You'd Better Watch Out Read online

  Johnny took a sip and continued. “Sorry, kid, but I just don’t believe that. You’ve been waiting too long to pull the trigger on him.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ll be asking me to kill him soon.”

  “What?”

  “You said it yourself, he’s got all the contacts. He’s the connection between the cops and the can. He’s in control of the pipeline. What’d you ask for as your cut? Fifteen percent? He’ll pay it for a couple of weeks until he gets comfortable out in free air again. It won’t take him long. Then he’ll bribe or pressure your captains to turn on you.”

  His boys all murmured saying they’d never do such a thing. Johnny silenced them with a glare.

  I kept the gun trained on him. “I say that a month after he hits the street again you’ll be buried behind JFK, Johnny, and my old man will be sitting in your chair.”

  “He’s not that powerful.”

  “He swallowed his wife’s tongue. In these rough days, who do you think is going to look better to the crews? You with your gold cufflinks or him with his psycho cred?”

  Johnny eyed me hard. He wanted to see if it was just a ploy. He wanted to judge how full of shit I was or how long a lie I’d spin to save my own life. He shouldn’t have bothered. He knew what I was. He’d had a hand in making me.

  Common sense prevailed. Johnny wagged his chin and the boys backed off. He smiled at me like we had to let bygones be bygones. “You really think he’ll try a takeover?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think it’ll succeed?”

  “I already answered that.”

  “Yes, I suppose you did.” He allowed a hint of sadness to enter his eyes and pushed out his lower lip like he was overwhelmed with sorrow. He reached a hand across the table to try to take my wrist but both my hands were out of sight. I was still thinking it might be a good idea to open up on him and try my luck with the rest of the crew. “I shouldn’t have stepped in your way. I shouldn’t have dared come between you and your revenge. I know it’s what you live for.”

  He waved a hand in the air as if to dispel an argument I hadn’t made. “Sure, sure, you’ve got a wonderful wife and two beautiful kids, but I know there’s death in your heart.”

  I said nothing.

  “You’ve been waiting thirteen years. I got greedy for a second there, kid. I fell back to type. I apologize.”

  I said nothing.

  “When your old man hits the street, you do what you have to do. I support that. I’m behind you one hundred percent.”

  I said nothing.

  “So, we’re square, kid?”

  “Sure.”

  It didn’t matter what I said. Johnny knew he couldn’t keep me around anymore. He’d shown his hand. I’d seen how easy he’d turned against me. He would never believe I could forgive that, and he was right. One of us would have to die now.

  ~ * ~

  Johnny would plot and plan. He would try to figure a way to bump me off as soon as I’d finished killing my father. Maybe he’d give my father some firepower in the hopes that we’d murder each other. Johnny’s mind was fertile and he’d spin schemes while he drank and smoked and listened to the jokes his boys told. He would be worried about me but not that worried. It wasn’t in his nature. He’d lived a protected life. Immune, inoculated, bestowed, and shielded.

  I’d driven down the block, parked out of sight, and walked back to the Fifth Amendment. I stood in back of the bar and watched the wise guys come and go. I waited. I wasn’t so proud not to hide behind a dumpster when the bartender brought out some trash. A couple of hookers dropped by. I waited. His capos left for the night, shitfaced and wobbling. Johnny didn’t like his hookers shooting up in front of him so one came out back while the other went to the ladies room. I waited. I thought of what I’d told Arlo Hoyt. That I hadn’t learned anything in this life that I didn’t know before. It wasn’t completely true. I had learned.

  Finally Johnny walked out the door. He was bookended by two of his soldiers. I stepped up from the shadows and popped one bodyguard and then the other. Johnny pulled a face when a splash of blood hit his cuff.

  “What is this, kid?”

  “You shouldn’t have bet on my old man.”

  “You know you can’t get away. You really this stupid?”

  I shot him in the forehead.

  Johnny went out with a lot of the same cool and style he always exhibited. He whirled once and took a step like he was dancing with the most beautiful woman on the floor of the Ritz. Even as he sagged it looked like he was. By then, the other boys had made it to the front door. They were holding their pieces aimed at me. They looked at Johnny’s corpse on the ground and didn’t know what to do or say.

