Back To The Stars: ROMANCE: ALIEN (Alien Invasion Abduction SciFi Romance) (Fantasy Anthologies & Collections) (6 page)

Chapter 3:

You don’t have to hear the rest, because you already know how it went, so there’s no reason you need to hear a blow-by-blow description of the fight. All you need to know is that good old Tandy came hobbling out of his corner and he tore Coco to shreds, and I mean to shreds. It was so brutal people were throwing up over the carnage, myself included. But I was barfing because I was screwed six ways to Sunday. I now owed two HUGE markers, and considering that I didn’t know who Pablo’s partners were, I was completely in the dark on money owed or how long I would have to pay it back, or what would happen to me if I didn’t pay it back when they wanted it.

But believe it or not, I was actually very well acquainted with Pablo’s partner.

After the fight I headed back to the bar, and Pablo—who was a couple of shades whiter than a hospital pillow case—had a beer ready for me. After I slugged it back in three long gulps, I asked about the particulars of paying back the marker, and that’s when he dropped a bomb on me.

The fight belonged to Junior. The whole thing, Pablo was just an employee.

Chapter 4:

I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me, I knew what I was getting into when I asked for the marked and placed the bet, and chances are I wouldn’t do anything differently even if I knew the outcome because that’s just how I’m wired.

Pablo felt pretty bad about the whole situation and said he would help me pay it back, which is help I readily accepted. But it was only a couple of grand a month, and my two debts to junior would be combined together and the interest from my existing debt would be applied to the new chunk of cash that I owed, so two grand wasn’t going to put much of dent on the monthly vig. I was screwed, plain and simple, so I did what I do best, I went on a bender before Junior found out about the new wad.

It took only three days for him to find out, and it was an epic three days on my end. I started drinking at the cockfights and then barhopped until my pockets were turned inside out. After that, I charmed my way into drinks and into the panties of a few of the women who were kind enough to front my bar tab. It was a wonderful, slightly mind blowing good time. But then Junior sent his muscle to track me down and bring him back to his office to make an offer to me that I wouldn’t be able to say no to.

And his offer was this: I belonged to him for the next two years. I could still do PI work and pay into the debt if I wanted (Of course I would need the money from PI work to keep a roof over my head, so you can bet your ass I wasn’t giving a dime of it Junior), but I could consider myself a full time employee of the Vecchio family. Whatever they needed to have done, I would do it. For the next two years, I was going to become a full fledged, honest-to-God gangster.  The three generations of cop in me turned my blood to acid.

Chapter 5:

To be honest with you, though, I kind of took to the work. You know that line from
Goodfellas
about how gangsters are just cops for wise guys? Well, it’s actually a true statement.

Gangsters pretty much only deal with scumbags, and I mean real scumbags, not the kind the police have to deal with. When you’re a gangster, you don’t have to deal with belligerent drunks, or domestic disturbances, or pedophiles or any of that sicko stuff. I mean, you do, but you don’t. Gangsters are far more single minded in focus when it comes to dealing with degenerates. The long and the short of it is, gangsters don’t care about what you do in your private life, because they only want their money. As long as you have their dough, you can be married to seven goats and shoot up drano into your eyeballs for all they care. They just want the cash, but if you don’t have it, well, they’re going to do some damage. They’re going to kill all of your goats and they’re going to make sure you don’t get your hands on another drop of Drano until you pay up.

I worked almost exclusively as muscle in Junior’s organization. When you’re muscle, it’s kind of a catch all position. You collect money from drop off points, you collect from various pimps and dope dealers who are on the payroll, same with the various games the boss had going on across the city. There was even a few times when I collected from Pablo’s cockfight.

The other part of the position was being actual muscle. Along with my pick ups, it was my job to get mean if somebody was short, and get really mean when they didn’t have any cash at all. If that happened more than once, I was under orders to put whoever stiffed in the hospital. Unfortunately, this happened quite a bit. I always had help, Junior had a seemingly endless supply of faceless gorillas who went with me on my runs, and if things got nasty, they broke bones and crushed teeth right alongside me. The only difference was is the goons seemed to enjoy it a lot more. Okay, I’ll admit I kind of enjoyed it, too. Remember, gangsters deal with the scum of the earth, so every person I kicked the crap out of, I knew they had it coming. But once in a while, I run across a guy just like me. Someone who liked to play the ponies or play cards or bet on the Bears. They weren’t bad guys, they were just unlucky and too stupid to figure out that you don’t borrow money from a gangster.

There were sometimes when I would go solo on a job. Usually it was when I had to deal with the college set.

