Shelia Moody relays the events of the previous evening to Kevin Alexander, her boss, telling him all about it. “Shards of wood flew off Wayne’s back in nearly every direction. It was crazy.”
The house lights are up, making the place brighter than ever when it’s in use. Kevin’s dressed in baggy clothes to hide his true stature, standing on one side of the bar, opposite Shelia with a clipboard in his hands, doing inventory. He checks off different boxes. He wears a flat bill hat low over his eyes to block out the lights. From under the brim, he flicks his eyes up to the broken glass pile neatly mounded near one end of the bar. He asks Shelia why he has to pay for a new glass shelf and close to twenty new liquor bottles—then wonders why she swept up but didn’t throw all the glass out. It makes him question how well she swept the area. Not that he’s going to go barefoot behind the bar, but he doesn’t want little glass pieces in the treads of his shoes.
Shelia tells him she wanted to make sure he saw the damage. “You know, so you could see what happened.”
“Looking at empty space where the shelf should be would have been enough for me to comprehend, much less, see the damage,” he says.
This is just laziness, and he still doesn’t understand how it happened.
Kevin says, “We’ve talked about this. I don’t like violence here at the bar. Don’t like the police in the bar either. One begets the other.”
Shelia, smoking a cigarette, suckling the filter, says nothing.
Kevin says, “Still, I’m mature enough to understand I don’t always get what I want. I’ll have to accept the police were here. I’ll have to accept there was a fight over billiards, which I still don’t like—I’ve told you to stop allowing pick-up games for money—but still, I’ll accept it because otherwise I’ll stress out, and I don’t like stressing out.”
Kevin doesn’t do stress when he can help it. He’s built his whole life avoiding it—the key was avoiding a regular job and living the life he’s chosen. Not living a life anyone else has chosen for him. His father wanted him to be straight, to work in the lumber mill, or whatever the fuck his father did when he left the house. He’d always come back looking like he spent six days underground digging coal, dark-eyed, pale, shell-shocked. Kevin didn’t want that. So the first time he fucked a boy, he did it at home in the living room and made sure he left evidence behind for his old man to figure out what was happening. Let him come home shell-shocked to find that. Why would he want to grow up to look like that, a bored working stiff, beholden to some clock? Don’t people understand the lessons they learn on vacation, on island time? Why people in New York City are fucktards, yet people down south are all friendly and hospitable? It’s time. Beholden to time. He didn’t want to be a slave to a clock or societal norms.
Shelia listens to him, doing that bored eye thing where she jams two hands under her chin and stares at him, blinking every few seconds like someone who has to remember to blink. A cigarette hangs out the side of her mouth.
“Shelia,” Kevin says.
“Kevin,” she says back.
Kevin takes a deep breath. He wants to slam the clipboard and break it in half, kick the glass pile, and break a few more shelves. “Hand me a cigarette.”
Shelia, using just her index finger and thumb, picks up the box of cigarettes like its dirty underwear. It might as well be because she keeps the box shoved into the top of her bra when she’s working. She tips the box to the side, letting two of the crumbled, sweat-dampened tobacco sticks fall out onto the bar top. She plucks one of the cigarettes from the bar and holds it up, but right before Kevin can grab it from her, she pulls her hand back.
“Are you serving?” she asks.
“Don’t Lucy me,” Kevin says, “Hand the fucking thing over.”
“No one’s Lucying you. I’m just asking, do you want to hand me that bottle?”
“What bottle?”
“The opened one.”
Kevin looks over his shoulder and scans the opened and “unopened” bottles. Some of the unopened ones have sat on the top shelves for years. They’re not real. They were opened, used, and put back there. He refilled them, sealed them, and made them look new. Sat them back up there to give the appearance … because appearances are important; if he’s learned anything in life, that’s a sure fact … to give the appearance of more, heavier priced alcohol than there is. It is an old trick he learned coming up, like cutting some of the bottles with water and then overpouring the six ounces, so the guy watching feels like he’s getting his money’s worth, but he’s getting less.
“Kind of like decaf,” his mentor in the bar game explained to Kevin when he first started at this bar. It was a drop bar for old man Siriano before he went to jail. The mentor said, “If you want to sling drinks, fine, sling drinks. We can make some money doing just that. But if you want to put on a show, then you’re going to put on a show. It’s like Vegas, all glitz and glam so people don’t know when you’re conning them out of everything they have. Treat the bar like Indians treat a buffalo; use the whole thing—nothing goes to waste. Nothing is free. It’s all got a price.”
