THUGLIT Issue Four (5 page)

by Roger Hobbs

It was a rainy Tuesday, around 7pm, when my boss dialed me up and told me he had a couple of big-balls hitmen coming to town. Since I was the low guy on the totem pole, it was my job to show them a good time. "Make sure you don't piss them off," he said. "These guys will waste a guy like you in a minute."

I started to say something, but my boss hung up on me before I could spit it out. I sighed, went to my bedstand, and wrote down the address where I was supposed to meet them. That was my job for the night, I guess. I was the babysitter to a couple of hitmen.

My name's Joe. In every criminal organization in the world, there's a guy like me. I'm the young guy in new leather who stands in the back keeping his mouth shut and his head down. The criminal world has a lot of room for advancement, sure, but just like any other job, it takes some time to get there. When you're as fresh to the game as I am, you're everybody's bitch. I bring coffee to wiseguys two times a day, and drive the working girls around so they don't miss a date. The first few years are just getting a foot in the door, I'm told, and right now that's where I am. Sure, I'm the lowest guy in a gang of low guys, but I can't complain. Before the Outfit I had to deal drugs and hold up gas stations just to survive, and I'd rather be somebody's bitch than spend one more minute selling black tar out in the freezing cold. When my boss calls me up and says I've got to show a couple of grade-A murdering buttonmen around for a night, I can't say no. It's just not how it works.

The address was this hotel bar way out by the Oregon Coast, maybe two hours away by car. I checked my watch. If I drove fast, I could probably beat the hitmen there and have time for a beer in the meanwhile. God knows I'd need one. I put on my leather jacket and was out the door in five minutes.

I'd never met these two hitmen coming in, but I'd heard about them. High-profile rub-outs don't happen much anymore, but when they have to, every organization has a couple of guys around to do the dirty work.

For the Outfit, our murderers were a pair of Italian brothers-in-law by the names of Vincent and Mancini. That's what everybody called them—Vincent and Mancini, like they were some sort of Abbott and Costello riff. I'd seen them once at an Outfit party, and heard stories through the ranks.

Vincent was the kind of guy who talked far more than he should have. He'd blab on and on, like he felt the need to narrate every single one of his daily experiences as they happened, all the time.

Mancini was the opposite, I'm told. He'd just sit there, listening to Vincent talk, and stare off into the distance, or sometimes right at the boss, like he was about to say something brilliant but he couldn't quite figure out how to put it. One never went anywhere without the other. If Vincent stood up to go to the bathroom, then Mancini would go too. It was like they were afraid to be alone, even just for a few seconds. They'd only split up if the job absolutely called for it.

They were an odd pair.

That Tuesday night the drive was easy. I got there in record time. The hotel bar was part of a little place out in Seaside. The Outfit doesn't do much out in Seaside, but I knew my way around. It was a quiet little place with a long wild beach and Cape Cod-style architecture wind-bitten from the cold. A low fog rolled in off the Pacific Ocean and clung to the windows of the hotel bar like blood clots. Vincent and Mancini had beaten me there, I don't know how, and they looked up at me as I came through the door.

"Hey, fucker," Vincent said. "Are you the guy?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm the guy."

"Then open a tab already."

And that was how we met. I laid my credit card down on the bar and ordered a double bourbon, neat.

When I first saw these guys a few months ago, Vincent and Mancini had been all expensive suits and ties. This night, though, they had switched back to what I could only presume was their usual attire: leather jackets, blue jeans and no-bull cigarettes. Mancini had perpetual stubble and hair as slick and black as a beaver pelt. There was a scar the size of a dollar bill along his cheek that turned pink when he drank. Vincent spoke to his brother in Italian and laughed loud enough to scare people. He was thinner and had cheekbones that sunk into his face like strip-mining pits.

I was ostensibly there to show them a good time, but I knew what was expected of me. Guys like these attracted trouble like flies to vinegar. Hitmen aren't like normal criminals. Normal criminals try to be subtle, but hitmen don't mind being noticed. They'd shoot a little girl in front of her parents, if they wanted to. I took the barstool next to them and Vincent clapped me on the back and tried to talk to me, but all I could think about was whether or not at the end of the night he was going to slit my throat and kill me. We fell into a conversation of sorts, but I can't remember half of it.

A lotta time passed that way.

I drank with Vincent and Mancini for hours. They ran up a six-hundred-dollar tab on my credit card, buying rounds for everybody in the place. Gran Patron. Johnnie Walker Blue. Grey Goose. Vincent's voice had a little squeak at the end of it, and when he drank it got louder and louder. The three of us moved to a back booth after a while, where nobody would bother us. After a few more rounds, Mancini took out a small mirror. He used the edge of a black American Express to cut cocaine into lines. Vincent and Mancini cut a whole bag into big, fat lines and did a couple though a five-hundred-Euro note. Mancini came up off his line with a look like molten lead on his face. It was something like pain, almost, but I couldn't tell. He was the kind of guy where you couldn't tell.

Vincent slapped him on the back and told him to do another.

I drank another bourbon and half-listened.

"Hey," Vincent said. "You smoke?"

I looked up from my drink. "What?"

"Come on," Vincent said. "Lets go outside and have a cig."

"Outside?"

"Yeah. Outside. Let's go."

Vincent basically picked me up by the collar. I got the impression I didn't have a choice in the matter, so I followed him out to the parking lot. Mancini followed me, flanking me between the two of them. It was half-raining, like it does by the coast, where the water pools up in the cracks in the pavement and sinks into the soft brown forest earth in great big sludge-like pools.

