DEREK STUMBLED DOWN Lundy’s Lane, singing a vague approximation of “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. That he had only the most nebulous grasp of the lyrics besides the chorus—and there were bits of that he wasn’t quite sure of, either—did not in the least dampen his enthusiasm.
“Somethin’ ‘bout a slave ship, plowing the fields, cold in a market down in New Orleans. Scarred old Sally’s doin’ all right, somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ just around midnight . . . ”
Around him, bar rats filtered into their cars and taxis, or clustered into the few fast-food joints that stayed open after closing time. Derek could go for a burger, but he was cleaned out. He had an empty wallet, a forehead shaking with the first pre-tremors of what was surely to be a foundation-buster of a hangover, and a stride-stiffening hard-on that he had no satisfactory way of alleviating. The cause of all three factors could be attributed to a halter-topped brunette in her early twenties. She and her girlfriends had carpooled down from Brock University to see the Falls and “get a sense of the culture,” as she put it, her words blending slightly one into another. Her cleavage had jiggled slightly as she’d sidled into the stool next to Derek, who was more than happy to impart a little culture on a willing pupil.
Things had gone great until about one o’clock, when Derek—who’d been guiding the conversation towards the motel room he had just down the road, replete with coffee and other euphemistic amenities—was interrupted by a pug-faced blonde, who’d collected her bouncy and be-haltered friend and led her into a car and away, leaving Derek without so much as a phone number or even, in fact, a name. To be fair, Derek was pretty sure she’d told him the latter, but he hadn’t been listening very closely.
“Fucking cocktease,” Derek mumbled aloud, though without any real malice. He’d known well enough the long odds he was throwing, and he’d tossed his chips in anyway. University girls were a bad bet. They slummed it at the Blue Lagoon readily enough, soaking up a bit of that underworld charm, but when it came to sealing the deal, they got cold feet nine times out of ten. They loved the proletariat, those university girls—just not enough to fuck them. Derek supposed that meant he’d been strung along, but he’d copped a feel or three in the process, so who was the victim? It didn’t take a Machiavelli to manipulate Derek McCulloch. A pulse and a pair of tits did it every time.
Derek stumbled into the parking lot of the Jupiter Motel, sparing a glance at its gloriously tacky sign. Built in the halcyon days of the 1960’s, the Jupiter Motel was one of those peculiar Niagara Falls institutions that embraced the faux-futurist optimism of the space age and looked dated about six months after they’d been built. A lot of people wrung their hands over the city’s copious eyesores, but Derek, for his part, couldn’t get enough of them. He found his room, conducted a brief survey of his pockets until retrieving his keys, and let himself in.
He pawed the wall next to the doorframe, but the light switch proved elusive. He was still fumbling for it when a yellow light sliced through the darkness. Two men occupied his small and dingy room. One sat on the foot of his bed, elbows propped on his knees, his sizable belly straining at the buttons of his suit jacket; the other, reed-thin and sporting an adolescent’s wispy moustache, leaned nonchalantly on the television stand. Both men held automatic pistols, their barrels trained on Derek’s chest.
A breaker tripped deep inside Derek’s brain and the usual cold machinery whirred to life. Intoxication evaporated in the autoclave of his mind, leaving a vacuum of utter sobriety. Yet his next words came out in a slurred jumble, and he stumbled slightly as he spoke, as if standing on a ship in an uneven keel. He’d already adopted, without consciously intending to, the mannerisms of a much drunker man.
“Man, that escort service’s got some explainin’ to do. I specifically said no ugly chicks.”
The man on the bed smiled thinly. “Look at this lush, Lou. He thinks he’s people.”
Lou nodded. “Real cute, he is.”
“No need to get nasty, girls. I’ll still do you. But expect a stern letter to yer manager.”
“You can tell him to your face in a minute.”
Derek dropped his lecher’s grin. He injected a look of delayed understanding into his features, a sudden widening of the eyes, a faint twitch beneath the lower lip. In truth he’d had a pretty good guess what this was about the moment they’d flicked on the lamp, but dumb was a role that got acclaim no matter how often you played it. “Whatta you mean?”
“I mean,” said the man on the bed, “that Mr. Ballaro requests the privilege of your company.”
“Yeah,” added Lou. “And he ain’t askin’.”
Derek suppressed a smile at the look the man on the bed shot Lou. Lou, for his part, was oblivious. But thick or not, the man knew his business, as did the man on the bed. Both guns kept a pin on Derek’s torso, their different angles giving at least one of them a clear shot regardless of which way he dove. He overbalanced right and took a stagger-step towards the closet, bringing him within grasping distance of his jacket, in the pocket of which resided a fully loaded .45 calibre revolver. Derek could picture the weapon clearly in his mind’s eye, an image verified down to the last detail when the man on the bed reached beneath the covers and dangled the selfsame gun between thumb and forefinger.
