Chapter One

Hot Season

John McMahon

© 2015 John McMahon

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Cover art by John McMahon

Cover design by John McMahon

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Now, it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,

For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down;

And at the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the east.'

-Solo from the Libretto of Naulahka.

Rudyard Kipling

It was that magic time just after sunset when the sky retains some of its golden light and the ocean breezes blow up over the sands to Beach Road. Two lovely kids sped along with the top down in a sports coupe. Music was turned up over the sound of the wind whipping through the open cockpit, lifting the long blonde hair of the girl from the passenger’s seat in a smooth flowing current. They followed the road all the way to the last cul-de-sac of the town, deserted at that hour by day trippers and weekend renters, now returned west to the great city.

The car broke hard into a spot that overlooked the long slope of the beach down to the rolling waves still just visible in the receding light as frothy white lines cresting and breaking. With the engine off, the immortal crash and suck of the tide was audible over the latest engineered pop music that came crystal clear from the cars aftermarket stereo. The boy went to the trunk and returned with an igloo cooler packed with bottles of beer on ice as the girl rolled and lit a cigarette.

Tall and tan with sandy hair and a body sculpted by athletics and good living he was on the brink of manhood. She, the whole package; blonde and young with a body that made middle aged men wince. The perfect offspring of the moneyed class who lived in beach side mansions on this once isolated spit of sand. Golden children that meant to pass from their privileged upbringings to long and successful lives filled with luxury and pleasure.

They sat in the open car drinking and kissing with the seats tilted back until the girl removed her top and straddled the boy sinking her tongue deep into his mouth and stayed that way for a while. When she got hot she slid back to her own seat and pulled off his board shorts to begin stroking his already erect penis. He laid back and let her take him into her mouth and she worked at it all the way, swallowed and washed his load down with a mouthful of just cold craft beer.

He got out of the car to walk off the mind altering orgasm that a boy of eighteen who though not innocent was still new enough to the experience to be shaken to his core. The girl turned up the music and was sitting on the seat's head rest smoking again, looking far out into the dark sea with a fresh beer resting on her knee.

'What do you want to do now?' She asked.

'Going home.'

'I thought we were going to hang out?'

'Work in the morning.'

'Drop me off at the mall then.'

'Where, the fence?'

'Yea, I need to see someone.'

'Why do you always wanna hang out there?'

'Cause they're fun.'

'Getting high with a bunch of...'

'Bunch of what?'

'Bunch of fucking losers! I'm taking you home.'

'No you're not.' She laughed

'Your old man is going to find out about this shit someday and who's he going to blame? Not his perfect daughter. He's going to kick my ass.'

'Fuck him. Anyway he doesn’t know shit.'

The boy took the car down Franklin coming to a full stop at every sign, keeping his speed well below the limit despite his annoyance with the girl. He made the left on to Roosevelt Boulevard and moved along with traffic to the dark strip-mall known locally as the fence. He pulled in and drove around the back of the shop fronts to where the loading areas lined up under cones of strong white light. Two cars sat well back in the shadows and the heavy thump of bass came across the distance. He killed the engine and the two sat for a moment scanning the depths where shadows passed in and out of the light's halos.

'I’m not waiting,' he said.

'Whatever.'

She got out and walked towards the cars shrouded in darkness at the back of the docks.

He watched until she dissolved into the shadows, shook his head, mumbled to himself, brought the engine back to high whining life and pulled away with a little too much speed, chirping the tires just once.

One

For the second week running a yellow post it note clung to the top of his pay envelope with the same block lettered message, Please meet Jerry tonight at the Cuttlefish after work; No signature, no greeting, no salutation. A silent order.

Lonny plucked the 2 by 2 inch insult from the envelope and released it to the mercy of the air conditioned currents in the break room like it was soiled toilet paper. It floated, spiraling to the floor where it melted into the geometric pattern of the dirty linoleum tiles. If Jerry was going to fire him again he could do it right here, to his face, no hiding, no dodges this time.

He zipped off his coveralls, the tang glided smoothly over the grease coated teeth stitching up his torso. One of the benefits of blasting filth coated trucks all day with a pressure sprayer, no sticky zippers. But the act of manipulating the zippers small tongue cramped his hands. Hours of squeezing the two stage trigger and guiding the high-pressure spray left the muscles of his thumbs locked and aching.

