was a woman. In her late 20s, naturally blonde hair, eyes as dark as a doll’s, she was stunning. She looked as though she might kill him on the spot.
Instead, she walked up to him and placed a bag of hard candy next to his bed.
“We know each other, or of each other,” she said.
Silence. Silence might keep him alive. It had kept him alive before.
“There was no reason to kill Jody, none whatsoever.”
Keep quiet.
“Your partner is going to have to pay for it.”
“And me?”
Now she smiled.
“Old Jody liked the kids who came in and bullshitted with him. I’ve known about you for years.”
“But me?”
Now she nodded and retrieved a lemon drop.
“You’ll need to take care of Wallup, given what happened. He was your partner. Do the job, and we’ll have a place for you. Don’t? And you’ll go with him.”
“You really aren’t giving me a choice,” Ventura said.
“I’m giving you a deal. I do what I do to keep my friends like Jody alive. And I kill those who prevent me from doing it,” she said. “I think you and I are alike, Paul.”
He looked over at the lemon drops and saw a pleasant memory. Maybe somewhere in there he saw a pretty blonde girl.
“When?”
“Old Man Craig will be here in a bit. He’ll run you through what needs to happen. You come back? Then I might have more candy for you.”
The situation was bad. Ventura lacked the ability to come up with a term stronger than “bad” to describe the place in which he now found himself and his only fried Wallup. A death sentence had been passed on Wallup, and with honest thought, Ventura knew it to be long overdue. If Ventura himself did not carry it out, they would both die. He knew they had both done enough crime in the Four Corners, the place in the city where one could easily die for something as trivial as walking on the wrong side of the street. Having killed a personal friend of Mary Vernon was bad enough, but now he was off to kill one of Brandy Di Pollo’s main earners.
He knew the death sentence was, in fact, on him. Kill Wallup, and Di Pollo would get him. Leave Wallup’s death to someone else, and it would be Vernon.
But Mary Vernon chose something else, and the offer was so great Ventura had no choice but to accept it.
Wallup saved Ventura’s life once. Ventura, Paul, and his younger brother, Frank, were in a gang of about a dozen robbing its way through the Four Corners. They weren’t the slickest gang, and they were always on the run. Nearly every single time, Paul was blamed for the struggles, and Frank had had enough. After a botched robbery, Frank took an aluminum bat and started pounding on Paul. There was a blow to the back; that knocked Paul to the ground. Frank pounded him three times in the gut, and Paul wondered whether he would ever breathe again. The beating continued. Frank hit Paul on the left knee, over and over again, while the gang watched.
Then Wallup decided it was enough. He pulled Frank off Paul who was left a bloody mess. He instructed the others to get Paul to a doctor they knew would help.
But Frank was still in rage. He took the bat and started swinging at Wallup.
Wallup, being different than Frank, pulled out a .45 and put an end to Frank. Paul never even wept, for he never could stand his brother; but he did wonder about the future of the gang. People started being killed for the slightest mistakes. People went missing. Paul was subject to another beating, this time at the hands of Wallup. Wallup toed the line of sociopath, and that is why, when he decided to kill Jody over a shipment of bananas, there were only the two of them left.
And now Paul, a slight, not overly strong man, one who walked with a limp, could choose to have them die together or kill Wallup on his own.
As he drifted into sleep, Paul Ventura worried whether he would be able to kill Wallup, not because of some misplaced affection, but he wondered whether he actually had the skills necessary to do the job. He was being told to kill Wallup, and he was okay with doing so, since it was likely the time had come for it. They were not saying whether they thought Ventura could do it.
Five miles past the center of the Four Corners in a part of the city described only as worse than the Four Corners, if that were actually possible, a warehouse served as a hanger for various weapons Mary Vernon’s gang had accumulated over the years. The crime world was a small one, one where news traveled quickly, and few were surprised by the different things that happened. Even someone serving as an informant would be known by day’s end, and the informant had better hope he wasn’t caught.
