The Franchise (79 page)

“I should have known when the Man from New Orleans asked to lay off
his
book,” Don snorted. “A favor, he says ... too much coming in on the Pistols in spite of the spread. He likes to keep his book balanced. A favor, he says. I tell you, one day I’ll return the favor. Maybe you’ll return it for me, Tiny?”

The killer nodded and played a red queen on a black king.
A cold day in hell is when I try to clip the Man from New Orleans,
Tiny thought.

“Why did they pick on me?” Cobianco complained in a whine. “It ain’t fair, big guys picking on little guys. It just ain’t fair.” Donald rocked and swung in his heavy reinforced chair. He was thinking, scheming desperately. Tiny peeked at the cards left facedown and waited. It wouldn’t be long now. The genius brothers were almost out of options; if Donald didn’t make up his mind quickly, they would be completely out.

“Tiny,” Don said, still rocking his chair, “you better go down and pick up our share from Suzy Chandler and that asshole Koster.”

Tiny nodded and played another card. There would be further instructions.

“You might as well get their share too.”

Tiny nodded, slowly lay down his cards and reached for the small leather fleece-lined bag.

“And dissolve the partnership.”

Tiny never changed pace, unzipping the bag and removing the blue long-barreled military-style automatic pistol, working the action and checking for lint or dirt, anything that might cause it to jam. He left the breech open and looked down the barrel, making sure it was clear. He unfastened a side pocket on the zipper bag and pulled out two ten-shot clips, checking the spring tension and their fit in the gun. From his coat pocket he removed a small box and slid it open to reveal forty rounds of .22 caliber hollow-point bullets. He carefully loaded ten rounds in each clip, sliding one into his pocket and the other in the gun, depressing the slide lock with his thumb. The breechblock slammed home, stripping a shell from the magazine and seating it in the barrel.

Tiny glanced at the idiot brothers, jammed the automatic into his belt, closed his jacket and walked out.

He followed the purple and white curving hallway to the door of Suzy Chandler’s luxury skybox. The door was unlocked. He slipped quietly inside and turned the lock. Sitting alone, abandoned, behind the one-way glass, A.D. and Suzy never heard him enter.

Tiny looked around the skybox. Everything was made out of animal parts; the walls, floors, ceiling. Skins, horns, hooves, heads, teeth. Suzy had designed it with help from a Dallas fag who had something against animals. The luxury box made Tiny’s skin crawl. He liked animals.

Two briefcases sat on the chair next to A.D. They were made out of alligator skin.

Suzy Ballard Chandler and A.D. Koster, both drunk on twenty-five-year-old private-label Scotch, had come a long way from the Sonic Drive-In. They’d come too far too fast and were too drunk to understand how badly things had gone wrong. There was to be no second chance. And it wasn’t even their fault, only their misfortune.

“I come for the money,” Tiny said.

Suzy twisted quickly in her seat at the sound of Tiny’s voice, but A.D. stayed slumped in his seat. The sight of Tiny’s face sobered Suzy considerably and she tugged at A.D.’s shoulder.

“It’s Tiny.” She kept jerking at her general manager’s shirt. “He wants the money.” Her eyes grew wide with fright. “It’s Tiny for the money,” she repeated.

“So tell him to pick a bag.” A.D. pushed her hand away. “I’m watching the game.”

“I want both bags,” Tiny said flatly.

“Now just a goddam minute.” A.D. whirled around; Tiny had gotten his attention.

“The deal was ...” A.D. focused abruptly when the automatic with the Dallas-made silencer appeared in Tiny’s hand.

“The deal’s changed. The partnership is dissolved.”

“You won’t get away with this....” A.D. stopped when he realized how many times he had heard those lines on television.

“Let him take the money,” Suzy pleaded.

“Jesus.” A.D. grimaced and shook his head. “After all the shit, this is all? One fucking Super Sunday in a luxury box.”

“Yep.” Tiny nodded. “You wanna watch or ...”

“Let him have the money, A.D.,” Suzy kept repeating. “Let him ...”

“It isn’t just money he’s here for.”

“What else is there?” Suzy looked from A.D. to Tiny. The two men looked at each other.

“The insurance. The sixteen million dollars in policies we signed to get the loan from Cobianco.”

“Yeah, honey, but that’s just if we ...” Suzy realized as she spoke, the word frozen on her lips.