The younger guys had already showered and gone and Lonny sat alone in the dim room with his convulsing hands, beer gut and yellow note about meeting Jerry. Jerry Whitman, his boss, the owner of the company, meet him at the Cuttlefish Inn, his restaurant, so that he can what? Fire and re-hire him again as a dishwasher? Maybe busboy this time?

Airport Cartage underwent restructuring six months earlier in the form of laying off their truck drivers and warehouse staff and hiring a whole new crew of recently green carded immigrants from Eastern Europe; big guys with crew cuts who could barely speak English and didn’t know the city but would work for half of what the original drivers made. Lonny had driven for 26 years until the end of shift one Friday when he and all the other drivers got two envelopes. Besides their normal pay stub was a severance check accompanied by a personal note of apology signed, Jerry Whitman, but written in his secretary’s hand.

Jerry spoke to them en masse in the break room and then one by one as they left that day. It was out of his hands, he wasn’t in control of the staff and wages anymore, there was a management company that directed things, and the bastards only cared about the bottom line. He was cursed and even threatened by a couple of the guys. For Lonny though he made an effort and kept him on as a cleaner in the bay at just over minimum wage; less than the driver who took his job was paid. Jerry did this out of loyalty; they were from the same neighborhood after all.

*

The Cuttlefish Inn was out of his way. Out on the west loop of the island, thirty or forty minutes in after work traffic and far enough from home that Lonny couldn't chance having more than two beers with the tourist season approaching. The cops would be out along Franklin Boulevard but Lonny made a right off the bridge all the same, giving in to the request as he knew he would.

Traffic was heavy beyond the discount stores and low end restaurants that divide Great Beach between the East and West loops. East end condo buildings from the sixties and seventies, once home to retired Jews from Queens and Brooklyn now rapidly gentrifying. West end, old Great Beach families, bungalows and Cape Cods of the Irish-German working class now worth six figures in the staggering New York market. Both separated from the inland projects that ran along the canal of City Island by the Long Island Rail and several strip malls, an un-signed but very real boundary.

When Lonny was a teenager the Cuttlefish was a working man’s bar like The Drop Down, The Pines and The Wake where he drank, a place that served cheap domestic beers and straight shots of bourbon or scotch accompanied by the sounds of a ball game or a fight from the black and white TV behind the bar. A place where men got drunk enough to go home to their families after toiling all day in the bowels, backrooms and docks of the towering metropolis just barely visible from their beaches in the hazy distance.

But the Cuttlefish was on the west loop, now the wealthy side of the island, and over the years Jerry had transformed it. He had made it a high-end steak and seafood restaurant with dark wood panels and a long elegant bar that served Manhattan popular drinks and wine to weekenders. It was a bar his father wouldn’t have drunk at. The interior was decorated with nets and naval implements and photos of whalers and crab boats, though Jerry had come from a long line of transport men. A family business that had started with a horse-drawn wagon generations before and now occupied three warehouses and used 15 leased box trucks.

Lonny left his car on the boulevard half a block away from the place to avoid the valet parking, not quite sure how it worked and with no interest in finding out. Scuffling his boots along the sidewalk he saw himself in tinted reflection of a flower shop window. His clothes were clean but only just, he had showered in the locker room at work but the grime and grease off the trucks stubbornly remained in the creases of his neck, the furrows of his brow, the lines of his hands. His hair was hand tossed and too long for the cut.

‘Be damned if I’m gonna get cleaned up for the bastard’, he mumbled to his wrinkled visage in the window and continued on.

Outside the Inn, kids in white polo shirts hustled new sedans and sports cars to a lot four blocks inland while the owners, professionals and business people, cracked the big black double doors that fronted the clap-board facade Jerry had built up around the old entrance of the brick building.

Lonny took a stool at the furthest end of the bar from the dining room entrance. There was no TV to focus on so he studied the seated clientele, catching snippets of conversation that didn’t sound like part of their shared language. Business words, corporate jargon, white collar talk. The two bartenders in black shirt and white aprons clung to the scalloped elbow of the bar where the soon to be dining patrons sat. Lonny snatched a napkin from one of the chrome holders and began shredding the thin layers into a heap, wondering whether to order a beer or ask for Jerry. He wanted a drink but he’d rather just walk out and drive down to the Drop Inn.