Kevin was just a dumb kid back then, and Neil, his mentor, was being nice, hiring Kevin to work at the bar.
When Kevin met Neil, Kevin had just broken into the bar to steal money from the cash register. He was wrist deep into the cash drawer when Neil, a toad-looking man with white hair, round glasses, and a hand-knit tan cardigan—from his daughter up north—put the muzzle of a shotgun, an authentic old relic of duck hunting past, on him and said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Kevin, having grown proficient in his short years at breaking into homes, taking things, and sometimes confronting homeowners, learned early on to fight aggression with coolness. “I’m stealing,” is all he said.
“I fucking see that,” Neil said.
Kevin said, “Then why the fuck are you asking?”
Neil lowered the shotgun and smiled. “There’s not much in there.”
“There’s enough.”
“Not enough to lose your life over it.”
Kevin realized that even if the old guy calmed down, and backed off, it didn’t mean he wasn’t willing to carry out his threat.
Kevin removed his hand from the “cookie jar.”
“You got a name, kid?” Neil asked.
Kevin told him he was Kevin Alexander.
“Neil Smith.”
Kevin made a face.
“Look, not everyone gets a cool name,” Neil said. “I get Smith, one of the most common names around, and you know what… I’m fucking a-ok about it, so wipe that smirk off your fucking face and come out from behind the bar so I can get back to sleep.”
Kevin looked toward the only other door besides the front door, which was the door at the back end of the elongated space. “You sleep back there?”
Neil said, “No, I sleep on the cot you stepped over, but I was back there taking a piss.”
Kevin remembered the cot but didn’t think anything of it. He thought it was something you put boxes on or something.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Neil said. “You’re going to sit there all night. I’m going to go to bed.” Neil rounded the bar and retrieved a liquor bottle from the shelf, sat it down on the bar near Kevin. “Pisser’s in the back like I said. But what you’re going to do is you’re going to sit there the rest of the night.” He checked his watch. “Which is about three more hours. I’m going to lay down. You’re going to do nothing. Sure, you could shoot me. Sure, you could leave. But if you leave, I will go to the people who own this joint, and I will tell them Kevin Alexander robbed me, and then I will let them figure out what they want to do with you. If you shoot me, same thing happens, except they have to work at figuring out who you are. Good thing we got cameras. Otherwise, I’m going to get some shut-eye, and if you’re still here in the morning, then maybe I’ll offer you a job. You look strong. You look like you might be able to handle yourself. You’ll be my barback—start there, and I’ll see how you do.”
Smoking the cigarette now, Kevin thinks that for having started as a freelance burglar, he’s done pretty well in life. But this latent ambition, which has propelled him from a nobody earner to a somebody taker, Iris King’s confidant, which was something Neil warned him against, telling him, “You don’t want to play with the big dogs. It’s alright having a thing and doing it well.” It has added a crinkle of stress to his otherwise mostly stress-free world.
What he can’t accept is how a fight on that side of the bar, looking now toward Shelia, imagining the man sitting at the bar top drinking the beer bottle as he watched in his surveillance—the same surveillance he told the police didn’t exist—how that man sitting there getting hit with a pool cue could break the shelf, and the twenty bottles of liquor, shitty liquor, but it still costs money. Turning to retrieve a bottle of whiskey, Kevin asks, “Yeah, but how did the shelf break?”
Shelia, who sits on one of the stools on the other side of the bar, smoking the other sweaty cigarette perched limply in her off-hand, says, “Not that one.”
Kevin sets the bottle down. Goes for a second one.
“Not that one either.”
“You want to come back here and get it.”
Sheila says, “I’ll have to put my shoes on; I don’t want to step on glass.”
Kevin gives in, selects one of the opened, nearly empty top-shelf liquors, and sets it on the bar. “That work for you?”
“It’s not whiskey,” Shelia says.
“You got that right—it’s free,” Kevin says. He pours clear vodka into a glass, remembering when he played this game with Renaldo. This was days before he put a bullet in the guy’s head. That vodka was the same brand as this vodka.
Kevin stares at the glass and sloshes the liquid around some, playing with it.
“You going to drink it?”
Kevin pauses his examination and looks past the glass at Shelia. “You going to tell me how my fucking shelf got broken?”
Shelia says, “The pool cue broke when he hit Wayne with it.”