“Good effort, Derek. We know your little tricks.”
“Wish I’d known yours, Joey.”
The fat man nodded. “What can I say? I keep it close to the vest. So, about this meeting.”
“Right. ‘Course.” Derek cleared his throat. “Duly noted. Thanks for deliverin’ the message. I love that personal touch. I can pencil him in for, say, next Tuesday?”
“Fraid this is a, whattayacall, rush order. You’ll be comin’ with us now.”
***
There were two types of meetings you could have with Frank Ballaro: those you showed up to on your own—on time, respectably dressed, and stone sober—and those to which you were escorted. The former type tended to end with a lot of money changing hands, though other outcomes were possible—from stern lectures to shattered kneecaps—depending on your current standing, past actions, and general comportment at the meeting in question. The latter type only ended one way: a bag over the head, a bullet to the temple, and a tumble into the Niagara River. Derek had attended enough of these meetings to know—though mercifully never as the guest of honor.
Now it seemed that invitation had arrived. The question was, how could he tactfully turn it down?
“Guys, this ain’t right,” he said, lubricating his voice with crocodile tears. “I ain’t caused Mr. Ballaro any trouble.”
“That’s for him to decide, not you.”
“Come on, Joey. We’re pals, ain’t we? Just tell me what the big guy thinks I done. Whatever it is, I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“You go on and explain it to him, then. We ain’t the judges ‘round here. We’re just the delivery men.”
Derek sniffed. “You . . . you think he’ll listen, then?”
“Sure, sure,” said Lou. “He’ll listen.”
Right. Not that I’ll be saying much with my brains splattered across his parquet.
Joey, ever the cagier of the two, managed a more plausible lie. “Mr. Ballaro ain’t no softy, Derek. You know that well as anybody. But he’s fair. He don’t ice folks for the fun of it. He don’t tell us why we fetch a guy and we don’t ask. He says jump, we jump to the fuckin’ moon, you get me?”
“Yeah?”
Joey nodded. “Yeah. But another thing about Mr. Ballaro, he don’t like to be kept waiting.”
Derek nodded hard enough to make himself dizzy. “Okay. Okay, let’s go then. Only hold on, I gotta . . . ” Derek clutched his stomach and squeezed his balls between his thighs until the nausea he was faking turned real. “I gotta . . . ” He staggered into the bathroom and dropped to his knees over the toilet, splashing the water as he cut loose a retching, gagging furor. It was a convincing performance; by the end of it he actually felt like puking. A few strings of bile hung from his lips.
Footsteps rang against the bathroom tile. Just one set, heavy and graceless. Lou, Derek was willing to bet. The sound of his voice proved him right.
“Okay Derek, enough fucking around. You cleared some room, now get up before we haul your ass outta there ourselves.”
Derek retched harder by way of reply, his vocal cords straining. Cramps wrung his overworked diaphragm. He placed a hand on the cistern and made to stand, then doubled back down for another go. Lou took another step closer.
“All right, you asshole, that’s enough.” He grabbed the scruff of Derek’s shirt, began hauling him to his feet.
The spin was swift and fluid, more dance than combat. Derek yanked the lid from the cistern one-handed and smashed it against Lou’s head, his free hand sweeping the pistol aside, where it discharged harmlessly into the wall above the bathtub. A hail of porcelain shrapnel exploded through the room. Several slivers pricked Derek’s face and burrowed into his hands; he would find himself digging them out over the next two weeks. Lou raised his hands to his jaw and let out a wail of pain, cut short as Derek jammed the broken edge of the cistern lid into his throat. He sawed back and forth until the porcelain turned red, grabbed the gun from Lou’s numb fingers, and spent two quick shots into the thin man’s head.
Derek sprang backwards before the shell casings hit the tile, sliding his ass onto the sink counter until his back was flush with the wall. With the slow motion clarity of soldiers and great athletes, he watched Joey lumber into the bathroom, gun brandished at nothing. The half instant it took him to figure out where Derek went was a half instant too long. Derek grabbed Joey’s extended arm, bent it sharply against the doorframe for leverage, and fired a single point-blank shot into his elbow. The joint blew out in a jubilation of blood and bone. Joey let out an ululating scream. The gun dropped from his hand and skittered behind the toilet.
