You'd Better Watch Out Read online

  So what was Johnny going to get out of me icing Vinny?

  We took Sunrise Highway out to the Hamptons. Stan Tripp had a gorgeous mansion in Bridgehampton right on the beach. I could understand why he’d rat out his friends to keep what he owned. It was always the mooks and the low-level wise guys who would do ten years in the joint without saying a word. They didn’t have much to lose. But the bosses and the captains, the guys who ran the syndicates and owned three-million-dollar mansions, they were the ones who’d cut each other’s throats to protect the sweet life they’d built up.

  Vinny wasn’t much smarter than Jojo. He hadn’t cased the place, didn’t know anything about Stan’s schedule. We drove by the beautiful home twice, once heading down to the beach and once heading back. There were lights in the windows. Vinny figured that was all he needed to know.

  “Come on, let’s go grab a burger someplace.”

  There weren’t any burger joints in the Hamptons. We had to drive for twenty minutes before we found a cheap-looking seafood diner. We ordered crab cakes and Vinny got some oysters on the half shell that he drowned in Tabasco sauce and sucked down one after the other without taking a deep breath between them. When he finished he took a long pull on his beer, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and said, “I knew your old man.”

  I said nothing.

  “He was a good guy.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, but what else am I gonna say? That he was a piece of shit?”

  “Sure.”

  Vinny put a smile on but his eyes went hard as shale. I thought about who he hated. His mother or wife or girlfriend. His father or brother or maybe Johnny Booze. Maybe everyone, maybe he didn’t even know who he was so furious with, and that’s why he turned to the life he had.

  “You nervous?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all right to be a nervous prick. The first one is always different, no matter what they say. The first one sticks with you. The next one, the one after that, those faces all tend to fade.”

  It wasn’t my first one and Vinny Venti was the nervous prick. He’d been a bagman for years. I had the feeling he’d been kicked up to hitter to become a fall guy. He wasn’t in charge of anything major.

  Back in the car Vinny handed me a snub .38 with the serial numbers filed off. I checked it and made sure it was loaded.

  “He’s supposed to be alone tonight. We’re in and out in two minutes. Nothing fancy. We don’t make it look like a robbery, we don’t torture the fuck, we don’t burn his house down after. In and out.”

  Vinny drove with his left hand on the steering wheel and kept his right hand in his pocket for the rest of the ride. Looked like he was fingering a 9mm. I had made him a little fidgety and he kept glancing sidelong at me waiting for me to talk or invoke my mother’s name or explode. Maybe that’s why he’d mentioned my father, to see if he could push my buttons. Maybe Johnny had suggested he make small talk with me.

  Then I realized it was a different type of test than I’d originally thought. I checked the .38 again, cocked the hammer, and found that the firing pin had been filed down.

  Johnny Booze wanted to see just how strong I was. How tightly I could hold onto my rage. How well I could perform under this kind of duress. It was a setup and a cheap trick. It was a bush league bitch move.

  He’d warned Venti that I might take a poke at him. He’d told Venti that if I tried he should spatter my brains all over the place.

  I settled back. I almost allowed myself a smile.

  I’d been waiting patiently for years to kill my own father. Did he really think I couldn’t smile into the face of my mother’s rapist and not take it?

  We pulled up in front of Stan Tripp’s house. The lights were on.

  “Aren’t you going to ask how we get into his house?”

  “I already know how. We’re going to ring the doorbell.”

  “Smart kid. We don’t leave any witnesses.”

  You didn’t have to be smart to realize that Stan Tripp was going to open his own front door when a wise guy knocked. You had to be an idiot to think he wasn’t going to be armed. It’s apparently how things worked. You knew you’d been fingered, you knew the feds couldn’t protect you, you knew the mob wanted you dead, but if they came knocking, what were you going to do? Hide in the closet?

  “Who else might be inside?”

  “A wife.”

  “Any servants?”

  He pulled a face like I was an idiot. “It’s a big place but not that big.”

