The old man was lecturing, so I amused myself by attempting to figure out which customers in the restaurant were really Feds. My money was on a couple in matching sweater vests. They were just a little too cute to be real, and I had caught them sneaking furtive glances towards us one too many times.
Naturally, Pops-- being something of an underworld celebrity-- was always shadowed by eager Feds who, through enhanced listening devices, hung with rapt attention on every garbled syllable that the old mumbled man through his phonetically-challenged lips. So while his lecture seemed to be about one thing, it was really about something else entirely: the ever-growing feud between the old man and Simeon Dread. I listened with one ear while I continued my federal agent guessing game with the other and the rest of my remaining senses.
Pops, thinking he was clever, had disguised the conversation with a completely transparent analogous discussion of chess. He kept referred to an opponent that he called "Simon", all too obviously close to the name "Simeon" even for my wry tastes. Clearly, "chess" referred to the silent but deadly gang war that had started to be played out across the streets of the city and was slowly gaining momentum. Any idiot, including the federal kind, who couldn't see through this shallow metaphor deserved to have his badge and gun shoved elbow-high up his ass (right next to the place where it kept his head).
The old man said something along the lines of: "None of Simon's moves make any sense. He throws pawns away like they were nothing, and his knights seem to be every where at once but without reason."
He meant: Simeon was cutting his losses, and more and more men were leaving his employ (one way or the other) every day. Pops wasn't sure what the end game was for Simeon. His valued men, the ones that Dread kept on or didn't straight out execute in anger, seemed to be merely spinning their wheels. Simeon Dread was treading water and waiting for something. But Pops didn't know what, and that bothered him.
I said, "That blonde woman in the sweater vest has amazing tits." My words had been spoken barely above a whisper, but the woman seemed to flinch in her chair, all the same. Had she heard me through a hidden ear piece? Was that a blush reddening her cheeks? Hard to tell from this distance, and it could have just been coincidence or my imagination. I followed this up with: "Her husband looks like prick though." The man (her pseudo husband/real partner in this little dinner theater drama) frowned. I was more and more positive I had the couple pegged. I gave myself a mental high five.
Pops ignored my ignominious comments (he was used to them by now) and continued his chess lecture: "When one does not understand one's opponent, one can never be too careful. I wonder if Simon is mad or merely playing at appearing mad." Personally, I wondered if the old man knew how irritatingly condescending he sounded. The only people I knew who used less first-or-second person perspective during a conversation were literature professors or gigantically arrogant dick heads. Oftentimes, they were one and the same. Pops went on. "The trick is to get him to keep it up until either he is truly mad or so deeply invested in his strategy that at the point he needs to change it, it is too late."
He meant: Do not underestimate Simeon Dread. Everything Dread did was loaded with purpose, even when it did not seem to be. The only way to beat an opponent like Dread was to outwit and outmatch him at his own game.
My reply: Duh.
The waiter appeared and placed our steaming plates of Italian food before us, so I looked at Pops and replied, "Your sausage is huge."
Whether he knew it or not, Pops had made his point albeit one that I already knew. I was very familiar with the dangers regarding Simeon Dread and his corporation, too much so. If Pops had been aware of how involved I had already become in the affairs of the infamous Mr. Dread, he probably would have keeled over with a heart attack right there and then-- before he managed to have the one his Italian sausage would undoubtably give him during dinner.
Would what the old man say if he knew that Veronica Dread, the voluptuous and deadly wife of Simeon, had offered to hire me to kill her husband? Better yet, how would he react if Pops knew that I had hesitantly agreed? The portrait of such a human expression might be titled, "I Doth Shat My Pantaloons".
The more we stuffed ourselves with delicious food, the less the conversation revolved around a coded discussion of work. Dinner ended with the weekly tradition of the old man passing me a manilla folder and saying, "Here's your allowance. Be careful. Don't spend it all in one place."
If the federal agents and their sweater vests had any clue as to what sometimes accompanied my "allowance" within these manilla envelopes, I would have been sitting in a maximum security facility many years ago. I had a feeling, however, that this week Dad had no contracts for me. The Dread business demanded his full attention, and one did not assassinate employees of Simeon Dread without fear of repercussion. A silent gang war was costly enough. An official one meant blood in the streets, and my dad and Dread both considered themselves businessmen at the end of the day. Blood in the streets was inevitably bad for business.
