I Might As Well Because I Have No Choice

CHAPTER NINE

  I found that GrandvilleMcNamara, who owned one of the biggest operations in New Jersey, was in town. He stopped me on the street and offered me a job. But the gig was that I’d be holed up all winter in an area with Vein Strychnine.

  There wasn’t a better man on the earth. He was a sharp shooter, trapper, hunter, hustler, hell raiser an one of the best rumblers you ever known. Thing about him, he had a bad temper and was quick to fly off the handle. We’d wind up killing each other.

  There were a hundred stories about him. One time Grandvilletackled a group of Italians with a clubbed rifle. They figured nobody but a crazy man would do that, an afterwards they left him alone. Another time a bullet hit him in the face and he rode for a doctor, but his jaw was broken an it pained him so much he just reached in and tore out a chunk of jawbone so big it had two teeth in it. That marked him forever. I never did hear whether tearing that piece of jawbone out made the pain any better.

  Me and Jaquan finally went back to Zian and hit that stewpot again. We got there early and Zian looked over at us and said, "You fucked up, aren’t you Pacino?"

  "We can sleep over to the moat and eat here until you throw us out. Soon as we find some work, we’ll be riding out of here."

  Zian stood there quiet for a moment and then he said, "Pacino, I’m going to put you onto something you may not thank me for. Johnny Santini needs two men for his click in the Camden area." Then he said, "You guys step up to the bar."

  We were alone in the place, but I guess he didn’t want to talk too loud. He filled a couple of cups with cognac and shoved them towards us.

  He leaned his forearms on the bar. "Pacino, this here country is walking wide open into trouble and you will be a fool not to see it. And that trouble may bust loose right in Camden. That’s why the job’s open."

  Well, I looked around at Jaquan. "What do you say man? It’s going to be a cold winter and a man doesn’t have to hunt for a living there."

  "I have been in trouble most of my life. This time, I’m not going to be by myself."

  "Zian, you tell Johnny Santini, he’s caught himself a couple of live ones. We’ll go."

  We finished our cognac and headed for the door.

  Just then, it opened wide and a man filled the open space with his shoulders. It was Shalhoup Cleveland. Shalhoup was a Diamond R and a tough hand.

  "What’s up? If it isn’t the heavyweight?" Shalhoup mocked.

  Five ten and weighting one seventy. But alongside his two hundred and forty pounds and his six feet four inches, I might be considered a midget.

  The room was filling up and I could see they had been egging on him anxious for a fight. Well, I hadn’t had no fun since the night they pitched me out of that honky-tonk back in Chicago. And tomorrow, I will be headed for the breaks along Camden.

  "Shalhoup, how tall are you?" I asked.

  "Six feet four inches in my socks," Shalhoup answered.

  "I didn’t know they piled it that high," I said. Then I hit him.

  When Shalhoup Cleveland opened his eyes, the sun struck right into them, but it were that city noise, jouncing in the road that woke him.

  It took a minute or two to realize where he were and when he did, he didn’t like it. There he were, lying on his back on the bare concrete of the sidewalk with boxes and garbage all around him, and his head felt like it had been pounded by a sledge hammer.

  There’s nothing like lying on a sidewalk when people are walking around you. When he started to rise, he wished he had another idea. A shot of pain took him in the side and when he grabbed at a passerby’s hand, he fell back on the concrete.

  "That Cleveland from the Diamond R, you did the son of a bitch to him and knocked him out cold."

  "Damn right Jaquan, I beat his ass!"

  "Whatever you done, he shrugged it off and counter attacked. He knocked you down and up to that time. After that, you set out to pain him."

  Jaquan drew up the team in the shade of a house. "I was about to wake you after that fight, then I thought otherwise. You needed your rest. Mr. Johnny Santini sent a car for us to conduct business. I don’t know the neighborhood. Mr. Santini, he just pointed me this way," said Jaquan.

  Jaquan had a cloth and a fifth of gin in his hand. And I took a few gulps and then wiped my face with the cloth. The gin burned my throat.

  "Mr. Santini said he wanted me to take you to the edge of the city. The informant will be waiting there. And he didn’t want anybody to know where we were going."

  That didn’t sound like Johnny Santini, but a lot of things had happened since I’d been away.

  "Jaquan, rest your nerves. I got to figure this out."

