Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

on the threshold of a dense, weedy grove of elms, the sickly flora withered by city pollution. A pale, washed-out sun beats down on the litter-strewn clearing, which is crowded with worm-eaten picnic tables chained to aging concrete pedestals (as if anybody would be desperate enough for furniture to steal such things).

As he paces, weaving compulsively between the picnic tables, the Candy Man keeps his hands in the pockets of his purple-silk crew jacket, his eyes shifting across the periphery of the deserted parking lot. Inside his pockets, each sweaty hand grips a matching snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, each cylinder full of slugs. He is taking no chances. He will not go down to some alcoholic half-breed.

The call that came in earlier this morning had spooked the pimp more than anything has ever spooked him. Sure, he had expected the Big Chief to come after him—in the wake of the fucked-up double-cross last week with Harkness—but not like this. The Candy Man had expected the Indian to sneak up on him with that Apache mojo-vengeance in the wee hours of the night, when the Candy Man least expected it, turning out his lights like the end of The Sopranos.

But not like this. Not with some weird-ass phone call, with the Indian saying how he just needed information and how he won’t try anything funny and how he just needs to know who’s on the Naughty List for the month.

The Candy Man stops pacing. The distant croon of an ambulance wavers in and out of the droning hiss of a nearby highway. The sound makes the Candy Man’s skin crawl. The air has that trademark West Side stench, a mixture of tar, carbon monoxide, and sewer run-off, and it tweaks some distant memory buried in the Candy Man’s gray matter—a childhood spent in the projects. He is too young to die. He is too smart to get dropped by a big, fat, drunk Injun.

He looks at his watch. 10:04. The motherfucker is late. Or maybe the Indian’s watching, waiting for a clean head-shot. The flesh on the back of the Candy Man’s neck goes cold and prickles.

“You there?” he says into his wireless headset.

A click, and then a voice: “Got ya covered, homes.”

“Shut the fuck up and listen. He’s gonna be showin’ up any second now.”

The voice from the tree: “Gotcha in the cross-hairs—as we speak.”

“Gonna leave the line open so y’all can hear what’s goin’ down. You dig me?”

The voice: “I dig you the most.”

“Soon as you get a clean shot you take this motherfucker down.”

“Got it, homes.”

“And stop callin’ me homes.”

“Sorry. Sorry, homes.”

“You call me homes one more time I will fuck you in the ass with a canned ham.”

“Sorry. Sorry, man.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“One question?”

The Candy Man sighs. “What is it now?”

“Is there something else I should, like, call you?”

The Candy Man rolls his eyes. “Call me Mr. Tibbs, motherfucker, now shut your fucking mouth and put a cap in this guy’s head so we can go home.”

Alejandro Rodrigues, a gangly street-kid in a hoodie and backwards Cubs cap, now straddling the knotted neck of an ancient elm tree fifty yards due east of the picnic area, cradling a Galil 7.62-millimeter sniper rifle in his tattoo-embroidered hands, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He barely made it out of Blue Island High School and had a hard time understanding the intricacies of paper versus plastic at the local Safeway.

But he can shoot. That he can do. Trained in the Army Reserve, he can hit things at great distances with all manner of weaponry. And word gets around. That’s why he is currently the go-to guy among the street gangs that rule the territory east of Cicero Road and west of the Kennedy Expressway.

And that’s also why, at this moment, he is perched so precariously on the dew-slick tree trunk (unaware that the slightest kick of the Galil, once discharged, will likely nudge him off the protrusion).

He hitches in a breath and raises the scope to his eye. In the cross hairs he can see the Candy Man pacing, alone, across the deserted picnic area. It looks like a little round movie, faded and flattened in the aperture by the long lens, like a miniature video game, and it makes Alejandro smile a little as he wraps his finger around the trigger pad and holds his breath and watches.

Movement blurs in the upper edge of the scope, a pickup truck pulling into the lot.

Alejandro tilts the scope up slightly, framing the vehicle in the center of the crosshairs. A figure slowly emerges behind the trees—a big dude with long hair in a fatigue coat—who moseys cautiously around the edge of the lot toward the picnic area.

Alejandro holds his breath.

In the scope, the big dude is approaching the Candy Man with hands raised—a reassuring gesture, a momentary truce—and Alejandro frames the guy’s head in the tiny hairline bullseye. The angle of the light, the distance, the time of day are not perfect, but good enough. Alejandro lets out a calming breath.

Then he inhales a deep, steadying lung full of air and braces his elbow against the trunk behind him for leverage and purchase. He holds his breath and gives it one more millisecond—just enough time for the big guy to move into the perfect position.

Alejandro squeezes the trigger.

Then falls out of the tree.

Oswald is ten, maybe fifteen feet away from the pimp when the shot rings out like a quick, dry clap in the air over his head. The slap-back echo in the high overcast sky barely has time to register in his ear before the invisible fist punches him in the lower right pectoral.

“AHHHHWG!”

He lets out a yawp, and his entire three hundred pounds are yanked off the ground and hurled backward, gasping and flailing, a sensation of a giant hook piercing his heart, the world suddenly imploding around him.

“UUHHH!”

He lands hard on his back, in the crab grass, and he can’t breathe anymore and finds