raised by wolves

I find the first of them downtown. The files Lusky gave me are some real professional work. I look right to the addresses. It’s still early. Thugs only go out at night. I hail a cab.

I knock on the door and the thug who blasted The Boss opens the door. He’s still got a length of bandage around his hand where The Boss got him with his straight razor. His numb eyes go wide when he recognizes me.

“You!” is all he manages to utter before I’m driving my fist into his face. It makes a sound like two steaks slapping together while porcelain breaks in the background. His head snaps back and there’s a spray of blood with teeth in it. This gets on my shirt, which is one I just washed. I bend down and hoist him back to his feet. He’s out cold. His eyes are rolled back into his head and his tongue droops out of the corner of his mouth. I punch him again and let him fall to the ground with a sound like fruit falling down the stairs.

I close the door and lock it, then I light a cigarette.

I don’t give him a chance to talk. I torture him, break his fingers, then his knees, then his elbows and then his toes. I stuff a sock in his mouth and duct tape it there to keep him from screaming. After the second knee, he’s bawling like a baby. I spend the afternoon kicking him around the apartment. I find a cabinet full of wrenches and screwdrivers and pliers and then I use those on him, too. He looks at me so pathetically.

I finish him off by picking him up by the neck and pitching him like a baseball out the window. He falls five stories and lands on a parked car. A woman screams, just like in a movie. I leave the apartment fast, but calm, before anyone thinks to even look up. On the ground, there’s a small crowd gathered around the trashed car and the trashed thug.

I don’t believe it, but he’s still gurgling. Someone is screaming to call an ambulance. I step close to the thug and lean in close.

“You got it easy,” I whisper in his ear. I reach into my waistband and pull my gun. “The others won’t be so lucky.”

I pull the trigger. I pull it again to make sure. The small crowd is growing, and now there’s more people screaming. I hail a cab.

I’m gone.

It’s about 7 pm when I’m through. This leaves me with fifteen hours to find out what’s so important to Lusky about the shares. It’s going to be a long night.

I tell the cabbie to drop me somewhere with cheap coffee. None of that chain crap. I like my coffee with a layer of grease on top, from a pot that hasn’t had more than a light rinsing between brews in years.

He lets me out on a corner and I pay him. It’s a little diner, Maura’s. I drink two pots straight and leave a big tip.

I arrive, once again by taxi, at the corner closest to The Crab. The lights are all out and it doesn’t look like there’s anyone inside. It’s been closed ever since The Boss went. I wait for the cab to pull away, then walk around to the back door, the staff entrance. I reach up to the top of a light fixture over the back door to grab my key. I figure it’s easier to leave it here, and no one could reach up there without bringing a step stool. And besides, who would want to break into The Crab?

My key is missing.

I lunge for the door, but it’s locked. I reach up and check again for the key, but it’s really not there. Frantically, I check my pockets. I grab ahold of the door knob, almost reflexively, and give it a good yank. It pops right out, the lock inside snapping clean from its fittings. The door swings gently open.

I pull my gun from my waistband and step cautiously inside. It’s dark.

Moving in the dark through this hallway is easy. I feel like a bat, navigating by sonar. I listen. I move as quietly as I can towards The Boss’s office. When he was alive, I would never have dreamed of going into his office without permission. But The Boss is gone. He would understand.

The first sign of anything amiss is a thin line of light projecting from the crack under the door of The Boss’s office. Someone is here. I can almost smell them.

I press close to the door. There is a soft, trembling sound, almost like coughing coming from the other side. Whoever it is, isn’t moving around. They aren’t moving anything else, either. Sleeping? Waiting? How many? These and other questions flood my mind, but my body knows what to do. I should always remember to listen to my gut. My head gets clouded so easily. Lugs like me should always listen to their guts.

I kick the door to splinters and get ready to make a mess.

Sitting in The Boss’s old chair behind his heavy oak desk is a woman with a scarf wrapped around her head. A pair of dark sunglasses are on the desk in front of her. She’s holding a small square wooden object. A picture frame. She screams and drops it, and the glass shatters.

