The Hard Bounce

Chapter Nineteen

It’s funny how sometimes the worst idea can seem like brilliance to a bunch of liberal hippies living as far away as possible from the problem they’re trying to help. Camp Freshwood was one of those ideas. Every summer for two weeks, we got trudged deep into western Massachusetts for some fresh air and macramé lessons. Sounds good, don’t it?

Two to three different Homes occupied parts of Camp Freshwood at any given time. Still sound good? We were supposed to make friends interacting with others in the same situation as us. Guess what? We hated each other. We weren’t peers; we were soldiers all thrown abruptly into one another’s company, and we all had something to prove. The only arts and crafts I learned were the art of war and the craft of being crafty.

In the seven years I fought in the wars of Camp Freshwood, three kids mysteriously drowned, countless others got bizarre food poisoning. One kid “fell” off a cliff, and another hung himself with a macraméd noose. I shit you not.

But nothing compared with the summer Twitch vacationed at Camp Freshwood. Incidentally, it was the last summer of that ill-planned social experiment.

We were hardcore kids, but we were still a step behind the Roxbury boys. They were just a little bit bigger, a little bit meaner, and carried weightier chips on their shoulders. They’d also earned themselves quite a rep as a gleeful bunch of ass-rapers. That summer, we got shifted into the camp at the same time.

Twitch caught the first offensive, of course. They found him in the woods. Alone. What he was doing out there alone, I’ll never know. I’ll never ask, either. I didn’t even know he was gone from the group. At mess hall that night, in he limped, wincing each time he brought his left leg around. As he made his way over to our table, I heard chuckling from the Roxbury table. One of the boys made kissy sounds. A thin line of blood dribbled down the back of Twitch’s thigh, one sock soaked bright red.

Later that night, the rest of us tossed around ideas for payback. Twitch sat apart from us in the corner, head between his hands like he was trying to hold his skull together. We all went to bed, ready to start the day fresh for blood.

We never got the chance.

All that night, rain beat down on the camp, pounding a wet cadence onto the corrugated metal sheets that passed for roofing. Wet and miserable in our cots, we were woken by a wild-eyed counselor on the edge of full-blown panic. We were herded quickly onto a waiting school bus. The sobbing middle-aged hippie didn’t give us an explanation until the bus was tearing down the highway.

Apparently, three of the Roxbury campers snuck out of their cabin during the night. The only thing the staff, the State Police, and the local ME could figure was that they encountered an animal, possibly a bear. What they never figured out was why the bear ripped those kids into chunks but didn’t bother eating any.

That morning, Twitch’s shoes had an awful lot of mud on them. And his face had an awful lot of smile.

To this day, I believe Twitch gives me far too much credit for his safety at St. Gabe’s. I have no doubt of his love for me and Junior; his devotion to us is absolute. Twitch would die for us, if it came to that. So despite him being a sociopath, a borderline psychopath, and pretty much any other path I can think of, his was the safest place I could think of to deposit Kelly until we could get shit cleared up.

Thank god the teenage Puerto Rican gang that lived on the floor below Twitch wasn’t home when we got there. I had Phil haunting the front of my house; Twitch had Boriquas. Nothing had ever escalated into physical conflict, but they got their ya-yas making visitors uncomfortable through stare-downs and low-voiced Spanish threats. Kelly was already at nerves’ end, and I didn’t need a tête-à-tête with those punks to bring the rest of her roof crashing down.

Twitch jumped out of Junior’s car as we pulled up. “Um, could you wait here a sec?”

“What’s up?” I asked.

A blush crept up Twitch’s pale neck as he cast a nervous glance at Kelly. “It’s, um, kinda messy up there, and I want to straighten it up a bit. I wasn’t expecting company.” Twitch’s eyelid had been stuttering nervously for the entire drive.

“No more than five minutes,” I said tossing an obvious glance with raised eyebrows to the empty front porch.

When he was out of earshot, Kelly gave me a watery-eyed look so full of tension it broke my heart. “What am I doing here?”

I took her hand in mine, trying to meet her eyes with a hard confidence I wasn’t feeling. “Listen, sweetie. Me and Junior need to get this straightened out.”

“But the police-”

“No. The police don’t give a shit. This is between me and…” I didn’t have a way to finish that sentence without letting Kelly in on more than I wanted. “I just need you to stay here with Twitch. You’ll be safe here.” Relatively speaking.