  It seemed that big to me. We parked and walked quickly up the drive. There was a little stone path that went around through a large lawn that opened up onto a private beach. A motion detector light went on. Vinny Venti rang the doorbell.

  Stan Tripp’s wife answered the door. She was much younger than I’d been expecting. Maybe twenty-five. A trophy wife with wet, long blonde hair, bee-stung lips, and dressed in an open cotton robe with a one-piece bathing suit beneath. She’d just come in from a night swim and I could see by the front light that there was a dusting of salt across one cheek. I thought Stan was a sack of shit for sending his wife off to answer a door when he knew there might be shooters after him.

  She peered out at me and a gust of wind blew her hair dancing over one shoulder. The smell of the ocean made me a little heady. Compared to Coney Island it was fresh and lush and very clean.

  She said, “Yes?”

  I eased in front of Venti as he drew his popgun and punched her in the face. She was out on her feet but didn’t go down. She was a strong lady and I’d pulled my punch at the last second. I tightened up, tapped her on the chin, and caught her before she fell over. There was a fancy chair in the foyer and I put her in it. The robe opened provocatively and Venti couldn’t control himself. He was a cheap, flash-grab kind of guy and he reached out and twisted her left breast. His face was hard and full of hate again, but this time it wasn’t just for the woman living in the back of his head, but for me. His expression twisted into a leer.

  “She didn’t witness anything,” I whispered.

  Venti led as we entered the house. Stan was sitting in the living room on a large leather couch with a .44 in his lap. He aimed it at us but he was shaking badly and a .44 is a heavy gun. The first shot went wild and took out a huge oil painting on the wall behind me. The recoil broke his wrist. I heard the bones snap like a pair of dice hitting the table in a craps game.

  I left the snub .38 in my pocket. I walked up to Stan and saw that all the fight had gone out of him. I picked up the .44. It was a stupid gun to defend yourself with if you weren’t used to shooting, but I got the feeling that one of his macho pals had talked him into it just because it was such a powerful piece.

  “I’m looking for an apartment,” I told him.

  He was practically catatonic with fear. I had to slap him to jar him awake a little. “What?”

  “I’m looking for an apartment in Manhattan. I want to put a down payment on one now, maybe in an area that hasn’t started turning around yet but will be prime real estate in four or five years. What neighborhoods should I check?”

  His eyes focused on me. “Are you going to shoot me?”

  “You want me to lie, Stan?” I asked.

  “But you’re just a kid.”

  “Would it hurt less if Vinny does it?”

  He closed his eyes and raised his head a little as if he was trapped in a moment of martyrdom. “My wife?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Thank God.”

  I nudged his chest with the barrel of the .44. “Stan. About the apartment?”

  He roused and stared at me curiously. “That’s a serious question?”

  “Why else would I ask?”

  He thought about it for a minute, and I could see that while he was running real estate properties, trends, housing developments, and urban renewal, he wasn’t afraid at all. His mind was moving along the usual track, checking angles, working schemes
. His mouth moved silently. He seemed to have forgotten that we were there, and that he was about to die.

  “They’re revitalizing Alphabet City,” Stan said. “It’s been the dregs for a while now, but the East Village continues moving farther east toward the river. In five years it’ll be trendy and upscale. Whatever you buy now will be worth ten times that by then.”

  “Thanks.”

  Then the full impact of his impending death hit him again and he rocked on the couch. His eyes drifted to Venti and he didn’t like what he saw. He stared at me again.

  “Do me a favor?” he asked, his eyes full of tears although he was doing a hell of a job of holding them back. “Make it fast, would...?”

  I made it so quick that he didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. The .44 bucked in my fist and Stan’s head more or less vanished in a surge of blood, bone, and brain matter. The pressure of the blast had popped his eyes loose and they flew off perfectly intact. A Magnum was way too much gun for this kind of a job.

  “Why didn’t you shoot him with your own pistol?” Venti asked.

  “You filed down the firing pin, Vinny. You left me with my ass hanging. If Stan had been a little more steady he could’ve taken me out.”