“Don’t shoot!” she shrieks. “Please don’t shoot!”

I don’t. But I keep the gun trained on her. She knows the drill. She puts her hands up. She looks at me and I see her lips tremble. She’s older. I can see the wrinkles at the corners of her glassy gray eyes and her thin mouth. She’s been crying. That was the coughing sound, I realize. Buy why?

I stand silently, utterly still. I see her bloodshot eyes down the barrel of my gun and I decide whether to waste her or not.

“Who are you?” I demand, finally breaking the silence.

She replies by bursting into tears.

I haven’t got time for this.

“Who are you?” I say again, louder, more forcefully and she drops her arms. She covers her face with her hands and sobs like a fire hydrant in the summer.

“So you really don’t know?” she manages to squeak out between sobs. “You really don’t know?”

There is a look of utter defeat on her face. The color has all gone out of her, the way The Boss looked all done up in the hospital. She sobs.

“Don’t know what? Lady, what are you talking about?”

“Oh, Arthur,” she sobs. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. My name is Arthur. My real name is Arthur.

“Oh, Arthur, don’t you recognize your own mother?”

The Pallid Mallard is a squat brown building down town with neon signs advertising all sorts of stupid expensive beers, and big sandwich boards outside advertising lunch specials that are still overpriced. My stomach growls. The door jingles when I walk in, and the girl at the desk in the front’s eyes go wide when she looks at me. She’s a pretty little brunette. She looks scared to death. I smile and ask to be seated with Mr. Lusky. She swallows hard and squeaks out: “Would you like a menu?”

Against my better judgement, I say yes. She hands me one and then tells me to follow her. She leads me through the restaurant with it’s low-hanging orange light fixtures and the smell of fried food. I’m so hungry at this point I could eat the upholstery on the booths. She leads me down a small flight of stairs and I almost run my head right into the ceiling. This I assume is the private lounge. The Crab had a Vee Eye Pee area, where The Boss and his friends would bring girls from other clubs back to dance after hours. I don’t see any girls, but I can only guess that it’s because the Mallard isn’t closed.

At the other end of the room, opposite the small flight of stairs is our Mr. Lusky. He’s dressed in the same gray he was the day of the funeral, and he’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s dark down here. He’s idly twiddling a french fry between his fingers. Then he looks up and sees me. I see his eyebrows raise and the fry falls back to the plate.

“Well, well, well,” he says and stands up, side-stepping around the table. “I didn’t think you would come. This is a very pleasant surprise Mr…Legs, was it?”

I nod and he reaches out to shake my hand. I don’t shake hands unless I’m going to break someones arm. After an uncomfortable second, Mr. Lusky drops his arms and exhales heavily.

“Please, have a seat,” he says, motioning to the table. He takes the menu from the girl, who is still standing silently a few feet from us.

“Thank you, Rebecca,” he says and hands the girl a small wad of bills. “You’ll let me know if anyone else comes in to see me?”

“Yes, Mr. Lusky,” she squeaks like a dog toy and then quickly shuffles away, back up the stairs.

Mr. Lusky smiles. “She’s a good girl,” he says. “It’s always a pleasure stumbling upon truly reliable help.”

He looks at the menu in his hands and then back at me. “Were you thinking of eating? Not that I mind, I was just curious. I would be more than happy to pay for your meal, just for the simple fact that you actually showed up. What do you say?”

I want to tell him he’s just said the magic words. I still can’t imagine what this whole meeting will be about, but now I’ve got a free meal coming to me. Maybe I’ll get the open-face sandwich after all.

“I say that sounds excellent, Mr. Lusky. Thank you very much.” I smile and take a seat. Lusky reaches into his pocket, and I can hear a faint buzzing sound come echoing from far away up the stairs. About a minute later, a waitress comes to take our order.

“Whatever he wants, put it on my bill,” Mr. Lusky says. The girl nods and pulls a pad of paper and a pen from her apron. I open the menu and read off anything that sounds appealing.

