When I’ve been on the inside looking out for a couple of months, I’m getting bitter about the deal. Here I was set to talk to Boston about what he’s got to offer, and Fingers hijacks me into another hitch in the cooler.
That’s why I am not happy on visitor’s day when there is a Mr. Bronck to see me. When we are seated, looking through the screen at each other, I see right off there is a change in Fingers. He looks kind of beat down. Also he is wearing a cast over his right forearm and hand.
“Why the cast?” I asks him.
“Hell,” he says disgusted like, “I had a accident.” Then he adds, “How you doing?”
“Not so good, thanks to you,” I snap back. “If you don’t seduce me out of Criminals. Anonymous I’d probably have a nice job and a, good future.”
With that Fingers really swells up. That big smile don’t split his fat face when he spits out in a low hissing whisper, “Criminals Anonymous, my eye! Wolves in sheep clothes, that’s what they are!”
Fingers moves his cast to a more, comfortable angle, then spills it.
“After you and Sam. Goggins fell into that police, trap I need two new collectors. So I go to another meeting of Criminals Anonymous to recruit experienced talent.”
Here Fingers pauses a little, and looks like he ain’t happy over what he is remembering. Then he heaves a sigh and goes on.
“This Boston is there, but another guy puts out the pitch. When the meeting breaks up, I head over to talk to a prospect and up comes Boston. He is smiling, and holds out his hand, saying, ‘I’m glad to see you again.’
“Without giving it a thought I mitts him. When his right hand closes on mine he suddenly stops smiling, grabs my hand in both of his and the way he spreads my, fingers and bends them back in a lock, I know he can break them if I move.
“So I stand still and say, ‘Easy, Mister, or you’ll break my fingers. You can go to jail for that.’
“Boston grins real nasty and says, ‘You should know, Fingers.’ Then he says, ‘When Jimmy Ahern went to the pen and his picture got in the newspapers, I recognized him as having been at one of our meetings. This is the third time one of your collectors get nailed. From the news pictures I remembered seeing them here, and you talking to them. So you are using Criminals Anonymous as a private employment agency for your stinking racket.’ ”
Fingers eyes is bugging out and he; is sweating when he says, “Then the SOB, suddenly busts my fingers. Of course that knocks me down to my knees. He still holds my hand, and I’m about to faint but can’t move.
“ ‘Listen, punk? he snarls, ‘that will help you remember never to come back again.’ ”
Fingers looks down at his cast and scowls “Everybody there sees and hears what happens, and the word gets around my protection area. So the wise guys on the street keep askin’ me, ‘How are your fingers, Fingers?’ Big joke, and everybody laughs. But that ain’t the real problem.”
Fingers sits looking at his cast a while and then says, “That Boston sends a runner around to me with a note. There ain’t no signature, but the runner says, ‘Boston said you would know this was from him.’ ”
Fingers fishes in a pocket for the note, and holds it so I can read it through the screen:
The runner who delivers this message has already contacted all shop owners who pay you for “protection.”
He told them that your protection racket is over. Also that if any collector shows up after today, to pay him, then call Criminals Anonymous (383-1030) and report it.
If anybody reports you making collections after you get this note, then what happened to your fingers, is not a patch on what will happen to you.
Fingers just can’t keep his eyes off that cast, and he adds, “Imagine that guy Boston, pretending he wants to help criminals, then putting me outa business by protecting the people from me that I was protecting. What a stupid hypocrite!”
“Why come here to tell me?” I asks.
“Well,” he says, kind of sad like, “I wanted to talk to somebody that would understand. You just might be the guy.”
“I understand,” I say, and I’m grinning for the first time since landing in stir. “Muscle can cut two ways — and you are the rabbit now, Fingers.”
Horror Story
by Jerry Jacobson
Hate-packed, obscene, the voice came over the phone. Listening, he felt cold terror clutch him. For a good man can live only one way. But he can die in a thousand ways.
Though he did not know it, Krieg Bannen’s private horror story began at eight o’clock that morning. He rose early, had breakfast with his wife, Peggi, and toasted the first full-fledged day of Spring warmth and sunshine with his orange juice.
For a forty-three-year-old professor of moral philosophy whose key movements occurred mostly between his ears, he was even looking forward to testing out his legs by biking it into the college on the ten-speed English bicycle his wife had parked under a Christmas tree two years before.
Peggi had already left for her job at Wesco Insurance, in town, where she was a rater. In fact, except for Bannen, most of Cresthill Circle emptied out early, so that the community was almost deserted when Bannen walked out to his car for the short drive to Shoreline Community College for his nine o’clock lecture class, his first scheduled assignment.
Had it been a gloomy, rainy day a little thing like an undelivered morning newspaper might have set him off on a brief tirade. But just as the hint that Spring was coming made young delivery boys absent-minded, it also made middle-aged philosophy professors tolerant and forgiving.
Monday was his Monster Day, as Bannen called it. Three lecture classes at nine, eleven and one o’clock, with a guidance session sandwiched in the middle. But after Monster Day, it was all downhill. He was in better spirits this Monday than most because on Sunday, he and Peggi had won the local neighborhood Paddle Tennis Tournament on the backyard court of the Graysons.
And the Berruccis had invited them the upcoming Saturday for a boat trip through the San Juans. So what was a little thing like an undelivered newspaper?
The closest paper box was ten blocks out of Cresthill Circle, a block from the high school. He drove there in faded dungarees and an old college sweatshirt, passing throngs of students on their way to the high school and to Coan Middle School reaffirmed his sense of worth.
Once in a while it did his soul immeasureable good to witness the raw product, to know that these small, unformed things on two feet, seeming to motor eagerly, were indeed not being brought to him shackled, in barred vans, against their will.
In five minutes he was back home, parked the late model olive-green sedan on the street and went back inside the house for another cup of coffee and a few minutes with his Record-American.
When the telephone rang, Bannen was just wrapping up the college and pro basketball scores and his second cup of coffee. The abrupt intrusion caused him to start slightly. The last morning phone call he’d received had been to inform him of the death of his father in Medford, Oregon; and the one before that, to transmit the tragic news of the suicide death of a close friend in college.
He lifted the receiver tentatively, like a demolition expert lifting rocks in search of unexploded bombs.
The answering voice was a woman’s one he did not recognize. In it was coldness, impersonality. And a vague something else.
“Is this the Krieg Bannen residence?”