“For how long?”

“I need you to stay with him for a couple days until we can figure out exactly what’s going on.”

Her eyes glistened, and she hugged me hard. Fear radiated off her skin.

“I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” I said. “Until we fix this, I need to know you’re protected. You’ll be safe here.”

Kelly squeezed my hand and nodded. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I trust you.”

Holy Moses on a trampoline, I wished I felt like I knew what I was doing.

“Hey,” Junior said. “How come nobody’s apologized for perforating my fucking arm?”

She laughed through her teary eyes. “Junior, I am heartily sorry for having perforated your arm.” Then, mockingly sweet, “You want me to kiss it better?”

“Nah. Probably try to bite it off.” Junior turned to cover his smile. He sniffed and rubbed his flattened nose. “Loony broad.”

Twitch’s apartment was the second floor walk-up of a two-family house. We marched up the thin stairway like a line of ants, with me on point. I was as nervous as Twitch was about the condition of his apartment. At least I could poke my head in first to see if he’d missed anything incriminating. Like a body or two.

Much to my surprise, not only was the apartment in fair order, but it was pretty clean as well.

Spartan would be the best way to describe Twitch’s decor. A small color TV on a footlocker stood as his entertainment center. For furniture, he had a leopard print futon and a blue futon mattress rolled up against the wall.

Twitch smiled nervously as Kelly gave his apartment the feminine once over. “Anybody want a soda?” he offered, his tic working so hard it nearly caused a breeze. Poor Twitch. He wasn’t exactly a masterful conversationalist and entertainer. Maybe I should have brought Pictionary.

Kelly stared at Twitch’s fish tank and the one fish inside. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the edge of aSwank magazine poking out from under a closet door. As smoothly as I could, I stepped over and nudged the corner back under with my cane.

“This fish is beautiful,” she said.

Twitch beamed, his face that of a little boy at show-and-tell. “He’s a Siamese fighting fish. Named him Roadhouse.”

“How do you know he’s a he?”

“Got a huge cock.”

Junior howled a laugh.

I winced so hard, I nearly cramped up.

To my surprise, Kelly guffawed. My respect for the girl kicked up another notch. I suppose I still had some residual filter on her from my first impression.

“Excuse me,” Kelly said, “but where’s the ladies room?”

“Down the hall on the left,” Twitch said, pointing.

I leaned over to him and said under my breath, “You do have TP, right?”

“We’re in luck. Just got a fresh roll yesterday.”

The last time I’d visited the apartment, I made do with an old Boston Globe. The fewer indignities Kelly had to suffer, the better. Wiping with the comics page is a pretty big one, in my book. Unless you’re using Cathy.

A shriek pierced the air, rising in pitch like an air-raid siren. We all bolted down the hallway to find Kelly waving her hands and dancing a heebie-jeebie in the doorway on the right.

“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod,” she babbled, her face the color of pasta dough.

“Wrong door! Wrong door!” I yelled.

One of my greatest hopes had been that she could spend a day or two without finding the pet room. Instead, she stumbled into it in less than thirty seconds.

In that wrong room, Twitch had two ball pythons and a six-and-a-half-foot long albino boa. Iggy, the iguana, rounded out the zoo.

And then there were the rats.

To feed his babies, Twitch kept a large fish tank full of rats that he bred himself. The tank was brimming with squirming rodentia that day. They all moved in one big, putrid mass of red eyes, oily fur, and teeth. Kelly gasped and made a horrified gurgling sound.

I knew how she felt. My skin crawled just looking at the snakes, never mind the rats. The first time I’d been shown the collection, I let out a scream just one octave down from hers.

“Uh, the bathroom is on the other left,” Twitch said.

“Can I tell you how much I hate rats?” Kelly’s teeth chattered as she sipped from the tea Junior was kind enough to go get at the packie for her. At least she’d stopped rocking and hugging her knees.

Junior stayed with her when Twitch motioned me into his room.

“Ollie’s working research on your shooter,” Twitch said.

“What kind of research?”

“He’s checking newspaper records, police records. Cross-search kinda stuff. If he is who I think he is, you might want some of this.” He lifted his mattress off the box spring. Sandwiched between the two was a selection of armaments that would have made Tom Clancy skeet in his boxers. Besides an assortment of handguns, I recognized an AK-47, a sawed-off Mossberg, a small Uzi, and some type of high-tech sniper rifle, laser sight and all.