“When who hit Wayne with it?”
“When Daniel… Daniel Cooley, you remember him? He used to run with a biker gang until he had them twins, and his girl, Nessa, left him for a bit. He calmed down some.”
“I thought he wasn’t coming here no more?”
“He wasn’t, but then Nessa came back into his life. She’s at home with the kids, or so he says.”
“Okay, so let me see if I understand. Daniel hits Wayne with a pool cue on the back—”
“You’ve seen the video. Why are you making me go through all this?”
“Because cameras only show you so much. There’s in-frame and off-frame, and what I can’t see is off-frame. I need to be able to see everything, and I learned a long time ago that it does me no good to make decisions or jump to conclusions without looking at all sides of the issue.”
Something Iris King has a problem doing. She is too much the card player, reacting to what she has and playing against the other person instead of finding out what they have, too, and then using it against them.
Neil taught Kevin a lot about life. Rumor had it, Neil chose Smith, not because it was his given name but because it was his “new” name when Neil left a life behind back east. Rumor also had it Neil and Russell Siriano, the old man, used to be pretty close, like really fucking close, and that Neil’s bar—now Kevin’s bar—brought in nearly a quarter of Siriano’s money. Siriano didn’t just put anyone in charge of the main drop bar—he put Neil in charge of the main drop bar, and when Neil, who still comes around, retired, Siriano saw fit to put Kevin in charge of the bar.
Which, in Kevin’s mind, lends him a sort of usable lineage.
“The pool cue broke into two pieces, one that bounced off the bar and then collided with that lower-level shelf,” Shelia says, pointing to Kevin’s left. “It broke glass and knocked bottles over. The other stayed in Daniel Cooley’s hands.”
Kevin sets the clipboard down and places both hands on the bar top, extending his arms through the elbows, and locking them. He hangs his head out in frustration—stress. Kevin says, “That shelf alone will cost nearly a thousand dollars, not to mention the liquor I got to replace.”
Shelia doesn’t seem to have heard him, or she ignores him. She says, “So he was just holding this big brown jagged stump, about as thick as my wrist. His face was a mask of anger and all red.”
Kevin doesn’t care about the fight. He cares about his bar. “How am I supposed to pay for that, a thousand dollars?”
Shelia shakes her head and continues with her story. “Shit, Daniel, I thought, knowing Wayne and knowing how Wayne’s going to react…”
Sheila goes on, but Kevin stops listening and shuts his eyes. He tries to center himself. Take himself out of the moment, as his therapist once suggested. After he ended things with Gene, his ex-boyfriend, he thought about going to therapy. Well, he did more than think about it. He went to a handful of appointments, but after a while, he just got tired of all the talking. The therapist asked, “Why do you break into houses? Why do you feel the need to shit on people’s rugs?” He told her because he had to, like a kleptomaniac stealing. He liked the power, the feeling it brought. The shitting was his calling card. He told the therapist that he considered it something like a business card left in the bowl at the restaurant. It was something to say he’d been there. She told him he shouldn’t do that, and he told her to go fuck herself.
Shelia says, “So now, Daniel’s seething, like breathing heavily, in and out, face all red, rage. He yells out to Wayne, ‘You owe me money, you mother fucking scumbag.’ But Wayne, he’s just sitting there processing, you know?”
Kevin removes his ball cap and sits it next to the clipboard. “I thought we talked about the pool betting thing,” he says. “I told you not to allow that anymore. It causes too many problems. Bands don’t like when there are problems. They won’t come play here.”
Not saying he won’t have an opportunity to pull burglaries if he can’t distract people with a concert. Checking bags and coats and things when they walk in, lifting their keys, going to their house, or sending a crew, and robbing them blind—the trick being they had to make it look like an amateur—and then returning to the club and putting everything back just like Kevin found it. It’s an excellent little side money-making operation, but it’s weeks’ worth of work to cover all the cost of the damage from the latest bar brawl.
And with what’s happening to Iris King’s newfound empire, he doesn’t, and she doesn’t need the headache of all this nonsense. She has enough problems as it is. Vultures are closing in on every side, trying to pick off the bones of the once-great Siriano organization, which is now a shadow of itself since the old man is back in prison, in protective custody, or wherever he is after the kidnapping escapade. When his boy died, Iris seized control.