The place was dark though still daylight outside. Atmosphere he guessed. Candles flickered along the bar, their smoothly pulsing light reflected in tiny facets off the divots of the pseudo hammered copper finish. The light was soft and relaxing and the music from the dining room echoed it. He didn't know if it was jazz, something featuring a piano, was it live? Lonny stared at the pile of shredded paper in front of him gritting his teeth, wondering how Jerry was going to lay it out and why here. Was it only him getting the ax this time?

One of the well groomed bar tenders appeared in front of him. ‘Tough day?’ He asked, looking at the paper heap. Lonny looked up timidly, as if he'd been caught day dreaming in class, and grinned out of instinct in the face of authority.

'No thanks I already had one.'

The bartender nodded at the joke and swiped the torn napkin away with a polite smile, 

‘What can I get you?’

Lonny, unsure of what kind of beer they might serve tendered ‘a Bud?’

‘Bottle or draft?’

‘Draft?’

‘Schooner or pint?’

Lonny scowled, ‘ mug.’

‘Pint then.’ The bartender knocked his approval against the wooden riser and hustled to the taps.

Lonny sat up on his stool, whistling along with the half familiar tune tinkling through the room. The place wasn’t too bad, relaxing he thought. His beer came and the bartender nodded and went off to another order. The glass was frosty, cold and heavy. The bottom thick and octagonal cut which gave it a solid feel and made the act of drinking it satisfying. The beer was craft poured with a well shaped head and went down clean, no sour after taste of old keg, of dirty pipes. In three long swallows the pint was empty, a swirl of airy foam clinging to the bottom. He put the glass down and spun it on edge in a tight circle with the palm of his hand as he watched the other patrons. Heads floating above the bottle tops in the long mirror facing him. The bartender returned, grinned, arced his eyebrows in anticipation.

‘Sure’, Lonny said feeling more at ease. Not a bad place at all. Costly, but quiet and comfortable. He could see himself going there after work to have a few warm up drinks, work the knots out from the pressure sprayer before moving on to one of his regular hangouts. Why not? There was no real difference between him and these people; they said things he didn’t understand like accumulated depreciation and path of viability but it was just shop talk. How many of these guys would know a J bar from a roller bed? Just different lingo. There was always the leveler of sports or fishing and if they were residents they could complain together about the summer people. Most of them probably didn’t make much more than he had when he was still driving. He had money tucked away, owned his car and house outright, he had nothing to be embarrassed about. His beer came, as cold and heavy and clean as the first.

He had already drank down half the second beer when two young men in shirt and tie moved in next to him. One sat, the other perched over his friend's shoulder, leaning in, balanced with his hand on the back of the stool. They were just in from the city, already loose-lipped and loud talking. Friday night on the prowl, skirt chasers, bullshitters, high-rollers on pay day. 

‘Have a few on the train, eh?’ Lonny asked, laughing, extending the knowing tone of men in bars. The one standing looked over his friends shoulder and nodded without making eye contact and continued talking in his ear. ‘Friday night on the town, big plans right? Like to be in your shoes,’ Lonny continued, ending with a chuckle meant to reveal an envy borne of past experiences that had never happened for him.

The standing one shot him a fuck-off glance, the seated man nodded at two stools just vacated and they got up and moved down the bar. The standing one murmured and the other laughed, eying Lonny like he was something found stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

Lonny gulped down the remains of his beer, warm now. The crisp edge gone, the dregs sour in his mouth like all the charm of the dark candle lit place he had felt just minutes earlier. Without waiting for a check he slipped one of the two twenties from his wallet and edged it under the empty glass. He wouldn't wait for a bill, wouldn't be insulted further. He turned in his seat to stand but Jerry’s hand had already fallen on his shoulder.

‘Hey Lon, thanks for coming.’Lonny nodded his head; Jerry’s big hand squeezed his shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie. He nodded at the twenty on the bar. ‘No need for that big guy, you’re my guest tonight.’

The sentence made Lonny’s stomach turn over, his job was shit, but better than no job. Better than being out on the streets pounding the pavement at 51 looking for a new one.

Jerry had a drink in his hand and gestured toward the dining room. ‘You have time for dinner?’

‘Gotta get home. My Ma.’ Lonny shrugged.

‘Right, how is she? Getting along all right? Bless her.’ Jerry shook his head in an imitation of wonder.