“Jesus, Twitch, you expecting an ATF raid or just Armageddon?”

“I expect everything.” He waved his hand over the guns like a game show host displaying his fabulous, fabulous prizes. “Take your pick. They’re all untraceable.”

Against my better judgment, I had the gun Twitch had snuck into the hospital tucked in the back of my pants. “I’m good with the one I got.”

Junior walked in and picked up a nasty-looking Ruger revolver. Junior’s no better with a gun than I am. Either of us were more likely to shoot ourselves or each other than an attacker.

In an effort to cut down our odds of unintentional murder-suicide, I said, “I already got a gun, Junior,” hoping he would the put the damned thing down. Instead, he picked up an automatic, comparing their heft in his hands.

He looked at me, and for the first time, I could see the wear on him. Worry lines creased his face like they’d been etched there with a tattoo needle. He opened the gun. “I don’t.”

Of course, the gun was already loaded.

Kelly gave me a tight hug like I was leaving for Iraq. As far as I knew, we were going to war. Or starting one. Junior went down to start the car. Twitch looked around the room uncomfortably. Kelly took my face in her hands and gave me a slow, warm kiss. I didn’t say anything, but she answered the question she read on my face.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “You come back as soon as you can.”

As I turned to walk out, I wondered just how fine she would be. The last thing I heard was Twitch clapping his hands together and saying, “So, who wants to feed the snakes?”

It was going to be a long night.

Junior got in the car and reached over to unlock my side. I climbed in and waited for him to start the engine. He just sat behind the wheel, chewing on the filter of his cigarette.

“Before I start this car, you gotta promise me that you will at least attempt to cut the bullshit.” He stared out the windshield.

“What shit are we talking about now?”

“The martyr shit. I heard you apologize to Kelly for getting her into this. You need to understand that this isn’t your fault. None of this is. We got called into this game way late in the fourth quarter, Boo.” Junior popped the dash lighter and lit his cig. “We got the ball when the game was pretty much played.”

“Yeah, but we can still kill the spread.”

“Okay, too much football. Let’s just say, and I’m only saying, as a theory-”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe we did make a bad situation a little worse.”

“I like your freewheeling use of the word ‘little.’”

“Hey, it’s a theory, ass.” He jabbed at me with the cigarette. I plucked it from his fingers and jumpstarted my own.

“Can we, in theory, start the car and go?”

“In theory, yes.” He didn’t start the car. “The point I’m trying to make here is that the situation was already bad, the game was fixed, and we were just playing the game we knew how to play. We got the girl. The rest is prologue.”

“Or epilogue.”

“Which one is before?”

“That’s prologue”

“That one.”

“So we’re in the epilogue, then?”

“No… we’re… shut the fuck up and listen to me. The main word here is ‘we.’ I hear one more line about your situation and your problems, I’m going to hurt you in the groinal area, buddy. A lot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Shut the fuck up.” He turned the key and Miss Kitty, our war engine, roared. We could have used a better name for our war engine.

There he was. My heartbeat tripled its tempo, breath short in my chest. I’d never had a panic attack before, but I felt close to having one. It wasn’t easy looking into the face again. The last time I’d seen it, I thought I was seconds away from a bullet to the skull. The picture was a low-res scan, grainy, but the loose, friendly smile was there, the oyster of a blind eye.

“This the guy?” Ollie asked, looking from the computer screen and back to me. I think my expression was answer enough.

Something spiky had nestled in my throat so I just nodded limply.

“Who is he, and where do we find him?”

Junior was ready to go out and draw some payback. Junior hadn’t seen the guy. How coolly he’d pulled the trigger on me. How casual it would have been for him to put another bullet into my skull.

Ollie grimaced. “See, now this is where we may run into some trouble.”

“How’s that?”

“This is a blowup from a picture I found in the Herald’s archives. The guy’s name is Louis Blanc.”

Louis Blanc. The name scratched at the back of my memory.

“Do I know that name?” asked Junior. “Why do I think I know that name?” He tapped a finger on the glass of the computer screen. “I think I’d remember that face.”

“Please don’t touch the screen,” Ollie said impatiently. He pulled a wipe from a box sitting next to the monitor and rubbed the point of contact until it squeaked.

“The name sounds familiar. Why would I know it?” I asked.

