Rocco
“Gerald Hightower, Red Fist, the Bloody Wheel,” Adams says, and then takes a sip of whisky. I reckon I’m the only one who calls the ancient man Adams. Everybody else just calls him White-Hair. He’s eighty if he’s a day, with a wheezing throat and hard eyes which look almost red. “This bastard’s got more names than any one man needs, and the Crooked Demons are sniffing up our goddamn asses. Tell me, how’re we supposed to take these pricks down with our president dancing with his head in the clouds?”
“I hope you don’t run your mouth to the other guys like this,” I say. “Shotgun’s a good man.”
“I never said he weren’t a good man.” Adams scowls, finishing his whisky. “No one’s listening to me apart from you. Don’t worry about it.” He gestures around the clubhouse. The bar is empty apart from Jerry the pledge sweeping the floor at the other end, where he can’t hear us over the Johnny Cash playing on the jukebox. Adams lights a cigarette.
“You sure you wanna do that, old man? Your chest already sounds like a rattlesnake.”
“If one of these things kills me, I’ll count myself lucky.” He strikes a match and starts puffing.
“Fair enough. Give me one, then.”
We smoke together for a while, waiting for Shotgun.
“What’s all this about, anyway?” Adams asks after a while. He bows sarcastically, wriggling his flaring white eyebrows. “You are our lord and savior, after all, the vice president of this crock of shit.”
“Seriously, if you talk to the boys like that—”
“You’ll break my fingers. I know. I don’t. Stop your damn worrying.”
“Shotgun’s got us a meeting,” I say. “Protection or somethin’ like that. Not sure yet.”
“You have faith in him,” Adams says.
“He hasn’t failed me, not once.”
“Yet.”
“Well, sure, yet. Everyone’s yet, ain’t they?”
“If I ever write a book of poetry, that’ll be the first line.”
“Hurry up and die, will you? We’re all waiting on it.”
Adams laughs from his throat, a sound more cough than laugh, and then smokes half his cigarette in one puff. “I remember when Shotgun brought you in here, lad. Sixteen years old, a wild animal more’n a child, fists covered in blood from where you tooled up two of our guys, men, full-grown men, just tooled them up like it was nothing.”
“I was there,” I say, remembering. “I don’t need the history lesson.”
“What’s an old man for, eh?” Adams aims a crooked finger at me. “If I can’t give you history lessons, what do you suggest I do?”
I click my neck from side to side. “Where the fuck has Shotgun got to?”
“Who knows these days? I’ve never seen a man go so mad over some pussy.”
“Careful. That’s his fiancée you’re talking about.”
Adams holds his hands up. “This Red Fist, Rocco, apparently he’s killed fifty men, maybe more. I heard that he served overseas and collected scalps. He’s Old Testament, if the stories are true.”
“What,” I say, leaning forward, “and I’m not?”
I hold Adams’ gaze for a moment, and then both of us laugh gruffly.
The door opens and Shotgun walks in. When I was sixteen and he was twenty-eight, he seemed like a giant to me. He seemed like an old man. He seemed like something out of a storybook (not that I’d read many of them). It was only as I got older that I realized he was young when he found me on the streets, and a head shorter than me to boot. It’s strange how I never noticed that, since I stopped growing at around eighteen and I must’ve always been his height, or taller. But that’s because he was the only dad I ever knew. He’s around five eleven, broad-shouldered, with shaggy ginger hair and squinty green eyes. He wears his Seven Sinners leather, always wears it. Maybe that’s why I always wear mine, too.
He nods to Jerry, and then Adams, and then gestures for me to join him in his office. I stand up and nod down at Adams. “Don’t smoke too much, old man,” I say.
“Too much be damned,” he croaks, dropping the butt into the ashtray and lighting another.
I laugh and then go into Shotgun’s office. There’s a picture of me and him above his desk, standing side by side on my eighteenth birthday, me wearing my new leather and standing next to my new Harley, the one Shotgun bought me when I became a bonafide member of the club.
“Sorry I’m late,” Shotgun says, which niggles me. Shotgun never used to apologize.
“Boss.” I nod shortly.
“Women troubles, you know how it can be. And financial troubles. All rolled into one. Too many troubles to count. But it’s all worth it, though. More than worth it.” His squinty eyes go wide and dreamy. “She really is something else, Rocco.”
I repress a sigh. I remind myself of who this man is, of all he’s done for me, of where I would be without him. “I’m sure she is, boss.” I’m not sure of that, in truth. I’ve only met Cecilia a handful of times and found her a normal-looking normal-seeming woman with her dyed hair and short skirts, not that much different from one of the club girls. Apparently she comes from some posh fancy-pants family, but she doesn’t seem like it. “What about this meeting?” I ask, when Shotgun just stares off into space.
