Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime

Fifty-two

That should have been it for me.

Okay, I got beat up. Okay, if not for Jerry I might have gotten shot by Buzz Ravisi in that flophouse. But now somebody had tried to blow me up. Someone had seriously tried to kill me. That had never happened to me before and it wasn’t the kind of new experience I was interested in having.

Pieces of my car were lying all around me, some of them burning, while the remainder of the car was ablaze at the curb. When I turned and looked at my house I could see that the front windows had been blown out. Some of my neighbors-the ones I didn’t hate and who didn’t hate me-came running out to see what happened, then came over to see if I was all right. The ones who did hate me came out to bitch about the noise or about their windows. They were talking to me but I couldn’t hear a thing except a kind of dull hum in my head. Finally, someone called an ambulance, which arrived in tandem with a Sheriff’s Department car. They put me in the ambulance and took me to the nearest hospital. I think I blacked out once on the way, because when I woke again I was in the emergency room. Still couldn’t hear, so the doctors and nurses asking me questions were an annoyance. I just kept shaking my head and shrugging. They finally gave uptrying to find out where it hurt-or whatever the hell they’d been asking me-and gave me a complete once-over.

Yeah, that should have been it for me. Why go on when somebody obviously wanted me dead this bad? And for what? For what?

Well … I didn’t know, and maybe that’s why it wasn’t it for me. My curiosity wouldn’t let it rest. What did I know, or what was I doing, that made somebody want me out of the way this bad? This … well, permanently?

So, that should have been it for me, but it wasn’t. The first thing I should have done when my hearing came back-if it came back-was march right up to Jack Entratter, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and say, “Sorry guys, I’m out.”

But I wasn’t going to do that.

You know why? It was more than just my curiosity.

For the first time since I’d started this whole thing I wasn’t afraid, or puzzled or confused.

Now I was mad.