Liam's Posts - CrimeSpace2024-03-29T07:41:12ZLiamhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/Liamhttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/60989580?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://crimespace.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=1qxluwel793bz&xn_auth=noTime and Tidetag:crimespace.ning.com,2009-03-07:537324:BlogPost:1867632009-03-07T20:00:00.000ZLiamhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/Liam
TIME AND TIDE<br />
<br />
1.<br />
DON’T TAKE YOUR GUNS TO TOWN<br />
<br />
South Boston, MA:<br />
<br />
Guys that look like me don’t do well in prison.<br />
<br />
They just don’t, it’s proven fact. If you’re not one of the blacks or the Mexicans or the skinheads or the chinks, you’re in no man’s land and you might as well kill yourself on the first night because you’d only last two days, maybe a week tops and that’s if you get yourself thrown in solitary. If you’re just an average guy who’s not quite white trash but who’s not exactly white…
TIME AND TIDE<br />
<br />
1.<br />
DON’T TAKE YOUR GUNS TO TOWN<br />
<br />
South Boston, MA:<br />
<br />
Guys that look like me don’t do well in prison.<br />
<br />
They just don’t, it’s proven fact. If you’re not one of the blacks or the Mexicans or the skinheads or the chinks, you’re in no man’s land and you might as well kill yourself on the first night because you’d only last two days, maybe a week tops and that’s if you get yourself thrown in solitary. If you’re just an average guy who’s not quite white trash but who’s not exactly white collar either, the only way you even think about taking a long hot shower or eating a peaceful meal at chow time without finding your own dinner fork oscillating in your back is if you’re a degenerate mick convict who at one time worked for my old man, if you’re still loyal to him now. And as blind luck has it, I’m a spitting image of the sumbitch, the soft-spoken but equally seedy racketeer, loan shark, gunrunner and convicted cold-blooded murderer.<br />
<br />
Billy Ray Landry.<br />
<br />
I know that his death will mean my death but when you got nothing and when you know he takes away and takes away without ever giving a single thing back, the color of your skin and the status of your prison popularity start to mean a lot less. When he took away that one thing in the world and came away with a menial forty-five year sentence, up for parole in twenty, the color of daylight, of your own blood starts to mean a lot less to you.<br />
<br />
Leaning against the brick structure of Kelley’s Pasta Village on the corner of E. 3rd and L Streets, dragging on my Marlboro and slowly working my way into doing what I swore to myself I’d do.<br />
<br />
Still dark, early.<br />
<br />
The sky a deep blue watery grave, the morning sun a ravenous, reclusive beast.<br />
<br />
Car horns, ambulances, cop cars screeching and wailing and serenading the city with their monotonous, luminous nocturnes.<br />
<br />
The unmistakable stench of diesel fumes and car exhaust, grime and garbage, dirt and desperation.<br />
<br />
A massive hangover from of a night of blood drunkenness, the smell of Italian food that’s been sitting cold and clumpy throughout the night, forcing my stomach and the world around me to spin against one another like yin and yang.<br />
<br />
I fish my cell phone from my pocket and check the time. Nearly five in the morning, the bitterly cold sea breeze whispering up the port and through the streets as unseen and unmerciful as the Angel of Death. I stand and wait in this existential enclave of the city, crammed and packed into this blue-collar community, this hard knocks haven. Restless, can’t sleep, and honestly who could when you have as much weighing on your mind, your shoulders and your heart as I do? It was a long walk to get here, and I know it’ll be an even longer one into the loving arms of Boston’s finest.<br />
<br />
The brown leather jacket covers the gray wife beater with the frayed edges and the snag and the sweat stains in the armpit, and that just barely covers the black Smith & Wesson .44 hiding in the waistline of my jeans. The one Billy Ray gave me ions ago, another lifetime ago.<br />
<br />
The one I plan to raise some hell with.<br />
<br />
Through the thick clouds of cigarette smoke, I squint over at the Exxon across the street, Newhill Plaza opposite the gas station on the corner of E. 3rd. When I cut my eyes back over to the station, I pay close attention to who goes in, and more importantly, who comes out.<br />
<br />
Flailing headlights, the warm buzz of the occasional car and the clunking and roaring and grating motors that propel them, all blazing down L Street ahead of me and all around me. I wait for the cattle to clear the beaten path before I even attempt to cross the street and do what I told myself I’d do.<br />
<br />
What I have to do or I won’t respect myself later tonight or any other night for that matter.<br />
<br />
I run a surprisingly steady hand through the long and unruly dark blond curls on my head and use my dirt-caked fingernails to scratch my dry scalp. I reassure myself it’s just a deep itch and not a nervous tick. I reassure myself that I’m not apprehensive at all because actually getting away with this crime is not something I’m really trying to do anyway.<br />
<br />
I’m the ticking time bomb who will intentionally fail to detonate.<br />
<br />
Now that the sunrise has finally managed to crane its neck up from over the top of Southie’s brand new row of condos, I know I look more than suspect as the unrefined, tattooed construction worker type, loitering and staking out the gas station across L Street, South Boston’s main drag. My location is completely intentional but no one else in the world would know that and after I’m apprehended, I’ll probably end up on one of those World’s Dumbest Criminals programs. Maybe I should’ve come later in the day, rush hour maybe when I’d cause a lot more attention. It’s common knowledge that most criminals don’t want to be seen, noticed. But even though I look the part of the lowlife, the derelict petty crook, I think I’ll just take a seat on the dirty tile floor and light up another smoke and wait until the cops take me willing and grinning to Cedar Junction Maximum Security Prison after I stick-up the Exxon.<br />
<br />
It’s not like I have a deathwish or I’m scared to be a contributing member of society because I have been for the past eight years. It’s just that now she’s gone and she was the only family I had except for Billy Ray.<br />
I wait and I smoke and I continue to lean against the pizzeria until I see the subtle hints of the sunrise, batting its eye up from behind the John Hancock Tower. That’s when I leave behind any lingering apprehensions along with the shortened cig butt I crush beneath one of my steel-toed Wolverines. That’s when I quickly secure the .44, take a deep breath, wait for the Pest Control van to clunk its way through the yellow light and then cross L Street without waiting for the pedestrian crosswalk sign.<br />
<br />
A jaywalking armed gunman, off to do the Devil’s work.<br />
<br />
I cross the cracked tarmac, the wind constantly smacking me in the face instead of remaining at my back like the old Irish blessing promised. I walk across the fading white line under the stoplights, stride to the narrow median between the four lanes, that slightly raised concrete island that serves as the halfway marker. Terra firma. The point of no return. It only reminds me that this is my last chance to turn back, to turn right around and go back to the hotel and pack up my clothes and head straight home instead of going to jail. It reminds me it’s not too late to turn in my room key and pile into my Nissan pick-up and drive right back to Charleston with my tail tucked firmly between my legs. It reminds me that I can learn to live with myself if I leave and go back to living in yet another compacted city where all my friends are either in jail or dead or completely different people than they used to be. Different people I wouldn’t recognize even if they knew the minute details of my life, like how my old man made his bones in the 70’s and 80’s, killed a few people in the 90’s, ran his own crew of Irish-American criminals early in the new millennium.<br />
