The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (14 page)

“Oh,
now
the motherfucker is awake.”

I’m duct-taped to a wooden chair in a room full of greasy meatballs wearing suits covered in luxury logos, like those poodle carriers you see babysitter mistresses toting around places like Beverly Hills and the Upper East Side. And the shoes! Who knew Gucci made ostrich loafers with a four-inch heel and a silver toe cap with an etching of the Virgin Mary? I missed that one at Fashion Week. I thought these Atlantic City dinosaurs had faded into pop culture lore, like Pet Rocks and dental dams.

“Here’s the deal, fucko. We’re gonna ask you questions. You’re gonna give us answers. If we like your answers, we’ll be nice. If we don’t like your answers, we’ll fuck you up like you never been fucked up before in your life.”

The rat-faced owner of the borrowed mobster dialogue gets in my mug and gives me a hard look.

“Capisce?”

I can’t help but laugh at “
Capisce
.” He backhands me and his pinky ring chips one of my teeth.

“Is there anything else fucking funny that you would like to share with the rest of us?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Now we understand each other.”

Another pork chop gets into my face. More pockmarks. Garlic and espresso breath. Guy smells like the inside of a rotting log.

“Why you so interested in Frank Bendini?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Thump!
This time I get a punch to the sternum. I was expecting the face, so I am momentarily paralyzed by the series of sickening palpitations that result from my heart taking a punch in the face.

“As you can see, asshole, I was not fond of that answer.”

“Is this guy stupid or what?!” another one yells.

I make a quick assessment of the room. It appears we are in the unfinished basement of what is undoubtedly a nondescript, working-class Jersey home typical of a gangster who is trying to move up but isn’t quite Tony Soprano yet. There are six of them, including the one in my face. There may be seven. I can’t tell if someone is standing in the shadows staring at me or if that’s Mama Luigi’s plastic Jesus lawn jockey that only comes out for the holidays. It’s weird. I thought for sure I saw someone in there, but when I blinked he was gone.

Whack!
I take a tasseled loafer to the shin. Fuck that smarts.

“Are we boring you?”

Raucous laughter. These assholes think they’re so fucking funny.

“No, sir.”

“Good. Then tell me what the fuck you’re doing casing Bendini’s place. Since you ain’t a fucking eggplant, I’m guessing you weren’t there to steal his cuff links.”

This brings the house down. I’m no longer amused.

“Casing? I don’t understand what—”

A loud buzzing sound, and my nuts are quivering and on fire. I
scream in spite of myself. And I am immediately sorry I did, because showing pain to these guys is like showing Slim Jims to a fat kid. The more you scream, the more they get a hard-on for making you scream.

“Okay. We’ve been nice long enough.”

They show me a rusty rose pruner.

“From now on, we take a finger for every wrong answer. You keep fucking with us and you’ll be finger-banging your sister with a stump.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Shh.”

He presses a fat finger that smells like ass against my lips.

“We know you’re on the make, dickhead. It’s our job to know these things. We found a lot of interesting shit in your car. We’re guessing you’re looking to whack the guy.”

He pats me on the shoulder and puts my thumb between the blades of the rose pruner.

“You know, losing a finger sucks. But losing a thumb . . . you go back to being a monkey again.”

They laugh.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yells.

“So you guys work for Mr. Bendini I take it?”

They laugh their asses off. I’ll take that as a yes.

“Yeah, dumbass. We called him. Told him we caught a fucking rat. Said he was gonna drive over here to have a look. Which means you’re screwed ’cause he ain’t as nice as us.”

Shit shit shit. Can you hear the ticking clock? Time to blow this lame-ass party before I blow my cover and the whole fucking gig. But let’s have a little fun first.

“I’ll tell you what I know but you got to give me a cigarette.”

One of them lights a cigarette and shoves it between my lips.

“You guys ever see
True Romance
?”

“Great fucking movie.” A chorus of agreement.

How these morons ever got control of anything in this country is beyond me.

“Remember the scene with Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper? The one where Hopper smokes a Chesterfield and tells Walken where Sicilians
really
come from?”