The college set was the nickname Junior used for anyone we did business with who was under twenty-five, and there were a lot of them. And there were a lot of them who didn’t do business with us, but should’ve been. Kids who were going behind Junior’s back and scoring from one of his competitors, or kids who had no idea Junior even existed and were just trying to score a few extra bucks and some free dope. I never liked dealing with these kids, and it happened a lot more than I’d like to admit.

If Junior got wind of some trust fund hippie who was floating a few dime bags in one of his neighborhoods, he’d have me go by and pay them a visit. I would knock on their doors, decked out in my standard issue Italian gangster suit (I usually wore Italian on my own accord, but when I was out on my runs for Junior, I kept my suits extra sharp. Usually I’m pretty rough on my clothes, like I fall asleep in them or I forget to change out of them for two or three days. But on the job, I always wanted to look professional.), and the bulk of the kids I dealt with would go ghost pale thinking I was one of two things: Either a cop, or the white boy equivalent of Jules from
Pulp Fiction
getting ready to recite Ezekiel 25:17.

Most of the kids who thought I was a cop were usually the ones who would give into me right away. Most of the time they would promise me they would never sell dope again and then give me the money they’d made along with the rest of their drugs. I liked these kids because you knew they were just playing around with being a dirt ball and they would be on the straight and narrow for the rest of their lives, and I would get to pocket the money and the dope. All Junior ever wanted was for them to knock of the shit, but if they wanted to keep doing what they were doing, they needed to kick back to him, and with most of them just wanting to be left alone and never having to see my face ever again, Junior didn’t ever expect for anything to be coming back to him. God knows I needed the extra cash, because my position with Junior was indeed full time, and I had zero time to pick up any PI work.

But occasionally when I dealt with the college set, there were guys who didn’t want to hang it up, or become partners with Junior. It was a couple of dipshits like this who got my ass sent to Arizona.

The kids were operating a couple of blocks north of the University Of Chicago. They lived in a real nice place that was obviously being paid for by their parents. They lived on the ground floor, and when I knocked I knocked, it took somebody practically ten minutes to make it to the door. While I was waiting, I pressed my ear to the door and all I could hear was the television turned up to 11 and what sounded like a couple of monkeys cackling at the top of their lungs.

When they finally opened up, I was greeted by a young kid wearing dreadlocks and laughing so hard his face had turned blue and he’d pissed his jeans. I followed a few feet behind him and shut the door behind me. The kid lead me into the living room, which was littered with fast food wrappers, crushed beer cans, cigarette butts, and shattered glass pipes. From the looks of the place it looked like I was dealing with tweakers. The kid flopped down on an equally filthy couch next to another guy who looked like his twin brother. The only difference was that this kid had crapped himself instead of pissed.

I walked to the TV, which was playing an episode of
Breaking Bad
at top volume. It was the episode where Gus gets blown up, and Jesse’s foster kid gets poisoned by Walt, so there was no reason the kids should have been laughing the way they were, other than the fact that they were high as kites. I switched off and turned around and faced them. They knew something was up because they stopped laughing right away and stared at me glassy eyed and slack jawed.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked, putting a little extra steel into my voice so they knew I was here to conduct serious business.

“Ummmmm, the taffy man?” said the kid who let me into the apartment.

“What?”

“Yeah, I mean, you’re all blue and pink and yellow and all rubbery, so you got to be made of taffy, or Now-n-Laters or some shit like that.”

I was off my guard because of the kids speech, and I hadn’t noticed that his buddy had gotten off the couch and was standing right next to me. I only noticed him when he ran his tongue up my face. His breath smelled like a dirty diaper filled with cigarette ash, and I shoved him off of me hard.

“Hey, man,” he said, “I just wanted a taste of you. Don’t be a bogart with the candy, man!”

He came at me again and he came at me quick. Before I knew it, this skinny little hippie was licking my face and trying to get his hands down my pants, and he kept saying, “Gimme a taste, man! Just gimme a taste!”

I slammed him hard against the flat screen TV mounted to the wall and shattered the screen with his face. I pull his right arm behind his back and pushed to the point of it practically breaking.

“Hey, man!” he yelled, “That’s not cool! How am I supposed to eat you with my face in the TV?”

I jerked his arm up and felt it snap at the elbow. I thought that would get his attention. I thought it would at the very least it would illicit a scream or a yelp, but all it did was make him start laughing again. By this time, the kid who had let me in was behind me, licking the back of my neck and massaging my chest. Despite the lack of crap in his pants like his buddy, he somehow managed to smell worse. Didn’t these kids ever think of showering?