<br />
I come up on the median, that vexing concrete island, and I use it as the only green light I need to leave L Street’s center street divider and shove onward towards the Exxon. As I cut through, violently separating the holly bushes that surround the front side of the station with no regard, I pat the handle of the .44 to make sure it hasn’t slipped out of place. That’s right around the time when I remember one of the two songs she sang to me when I was just a toddler, one she used to put me to bed with at night.<br />
<br />
“Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” Johnny Cash.<br />
<br />
As I approach the pumps, the fresh fumes stinging my nostrils and throwing a swift sucker punch to my already groggy head, I silently tell her I’m sorry, tell her that I did take my guns to town but that I did it all for her and for the betterment of everyone else in this city. For the betterment of my own buried soul. I tell her it wouldn’t be coated in grime and sin if she were still here. Now I don’t know who I am or how what happened to her could’ve actually brought me to this. All I know is that there’s not much else to lose, and that now I’m preparing to walk headfirst through the fire and brimstone and the flames of retribution and all that other metaphorical horseshit. I prepare to turn the main drag of South Boston upside down and right back around again.<br />
<br />
Two trucks at the pumps, both old, beat up, ridden hard and hung up wet, the beds boasting strings of roof shingles and lumber and grimy water coolers. I peer through the glass and into the station to see both drivers standing in line at the counter with their steaming coffees and their honey buns and breakfast burritos. Behind the counter, a moderately attractive young woman with pale skin and dark curly hair taking cash and punching buttons, beaming a toothy grin as she exchanges chit chat with the working-class heroes. I see that underneath all her coy, flirty charms, she’s a bored, ditzy tease who seemingly hopes for a tip even though you don’t give tips to the pretty gas station attendant girl, no matter how pretty she is.<br />
<br />
The smartest thing for me to do would be to stop, wait for these two clowns to come out before I roll in and pull the gun. I figure just to show off for the checkout girl, they just might try to get righteous and take me down. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing, except I might catch a beating and I’d much rather scare some chick half to death than to catch a beat down by sixteen calloused, simultaneously thrown knuckles. I go for the pocket of my jeans, pull out my Marlboro pack only to find it empty.<br />
<br />
Damnit.<br />
<br />
Guess I was so honed in on my target that I didn’t even notice I already finished off my last smoke. To compensate, I fish through all my pockets and come up with the cracked, splintered toothpick I snagged from the counter at the Cracker Barrel a few nights ago, just outside of Charlotte. Snagged it while I paid for my meal and the road CDs I picked up from the gift shop. Both extremely significant and guaranteed to fuel my need for an unbridled revenge.<br />
<br />
Celtic Roots, and the 16 Biggest Hits of Johnny Cash.<br />
<br />
I haven’t shaved or had a shower since her funeral earlier this week. Few of her co-workers, the priest, the gravediggers and me, standing in the rain at the Sister of Mercy Cemetery in Summerville. I was so overwrought with grief and guilt when I got the phone call back in Charleston, it took until I was halfway through Virginia to transition myself, to fill myself full of anger, rage, a relentless all or nothing vengeance. Didn’t even tell Doug what happened, just packed a bag and left town without calling in for work. I just split and if he doesn’t understand my reasoning for leaving my job behind and driving up to Boston, then he’s a seedy businessman who’s in love with his money and who knows shit about the human heart.<br />
<br />
I chew on my toothpick, taste mint-flavored splinters and pocket lint. That’s right around the time the first guy exits the station, and I hear the second ask the checkout girl for a pack of Newports from behind the counter. Working man number one looks over at me suspiciously and I throw him a nod with a smirk that tells him to beat feet or get clocked in the noggin with my piece. He’s staring at me, seemingly sizing me up like he wants to kick some shit. I take it in stride, follow through with my best-laid plan, wait until Paddy McBlue-collar inside joins the Mighty Quinn out here and the two of them take flight in their trucks.<br />
More for his sake than mine, I glance in the other direction, over across 3rd at Newhill Plaza, which seems to appear even more desolate than the Exxon. Thinking I may have chosen a poor location for my heist, starting to feel just the slightest anxiety rise from my belly and trail down to my now quivering hands, I toss the toothpick to the asphalt, swing the door open, and step inside the Exxon as the first guy returns to his vehicle.<br />
<br />
Paddy’s leaning in towards the chick behind the counter, telling her some kind of anecdote about a priest and a rabbi while, judging from her reaction, his rancid breath forces the unruly hair nestling on her shoulders to dance a jig. She’s more attractive than I originally thought. Thin lips, a few endearingly uneven teeth, big blue eyes, same shade as mine. She looks like a cross between Natalie Portman and Scary Spice. Probably has the same story every other twenty-something gas station checkout girl has. Single mother, living temporarily with mama while she works insane hours to support a toddler, no child support check from deadbeat daddy.<br />
<br />
Sounds familiar, in more ways than one.<br />
<br />
Paddy stalls like a used Chevy, overstaying his welcome, taking for fricking ever to get to the punch line of his joke. Checkout girl stands frozen, halfway between disgust and faux anticipation. I stand behind Paddy, stare up towards the ceiling, huff and puff and wish I could blow this goon away for simply keeping me from what I’ve come in here to do. I cross my arms, place a shaky palm over the Celtic cross tattoo on the right arm, and Spike, the Tom & Jerry bulldog on the left. When he gets to the end of his agonizing attempt at humor and suavity, the girl tosses him a sympathy giggle as I step up to the counter and crowd him, force him to subconsciously move aside. Fortunately, he does and I plant both hands on the coffee-stained countertop in front of me. Paddy shifts his body halfway behind me, halfway between the double doors. I turn and eyeball him, see what his hold-up is. His eyes glued to the back on my jeans, he’s either a queer or he has an uncanny ability to spot the outline of my thought to be discreetly placed pistol under my shirt and jacket.<br />
<br />
His eyes on the covered .44, he takes the first swig of his coffee as he points to the gun.<br />
<br />
“Bro, you ain’t carryin’ no pistol under there, are ya?”<br />
<br />
Shit.<br />
<br />
I can’t rightly pull a stick-up if Paddy here won’t frigging put boot to pavement and walk away. I think quickly, concoct an answer, throw it at him as he casually rests a hand on the top of the leather knife sheath on his on his belt, the top snapped shut.<br />
<br />
For now.<br />
<br />
He grins at me, cocks one eye closed like Popeye and guffaws in a way that could only make me want to quit smoking, today.<br />
<br />
Aggravated that this shitbird can’t seem to mind his business like everyone else in this neighborhood does so well, I snap at him.<br />
<br />
“Why don’t ya move the stand-up comedy show to the street, work your sad-ass jokes to the morning traffic? Kindly, can ya go ahead and do that for me? And by the way, no, it ain’t no gun. Why would I be carrying around a gun in broad daylight? I don’t even know you. Beat feet, leave me the hell alone and catch up with the Mighty Quinn out there so you won’t be late for the union meeting or the Patriots game or some shit.”<br />
<br />