Now I’m the only one laughing.

“Yeah, Hopper took a fucking bullet in the head after he said it.”

“I know. But it was so classic. He knew he was dead, so he just decided he was going to go out with a bang, insulting the shit out of one of the biggest mobsters in the city.”

“What’s your point, dickhead?”

“My point is this. You’re not even Sicilians. What you come from is much lower on the food chain. You’re the fucking grease spot that trickled down your mama’s ass and stained the gingham tablecloth.”

“You wanna run your mouth? Let me open it for ya.”

Fat face comes at my mouth with the rose pruners. But I’m already thinking two steps ahead as I fall back hard on the chair, splintering it. I am free of the chair except for the two jagged pieces of the chair arms that are still firmly duct taped to both of my wrists. I think
it’s my lucky day
as I shove the sharp stake strapped to my right wrist under fat face’s double chin, skewering his tongue and ripping through his soft palate into his brain. He jerks around on the floor like a bluefish that just got the hammer, bright red blood jetting in arterial spray from his mouth.

Hands go to jackets for guns but I already have fat face’s gun and I use it to treat Slow Draw 1 and 2 to a bullet in the balls. They hit the ground, clutching what is left of their junk. Judging by the .45 hand cannon I lifted from fat face, there isn’t much to clutch. One of them lunges at me, and I finish him by breaking the other jagged chair arm duct taped to my left wrist off in his eye socket. Another fish on deck! Fire up the grill!

And then there were two. One is smart. Takes cover first, then goes for his weapon. The other is trying to flick the safety off his Glock.

“Allow me,” I say as I kick the gun out of his hand, catch it, and put two pills through his open mouth.

“Did you say something?” I say with my hand to my ear.

He gurgles and falls hard on his face. His teeth float out on the pool of blood that gushes out of his new suck hole.

Oh yeah, the guy that took cover. He’s standing behind a water heater. I switch to the .45 and blow a hole in the canister, showering him with scalding water that turns his face and neck into an angry red blister. As he staggers out, I side kick him in the neck, crushing three of his cervical vertebrae, and dropping him like a sack of shit.

“I think I’ll take that Chesterfield now.”

I pick up my lit cigarette and take a long drag on it.

“Enjoying yourself?”

Shit. Someone
was
in the dark. He steps out. Looks like a boss. He has the drop on me. Love that phrase. 1950s western style. Got the barrel of a Desert Eagle trained on my chest. Finally, a man with pistol training. But I don’t like my odds if I get hit by one of those bowling balls in the chamber.

“Let me guess. Don’t try anything funny?”

“Smart-ass. You know how long it’s gonna take me to replace all these dead greaseballs?”

I laugh. I like this guy. But he’s going to shoot me.

“Gun like that has a lot of kick.”

“Not to worry. I can squeeze off two rounds and pattern them in the same hole. It just takes practice.”

“Impressive.”

“Not as impressive as what you just did.”

“Actually, I’m a little off today.”

He laughs. When someone laughs, they expel a shitload of air. Plus, he is a chain-smoker, as evidenced by his raspy voice. The air goes out, and for a few seconds, the body is slightly relaxed. This calms everything down. This is why snipers shoot on exhale. Steadies the hand. When he’s finished laughing, he will suck in a huge breath. This will expand his chest and make it difficult for him to shoot straight.

He inhales. I exhale.

I fire the .45 from my waist level so the only thing his brain has to react to is the motion below his sight line. If I had tried to raise it, I would be dead. The round hits him square in the Zegna belt buckle, splitting it and blowing a hole in his abdomen. Gut shot. Best I could do. I sit down hard on the floor when he fires. This is risky because he could hit me in the head. But trying a side move would be futile because when it leaves the barrel, a .50 caliber round is as big as a baby Portobello, and even an indirect hit in my chest spells catastrophic blood loss and tissue damage that the best trauma surgeon can’t fix on a good day.

