The Damned (13 page)

“What about them?” Carlicci said.

Trixie frowned as he slid his plate away. Then he rubbed an open palm gently across her cheek. “It’s okay,” he said. “Sit, enjoy your meal. You’ll get to them later.” To his henchmen, he called out, “All in due time, boys.”

Trixie sat down and Carlicci picked a half full glass of red wine up off his desk. He carried it over to the couch, where his son had taken up residence between Heather and Mariah. Bert and Ernie were standing beside Dub and Teddy, dwarfing the much shorter Spud, who was looking out at the patio.

“You boys I know,” Carlicci said. “Who’s he?”

“My brother.”

“Brother, huh? You never told me you had a brother.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Your brother got a name?”

“Spud.”

Carlicci stood directly in front of Spud. They were about the same height, and he stared thoughtfully at him, as if taking his measure. “What happened?”

Spud sighed, and Dub said, “Desert Storm. Some prick rolled a grenade through the door and he ate the son of a bitch. Saved his unit but FUBAR’d his ass.”

“A hero.”

Spud said nothing.

Carlicci looked over at his son. “You see this? A man of respect, not some pretty boy motherfucker playing gangster.”

“
Pop,
what the fuck?”

“Sitting around with a couple of whores like he’s fixin’ to take ‘em to the prom.”

“Jesus, Pop,” Tony said, his face turning red as Mariah smiled and put a hand on his thigh, probably hoping it was just a little playful banter between a father and his son. But the old man didn’t sound like he was kidding around, and he sure as hell didn’t look like he was.

Carlicci sighed. “The future,” he said. “Ah, well, what’re you gonna do? You are what you are, you have what you have. You do the best you can with it.” He crossed the room, to the card table, motioned for Dub and his friends to join him and they did. There was a bottle of Jack Daniels on the table, and watered-down tumblers of booze, a pile of poker chips and a grouping of face-down cards in front of five of the empty chairs, as if Carlicci and his henchmen had discarded their hands, abandoning a pot which had to have been in the thousands of dollars. Dub understood—who cares about a winning poker hand? Who cares about money when there’s no place to spend it?

When they were seated, Dub said, “The fuck did you get those steaks?”

“Same place you get your gas.” Carlicci smiled. “Steaks, poultry and fish, sausage and ground beef. However long it takes, I’m set for the duration—what, you think we’re up here eating Alpo like the rest’a you cocksuckers... Not hardly, my friend.”

“What’re you telling me, you got a fleet of refrigerated trucks stashed away someplace?”

“I’ve got enough shit to feed an army, which is good, because soon that’s what I’ll have. An army big enough to take over the city.” Carlicci took a drink of wine and set the glass on the table. “Play your cards right,” he said, “I’ll take you boys under my wing. The way I see it—” Carlicci looked over at his son, who had settled back into the couch, Heather and Mariah both snuggled into him, his wine-red shirt unbuttoned and Mariah’s hand roaming around beneath it. She kissed his neck and he moaned.

“—Hey! PRETTY BOY!”

Tony looked over his shoulder at Carlicci. “Jesus, fucking—”

“Get the fuck up and get the stash.”

“Jesus, Pop.”

“Now, goddamnit!”

Tony’s face turned the same dark red color of his shirt. He didn’t want to get up—that much was obvious. But he did it just the same. He disengaged from Heather and Mariah, stood up and exited the room. When he was gone, Carlicci called out, “C’mere!”, and both women stood and crossed the room. When they reached the table, he said, “What’re you, one of those high-yellow motherfuckers?”

Mariah, visibly shaken by the remark, said nothing. Her dark eyes narrowed, her smile melted away.

“What, your mother black? Your father black, your mother Puerto Rican? Or was one of them a monkey?”

Heather giggled as Carlicci’s henchmen went on with their meal, and Dub and Teddy watched the old gangster, who said, “How about you, hon? What’re you?”

“Huh?”

Carlicci turned to Dub. “It really is true what they say about blondes, isn’t it?”

“No shit.”

To Heather, he said, “Your nationality.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m Irish.”