“Well shit,” said Derek, inspecting the wound. “Now there’s a hole I’d pay full price for. You’ve been holding out on me, Joey.” The slur in his voice was gone, shed like so much snakeskin. He gave Joey’s arm a gentle tug and the fat man dropped to his knees. The bathroom echoed with his incessant wailing.
Derek bent the arm upward. “Shut up, Joey. You’re irritating me.”
Joey shut up, his screams replaced by a low and steady blubbering.
“Question time, tubs. We both know how this meeting with Ballaro was supposed to end, so don’t bother denying it. I don’t hold a grudge. We’re professionals, you and me, and that shit’s just business. What I wanna know is what the big guy thinks I did to earn my invitation.”
“I dunno, man, I dunno. You think he tells me anything?” Joey’s eyes were red and glossy with tears. He wiped his face with one pudgy hand. A runner of snot clung to his index finger. Derek yanked a length of toilet paper from the roll and handed it to Joey, who wiped his face with a small nod of thanks. Shoot a guy in the elbow and he thinks you’re Hitler reincarnate. Hand him a hanky after and he thinks you’re a god. People are funny.
“No, I don’t think he tells you jack shit. But you hang around that club of his an awful lot, and I know you ain’t quite so brain-dead as your ex-partner over there.” Derek motioned to Lou’s body, dangling grotesquely over the lip of the tub. “I’m guessing you hear shit. So what I’m asking for is an educated guess. Why does Ballaro want to see me?”
“It’s Eddie.”
Derek blinked. “Eddie? His dipshit son? Since when’s he been orderin’ muscle around? Last I knew of things, Ballaro wouldn’t trust the kid with his own cock and a tub of Vaseline.”
“Eddie didn’t order shit. Ain’t you heard? Eddie’s fuckin’ dead.”
Derek giggled. Oh, this was rich. “Humanity’s fuckin’ loss. What’d he do, grope the wrong biker’s favorite stripper? Wrap his fuckin’ Beemer around a tree? Drink his dumb self to death?”
“Ain’t what he did that counts. It’s what was done to him. Shit was ghastly, Derek. I seen pictures. Ain’t nothin’ left of the kid but some guts and his fuckin’ hand.”
The situation got a whole lot less funny. “And Ballaro thinks I did his son?”
Joey clenched his jaw against a wave of pain. It crested, dropped. The tendons in his neck lost their guitar-string tautness. “You got the meanest rep outside the family. You been known to leave some . . . uh . . . souvenirs behind. And Lord knows you and Eddie were on the outs.”
That’s a fucking understatement. “Eddie’s pissed off half the peninsula in his time. Why me?”
“Well, there was, you know . . . the whole scene at Vintage . . . ”
Derek gritted his teeth. Time had yet to dull the memory’s jagged edges. He’d been shooting pool at a bar on Main Street, a dive hangout for bikers and metalheads. It wasn’t the sort of place named men like the Ballaros normally showed their faces, but Eddie fancied himself pure street and got a kick out of getting tippled alongside the city’s riffraff underclass.
He came in with his usual abrasive swagger, a phalanx of cronies at his shoulders, tipping winks at waitresses and generally acting like he owned the place. At a glimpse of the prick Derek’s stomach went sour, as if the several pints of beer he’d drunk all spoiled at once. “Fuckin’ prick,” he muttered under his breath. His opponent, a wiry guy called Corey with thick-framed glasses and a braided beard, gave Derek an uneasy look over this blasphemy.
“Careful, man. That guy’s dad owns like half of the Hill. Cosa Nostra and shit.”
“That so?” Derek asked, feigning ignorance. “Then I guess he could stand to lose a few bucks.”
Derek waited until Eddie had spotted him, offered a small wave, and missed his shot. The cue ball careened off the seven and landed with a muted thump in the corner pocket.
“Skee-ratch!” cried Eddie, to tepid laughter.
“Not my night,” Derek admitted. “Look at all these solids.” He gestured to the table, where a constellation of five low balls spread out around the eleven and thirteen, the only high balls left on the felt. Derek was, in fact, shooting stripes for this particular game, but Corey picked up their swapped allegiances quickly enough and didn’t protest. It did, after all, provide him with a substantial lead.
Derek hacked his way through the rest of the game, allowing himself to pot the odd ball so as not to appear unrealistically awful. Corey was a competent player. Not gifted, surely, but possessed of enough raw skill to leverage his sudden lead into a reasonably truncated victory. They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, Corey’s gaze shifting uncomfortably between Derek and the posse by the bar. He downed the remains of his beer in a rolling swig and left.