“No options?” A.D. asked.

Tiny shook his head. “You wanna be first? Or do you wanna watch?”

Suzy’s breathing became labored, her eyes went wild, the beautiful young face contorted in terror. She looked desperately at A.D. to do something.

“Here, honey.” A.D. handed her the bottle of Scotch. “Don’t worry. Have a couple of drinks while Tiny and I discuss this.”

She took the bottle in her tiny trembling hands and held it to her lips. Her eyes closed involuntarily, as they did whenever she drank.

A.D. looked up at the shooter and nodded toward her.

Tiny put three slugs in her delicate ear before she took one sip. Suzy dropped the bottle and looked in shock at A.D. Blood spurted from her ear. She thought he had slapped her and confusion spilled from her eyes across the beautiful, treacherous face. Parting her soft lips in an attempt to speak, only a mewing sound escaped. Suzy slid to the floor.

A.D. faced Tiny with a cold stare of hate that unnerved the killer slightly.

“Come on, you fat pig. Kill me. The sooner I’m dead, the sooner I can start back after you.” A.D. glared down the muzzle of the pistol. “I won’t close my eyes. I won’t even blink.”

Tiny felt the slightest twinge of awe, then pulled the trigger.

A.D. took five forty-grain slugs in the forehead and cheek. He never moved; his eyes stayed open. Tiny started to shoot him again when Suzy twitched on the floor and he put the other slugs in the back of her head. Her body convulsed in the ever-widening pool of blood.

A.D. was still erect, staring at Tiny. He was dead where he sat, but his eyes never closed. Tiny slipped a new magazine into the pistol, picked up the empty shells and grabbed the two briefcases. At the door he looked back. A.D. Koster still sat there, staring furiously at him with cold, dead eyes.

Tiny was frightened by A.D.’s eyes. Dead eyes that watched him with hatred and promised revenge.

Tiny locked the skybox door and joined the brothers at the insiders’ private elevator. He rode down with them.

“Tomorrow,” said Don, “American Imperial Insurance Company is going to have the Prudential’s whole rock dropped on them. They’re the reinsurers on the sixteen million dollars in policies we took out on A.D. and Suzy.”

“You think they’ll pay?” The elevator hummed, descending slowly.

“Let ’em try and get out of it.” Don clamped his jaws on the cigar stub and chewed violently. “They’ll take a long time paying, but they’ll have to eventually.”

“We’ll get Kimball Adams. I’ll call New York tonight.” Tiny looked up at the ceiling. “We’ll have that money by Tuesday.”

Don listened and didn’t care. He had enormous bets to cover with very dangerous people.

“We lost serious money today,” Don said as the elevator continued its descent. “We got to figure out who else to squeeze to pay Dick Conly.”

Don Cobianco frowned. He hated to lose. It was going to cost him more than money. It was going to cost him respect, and that could be fatal.

“Fucking Dick Conly,” Donald C. complained. “No goddam decency. This country would be in one hell of a fix if we was all like Dick Conly.” Don paused. “I guess we better make some sort of deal.”

“Tell Conly to go fuck himself,” Johnny said. He maintained his imaginary nerve. “What’s he gonna do?”

“You tell him,” Don said to Roger, despairing of his baby brother.

“Johnny”—Roger’s tone was friendly but patronizing—“what would you do if some real tough son of a bitch owed
you
millions and refused to pay?”

Johnny grinned. “I’d get a
tougher
son of a bitch to go collect for a percentage.”

“You think Dick Conly is smart enough to figure that?” Roger said. “There’s some real tough sons-a-bitches in Dallas and Houston. Besides, we took other bets. Kansas City. San Antonio laid off Pistol bets on us.”

“So did one very bad boy from New Orleans,” Tiny added. He should know. He often did wet work as a favor to the Man.

Don furrowed his brow. Where would he get more money? Who could they squeeze? It would be months, maybe years, before Prudential paid off. Conly wouldn’t wait. Neither would KC nor New Orleans. Not long. Don didn’t have the money.

“You mean ...?”
Johnny looked shocked. “Well ... but ... they ... ? You? You wouldn’t help
him
against
us?”
Johnny looked from face to face in the sinking elevator. His own face sagged in despair. There was no Santa Claus nor honor among thieves. It
was
every man for himself.

