View all NaNoWriMo entries
…
There was Stan’s gun, of course, but Rosso’s got a way of making you feel disarmed just to think of him. I reached under my seat and retrieved Stan’s piece, which suddenly felt flimsy, like a toy, while I struggled with Rosso’s simple question. Where can we meet? I ought to know. I lived here. Rosso was just visiting. I was his host; he’d be my guest. The man had a right to expectations, to simple decency. If it sounds like he was in my head, well, he’s my boss. A boss has a right.
Stan and I had been staying in nice little house on a nice little side street, and it hit me that Rosso would’ve gotten to Stan there if he’d known where we were holed up. It also hit me that every place I’d been in this town was a nice little street with nice little houses. Even if I’d wanted to meet there, I’d have been hard-pressed to give directions.
“Downtown,” I blurted after what seemed like days.
“If you call it that,” said Rosso. “Sure. Half an hour, by the playground.”
“By the-“
“The playground, the jungle gym, the- You’ve been out here a while, haven’t you? You’ve been busy, Lenny, but Christ, take some time to smell the students. There’s a playground downtown near the library, plenty of public seating around. We’ll see you, or you’ll see us, and we’ll talk. Half an hour.”
“Half an hour.”
It took me nearly half an hour to park, not wanting anything to do with parking garages just yet, and while circling around, I noticed the library and caught a glimpse of the playground. Ended up parking a few blocks away, halfway up a bridge over something halfway to a river.
Rosso and Kevin were sitting on a bench. Kevin’s elbows rested on his knees, and he was leaning in, listening to Johnny. Rosso looking as relaxed as Rosso ever got: his square face and broad shoulders still dared the world to a fight, but he was leaning back, his arm along the bench’s back, feet out and crossed at the ankles. He was staring off into the middle distance and talking when he saw me, and didn’t stop when he waved me over.
“-which is why you stay close to your smartest people. And your stupidest,” I heard him conclude. “Speak of the devil! Lenny boy, how’s tricks?”
“Been better, Johnny.”
“John,” he corrected.
“John. How come you-”
“It’s John now, Lenny. Kevin,” he reached for his wallet and handed a few bills to the kid, “go grab a beer with your friends.”
“I’m only 19. They don’t-”
“Go grab a beer with your friends. You got money, you know where to spend it, somebody wants to take it from you. Let ‘em.”
Kevin nodded, muttered “Hey, Lenny,” and tromped off.
Rosso watched him walk out of earshot, then turned to me. “So I fuck guys.”
“I- Jesus, Johnny. John.”
“You met Edward, the man likes to talk. Figured I’d get it out of the way. You got any questions?”
I drew a breath and couldn’t think of words to spend it on.
“No one ever does. Not that they say. Have a seat.”
Like I said, the man’s disarming.
“You’ve done well, Lenny. You’ve been a good soldier. That goes a long way in my book. So I’ll answer you one question-”
“Johnny, I really don’t-”
“I’m talking here,” he said calmly, “and it’s John, and shut your goddamned mouth. I’ll answer you one question, and you don’t have to ask it.” He paused, as if to prove that not even Johnny Rosso could make him talk before he chose.
“A man in my position has to worry. Even if he sneaks around. A man in my position does two things: first, he makes a statement. Then he moves out of the racket. Because a man in my position cannot take the time to shut up everyone talking about he’s a fag. So I took out Al Ticcio, you heard about that, and then I started moving my business.”
Al Ticcio had been found in a shallow grave out in northwest Indiana–where bodies are left to be found in these sorts of situations–missing the fingers on his left hand. The cause of death was ruled to be suffocation on one of those fingers. According to Rosso, Al had cut his own pinky finger off with a bolt cutter, as an act of contrition. Rosso had been impressed, and wondered if Al’s wife would be just as impressed. So Al took his own index finger. Which left his three children: what would they think? Delirious, Al had joined the laughter when his own middle finger was raised against him. And he’d been barely conscious when one of Al’s crew helped him with his ring finger, barely able to swallow his wedding ring when Al fed it to him. Then the party really started, though it quickly ended.