I get the appetizer combo, which is onion rings, french fries, jalapeno poppers, chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks, an order of stuffed grape leaves, a vegetable quesadilla, a gyro, a plate of nachos, a hamburger cooked medium rare with everything, a cobb salad, a whole apple pie and finally the open-face sandwich of my dreams, salami, mayo, mustard, onion, sauerkraut, hot sauce, heaven.

Mr. Lusky almost falls out of his seat laughing when I conclude the order, his face turns red and sweat beads up on his forehead.

“My God,” he says after the waitress scurries off. “Skipped breakfast, huh?” I smile.

“Well, I suppose I brought it on myself, telling you I’d foot the bill. But I don’t mind. They usually comp my meals here anyway.”

I should’ve asked for a glass of water. Mr. Lusky leans forward, breaking out the same conspiratorial tone he used at the funeral.

“You see, I’m a very important man. Well, not so important as some, but certainly important enough. There are circles I travel in that afford me quite a bit of influence on certain matters. Real estate is one. This is one of the only restaurants in town that I don’t own. I suppose that’s why I still come here. Shipping is another. I own a fleet of trucks that moves forty thousand tons of products along the coast every four hours. Fruit, vegetables, consumer electronics like computers and televisions. All good, honest enterprises, I assure you. But as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m also involved in a number of…shall we say…less wholesome endeavors as well.”

This sounds like a familiar pitch. I’m going to knock it out of the park. Just like Babe fucking Ruth. I let him talk.

“Your former employer and I were in the midst of brokering a deal in which I would gain a share in his night clubs in exchange for a share of one of my shipping companies, a convenient front for…well, whatever it was your employer wanted a front for. Unfortunately, now that he’s gone, there’s no one to secure the deal. We had a gentlemen’s agreement, sealed with an honest hand shake, but a hand shake is not enough for the courts. Not in this field.

“I want you to take over the deal and see to it that I get that share in your former employer’s clubs. I’ve done some research into you, Mr. McGinnis—err—Legs…and it seems to my men that you’re just a spook. Appeared on the scene some years ago as Mr. Marini’s head enforcer and that’s all besides your name. Your real name, that is.

“As you know from attending the funeral, Mr. Marini had no next of kin. No one to claim his assets. No one to see to it that his business ventures continued to be taken care of.

“What I want you to do is become Mr. Marini’s next of kin to facilitate the deal we had in place before his untimely demise. In exchange, I’ll give you the names of the men who killed your boss. I know he meant a lot to you, and I feel it’s the least I can do. I would take care of them myself, but I find myself under a fair amount of scrutiny lately because of some certain less-than-legal trafficking operations going on under my watch.”

“What do you say?” he asks. “You’ll be the sole benefactor. You’ll inherit a veritable empire, and all you have to do is go to an office, file some paperwork under a prepared false identity, and easy access to the men who killed your boss. You stand to benefit greatly in exchange for just a small favor to satisfy an agreement between two businessmen—two gentlemen.”

He sits back and waits for my answer. The food comes out, carried by what looks like the entire staff. Three girls all in black, all carrying trays of my lunch. It reminds me of a movie I saw where a medieval Indian king or sultan has a whole feast carried to him on gilded platters by slave girls. They put the trays down and I start eating, letting Lusky sit in silence to wait for my answer.

All the time while I’m eating, I can feel Lusky grilling me from behind those sunglasses. He’s impatient. I see sweat beading up on his forehead while I eat. He’s nervous. He wants me to accept bad. There’s more going on here than he’s telling me.

I weigh my options between bites. I don’t know how he set it up for me to claim to be The Boss’s next of kin, but I can only assume he has people. This could also be a trick. I have to find out what about the shares in the clubs is so valuable to Lusky. I also have to find out how it is he knows so much about the men who killed The Boss when I’ve been in the dark for a whole week.