“Oh, yeah.” He clicks his fingers. “The meeting. Fuck, it slipped my mind. Her dad isn’t paying for the wedding anymore. Doesn’t give a fuck about tradition.”
I wave a hand. “Pay for it yourself, then. That’s no big deal.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Shotgun says. “The man’s lucky he’s my future father-in-law.”
The talk of family annoys me, reminds me . . .
I say, “So who’re we meeting with?”
“Some small-time gang,” Shotgun says. “Small-time, but worth taking seriously. They’ve got some lethal motherfuckers working with them, if my source ain’t screwing me around. Let me call the guy and we’ll rearrange. We’ve stood them up.”
I bristle, but say nothing. “We’ve” stood them up, like I was the one putting a woman before business. Shotgun arranges for two of their men to come by the clubhouse.
“I need to make a call,” he says when he’s done. He nods at the door.
“Boss.”
I leave the office and return to the bar, sitting at Adams’ table. Roger Smith has joined him, a man a lot of the boys call Beast since he’s about seven feet tall and vicious in a fight. We drink in near-silence for a while and then two scrawny, meth-head-looking men walk into the bar. A few minutes later, me and Shotgun and the meth-heads are in Shotgun’s office, talking business.
“My name is Daniel One, and this is Daniel Two.”
“Don’t use any of that codeword bullshit with us,” I say. “What’re your names?”
The man calling himself Daniel One shifts from foot to foot, and then says, “I’m Philip and this is Liam.”
Philip is a bald man with a tattoo of a dragon on the crown of his head, the wings spreading down past his ears. He wears a grimy shirt that was once checkered and stinks of beer. Liam is a short, dirty-haired rat-looking man with whiskers like pubic hair and watery eyes. After about ten seconds I can tell these aren’t the lethal men Shotgun thinks they are, but he seems oblivious to it, waving at them to sit down, and even shaking their hands.
I swallow my feelings and sit down next to him. It ain’t my place to question Shotgun. That’s never been my place.
“What’s your proposal?” Shotgun says, but he doesn’t look at Philip or Liam. He doesn’t even look at me. He looks at the wall, and I can tell he’s not thinking about these guys or what they have to say. He’s thinking about his wedding. It’s been this way for weeks. I wish they’d hurry the damn thing up so that he’d focus on his work again.
“The Crooked Demons have a shipment of meth coming in the day after tomorrow,” Philip says, stroking his dragon’s wing. “We’re going to steal it. We’d like to hire somebody for protection. We don’t want anything going wrong, you know?”
“Nothing going wrong,” Liam agrees, twitching nervously.
“Something’s wrong with you already.” I nod at Liam. “Why do you want that meth, to use yourself?”
Philip ignores me, talking to Shotgun. “We can pay one and a half times the standard rate.”
“Twice the standard rate,” Shotgun mutters. “And maybe we can talk. The Crooked Demons aren’t anything to joke about.”
“Who’s joking?” Philip says. “Twice it is, then.”
“Okay, we have a deal.”
“Wait a sec,” I say. I try and keep my voice respectful. Shotgun is in charge. I can’t ever forget that. “We need more details before we shake on it.”
“Come on,” Philip says, appealing to Shotgun.
“The fuck you looking at me like that for?” Shotgun growls, some of his old bite coming back into him. “My VP says he needs some information.”
I get it all out of him. They’re going to hit the warehouse in the window between the initial delivery and the meth being moved, and they need protection because some of their guys aren’t very experienced. They’ll pay upfront, too, which makes Shotgun’s eyes go as wide as saucers. I guess a man who’s got a wedding to pay for likes hearing things like that. It’s even enough to make him ignore the short notice. They’re going to hit it in under two hours.
“I’ll pick one of the guys to lead the protection gang,” Shotgun says. “Maybe Beast.”
He really isn’t here at all, I reflect. Beast is a terrible choice to lead a job like this. “I’ll lead it,” I say. “Make sure it’s done right.”
Shotgun nods. “All right. Be careful, and if there are any Crooked Demons, don’t hesitate.”
I return to the bar once the details are sorted out, sitting in a corner alone and nursing a bottle of whisky. There was a time when Shotgun would’ve led it himself, and not that long ago. What—a year, less? Before he met his fiancée. A man can’t talk shit about another man’s woman. That’s just not how it works. But I also can’t close my eyes to reality.
As I get drunk, I get a feeling in my belly, a feeling that something terrible is going to happen.