“Go on, screw, Jimmy. Pat’s gonna catch a bad one if you’re late to the job site today. He told me you been slackin’ off lately, takin’ long liquid lunches in the park if ya know what I mean and I know you know what I mean. Leave this poor fella alone, will ya?” says the checkout girl with a slightly low-pitched grain in her voice, firing a furrowed brow at Paddy, winking at me.<br />
<br />
He stares me down, takes another sip of coffee, burping under his breath before scratching his junk ardently.<br />
<br />
“You ain’t from around here, are ya, bro? Well, since you’re new to the neighborhood or whateva, I guess I can cut ya some slack. Today. Tomorrow, I might just cut ya, okay, talkin’ shit like ya got a mouthful of it. So, yeah, okay, apologies, sure, just yankin’ your chain or some shit. Talk to me like you’re my old man again, I’ll pull your fackin’ card, got me? Alright then. I’ll catch ya, Maggie, take it sleazy,” he says, spinning on the heel of his mud-crusted boot and pushing the glass doors open.<br />
<br />
He stumbles off towards his truck as I figure the wind tossed the tail of my jacket up, allowing him to successfully call my bluff. I turn my head back to the checkout girl, and because I guess I’m so appreciative of her interjection, because she’s a lot better looking up close than she was from outside the station, I hold off on the urge to pull out my gun and snatch up all the dough from the register.<br />
<br />
I opt for a new pack of smokes instead.<br />
<br />
“Pack of Marlboro Reds, please ma’am.”<br />
<br />
“Ma’am? Don’t think I ever been called that before. Marlboro Reds, sure thing. And don’t worry about Jimmy…he’s just a bitter ol’ dink who gets all pissy and jealous when I bat an eye at anybody who’s male, and who’s not him. He treats me like I’m his daughter slash girlfriend, and if ya put those two together it equals just full on wicked perverted pukefest. He’s just mad ‘cause you’re young and cute and he’s not at all.”<br />
<br />
“Young and cute, huh? Well, I guess that’s about the closest thing to a compliment I heard all day. Well, besides I talk shit like I got a mouthful of it, of course.”<br />
<br />
If I was ever considering pulling out my gun and scaring her half to death, I surely can’t do it now. Damnit. Why couldn’t she have been some fat and rude trucker-type with a greasy Grizzly Adams beard and holey flannel shirt?<br />
<br />
Maggie, you just threw a wrench into the spokes of my foolproof plan, botched up my entire day’s work.<br />
S<br />
he grins at my last comment, then speaks.<br />
<br />
“Oh, by the way, I need to see some ID for the smokes, if ya don’t mind.”<br />
<br />
“What if I do mind? Need to see my ID? Wow. I guess I’ll take that as a compliment too,” I answer, a little taken aback as I awkwardly reaching for my back pocket.<br />
<br />
As I do, my fingers brush up against the handle of the .44, and because she insulted me by suggesting I was younger than I actually am, I nearly reconsider my plan to keep my peace.<br />
<br />
After she grabs my smokes, she sets them on the counter and picks up my driver’s license, fastening a pretty blatant smirk on her lips while her tongue paws the inside of her mouth.<br />
<br />
“South Carolina?”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, Charleston.”<br />
<br />
“Morgan Landry? Morgan? That really your name?”<br />
<br />
“The inconceivable, unbelievable truth.”<br />
<br />
“Wow. Never met a dude named Morgan before. Kind of a girl’s name, isn’t it? It’s kinda like ‘A Boy Named Sue’.”<br />
<br />
“I met Johnny Cash once, y’know. No lie.”<br />
<br />
“Oh, go screw. No ya didn’t. Did ya, really? No shit?”<br />
<br />
“No shit. My Mom and I were eating fried chicken at a local dive in Nashville when the man himself walked into the joint with John Jr. I was young. Too young to remember Mom said, but I know I recall shaking Johnny’s hand. Anyway, yeah, she got me his autograph. She said she nearly didn’t because people had been telling her how flat-out mean the guy was. Said people in Madison County pretended like they knew him and he’d embarrass ‘em for it, call ‘em out, call their bluff and all. But yeah, I met the man in black, back in ’78 I think it was.”<br />
<br />
Her eyes are wide, the lids heavy with a metallic blue eye shadow and thickly coated mascara.<br />
<br />
“Geez Louise, you’re serious, aren’t ya? That’s pretty damn cool I must say.”<br />
<br />
“Serious as a heart attack.”<br />
<br />
As serious as the heart attack I would’ve given you had you not been such an attractive young bird.<br />
“Well, Morgan Landry, that makes me your number one fan I spose.”<br />
<br />
I grin, pay for the smokes, tap the pack and light up. Her head lowered, Maggie peers up at me, crossing her arms and resting them on the countertop in front of me.<br />
<br />
“So, this how you normally sweep all the unsuspecting gas station attendant chicks off their feet, huh? Ya just waltz in off the street all cool and Don Juan and spew out some story about how you met the man in black himself?”<br />
<br />
“Every once and awhile. Usually, I at least try to rob the place blind first.”<br />
<br />
She giggles. I don’t.<br />
<br />
“Y’know, you do look like you’d just go ahead and stick me up with the quickness. Swoon me away with all that southern charm and just take me for all the money I got. I know. I can just read it in your baby blues, Morgan Landry. So, anyway, you’re from Charleston, right? Civil War and southern hospitality and shit. Whatta ya doin’ all the way up here in Boston? You lost?”<br />
<br />
“No.”<br />
<br />
“Ya visitin’ family or somethin’?”<br />
<br />
That’s one way of looking at it.<br />
<br />
“Yeah, something like that.”<br />
<br />
“Nice,” she answers as she hands over my change and my receipt.<br />
<br />
“So how long you in town for?” she asks, snatching my receipt right back from me, pulling a fountain pen from the Boston Bruins coffee tin by the register.<br />
<br />
How long am I in town for?<br />
<br />
Depends on how long my sentence is.<br />
<br />
More than likely, I’ll be in town for oh, twenty-five to life.<br />
<br />
“I guess I’d have to say that my stay here is pretty indefinite.”<br />
<br />
“Ya don’t say.”<br />
S<br />
he feverishly scribbles on the back of my receipt and I listen to her multitude of earrings, her multitude of silver bracelets clank against one another like a wind chime symphony. When she’s finished, she holds the thin piece of slightly curled paper up beside her face and cocks an eyebrow.<br />
<br />
In a fancy, discreetly nervous cursive, her name and phone number.<br />
<br />
“Look, I don’t normally do this a lot ‘cause let’s face it, all the other bums in Southie are boozehound hooligan loser snorefests. If I give ya my number…will ya call me?”<br />
<br />
“Maggie, I gotta be honest with ya…I don’t think I’ll be calling anyone for a pretty long time. Why would you want me to call you anyway? For all you know, I could be some kinda psycho killer, some kinda burn-out career criminal.”<br />
<br />
I’m not there yet, but I’m slowly clawing my way closer as we speak.<br />
<br />
“Oh yeah? Well maybe I like bad boys. You don’t even know. Besides, how bad could you really be with a name like Morgan?”<br />
<br />
“What can I say, my old man had a sense of humor. That doesn’t mean I do.”<br />
<br />
I give her a reluctant grin and accept the recycled receipt as I turn, take a few steps and exit Maggie’s Exxon station. I don’t even reply to her last statement, don’t even give her a parting word before pushing through the double glass doors and leaving the store. I don’t want to lead her on, lead myself on because I know I’ll more than likely never see her again after today.<br />
<br />
And because I didn’t account for Maggie being so easy to look at and witty to boot, I secure her number into my back pocket just next to my gun when I cross the tarmac and storm into L Street Liquors just next to Kelley’s Pasta Village, using nothing to cover my face. I calmly walk up to the register, pull out the .44 and bark at the young slacker behind the counter, engulfed in the Guns & Ammo magazine splayed out in front of him. I aim my .44 at his chest, scream at him, scare him into handing over all the cash in the drawer. When he does, I hop up onto the counter and order the kid to put ass to tile. Before he complies, I watch him clumsily fumble for the red button under the counter, and I pretend not to see him push it in.<br />