  That’s what I’d been counting on. These mooks knew how to take orders but not how to move on their own. I put my gun away, stuck my hands in my pockets, and said, “One of you capos is in charge now. I’m still the torpedo. Be thankful. Consider it a gift. Everybody’s just been promoted. Don’t make a run against me or I’ll kill every last one of you.” Then I turned my back on them and went home to my wife and kids.

  ~ * ~

  Five hours later I pulled up outside of the prison gate of Sing Sing and saw my father hunkered down against a stone wall, fuming. I was twenty minutes late. I’d done it on purpose. I wanted to see if my father had learned any cool in the joint. Twin red veins stood out on his forehead as he seethed. He stood and walked toward me. Word wouldn’t have gotten to him this fast about Johnny being iced. Johnny’s captains would still be arguing among themselves as to who would take the outfit over. Word wouldn’t leak until a new king had been crowned.

  If my father had known about the hit on me then he’d think I was dead. The clock that had been ticking in my head for thirteen years finally went off. For a moment my skull filled with a sharp pain and a deafening swell of noise, and then it was gone.

  Like most cons, my old man had kept healthy in prison. He’d gained a little weight and all of it was muscle. His face wore the token abuse of hard time well. He was forty-nine years old and looked ten years younger. I had more gray in my hair than he did.

  I said, “Hello.”

  He glowered at me. There was absolutely no recognition in his eyes.

  “You one of Johnny Booze’s boys?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re late. I’ve been freezing my ass off.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re sorry.” He still couldn’t control his hands. He wanted to take a poke at me but wasn’t sure how it would go down, what kind of leverage he really had, so he just sort of brushed my upper arm with his fist, a real love tap. “I’ve been in the can thirteen years, doing nothing but waiting. I finally get the fuck out and you still leave me waiting.”

  “Couldn’t be helped,” I said. “There was a shake-up in the crew.”

  “Yeah?” His eyes grew hot and amused. There was an old knife scar at the base of his chin. He’d barely been touched. Whoever had done it would be long dead, I knew. “Someone get aced?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  I pulled away and started back toward the city. His overwhelming presence in the car was like a boulder slowly rolling closer and closer, the weight and implacability first easing against me and then pressing beyond my boundaries, and then trapping me beneath it, crushing me.I cracked the window. The icy draft washed against the side of my face.

  “You found a place for me?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Three bedrooms?”

  “It’ll be big enough for you,” I said.

  He noticed the two baby seats in back. “Jesus, you had to use your wife’s car?”

  “It’s mine.”

  “So you’re a wise guy at night and a fucking soccer mom during the day?”

  “I’m a family man.”

  “That shit’s overrated, trust me.”

  Most other jackasses busting balls would do so with a grin and a
chuckle. My father said it all with a hiss and a sneer. He was chattier than I was expecting, probably because he was excited about being back out on the street. He was already trying to assert his dominance. It would only grow worse. I could feel the air in the car shifting, growing heavier, the way the mood in our house when I was a kid was always grave and laced with tension.

  He lit a cigarette and turned on the radio. After a couple of minutes he snapped the radio off, rolled his window down and tossed the cigarette. He was nervous. The surface of his dark eyes seemed to roil like a black storming ocean. “I don’t want to see Johnny yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take me to my new digs. Furnished?”

  “You’ll want for nothing.”

  “Where are they?”

  I gave him an address not far from Johnny’s place. He’d know it as a fine part of the neighborhood. I drove through Brooklyn and noted how busy the streets were with last-minute shoppers. It wasn’t a white Christmas.

  His hands were clenching and unclenching, shoulders tightening and loosening so that his head kept tilting to the side, something like a tic. I’d seen him this way many times before. He wanted something to fight, to break apart, to kill. The blood lust was on him. He’d unleash himself against me soon, which was fine, but not yet.

  “Wait, I don’t want to go to an empty house. Take me for a drink.”

  I pulled up in front of the Fifth Amendment. My old man said, “This is Johnny’s place. I told you I didn’t want to see him yet.”

  “He won’t be here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  We walked in and the crew kept their distance. They looked like they’d been arguing and conniving since I’d iced Johnny Booze this morning. I knew exactly how it would play out. There would be a power play, a call to arms, and the capos would battle each other in stupid and heinous ways, and the entire crew would break into pieces before New Year’s.

