Vinnie shook his head. “No. I was supposed to win that fight. It wasn’t no fix.”
“Not a fix,” I asked. “What was it then?”
He looked at me knowingly. “Weiss said I had to make Douggie Burns go down.”
“You had to make Douggie go down?”
“Teach him a lesson. Him and the others.”
“Others?”
“The ones Weiss managed,” Vinnie said. “His other fighters. He wanted to teach them a lesson so they’d...”
“What?”
“Stay in line. Do what he told them.”
“And you were supposed to administer that lesson by way of Douggie Burns?”
“That’s right.”
“What’d Weiss have against Douggie?”
“He had plenty,” Vinnie said. “ ’Cause Douggie wouldn’t do it. He was a stand-up guy, and he wouldn’t do it.”
“Wouldn’t do what?”
“Drop for Chester Link,” Vinnie answered. “Douggie was supposed to go down in five. But he wouldn’t do it. So Weiss came up with this match. Between me and Douggie. Said I had to teach Douggie a lesson. Said if I didn’t...” He glanced down at his hands. “... I wouldn’t never fight no more.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to lose that fight with Douggie. I was supposed to win it. Win it good. Make Douggie go down hard.” He hesitated a moment, every dark thing in him darkening a shade. “Permanent.”
I felt a chill. “Permanent,” I repeated.
“So Weiss’s fighters could see what would happen to them if he told them to take a dive and they didn’t.”
“So it wasn’t a fix,” I said, getting it now. “That fight between you and Douggie. It was never a fix.”
Vinnie shook his head.
The last words dropped from my mouth like a bloody mouthpiece. “It was a hit.”
Vinnie nodded softly. “I couldn’t do it, though,” he said. “You don’t kill a guy for doing the right thing.”
I saw Douggie Burns’s glove lift slowly, hang in the air, soft and easy, drift forward, barely a punch at all, then Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, hit the mat like a sack of sand.
The hydraulic doors opened before I could get out another word.
“I get off here,” Vinnie said as he labored to his feet.
I touched his arm, thinking of all the times I’d done less nobly, avoided the punishment, known the right thing, but lacked whatever Irish Vinnie had that made him do it, too.
“You’re a stand-up guy, Vinnie,” I said.
He smiled softly, then turned and scissored his way through the herd of strap-hangers until he reached the door. He never glanced back at me, but only continued down the short flight of stairs and out into the night, where he stood for a moment, upright in the elements. The bus slogged forward again, and I craned my neck for a final glimpse of Irish Vinnie Teague as it pulled away. He stood on the corner, drawing the tattered scarf more tightly around his throat. Then he turned and lumbered up the avenue toward the pink neon of Smith’s Bar, a throng of snowflakes rushing toward him suddenly, bright and sparkling, fluttering all around, like a crowd of cheering angels in the dark, corrupted air.
Sean Doolittle
Summa Malhematica
From Crime Spree
Somehow, no matter what the variables, the last customer always seemed to come in three minutes before closing.
It was uncanny: a chaos theorem that yielded takeout orders. There had been a time when Stephen Fielder, Ivan and Adele Stremlau Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics, would have been compelled to consider such a peculiar phenomenon in terms of statistical models and probability curves.
But Stephen Fielder, fry cook, only straightened his kink-riddled back and sighed. He put down his grill brick, wiped his hands on the last clean corner of his apron, and hauled himself up front to face the man squinting at the backlit menu marquee.
“Welcome to Bronco Burger,” Fielder told him across the register. “Can I take your order?”
“Gimme the Bacon Double Bronco Buster,” said the man. “And some fries. And a Diet Coke also.”
“That’s one Wrangler?”
“One what again?”
“Wrangler Meal Deal.” Fielder pointed behind his head without looking at the board.
“Sure, whatever. Just make it a Diet Coke.”
“Do you want to Chuckwagon-size that?” Wearily, Fielder waited with his finger poised over the color-coded keypad. When no answer came, he looked up to find the customer glancing around the empty store.
A thick fellow. Not tall. An oil drum, Stephen thought, in a wrinkled linen suit. The man wore the sleeves of his sport jacket pushed up to the elbows. If he noticed Fielder watching, he didn’t show it.
“Chuckwagon-size that order, sir?”
The guy looked at him blankly.
“Look, it’s a large fry and extra-large Coke. Thirty-five cents extra.”
“Diet Coke,” the man said. He now seemed to be checking the deserted seating area behind him.
“Sir?”
Finally the man rolled his stocky shoulders, turning to Stephen with a companionable grin. “So they got you holdin’ down the whole place by yourself tonight, huh?”
In retrospect, Stephen Fielder would recognize that he probably should have heard warning bells then and there. But he was new to the late-night rhythms of the food service industry. He felt weary in his bones. It was midnight; he had raw hamburger in the creases of his palms. He only wanted to finish scraping the grill and go home.
But the kid with all the earrings was out back sweeping the parking lot; Veronica, the cute teen who worked the night shift drive-through window, camped in the break room, smoking cigarettes. Which made Stephen the only hand on deck.
So he shrugged and said, “Slow night. Will that be all, sir?”
“Sure,” said the guy. “Pretty much.”
Then he did something that caught Fielder by surprise. The man took a step toward the register, lifting his right hand as he moved. Fielder followed the slim gold bracelet dangling from the dark hairy overgrowth of the man’s wrist.
So distracted was Stephen by the strange gesture, in fact, that he never saw the customer’s other fist cross his jaw.
All Fielder saw was a blooming nova of cool blue light, followed by a hazy descending screen. He thought: hey.
Then he realized he was being dragged over the counter by the apron, which had somehow become tangled in the man’s knuckle-bound grip.
“You two. Scramola.”
Fielder heard the words as if from a great distance. His eyelids creaked open to a painful light. Stainless steel loomed up around him on all sides; dimly, Fielder realized he was prone on the greasy back-kitchen floor. He didn’t remember being deposited there.
His workmates, David and Veronica, didn’t need to be told twice. As they high-tailed it out the back door, Fielder lifted his pounding head. Eventually, he managed to raise himself enough to lean against the bun warmer. Only then did he look at his assailant, who picked stale curly fries from an unemptied fryer basket.
“Are you from the foundation?” It was a ridiculous question. Fielder realized he must still have been dazed by the punch. His jaw-felt knocked off its hinges.
“Yeah,” said the guy. He nodded right along, munching cold fries. “Sure. I’m from the We Stomp the Crap Outta Deadbeats Foundation. This is an outreach typa thing.”
Fielder closed his eyes and probed his jaw gingerly. The room see-sawed around him. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake.”
“Yeah? I’d feel awful bad.” The man produced a small black notepad from inside his jacket. “Fielder? Works at the Bronco Burger on Davenport, is what I got here. This is the Bronco Burger, right?”