<br />
As I sit and wait for the cops, I hold my piece in one hand, and with the other, I count up the 522 bucks that mean jack squat to me. No money in the world could buy me what I ache for, what I’m willing to rot away for, to die for.<br />
<br />
As I sit and wait for the cops, I stuff the money into my pocket, set the gun down onto the counter next to me, and I light up another smoke.<br />
<br />
As I sit and wait for the cops, I think about Maggie, how I finally found one girl in the past five years who’s been worthy enough of snagging a date with me. I think about how I can’t even call her now because of all the days in my life, I had to meet her on the worst one imaginable.<br />
<br />
As I sit and wait for the cops, I think about how I’ll soon be in Cedar Junction with Billy Ray and I won’t even care about being the fresh fish lone white boy with no allies. I’ll only care about being able to see my father again, the long-awaited family reunion.<br />
<br />
When the cops finally squeal up on the curb of L Street Liquors, I sit and smoke, welcome them through the doors and thank them when they snatch up my gun, grab me and throw me to the dusty floor, grinding a multitude of angry, pointy knees into my spine.<br />
<br />
I thank them when they handcuff me, read me my rights, curse me up and down, stand me up and shove me face first through the double doors.<br />
<br />
Full of resolve, I peer up at the morning sky, take a deep, calming breath. I glance over across the street at Maggie, now standing outside the Exxon, crossing her arms and shaking her head with a dropped jaw. I throw her a nod, a grin before I silently thank the cops for finally arriving on the scene and promptly arresting me. I silently thank them for ushering me to the police cruiser and clumsily shoving me into the backseat.<br />
<br />
And I thank them because now I can finally go to MCI-Cedar Junction Maximum Security Prison and kill my father for killing my mother.Black Lambtag:crimespace.ning.com,2008-07-24:537324:BlogPost:1531902008-07-24T21:00:00.000ZLiamhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/Liam
BLACK LAMB<br />
1.<br />
<br />
RITE OF PASSAGE<br />
<br />
Charleston, South Carolina – 1995:<br />
<br />
If the frigid, stifling December air inside the car could somehow allow me to move my hand, the anxiety alone would surely object. I attempt to take just one tiny peek at the three-inch scar running diagonally across my palm, the one that forever connects me to Ryno, Dax, Yaya and Eddie. My best friends in the world, the ones who choreographed me through my most significant rite of passage.<br />
<br />
I’m frozen inside the narrow…
BLACK LAMB<br />
1.<br />
<br />
RITE OF PASSAGE<br />
<br />
Charleston, South Carolina – 1995:<br />
<br />
If the frigid, stifling December air inside the car could somehow allow me to move my hand, the anxiety alone would surely object. I attempt to take just one tiny peek at the three-inch scar running diagonally across my palm, the one that forever connects me to Ryno, Dax, Yaya and Eddie. My best friends in the world, the ones who choreographed me through my most significant rite of passage.<br />
<br />
I’m frozen inside the narrow limitations I’ve previously set for myself, half an inch away from touching Eddie’s hollow body beside me and breaching the contract signed in pre-adolescent blood. The rusty blade, the bond that spawned the vow of five impulsive, masochistic turned nihilistic children all those years ago has successfully stood the test of time and caused one catastrophic landslide after another. None seems to be more devastating than the one that’s been compiled and molded and shaped into the single greatest organized criminal act that the quiet, law-abiding city of Charleston has ever seen.<br />
<br />
The wind nearly cuts Ryno’s Oldsmobile in half, rocking it side to side like a Turkish cannon battering the city walls of Constantinople. And the cruel analogy only reminds me that I have a huge test tomorrow, Floore’s second period World History. But instead of peering over notes on the fall of Byzantium and committing to memory all of Napoleon’s mishaps at Waterloo, I’m out late on a school night with my loser friends, preparing to hijack a truckload of booze to re-sell and turn a profit.<br />
<br />
As I wait for Ryno’s decrepit heater to reach me, Eddie, and Dax in the backseat, I take a deep breath and blow it into my hands with the kind of controlled vigor that shouldn’t give the guys a chance to notice that they’re trembling uncontrollably. My scar, my birthmark, my rite of passage, it winks at me with its centimeter wide seedy stare and its multitude of stitch marks that line the wound like lulling, batting eyelashes. Mom and Dad wigged out when I came home with a gaping gash in my hand. After they rushed me to the emergency room, after they simmered down enough to hear how that gash got there in the first place, they grounded me for two weeks. No TV, no Nintendo, no stereo, and no friends, especially not my closest ones.<br />
<br />
The ones I ill advisedly decided to play pin the tail on the blood brother with.<br />
<br />
If Mom and Dad knew what I was up to tonight, I could go ahead and call my being grounded for two weeks when I was ten a fond memory. If they knew I was out tonight with these guys, they’d never let me see the sun again. Bread and water in a room with no windows if I was lucky, and that’s only after they marched me down to Berkeley County Jail themselves and made sure my fingerprints were run ragged through the system, that my name and my stats and samples of my DNA were delivered to the cops by hand. Dad still busts my chops, has for years now because I can’t seem to break away from the neighborhood friends I came up with, Eddie and Yaya, Dax and Ryno. And this two hundred pounds of perfectly good wasted space in front of me, Jimmy Cochran, the Cockroach as I like to call him, who finds himself in a constant struggle to win one hundred percent of Ryno’s attention from Yaya.<br />
<br />
Yaya and I grew up together, two peas in a pod all through grade school and junior high. But in ninth grade, she started hanging with the smokers and the metalheads who sort of ruled the school. Eddie and I have always been pretty good friends, but when Yaya started lowering her standards in the company she decided to keep, that’s when Eddie and I started getting closer. I guess that kind of made us best friends and it’s been that way ever since. In high school, Yaya’s friends and Ryno’s friends started hanging out together and that’s when Yaya and Ryno started dating. They’re still together now.<br />
<br />
The corner of S. Market and Church Street, stewing here in Ryno’s beat up schooner of a car with the well weathered, heavily blemished roof and the heater on the very brink of falling completely to nothing. I glance up at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company Restaurant, over at Black Market Minerals, the French Quarter Inn, Bacci’s Italian Bistro, the Charleston Market behind us, and Tommy Condon’s Irish Pub just ahead of us, where this Bushmills whiskey truck will apparently make its weekly delivery. And what makes this particular truck so special is that usually, it makes its deliveries on Thursday morning. In broad daylight. This time, this week, Tommy’s opens a little later because of the new holiday schedule implemented by the new management. Which means that this particular delivery will fall on a Thursday night instead.<br />
<br />
Tonight.<br />
<br />
And as I fix my eyes on the freezing rain that pelts the flapping, adjacent Irish flags outside the east entrance of the pub, Ryno catches my preoccupation in the rearview and speaks up.<br />
<br />
“You straight back there, Bill?”<br />
<br />
“Ryno, this homo ain’t been straight a day in his life. You didn’t know? He and Eddie like to…y’know…swap a little spit and give each other succulent rubdowns and shit on the weekends and holidays,” taunts Cockroach, twisting his curly, nappy head around from the front seat to eye me crookedly.<br />