I gave him a quick elbow to the face and I felt his nose explode. I gave his buddy’s face another hard shove into the television hoping it would persuade him not to try anything funny while I dealt with his roommate. I let go and turned around and the kid’s face was a horror show. I’d obviously hit him with my elbow a lot harder than I intended to, because it looked like he didn’t have nose anymore. His face was slick with blood, and he was flicking his tongue out at me like he still wanted to turn me into a human lollipop.

“Tastes like Twizzlers, man! Just like Twizzlers!”

I didn’t give him a chance to come at me again, and threw a couple of hard punches at where his nose was supposed to be. I leaned hard into them and felt more bones in his face crack and a few teeth shatter. It was ugly, and usually the kind of punches I reserved for hard asses who fight like they have nothing left to lose. It took him down though, but now I had his roommate on me again. More licking, more fumbling with my crotch.

I gave him the same elbow I gave his buddy and bounced him off the TV. Right when he was getting ready to come at me again, I picked up a small, cluttered coffee table that had somehow managed to not get trampled in the struggle and slammed it hard into his upper body. To my surprise, he stayed up on his feet, so I gave him another hard whack and broke the thing in half.

With both of them out for the count, I doubled over, breathing hard, retching a little bit from the smell of their silva that was still slick on my face and neck. Goddamn, neither one of those kids should have been able to take that kind of beating. I mean, these kids combined maybe only weighed two-hundred-and-fifty pounds combined and looked like they’d never been to a gym in their lives. But yet, they fought like a couple of bruisers jacked to the gills on steroids and meth.

Standing there catching my breath and staring at the filthy carpet, I noticed a little gram baggie filled with deep green rocks. I picked up and took a closer look at. Was it some new kind of speed? Or something that I’ve never seen before? I pocketed the stash and straightened up and headed out the front door. Somebody had to have called the cops during the fight, and I didn’t want to be around when they showed up.

Chapter 6:

I walked into Junior’s office, and the minute he saw me he started laughing, his body jiggling sloppy like a half thaw bowl of jello.

The thing is after his old man’s trial and his release from jail, Junior decided to go the same rout as his old man used to. No boozing, no drugging, no whoring. The difference between Junior and Senior was that before he decided to get straightened up, Junior had some real problems. First and foremost, he was a two pack a day man. He smoked like a fiend from the time he was fifteen and like most smokers, he was deep down addicted to coffin nails. So when he gave them up, he replaced them with twinkies and quarts of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. Within a year of quitting smoking, he ballooned from two-hundred pounds to three-twenty, and he kept on gaining weight. He was now close to four-hundred pounds, and if he kept going at this rate, he wasn’t going to be able to get out the front door of his house without a forklift.

But don’t get me wrong, despite all the blubber, Junior was a dangerous dude. Before the weight gain he’d studied a few different martial arts to expert class and he was really fond of using a knife. On personal level, Junior was not someone you wanted to screw with. The unfortunate part is that too many people did. When the guy went out in public, he’d have stupid morons making fun of his girth. Of course most of the guys who did this would end up getting a chop to the throat and a broken larynx for their juvenile behavior. I may not have liked Junior—as a matter of fact, I flat out hated the Jaba The Hut looking son of a bitch—but I respected him because I knew what he was capable of.

After he had his chuckle, I sat down across from him.

“What the hell did you send me into?”

“I sent you over to talk to a couple of kids. Did you meet up with a couple of pro-wrestlers instead?”

“No, they were kids alright. But something wasn’t right about ‘em. They kept laughing and trying to lick me. I almost thought they were going to try and rape me.”

“Jesus …”

“Yeah, I had to beat the hell out of them to get them off me. I had to brake a coffee table over one of them to get them off of me. I think I might have killed him.”

“You didn’t check?”

“Hell no I didn’t check! With all the noise we were making I thought for sure someone would have called the cops.”

“Nah, I doubt it. I own that place.”

“The apartment? What were you having me do, serve an eviction notice?”

“No, I own the whole building. I’ve got legitimate renters on the top three floors, the rest of it is all crash pads, porn sets, and discrete labs. I make a nice little profit off the renters, and the downstairs is kind of my nucleus for my action around the college.”

“So what were those kids doing on the ground floor? Didn’t they interrupt business down there?”

“I had to move ‘em. Their parents rented the place out for their kids a couple of years ago. They were great tenants. They paid their rent on top, sometimes they got a little loud and smoked a little too much pot, but they were good kids up until a month ago and then they started in on the laughing, and the other renters started complaining about the noise and the smell.”

“Yeah, I can understand both. They stunk like they hadn’t showered in a month and they had the TV at top volume when I walked in on ‘em.”