“You would have heard it,” Ollie said, matter-of-factly. “Look at the rest of the picture.” Ollie tapped a few buttons on the keyboard and double-clicked his mouse to show us the full picture. “You tell me why we have a bigger problem than we may have suspected.”

The shot was of a restaurant opening in Southie. An Irish Shebeen called Conor’s Publick that got a lot of press when it opened. The restaurant was bought for and operated by one Mr. Conor Cade. In the picture, Louis was standing behind the owners. Conor’s son had his arm draped around the old man, smiling. The only other face I recognized in the shot was Conor’s son, Francis.

Frankie “the Mick” Cade.

“Aw, fuck me,” Junior and I said at the same time.

“His nephew?”

“It’s pretty simple, Boo,” Ollie said. “Mr. Cade’s sister let a guy named Bevilaqua stick his pee-pee in her. They had a bouncing baby Bevilaqua. Named him Derek.”

“I was being rhetorical, prick.”

“So, Snake is The Mick’s nephew?” Junior was having no easier a time than I was processing the information.

“Supposedly, it was a bit of a controversy within the ethnic circles when an Irish lass got herself knocked up and married to an Italian.”

I could only imagine. The only people Boston’s tried and true Irish hated more than the Italians were… well, they hated everybody. “So, we put the rings to the nephew of this town’s top organized criminal. That’s just peaches.”

“And probably I’m next on the hit list,” Junior said. A brief flash of pleasure passed over Junior’s face. I think he’d always dreamed of making somebody’s hit list. Then the blunt rock of reality bounced off his skull. “Aw shit. I don’t wanna get shot.”

“Guess what, Junior. It wasn’t part of my life’s ambitions either.” I grabbed Ollie’s phone and dialed Twitch.

“County Morgue.”

“It’s Boo. How much do you know about Louis Blanc?”

“Wow! I was right! So it was Lou Blanc. I mean… wow!”

Great. I’d been shot by the right-hand man of the local Irish kingpin, and Twitch was star-struck. Too bad I hadn’t had time to ask for an autograph. “Yeah, it was a real honor, Twitch. Maybe I’ll have the bullet bronzed.”

Twitch chuckled. “You have no idea. Blanc is as cold-blooded as they come. Completely heartless son of a bitch. Like I told you earlier, you’re one lucky bastard you even got to ID him. There’re about three dozen others under construction sites around town who never got the chance. Lou Blanc. Wow.”

I gritted my teeth with impatience, sending a bolt of pain into my skull. “Hey, Twitch, you want to go jerk Blanc off or you want to tell me what you know?”

“He’s Cade’s numero uno enforcer. Has been since the late eighties. Nobody knows for sure why, other than Blanc is still standing and so is Cade, which means he does his job well. Pretty much everyone agrees Blanc’s got more balls and brains than Cade and the old guard put together.”

“Why isn’t he boss, then?”

“There are two rumors on that one.”

“And they are?”

“One is that Cade’s pop saved Blanc’s on the islands during Dubya-Dubya Two. You know, the old Irish code of honor bullshit.”

“What’s the second?”

“The second is the one I’m more inclined to believe. And it’s that Blanc just likes doing what he does. Bosses don’t get their hands dirty, and that’s what Blanc likes to do.”

An entire flock of geese and a fair-sized turkey walked over my grave as I remembered the cool gunmetal pressing against my head and the words that followed.

Be easy…

“Another popular belief is that the guy’s got something seriously wrong with his head.”

“No shit.”

“Seriously. Urban legend is the bullet that creased his head took out something in him. Like the part of his brain that controls remorse and stuff.”

And stuff. Well, wasn’t that just ducky. “Thanks, Twitch.” I was cold all over.

“There is a silver lining, though.”

“What is that?”

“Death is expensive, even for these guys. This was light retribution. They probably just wanted to give you back a taste of what you served the nephew. Because, believe you me, Boo. And if you’ve ever believed anything I’ve ever said to you-ever-believe this. If they wanted you out, you’d be wearing a toe tag right now. It’s probably over.”

The fuck it was.

Junior parked on the opposite side of the street, parallel to the long windows of Conor’s Publick. I could clearly see Cade leaning over a plate at a table in the back. I guess when you’re the last man standing like Frankie was, you didn’t have to worry as much about sitting at dark and secluded tables like the old guard used to. A cherry-colored Caddy was parked in front, a dinosaur in a cheap suit leaning on the hood.

