Manny
I rolled up to my shift at the bar, but I wasn’t even sure why I bothered anymore. Ever since that bitch—Bamber’s sister—started working with Micah, there were fewer and fewer girls working the bar, fewer on the streets, and fewer in the call rooms that needed check-ins. Rob, the dumbass, didn’t care much; he said that we should be glad to have the lower-stress job. But the lack of girls getting action in Micah’s scheme of things was cutting into my personal profits.
“Hey, Manny,” Claire said from behind the bar. “Corona and Cuervo?”
I nodded. I might as well have a little fun—after all, I wasn’t going to make any extra that night, that was for damn sure. Claire was pretty cute; not hot enough in the right way to work with the girls, but she had a nice ass and long legs, which she showed off in short shorts that went with her tank tops. She did well enough to get the guys’ appetites going for the girls who were actually selling.
She poured my shot and took the top off my beer, and I knocked back the tequila first, biting into the little wedge of lime on the shot glass. “How’s it looking here tonight?” Claire shrugged, doing her side work like always.
“It’s probably going to be slow,” she said. “Wednesdays are always slow, and Micah won’t listen to me about getting some kind of event going for the night.”
“I could talk to him about it,” I told her. “I like to see us all succeed.” Claire grinned.
“Well the girls are doing fine,” she pointed out. “It’s my tip envelope that ends up a bit thin on slow nights.” I nodded.
“I got you there,” I said. I sipped my beer and looked around the bar. The place was a dump. I’d told Micah more than once that he needed to put more money into it—that if he wanted a higher class operation with the girls, he had to give them a higher class base to work out of.
Of course, when that bitch Sadie had rolled up on the scene, he’d taken my advice and run in the wrong direction with it; instead of making the bar better, he’d started taking the girls—best ones on the beat—and putting them into the hotels with the bank guys. Of course, Rob and I didn’t make any kind of cut on the earnings of the girls who went off to the hotels; we just got our standard pay, same as Claire did on a slow night. Rob didn’t care, because he was also working for Micah on the drugs end—not a lot, not enough that Micah couldn’t trust him to keep his hands clean—but enough to where he was making plenty.
When Micah had started letting the girls sell their clients on a bit of the good stuff as an add-on for the night, I’d had my idea. Micah had explained it to me and Rob like this: the girls would have a little menu on them, with the different drugs that they could order for their johns. It wasn’t a lot—a little bit of meth, or a bit of E to make things better. It was a way for the girls to cross-promote Micah’s other business interest, was how Micah had sold the idea. They’d sell these guys a hit or two, maybe convince the guys to buy them a hit, and one of the runners—guys like Bamber—would bring the drugs and take the payment. Rob and I were not supposed to have anything at all to do with it.
But the guys who were running the drugs and money weren’t part of the usual group that dealt for Micah either. They were new guys mostly, ones who could be trusted a little bit, but not ones who were really hard and deep in the business. For someone like Bamber, who ended up working the job, it was a way to kind of get a foot in the door for the org, and maybe move up later on down the line.
I didn’t have anything against guys proving themselves and working their way up later on. That was how I’d gone about life. But it did give me an opening, especially since the guys weren’t all that trusted; after all, they were new. I wasn’t as directly involved in the drugs part, so I wasn’t making as much money as I thought I deserved. I talked to a couple of my friends, and convinced them to go along with me by giving them their own cut of the earnings we could make.
The big vulnerable point was the guys working for Micah, running the drugs to the call rooms. They had money from the buys, and they had the drugs for the sales. It wasn’t like with the dealers who usually had spotters, security working for them along the street; these guys—like Bamber—were just taking a night’s worth of drugs from the dealers and distributing as they needed, going up to the rooms to collect and drop off. So they were easy fucking targets—easier targets than probably anyone else in the city. The scam was simple: I’d give my friends some seed money, just enough to buy an hour or two with the girls, and a couple of bumps. They’d get the info on as many of the runners as possible—I didn’t know that many myself, and I couldn’t ask Rob, considering the plan and what it involved.
Once they had a decent idea of who they were looking for, they would stake out, and wait for the right moment, usually halfway through the night, to get the guy. They’d attack him, grab the cash and the drugs, and send the guy on his way. It’d been going smoothly, since it was new enough that Micah just figured he’d made some bad choices hiring guys. I’d come out of it about two thousand dollars the richer every week—and my friends got some cash to pay me back the seed money with and some drugs to use or sell how they wanted.
As far as I was concerned it was a perfect system. I’d keep milking it, a little at a time, and supplement my income, and as Micah expanded the new business connection, I’d be able to take a little more. Maybe I’d start charging the guys doing the running protection money, make that part of my game. But for the moment that was as far as I’d thought.
Right up until that bitch, Bamber’s sister, had stuck her nose into shit. As far as I was concerned, Bamber was just collateral damage; he was new in the business and if Micah made an example out of him it was no skin off my ass. But instead of just leaving town, or taking his lumps when a couple of my guys robbed him, his sister had gotten involved behind my back, and had halfway talked Micah into forgiving him.
And then of course Micah had gotten the idea to start using her, and not just to collect old debts. I barely cared about that and I didn’t think Micah cared much more about guys who owed him money from way back. But when Micah had figured out where the bitch worked, he’d started getting her involved with getting the girls into hotels, away from the streets and call rooms. Before I knew it, half the staff I was supposed to be watching—the girls who were supplying me with my side income and my cut of the action and even my normal salary—weren’t even working my beat anymore.