  The bartender tried slipping away from behind the bar but I glared at him and he returned to his station. I turned my back on the crew. They needed a constant in their lives at this point, and I was it. Their trusted friends were about to change but I wasn’t a friend. They’d all be coming to me to side up with them soon.

  I spoke my father’s name. I told the bartender to give him anything he wanted on the house. My father ordered a triple Jameson beer back. He tossed the shot back in one throw and sucked the beer down nearly as quick. I kept staring at the scar on his chin. I wondered if I would’ve been angry at the guy with the knife if he’d managed to kill my old man.

  “They all look worried,” my father said.

  “I told you we had a hit last night. It’s got them on edge.”

  “Torpedoes are a dime a dozen.”

  “This one cost a little more.”

  “He was my son. Johnny’s hitter. But you probably already knew that.”

  “I knew it,” I said.

  My father kept drinking. He told stories about prison life and what kind of deals he’d been on before he’d been sent away. He didn’t mention my mother. He approached the crew and chatted with them and drank with them, and they did their best to pretend they didn’t know what was coming. I kept my hands in my coat pockets.

  I turned and looked at the tree and remembered how my mother would decorate ours, the burden of her existence lightened just a little by the season. I saw that before Johnny had decided to betray me, he’d bought some presents for Angelina and the kids. Several wrapped boxes were under the tree with my family’s names on them. It was probably in poor taste to take them now.

  My father’s voice grew louder as he finished a particularly cruel story. The boys laughed along with him until I turned around. They knew the time was here. They said their goodbyes and patted him on the back, told him how much they were looking forward to working with him, and then drifted off.

  My old man wandered over and stood shoulder to shoulder with me, sucking at another bottle of beer. “Okay, take me to my place. But get me a woman first. Make it two. High class. With good manners.”

  I wondered what constituted good manners for a hooker but let it slide.

  I said, “I told you what was going to happen the day you got out.” I didn’t quite know my own voice. I sounded like him.

  He drained the beer and wiped his mouth. “What’s that?”

  I said nothing.

  “You say something to me?”

  I said nothing.

  It took him a few more seconds before recognition bled into his eyes. He wasn’t afraid. He set his back teeth. Maybe he’d known all along that this was how things were bound to play out. He wasn’t a stupid man. He knew he couldn’t hide forever.

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “It’s me.”

  I had wanted to fight my father. I wasn’t sure why. I had nothing to prove. I wasn’t someone who needed to feel bone breaking or have blood smeared across my knuckles. Not even my old man’s. And yet I had wanted to do it with my bare hands.

  I had imagined beating his head in with my fists until it rolled around on his neck like jelly. I had seen myself tearing and cutting his tongue out a thousand different ways. With pliers, shears, a rusted knife, an X-acto blade, my own teeth. I imagined whispering “Merry Christmas” in his dead ear and then washing my red hands in the snow. Except there was no snow tonight.

  An oily grin eased over his face and he said, “Okay, let’s—”

  I pulled my piece and shot him in the center of his forehead. He fell backwards and toppled into the Christmas tree. His corpse got hung up in the lights and his death throes tore loose a few branches. Ornaments went flying. Each of his hands clenched on to a candy cane. He went down on his face with a rattling last breath. He died easier than he had lived, and I left him there in his own growing puddle of shit and blood and brain fluid.

  It wasn’t closure but I hadn’t expected any. It was simply something that needed to be done. I’d waited thirteen years for it to happen and now I could quit waiting and move on to the next thing.

  Maybe it would be a job for whichever capo came out on top of Johnny Booze’s crew. Maybe some other syndicate family would rush in and take over the trade and traffic. Maybe there’d be a vicious blitzkrieg. I might hook up with them or perhaps I’d get out once and for all. I couldn’t see myself quitting the life but you never knew. No matter what happened, I’d look out for my wife and children. There would be white Christmases in the future.

  Before I left the neighborhood I walked a couple of blocks up to the Jewish deli and bought some tongue. All these years the old man had been sending it to me and I’d never tried it. Now my mouth was watering to give it a go.