In a white condo in Stonetown, Jerry Kelly watched as Marko Markowitz snapped his cellphone shut and screamed at the ceiling. “Fuuuuuuuck.” He pounded his fists on his head and walked in a circle. “They just grabbed Abner at the bridge. Two hundred G. Cockfuckingsucker.”
With a smirk Jerry Kelly wondered if Markowitz was going to jump out the window. He waited calmly. He was a placid-looking, sandy-haired man, twenty years younger than Markowitz and average in every way. He deliberately fashioned himself as a mid-level schoolteacher at a mid-level school, with a mid-level split containing a nagging wife and frustrating children with middling grades. His mouth was curved up into a perpetual smile of sad disappointment. He cultivated a resignation as though life had done so much to him that another kick in the head wouldn’t make him blink. Marko’s rant amused him. Marko being haunted by nightmares of Colombian midgets twirling chainsaws. The legendary necktie, the throat slit and the tongue flapping out through it.
When he spoke his voice was at odds with the innocuous appearance. It was deep and rough and toneless. “We should have used skanks, Marko. Skanks with big tits get through. But Abner told me: no question, Jer’, I got the face on, it’s as good as in Canada.” He burped loudly and scratched at his stomach through his plain white dress shirt. “That’s three-sixty-nine we lost, between ripoffs and seizures. At this rate we’re going to each crash the border with a roll of quarters, offer ’em to Pavo for a line each before he takes us to the biology lab. I told you, Marko, we gotta get your legendary pal Preston, and put his variations to work, or the dwarf Colombian is going to come up here and do chainsaw wheelies inside our chest cavity.”
“Forget Bobby. He knows what kind of dough it is.”
Bobby Preston was a master smuggler. A truckload of cheap chickens on one side of the border, and presto!, he’d come with a variation to move it across. Booze, smokes, anything. Anything except anything to do with dope.
Markowitz felt a creepy unease at hearing Jerry Kelly talking about Bobby Preston. “He lost a bunch of Chinks in the river last winter. It broke him, he’s finished. He’s out.”
“He lost, what? Four Chinamen?” Jerry Kelly shook his head. “Man, we did in more than four people last year that pissed us off. Bummer for poor old Presto, it was a fucking tragedy I’m sure, but four Chinamen, man, is only a little bit interesting in only a limited way to very few people. You know how many fucking people there are in China? Relative, man, it’s all relative. We got to get Presto on our bus.”
“Won’t happen, Jerry.” Markowitz was firm. “Presto’s out of it. We need something else. And fast. How much went through today?”
Jerry Kelly sneaked a glance at his watch. His shirtsleeves were rolled halfway up revealing tattoos: 13 printed on the left, above his watchstrap, M on the right wrist under a gold chain. Both meant marijuana, good old tats from good old times. On the inside of his left wrist was a faded tattoo of a motorcycle shooting flame, a gargoyle astride it wearing goggles and a Nazi helmet. FTW was bannered beneath it. Fuck the World. He had long jagged rips in his left forearm and he had other stuff going on under his shirt, including a wide blur of flesh across his upper back where a tattoo of his biker colours had been removed with a cheese grater.
“Between Rosie and Pat and Georgio and Juke, we got one-point-six ems out. But all the dough’s in little bills. Pavo wants big stuff, fifties, hundreds, money orders, to his cousin in Toronto. He’s getting pissed at what we’re sending up there, so he’s discounting the count by ten percent for boiling it down into something he can move. That broke-ass Canadian buck is fluctuating, so that’s okay, it averages out par, what we lose on the swings we make on the merry-go-round. But with what’s still coming in from retail product and what the cops are grabbing off us, we’re fucked.” He shook his head. “Marko, we gotta stop selling until we get this thing fixed. We’re drowning in dough.”
Markowitz brooded. “Fucking rats, ratting us out. On top of everyfuckingthing else we got after us.” He slumped in a deep leather chair, looking dazed. His count house had recently burned to the ground. His prime money boiler had been kidnapped and beaten senseless. His summer Mercedes had been shot up. Colombian foreplay. His last long-shot hope, Bobby Preston, had fallen apart on a riverbank. Preston had been his last hope. Marko could cash in their history as kids and teenaged bandits, he could invoke Presto’s ex-wife, Julia, and their kid, Zoe. They both loved Marko, the bad-boy uncle and friend. It might have been enough, maybe, to move Preston. But that faint hope was gone. “Pavo. That fucking stunted Bogota midget.”