I scoop up a bit of meat and cheese on the last corner of the last nacho and put it in my mouth. It gives a satisfying crunch. I chew and swallow and then tell Lusky I’ll do it.

But I don’t want any funny shit. I tell him if he’s screwing me, I’ll find out. I tell him I don’t get screwed. I tell him if he’s trying to set me up, he’d be better off trying to snuff me here and now than setting me off like a rabid dog to sic some hapless yanks.

He gives me a look like he would never have even thought of a double cross. He assures me my best interests are in mind, as well as the best interests of The Boss’s business. He hands me a manilla folder. Inside are names, addresses and photos of the black guys in the van, as well as the whereabouts of their employer, a Mr. Von Tier.

“Thanks,” I say, closing the folder and standing up. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait,” Lusky says. “You need to be at the executor’s office tomorrow morning. 10 AM, no later. I swear I’m not here to screw you. Like you said, if I was trying to get you snuffed, I’d just get it out of the way now. But there’s no reason for me to do that. Unless you try to screw me. 10 AM. Got it?”

He’s shaking back there in that booth. I smile at him and lean down over the table, real close, close enough that he can smell the nachos on my breath.

“Got it,” I tell him and scoop up the last bunch of french fries from his plate. I eat them in one bite and make my way out of the Mallard, up the stairs and out the door, back into the daylight.

Now I have the names. Now I have a place to start. From here on, it’s easy.

They all think I’m just some goon. I might be, after all, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing.

It doesn’t mean I don’t know how to make them squirm.

Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. It’s the only one I usually cook for myself, and I make certain to make it count.

Two pots of coffee, four slices of toast, four eggs with cheese, six pancakes with maple syrup, a muffin or a danish, a half gallon of skim milk, a half gallon of orange juice or apple juice, a bowl of grits with butter and brown sugar, a plate of bacon and a stack of sausage links usually holds me over until lunch time.

After breakfast I do sit ups and push ups for at least an hour and then stretch and take a shower. These things help me make sense of the day. My head clears when my stomach is full and my body is working. It feels wonderful to have my head so clear, like looking at the horizon from the top of a cliff in the desert. A cool breeze blows and you can hear the gentle hum of a serene, far-away nothingness.

There are times when I wish I could stamp out that humming, when I wish I could turn off my mind for good and not ever have to worry about anything ever again. But I know that’s really not how it works, even when things are too difficult for me to understand all the way. It makes my head hurt, but I know if I don’t worry about the way things are around me, there won’t be anyone else to take care of it when it all goes wrong. This is what The Boss liked best about me, I think: perseverance.

“That’s our Legs,” he said once, after I came back to The Crab with shards of shrapnel stuck in me from a grenade that went off on a particularly hairy assignment. “Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.”

He was sitting in the back room playing cards with some of his associates. They all had a nice laugh at that one. The Boss was always making jokes that got the whole room in an uproar.

“Nobody solves a problem quite like you, Legs” he told me when he realized I was bleeding under my jacket. “Go on, Natalia’s in the back, she’ll get you fixed up.”

Natalia was a doctor from somewhere far away, Russia or Ukraine or something. She was tall for a woman, with brown hair that fell off her head like a huge cascade of liquid chocolate, filled with flecks of gold dust. She always wore very low-cut shirts and would take pains to bend down as far as she could when she was fixing you up, just to tease you. She would laugh when I blushed and say things in that other strange language, and go on about how she loved big strong men. I think Natalia liked me a lot.

One day Natalia stopped showing up at The Crab. The Boss never made any mention of her again. The next time I got hurt, he sent me to Dr. Cord, a skinny black guy with glasses like telescopes. He fixed me up fine, but it wasn’t the same. I could tell Cord was scared of me while he was working. I took extra care not to get hurt after I realized Natalia was gone. It was a shame, I liked her. But that’s how things work.