All of that was her plan. Kevin helped. It was her plan and end game all along, which means Kevin’s now her trusted advisor and can’t get tied up in these little disputes; he has an empire to steward. He earned it. He started this power gambit by helping her kill her beloved Renaldo Luna, then placing Wilson Notaro, Siriano’s bastard, in charge. Just in time for Wilson to catch a bullet while trying to take down the competition.
Again, Iris’s plan. What is not Iris’s plan is all these little startups causing problems, fighting against her while she tries to keep control. Kevin made her believe the German was moving in from the west. It’s funny, thinking about it now; Franklin gave him that name because of his middle name and the one time he made his childhood friend try sauerkraut. Franklin said, “You all eat this every week?” To which Kevin responded, “Every Sunday for dinner.” Then Franklin tried some, made a disgusted face, and laughed while letting the fermented cabbage fall from his mouth. “Yo, Kevin Germaine—Kevin the German.”
Then there are the people that are Iris’s real competitors, like the Russos, coming in from the east. Tommy Schafer. Short Philly. Others. All rushing to fill a void Siriano’s absence created.
Kevin started the German persona just to fuck with Iris, but then the rules changed, and he built a nice fiefdom for himself within her domain, under her nose.
The bitch.
But the more Kevin’s climbed the ladder, the more stress he’s accumulated. He feels he can handle it if he’s working for and with the right people. Also, the more he’s climbed the ladder, the shorter and closer the rungs are, and now Kevin’s wondering if he played his cards right, figuratively speaking—Iris loves poker, and it all started over a poker game—could Kevin have something more?
Could the German take over?
Could he settle the disputes plaguing her recently? The issues with the cousins down south. The issues with Flavia and Omar pressing in on the side while maintaining a brittle truce.
Everyone seems to tolerate Kevin, and they all fear the mysterious German. He’s built the connections. He’s trusted… He knows enough about the old days to speak to the old dogs, but he’s new enough, smart enough, to show people that this is his thing—he’s devoted, invested, a part of something. Something he believes in. Something that, with Neil’s help and maybe a few others, he could turn into something better than a shadow of itself. Maybe he could turn it into real power.
Maybe he could go to Flavia?
Tell her what?
Tell her he’s taking over, put it to her like she doesn’t have a choice. Tell her he’ll kill her if she doesn’t fall in line? He could do that. He could and would kill to take it all. Iris thinks she can kill, but she hasn’t ever pulled the trigger. Kevin did. He killed Renaldo and didn’t feel a thing. Kevin saw how Iris dealt with death when her husband died. It distracted her. She played it off well enough, but when the other side started making moves that weren’t on the board, she was knocked off-kilter when things didn’t go as planned. Kevin could take advantage of that. He could be someone.
Fuck that; he is someone. He’s the German. He’s Neil’s protégé. He’s Siriano’s trusted advisor, who was already setting up deals behind Renaldo’s back before all this started. Wilson trusted him and made him his personal steward. Iris trusts him.
That’s her mistake.
How would he do it? How would he take her out?
Shelia takes a drag of the cigarette. “You told me not to let people play for money, but what’s a little betting on friendly games here and there?”
“Here and there…” Kevin says, motioning to his side and the aftermath of destruction. The broken pool table, the toppled chairs, the smashed jukebox. Wayne Kissee slammed Daniel Cooley’s face into it, breaking the front. “…Is what leads to this. We’ve talked about it.”
“No, you’ve talked about it,” she says, pulling the words out.
“And I’ve told you not to let Wayne Kissee in here either. Why was he here?”
Shelia’s face says she’s thinking his question over. “He came to see me.”
“Does he give you a cut of his winnings?” Kevin asks, facing her. “I mean, I can get it if he’s giving you a percentage or something for allowing him to play his little games. But then you have to pass on a piece to me.”
“I don’t have to give you anything,” Shelia says, defensive, with her hackles up.
“Okay, well, what happened after the fight started?” Kevin asks.
Shelia looks to the side, thinking back on it. She says, “Brogdon stepped in.”
“The deputy?”
“Yeah, that guy, the pretty frat boy…” Shelia’s voice trails off for a moment as she sips the vodka. “…He’s weird.”
“He’s on the payroll,” Kevin says. Good, he can handle any fallout from the bar. “He knows what to do.”
“I wouldn’t trust him.”
“I don’t. What’d Deputy Brogdon say?”