“Marko, Marko, Marko, c’mon. I don’t like what he’s doing, or what he’s going to do, but he isn’t wrong. He sent you powder on consignment, you took it, you sold it. But you didn’t sell it right. You should’ve just turned it over to the next guy in the line, let it go in five or ten-kilo lots, and doubled or tripled your money, paid off Pavo, then bought more. Let other folks make some money down the supply chain. Create a robust economy. But, nope. You had to step and wholesale and step and retail yourself, double and double and double. Womb to tomb, cradle to grave. The womb was fun, but now it’s time for the grave.”
Markowitz looked sheepish. “I know, I know.”
“And, you got all that dough in cash and you just let it stack up because you were so busy dealing fucking spoons and lines, you didn’t do any boiling. You got fives, tens, twenties, probably you got buckets of quarters and dimes. And that’s what’s drowning us. You got sloppy. You didn’t boil the dough down for shipment out to Pavo, you just let it sit there, wherever you’ve stashed it. So, Pavo presents the bill, he wants his dough. I mean, fuck, Marko, it’s his fucking dough. That’s business.”
“I was fucking sure the Mexicans were going to get him. The guys in Laredo said they’d send a crew to Bogota and take him out. Fucking Miguel, that fucking beaner. Murder capital of the world and he can’t even whack a fucking midget.”
“Marko?” Jerry Kelly was playful, chiding. “You wanted all the dough for yourself. Admit it. You wanted The Mig’s guys to take Pavo out, then you end up with the dough and you get new supply from the Mexicans.” Jerry Kelly tried not to look satisfied or to reveal his hatred of Markowitz. “Now where are we? Forsaken, that’s where. God hath forsaken us, man. We’re forsooked. In fucking spades.”
Markowitz hung his head, hangdog. “I took the shot, that’s all a guy can do, right? Take his shot.” He made a guilty smile and started laughing. “Okay, okay, I’m an asshole.”
Jerry Kelly didn’t mind kicking a sick cat. He piled it on. “Plus, we just lost another eighty. That guy Petey that said he had a pipeline to get the dough out? Do a test run with eighty grand? He just fucked right off.” Jerry Kelly’s blank blue eyes studied Markowitz gnawing at his lip. “I’ll fix that.”
Markowitz was distracted. “What? Eighty? Fuck it. The squirrels at the stash probably ate eighty this morning for breakfast. Eighty, I write it off. Breakage.”
“We can’t have this, Marko. Petey gets the slap in the back.” He studied Markowitz. “What’s the matter with you? You never heard of anarchy?”
“Ah, fuck. Whatever.” Markowitz brooded, his stocky body leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He felt old, defeated. Somewhere, maybe pulling time in the joint, somewhere, somehow, he figured, he sat too much and ate too much starch. His eyes were pouchy, his hair was chasing back from the front and forward from the back, and his ass had dropped and was taking a plum shaped aspect. He sagged like an old man. He felt Jerry Kelly’s eyes on him, waiting. “Okay, okay. Fuck it. Who we got ready to head out?”
Jerry Kelly looked at him in amazement: “Marko, we got nobody. We’re froze. Guys aren’t returning calls. If they do, they get caught like old Abner or, like Petey, they put the dough in their pocket and take the fuck-you hike. Between ripoffs, and there are going to be more the longer this goes on, and the Green Squad, we’re getting knocked down. People are starting to talk. If the word goes out, wide, we’re gonna have probs with a lot of ruthless people, come to take our dough,” Jerry Kelly shrugged and went to work. “We gotta get your pal, the king of the variations, old Presto, to do one big push for us, cross it all over at once, or we’re both going to wind up in the Colombian clown factory. I know he was your bestest pal from when you was kids, and I don’t like the guy, I admit it. But he’s all we got.”
Marko evaluated his options and shook his head. “Bobby ain’t going to do anything for us.” He shook his head in disgust. “Presto. The honest crook.”
“Except when he leaves a bunch of Chinamen bobbing in the river.” Jerry Kelly smiled, an action that suddenly made his face canine and predatory, erasing any trace of the bland schoolteacher. “Offer him a bonus. Tell him we’ll leave his feet on. He’ll like that.”
“He won’t care what we offer.”
“He’s got to have a soft spot, some way we can twist his nuts, get him back into the game, into our game. Think now, Marko. What? What about that ex-wife of his that got beat up? That used to move our money? Maybe she can help us out, maybe she’s ready to go back to work?”
“Forget Julia. She’s barely recovered from Spicetown.”
