Chance
A lot of folks in Brooklyn might be surprised to find that the abandoned warehouses dotted all over the place ain’t abandoned at all, but are used by some damn evil gangs for some damn evil stuff. Not that I’m judging whatever it is these bastards wanna do with their free time. I know I do some damn bad stuff when I’m unoccupied, especially when it comes to killin’ and fuckin’. But as I sit across the street, in the full darkness of an autumn night, watching the warehouse, I idly wonder what’d happen if some kids came by and ran on in there, doing like kids’ll do. Could get shot and killed, or worse. I ain’t a saint; I wouldn’t run after some idiot kid who didn’t have the sense to stay out of a dark abandoned warehouse. But still. It’s a thing that ain’t what it should be.
Idle thoughts as I wait for Nate to contact me.
As I sit here, I scan the warehouse. The gang inside are known as the Blood Bandits, which is about the most goddamn stupid name I’ve ever heard in my life. As far as I know, might have a lead on Julian. According to my boss Giovanni, Julian is a Capo who has made the incredible mistake of turning on the Family. Giovanni points, I go; now, I sit and wait.
The outside of the warehouse is nothin’ but a blank wall of darkness, the windows painted over with black paint, all the doors boarded over like they haven’t been used in years. But the truth is I saw a few Bandits walking in and out of that boarded up door about an hour ago, using it just like a regular door. It’s all a performance, put on for the public. Something’s going on inside there, something they want kept hidden. Maybe heroin, maybe meth, maybe prostitution. It don’t matter to me, as long as I get my lead, get my pay, and get out of here alive.
I lay my weapons out on the passenger seat: a pistol, a machete, a knuckle-duster, and a sub-machine gun, along with ammo for the pistol and machine gun. I check the weapons, keeping my hands busy and my eyes on the warehouse. Everything’s good. How many men in there, I wonder? I saw two dark-skinned guys go in earlier, but they haven’t come out yet. There’s been no screams, or gunfire, so if anything’s gone south in there, it’s gone south silently, or earlier today, before I got here.
Drumming my fingers on the dash, I mutter, “Come on, Nate.”
I always get itchy before a fight, itchy in my bones. I guess other men’d get scared, or excited, or nervous, but all I get is this itchiness throughout my body. The violence, something I keep chained up most of the time in order to exist in polite society, getting itself ready to spill over.
Finally, my cell buzzes. I put it on speaker, giving my weapons a final once-over.
“Nate,” I say.
“Chance,” Nate responds. Nate’s a nerdy short guy with horn-rimmed glasses who dresses like a little kid with colorful shorts and T-shirts, big running sneakers on his feet. I’m sure he’s kicked back, studying his multiple computer screens as he talks to me. He’s my intel guy, a hacker, but he’s also got a knack for anticipating people. He’s the sort of guy who knows you’re gonna sneeze before you even get a cold. “How is it down there?”
“A warehouse in fall at night,” I say. “Cold and dark.”
Nate laughs awkwardly. Folks’re always trying to bring me out, make me have some banter with ’em, but I’ve never been that way. I just get the job done. Whenever I go by the bars and clubs where the enforcers hang out and I see ’em there, laughing and joking and shit, I always get the sense I don’t belong. Maybe that’s just ’cause I was passed between so many families on my way up I was never allowed to belong. Not that it matters. Belonging don’t mean much to a man like me. Difficult to feel like you got any place to call home when your hooker mom checked out the day after she gave birth to you and your enforcer dad got himself clipped when you were seven years old. Damn difficult.
“Chance, you there?”
“Yeah,” I say. “So what’ve you got for me? Somethin’ serious, to tell me to wait for your call.”
Usually, I just go in and do my work. Usually, Nate’d given me anything I needed to know way before I was about to go in there. But tonight was different. I got a text from him just when I was about to bust down the door, telling me there was more to this than I knew, and that he needed to do some more research.
“Go on, then,” I say, when he’s silent a few moments.
“Well, it’s not a hooker hovel,” he says. “It’s drugs. That’s the first thing.”
“Does it matter? Meth, heroin, coke, women…who cares? All that matters is I get in, get one of those bastards singing, and get out.” As I talk, I slide my weapons into their places: the pistol into my armpit holster, the machine gun into my other armpit holster, my dusters in the pocket of my black hoodie, and the machete into the sheath on the back of my leg, just in case. Sitting here tooled up, I wait.
Nate hesitates, and then says, “Look, Chance—I don’t even know if I should be saying this. I’m just the research guy, right? But you know me. Once I get my teeth into something, I can’t just ignore it. But I don’t want to cross into any Family territory. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Just speak,” I say. “No one will know where I heard a thing. Goddamn. Hurry up.”
“You’re there to get information about Julian, right? Because Giovanni thinks he might’ve said something he shouldn’t have, or something?”
“Family shit,” I say, shrugging. “The boss wants to talk to a made guy who’s chosen the wrong time to take a vacation. So what?”
“It’s just that the Bandits—the gang in that warehouse—have recently kidnapped the daughter of a low-level enforcer, a man by the name of Michael Morris, Mikey Morris.”
“So what?” My hands on the door, ready to open it. Nate’s in a weird mood today. He ain’t usually the type to call and ramble at me like this. Maybe he’s scared. I don’t know. Readin’ people’s moods ain’t really my specialty. “Spit it out, Nate.”