“So you understand why I had to move ‘em? I mean, I ain’t going to kick them out, they pay four grand a month for that place. I’m not going lose that kind of dough because of some noise complaints.”

I rummaged around in my pockets and dug out the little baggy I’d picked up at the apartment and tossed on Junior’s desk.

“Do you think that’s what’s causing them to act so nutty?”

Junior picked up the bag and stared at the green crystals inside of it.

“This is the other reason I sent you over there. When my maintenance guy, Doug, went in to clean out the place he found a few hundred of these, but empty with just a little rids in each.”

“What is it?”

“That’s the thing, we don’t know. I had the chemists working in one of the labs run some tests on it to see if we could identify it. They came up with squat. But then I put the word out to a few of my street guys, and they found out what it was. They’ve heard it called Leprechaun, Green Eggs And Ham, and a few other stupid street names.”

“What does it do?”

“See, that’s the thing, we don’t know. All we know is that it’s popular as hell with the college crowd, and that as soon as some of it hits the street, it’s gone, and I mean gone as in people buy it up in the pounds and don’t resell, they just use it.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, and the eggheads have tried breaking it down with the crumbs we’ve found, but it’s never enough to replicate it. And I’ll be blunt with you, Larry, I want in on this. This thing could end up being a real money maker. Something that could maybe put the family back on the map.”

Ever since his old man ended up in jail, Junior had been pining to make the family what it used to be. Sure, he said Chicago was enough for him, but everybody in the life knew that was a load of crap. Once you have the kind of power Junior had, it’s practically impossible for them to size down. I always wonder how the guys in witness protection did it? Of course, guys like Sammy The Bull and Henry Hill couldn’t and got back into the life even while they were in protective custody.

“Do you have any idea where it’s coming from?”

“Yeah, well, those kids you tuned up were most likely suppliers. Both of ‘em are from Phoenix, and from what Doug was telling me, those two were making a lot of trips home in last few months they were living in the top floors. So I figured they were muling it in. I put my cartel contact, Juan, on trying to find it, but just when he thought he was getting close to tracking it down, he dropped off the face of the planet.”

“So I guess you’ve been on this for a while. Do you think another cartel other than your guys are in on it.”

“They might be? But the thing is if they were into, don’t you think the mid-west would be flooded with it right now? Hell, as soon as those guys started cooking meth, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into some toothless clown who hasn’t slept in a month. But checking in with the other cartels might be a good place to start looking.”

I didn’t like where this conversation was starting to go. Junior was dropping itty-bitty hints, but to me they were great big bombs of danger that I didn’t want to touch with a ten foot cattle prod.

“What d’ya mean by ‘start looking’?”

“Look, Larry, I know how good you are this investigation stuff. Before you came and started working for me, you had a solid reputation. You’re just like your dad with being able to track down clues and all that other crap.”

“And…”

“And I was thinking maybe you could head out to Arizona for me.”

“You want me to go out to Arizona and deal with the freaking cartels? The cartels, Junior? Those guys are freaking maniacs!”

“Ah, man, come on, so much of that stuff is just rumors. They’re business men, just like me.”

“Yeah, the only difference is you don’t behead people who screw you over and then post it to YouTube.”

“Well, posting crap like that to YouTube will only get an American put in the slam for the rest of their lives, or get the needle. Like I said, it’s for show, they’re business men.”

“I don’t know, Junior.”

“Look, Larry, don’t make me remind you how much money you owe me. And yeah, you’ve been doing a good job for me, but it’s still a lot of money.”

“And I appreciate what you’re doing, I really do,” I didn’t appreciate it one damn bit, and if I had any real balls, I’d tell Junior where he could stick my debt. But I knew if I did that, I’d be in a world of pain. “But, seriously, I don’t want to become just another statistic.”

Junior sighed and blew out a huge breath. I could tell he wanted nothing more than to light a Camel and think for a few minutes. But instead he popped a half pack of fruit flavored Life Savers in his mouth and munched.

“Okay, I get it. I get it, so how’s about I sweeten the pot a bit. How about if you go out to Arizona on my dime, stay at a swanky hotel, find out which cartel is making this stuff, and maybe set up a connection, I’ll wipe out half your debt to me.”

“Half. Even if you don’t set anything up, you just go down there and do a little digging for me and then I’ll set up a connection. So what do you say?”

“You don’t think you’d go for clearing the whole thing if I go? I kind of like the idea of not being into you anymore.”

“You’ll always be into me, McGee. One way or another, so don’t push your luck.”

But before I headed out to Arizona, I had one last piece of business to attend to, work I’d agree to take on to keep a roof over my head.