As I am falling, the lead mushroom from his gun whines past my right ear and puts a six-inch hole in the drywall behind me. When my butt hits concrete, my teeth make a loud
clack
and my .45 makes a loud
bang
. This time I have it raised and I fire my kill shot. I instantly see a smoking hole in his throat and I can tell by the way he collapses to the ground like a marionette on severed strings that
my
lead mushroom severed his spinal cord, closing him down like last call. He slumps in a crooked heap against an avocado green washing machine and stares at me with dime-size pupils.

“Why didn’t you just kill me when I was shooting your boys? You could have easily taken me out while I was distracted,” I say to his corpse.

I know the answer: Lack of humility.

Rule #9: God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

To survive and be successful in this job, you don’t have to be that smart. You don’t have to be that tough, or tenacious, or have that killer instinct. Above all, you must be humble. When you are humble, you are like a sponge, taking in the world and letting it fill you with the knowledge of what is real. Pride and arrogance are a dry sponge. You learn nothing. You think you know everything when it’s not even possible to know everything. And then
you’re
the dumbass with the surprised look on your face when someone puts a bullet in you.

If you ever ask a kung fu master who has been training for three decades how much he knows, he will always say, “A lot less than when I started.” That’s because when he started, he was a know-it-all, his master beat the shit out of him in ways he never dreamed possible, and then he knew that he was nothing but a blind, slow, ignorant slob. And the more he learned, the more he realized that there is too much to learn in anyone’s lifetime. And you mother-fuckers only have about ten years to perfect your craft
while
you are doing it. So, be the blank slate or you will have a blank stare on your face like Jimmy “hand cannon” Goombah over there, shitting his gabardine slacks.

T
hat night, as I nurse my wounds and swallow a drugstore of Vicodin, I decide that what Bob doesn’t know about my little field trip tonight won’t hurt him and I get into the business of formulating my endgame for Bendini. I’ll use the fact that my face looks like raw hamburger to my advantage. So I call the office and let Bendini’s assistant know that I was in a nasty car accident. This is the perfect excuse, because lawyers despise it when someone dents their fancy cars. They consider it an affront, an intentional act to destroy the only sliver of personality they have in this world. They figure if they are bald, fat, ugly, hairy, smelly, and suffer from acute micro phallus, as long as they drive a 7 series, 911, or Jag (even though it’s basically a Ford), they “still got it.” So if you mess with the only thing they truly love anymore, they will go all jihad on your ass.

As predicted, Bendini himself calls the next morning to check on me and encourage me to right the universe by gutting the jackass that hit me—even though most homeless people live in nicer cars than my Honda. He also plays into my hands when he inquires about a very important case I’ve been working on that he was expecting to review today. It’s a massive estate mess that some associate fucked up royally before he was summarily shit-canned. If I can unfuck it, the firm will make nearly a million dollars in uncollected commissions and fees. Bendini’s been waiting for it because he probably wants to hide the money from his partners and launder it through some
offshore banana boat account so he can buy more condos, white slaves, Cuban cigars, whatever. Of course Bob’s people finished it a week ago and I’ve been keeping that little ace in the hole for a rainy day—which is now.

I roll the dice and tell him I am happy to bring it to his house that night. He agrees, and as the white men say when they are attempting to play basketball at health clubs all over the country, “It’s on.” So I spend the day gearing up at HR, Inc., avoiding Bob so I don’t have to come up with some world-class bullshit to explain my face. Our weapons guys load a couple of duffel bags with a small arsenal of weapons and explosives that are typical drug cartel fare. You’re going to love these fuckers. They are very creative, and no request is too difficult. Once I had them make me an armor-piercing RPG launcher out of what looked like a tennis ball can. Worked like a charm, and I just tossed the launcher into the garbage after I blew the target’s bulletproof limo to kingdom come.

After gearing up and devising an infiltration strategy based on my photos and schematics of Bendini’s property, Bob asks me to meet him in his office. When I arrive, I am relieved, and somewhat suspicious, that Bob is in good spirits. After we review the Bendini plan, Bob attempts to make me an offer I can’t refuse.

“So this is it,” he says, waxing nostalgic.

“Yeah. Hard to believe I’m out of here after tonight.”