‘Let’s talk in the office for a couple minutes then, O.K?’

Lonny gave him a quizzical look. If he wanted to talk in the office what the hell were they doing in the restaurant? Jerry waved toward the kitchen.

‘My office here, place doesn’t run itself you know.’ He turned and walked towards the end of the bar with a sidelong glance to make sure Lonny followed.

The kitchen staff were rushing around in the melee of pre-dinner preparation; banging huge pots of boiling water, scraping pans sizzling with butter across burners. Men in white jackets and checked pants chopped vegetables and gutted fish. The air was heavy with frying garlic and broiling meat but under pinning these transient scents was the ancient tang of raw seafood.

‘Whole new staff, everyone but the chef, Guatemalan, came as a group; I think they’re all related.’ Jerry narrated over his shoulder.

Lonny ducked his head in agreement. Just like at APC, a clean sweep. Fires everyone, keeps the workers in check, son of a bitch. Who made the decision here?

Jerry lead him through the kitchen and down a flight of stairs to the storage cellar where the walls were lined with racks of wine and boxes of good booze and kegs of beer. Then through a hardwood door that opened into a paneled room with a big desk, matching sideboard and leather couch. Dimly lit and decorated with more nautical memorabilia the room exudes male wealth.

‘Ever been down here?’ Jerry asks.

‘Never been to the restaurant before.’ Lonny says.

Jerry took his seat behind the desk in a high-backed, upholstered chair that matched the couch’s worn brown leather, its skin soft and pliable.‘Why not?’

‘Kinda' far for me.’ He wanted to say kind of expensive, but his natural aversion to conflict kicked in and changed the words in his mouth.

‘Yeah, these cops out here, dying to pinch the locals. Give the weekenders all the leeway they want but a local guy, good guy, has a few and he’s in the shit. Cops here.’ Jerry shakes his head and sneers. ‘They don’t play right. But you never been in trouble have you, Lon? Clean record all the way round far as I know, and I guess I would know right? You were like a cop in the Army or something, weren’t you?’

Lonny dipped his head. ‘No, I wasn’t an M.P, just a normal brig guard; never saw too many problems there.’

‘Emm, Drink?’ Jerry pours himself another four fingers of Bushmills. Lonny shook his head no.

‘I Just drink beer.’

‘I’ve been drinking, maybe a bit too much lately, with the recent situation.’ Jerry’s eyes go dead and whatever charm he was putting on dries up and falls away leaving his face a mask of grief.

‘Yeah, Sorry for your loss,’ Lonny said automatically.

Jerry froze for a moment, shook his head and forced his mouth into a sickly grin.

‘Been hearing that a lot lately, as if I lost a fucking cat.’ His voice cracked and his face flushed but he held up a hand in peace, waved his fingers for time to check his emotions. He took a long drought from his glass and picked up a framed photo from a cluster atop his desk and turned it so Lonny could see the girl's face. She was 16, good student, cheerleader, volleyball player. One of those girls lying on the beach in the summer wearing a too-small bikini, showing off all of her skin browned by hours of lazing in the sun. She worked here in the dining room, must have known all the stalwarts, all the Great Beach players who came to dine. A favorite of lawyers and real estate developers who must have innocently flirted and watched her swish away with each order, a glint of lust in the eye, even if she was their own daughters’ best friend.

Jerry replaced the photo on the desk gently, maybe just a bit tearfully for a second. ‘God damn Lon, this is killing me.’ He fell back into the deep leather of his desk chair with a soft whooshing sound.

How much would it have cost? Was it one of those things that you think will be about 300 dollars and turns out to be 5 grand, Lonny wondered.

‘Killing me. Christ, I can’t think about anything else, ruining me.’ He ran one of his big soft hands through his costly hair cut, each layer falling lightly back into place in the wake of his fingers.

‘Lon, this fucking downsizing at APC was unfair and I’ll be the first to call it as such and out of everyone you got the lousiest deal, don’t think I don’t know that, and I would have done something about it sooner if I wasn’t so, so fucking…’

Jerry looked around the room desperately, searching, casting right and left and then focused back on Lonny. ‘I’m going to ask you to do something for me and I need you to say yes, for whatever reason works best for you.’

Lonny sat speechless as Jerry poured his heart and his plan out, gulping down several more glasses of whiskey.