<br />
He’s a garbage-spewing degenerate, a major league asshole who moved here from Charlotte the summer before we all went into seventh grade at College Park. He sits in the passenger seat with Yaya in the middle and Ryno behind the wheel.<br />
<br />
The way Ryno talks would probably be considered strange to most Charlestonians, with his deep and droning tone and his thick Boston accent, which he refuses to let go of even though he’s lived in South Carolina for most of his life. It’s even a bit strange to me, since he doesn’t sound like any other dude from Boston I’ve ever seen on TV. His real name is Ryan Mulraney, but we’ve been calling him Ryno for as long as we all can remember. The guy’s built like a Homeric hero. He’s always been a pretty muscular kid, seemed to hit puberty, to start shaving before any of the rest of us.<br />
<br />
“Yeah, I’m cool, Ryno. Just a little…anxious, I guess, I dunno,” I answer timidly.<br />
<br />
He chuckles, grins with one side of his mouth as he drags on his Newport and passes it to Yaya.<br />
<br />
“Anxious? Is it about the job or what? It’s like I told ya, ya don’t even gotta to do nothin’ hardly. All ya gotta do is kick back, drive a friggin’ car, stay under the speed limit and maybe change the diaper ‘round Eddie’s twig ‘n’ berries when the bottom falls out. Other than that, you’re roses, bro. Ya got nothin’ to worry about.”<br />
<br />
“Whatever, Ryan, I’m not even scared,” shoots Eddie with a gust that rivals the wind outside.<br />
<br />
Ryno guffaws his foghorn laugh and jabs a blunted elbow into Yaya left arm. She gives him a sympathy grin, rolls her eyes, then takes a long drag from the cigarette.<br />
<br />
Ryno continues.<br />
<br />
“But seriously, dude, there’s nothin’ to even be anxious about either. We got the shit on lockdown. Honestly, whatta you really gotta do in this whole thing anyway? You and Fast Eddie back there winded up with the easy job.”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, Billy’s on bitch detail,” jests Cockroach with a crap-eating grin that makes it extremely easy to clench my jaws in a subtle facsimile of my hands wrapped around his stubbly throat.<br />
<br />
Yaya pries her head around and grins at me, shifting her eyebrows as if urging me to retaliate against Cockroach.<br />
<br />
Before I get a chance, he develops a pretty bad case of diarrhea mouth.<br />
<br />
“By the way, Eddie…how’s the sunrise over Yokohama? Did you know Chinese people don’t have very much in the way of eyebrows and that’s why ya’ll have to squint your eyes so much? To keep the sun out of ‘em. True story,” says Cockroach as sarcastically as possible, trying his best to sound like one of those Mister Rogers-types who always host those obscure PBS educational programs.<br />
<br />
Eddie’s not Chinese. He’s not Japanese. He’s not Asian, but he does have almond eyes that do tend to come off as squinty and shifty. He doesn’t look like a juvenile delinquent either, despite his small role in tonight’s events. He’s a senior, like the rest of us, but he looks more like the post-adolescent, pre-puberty eighth grader you want to watch out for because he’s such a genuinely nice kid. Nobody in their right mind should want to mess with him because he’s got a 24-karat heart.<br />
<br />
Clearly, Cockroach isn’t in his right mind.<br />
<br />
Eddie’s hair is slightly spiky in the front but with one serious cowlick in the back. Square jaw, not a trace of stubble lining it. Whole face about as unblemished and smooth as a baby’s caboose. Voice still a little high, like he hasn’t hit puberty yet. He assures us he has, but that he was born with a shortage of testosterone. He has just started taking shots for it in his rear end, but nobody knows about that except for me. He’s actually German-Irish, with dirty blond hair and blue eyes, but Cockroach has been ridiculing the poor guy for years about his Asian appearance. Constant jokes about Yokohama and the false reasons behind squinting eyes and wearing Kimonos to bed and bowing 24/7 and catching flies with chopsticks and other highly unnecessary Asian-themed semantics. But Eddie’s always been the nice guy of the gang and the rest of us love him for it.<br />
<br />
He sits rigid, practiced, staring straight ahead, now boasting a big pair of headphones on his ears and exhaling a fresh cloud of icy breath from his thin lips. The wire to the headphones disappears down into his brown corduroy jacket.<br />
<br />
“Whatcha jammin’ to Ed? Is it that Radiohead mix I made you last week?” I ask him, trying to stir a bit of morale throughout the rest of the car.<br />
<br />
Slowly, unsure that I’m actually talking to him, he turns to me.<br />
<br />
Regrettably, so does Cockroach.<br />
<br />
“Radiohead blows, Billy. Buncha squealin’ and whinin’ and moanin.’ Sounds like a buncha castrated pigs cryin’ about how much their life sucks,” he spits, full of animosity towards me, and anything I take even the slightest enjoyment in.<br />
<br />
Both Eddie and I and everyone else in the car continue to deny Cockroach’s painful existence.<br />
<br />
“What?” questions Eddie with eyes that tend to squint even more in discernment.<br />
<br />
“I said what’re you jammin’ to, on the headphones?”<br />
<br />
He shakes his head, purses his lips.<br />
<br />
“Oh, nothing. Yeah, I just decided to start using these babies to keep my ears warm. They actually work pretty good so far,” she says with a smile.<br />
<br />
I give him a little grin and shake my head, while Cockroach continues to find discrepancy in every conversation I’m part of.<br />
<br />
“Seriously, Eddie? Seriously? Hear this tool? This fucking guy can’t even afford a hoodie or a skullcap to keep his ears warm. Ever heard of a skullcap, Eddie? Yeah, they’re actually made for keepin’ your ears warm. Mind blowing concept, I know. Yo check it…Eddie’s family’s so poor they had to put their cardboard box up for a second mortgage. Damn special ed case.”<br />
<br />
“Really, Cockroach? Really? Weren’t you the one who used to ride the short bus to school? Had a special seat in back that was all your own? Went to the classes in the back building with all the other behavior cases? Everybody in school called the back building ‘Dysfunction Junction,’ right?” Eddie fires back, and it forces everyone else in the car to giggle a little, even Cockroach’s role model, Ryno.<br />
<br />
“I told you if you called me Cockroach again, your ass was grass, didn’t I? You friggin’ ten year-old foreign exchange student. I told all you guys before, alright? They were overcrowded on the big buses and had to send some kids from my neighborhood on the short ones.”<br />
<br />
“But…Ryno lives next door to you. Always has. He rode the big bus. He always rode the big bus. You always rode the big bus, didn’t you, Ryno,” Eddie asks facetiously, a grin slowly fading into the corners of his mouth.<br />
<br />
Ryno chuckles and blows a mouthful of smoke.<br />
<br />
“Dude, seriously, Eddie, I swear to sweet Jehovah, if we weren’t in the middle of a job and if you weren’t a five year-old toddler I would jam you up so bad.”<br />
<br />
“Jam you up? What the hell is that, Cochran? Jam you up?” says Dax with a face like he’s just licked something sour.<br />
<br />
Cockroach turns and flips him the finger, then spreads it around the entire backseat to Eddie and I to cross us with it, to christen us all with his divine cynicism.<br />
<br />
“Just sit on it and twirl, all you homos, man. Damn buncha damn tards, man. Seriously. Lucifer lifted his leg and out shot you three chodes,” fires Cockroach from the front seat, now furiously raking his fingernails through his curly locks and his blotchy rat’s nest excuse for a stubble beard.<br />
<br />
“Yes, ladies and gents, you heard it here first. Coming straight from the mouth of this prestigious, four-time award-winning MVP of the short bus,” announces Eddie triumphantly with a twisted sneer.<br />
<br />
