“No,” I said. “The way I have to do it is the only way. They’re going to get me anyway. I might as well have a name.”
“Where are you going to get a real pistol?” Bunchie said. “Nobody around here has one to sell.”
“The same place we get our jackets,” I said. “The guy who makes them up for us, I heard, if you bring the right money, he can get you anything. Now, everybody, put up your coin. Tomorrow, I’m going shopping.”
7.
I didn’t blink when the old man in the shop told me it would be three hundred dollars for the pistol and the bullets. I told him I’d leave the money with him, come back in a couple of hours. He looked at me for a minute, then he said, “That’s not how it’s done. You want the piece, you wait right here for it. Understand?”
I said I did. Right then is when I started to understand a lot of things. Like why people call a pistol a “piece.”
The old man picked up the phone and said something in Italian. I didn’t speak it, but I figured what it was about.
When he hung up, he looked at me. “You’re getting bigger,” he said. “All the time.”
“I’m almost eighteen,” I told him.
“I mean your... ambitions,” the old man said.
“Oh. Like what I just—?”
“Sure, that. A business expense. And I see you’ve been recruiting, too. Outside the tribe. Very smart. All over the city, you can see, that’s the trend among... businessmen.”
I think I knew it right then, but I gave myself a minute to make sure I was under control. Then I asked the old man, “What do you mean, outside the tribe?”
“The last bunch who came in here for your jackets, that was a surprise,” he said. “I never saw Spanish boys in your... organization before.”
8.
Right after that, I straightened things out with Baron James. We agreed on the tolls. I paid them, and the Mystic Dragons never moved on the Royal Vikings.
The pistol the old man sold me worked perfect. The only way I could use it was by calling for a one-on-one, so the cops found out pretty quick it was me who aced Junta.
I thought maybe the Renegades wouldn’t testify against me... you’re not supposed to. But they did. By the time the court was through with me, I was doing the book. That’s what they call a life sentence... from throwing the book at you, I guess.
When I got to prison, I came in with a name. Not just from what I did — there were plenty of guys who had a body up there. But I was the first white guy inside who had friends in the Mystic Dragons, just like Baron James promised. It made me kind of a leader in there, even that young.
I see the parole board again in another year. Maybe they’ll cut me loose this time. I’ve got a perfect institutional record — I know how to do time.
I’m only forty-two years old now. It’s not too late for me to get my little piece of the city.
Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Vachss.
The Voice of the Turtle
by Neil Schofield
A finalist for the 2001 EQMM Readers Award, Neil Schofield produced several top-notch stories for us in 2002. His lead tale for 2003 takes a look at a little-known part of the theatrical world in which the actor is simply a voice. “In my time, I’ve worked with many ‘voices,’ ” he explains, “all of whom were extremely hard-working and talented artists. But in this, as in any profession, often there is someone like [this story’s] Victor lurking around the fringes. He is not typical.”
Victor was sitting in the dark, getting drunk. Sitting on one of the leather sofas in the reception area, drinking from a bottle of scotch, and thinking, I don’t have a murderer’s voice, that’s the problem, but how can that be? I have every kind of voice. I am the voice of them all. I am Victor the Voice. I must have a murderer’s voice somewhere in me. He was passing through the maudlin stage now, sitting on the leather sofa in the pitch dark and knowing that if he didn’t move now, get up and leave and go to his car, he’d be here all night. And that had happened more than once.
And then very quickly, as often happened, maudlin was gone and he reached the angry stage. A rage took hold of him, boiling but icy in its intensity. He was going to kill Harry Phoenix. He was going to wait for Harry, wait for him in the alley outside the studio doors, and leap on him when he came down. Batter his head against the pavement, kick his teeth out with the heel of his shoes. He was making little jerking movements now, playing out the savage scene. But no. Harry Phoenix, he remembered now, was one of those aikido freaks. Victor was much older than the little sod and he’d lost a lot of weight recently. Harry would have Victor’s tripes out and on the pavement in no seconds flat. But there had to be something. He’d find a way. For all that he was, and all that he was going to do, Harry Phoenix deserved to die. Especially after he had killed Victor stone-dead. Just now. Up there.
The woman was trying to scramble away up the bed, away from the axe that was clearly visible in the foreground of the shot. She was trembling, the bed was trembling, the axe was trembling, everything was, because the image had been frozen on the monitor in front of Victor. The next frames, Victor knew, because he had seen this a dozen times, would be a cutaway shot of the axe being raised high in the air, a tight shot of the woman’s terrified screaming face, and then, what an original idea, another cutaway to the wall above the bed on which spatters of blood were landing.
Victor was desperately trying to keep his eyes on the monitor. That wasn’t really difficult, because suddenly he was identifying strongly with the terrible actress on the bed. A trapdoor had suddenly opened up in his stomach, his ears were singing, and he had a sense of vertigo exactly as if he were looking into eternity. His eyes were fixed on the image because he didn’t dare look to his left towards the soundproof window between where he was, in the voice-over booth, and where they were, in the control room. And his ears were burning. Because through the headset, the talk-back which Tony had carelessly left open was relaying to him the things Harry Phoenix was saying to Beattie and the things she was saying back to him. Harry and Beattie were sitting at the long production desk, and Tony, the engineer, was diplomatically fiddling with the controls on the mini-disc machine with his back turned to them, pretending not to listen, ha-ha, a sound engineer who didn’t listen, pull the other one.
So Victor watched the frozen woman on the bed. Lit by the reading lights on his table, his face was reflected in the monitor, nicely superimposed on the woman’s frozen image. Symbolic, he thought distractedly. Because the conversation he was listening to, and that was bringing curiously ice-cold beads of sweat bursting out on his forehead, was your real, honest-to-God axe-job.
Small, bearded, in fact small-bearded, Harry Phoenix, the producer from hell, owner and proprietor of Phoenix International Productions, was speaking to Beattie. And get that International. A tin-pot production company that had sprung up like mold, as they do every other day in this business, existed for what, six months, and it was already International. My arse. And the titular head of this mega-enterprise was saying, “You’re going to bugger this up, Beattie, if you go on with this old has-been, and I’m not going to let you bugger it up. This is a one-hour special for Channel Four, let me remind you. I’ve been selling this for a year. If it gets the ratings, and it will, there are another twelve lined up. Jake’s come up with some of the best footage I’ve ever seen, anyone’s ever seen, for God’s sake, and now you’re going to naus it all up by laying a voice track that they wouldn’t risk on Playground."