“And
you?
”

Mariah’s smile, now completely gone, was replaced by a tightening of the jaw, and a hard, narrowing of her dark brown eyes. Dub thought she looked like a captured warrior, strong and vibrant, defiant in the face of her enemies. He also thought she was absolutely beautiful, and that Carlicci was a damn fool. “Puerto Rican, and yes,” she said, “my father is Afro-American.”

Carlicci said, “Take off your clothes.”

Mariah didn’t hesitate. She took off her blouse, slipped out of her skirt and kicked off her shoes, unfastened her low-cut black silk bra and tossed it to the floor. Then she peeled off her black thong panties and dropped them as well. She stood in front of Carlicci, tall and slim, her tight, perfectly proportioned breasts jutting out as if chiseled from stone. She was every man’s dream, a statuesque beauty with the strikingly good looks of a high fashion model, and she drew the attention of every man in the room, even Carlicci’s henchmen, who had finally put down their eating utensils to look her way.

She smiled at Carlicci, and said, “See anything you like,
Papi?
”

“If you were Italian, I’d gut your ass. But since you’re not, and I don’t fuck niggers, walk your ass out to the patio and service those boys. Make ‘em happy and I’ll keep you alive. Anything short of that, I’ll carve you into little pieces and grill them over that pit.”

Mariah sauntered across the room, and although she was sure to suffer some form of degradation once she reached the patio, she walked proudly, as if unwilling to give Carlicci the benefit of witnessing her humiliation.

“Man,” Teddy said. “You sure do have some high standards.”

“Yes, it separates us from the dogs, separates us from you.”

Dub chuckled softly. Teddy smiled and shook his head, but said nothing. Bert and Ernie were watching Mariah cross the room. Spud was watching Carlicci. The patio door slid open. The door slid shut and the henchmen went back to their meals, mirroring Trixie, who was busy stuffing another hunk of prime rib into her mouth.

Carlicci looked up at Heather. “You,” he said, “go back to the couch.”

To Dub, he said, “The way I see it, this place is up for grabs. For now—for the near future—civilization’s fucked. I’ve got the men and resources to take over. We’re gonna start at one end of the city and ransack the fuck outa the place, every bank, every jewelry store and supermarket, everything. Any business, any place with a safe, we’re gonna go in and crack the motherfucker. If we can’t crack it, well blow it wide open. We’ll stack the cash and warehouse whatever big ticket items we get our hands on, high-end cars, mostly, big screen T.V.’s... that kinda stuff.”

Carlicci finished off his wine and set his glass on the table.

Dub, who had leaned forward to give the old man his undivided attention, said, “Where do we come in, and what do we get out of it?”

“Well, I’ve got plenty of men, but you can never have too many, can you? I know you guys have the police station, a shit-load of guns and ammunition. You’ve been riding herd on the citizenry and seem to have them under control. We just want you to keep them under control. Anyone fucks with us, you lock ‘em up—the ones we don’t kill, that is. But let’s face it; we can’t kill everybody, we don’t want to. Sooner or later this shit’s gonna blow over, the city’s gonna come back to life. The army, the National Guard or somebody’s gonna ride in and restore order. Until that happens, we’ll go about the business of cleaning out the pantry. Join up with us, you’ll be glad you did—you don’t, well, that’ll be a problem.”

“Okay,” Dub said. “You told us what you want, but you left out an important part of the equation.”

“I know—what you get out of it. I figure ten percent oughta do it. All told, cash, jewels, the rest of the shit… the crazy situation we’re in holds out long enough to allow us to complete a clean sweep of the place, we oughta net us somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars.”

Teddy gave out a low whistle.

“Your take’ll be a hundred million, easy. Oughta keep you in motorcycles for a while. Eventually, law and order
will prevail,
and when it does, we’ll all just sit back on our mountain of money and let nature take its course. You know, that first week or two, I figured any day now everything would come back, so I was content to wait it out with my generators and tanker trucks and shit. But it didn’t come back. Seven weeks into it, I figure we’ve got a golden opportunity on our hands. Right now it’s anarchy, the power grid’s down, governments have fallen to the wayside, there’s no communication. But that’s only temporary. Somewhere, somebody out there is working on this shit. We need to get busy before they figure it out.”

