“I don’t know. How’s the food?”
“Would we be here if it was bad? Come on, Cruz. You gotta eat. Keep up your strength.” He looked to Mr. C for confirmation. Mr. C nodded his agreement.
“All right, I’ll eat.”
Vito waved over the skirt.
Cruz looked at the menu. He spoke in a quiet voice. “Three eggs, scrambled. With Swiss cheese. Sausage. Corned beef hash. Black coffee.”
“That’s what you’re gonna eat?”
“What’d you think, a fruit cup?”
“Nah, it’s just, you know. They got healthier items. Look. Egg whites. Turkey bacon. Anything you want.”
Cruz put the menu down. “I think I’ll stick with what I said.”
The girl went away.
“We read the paper today,” Vito went on without preamble. “You know, got the box scores. Checked everything out.”
“Yeah? What do you think?”
“Good. We’re happy the home team won.”
Mr. C. nodded, licked his lips, gave his cigar a long look.
“Very pleased,” Vito said.
“Good,” Cruz said. “I want everybody to be happy.”
“Everybody is.”
There was a pause. “You looked at what we left you? The driver gave it to you?”
“Yeah. Not sure I get it, but… ”
“What’s to get? It’s in plain English, right?”
“Oh yeah, that’s not it. It just seems like, maybe a little lightweight. Retrieval isn’t my thing. I’m usually in, how do you want to call it, disposal.”
“It ain’t lightweight. You let us worry about the thinking end of it. You just make it happen.” Vito wrote something on a napkin and passed it across to Cruz. 63 and Lex. Black Mercedes. Massachusetts plates.
“I’ll make it happen,” Cruz said.
The girl was coming with the food. The two men got up to leave. “Enjoy your breakfast.”
“You guys ain’t gonna stay?”
“You know, we got business. Never ends.”
Cruz looked at the breakfast. It made his stomach turn.
Mr. C eyed him closely.
“Hey Cruz,” Vito said. “How ya feeling?”
“All right.”
“You know, because you look like shit. We worry about you. Maybe you need some time away, like down in the islands. Maybe when things slow down a little.”
“Yeah,” Cruz said. “That sounds good.” He dug into the food.
Now, in the Mercedes, he watched the two young men up front with some interest.
The dossier at his feet included information about both these two kids. The driver was a big muscle guy, wore a leather cap and black sunglasses. The other one was skinny and missing three fingers on his right hand. Jesus, who were they hiring nowadays? Cruz was wary of the whole thing. He had worked on his own for years, and now they gave him this babysitting job, with these kids to drive him. He didn’t like it.
The one in the passenger seat was Ray “Fingers” Pachonka. He had lost those fingers playing with explosives. Lucky to be alive after a fuck-up like that.
The driver was Roland Moss. Late twentysomething. Former bouncer, former legbreaker. Barely two years in the murder business, and he had been in on a dozen hits.
Roland is strong as an ox. He likes to hurt people. Likes to make them talk.
That’s what the dossier said.
Cruz watched them carefully, mostly because he didn’t trust them. Cruz had learned early on that it was best not to trust anybody, especially young men who believed themselves to be on the rise. He had learned this from himself.
He listened in to their conversation for a moment.
“So they sent us to do this jigaboo one time,” the skinny one, Fingers, said. He spoke rapid fire, like a machine gun, or the heartbeat of a rabbit. Bippity, bippity, bippity. “The guy had ripped somebody off. I don’t remember the details. Different job, same bullshit. Right?”
“Yeah,” said the big one, Roland Moss. The guy could be a pro wrestler, Cruz thought. His broad shoulders extended past the edges of his bucket seat. His neck was a trunk line, his head sitting perched on top like a pomegranate. The muscles in his neck stood out and flexed like cables.
“They sent us to Gary fucking Indiana, just outside Chicago.” Fingers paused, seemingly for effect. “I mean we fucking drove out there. Me and Sticks. You know Sticks? Little guy, smokes a lot. Pissed off, always wants to cut somebody. Somebody doesn’t signal in the car ahead of him, he wants to cut the guy. You know him, right?”
Moss nodded. He spoke slowly, like syrup pouring from a bottle. “Yeah, I know him. Did a couple jobs with him. Saw him cut a man’s eyes out once.” He sounded like he was giving it a taste of the South. The dossier said he was from New Jersey.
Fingers nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. Sticks. Crazy as a fucking loon. So we drive out there, me and him. And Gary Indiana is like, nothing you ever seen before. Everybody is gone, except some jigs that couldn’t make it in Shy-town. All the buildings are empty. Or just plain gone. A wasteland. So we find the jig, drive him around for a while. He’s all acting cool, like his life is worth something. Like he thinks we drove all this way just to, I don’t know, shoot the shit or something. He has this gym bag with him? He has a fucking Tec-9 in there.”
“Piece of shit,” Moss drawled.
“All right, a Tec-9. It’s a piece of shit. But I mean this jig has it in the gym bag, and he has a forty round clip in it, and then he has this custom twelve dozen round drum magazine, you should’ve seen the fucking thing. Like something out of the movies. He says he has the thing modified for full auto, and this big drum to attach to it. Can you imagine this guy running around, spraying bullets everywhere? No wonder all these little kids get shot in these jig neighborhoods. You got these guys running around, think they’re fucking Rambo. Am I right?”
“I never saw a gun like that,” Moss said.
“You wouldn’t see one. Only a crazy person would have one. So anyway, we bring him to this abandoned building, right? We take him upstairs. Now he’s not as cool, he’s starting to get the message. We bust him up a little. Then, you know Sticks, he starts to cut the guy up. It’s all right, but it’s a lot of blood and shit now. The jig is crying and all this, half his face coming off. Sticks cut the jig’s lips off, you know what I mean? The guy’s teeth are like out to here.”
Fingers held his hand out about a foot in front of his face. He laughed, an uncertain sound. “I don’t know about Sticks, man. He should’ve been a butcher or some shit. He gives me the fucking creeps, to be honest.”
“And the guy never pulled the gun?” Moss said.
“Yeah. He never pulled it. He never got anywhere near it. A hundred and forty four rounds. A lot of good it did him, right? So finally, I take over from Sticks and I’m just like let’s do this shit and get out of here. So I take the jig and I tell him, you know, that’s it, man. You’re done. He’s grateful by then. He just wants the whole thing over with. They got these floor to ceiling windows and they’re all busted out. So I send him out the window. We’re about six stories up, right? By now, it’s full on dark. And I send him down into a vacant lot down there. I mean, the whole city’s a vacant lot. The guy didn’t scream or anything. He just sailed down there in total silence.
“So here’s my point. We go downstairs to the street, and it’s like, let’s check it out, let’s make sure this guy is dead. We go around back and here’s the jig. He’s laying there and the whole top of his head is broken off. You know what I mean? I mean, he hit the pavement and the top of his head broke off – right above the eyes. He was like a stewpot with the lid off. His eyes were open and I thought for a second he was looking right at me – I thought he was gonna say something. And his brain had come out and was sitting there on the ground. So I’m just standing there looking at this brain, and the jig with his eyes open is laying there like he’s awake. And the brain – it was like a bowl of Jello. You know, when you turn the Jello upside down and it comes out all in one piece? It was like that. Like a toy. It was fucking perfect.