  He started digging around looking for clues, but all of a sudden, he pulled up and held his breath, then said, "Pacino, you look at this here."

  What he were showing me were a SK-47 and a .30-06 and boxes with 500 rounds of ammunition. Alongside the assault rifle lay two .44 caliber, both new. And with them was a note scrawled on a piece of paper, greasy with gun oil:

  Somebody's been stealing my weed.

  That was all that were scribbled on it with his initials signed to it. But with all the guns, and coming from a subtle man like Johnny Santini, it seemed he must figure he were sending us into the middle of war.

  "You want to quit?" I asked Jaquan.

  Jaquan chuckled. "Where are we going to? Mighty soon there’ll be snow falling, and I never did enjoy riding in the snow."

  We drunk up our coffee and Jaquan smoked a cigarette and I dug around in my pocket for the butt of that cigar. When I found it, it was all mashed to pieces. But no use in throwing it away, so I put the tobacco in my mouth and chewed it, although I’d never been a man to chew tobacco.

  From what Zian had said in Zian’s, and of Johnny Santini, they must believe Camden was were the trouble lay, or some of it.

  Everybody knew Johnny Santini didn’t play no games with you. Mighty few crossed him. And if you did, you were a goner. Santini was a shrewd man, and he took account of conditions. He sold tons of marijuana, but on account of that, it was supplied from the motherland Africa.

  If he were missing pot, somebody was playing a mighty tight dangerous game.

  While we rolled around the street, I puttered around cleaning the grease from the rifles and holding it up. Then I did the same for the pistols. Come dark, we pulled off the street where there was a little street that trickled down toward the coast.

  We ate pizza and afterwards drunk a soda. They tasted almighty good.

  Where we had stopped, there was a small patch of grass among the scattered trees and we peeped the scene then moved back under the trees and hid in the shadows.

  If anybody was hunting us, we’ll see them first with no problem.

  Only they weren’t close behind us or I would have seen them. So if they didn’t know exactly where we stopped, they might overlook us.

  I grabbed the SK and sighted it and put a pistol in the crotch of my pants.

  A man never knew when he had to brush off a bunch of scalp hunting hooligans.

  Once I were relaxed out under the trees, I started trying to figure out what Johnny Santini had in mind. It seemed to me he was hoping we will get to the spot in Camden without anybody knowing we were there and he wanted us ready for a fight when they did find out.

  If they were that bad, Jaquan and I could look for trouble, real trouble.

  Time enough to cross the bridge when we come to it, so I stretched my muscles on a bit and then sort of let myself relax looking at the stars through the night sky.

  Those earlier remarks of Jaquan’s were beginning to nag at me. Come to think of it, I amounted fairly, so and so. Top hand in anybody’s click. But what did that mean? Fifty grand a month if I were lucky? Thirty if I wasn’t? And when I got to be an old man, sailing on a private boat. Living on the shoreline either a condo in the suburbs, either a home in the mountains?

  Somewhere along there I dropped off and it was coming on toward morning
when my eyes fluttered open at a noise and then I were wide awoke at the blink of an eye and my hand on the trigger of the rifle.

  "That there’s some of Quirk’s click," I heard somebody whisper.

  "Hell, Quirk's boy’s been over this here streets a half of a dozen times," another voice said.

  "You think he’s scoping us out?"

  "Wouldn’t put nothing passed him."

  "I believe we should bomb first before he does."

  I held the heavy artillery SK-47 in rage with a conscious of putting a few bullets in his brain and seeing the brain splatter from his head. But I listened intensely as to what were a brewing. A war from the sound of it.

  "They don’t call him Pacino for nothing."

  There was a moment of quiet then the second voice questioned, discussed like, "You going to contemplate all night?"

  "No."

  There was a streak of dirt crunching then the sound of footsteps moving off through the grass. I stayed in the cover of the trees and tried to remember where I heard those voices before.

  After awhile, I heard a faint stir from where Jaquan lay. And I think he where awoke also. He were waiting for them and it gave a man a good feeling to know he wasn’t alone out there. Just the same as I stretched out to collect interest on a night’s sleep, I couldn’t help but wonder what I had gotten myself into.

  Winter was coming on. When snow fell, all we had to do was sit tight and keep an eye on the shipment.

  But something kept bothering me. What would they do if they had found us?

  And we still had more nights to go before we got to another spot.