“Yo—Manny! How’s it going?” I looked up to see another one of Micah’s guys, a dealer named Carlo, walking up to the bar. I gave him a nod and he came to the seat next to mine.
“Not bad, not bad,” I told him. “Just getting the day started.” Carlo raised a hand and Claire brought him his regular: two shots of Jack and a PBR. He lit a cigarette.
“Man, some of these guys—these business guys that Micah’s going after—know how to fucking party,” Carlo told me. He knocked back his first shot and chased it with some PBR.
“That so?” Carlo nodded.
“I got a couple of them buying from my guys,” Carlo said. “Separate—not using the girls themselves. Asking for names. Rob’s been telling them.” I looked at Carlo, and tried not to make it obvious that this was news to me.
“Well from what I hear the runners have been getting their asses handed to them, so that makes sense,” I said. Carlo nodded again.
“I think Micah’s trying to figure out a way to make that shit more secure before he expands it,” Carlo said. “Best thing to happen for both of us, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. But deep down I was pissed at Rob for telling the girls they should refer their clients directly to the dealers. I wasn’t sure if Micah knew he was doing that—he’d wanted to keep the dealers separate from the girls, and he’d wanted the upgrade system to stay its own thing. But if Rob was putting together the fact of all the guys getting robbed, then I could see him trying to take care of shit his own way.
Rob wasn’t stupid—I knew he was smart—so the next thing would be to make sure that he didn’t catch on that I was involved in that shit. Carlo went to pay for his drinks and I pushed his money away, nodding to Claire. “On me,” I told them both. After all, Carlo had told me something important.
We shot the shit, talking shop about our beats. Carlo was one of Micah’s big dealers—he did mostly E, worked the club circuits, did some private parties, and there were a few big-dollar clients who came to him on the regular. “Want to hear something weird?”
“Go for it,” I told Carlo. He always had good stories, him and Lenny—Lenny did meth for Micah—both.
“So I get this call from this chick,” Carlo says, and I feel my heart beating faster. Was it Sadie? Was Bamber’s bitch sister getting her fingers in the dealers’ business too? “She says she’s heard about me through the grapevine and shit.”
“What’d she want?” I sipped my beer, still not sure whether or not it was Bamber’s sister going after this guy.
“Turns out she’s some kind of shrink,” Carlos said. “She said she had read some recent studies that E could help folks with PTSD or some shit, so she wanted to buy some from me for a couple of her patients to take on the down low.”
“No shit?” I shook my head. It sounded fucking crazy to me.
“Apparently it helps them deal with like, flashbacks and shit,” Carlo said with a shrug. He took his other shot and sucked down cigarette smoke. “But I mean, it was funny as fuck. This bitch calling me like ‘Hello, yes, is this Carlo Giambetta?’” I laughed out loud at the fruity, girly voice he put on.
“So are you going to sell to her?”
“Damn straight I will,” Carlo said. “She said if it works on the one patient she’s talked to about it, she might try it on some others.”
“What kind of shrink is she?”
“The desperate kind, I don’t know,” Carlo replied. “Anyway, she thinks it’ll help, and obviously she can’t get shit like this from the corner drug store.” I laughed at the idea of some shrink trying to buy E from a CVS or Walgreens.
“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “And sounds like she’ll be a regular. Think she’ll start doing it herself?” Carlo shrugged.
“No fucking clue,” Carlo said. “Sounds straight-laced though, so probably not.” He finished off his cigarette and lit another and I finished off my beer and snagged a smoke out of his pack.
“You know anything about this running business?” Carlo shrugged again.
“All I know is Micah’s trying to increase security. There’s been too many robberies for it to be a coincidence,” Carlo told me.
“Yeah,” I agreed. I’d tried to keep my face as clean as possible; but obviously Micah was making sure that not everyone knew everything about everything. Except for maybe Bamber’s sister. “What do you think of that bitch he’s hired?”
“Sadie?” Carlo looked at me. “No fucking clue about her, except she seems to be getting the girls some choice gigs uptown.” Carlo knocked back some more of his beer. “How’s that affecting you and Rob?”
“Makes my work easier,” I said. “But I’m not getting the extras I used to. Man, that was fucking sweet.” I wanted to sound like I was on board, like I was a team player, but I also didn’t want to be too obvious. Micah would start looking for people to blame soon, and I couldn’t let myself come up too high on the list. Let him blame someone else; I wasn’t going to go down for that shit.
Carlo had another cigarette, finished off his beer, and went out to start working the streets, and I got started on my own work for the night: checking on the girls, making sure they were staying on task both in the bar and on the streets. I had to think, too—I had to come up with something to keep Micah from looking at me when it came time to blame someone for the thefts. Micah wasn’t fucking stupid; he would figure out it had to be an inside job at some point. My deal was going to be making sure he didn’t figure out that the inside part was me.
Maybe I should let one of my guys get caught—but then I’d risk him rolling over on me. Let him get caught and then kill him before he talks, I thought. That might work. Or get someone to put the blame on someone else, like Bamber. It’d serve that asshole right, putting his sister in the biz. I got the impression that Bamber’s sister had done it herself, but that didn’t matter. She had stuck her nose in something that wasn’t her business and she was getting on my last nerve. She could fucking go down with the ship, for all I cared.