“What do you say, Eds?” Derek called across the bar. “Up for a game?”
“I dunno, man. I like to play someone who can offer a bit of a challenge, at least.”
“Come on,” coaxed Derek. “It was an off table for me. I’ll even make it interesting. Say five bucks a ball?”
Eddie blew dismissively through his lips. “Pffff. Chump change. You wanna play? Let’s do it. Fifty bucks a ball. Plus a hundred for a win.”
Derek forced a look of apprehension across his face. “Okay, I guess.” He racked the balls and swivelled some chalk onto the tip of his cue. “You wanna break, or should I?”
“Go for it, chief.”
Don’t think I won’t, you arrogant prick.
Derek went for it, all right. A true shark job called for feints and artifice, whittling out a few slight victories and goading the opponent, through frustration or arrogance, into raising the stakes. But this wasn’t about fattening Derek’s wallet; it was about busting Eddie’s balls—and not the ones on the table. This was Derek’s first major miscalculation, but it felt so damn good that, were he given the chance to relive the night’s events, he’d probably do the exact same thing all over again.
His break sank two balls, a stripe and a solid, leaving an open table and even odds on both suits. Derek put nose to felt and pledged his allegiance to stripes with a bank shot into the corner pocket. He potted two more and found himself pretty snookered by the four ball, which placed a solid defence between the cue ball and the thirteen. Rather than risk it, Derek tried a glancing shot off the ten at the quiet end of the table, failing to sink it but leaving Eddie with nothing. Eddie took a gamble on the three ball and scratched, giving Derek ball in hand. In friendly games Derek would place scratches behind the line in a gesture of sportsmanship, but there was nothing friendly about this game, despite the smiles plastered to both players’ faces. He placed the ball kissing distance from the fifteen, which teetered on the lip of a side pocket, nudged the ball home, and set the nine ball caroming into the corner, where it landed with a clack atop the previously potted eleven.
In three short turns Derek faced the eight ball on a table where three of seven solids still stood. He treated himself to a quick glance at Eddie, who stewed beneath his smile like a lidded pot approaching boil.
“Corner pocket,” Derek said, pointing to the target with his cue. He sighted the ball, chin grazing the felt, and took the shot. The eight ball bit the pocket’s back bumper and sank like a stone in a well. “That’s game, chief. Eight sunk against four at fifty bucks a ball, plus a win, that’s me up three even. Care to go again?”
Wordlessly, Eddie racked the balls into a slightly off-kilter triangle. “Got lucky,” he mumbled.
It was Eddie’s turn to break. He struck the cue ball at a bad angle and sent it spinning into the broad side of the triangle with an ugly scraping sound. The shape took on a rumpled, fender-bender look. Eddie fixed it and took another shot from behind the line, this time scattering the balls. Anger crippled his already shoddy game. Derek scored an extra four hundred bucks, then a remarkable four hundred and fifty. He started to think he might have a new business going when Eddie finally yanked out his wallet and, with stiff, shaking fingers, tossed out twelve one-hundred dollar bills. They fluttered down one after another, landing in a loose pile at Derek’s feet.
“Keep the extra fifty.”
Derek knelt down to collect the bills. For twelve hundred dollars, he was willing to let Eddie claw back a bit of his lost dignity. As he gathered the money into a pile, he heard a wet, plosive sound. A droplet of warm liquid plopped onto his head. Eddie bent over him, a gleam of spittle on his grinning lips. A few members of his posse chuckled, elbowing one other at the spectacle. Derek rose, his good humor long gone. He looked Eddie square in the eye, noting with pleasure the faint glimmer of apprehension there.
“Watch yourself, Eddie.”
Eddie thrust his chest out, shoving his way into Derek’s personal space. “Or what? What the fuck you gonna do, eh?”
“Why don’t you ask your daddy? He’s seen enough of it.”
Eddie’s mouth shrank to the size of a half-healed scar. “You threatenin’ a Ballaro, Derek? That it? You ice a few guys, torch a few buildings, all on my dad’s say-so, and you think you can step to, act a big shot in my town? You’re a fuckin’ janitor, man. You clean up our shit and collect your paycheck. That’s where it ends.”
“Your father doesn’t need a janitor, Eddie. He can keep his own house in order. You’re the one who makes the messes in the family, usually in your pants. You don’t need a janitor, you need a fucking babysitter.”
Under most circumstances, Eddie’s tough talk deflated into a queasy just-joshin’ bonhomie at the first real sign of resistance, followed by a smouldering period of behind-your-back trash talk. But the presence of his posse made him bolder than anticipated, and where Derek expected a snide remark, he got a right cross to the temple. It was a clumsy punch thrown by a novice welterweight, but its sheer unexpected nature helped it land. Derek staggered back, jags of light bursting before his left eye.