  “No, he couldn’t have. You were a rock. You didn’t even flinch when he got off his one shot.”

  I wiped my prints off the .44 and tossed it back into Stan’s lap. Venti had to know I wasn’t going to pop him. He had to report to Johnny that I wasn’t holding a grudge. That I stayed cool and didn’t go mad dog when it came to civilians. I wondered if it would reflect badly on me that I’d allowed the wife a glance at our faces. Or that I’d taken a little time out to converse with Stan about real estate first. I figured Johnny would get a kick out of it all, one way or another.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and waited. Venti looked at me with a puzzled expression. Maybe he wanted to apologize for being a part of the chain reaction that had led my father to swallowing my mother’s tongue that Christmas. Maybe he was thinking of taking me out just to be sure that I wouldn’t come back at him later on. Maybe he was imagining that we would partner up as hitters in the future and that I’d take point and do all the dirty work. Or maybe when he looked at me he saw my father and he felt a hot terror working through him.

  In any case, he held the popgun at his side, fingering the trigger guard. I was fingering the switchblade in my pocket. If he lifted his arm even the slightest bit I would ram the knife into his throat.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here before the bitch wakes up,” he said.

  We left and climbed back into his car and said little on the ride back to Brooklyn. As soon as we got back to our neighborhood he asked, “You really going to move into Manhattan?”

  “When I get up enough of a stake.”

  “It’s good that you’re thinking ahead. Thinking about your future.”

  “I always do,” I said.

  “Even when you walked towards the muzzle of a .44?”

  “Even then.”

  He cocked his head as if thinking about it, then grinned and let out a laugh. The laughter grew. He reached under the dashboard and pulled out an envelope stuffed with ten G’s and handed it to me. He turned the corner and pulled over the curb in front of the house, where Angelina was seated on the porch waiting for me. Venti was still chuckling but when he saw Angelina he stopped and gave her a slow look.

  “You’re a smart kid,” Vinny Venti said.

  “Thanks,” I told him. We shook hands. He was strong with ugly calloused fingers. I thought about them on my mother’s flesh. I thought of how much she enjoyed the humiliation and pain he put her through because it was all like the sweetest of caresses compared to the degradation my father doled out. Venti packed a lot of power behind him. I fondled the switchblade I’d taken off Jojo those years ago. I was good with it, much better than Jojo had ever been. I knew how to hold it the correct way. Loosely in your palm. I could pull Vinny to me and drive the knife into his eye and up through his brain pan anytime I wanted. It would happen one day. I wasn’t in any rush.

  Maybe I was one of the boys and maybe I wasn’t. One thing I knew for sure is that I was capable of murdering a man who hadn’t done me any wrong. Jojo had been self-defense and personal. This had been stand-up and icy.

  I’d picked up another of my father’s habits.

  I was a stone cold killer.

  ~ * ~

  My old man had been wrong when he said he’d be out in ten years. He went away for thirteen. It was his own fault. If he’d shown some remorse or had given up any of his cronies he would’ve walked after ten. But it had been an election year and the DA was running on a platform of cleaning up the city and coming down on corruption. Considering the brutality of the crime, as well as my father’s other offenses, he got off easy.

  Even inside he had some major juice. I heard about it from time to time. How he was living large, making big money, held most of C-Block wrapped around his finger. The guards floated him women, liquor, primo drugs, good food, just about everything he might want on the outside.

  He even paid ex-con friends to piss on my mother’s grave. It was crass, hateful, and stupid, just about everything I had come to expect from my old man. I hadn’t visited her grave even once, but when I heard what was happening, I started going. I didn’t quite know why. Not to pray or make any kind of amends with her, not to stand over her and protect her from my father’s whims, and yet every few days I found myself buying flowers and walking through the tight stone paths of the cemetery to stand before her tombstone.

  A winter’s afternoon three days before Christmas, I had my collar up, carrying flowers, moving across the icy grounds when I saw some fat bastard with his crank in his hand whizzing on my mother’s headstone. The steam rose from the earth like thick trails of smoke, as if the grass was on fire.