I give him another grin, then almost immediately turn and stare out the window. I deliberately disrupt my thoughts on the pointless squabbling and divert all my attention to Carrie. How much I want to marry her one day, how bad she wants me to quit wasting my time with these bozos, and how if she knew I was downtown right now with my delinquent friends about to steal a truck full of hard liquor, she’d surely side up with my Gestapo parents. She can stomach Eddie because he’s like my brother. But the rest of them, she steers clear, holds them in nothing but contempt. She sees any of them treading down the hallway at school and she deliberately walks the other way. She knows that they are all juvenile criminals in the greater Charleston area and that Ryan “Ryno” Mulraney is the thug life pack leader at a high school full of spoiled rich kids from corrupt rich families.<br />
<br />
Yeah, Carrie’s smarter than me, because this foolishness, what we’re doing tonight with the truck…it’s going put me in the jail one of these days. Maybe even sooner than I think.<br />
<br />
Though Cockroach still tries to egg me on, I ignore him, as I come to the conclusion that now isn’t really the best time to take action. Not with Ryno back to wearing his game face in the driver’s seat, zoning us out completely. Yaya continues to glance from me to Cockroach, a big anticipatory grin on those perfect lips of hers. Her greasy, shoulder-length raven black hair blows in my direction with the force of the struggling heater, the split ends dancing off of her broad shoulders like marionettes. She looks almost post-Goth, pale skin contrasting her black hair and eyebrows and eyeliner. She looks like the punk rock badgirl who every other girl can’t stand but secretly wants to be more like. Her bangs are cut straight across her forehead like Betty Page, the black eyeliner surrounding her eyes heavily-caked and guaranteed to keep them shadowed from the sun that’s been next to non-existent this month. Like Ryno and Cockroach, she has a massive amount of tattoos, stemming from the tops of her shoulders to her elbows on both arms. They’re now covered by her denim jacket and a puffy black vest that makes her look like a female rapper.<br />
<br />
Around her neck, she wears a black bandana, and under her jacket, a black hoodie.<br />
<br />
All of them abide by the same dress code. Bandana and dark hoodies. All except Eddie and me.<br />
<br />
The plan is they pull their hoods over their heads and fasten those bandanas over their noses and mouths before swooping in and stealing the truck. Ryno says that he’s going to commandeer the vehicle while Yaya rides shotgun. Cockroach and Dax are supposed to head around to the back of the truck, throw the driver in and jump in with him. Then they’ll drive and wait until they’re in the middle of nowhere and toss the guy out on the side of the road. Ryno says they will drive the truck halfway down Rivers Avenue and stash it at the old abandoned Naval Base until they can unload it tomorrow. Eddie and I are simply supposed to drive Ryno’s Oldsmobile back to his house in Summerville. Then we’re free to walk just a little over a mile home to get at least a little shuteye before school in the morning.<br />
<br />
I’ve already told them that I was doing nothing more than driving the car back, and that I was reluctant to even do that. My whole life, I’ve never really done a whole lot wrong. One night last summer, the whole gang stayed the night at my house and we all snuck out after midnight to wreak havoc on the neighborhood, to spray-paint hubcaps and throw eggs at houses and boost a car phone or CD player or two. We were all supposed to split up and each steal a bike to get around from one surrounding neighborhood to another. Everybody stole their own except for me because I simply refused to do it. Eddie had to boost one for me just so I could keep up with the rest of them. My reasoning was that I was cursed with a conscience, that I was raised with a little more morality than them. Then, when Carrie came along, well, that only added salt to their wounds, as it stifled my levels of criminal involvement with them even more. My friends have been petty crooks for years now. At school, they run their own racket, selling stolen car phones and mobile phones, portable and car CD players, and pagers. Sometimes Ryno fronts one or two in good faith, but if customers don’t pay up, they’re introduced to Cockroach’s pocketknife in the boy’s bathroom. Eddie and I have no part in any of that.<br />
<br />
Problem is, we don’t do anything to prevent it either.<br />
<br />
Ryno’s cigarette smoke is thick, toxic, so I roll down the window to get some fresh air. The December wind just about takes my head clean off as it stings my cheeks and transforms the night into something a little more dismal and unsettling than it should be. We’re just a few weeks before Christmas, but Charleston’s greater downtown area already has its lights up. They stretch from one street corner to another, hang from street lamps and twist like neglected, overgrown vines around looming palms and dormant oaks. They twinkle and beam and try their best to outlast the freezing, dismal conditions in all its nebulous tendencies. And I’m still a little apprehensive, especially since Ryno has decided to bring along his .45 Glock and store it in his jacket pocket. That, and because Cockroach feels the need to play copycat with his Ruger .22 revolver. I don’t think anyone else is packing a gun. Hope not anyway.<br />
Everybody seems a little shaky tonight, all except for the badgirl, and the two cowboys holding the pistols.<br />
<br />
Dax dully taps his calloused knuckles on the backseat window to the rhythm of the piercing rain. He has this sort of quiet cool that has always creeped me out. He used to be a pretty good athlete, made the varsity basketball team as an eighth grader back when he was his own person, before he came under the influence of Ryno and Cockroach and then he just turned into a minion of their petty criminal underworld. His spiky hair goes flat against the cold window of the car door when he leans his head onto it, a look of sheer boredom now twinkling in the oceanic blue eyes he rolls up towards the moonless night sky. He’s tall, a good 6’4” at least, and his long legs jab uncomfortably into the back of the passenger seat, which Cockroach refuses to shift forward for him. I personally think it’s because Cockroach still harbors some resentment from the time they fought each other in Dax’s front yard and the rest of us tried to root the home team to victory.<br />
<br />
Yaya takes out a hair tie, holds it between her pale pink lips before pushing her stringy sea of black locks into a short ponytail and wrapping the tie around them. Her real name is Angela De Rossi, born to the Italian-Irish parentage of Tony and Mary Monaghan De Rossi. But we’ve been calling her Yaya for as long we can remember. When we were all kids, we would ask Yaya something and every single one of her yeses would come in the form of “ya, ya, ya, ya.” She never could answer with just a yeah or a yes, never just one simple answer either. Always the multiple variation. She quickly morphed into the name Yaya and even though she says “ya” a little less these days, the name stuck.<br />
<br />
I notice Cockroach as he runs an anxious hand through his tiny curls, as he reaches for his .22. He flips the safety on and off like a ticking time bomb, like this is all a game. It only proves to add to the tension.<br />
That, and the fact that he does it right around the time we see the Bushmills truck pull up and come to a stop in front of Tommy Condon’s.<br />
<br />
Now’s the time. I’m still not ready, even though I don’t even have to do much.<br />
<br />
Ryno turns, speaks to us in droning foghorn.<br />
<br />
“Alright, here we go, fellas. We give ‘em a little razzle dazzle, then get out while the gettins good, got it?”<br />
He decides to single me out, because I guess he considers me a little more competent than Eddie.<br />
“Don’t fuck this up, Billy. Wicked trouble if we get pinched. Remember, wait ‘til I turn onto Cumberland and then beat it. Make the u-ey back to Market, then onto Meeting Street towards home. Don’t speed, act natural. Got me?”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, I got it,” I reassure him.<br />