Eddie landed no second punch. At least, not until three of his goons had peeled Derek off of him, snorting rage and flicking blood from his knuckles. Eddie pulled himself upright on the pool table. Twin rivers of stringy red mucus streamed out his nostrils.
“Hold ‘im” Eddie said, his voice clotted with the smudgy sound of a broken nose.
“Yeah, you boys hold me tight,” Derek said. “Wouldn’t want your precious little angel to risk his ass in a fair figh—”
Derek’s last word broke off, snapped in two by Eddie’s fist. He played some chin music, rattling Derek’s teeth and splitting his lip like an overcooked sausage, and threw a volley of quick rat-a-tat jabs to the abdomen. His rings left nicks and gauges in Derek’s skin. The goons knew their business, holding Derek taut and steady, but with enough spring to take the sting out of it for Eddie’s knuckles. The animal dwelling in the depths of Derek’s mind gnashed its teeth and pulled furiously on its chains, but Derek refused to let it free. Fighting back could only make a bad situation worse. Eventually the pummeling eased up. Eddie, winded and nursing his raw knuckles, told his posse to toss Derek out.
“Don’t let me catch you around here again, Derek. You hear me?”
The goons dragged him onto the patio and tossed him over the railing, where he landed in a heap of scrapes and bruises. They didn’t even spare him a second glance as they went back inside. A few abrasive measures of amphetamine-soaked death metal shrieked out the door before it swung shut. Derek lay where he’d fallen for a moment, patting down the pockets in which he’d stuffed his winnings before the worst of the beating. It seemed to be all there. He slouched down the road to a neighbouring bar with a danker, quieter air and soaked his hurts with several successive shots of Jack Daniels.
So that was it. Eddie gave him a public humiliation, and a few weeks later had wound up a corpse in a theatrical and deeply messy fashion. It wasn’t exactly hard evidence of guilt, but nor was Ballaro beholden to the finer points of jurisprudence. Still, he had a good working history with Frank. With some kowtowing and a bit of luck, the whole misunderstanding could potentially be straightened out.
Before, that was, he’d killed one of Ballaro’s men and crippled another. Neither action spoke volumes towards his innocence. Had he submitted meekly to his capture, he might’ve been able to talk himself out of his death sentence. Instead, he’d seized what had seemed like his one chance at survival—violence; a personal specialty—and in so doing effectively signed a warrant for his own execution.
It was almost sort of funny.
While Derek mulled over the finer points of his situation, Joey slumped onto the floor, his injured arm still held loosely in Derek’s hand. The tiles were slick with blood. The soles of Derek’s shoes made an unpleasant smacking sound every time he shifted position.
“Well, Joe, I guess I’ve gone and made a mess of things.”
“I’m really bleedin’ here, Derek. You gotta get me to a hospital.”
Derek tapped the barrel of the pistol to his lips. “When Ballaro sent you to collect me, he call on anyone for backup?”
“No, man. Just me and Lou.”
“Don’t lie to me, Joe.”
Joe peeled his face from the floor. Threads of blood and snot clung to his cheek. “It’s God’s honest truth, Derek. Really. He expects his name to carry enough weight that it don’t matter we got no backup.”
Derek made a hook of his index and middle fingers and sank it into the hole in Joey’s elbow. Joey writhed like a man undergoing electroshock, bellowing like nothing human. Derek withdrew his fingers.
“Let me hear God’s truth one more time, Joey.”
“I swear it, Derek, I swear it,” Joey blubbered. “It was just me and Lou. He’s gonna expect us back pretty soon, though, so we don’t show up I wouldn’t be surprised he sends a couple guys to check up on things. You know how he is.”
Derek nodded. “Cautious. Cautious and smart.”
“Hey man, I’m losin’ a whole lot of blood. Can you drop me at the hospital? I won’t look where you go after that, for real. Everything’s sorta dim and all anyway. Or call an ambulance on your way out. It won’t cost you nothin’. I won’t hit you back Derek, I swear it. I swear it. It really hurts.”
Derek chewed his lip, gave a quick glimpse around at the scene, and sank to one knee. Tenderly, with the solemn movements of a man proposing to his fiancée, Derek tucked the barrel of the gun under Joey’s chin.
“I just want you to know, Joey, that you were always one of the better ones.”
“Derek, wait, I—”
Derek made it quick and clean. As clean as possible, anyway.