“It’s strange. The girl who’s been kidnapped has been given to Julian. For marriage, you know. Her dad gave her away, and now the Bandits have kidnapped her and Julian’s nowhere to be seen. What sort of sense does that make? I don’t get it. I’ve heard whispers that Julian’s on a crusade to get her back, but if that’s the case—”
“Goddamn,” I interrupt. “None of this matters to me, Nate. My job is to get in there, get info on Julian’s whereabouts, and get out. Not get all the ins and outs of his love life. Is there anythin’ you need to tell me about any of that? Anything that matters to the mission, right now?”
“Just be careful,” Nate says. “Maybe Julian hasn’t gone rogue or anything like that. Maybe he’s just looking for this girl. And if the girl’s in there, whilst you’re in there, and something happens to her…”
“Ah,” I say. “Right.” Don’t let anythin’ happen to the girl, ’cause if it does and the boss and the Capo decide they wanna make peace, I’ll end up going down for whatever went wrong. “Could’ve just come out and said that,” I say.
“You needed to understand all the angles,” Nate replies. “And I know what you’re like. You’d end up blowing the girl up by accident, lighting up the room she’s in without thinking about it.”
I manage not to scoff. I don’t shoot people I don’t mean to shoot. “Anythin’ else?”
“Be careful. That’s it. Anyway, she might not even be in there.”
I hang up the cell. It’s good that he called me, then, if there’s a girl in there somewhere who I need to try and keep alive. Nate was right, what he said about lighting up the room, but I’ve also been in the game long enough that I’m damn good at telling the difference between a chick going for a gun to shoot me and a dude shaking because he’s about to shit himself.
Climbing from the car, I head toward the warehouse, jogging slowly. The ground is slick with rainwater, so I don’t sprint. I had a few jobs in the early days where I thought sprinting was a good idea, only to find that my boots and the concrete didn’t agree with me. I grip my dusters as I jog, ready to fight.
I’m about to kick in the fake boarded-up door when I hear two men walking from the opposite side of the warehouse, through the car park. All around us, tall buildings with yellow lights stare on, normal people livin’ normal lives, none of them knowing that in a few minutes hell might break loose just outside their windows. I stay close to the warehouse’s wall, in the shadow of the eaves. It’s surprising how many men’ll just walk right by a man standing like this, ’cause in their heads he’s not a man, just a collection of shadow, and they pass right over it.
The Bandits are a low-level gang, with a small turf and a trigger-happy reputation. They’re mostly kids, not bright enough to organize themselves, not much of a hierarchy. Really, havin’ a warehouse is a surprising move up for these shitheads. Two boys walk past me, both of them barely old enough to shave. One is tall, skinny, wearing clothes which are way too baggy for him, which’ll make it hard for him to fight. The other is shorter, muscle-bound, and efficient-looking. I fade into the wall as they walk toward me.
“All I’m sayin’ is, you can’t break a bitch in twice, man. That’s just crazy.”
“If you weren’t a fuckin’ virgin, you’d know that ain’t even true. I broke that girl in a dozen damn times last night.”
The shorter one laughs, so close to me now I can see his pensive features, even in the darkness. “You lie so damn much I bet you don’t even know what’s—”
I move with quick, practiced movements, motions buried so deep in my muscles that I don’t need to think. Darting forward, I take the machete from my leg sheath and aim a powerful over-arc swing at the short kid’s head. The blade thuds into his skull, burying deep between his eyes, all the way down to his nose. By now the tall, baggy-clothed one is turning on me, pulling his gun, but it’s caught on his waistband. I punch him in the gut with my duster, hard, keeling him over. Hit him again, twice more, so that he crumples up and lands on his ass, coughing. Then I kneel down and grab his neck and shove him up against the wall and look into his face.
“That,” I say, “is why you use a damn holster. Likely to shoot your own balls off, carrying a weapon like that. Idiot.” I slap him across the face with an open palm, and he whimpers.
“Get the fuck off me, man,” he cries, but there’s no steel or bravado in his voice. He’s already broken. Of course, I did just put a blade into his friend’s brain.
“Quiet,” I say.
He goes quiet, but I hear the sound of dripping liquid and know he’s pissed himself.
“What do you know about an Italian called Julian?” I ask him. “Heard any whispers around the ’hood? Heard anything at all? Maybe not even by name.”
I squeeze his neck as I speak, letting him know that it’d be no big thing for me to crush his throat.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, looking like a little kid now in all those clothes, nothin’ like the loud gangbanger he was a few moments ago. I see he’s got a tattoo of a cowboy covered in blood on his neck, with the words Blood Bandits painted beneath the image. “I don’t know shit.”
“That’s not very useful to me,” I tell him. “What about a girl? You heard anythin’ about a girl being kept hostage around here?”
“There’s no girl in there,” the kid says. “I know that for a fact, man. I been at this place since it started, and there never been any girls in there, just the workers, just the cookers, you know?”
“Of course you don’t know anything. Useless grunt like you.”
“So you’ll let me go?” the kid says, raising his eyebrows. He’s crying now.
“Nope,” I say. “I’ve been given orders to kill every bastard in here after I’ve gotten what I need.”
He’s starts blabbering then, like they often do. I jab him once in the nose, dazing him, and then jab him again, his nose exploding with blood as my duster breaks bone and messes with cartilage. While he’s sobbing and gasping, I go to the other boy and pull the machete from his head. This is harder’n it might seem, ’cause it’s wedged deep, but after a couple of seconds I pull it free and return to the kid. His still crying, begging, talkin’ about his momma. When I slice through his skull, he finally shuts up. I put my boot on his shoulder, still jittering as his body fails to get the message that it’s dead, and pull the blade free. I clean it on his baggy shirt; maybe they’ll know more inside.