“A fucking horror show from what I understand.” Jerry Kelly made his face sympathetic. “Five days they had her, Marko. Five fucking days.” He sighed. “Poor Julia. What they must have done to her.”
Markowitz didn’t want to talk about what happened to Julia Gurr, his teenaged true love. He’d lost her. She’d married Bobby Preston while Marko was spending three bucks at Craddock. By the time Marko got paroled, Preston and Julia Gurr had had a daughter. Preston had ended up with everything Marko had ever wanted. Julia and a great kid. And then he’d fucked it up on a shit winter night on the river. “Something else.”
“A fucking cat? Something we can use?” Jerry Kelly mimed receiving a sudden idea. “Hey, they had a kid, didn’t they? Presto and Julia? Where’s that kid at? Maybe she can help us out, we give her the squeeze.”
“Zoe? Fuck, no. She’s straight, a square John. She’s practically my niece. No way we give her the squeeze.”
“Marko, Marko, we don’t have to actually give her the squeeze. We just have to make it look like we will if we have to, if Presto doesn’t come aboard. And if he comes aboard, we’ll need the dough boiled down into hundreds, right? Well, Julia’s got to help out, it’s family. And she’s the best at it, got a good strong network of money guys. After Spicetown, maybe the work’ll do her good. Get her mind off what happened.”
“No, Jerry.” Markowitz felt himself wavering, then he steeled himself. “Jerry, no.”
“Think it out. We pretend to tie the kid to the railway tracks and make funny choo choo noises. If Presto don’t go for it, fine, we shrug our shoulders like we were kidding, wait for Pavo to come knocking, and we watch each other gargle our testicles.”
“Forget it, Jerry. Even if we put the hammer on Presto by threatening Zoe and he runs the dough out for us, when he’s done he’s going to come looking.”
“Well, let’s not rule it out, right?” Yawning, casual, he asked, “So, where’s she at, the kid, Zoe?”
“Out of reach. Down in Mexico doing some humanitarian stuff.”
“Nobody’s out of reach, Marko, especially down there.” Jerry Kelly pretended let a fresh riff form in his mind. “Hey, how about this: we get her picked up for dope. Presto finds out she’s in trouble down there and he calls you, because you have business interests in the region, and you say you’ll help him out with her problem if he helps you out with ours. Presto! We got Presto and the variations.” He could see Markowitz evaluating the possibility of it, but not liking it at all. Eat it, Marko, he thought, clean your plate like a good little retard.
Markowitz wavered. “Ah, fuck no. There’s not enough time and …”
Jerry Kelly studied him. He let a gleam come into his eyes. Marko on the ropes. Nightmares of bloody stumps. Empty eye sockets. Not the career arc old Marko had chosen for himself. He sneaked a covert look at his watch at the exact minute Markowitz felt his telephone vibrating at his belt.
“Fuck, Jerry,” he said. “This better be good fucking news.” He stood and squinted at the display, frowned and shrugged, then punched in and put it to his ear and instantly pulled it away. “Fuck. Shit.”
Jerry Kelly got up lithely. All traces of the schoolteacher were gone. His legs had the slightly bowed aspect of a cowboy and he led with his shoulders like a boxer who didn’t care if he took a punch or six. He moved, all shoulders, like a bull.
Markowitz held the telephone to Jerry Kelly’s ear. They listened to the roar and rev of a chainsaw. A heavily accented Spanish voice screamed laughter, “Aaaaribbbba,” and a thickly accented voice said, “Five fock-kink days, mang …” and again the rev of engine. “I take jore cojone …”
Markowitz folded the phone and went to the window and stared down onto Stonetown Road. “Fuck, Jerry.”
“We got to make a move, Marko. We’re in the fucking furnace, now. We have to be ruthless.”
“We came up together, me and Presto and Julia. Fuck-fuck-fuck.” He put his hands on the windowsill; his shoulders sagged. He turned to the sad-eyed Jerry Kelly. He sighed. He glanced at the phone and licked his lips. “All right, this is too fucking much. Do what you got to do, okay? Make it work for us. But if Zoe or Julia gets hurt in this, it’s your ass.”
“You telling me to do it? You gotta be clear. I don’t want recriminations later, that I misunderstood.” He was pleased at Markowitz’s anxiety. Fucking goof. “I can make it work, pal, but you gotta pull the trigger, Marko, you’re the boss. The capo.”