Lou Blanc was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t help but contrast the pair of duos we’d dealt with. Donnelly and Barnes. Cade and Blanc. On one side of the law, the brains ran the show, the muscle performed the errands. From what I knew about Cade’s side of the fence, the vulgar strength called the shots. It bothered me to recognize which side I lived on.

We decided it would be just the two of us. Ollie never was much of a tussler, and I couldn’t trust Twitch not to pull the trigger on Cade simply because the opportunity arose.

We also decided, much to Junior’s dismay, that it would be me who went in. Alone. I’d already been shot. I was walking wounded. If something went horribly wrong and I didn’t come back out of Conor’s, Junior was more physically able to enact the retaliation that would follow. We may have been understaffed for an all-out street war against the Irish, but my army would at least make sure Cade followed me soon after.

I strolled over to the dinosaur as casually as a man with a hole in his leg relying on a cane could. The dinosaur turned his head on a neck as thick as a telephone pole. “The fuck you want, Gimpy?”

“Nothing with you, Bobo. I want your organ grinder.”

A dull film passed behind his big dumb cow eyes. Dim bastard didn’t even know I was mocking him. “What?”

Oh, this sweetheart was going to be an absolute pleasure. “I’m here to see Mr. Cade.”

“Mr. Cade don’t see nobody when he’s eating.”

“Where you from, paisan?” I smeared the last word with the same jackass Italian inflection the dinosaur was affecting.

“Hyde Park.”

“Then why the fuck do you talk in that Long Island wiseguy wanna-be patois?” I said with a smile.

“Huh?” Again with the stupid.

“I mean, this isn’t The Sopranos. If you’re gonna work for the Irish mob, you should at least affect a brogue or something. The Italian thing just makes you sound like the retard you look like.”

A dangerous smile crawled across his lips. “You fucking kidding me, Gimp?”

“If I wanted to kid you, big boy, I’d tell you a knock-knock joke.”

He wrinkled his brow, unsure whether to pound me into dust or laugh in my face. He turned his head up a bit, thinking about it. I whipped out the stun gun and jabbed it into his neck.

Nothing.

Batteries were dead.

Fucking great.

“The hell you doing?” he asked, grabbing my wrist. The stun gun dropped out of my hand and smashed on the sidewalk. “What is that, a pager?”

Plan B.

Losing the crutch, I pulled the white and blue striped tube sock out of my leg brace. I brought it down on his skull as I hopped on one leg. If he hadn’t moved, he might have gone down clean. But in his effort to get out of the way, the sock popped him square on the forehead. The skin split wide open, blood immediately gushing over his eyes. He took a groggy step backward, and I took another shot.

The second time, I landed right on the sweet spot. The dinosaur let go of my wrist, bounced once off the hood of the Caddy, and slid down to the sidewalk. A smear of darker red on the Caddy’s cherry color marked his descent. The sock tore from the impact and the change from my retirement fund spilled onto the street with a jingle. I dropped the sock on the dinosaur’s lap and limped inside.

The air conditioning blasted me as I opened the door. Conor’s was empty but for Cade, who barely afforded me a glance when I walked in. Hung over the bar were portraits of the Irish Holy Trinity: JFK, RFK, and Teddy. Only Teddy’s had a half-full rocks glass of whiskey in front of him, whether in honest tribute or smartassery, I couldn’t tell.

An empty restaurant was the last thing I wanted. The only three sounds in the place were my heart, some Chieftains on the speakers, and the cracking of the lobster claw Frankie was working on.

I sat at his table as casually as I could. Brando in a leg brace.

Caught in the silver lobster cracker in Cade’s scarred hands, the claw made a sharp splintering sound, like bone snapping. Cade couldn’t have cared less that I’d seated myself. I pressed my hands flat on the table to show that there was nothing in them-and to keep them from shaking.

Looking at him up close was strange. He was as close to a celebrity as I’d ever come. I found it hard not to look at the distinctively wide ears, knobby and cauliflowered, that the crime beat loved to use in descriptives of the man. A thick head with a face like a fist perched on top of his wide body. The wide ears made his head look even bigger. Between the thinning, bone-white hair that was combed sharply back over his pate and the thick white moustache, Cade looked like a polar bear in a light blue, three-hundred-dollar sweat suit. A polar bear that could have me killed just as easily as he ordered his barley pudding.

