that much money in your entire life. Not even if you sold your organs on the black market.” He cocked a finger at the bodyguard standing next to him. “Now, there’s an idea. Write that down.”

  I didn’t bother to offer a reply. It was no use. The only fool in this room was the man sitting in my chair, having decided that it might be a good idea to celebrate a little before leaving town. I should have been sitting in the back of a limo at the moment, as planned. Instead, Didi’s boys had picked me up an hour prior at the Burrowin’ Beaver, blowing through a roll of ones the size of a pack of Charmin.

  Bullets of sweat ran down my forehead and chest, soaking my tee shirt. But I still kept my big mouth shut. I don’t know that I could have made the situation any worse, but some miracle kept me from trying. I shot a longing look at the emergency door. It was only ten feet away. I could probably make it at least seven or eight feet before I was shot to pieces, which still sounded like a better option than whatever was awaiting me in the imagination of the man in the iron mask.

  “I’ve thought about this long and hard. And I think I’ve come up with a solution. I’ve decided that it’s time to re-negotiate our agreement.” At this, Didi lit a stubby cigar and pinched it between steel and enamel. “Since you saw fit to gamble with my well-being, I think it only fitting to return the favor. Renfrey, bring the deck.”

  At this command, a man roughly the size of a bull ox lumbered up to the table with two racks of poker chips in one hand. In the other, he held a claw hammer, a wood chisel and a propane torch.

  “I wondered for a while,” Didi hissed, “whether or not you were bagged beforehand by that shitbag Delacroix. Would you have had the balls to cross me like that? I never would have thought so. And I thought about it long and hard, until I realized that it didn’t really matter, Nel. Whether you were stupid enough to intentionally cost me that much money, or not…I simply can’t afford to keep an unreliable stake horse. Not even your slick arm is worth that kind of dough.”

  “So, what’s all this?” I felt my chest tighten at the sight of the tools that generally did not belong in a poker room.

  Didi chuckled disgustingly.

  “All this. Ya hear that, Renfrey? Ah, Nelson, you never were the sharpest crayon in the box. This is gonna be a game you’ll never forget. Well, I’ll never forget, anyway.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what Didi had in mind, but the fact that the stack of chips set in front of me was a quarter of the size of his hinted that this supposed game was going to be less than fair.

  “What’s the matter, Nel? Surely this ain’t the first time you’ve seen something that’s bigger than yours.” He smiled, which was a rarity. It also made his facial framework that much more menacing, accentuating the ragged line of his lower lip.

  “What are the stakes?” I asked, eyeing the chips.

  Didi chuckled again before answering. “Well, Nel. Let’s just say that when you start running out of chi
ps, we’ll have to find other things for you to ante with.” He nodded toward the construction tools between us on the table.

  I smiled. What else could I do besides throw in the towel and give this asshole the satisfaction of witnessing my forfeit. “Oh, I get it. For a second there I thought Renfrey here was just going to give you a facelift.” I’m sorry. Sometimes I just can’t help myself.

  Didi was around the table faster than I could blink. He seized me by the shoulders and planted the sharp protrusion of his steel nose into my left eye.

  I screamed. There was a fireball of pain in my face and I tasted blood in my mouth.

  “If you’d rather I just kill you now, just say one more motherfuckin’ word, you spineless little shit. I’ll have you in the bottom of Sinai before you even have a chance to figure out why the fuck your feet are wet.”

  I shook my head woozily. It may have been blurry, but at least I could still see. Any lower with that schnozz of his and he’d have probably taken the eye out completely. But that didn’t make it hurt any less. He hit me so hard my ears were ringing. I wiped at my brow to keep the blood from running down my face.

  “What’s the game?” I slurred.

  Didi unclenched his fists and straightened his tie. After a moment, he took a seat, apparently glad to see that I was going to play along with his little scheme of vengeance.

  “Hold ’Em. Blinds are one and two hundred.”

  I looked down at the stack of chips before me. They were all the same color: red with yellow stripes. The stack sat twenty high. That put me at an instant disadvantage. Didi had at least four stacks, maybe five. I couldn’t count them right because of my fucking eye.

  Renfrey tossed two cards to each of us.

  I had a weak pair and limped into the pot for the minimum. The community cards were all painted, and effectively kicked any chance of my winning right in the ass. That happened twice more before Didi started pounding away at me with heavy bets pre-flop.