There was no explanation for what happened to Jenny Whitman. Sixteen, just starting life, a blossom Jerry had called her. A delight. Everyone that came to the restaurant loved her. Top of her class, good athlete. She was just so young and so good. Why? Jerry wanted to know. Why would anyone have done that to his little girl, who had never hurt anyone. She was just the perfect Great Beach kind of kid.

They found her body one morning about six months earlier wedged beneath a dumpster behind the Roosevelt Avenue Mall. What locals called the fence, since it was as good a demarcation as any between nice white Great Beach and scary dark Great Beach. She was naked and had been beaten to death. Her face had been pummeled into her crushed skull. It was described in the papers as a long and severe beating. Her jaw, nose, teeth were all broken. Most of her ribs and her sternum were cracked, her shoulder hyper extended, fingers bent back at right angles and nails broken off at the quick.

The beating had come after a prolonged gang rape, anal and vaginal and it all had occurred right there between the loading dock and the dumpsters behind the drugstore. Forensics found all of her teeth-eventually. Pieced together her clothes. Blood spatter covered fifteen feet of the trash smeared brick wall and her jewelry was scattered over the entire loading area.

Upper class Great Beach was devastated. The investigation was closely followed, the police had a special motivation. The captain and most of the detectives took meals and drinks at Jerry’s restaurant on the cuff. They had known the girl and the citizens, the ones that mattered, were on their asses. The crime scene was a mess. There was a glut of evidence; foot prints, hair, pieces of skin, semen, saliva. When Tanner Bloodright was picked up, Great Beach society was hit with a second punch.

Tanner was the perfect equivalent to Jenny. He was a good looking eighteen-year-old lacrosse player who got good grades. He was a surfer and had been a summer lifeguard for two years and worked as weekend bar back at the Cuttlefish.

He wasn’t what anyone thought of as a delinquent, never mind a rapist and killer. The Cuttlefish’s kitchen was full of likelier suspects as far as everyone, including Jerry, was concerned. Who was at first outraged by the arrest. But, as the investigation progressed he became convinced of the boy's guilt. Convinced himself to the point that now nothing would sway his desire for revenge against the boy.

Of course the story wasn’t quite the same down at the Drop Inn. Lonny had heard a lot of talk about Jenny Whitman even before the tragedy. Her being the boss’s daughter some of the guys from APC used to run her down. He had heard she was wild, taking every drug she could get her hands on, and was sleeping with about eight different guys. She was often seen going to the wrong side of Great Beach in the dark back seats of cars belonging to kitchen staff after her shift to score drugs. Some said she was even dealing a little at her school.

Beat cops who came in to drink at the Drop Inn said forensics found traces of Tanner Bloodright’s semen in the wad of chewing gum stuck to one of the girl's molars recovered from the parking lot but they had also detected four other samples as well; off her clothes and from her hair.

Tanner admitted in questioning that he had picked her up from the restaurant. That they had driven to the far side of Beach Road where they drank a couple of beers. That she had performed fellatio on him and when they were finished he dropped her off at the Mall. He hadn’t seen anyone else, but yes he knew she was going there to buy and use drugs and that she had done so often.

Tanner was dropped as a suspect. He finished his senior year as planned and spent the summer life-guarding as usual. In the fall he enrolled at Hoffstra University on a partial Lacrosse scholarship just as he had intended. His life continued on without a hitch.

Besides the DNA from Tanners semen there was nothing else. He was unmarked by struggle. His feet were too big to have left the prints at the scene. His teeth were too white, his shoulders too broad, his hair too blonde to have done such a thing and so he was let go. But Jerry couldn’t let go.

Jerry said he had been confided in by a witness that could never be named that Tanner was the right man. The two prep cooks that were ultimately locked up for the crime were scapegoats. A brown sacrifice to placate the white citizenry and only ever tentatively linked to Jenny by the restaurant and probably had nothing to do with the crime itself. Jerry wanted his pound of flesh.

Jerry had kept tabs on Tanner at Hoffstra. He scanned the papers for other unsolved rapes or assaults in the area. He hired a private investigation firm to vet the case and analyze the evidence but it came to nothing. Then, during the spring semester, Tanner had volunteered to go to Bangkok, Thailand with a woman’s Health organization for three months. It seemed obvious to Jerry what Tanner was doing. He was going on a sex holiday far from any watchful eyes under the guise of educating the exploited girls in Thailand and getting course credit for it to boot.