Something in his face gnawed at my mind. He and his nephew shared no features whatsoever, but something familiar was bugging me about the man.

“You need something?” he said, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to go away. As he sat up to give me his attention, I saw the ridiculous bib he was wearing-a white plastic job with a picture of a smiling lobster in a pot of boiling water.

I knew just how the lobster felt.

Before I spoke, I realized that I was staring at his garlic knot ears despite myself. “You had me shot.”

A broad smile stretched his thin lips wide. “Oh. You’re the tough guy who thought it would be a bright idea to smack my nephew around.” Crunch. He sucked noisily at the claw, letting me know I was as much a threat as the lobster.

“Your nephew is a piece of shit.”

That got his attention enough to stop his wet slurping. He leveled his gaze at me over the claw. “Watch your mouth.” His eyes threw daggers with the warning.

“You know what he does?”

“I don’t fucking care what he does. I care about what you did.” He casually pointed a broad finger, greasy with melted butter. “You should care what you do. You should be careful what you’re doing right fucking now, kid.”

“He makes videos. He rapes girls, and he videos them.”

“So what? You a faggot or something? You don’t like fucking girls? Maybe you’d like it if there was some nice cocksucking on there? That your thing?” He smirked and lifted his chin. “Huh, big boy? That it?”

“What you should know is that the girls are underage. Not only does he rape them, but he smacks them around first.”

“So maybe the little cunts are into that shit. You don’t know.”

“Vice has a file on him. They’d love to get a name.”

Cade rolled his eyes and dropped the lobster cracker on the table from a height where it made a nice thump. “Oh. And you know the name? Is that what you’re saying?” He laced his fingers in front of him, the index fingers pointing at me like a child’s approximation of a gun. “Let me make sure I’m perfectly clear about all this.” He cleared his throat and looked me dead in the eye. “You making threats? That right? Hey, Lou? You hearing this?”

“I’m hearing it.” Like an apparition separating himself from the shadows, Louis Blanc came walking around the corner. He circled us slowly, one perfectly manicured hand tracing the material of the green-checkered tablecloth. An obscenely large diamond winked at me from his cufflink, like it was letting me in on the joke. “But I’m not sure I’m believing it.” He made his way behind me, the hand coming to rest on the back of my chair. He leaned over my shoulder. “That true, kid?” he whispered. “You making threats to Mr. Cade?”

His breath was warm on the hairs behind my ear. His inflection was gentle, almost paternal. Good thing I’d pressed my hands onto the table, since they were starting to tremor. As was my jaw. But since I couldn’t press my face onto the table too, I just chomped on my lip to make it a sneer. Unfortunately, I think it made me look like I was pooping.

“You fucking making threats against my family, you little cocksucker?” Frankie’s temper was starting to flare. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Do you know who the fuck you’re talking to?”

“I know all about you, Mr. Cade. I know you have two daughters-”

Cade stood up, sending his chair backward onto the floor with a bang. “Don’t you say another fucking word!”

It was all so absurdist in a way, made more so by the smiling lobster I was now eye to eye with.

“How old was she, Frankie? How old was your daughter when she died last year?”

“Lou! Hold this punk down!” With an animal growl, Cade snatched up the silver lobster crackers.

For the second time that week, I felt the chill of Louis Blanc’s gun against my head. His other arm reached around my throat in a headlock, pulling me off-balance in the chair. I had no footing or leverage to resist if I wanted to. So I kept talking instead.

“How old was she, Mr. Cade? She was fourteen, wasn’t she? What if it was her, Frankie? What if it was her?”

That caught him for a second. Then, just as fast, the rage overwhelmed his doubt. He grabbed my wrist and went straight for my fingers with the lobster cracker. I made a fist and pulled my hand back. I wasn’t going to resist all that strenuously, not with a gun to my temple. Still, I wasn’t going to give up my fingers without making it difficult.

“Gimme his goddamn hand, Lou!”

“Uh, Frankie? I only got two hands here. You want me to let him hold the gun for me so I can keep his hand straight?”

“Shoot him in the fucking head, he keeps moving.”

I stopped. But then Cade stopped too.

Because I was smiling.

“The fuck you smiling at?”

Suddenly, the grip around my throat loosened. “Well, shit on me,” Blanc said.

“What the fuck areyou smiling at, Lou?”