By the time my cab arrives at the Pallid Mallard, breakfast is a distant, unsatisfying memory. I should have made the whole dozen eggs. Or maybe french toast would have filled me up better than pancakes. But it’s too late to care about it now. I’ve heard the Mallard has really good open-face sandwiches, with corned beef and sauerkraut. I lick my lips. I step out of the cab, which creeks unapologetically as I remove my extra weight from it’s axles. I pay the cabbie and tip well. He smiles with a big gold tooth right in front and says, “Thanks, boss.”

I tell him The Boss is dead. My name is Legs.

He drives off and I go inside.

The next day after I ripped a bunch of tubes out of the machines I was hooked up to, I go with Gracie to the I See You, a place in the hospital where only people who get hurt the worst go. They don’t allow visitors, but even with a big stupid bandage around my head, I’m big and wide and people usually let me go where I want.

There’s the Boss, sitting in bed like a cardboard cut out. He’s all flat and looks like he’s in black and white. A tube is stuck in his nose. And another in his mouth. Cables fly out from under his clothes in all directions. More tubes under the flimsy hospital sheet. A machine next to the bed beeps a steady, slow rhythm, and another machine sucks air in and then blows it back out, hhhhhhh-psssh.

I feel all choked up.

“Oh, Boss,” I say. It doesn’t sound like me though. Must be something in the air, making my throat close up and making my voice squeek. Like helium. I turn to tell Gracie, but I forget what I was going to say because she’s doing the Russian dolls thing with my hand again. My throat gets tighter. I have to breathe in hard through my nose. My eyes are watering.

“Oh, Boss,” I say again. I can’t stand looking at him, so I look at the floor.

Gracie squeezes my hand like a soft breeze and says, “Oh, Legs.”

The Boss died later that night.

Two days later was the funeral. Me and Gracie and a couple folks from Cosmo’s #2 were the only ones who came. Lots were invited. The only people I didn’t recognize were a woman in sunglasses who stood far away, and a man in a gray overcoat with slicked-back black hair who arrived just as they lowered The Boss into the ground.

The man in the gray overcoat came up next to me and watched the coffin disappear beneath the soil.

“You must be Legs,” he said, calm, voice cool as a straight razor. I don’t like that tone.

“Who’s asking?” I replied. I was still upset about the whole thing, though my throat had stopped clenching up by then. I leered down at the man over the collar of my coat.

“I was an associate of Mr. Marini. Er…Cosmo. I’ve heard a lot about you, young man, and I have some interesting information regarding your…uh, former employer.”

“Go screw. The Boss’s dead. That’s all I need to know about ‘em. He was a good man and now he’s dead.”

I clenched my fists in my pockets. Something about this guy made me want to slug him. You ever meet someone like that? Something about their voice, or the shape of their head or the dumb animal way they look at you, just makes you want to cave their head right in? This guy was that.

The guy in the gray overcoat exhaled sharply and cleared his throat.

“I can see that you are upset, and I understand. I am just as upset. Cosmo Marini was a good man, I agree. And that is why I have come to you. A good man dead deserves vengeance, don’t you think?”

This got my attention. But I still wanted to slug the guy.

“You think I’m not taking care of that?” I said, not ready to play it easy with him yet.

“Not at all. But it strikes me that with my information, you would make much haste in such a task.”

I looked back at the black hole in the ground. Everyone else had gone. A few yards away were a couple of men and a backhoe, ready to cover The Boss in dirt for eternity. A moment passed silently and I felt like a tidal wave had hit me in slow motion. I closed my eyes and breathed deep.

“Tuesday, 12 o’clock. The address is on the back,” the man said, interrupting my daydream. He thrust out a small white business card with the name Salvatore Lusky in fancy gold print. This Salvatore then made his hasty departure, back to a car on the other side of some nearby trees.

The address was a bar downtown. The Pallid Mallard.

Tuesday. 12 o’clock. I’d be there.

When I come to, it’s all sterile white sheets and a curtain and the buzzing of complicated machinery. Hospital. Haven’t been to one of these in a while.

Someone’s talking.

“Well, Mr. McGinnis, welcome back to the world of the living,”

It’s a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. He’s wearing glasses and looking at a clipboard.