“Not enough hours in the day to work everybody over like that who gets ideas about someone like me,” Rosso observed. “Not enough time to just…kill them. But Ticcio bought me some time.
“I’d always had ambitions. You know I haven’t run a card game in over seven years? The games still run because of me, because I bankroll them, but I’m not involved anymore. Guys who need to know, know who to go to, and it’s not me.”
“And me and Stan-”
“And a few others, yeah. It helps to have a presence out there. Projects power. You’re an important part of things, you guys.”
“But what’s your game now?”
“It’s Chicago, what do you think? Denver sells its parking concession and its mayor gets drummed out. Who you think got that done back home? Daley and the council all behind it, unions behind it, no riots in the street, no one’s job even on the line. I make things happen.”
“You a politician now, John?”
“Watch your mouth. I make things happen. I’m a matchmaker. The vig’s better than cards.”
A toddler, still shaky on his feet, waddled up to us waving its arms. Rosso stuck his tongue out, bugged his eyes, looked up and smiled to the approaching mother when the boy giggled and clapped, shook his head at her apology as she retrieved her kid.
“I’m going legit,” he said. “Slowly. And it’s a local kind of legit. But it’s the big score, what I’ve wanted. Legal public money.
“But Edward, he’s…looking back, we never really had much in common. Business-wise.”
He told me about meeting Edward at a card game at which Edward was a player and Johnny muscle, enforcing the house rules. How Edward had drawn on the bank and tried to welch, how Edward tipped him off to a delivery of prescription drugs, how he’d hijacked the truck and how Edward’s cut covered what he owed. How the rush of that first job subsided, how he didn’t want to come down, how they’d planned the next one, and the next one, planned bigger scores and bigger, how keeping the rush fed somehow started to feel like planning a future.
He paused, coughed in his throat, shifted to sit up a bit straighter.
“When we started thinking big, that’s when things started going south. Edward was older. He was educated, had prospects in the straight world. And he was bored with that. Me, I was building something. He was-” Rosso coughed again “-he was slumming, I think.
“He’d known about that first score, when we met. He knew about others. Drugs were easy money to him, and he felt like a big man. He didn’t have to supply slingers; slingers had to sling.
“But he wasn’t ever at the center of anything. He never had a regular supply, and he never really invested himself in the business; he just kept his ears open and made a score when he felt like it. It was a rush.
“He’d trade oxycontin for coke and try to unload it by the gram. That sometimes worked. He’d land some methadone and trade it for K, then get off on the thrill of figuring out how to sell to club kids. It was a hobby for him. But after a while, it wasn’t enough.
“Meth, though, meth he could sell. Meth he could get. And he could get it regular. Which is why we’re here, Lenny. That and the girls.”
When he learned about a drug that could be cooked up using nothing but off-the shelf products, a drug that didn’t come from California or Mexico or Laos or Afghanistan, a drug produced all around him, Edward saw his chance to step up. To control supply, delivery, and distribution. He liked how that felt.
He started by financing a few operations scattered throughout northern Illinois and Indiana. He’d make a connection, usually some confused kid or laid-off factory worker, someone anchorless who’d been kicked around a bit until he’d drifted close enough to say yes to a simple proposition. Edward would set the guy up–usually a guy–with a rental house, or a trailer, and would supply him with equipment and supplies. A couple were busted, a couple blew themselves up, but those cases were always linked back to the local trade. Edward directed it all from back in the city. Getting it back to Chicago was the easy part: Edward employed truckers, bikers, college kids as couriers. And selling it was never a problem.
“Me, I was just working, working, working. In the neighborhood, in the city. Learning how things ran–if you don’t know the details here, Lenny, no one will ever force them out of you–and just inching up, picking my spots. Edw–Eddie–, Eddie decided he wanted an empire. Emperor of white trash and Mexicans–by now, the Mexicans were running distribution, and Eddie used them.