“Frankie, you might want to look at your lobster,” I said.

Cade looked down at the stupid bib. At the tiny red laser dot that danced in the center of the cartoon lobster’s forehead. “The fuck?”

Louis whistled through his teeth. “Nicely played,” he whispered in my ear as he released his grip around my neck and put all four legs of my chair on the floor. He gently smoothed out the shoulders of my shirt and clapped me on the shoulder as he holstered his gun with the other hand.

“What the fuck is this?” Frankie tried to wipe the laser dot off his bib with a napkin. The light just ran over his hand.

“That, Frankie, is a laser beam. Most commonly used on sniper rifles and the like.” I knew Blanc’s gun was gone, but I could still feel the ghost of its pressure against my temple.

“Shit,” Frankie said.

Feeling a sudden empowerment, I reached across the table and took Frankie’s glass of white wine. I swallowed a mouthful to clear my slightly crushed voicebox. “This isn’t a threat, Mr. Cade. This is a fucking promise. Now I want you to hear me when I say this.”

“Yeah, yeah. You got my fucking attention, kid. Hey, Lou, can you believe this shit?”

Trying to regain my composure, I finished Frankie’s wine and placed the glass back on the table. “I understand why you did what you did. But Derek is pulling some sick shit, and he’s pulling it publicly. So I’m offering you two things: The first thing is my silence. You talk to him. He stops. Period. I hear of any more movies, and I buy myself a ‘get out of jail free’ card, courtesy of turning on your nephew.” Cade didn’t answer me, but I knew he was hearing me. His eyes were down to two slits.

“Second thing is I don’t raise my hand right now. If I do, your bib won’t save your lovely sweat suit. You proved your point. You got me. You got me good. But don’t you ever, ever threaten my friends or anyone I care about again.” I let my words hang.

Then they both started laughing. Whooping guffaws of amusement that threw me off the cool hand I thought I was playing. Cade walked around the table and put his arms around me, lifting me up from my chair.

“Jesus H. Christ, Lou! You believe this kid?” Frankie cupped my face in his hands and kissed me on the cheek. I don’t think it was a kiss of death, but it wasn’t full of passion, either.

“I must admit, Frankie, I’m impressed.” Lou leaned against the table, took a pair of cigarettes from a polished gold case, and lit them with a gold lighter. He handed one to me. I was too bewildered to refuse it. I guess state tobacco laws didn’t apply in mob-run establishments.

Frankie put his arm around me like we were long-lost family. “I mean, where do you buy pants with balls so big?” There were little tears of laughter in the corners of Frankie’s eyes. “C’mere.” Frankie hugged me again.

“You’re a piece of work, Malone. No doubt.” Louis’s scar crinkled up when he smiled, the cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Frankie grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen. You impressed me today. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been so impressed.”

Louis blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “You used to like that Rainey kid in Pittsburgh.”

“Before he went and made me have him shot.”

“Yeah.” Louis looked at me hard. “Before that.”

Cade clapped his hands and laughed. “True. But you, Malone. You, I hope, won’t make me kill you.”

How was I supposed to respond to that?

Frankie continued. “I’ll tell you what. You have actually done both me and my nephew a favor today. I’m sure that he don’t know about any police file on him. He don’t need the grief, and I sure as shit don’t. As of today, Derek’s production company comes to a halt. I’ll see to it myself, okay?”

“Okay.” If there was anything else I wanted to say, I couldn’t think of it.

Cade chucked me on the cheek and flecks of ice came back into his eyes. “Now, if I ever see you again, I’m gonna personally make sure you eat your own testicles. Got it?”

I got it. He knew I got it. There was no need for me to answer.

“Now, get the hell out of here. I gotta piss, you made me laugh so hard.” He dismissed me with a wave and left.

Before I turned to go, Lou gave me one more smile and a wink.

With his dead eye, of course.

Out the door, I hustled quickly past the dinosaur. He’d managed to make it back to his feet with the assistance of the small crowd of rubberneckers that had grown around him. He held his hand to his head, blood streaming between his fingers.

I climbed into the car, and Junior sped off. “We good?”

“We good.”

Junior tossed the laser sight he’d pulled off of Twitch’s rifle onto the backseat. “By the way, what was the backup plan in case they didn’t buy the laser?”

“We don’t need no stinking backup plan.”

“Didn’t have one, did you?”

“Um, no.”