<br />
Ryno lives around the duck pond in Indian Woods, just next door to Cockroach in the neighborhood across the parkway from mine. Eddie and I will park Ryno’s car at his house, take a relatively short walk home, then head to our respective beds for the night. When we get on that road, that’s when I’ll sure enough tell my best friend that there will be no more of this truck boosting business for me. Seriously. I’m done.<br />
<br />
The three amigos in the front seat waste no more time in pulling on their hoods, their gloves, and fastening their masks into place before making their hasty exit. Dax is quick to follow while Eddie and I make it out into the 40-degree night for only a split second. Then we’re quick to nestle ourselves into the front seats, already warmed up for us.<br />
<br />
I watch Ryno, Cockroach, Yaya and Dax make their way across the street and onto the sidewalk as inconspicuously as possible.<br />
<br />
As unnoticed as four young deviant-looking numbskulls can be when the two out in front play towards the bulging inner pockets of their leather jackets.<br />
<br />
And Cockroach’s body language tells me that tonight, he’s the one most likely to use that little warm gun of his.<br />
<br />
I catch the sheer terror pulsating from my wide eyes in the rearview, a hazel brown, almost black to match my shaggy hair and to match the night and everything devious transpiring within it. Yaya says I look like a young Johnny Depp, especially with the faint mustache and chin fuzz. Dax calls me a pretty boy. Eddie calls me his best friend and Cockroach calls me a homo and Ryno calls me a competent thief even though I still can’t seem to keep my stiff, nearly frostbitten hands from trembling when I go for the gearshift.<br />
I manage to switch the car into drive, to take the emergency brake off, and to wiggle one of my Doc Martens into place on the brake at my feet. Then we watch this ragtag crew of demon seeds shoot across Linguard Street and run up on the Bushmills truck. Not sure how Ryno found out about this shipment being delivered here in the evening instead of the morning, and I don’t care. Didn’t ask, didn’t want to. I’ll just be sure to make it clear that this is my last go around. Then I’ll concentrate on being a normal everyday senior. Girlfriends and scholarships, pep rallies and prom committees, all that other regular high school stuff.<br />
<br />
I don’t pray nearly as much as I should but I send up a hopeless petition anyhow, just a meager request for the sake of this truck driver, to see to it that Cockroach doesn’t go trigger-happy Jack and blast him. A roaring gust of wind shakes and rattles the car again and maybe it’s an answer from the Almighty or maybe it’s just warning sign for Eddie and me to split the scene now before something bad happens.<br />
Before I become an accessory to murder.<br />
<br />
The hard rain has now morphed into a carnivorous beast as it tries its best to tear through the roof with pelts like pickaxe blows. It proves to be the prelude to what I’m forced to bear witness to through the bladed pendulum wipers.<br />
<br />
My friends bum-rushing the middle-aged driver when he parks the truck and scampers around to slide the back open.<br />
<br />
It all seems just a bad dream when we watch Cockroach shove the skinny barrel of his .22 into the driver’s face. Catatonic, we watch as Yaya snatches the pager from the guy’s hip and drops it onto the pavement, smashing it under her heel of her Chuck Taylor. We watch as Ryno heads straight for the driver’s seat while Cockroach and Dax grab the guy and go for the back to pile in. But before they do, I watch Cockroach take the driver by the hair, manipulate the movement of his head back and forth painfully, and bark at him cryptically.<br />
<br />
For a second, I think maybe he’ll shoot the guy just for fun of it.<br />
<br />
They’re not professionals, far from it. They’re just juveniles, but they’re delinquents the same. And when everybody is securely in the truck, they pull away from the curb and take Linguard to State to Cumberland Street. I wait until I can’t see them anymore, then Eddie and I u-turn, go the opposite direction on Church, turn onto Market then Meeting and drive towards the interstate like a couple of bats flying blindly out of the deepest and darkest pits of hell. I drive frantically until I hit I-26 and that’s when I finally come off of auto-pilot and remember where I am and what I’ve actually just done, what I have to do in order to survive the night and what I never want do again as long as I live.Chasing the Dragontag:crimespace.ning.com,2008-05-23:537324:BlogPost:1422172008-05-23T19:30:00.000ZLiamhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/Liam
CHASING THE DRAGON<br />
1.<br />
“Let us depart from this<br />
Lake of the Red Eye,<br />
Let us separate in sorrow<br />
From the tribe that has loved us.” – W.B. Yeats,<br />
The Fate of the Children on Lir<br />
<br />
<br />
So you fall for a beautiful young Chinese patron at an underground masseuse parlor off of Mott Street.<br />
<br />
So you fall in love.<br />
<br />
So you find out her mother is the queen of the Black Market, a contractor for professional killers, an all-star in the game of gunrunning and enterprises of assassination, fronted by legit…
CHASING THE DRAGON<br />
1.<br />
“Let us depart from this<br />
Lake of the Red Eye,<br />
Let us separate in sorrow<br />
From the tribe that has loved us.” – W.B. Yeats,<br />
The Fate of the Children on Lir<br />
<br />
<br />
So you fall for a beautiful young Chinese patron at an underground masseuse parlor off of Mott Street.<br />
<br />
So you fall in love.<br />
<br />
So you find out her mother is the queen of the Black Market, a contractor for professional killers, an all-star in the game of gunrunning and enterprises of assassination, fronted by legit businesses in a mogul heaven, a Mongol hell.<br />
<br />
So you find out your girlfriend is a killer for that mother, and worse yet, you find out she’s good at it.<br />
<br />
So you are already in love with her regardless, and before the sun goes down today, you will join her for the hit and the heist, for the two of you are yin and yang.<br />
<br />
But something will compel you, propel you in a different direction to start a new life out of the shards of one forged by drugs and alcohol abuse, fighting and theft and larceny. You tried to start over once before, but that’s when you moved to New York City and met Jin. Now you hope that she will lose her taste for the life she’s chosen, because you have. You hope she will change for the better and run away with you because you want to marry her and live the honest blue-collar life and not as a male concubine to a girl whose other love affair revolves around blood and carnage.<br />
<br />
A pleasant fiction. Nothing is ever as simple as it should be. Your life is far too complicated and destined for mayhem.<br />
<br />
I glance over at her, sitting to my right in the passenger seat of her Jag. She’s beautiful when she fumbles through the black bag at her feet for an assortment of daggers and other shiny, pointy objects. Shaggy and choppy black hair to her shoulders, tight black pants, spaghetti-stringed top, green dragon tattoo wrapped diligently down the length of her left arm.<br />
<br />
Jin.<br />
<br />
Jin Huang is her name, and she rummages quickly as she prepares and she smells like lotus blossoms and hot death as the blood red sunset reflects from her glossy, olive skin.<br />
<br />
“Fēnzi…you are ready?” she asks as she looks over at me, all slanted eyes and broken English that’s easy to fall for when you set yourself up for failure.<br />
<br />
And her tenderness is gone for the moment, as she has now switched to her muted assassin mode. The beautiful killer, the mĕilì shārinfān, poker face, an ambitious readiness oscillating in her almond eyes. There’s nothing amateur about her, and she doesn’t even wait for my reply before pulling a tight-fitting black polyester jacket over her arms and zipping it to the neck.<br />
<br />