He had someone watching him, tailing him as he hung out in the seediest streets of the worst parts of a city known worldwide as a Mecca of debauchery. This was a reliable guy who followed his every move. Tanner had gotten away with murder, Jerry said, and now he wanted Lonny to go there and kill him.

Jerry had a financial plan all worked out. He was going to make sure that in a few years when Lonny was eligible for retirement his pension was based on the salary he had earned as a driver. That he would receive the full benefit package he would have been entitled to if he hadn’t been laid off as a driver and re-hired as a menial truck washer. It would mean a real retirement; he wouldn’t have to get a part time job to make ends meet. The rest of his life would be his to do with as he liked. And on top of it he was going to hand him twenty five thousand dollars cash. Ten up front, fifteen when he returned. Their link would never be enough to make him a suspect. Lonny was to take his vacation time for the trip. To talk about going there at work. Come up with a story, maybe an old army buddy was there? Jerry would take care of all expenses on top of everything else.

Lonny guided his Monte Carlo in light traffic through the West Loop, past the ginger bread LIRR station and stopped at a red light dead across from the Roosevelt Mall. He searched the facade of discount shops for the drug store behind which Jenny had been raped and beaten to death, but it had closed and re-opened as a dry cleaner.

Someone behind him leaned on their horn the second the light changed and Lonny let his foot down on the pedal, the big four barrel carb under the hood made a hollow sucking sound as he checked the rear view and saw the Lexus that had honked. 'Where's the fire', he mumbled and dropped his foot, the Monte Carlo leaped forward and he wove through slower traffic as if it were stalled.

He shared the duplex he was raised in with his widowed mother whom he bought it from over the last twenty years at a price only slightly higher than what his father paid for it twenty years before that.

Every Friday evening after a couple of beers at the Drop Down Lonny took his mother to the Wake for a fish fry. Besides doctor’s appointments it was the only time she got out in a week.

The side of the house where he grew up, his mother’s side, was a cluttered world of memories and remnants of decades gone by. His own was the sparsely outfitted habitat of a bachelor who had no hopes of being anything else. Efficient and utilitarian, clean, comfortable but certainly not welcoming. There was no fat to be trimmed, no excess. He had four glasses, one mug, three bowls of varying sizes, three forks, three spoons and one knife. His living room was furnished with a television, an easy chair and a single side table, ringed across the top from beer cans.

On the second floor he stripped and dropped his work clothes on top of the pile in the plastic basket that he sent to the laundromat once a week, no separation of colors and whites needed. He showered again, letting the hot water wash over him as he scrubbed his finger nails with a toothbrush; trying, ultimately in vain, to remove the filth stratified beneath the chipped edges.

He dressed in a clean pair of jeans and pulled a pressed XX Islanders shirt on from his closet and topped it off with his spring weight Mets jacket which commemorated the ‘86 world series championship. He stomped back down stairs and checked the clock. He was late and his mother would be irritated. They were meant to be sitting down at The Wake by seven, any later and she would complain about the crowd, no matter how few people were in the dining room. She would search the menu for twenty minutes before ordering, to the letter, the same fish fry dinner and large diet coke she ordered every Friday night for the past ten years. It was like clockwork or at least it was meant to be, but now he was late. He squatted, pulling on the immaculate Nike Air Force 180’s he wore when going out, and thought about the sameness of his life. How the days ticked off as near perfect replicas of the ones before. Then what Jerry had talked about, his insane proposal.

Lonny had only half listened as Jerry moaned about his grief over Jenny’s death. He was distracted by the photos of old whalers and fishermen hanging on the walls and the expensive looking furniture and decorations. When Jerry detailed the plan to kill Tanner though he had snapped back into focus. It was nothing short of blackmail, promising him what was rightfully his if he would travel half way around the world and kill a boy. Lonny knew ACP was going to try and screw him on his pension and was planning on a fight for it but maybe this would make that unnecessary. He would take Jerry’s cash, go there and make the contacts and that would give him all the leverage he needed. Jerry would be furious, but it would be too late.

He locked his own door and reached over to open the adjacent one. The smell of old age seeped out of the house, ‘C’mon Ma, we’re late.’ He called out. He could hear the drone of television and the hiss of her oxygen tank in the living room where she was sitting impatiently.