Vincent lit a Marlboro Red for himself and then another one for Mancini back behind the neon sign. The two just stared at me for a while, like I had just appeared out of the ether and they didn't know what to make of me. We stood like that for a while, in the rain, and listened to the sound of the ocean wind come through the pine trees and watched the rear floodlight flicker over the dumpsters.

Then, after a while, Vincent said, “You ever been in a fight, kid?”

I nodded, but didn't say anything.

Vincent smirked. He said, “Of course you haven't. Your hands are as soft as a baby's.”

I said, “I got in a lot of fights when I was younger.”

Vincent laughed and stared at me and took another deep drag off his Marlboro Red. He said, “That doesn't mean you've been in a fight. Not a real one. Maybe a few scuffles. Maybe some guy on your corner giving you lip, so you break his nose on a brick wall and put him down for a while. But I don't think you've ever really been in a fight. Not really. Not a drag out all-or-nothing brawl, the kind where you're spitting out teeth on the pavement and praying to God for it to just be over, before the adrenaline hits you full force and you let go with all your strength, pounding your fists into some guy and hoping that maybe one out of five makes contact because you know that when it does, you're going to straight up kill that motherfucker.”

I said, “I don't like fighting.”

“Nobody does,” he said. “Not if you do it right.”

Vincent took another drag off the cigarette and I got a good look at his hands. His knuckles looked like a construction site, with deep brown scarred ridges and heavy bulging calluses at the top of his fingers. He held his cigarette like another man might hold a pencil. There was no finesse in his hands. His thumbs were the size of sausages.

Mancini flicked the butt of the cigarette and took a set of gold-plated brass knuckles from his left jacket pocket. There were scratches along the ridges where the gold plating had flaked away to reveal the solid steel underneath. He slipped them over the glove on his right hand and flexed his fingers until they were snug right above his second knuckles. He formed a fist. The metal caught the light and glimmered. Mancini didn't say anything. He took a small vial of cocaine out of his pocket, poured a little on the soft spot between his first finger and this thumb, and snorted it.

Vincent said, “You ever been punched with brass knuckles, kid?”

I didn't say anything.

Vincent said, “It's much more important to know how to avoid getting hit. You see, the knuckles preserve the force of the punch by concentrating it all into one small little place on the hand. Makes the punch stronger, and keeps you from breaking your fingers when you give it. Normally if you want to kill a guy with a punch, you've got to practically break your hand to do it. This makes things easier.”

“Kill?”

“Yeah, you heard me. Kill. A sap or a stun gun knocks a guy out. Brass knuckles don't. They break bones. Powder teeth. Snap ribs like a twig. You don't punch a guy with brass knuckles to incapacitate him. You punch a guy with brass knuckles if you want to crack open his skull and send fragments of his nose into his brain. You punch a guy with brass knuckles if you want to break a man's jaw so hard he bites off his tongue and swallows it.”

I didn't say anything. Mancini stood there in the half-light, looking up at the flickering neon sign. He didn't move. He hardly even breathed.

Vincent said, “Mancini here? He got hit by brass knuckles. We were just kids, you know. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. It was a fight outside church one Sunday afternoon. This dealer came up from the left while we were walking out of service and blindsided Mancini with a right hook, knuckledusters to the jaw. Mancini went down after that. Lost about ten teeth, bits of his gums, a good half his tongue. He spat it out on the pavement like chewing gum. Had a hole in his cheek he could breathe through. But Mancini got up. Kicked the guy in the kneecap to bring him down. Beat that kid to death, right there on the church steps. Took him by the collar and slammed his head into the marble until his skull broke and his eyes went dark.”

Mancini didn't say anything.

Vincent said, “Ever since then, he's kind of had a thing for brass knuckles. Every guy's got a preference, and that's his. Some go for knives, some for shotguns, some for piano wire. But Mancini? Brass knuckles.”

I said, “What's your point?”

“What's my point? Look around you. If you want to survive in this business, you have to know what you're dealing with.”

I shook my head.

Vincent said, “My point is, if you're going to work with men like us, you've got to know what it’s like to kill someone up close. Personal. As far away as you're standing from me, right now, no further. If you're going to work with us, you've got to kill someone close enough to smell their fear and watch their eyes go dark. Plunge a Ka-Bar into somebody's chest until you can feel his heart stop. Can you do that?”

I said, “I told you, I don't like fighting.”

He said, “And killing?”

I shook my head. “That especially.”

“That's cute,” Vincent said. “Real cute. You practice that? You say that to yourself in front of the mirror?”

“It's true.”

“Well, I hope you've got it in you. Because if the moment comes, you better have the stuff to finish the job. Because if you're holding us up, I won't hesitate to put you down.”

“You won't--”

And just like that, Mancini took a swing at me.

It was a big and wide and dirty thing, one of those punches that people don't get up after. He punched with the force of his whole body behind it. Stepped forward, wound up, and everything. If the punch had made contact, it would have left me in a puddle of blood and spinal fluid right there in the parking lot. It didn't, though. The shot was wide and I jerked to the left on pure reflex. Mancini stumbled after the miss.

I grabbed his hand by the brass knuckles and twisted his wrist back. The joint came to a lock and his arm straightened out against the unnatural motion. From there I twisted clockwise. The wrist doesn't naturally allow much rotational motion, so all of the ligaments locked up. There are a bunch of nerve endings at the base of the bones in the forearm, near the bottom of the wrist. I kept going until his bones were pressing right into them.

Mancini screamed.

I took a quick step behind him and twisted his whole arm around with me. He stumbled with me because of the pain. I twisted his arm back until it was completely straight, then pushed my other hand into the small of his back. Now all of his joints locked up, from the shoulder to elbow. Three times the pain. I held him like that for a second to make sure he could feel the full extent of the agony. If I wanted, a small punch would shatter all the bones in his arm.