This guy, this Vincent Somethingorother...Jin is supposed to go in and off this bum up in his yuppie condo. He’s the silent partner in Lady Huang’s law firm cover company who’s been withdrawing a whole lot of dough that belongs to her. And he’s got nothing to show for it but an off shore bank account, a trophy wife, and several overly lavish vacations to Western Europe.<br />
<br />
And Jin was supposed to handle this job alone, but she wanted to bring me along for the ride. I was out of work when I met her, so ever since the two of us have been together, I guess you could say I’ve been working for Lady Huang too. Mick bum from Boston posing as a little errand boy for Lady Huang and her Chinese mafia cronies, usually just pick-ups and deliveries, to flex a little muscle, to pose a threat or two every now and again.<br />
<br />
Never to plug anybody.<br />
<br />
Jin glances over at me because I haven’t answered her yet.<br />
<br />
“Erik…you are not backing out…are you?”<br />
<br />
I have a real tough job in this little caper. I’m supposed to play getaway driver and lookout, supposed to buzz Jin on her cell phone if the cops show up while she ascends this condo in Central Park West in upper Manhattan, just next to the Park. And I’d be inclined to worry about her going at it alone, but she’s so damn good.<br />
<br />
Jin’s a badass and she knows it.<br />
<br />
I stare back at her and her lips are full and pouting and I want to plant a kiss on them every time I lay eyes on her.<br />
<br />
“No. I’m good. Ready,” I answer.<br />
<br />
She doesn’t respond verbally but nods.<br />
<br />
She opens her car door and takes a step out just before I stop her.<br />
<br />
“Jin.”<br />
<br />
She turns to me with a face chiseled out of stone. I start to tell her I love her, but I reconsider. Not telling her will make it easier to leave.<br />
<br />
Instead of the soft sentiment, I offer advice by default.<br />
<br />
“Be careful.”<br />
<br />
She’s already in killer mode so she does little to respond, barely even a nod before darting from the car, slamming the door shut, and disappearing through the building’s fancy façade in a blaze of black.<br />
<br />
She’s the hired assassin, dark and fast, the last of her kind, well trained and well rehearsed.<br />
<br />
A face in the rearview and it’s mine, floating right along with a typical Tao insignia that sways from the mirror. Blue eyes, brown hair cut short in a buzz, beard of stubble. Lips pink and dry and in withdrawal of that familiar feeling, that little cancer on a stick that aims to kill me one of these days. White tank top, because it’s hot, and it’s a hell of a night.<br />
<br />
Sleeves of tattoos up and down both arms, overcrowded, multi-colored, mostly drunken stupor stamps of my own stupidity. Celtic cross on my right forearm, octopus tentacles clutching a rusty cast iron anchor on the left. Tribal design around my left bicep, my name intertwined in thorns on my right. A set of rosary beads tattooed around my neck and down my chest. Skulls with dreadlocks and abstract Grim Reapers and fighting leprechauns and an ace of spades all filling in the rest of the space. And coming out from under the cover of my shirt, flames and debris from a massive explosion of colored ink on my chest. It stems from my heart and connects itself all the way over to the typical Irish symbol on my upper right arm, and to the Chinese character on my left.<br />
<br />
A shamrock with the Irish flag tri-color on its inside, and the Cantonese symbol for purity.<br />
<br />
These two begin the descent of the ill-forged ink designs that extend to my wrists and desecrate my flesh. These two are the only designs that represent something of substance.<br />
<br />
They represent Jin and me.<br />
<br />
Belt buckle stabbing me in the stomach, dirty jeans that have worn holes to go right along with their habitual stench. Decadence. Embodied.<br />
<br />
The door opens and my boots hit the pavement and the walking dead unfolds from the car like a phantom rupturing the edges of its shadow, bursting through with intentions of corruption and the macabre. Cig. Lit. Smoke rising in subtle brutality, and I can smell the stale stench of nicotine and post-alcoholic gluttony radiating from my unwashed body like a mist of malevolence.<br />
<br />
The holiest of all unholy.<br />
<br />
In the name of the Fodder, the Gun, the Holy Spurious.<br />
<br />
Amen.<br />
<br />
I slam the car door shut and lean against it and contemplate the night. And the night, she’s set aflame with the conscience I was born without. But somewhere, out of the shambles of it all, I grew one. Tonight it’s a cancer, spreading, coursing through my veins. Tonight, changes will be made, events will be set into motion that will resonate and bring certain repercussions with them.<br />
<br />
Never really saw myself as a lover in the first place. What brought Jin and me together was bigger than the both of us. How a girl like her ends up with a bum like me…God only knows. Or maybe God doesn’t even know. Maybe the two of us forged ahead to form a relationship that is deserving only of an expulsion from the Garden of Eden.<br />
<br />
The smell of lotus blossoms slowly deteriorates as the barreling smoke of my cigarette exhumes from my nose like a dragon on the fringes of forgotten flame. And though the finer thoughts of Jin still make my ticker beat a little faster that usual, the flame burning atop our sacred heart feels the extinguishing condensation of a need for new life. It beckons for me to start clean. It knows that Jin won’t change because she is a programmed beast, a killer who has been hypnotized, brutalized, cauterized by her mother. Jin won’t change and when I’m gone from here, I’ll wake up and the tenure of our relationship will be nothing more than a bad dream with hints of pure beauty coyly loitering in its recesses.<br />
<br />
I’m not all that well educated by the standards of systemized learning, but I read a lot. I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve read Crime and Punishment, I’ve read Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Twice. I’ve read The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Oscar Wilde said it best.<br />
<br />
“…the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”<br />
<br />
But words from an English classic will only get you so far. You don’t really grasp the meaning fully until you experience it firsthand. And I have.<br />
<br />
And it’s a wicked pisser.<br />
<br />
While Jin’s upstairs making a pincushion out of that guy’s head, while I’m supposed to be watching out for any and all signs of the cops, while our song echoes through my head like some kind of curse that’s there simply to remind me of our love and my negligence to keep it intact, I blow a mouthful of smoke, throw my Marlboro to the asphalt…<br />
<br />
And I walk away.<br />
<br />
I’ll just walk this street until it ends and the shadows will bring the old ghosts of the NYC underworld, and those ghosts will bring the NYPD. But Jin is the hired assassin, dark and fast, the last of her kind, well trained and well rehearsed, and if I know her as well as think I do, she will make her daring escape. The high wire escape artist, chopping necks and blending into walls before making it home to send out the dogs to find me. The Huangs have connections all over the world, in at least half the states in this country.<br />
<br />
Tonight’s exodus will not go unpunished.<br />
<br />
Yeah, she’ll get away from the cops, I’m sure of it. She’ll get away because she’s an entity of death. She’ll vanish into the air upon request, light and fast, eyes without a face, nocturnal native of her own stealthy essence. A skydiver, a cliffhanger without the need of harnesses or parachutes because she is one with the moment, one with the fear of death. And she’ll disappear because she was never there to begin with, her knife slash coming with the casual pull of the breeze, sharpened steel stars reigning from the sky with no trace of the red right hand that fed them.<br />
<br />
She’s the hired assassin, dark and fast, the last of her kind, well trained and well rehearsed, and the last thing I see before turning off of Central Park West is Jin’s face, Jin’s eyes, glaring at me from the back of an NYPD patrol car.