Shelia says, “Brogdon told Wayne, ‘I got a call you were here.’ But I don’t know who would’ve called him. I thought that was weird. Like, Brogdon’s here, you’d think he was here for the fight, but it just started.”
“So he was looking for Wayne?”
“Seems like it.”
“What happened after that?”
“Wayne told Brogdon to fuck off, to which Brogdon said, ‘Wrong answer.’ He told Wayne to try again. Wayne said, ‘I don’t have nothing to do with you. Fuck off. I’m not doing nothing.’ Except he was; he had Daniel’s, or what’s left of Daniel’s, hair in his hand, lifting Daniel’s face from the jukebox. Wayne was caught in the act. Brogdon smiled and said, ‘You missed another payment.’ I guess he was talking about child support.”
Kevin sips his vodka. “What do you mean?”
“Before the fight started, Wayne was telling me he was behind in payments, like twenty-eight thousand,” Shelia says.
“Jesus,” Kevin says, mind working.
Desperate men are his type.
“…and you know what, come to think of it, I heard his wife—ex-wife—whatever the fuck she is, was getting mighty cozy with Brogdon and looking to make some money, but to hear Wayne tell it that’s all she cares about, money. She’s always on him about money. She was when they were together, too… always telling him he couldn’t go out because of the money. Telling him to get a job because of the money. Telling him money didn’t grow on trees. No, it comes out of my daddy’s back pocket cuz he’s the only man in town crazy enough to hire Jerilyn; everyone else wants nothing to do with her. ’Course, that’s on account of Wayne.”
Kevin asks, “So Brogdon arrested him?”
Shelia nods. “Wayne said, ‘Man, I was working. I’m trying,’ but then Brogdon said, ‘A warrant’s a warrant.’ Wayne looked confused at that point. He dropped Daniel’s head. And now that I’m thinking about it… yeah, that’s weird because Brogdon had said something about having a call, not being here for a warrant.”
“He could have got a call that Wayne was in the bar.”
“Yeah, I guess he could’ve.”
“The bar he wasn’t supposed to be in no more.”
“I guess that’s possible,” Shelia says. She imitates Brogdon’s voice like she’s trying the scenario out, “I got a call.” Then she switches back to her normal voice. “I don’t know, seems … doesn’t matter. Wayne said, ‘You don’t got no compassion? When’s the last time you had to deal with me for anything other than this chicken fat bullshit? When? A year, more, I’m not stealing no more. I’m staying away from those hotels. I haven’t even touched another car that ain’t mine. I’ve been good.’”
Kevin says, “But he didn’t pay his child support.”
Shelia says, “He missed one payment. One! That’s what he said. He asked, ‘Have you ever missed a payment on something?’ He told Brogdon he was working. He was out of the state. Wayne’s been good the last few months.”
Kevin stubs out his cigarette on the bar top, throws the butt on the floor, finishes off the vodka, and pours some more. He’s celebrating. He knows the answer to the question he’s about to ask, but he wants to double-check. He lifts the cigarette out of Shelia’s mouth, sticks it in his, and breathes in. He releases some smoke. “Who’s he working for, again?”
“Tommy Schafer,” Shelia says. “But he spends most of his free time when he’s not trying to get in my pants hanging out with his wife’s brother, Jeremy. You know Jeremy?”
Kevin knows Jeremy. He knows him very well. Jeremy’s one of his best producers, even if he’s gotten cross with Fat Tommy and Short Philly. Jeremy’s done an excellent job of building the mystique of the German and done well to keep Kevin’s name out of people’s mouths beyond whispers, which is what Kevin wanted.
Shelia says, “He made it to one of those world poker championship shows or something. He’s back in town. I think he used to know that Iris woman way back in the day when she first got started. Wayne says he sells marijuana for the German, but I didn’t think Jeremy did anything, much less was connected. And that’s a silly nickname. Anyways, my daddy says Jeremy still lives at home, or that’s what Jerilyn tells him.”
Kevin returns to the idea forming in his mind. “How much money did Wayne lose?”
“What do you mean?”
“Betting, how much money did he lose, playing Daniel? Some of that could have gone to his child support?”
“Wayne said one-sixty,” Shelia says. “He dropped the bills on Daniel’s knocked-out face before Brogdon arrested him. But knowing Wayne the way I do—hell knowing that whole white-trash clan—they all are always hurting for money.”
Kevin sees the opening now and feels like a shark entering the fray, smelling blood in the water. “So what you’re saying, Wayne needs money.”