The police had their ears to the ground, but there was only one gang they essentially allowed free reign, which was why the warehouse at the corner of 35th and Flagstone was allowed to exist. Armored cars were known to come and go. Troop transports, replete with 50-caliber guns on top, could be seen leaving. Even a dozen hover steeds, known to have been purchased from the Dragoons at rock-bottom prices, were housed there.
Old Man Craig, the person Mary left in charge of getting Paul Ventura to the next stage of his recovery, spent no time trying to hide the location of the warehouse from Paul. Everyone knew it, and everyone was intelligent enough not to do anything about it.
The Suburban they rode in came to a stop, and two guards stepped out from the shadows. They each acknowledged Old Man Craig with a wave, and he and Ventura stepped inside.
The hover steeds, most of which were decked out in camouflage for the desert but some of which were now painted jet black for their urban assignments, were parked in a line on the far side of the warehouse. Even with his limp, Ventura walked at a brisker pace than Old Man Craig, so it took them time to cross over from the door to the vehicle.
“You’ve been on one before,” Old Man Craig said as he pointed to one.
It was the oldest of the dozen. There was battle damage. The shield on the left of its engine compartment was gone. Ventura checked, and he noticed it was not only the oldest, but in far worse shape than the others.
“We used them for just a little while, then Wallup decided they weren’t worth it.”
This made Old Man Craig smile. It would soon become apparent Old Man Craig loved making fun of fools. “We stole the two you had.”
“What? Wallup said they were sold, and he kept the money,” Paul said.
“What other lies do you think he told you?”
It took a second to get his bad knee up and over the center fuselage, but he did it. He settled onto the steed as though he had been on it a million times. Ventura leaned forward and grasped the grips to the handlebars. Old Man Craig nodded.
“You’re going to do alright,” he said.
“So long as I find a way to kill my best friend.”
Old Man Craig did a walk around, pulled on a bulkhead, pressed in on the hover wheels, and shoved as much as a man of his advanced age could shove. It was done to know the steed would perform as expected.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. Your best friend—Wallup.”
“That’s right.”
“He has what’s coming to him.”
“It wasn’t like we robbed a million dollars. It was an armed robbery of a few thousand dollars that went wrong.”
Old Man Craig pressed the start button, and the wheels whirred to life.
“We’d be sending you after him if it were a stick of gum.”
“That makes no sense. Damn it, he’s my friend. Maybe he could help.”
Then the old man turned the steed off.
“No one fights against Mary Vernon because she takes care of everyone who asks for her protection. No matter the crime or the degree of the crime, do something against someone under her protection, and there will be retribution.”
Ventura sat with it.
“Do you want to get off or go do this? So far as I can tell, and I know these things, he’s put you in the hospital three times, shot you once, and left you for dead not four days ago. And this is your best fri
end.” Ventura nodded. “We have plenty of people here who will like you, but this must be done.”
Ventura started the steed again.
“You know where he is, but when he sees you’re after him, he’ll run for the Burris Highlands.”
“Burris Highlands.”
Old Man Craig took an aluminum pole that had been strapped to his back. He handed it to Ventura.
“You’ll have to figure out how to use it on your own; I don’t know whether you can, but I know you can handle the steed here. Don’t take chances, and don’t find a way to protect him.”
“So don’t warn him off.”
“It’d be a bigger mistake than he made shooting a friend of ours.”
Ventura slung the aluminum pole over his shoulder, he kicked the steed into gear, and it started flying off through the warehouse. Mary Vernon stepped from the shadows.
“Do we need to follow him?” Old Man Craig asked.
“No, but do it anyway.”
Old Man Craig climbed aboard a steed of his own, revved the engine, and sped off into the night.
The whir of a hover steed gave itself away from half a mile away if there were no other noise. It was more than a mile if things were quiet. Wallup, not knowing who or what was on its way, or whether it would have anything to do with him, climbed down the fire escape to his apartment building hid down behind the garbage dumpster filled to the brim with the refuse of his tenement.
He pulled his shotgun and waited. The smell was terrible.
The whir got closer.
It stopped.
Using the shotgun as a ram, Wallup pushed against the dumpster with everything he