The elevator stopped on the ground level.

“Well, we got a little time.” Don was upbeat. “I think we may have to squeeze that prick that gave us the sixteen million. I was hoping to save him until he got hold of the big money, but ...”

The sun was gone, and the eerie flat glow of the Mercury vapor lights reminded Lamar Jean Lukas of star shells when the elevator door shooshed elegantly open, delivering the Cobiancos and Tiny to the Insiders’ parking lot.

Johnny’s disappointment with crime became moot and Don was wrong about time.

Lamar had some due bills of his own to collect.

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE
of the fourth quarter when the fire broke out in the end zone seats.

It was a small fire. Few noticed, nobody left and the only person to panic was the girl who was set afire by the people free-basing cocaine in the seats behind her. The peanut vendor had knocked over the ether bottle.

The people around her cheerfully ripped the burning clothes from the flaming girl and threw beer and soft drinks on her head to quench the fire in her hair. One man, claiming he was a smoke jumper, kept throwing lighted matches on her naked body. He said he was trying to start a backfire.

The referee called a $500,000 time-out for TV commercials.

“Take a break and sit down,” Taylor said in the huddle. He wasn’t certain why the official time-out had been called, the girl burned clean, without much smoke. “It’s in the bag, boys, just sit down and suck it up. Enjoy the win. We couldn’t lose now if I let Red start calling the plays.”

“Don’t go talking crazy.” Amos Burns spoke his first complete sentence of the game. Mostly he communicated with nods and grunts.

Ignoring Red Kilroy’s frantic signals to come to the sidelines, Taylor pulled off his headgear and stepped away from his teammates. For the first time since stepping on the field, he looked up into the Pistol Dome Super Bowl crowd. Until then he hadn’t dared look. Like always he had played the game from within himself. The audience was a distant noise, which, if really heard, would draw him from his concentration, wake him from the dream that he had spent so much time and effort creating: his angels, devils and delusions.

The quarterback looked up into the bellowing inverted monster’s mouthful of people, the animal roar vibrated his skeleton. His nostrils flared as he drew deep drafts of air, controlling the panic and continuing to watch those who watched him. His shiny eyes were black, the pupils so dilated that the thin brown rim was imperceptible.

Running on pure adrenaline, concentration and imagination for nearly four quarters, he had danced on the edge of the void. One misstep and he would fall forever into the deep dark hole overhead and all around. If he fell, it would be
up
into the mouth of the beast to be devoured and forgotten, a tasty morsel fed to the void.

He could never create enough. The fan could chew, taste and swallow, but he remained forever empty, hungry. Hungrier. Who were these people, arriving empty to be force-fed, to gorge themselves for hours on the spectacle and leave emptier than when they arrived?

Fans in a feeding frenzy. It was a frightening vision and his heart began to hammer. His mouth went dry; he choked back the bitter taste of fear and the urge to run for the tunnel. If he broke and ran, they would smell blood, and blood was what they wanted.

What if I had failed
, he thought.
Would they have devoured me?
The roar continued, momentarily seemed to increase, then faded. The crowd was still screaming for more, but he was regaining control, even if they weren’t. He pulled on his headgear.
What if you can’t?
Wendy had asked.
But I can
was his reply. Few understood.

He wouldn’t quit. He hadn’t failed. They had won the Super Bowl. The crowd had gorged itself the whole game. He’d kept their plates piled high with something created out of nothing. Loaves and fish. He was their messiah. But now he was leaving. Before the crucifixion.

T
HE HANDLERS BROUGHT
out the Dobermans with about two minutes left in the game. They stood five yards apart, completely around the field. Another group of them formed a double phalanx leading to the locker rooms.

Denver had possession and was still vainly putting up an air battle, throwing outs and ups, always angling for the sideline, trying to kill the clock.

Sensing that their time was also running out, the crowd began its own two-minute drill. Brushfire wars between bands of drunks broke out in the upper deck. Seat cushions, rolls of toilet paper, bottles, cans, red-hot coins, sailed out of the stands. The players on the sidelines put their headgear back on. A dead calico cat flung out of a luxury box hit a Pistolette in the back, knocking her unconscious.

“What the hell?” Ox Wood turned to Taylor when he saw the dead cat fly through the air and knock the full-breasted brunette flat on her face. “Why would anybody do something that sick?”