This information comes from several different sources, mostly Wikipedia, which I know isn’t completely reliable, but it’s sure convenient.
Throughout his childhood, Gary Sheck’s parents had said that one day he should open his own Italian restaurant. Nobody in the Sheck family was Italian, and in fact, the family had a long history of making fun of people with Italian accents, but nevertheless, that was the career path they encouraged. When he was sixteen, Gary took a job washing dishes at a local Italian restaurant, and that’s when he discovered that being a professional dishwasher absolutely sucked.
Here’s how it works: A customer complains to the server that the chicken on his fettuccine Alfredo is overcooked. The server says, “Oh goodness, I’m so sorry. I’ll fix that right up, and it’ll be no problem at all.” The server goes back into the kitchen and informs the chef that the customer sent the chicken back because it was overcooked. Despite the server’s assurance to the customer that it’s no problem at all, it really is a problem, and the chef throws a minor temper tantrum. Of course, the chef can’t come out into the dining area and punch the customer in the face or dump a bowl of spaghetti sauce on his head, so he yells at the server. The server can’t yell at the chef or the customer, so to vent his or her frustration, the server yells at the dishwasher, who is entirely powerless and who had nothing to do with the overcooked chicken on the fettuccine Alfredo.
Gary quickly decided that he didn’t like getting yelled at all day. He wanted to be the one yelling at people who weren’t responsible for what they were getting yelled at for.
He vowed that he would work hard and rise through the ranks until he acquired the power he so desperately sought.
On his second day, when a server named Tom yelled at him because the customer complained about the insufficient intensity of tomato flavor in the lasagna, Gary hit Tom in the face with a large metal spoon and stormed out of the building, never to return to the restaurant business again.
Gary went to his parents and proposed the idea that instead of following the original plan of getting a job, he would pursue an alternate course of action where he did not get a job. Their counterproposal was a simple and straightforward scenario in which he did get a job immediately, perhaps something in retail.
Gary Sheck did not enjoy working retail.
On his second day, after an elderly woman waited until he’d completely rung up and bagged her purchases to reveal that she had a twenty-five-cents-off coupon, Gary raised his fist and was immediately fired. He walked home, unsure of whether he would have punched the old lady in the face or not.
The unanswered question really bothered him, so he walked around until he found another old lady, and then he punched her in the face.
That was infinitely more satisfying than owning an Italian restaurant.
After a few days of soul searching, Gary realized that his opportunities for hurting more people would be greatly increased if he focused on doing jobs that were illegal. He started with petty crimes—a mugging here, a grand theft auto there—and then, on his eighteenth birthday, as a present to himself, he shot a man.
It wasn’t as much fun as he had thought it was going to be. The man died too quickly.
The next one took a lot longer. Gary was in a cheery mood for nearly three hours after that.
He joined a gang called Autopsy Report. By age twenty-five, he was their leader. He decided that Autopsy Report sounded more like the name of a band than a gang and changed it to the Maulers. He got reports that people were confusing it with “the Mallers” and assuming that their turf of terror was limited to shopping malls, so he changed it to the Red Shredders.
Gary knew that to instill fear in his enemies, he needed a trademark. So he became known for bashing his enemies to death with a brick. He was good at it.
By the time Gary was thirty, the Red Shredders had disbanded, but Gary and his five most loyal members stuck together and continued to commit crimes. Gary preferred crimes that were violent or at least destructive, but sometimes he settled for profitable, as with his lucrative auto-theft operation.
Gary was furious at the moment, because he’d told Scorp (the nickname for Scorpion, whose real name was Fred) not to bring in any more of these annoying, sensible, fuel-efficient cars. Scorp had apologized but didn’t seem to really mean it, and he giggled when he told Gary how he’d stolen it from a teenage kid, and the kid’s mom had called, and Scorp had told her the kid was dead.
Gary had to admit that that was pretty funny. Still, Scorp had disobeyed an order, so Gary threw him to the ground and kicked him in the side a few times.
Then they went to work dismantling the car.
“Hold up, hold up,” said Gary, waving for everybody to be quiet. “Did you hear that?”
Shark (real name: Trevor), Blood Clot (Charles), Ribeye (also Charles) and Scorp all went silent.
“Somebody’s knocking!”
Shark hurried over to the garage door and looked through the peephole. “Are you kidding me?”
“Is it the cops?” asked Blood Clot, who had never murdered a police officer but hoped to someday.
“Naw,” said Shark. “It’s a teenage kid.”
“For real?” asked Scorp. “Blond hair?”
“Yeah.”
Scorp let out a high-pitched laugh. “That’s the kid I stole it from! Can you believe that?”
“You think that’s funny?” asked Gary. “You lead him right back here to us, and you think it’s something to laugh about? You gonna laugh in jail? Huh? You gonna have a nice big chuckle in jail?”
Scorp had received three separate black eyes (not that he had three eyes; his right eye had been blackened once and his left twice) and a cracked rib from answering Gary’s rhetorical questions, so he said nothing.
Gary took out his gun. Ribeye and Blood Clot did the same. “All right,” said Gary. “Let him in.”
I didn’t know any of that when the garage door slid open. All I knew was that a big, frightening man grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside, and then the garage door slammed shut, and then I had five guns pointed at me.
CHAPTER 10
Before this moment, the most guns I’d ever had pointed at me was one, and that was during the carjacking a few minutes ago. I wouldn’t say that this was necessarily five times scarier, but it was at least three or four times scarier.
None of the criminals looked happy to see me.
I said the first thing that came to mind: “I’m not a cop!”
For a few seconds, they all just stared at me. Then Gary (who I did not yet know was Gary—I simply thought of him as muscular guy with goatee, black hair, and cruel eyes) chuckled. Scorp chuckled right after that, and they were quickly followed by Blood Clot, Shark, and Ribeye. Their chuckles never quite reached full-fledged laughter, nothing like what you’d see in a movie where the bad guys are all having a nice big guffaw, but they were all clearly amused by my comment.
“Not a cop, huh?” asked Gary. “They hiring a lot of terrified- looking teenage boys as cops these days?”
“I’m just saying.. .I’m not, y’know, wearing a wire or anything.” “Well, good.” Gary patted me on the shoulder. “Good to
know. Because I’ve gotta say, when you came in here, I thought they’d sent in the marines.”
The other guys chuckled some more.
I glanced over at my mom’s car. The tires had already been removed, as had both doors. These guys were scumbag thieves, but I had to admire their efficiency. The trunk remained intact. “What’s your name?” Gary asked.