Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

around the globe on grainy black-and-white televisions, the whole world reveling at the particle-bomb splash signaling their heroes’ safe return and a new era in human progress. This particular splash, tonight, in the water park, amid all the tumult, has a similar dramatic impact and displacement of water.

Minus all the heroism and human progress.

“Excuse me! Excuse me! Coming through!” Gerbil has the comatose Russian draped over her shoulder as she quickly negotiates the throngs of the crowded foyer. The fire alarm is pounding away in her ears. Somebody pulled the alarm a minute ago and now the E-units are on their way. “Sorry, folks—Uncle Bernie had one too many pink ladies tonight!”

The doors are only twenty feet away.

Gerbil hauls the Russian toward the exit, Wachowski’s flaccid legs dragging behind him, his shoes pigeon-toed and skating along the carpeted floor. “Just gotta get a little air for the old boy!”

Gerbil kicks one of the glass doors open, and then lugs the deadweight outside.

It only takes Oswald thirty seconds to climb to the top of the waterslide. He reaches the apex, and emerges into the light and noise of the platform, breathing hard and angry as a hornet. He sees the back of Elgart’s head.

“Freeze, puss-brain!” Oswald lurches across the slippery platform with his nine-millimeter ready to blaze. He grabs Elgart by the scruff of his collar.

Elgart winces, giggling maniacally. “Only one rider at a time on the—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Oswald flops down on his ass behind the gambler, splashing down on a sheet of moving water sluicing across the footpad.

Then Oswald gives Elgart a little nudge.

22.

“GET DOWN!”

The younger guard shrieks as he takes cover behind a fiberglass Captain Hook statue. Heart thumping in his chest, he peers around the side of the statue as the bizarre spectacle unfolds across the pool.

In one great, heaving plunge, the big fat lunatic in the pink T-shirt—with the little guy between his legs—comes roaring down the twisting slalom of the waterslide, the automatic pistol still visible in the big guy’s hand, raised toward the ceiling.

Seconds later, the two nutcases reach the bottom of the waterslide and soar off the edge, the big fellow hanging onto the gambler with a scissor-hold that would make a World Wrestling Federation wrestler proud. For one spectacular second, they are airborne.

Then they plunge into the deep end and are completely submerged for a brief moment of jarring silence, broken only by the ceaseless whine of the casino’s fire alarm. Somehow the big guy manages to keep his Glock above water, menacingly visible like a shark fin—and then he bursts back to the surface, spitting water and shaking the chlorine from his face like a Labrador Retriever. He starts frog-paddling his huge, powerful legs, dragging the little guy by the neck toward the closest stainless steel ladder.

Both guards, huddling out of sight, are momentarily frozen with panic. The water park has nearly been evacuated, except for a couple of stoned teenagers, both of whom, transfixed by the bizarre floor-show unraveling before them, now begin to applaud.

“Stay down, everybody! No heroes!” the big fellow booms as he yanks the shivering gambler out of the pool.

The fat guy turns toward a row of windows across the west wall. Visible on the other side of the glass are the dark reaches of the parking lot.

“Nobody do anything stupid!” the big guy bellows and raises the gun at the glass.

The guards, cowering behind matching fiberglass cartoon figurines, are weighing their options. The younger guard, a Portuguese kid from West Chicago, is thinking about his measly salary here at the casino, the shitty benefits package, and the fact that they won’t even let him use the men’s room on the club level. Thirty-five feet away, crouched behind a Little Mermaid statue, the older guard is thinking about his retirement coming up in less than a year. He has his eye on a condominium in Boca Raton.

The fact is, as each man does the math, neither can see a reason to be John Wayne here tonight.

Across the promenade, the fat man in pink fires at the window. Three quick ear-splitting blasts tear through the safety glass in brilliant starbursts, sending spiderwebs in all directions across the pane, and then the man throws a chair through the damaged heart and the entire row of windows collapses in an avalanche of sparkling diamond shards.

It takes less than ten seconds for the big guy to lift the shivering hostage over the ledge, and through the gaping hole in the windows, and then climb out himself.

A minute later, in the echoing silence, the younger guard comes out of his hiding place, brushes himself off, and then nods at his colleague.

The older guard peers out from behind the Little Mermaid statue. “All clear?”

“Yes, Melvin, we’re all clear,” the younger guard says with a weary sigh.

The two guards join each other, shaking their heads and holstering their handguns. They walk over to the breached windows, their boots crunching broken glass. The teenagers join the guards, and the group lingers there for a moment, speechless, as sirens fill the air, a dissonant harmony against the fire alarm.

Out in the parking lot, about a hundred yards away, a rust-pocked blue pickup truck is screeching to a stop in front of the fleeing pink gorilla and his hostage. The big guy throws the hostage into the cab, and then quickly climbs in as the truck lays another patch and roars off toward the west exit gate.

Far beyond the gates, out over the black fields of steel mills, a big yellow gibbous moon rises over the western horizon, the significance of its size lost on the gallery of onlookers.

23.

Early the next morning, not long after the waxing moon has tucked back under the far gray reaches of Lake Michigan, the head of the Ferri family’s criminal empire, Anthony Michaelangelo Ferri III, also known (but not to his face) as the “Mink,” is