  He zipped up and took a photo of his urine dripping across my mother’s name. Then he turned around and saw me standing there. He must’ve known who I was. He whimpered, “Oh Christ...”

  I was strapped with a 9mm in a holster beneath my peacoat, and we were alone in this part of the cemetery, two hundred yards from the road. I saw he’d left his car running, a pickup truck burning a lot of oil and spewing white clouds from the tailpipe. He had a Christmas tree in back and garland strung around the antenna.

  The guy waited for me to pull my piece. I didn’t. He waited some more. I stared at him. He didn’t know whether to run or draw his own gun or drop to his knees and beg forgiveness or just take a shit and go blind.

  I laid the flowers on her grave. I turned and asked him, “You sent my father a photo?”

  He could barely get the word out. “Yes.”

  “Does he have his own phone all the time or does he have to borrow one of the bulls’ or what?”

  “It’s his own.” He held his hands up even though I hadn’t pulled my piece. “Look...look...kid...I got nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Your dick does.”

  “No no, listen...I mean, this isn’t something I wanted to do. It’s not like I go around doing this kind of thing. I don’t. I’m not a pervert, right? I didn’t do time for anything like that. This...this...he made me do this...”

  “How?” I asked.

  The guy had nothing to say.

  “You mean he paid you and you said what the hell.”

  “He didn’t pay in money. My last two nights in the joint he threw a going away party for me. Girls, booze, you understand?”

  “You were two days away from all of that anyway, you asshole,” I said. “Give me the phone.”

  He handed it to me with a resigned air and turned back to his truck, wondering if he could make it back to his pickup before I either tackled him or shot him in the back. He looked at my eyes and started to cry.

  “Listen, kid...please...”

  I checked the last call made and hit redial. My old man answered with an emotionless, “Thanks. Nice picture. What, d
id you drink a six-pack before you let fly?”

  It was the first time I’d heard his voice in over six years. A strange heaviness settled in my chest. The smell of piss was thick enough to make me turn my head away. When I turned back the guy was getting ready to run. I pulled my piece and shot him twice in the chest. He went over backwards across my mother’s grave and I put two in his eyes.

  I took a photo of his dead face, sent it to my father, and disconnected.

  ~ * ~

  I became Johnny Booze’s torpedo. It’s what he’d been after since the beginning. He set me in motion and I did my job. Mostly against other families, occasionally against someone in his own crew who was in danger of being flipped by the feds. If Johnny had even a notion that you might turn rat, you were dead. He’d give me a name and I’d go make the hit. I didn’t watch the mark for weeks to learn his every move. I didn’t infiltrate his life. I didn’t play act like I needed help with finding a lost dog or that my car had broken down and I wanted a lift.

  I stuck to a few basic rules: Never kill a man in front of his family. Never torture him. Never hurt a civilian. Be quiet, clean, and efficient.

  Most of the marks never saw me coming. If they did, they sometimes dropped to their knees, sometimes began to sob, but most of them stood tall. I gave them a lot of credit.

  Johnny’s crew started looking for a nickname for me. They went through all the regulars trying to get one to stick. The Kid. Iceman. Killshot. They were stupid. None of them took.

  No one ever pissed on my mother’s grave again.

  I was paid well and took Stan Tripp’s advice and got a four bedroom place off Avenue A in an area that was already starting to turn around. I didn’t stay there on my own, just kept making payments and waiting for the day when Angelina and I could move in together. When we turned nineteen we got married. Johnny Booze was expected to be my best man and he was. I didn’t care. I had no friends.

  Angelina and I moved into Manhattan. Her mother started to rouse a little and became more active in our lives, shopping with Angelina and talking a lot about grandchildren. They filled the place with classy furniture and fretted down to the inch where to hang paintings and photos. I came home one day and there was a grand piano in the living room. Neither of us could play the piano. I looked at her and she seemed immensely pleased with herself. I shrugged and hoped our kids wouldn’t mind taking lessons because their parents needed to have a grand piano in the corner as set dressing.