Marko sat sagged in his leather chair in visible angst. “Okay, okay. Call The Mig down there and get it set up. Tell him to go soft on her, Jerry. I mean it, really, really soft. They don’t put a fucking hand on her. She’s with Medicine and Peace, outside Laredo. The Mig knows them. Have him rescue her up after she gets pinched and tuck her someplace safe. He’s got a place with a pool, a cook, and lots of sunshine. Tell him to put her on vacation and I’ll call him later.”
“And Presto’s variations? And Julia? To do the boiling?”
“If Zoe’s in the sauce and Bobby and Julia want to get her out raw, they’ll help, separation or no separation.”
“A family affair, eh, Marko? Just like old times when you guys were all kids together.” He made a forlorn face. “I just wisht, Marko, I’d’a had that kind of thing in my young life.”
Jerry Kelly picked a phone booth at random and used a throwaway card. Miguel, Marko’s Mexican connection, answered cautiously. Jerry Kelly sported with him, crumpling the cellophane from a discarded cigarette package into the phone to create static and yelling, “What? What?” Finally, The Mig said he could move right away, maybe in hours in fact. How did Señor Markoweetz want it played? Soft or rough?
“Marko says to let her know she’d been busted, put some fright into her day. He doesn’t want her to end up walking funny, but she shouldn’t be whistling a merry tune either.” He paused. “Have them kick her around a little; you go in after and, like, save her.”
Afterward, he found his pal Petey sitting in the back of a falafel shop, nervously watching the door, and two grocery bags between his feet. Jerry Kelly was famous for his games and pranks and Petey held a little pistol on his lap, under the table, hidden by a folded sweater. He was fingering a micro tape recorder on the tabletop. A nervous wreck of a falafel was on a square of waxed paper in front of him.
Jerry Kelly sat down and picked up the micro-recorder and dropped it into his pocket. “You play a mean chainsaw, mang. Marko about shit his eyes out.” He poked into the detritus of the falafel and found a ball of chickpea and popped it into his mouth. “So, we make easy dough. Marko’s looking for you for fucking off with his eighty G. Speaking of which? You split it up?”
“Yeah. It should be more for me, though, Jer’. I’m fucked now, Marko catches up to me.”
“Petey, you made twenty grand for nothing, really. You played a tape of a chainsaw and sang him a song.”
“Twenty-five’d be at least fair.”
Jerry Kelly made his mad dog smile. “Give me my fucking end, quit fucking around. I got place to be, folks to fuck up. There better be sixty or more in the bag or you’re going to hear me play the Texas chainsaw melody and it won’t be over the fucking telephone.” He saw Petey’s arm spasm and the sweater move. “You got something under there, Petey? A nice surprise for Uncle Jerry? Maybe a hard-on? It better be a hard little dick because whatever it is, if it comes out of under there it’s going straight up your ass.”
“No, no, Jerry. I brought it because I’m carrying the dough. Twenty’s fine, twenty’s good.” Petey pushed a bag with his foot under the table. “Anyway, I heard Marko lost another run at the bridge. Abner, like a quarter-million.”
“Somebody dimed him, is what I think,” Jerry Kelly said, shaking his head. “Called up the Green Squad and told ’em to look for a funny-looking fat fuck with red underwear and envelopes taped to his body.”
Petey got to his feet, holding his bag in one hand and the gun wrapped in the sweater in the other. “He’s got a rat in there, someplace.”
“I think Marko is losing his faith in the code of the underworld. And it might get worse. I think, Petey, there’s a whole bunch of shit surfing Marko’s way. Rats might be the least of it.” He shook his head. “Anarchy, pal. It’s a curse on all mankind.”
After Petey left, Jerry Kelly foraged in the wreckage of the falafel. His hatred for Marko Markowitz was growing inside him. He’d thought he’d nourished it as far as he could, but this weak Marko, this crushed Marko, that was kindling on the fire. Hatred and anarchy were Jerry Kelly’s default mode.
And Julia Gurr, that skank. A perfect skank before Spicetown, but a skank nonetheless. And little Zoe, sweet little Zoe, who Jerry Kelly had never met, well, probably she was some perfect little do-gooder, some bleeding soul. Why should she be immune from the anarchy of life?
If Jerry Kelly had one belief, he thought, old Jerry Kelly worshipped at the altar of anarchy. He didn’t have a plan, he didn’t have anything like a plan, he didn’t even have the vaguest most shadowy outline hinting at the idea of maybe a plan.
And, he knew, that was where true freedom lay.
When old Jerry was done, Markowitz and everybody he cared for were going to be wandering in burning wreckage.