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

plastic drop cloth as though preparing to paint the walls. The tension ratchets up in the room like a rheostat cranking up.

“Go on, son,” Ferri says from behind the desk with a coldly encouraging smile.

The pimp licks his lips. “I swear, y’all, I got myself in a situation. The motherfucker ambushed me! Puts a motherfuckin’ gun to my head! What am I supposed to do?! What would you do?!”

Across the office, Dalessandro is standing on the edge of the plastic, which now covers half the wall-to-wall shag. Absently puffing away on his cigarette, he calmly screws a silencer onto the muzzle of a silver-plated .357 magnum. He has the bored look of a plumber preparing to climb down into a sewer to root a pipe.

“Don’t do this, y’all,” the pimp pleads, glancing back and forth from the man on the plastic sheet to the man behind the desk. “I can help y’all with this shit, I can!” The pimp turns to the lieutenant. “Tell ’em how I can help ’em! Tell ’em what you told me this morning!”

Anna Marie Rigby pulls a Kleenex from her purse and wipes the tip of her nose. “What is it with mob people? Bunch of drama queens.”

Dalessandro strolls over to the pimp and pushes the muzzle of the .357 against the man’s head. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like you to step onto the plastic now.”

The Candy Man closes his eyes. “C’mon, y’all, you don’t gotta do this, c’mon, c’mon!”

Anthony Ferri watches impassively behind his gigantic teak desk.

“Sir,” Dalessandro says, his baritone voice sharpening slightly, “if you don’t move over to the plastic immediately I’m going to have to put you there.”

The pimp rises on elastic legs and somehow manages to stagger across the room and onto the plastic.

The tarp crackles as he falls to his knees and begins to pray.

“Drama queens,” Lieutenant Rigby says with a weary shake of her head. Then she blows her nose. The honking sounds are oddly incongruous as they blend with the pimp’s frantic praying.

“One second.” Old Man Ferri raises a crooked index finger, as though something is on the tip of his tongue. “One second, please.”

Dalessandro waits for a signal, the gun barrel pressed against the pimp’s temple.

Ferri rises behind the desk as though discovering the cure for cancer. “One second, Jimmy. Hold on.” The old man looks at Rigby with a twinkle in his eye. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Lieutenant Rigby wipes her nose absently, looking a little bored.

“I see now…” the old mobster says with a yellow, espresso-stained grin. “... how this nigger’s gonna help us with the half-breed problem.”

24.

He wakes up in darkness.

Zero bearings, memory fuzzy, the back of his head throbbing with pain, he tries to move. His lanky body, numb and stiff, presses snug against something hard and rubbery-smelling. His hands are shackled behind his back with something cold and hard like nylon strapping, and he cannot move his mouth under a big swath of duct tape.

Gentle swaying vibrations—and the occasional bump—tell him he’s in a vehicle, and the vehicle is moving, and the vehicle is taking him somewhere.

Most ordinary people would panic. Others might get incensed. Not the Russian. The Russian is genetically marked with cobra-like calm. He lies there in that dark coffin and takes deep breaths and relaxes and searches his traumatized brain for the dominoes that led up to this predicament.

He remembers the job. He remembers slipping into the Riverside Casino through the service entrance and drugging the guard. He remembers observing the asshole Elgart playing the slots for tedious hours. And he remembers seeing the Indian, and going after both of them in the men’s room. But how long ago was that? Hours? Days?

Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he begins to make out dim shapes around him. The back side of a hinge, a faded label reading RoadCase, and he realizes, with some measure of outrage, that he is cooling off inside a huge cargo trunk. He is stowed in a trunk, in the back of a van or a truck, and he is being hauled somewhere—most likely for disposal.

Muffled voices.

They are coming from behind the Russian’s head, through layers of metal and fiberglass. Wachowski gets very still and listens, and he tries to identify the source of the voices. One of them, a high, shrill female voice, rings no bells for Wachowski.

But the other voice—a low, phlegmy, male drone—sends jolts of recognition up the Russian’s spinal column. He remembers how close he was to pulling the curtain on this fat, incompetent slob of an Indian—another half a foot-pound of pressure on that trigger-pad…

Wachowski is just starting to saw the edge of his shackles against a sharp metal joint when he feels the truck slowing down.

The wheels bump over a traffic hump, and then the vehicle slows down to a crawl over a pebbly surface like gravel or dirt. Wachowski tightens up. His anus puckers with alarm. This is it. Unarmed, bound, and gagged, he will surely be zapped and buried and forgotten in some godforsaken landfill. The vehicle stops.

Doors clanking open. Footsteps approaching. Wachowski closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and waits to die, waits for the sharp bright pop through the front of his skull—lights out forever.

The sound of a key rattling in a padlock is so loud it makes Wachowski flinch.

The top of the trunk creaks open and floods the enclosure with blinding daylight.

Wachowski cringes at the stabbing pain behind his eyeballs from the overcast light. Blinking like a vampire bat, his skull pounding like a kettledrum, he sees nothing at first but a blur of color.

“Jesus Christ, he’s awake,” the female voice says from somewhere nearby.

“Okay, let’s go through the thing,” Oswald Means says, his huge silhouette looming over the trunk.

Blinking fitfully, trying to focus on the figures hovering in that corona of light, Wachowski swallows the sour metallic taste in his mouth and tries to say something, but the tape limits his communication to