Our dinner concluded, we made our way outside where Pop had a car waiting from him. I looked over my shoulder but didn't see the sweater vest couple. As the old man climbed the vehicle, I held the door. "About the chess game," I said. Pop raised his eyebrows in an expectant but wary fashion.
"Beware the queen," I said and closed the door behind him.
***
The people in this area of town knew me, if only as my father's son, so I had the privilege of being able to walk the streets without the fear of being mugged. To be fair, everyone who lived for several blocks around were able to live under a relative umbrella of my father's protection. That is, as long as they did as they were told. Such protection wasn't always a guarantee, however, so it helped to have my last name and face. It also helped to know that I could kill any would-be muggers with my bare hands. It wouldn't necessarily deter any muggers stupid enough to try, but it gave me a certain peace of mind. I knew I could walk the three blocks to
The Deep End
, the bar I owned, without having to look over my shoulder like some kind of paranoid loser who had at least three people seriously wanting to kill him. Which I had.
Considering this and considering the bottle of very expensive wine I had finished off with dinner, it was a miracle that I heard the car at all before the gunman opened fire at me. One moment, I was admiring the stale night air and the aromatic smells of the city (exhaust and asphalt), and the next I heard a roar of an engine, and the night exploded into a bullet-buzzing nightmare.
By instinct, I threw myself down and made myself small, rolling into the nearest doorway and behind a steel trash can. Cement popped up in sharp chips around me, and the trash can echoed with metallic clangs as bullets spattered it. The car flew by, engine revving, in a flash of headlights, gunfire, and then taillights. To my horror, it spun in the street, tires squealing, coming around to make a second attempt.
Of all the streets in the city that I could have been walking down, I'd been on the ONE with no other moving vehicles than the Murder-mobile. I cursed my luck and my timing.
Well, maybe not my timing. On most of the evenings that I met with my father, I did not carry a firearm. Since my run-in with Dread, his wife, his gorilla-suited bodyguards, and a ferocious assassin who went by the nickname "The Black Ghost", I carried a (mostly) legally licensed firearm on me at all times. I reached into my coat, pulled the gun from its shoulder holster, and pulled myself into a firing position behind the trash can. As the car made for me, the gunman leaned out of a window, apparently to get a cleaner shot or to see if perhaps he had hit me during the first pass.
Either way, it was a bad move as it made him an easy target, so I made him pay. I fired once, and I saw the man's head buck backwards as if he'd just experienced a drastic case of spontaneous whiplash. In the sickly yellow light of a street lamp, I saw something red and thick splash across the top of the car. It was going to need a thorough wash in the morning. The gunman went limp and hung from the window. His gun fell from his hand and skittered across the pavement. I fired again, and a small spiderweb crack appeared in front of the driver of the car. I groaned. Bulletproof glass.
The engine revved, roared, and the car became a dark blur. It made a hard right on two wheels at the end of the block, and then it was gone.
I holstered my gun; it was registered to me and had been used in self-defense. I imagined that the dead gunman and the gore-splattered car would disappear before they ended up in any police reports, so I didn't think I had too much to worry about on that end. As added insurance, I kicked the gunman's weapon into the nearest gutter. If I was lucky, maybe it would land in a puddle of shit, and the NYPD forensic team wouldn't want to touch it. But I didn't think I'd be lucky.
My heart pounding in my chest, I spun on my heels and headed in the opposite direction. Towards home.
***
My mind whirled at how holy fucking shit bad things had just gotten. Someone had tried to kill me, Pop's boy, out in the open. Talk about a surefire way to get the war started. Which was exactly what someone was trying to do. But who? And why? No one would benefit from the kind of all-out destruction my father and Dread would put each other through.
Then I thought--
Veronica Dread
. Somehow the whole thing had her sexy little fingerprints all over it, but I couldn't figure out what or how she'd gain from my death. She had hired me to kill Simeon. Why kill me before I finished the job? What was her play? I had guessed she wanted her husband out of the way so that she could spend the rest of her days in sunshine and splendor without having to cow tow to Simeon's every demand, but maybe I was wrong. Dead wrong. Maybe it wasn't even her. Now that both Tuxedo brothers were dead, there were a lot of underlings who weren't getting paid and might have a beef with me. Maybe even Dread himself had become so paranoid that he wanted to put me out of commission before I could do the same to him. The only enemy I could totally rule out was the Black Ghost. She was way too good to have put my life in the hands of amateurs. She would have killed me in a much more... classy... way.