“No doubt,” said Teddy.

“So, you in?”

“Yeah,” Dub said. “We’re in.”

The door opened and Tony came into the room carrying a black nylon knapsack. When he reached the table, he handed it to Dub, who opened it and spilled its contents atop the discarded poker chips.

“Three pounds of dope,” he said. “Three pounds of dope for three beautiful ladies.”

“Three beautiful ladies,” Tony said. “Three—what the
fuck?
Pop, goddamnit!”

“What?” Carlicci asked his son, who stood before him staring out at Mariah, whose face was buried in the crotch of one man while another pounded her from behind, both men with their pants around their ankles and pained expressions on their faces, as if struggling to hold back their orgasms.

“Fuck!”

“What, you wanta fuck the nigger?”

“Yes, goddamnit!—”

Dub and his friends burst out with laughter, as did Carlicci’s henchmen.

“—She’s fucking beautiful!”

“Fine, fuck her… soon as everybody else has a turn. Hey boys! You wanta fuck the nigger?”

“Not hardly,” one of the henchmen called out, while another said, “Fuck ‘dat.”

“When they’re done with her outside, we’re gonna take her down the hallway and line her up in front of every swinging dick on the property, and when they’re finished with her, when they’ve fucked her bowlegged, then you can do whatever you wanta do with her. Take her to the prom, for all I care… starry-eyed motherfucker.”

“Jesus, all I wanted—”

“In the meantime, why don’t you see our friends to the door? While you’re at it, send ‘em over a truckload of beef. They’re going to work for us—right, boys?”

“Most def,” Dub said, Teddy nodding his approval while Bert and Ernie grunted theirs.

Dub grabbed the dope—two pounds of cocaine and one pound of heroin—stuffed it back in the knapsack, and said, “How much of this shit have you got?”

“Mountains of it,” the old man told him.

Dub pulled a canister of cocaine from his pocket, uncapped it and said, “One for the road.” He picked up a playing card. It was the king of hearts and he flexed it. Bending the ends upward, he dumped some coke across it, held its end to his nostrils and snorted it clean. Then, passing the coke to Teddy, he watched each of his men take a turn—except Spud, who could not manipulate the card and the coke with his disfigured hand, so Dub did it for him, holding the coke-laden card up to his nose so his friend could inhale it.

When it was over, Dub said, “Mr. C?”

“Why not?” the gangster said, and then took a turn as well.

Dub capped what was left of his canister, stuffed it in his pocket and stood. “It’s been a pleasure, boys,” he said, as his crew followed him up from the table. He grabbed the knapsack of drugs and tossed it to Teddy, and then followed Tony across the room, past Heather, who smiled as he went by her.

“All right, boys,” the old man called out. “Come on over and dip yer wicks.”

Carlicci and his men made their way to the couch. “You too, Jaws,” Carlicci said, and Trixie came over as well.

Dub paused long enough to watch Heather stand up and shrug out of her blouse. She was dropping her bra to the floor when the door shut behind him, and they all started down the corridor. He didn’t say much of anything. His business was transacted, he had his dope; he’d done what he’d set out to do. He could’ve used a cold beer, but he didn’t bother asking for one—there was a bottle of whiskey in the SUV, and a few cans of Coors. Besides that, he’d be back to the Ambassador soon enough and he was ready to get the hell away from this place. Tony said, “Coming in with us, huh?” and Dub grunted his reply.

On his way past the dining room, he couldn’t help thinking about Mariah. There was a crowd inside, and Dub was reminded of what Carlicci had said:
Every swinging dick on the property.
He wondered if the old man would make good on his threat. But it wasn’t any of his business what happened to her now. She’d served her purpose, and her well-being—or lack thereof—was none of his concern.

When they reached the front porch, Bert and Ernie got into the Escalade, fired up the engine and drove off into the night. Teddy climbed into the SUV and Spud returned to his place in the back. The two guys who had been at the foot of the driveway were standing by the front door, watching Tony and Dub as they stood beside the car. Dub opened the door, slid behind the steering wheel and slammed the door shut, looked out the open window and said, “Dude, why you let that old man treat you like that?”