When throwing someone in the water,
make sure those concrete shoes are a good fit.
make sure those concrete shoes are a good fit.
Retribution by James Candiloro
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Never mind the fact that cement
shoes are a fucking cliché. If you don't let 'em cure, you end up with a body
that doesn't sink.
Getting cute with the
methods just invites ways for things to go sideways. I know first-hand that if
you need info you gotta use your imagination. But, you try to kill me, you better
make fuck-sure my body sinks.
Take Nicky Peaches as an
example. He needed to live long enough to talk so I took half-a-dozen of those
plastic bouncy house stakes, tied them to his arms and legs, and pounded them
into the ground. For this I go taut-line hitch every time, it's a simple knot
that always does the job. Boy scouts and astronauts can't be wrong. He was half
unconscious, so there was plenty of time to let the lawn mower warm up while he
came to.
His old lady had one of
them sweet, quick-turn jobbies - twenty horse power, fifty-four-inch cutting
deck. A machine like that doesn't even drop RPMs when you run over Nicky
Peaches’ arm. It sprayed red gobs, white bits, and strips of blue-white
Hawaiian shirt a good eight feet across the stone patio. Red, white, and blue.
I almost saluted.
He told me the day's
password while his blood soaked the grass. A ragged, twitching stump where his
left arm used to be. Don't think I felt bad about the tire marks I left across
his neck and face, that pig-fucker had it coming.
The cement shoes were his
idea.
Then there's Vinny, the
door guy at Joey's place. It would've been in everyone's interest if Vinny had
just taken the chromed .38 he kept in his waist band and put it to his temple
years ago.
Instead, there I was
knocking on the door, answering his challenge with the password. He recognized
my fuckin' voice and still opened the damn door. As soon as it unlatched, my
weight went against it and Vinny's eyes widened while he fumbled for his piece.
Everything in the room,
including the cheap-ass wood paneling, vibrated from the movie blasting
upstairs and I realized nobody was going to hear shit.
The wall behind Vinny got
painted like a Pollock.
The new paint job was done
in shades of red, white, and gray, reminding me of a shitty band poster the way
the arrangement of the white sort of made like a Soviet hammer and sickle.
What was left of Vinny,
from the nose down, toppled back over his black stool. A glob of gray paint hung
out the back of his head.
In all honesty, that's
when my throat closed up and my mouth got all slick, but that simpleton
shit-head had it coming. He was the one that bought the cement.
Upstairs, I took my time
looking around, waving the barrel of my Glock into each room until I was
satisfied Nicky Peaches's info was good, and that Vinny was working security alone.
In the movie room, Joey
was sprawled out on a leather couch, empties piled on the floor.
I let myself think maybe
he was trying to drink away the guilt. Fill up the space that hollows out under
your ribs when you waste your own friend. That beat-dog look almost made me
turn back.
Almost.
Sneaking around a couch
littered with empties—when you want nothing more than to shoot the fucker lying
on it in the face—is a challenge all its own. Joey watched the damn movie until
I was half in front of the screen. He just laid there, mumbling the word, “Ghost.”
Then I saw the pills spilled across his chest. Half a handful of vikes
forgotten on his shirt.
I don't know what it was
that snapped him back to reality enough to draw his Smith and Wesson.
Two shots—one to the
shoulder and one to the upper thigh—put an end to that shit. The shoulder shot
would have been enough to keep him from wasting me again. The shot to the thigh
was, well, because I wanted him to bleed out.
Joey, he convinced the
others to keep me alive until they threw me in the river.