“That’s when he started spending time out here.” Johnny relaxed, leaned back a bit, took in the sky. “We’re in a very important spot, Lenny. You know why?”
I knew better than to dig for an answer, so I stared off with him.
“You got I-80 running out to the middle of nowhere and back to Chicago, then all the way to the coast. And a few miles down, you got I-35 running up from Texas and Mexico.
“There ain’t much here, Lenny, and that’s the best part. From here, you can make it and get it anywhere you want, fast.
“You can also bring it here, and keep it out of sight as long as you need. And then get it to the city, or St. Louis, or K.C., or Minneapolis, in a few hours.”
“So Edward started fencing?”
“Edward started in with girls.”
I must’ve flinched.
“Don’t get cute,” Rosso warned. “He started running girls. Whores. But when I say girls, I mean girls–kids, 14, 15.”
“Jesus, John.”
He paused, breathed deeply, his face seemed to thicken and harden. “That, I couldn’t take. When I learned about it, which was too late.
“Eddie and I were close–watch it–and we had a way of doing business. I was learning how to get things done in the city, moving up slowly, checking twice before reaching out for any little extra thing I could grab. Eddie liked to jump at things, and I helped keep his nose clean. When he fell into a shipment of this or that, I knew who he should talk to. I helped with the logistics.
“I guess I bankrolled him. When he wanted to set up shop, stabilize things, I was relieved. Got him a club, a couple of bars, to do business in. Hands-off. I didn’t even go to those spots very often: just places for him to relax and make deals. I was glad. He was settling down.
“I can’t see him as a pimp. Not the type, somehow. But girls–women–started working his club, and he let them, so you tell me what that made him. That, I knew about. By then, we were in bad shape, Eddie and me, and I wasn’t paying attention like I should. Word has it Eddie took in a working girl whose manager wanted her back, and by now, Eddie didn’t have me at his side. The pimp knew him, knew his operation. He offered a settlement. Eddie was rattled. Eddie agreed.”
Rosso was quiet for a while. “Look closely at these kids, Lenny. What do you see?”
I took my time, searched the afternoon traffic for whatever had caught Rosso’s eye. “College kids, a few families with babies…this isn’t my world, John. I don’t know. What am I looking for?”
“You’re right, mostly. But even here, right here, look close. Some of these kids aren’t in college. I think I’m right about this, maybe I’m wrong about these particular kids, but some of them don’t look collegiate. Too young, too hard. Some of these kids are just drifting. Kicked out of home, maybe ran away. They’re scrapping, squatting someplace.
“You ever run away from home, Lenny?”
“Not for long. A day once.”
“Me, neither. You know what kind of guts it takes to really do it? What kind of smarts? Leave home when you’re still a kid, keep it together, stay alive? You ever think about how much balls it takes to do that?
“Now think about what it takes to beat all that toughness out of a kid and make her a slave.” Rosso’s glare could’ve melted the pavement. “This is what Eddie got mixed up in. This is what Eddie chose. And this is why I put 50k on his head back home. Tried to get to him out here, but I lost a few guys–Ronnie Bagglia, you knew him, right? Two others, too. So I put the word out back in Chicago and figured he’d come to me soon enough. He never did.
“A few months ago, though, he reached out to me. And not in a kind way. That’s when I put the price on his head, that’s why I sent Stan and then you.
“I’m sorry about Stan, but that had to happen, and you know why.”
“Stan made his bed. But Carol-”
“Carol’s been part of this for longer than you know, Lenny.”
And that’s when I knew that Rosso had told me the whole truth about a tiny sliver of the bigger story. That’s when I knew that the gun in my jacket meant absolutely nothing.
“So, Lenny. You’ve got a decision to make. What’s it gonna be?”
I held his stare. I had nothing. I looked away, down the brick-paved little pedestrian mall.
“Smart man, Lenny. I’ll be in touch. You know that.” Rosso stood and straightened his coat, and when I turned around a moment later, he was gone.