“Legs,” I grumble. He raises an eyebrow.

“No, you were shot in the head, Mr. McGinnis, your legs are fine.”

“My name. My name is Legs.”

My head hurts. It’s hard to think. Not that it was particularly easy before. This doctor is making my head hurt.

“Oh,” he says, finally understanding. “Well um…Legs. You’re very lucky. The bullet took off a chunk of your ear and part of your skull, but your brain was untouched. You’ve already been through surgery and you’ll make a full recovery in just a couple days,” he smiles and takes a step closer to me. He snaps his fingers in my ear. I flinch reflexively and glare at him. He nods.

“And you haven’t suffered any hearing loss, either. Very lucky indeed.”

He taps his pen against the clipboard and says he’ll come back to check on me in a couple of hours. He tells me there’s a little button to push if I need anything, food or water or maybe a newspaper. I ask when I can leave and he tells me tomorrow.

“Oh, and one other thing,” he says. “You’ve got a visitor. A Miss…Partridge? Perkins? There’s a little blonde girl here to see you, I didn’t catch her name.”

“Parker,” I tell him. It’s Gracie. She came to see me. I can’t help but smile.

“Right, Miss Parker. Would you like me to send her in?”

I nod, or try to, but my neck is very stiff. I wonder how long I’ve been here. The doctor winks at me and says he’ll send her right in.

A little while later, there she is.

“Look at you,” she says. “They fixed you up good, huh, you big lug?”

Gracie. What a doll. Five-five, a hundred and twenty pounds. I could lift her up with one arm like you’d lift a bag of groceries. She’s got her hair pinned up in a cute little bun with chopsticks stuck in it. She’s wearing a brown fur overcoat and black heels. I smile.

“Hi, Gracie,” I say, but my voice cracks like it used to when I was a kid, before my growth spurt. I cough and clear my throat and she smiles.

“Easy, killer,” she says and comes to stand next to me. She takes my hand in both of hers and it reminds me of Russian dolls. “You don’t have to talk or anything, I didn’t expect you to be awake. I hear you’ll be fine in a couple days though,” she says and smiles wide, full red lips peeling back like curtains on ivory piano keys. I nod and tell her I feel fine now, even better with her there. She squeezes my hand and smiles.

“Yeah, well, you aren’t going anywhere, least not til tomorrow.”

When she smiles, she shows her dimples, the left one with a tiny black speck in the center.

“You’re very lucky to be alive,” she says after a pause. “I’m glad they only grazed you. You can hardly tell there’s anything wrong with your ear,” she goes on, but stops and then blushes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it at all, I mean…You know what I mean, Legs.”

She purses her lips and slightly narrows her eyebrows. I smile and tell her I don’t mind. Not like I’m the one who has to look at me.

“Who put the nasty idea in your head that you’re so ugly, huh?” she asks and gently strokes my hand. I shrug. No one, I tell her. That’s just the way it happens.

She frowns. “You’re a silly fool, Legs,” she says just above a whisper.

I tell her I know.

“And you’re not ugly. Whoever told you that is the ugly one,”

Normally I don’t take to people talking to me like that, insults are always out of line; coming from Gracie, though, it doesn’t sound unreasonable that I might be a fool. I try to think, though my head still hurts and my ears start to ring, to prove that I’m not a fool, about the first time I heard someone call me ugly.

“It was the Boss,” I say.

“Who?”

“The Boss. Mr. Cosmo. Mr. Cosmo told me I was ugly. But he didn’t mean it bad or anything,” I hesitate. It never occurred to me that he could have meant it as anything but a statement of a fact. I didn’t mind being ugly. That’s just how things were.

Gracie’s turned red again.

“Well that horrible man got what he had coming,” she says. I ask what she means and she looks at me, eyes suddenly wide and round and mint green, like lifesavers caught in headlights.

“They didn’t tell you?”

I ask, tell me what? And she covers her mouth with her hand.