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

feet like a puppet on a string. He closes his eyes with the anguish of a man in front of a firing squad.

“Get the fuck outta here,” Oswald commands in a strange voice.

The kid opens his eyes. “Huh?”

“I’m saving your life, asshole.”

“You’re what?”

Oswald stares at him. “Saving your life, numb-nuts. You tried to wax another shooter. What are the odds of you walking away? I’m giving you a second chance. Get outta the game, stop doing jobs.”

The kid is vexed. “I don’t—”

“Do you agree that I’m saving your life? By not putting cap in your ass?”

The kid nods furiously.

“Okay, so get the fuck outta my face!”

The kid starts limping away, not looking back, not saying a word, holding his injured arm. He hastens his pace, and soon he is running, an awkward sort of half-run/half-hobble, running for his life, making a beeline for the access road running along the east edge of the park.

Oswald and the Candy Man watch the kid vanish around a corner of dense foliage, returning to whatever fate the rest of Alejandro Rodrigues’s life holds for him. After a brief silence the pimp addresses his own fate.

“You ain’t gonna give me the same opportunity, are ya?” the Candy Man mumbles, still on the ground, staring down into his lap.

“There’s something else I need from you, Candy,” Oswald tells him, reaching down and grabbing hold of the pimp’s silk jacket. He pulls the man to his feet.

“Anything y’all want, y’all got it—bitches, ecstasy, AK-47s, weed, I got some great weed.” The Candy Man frowns. “What the fuck is that smell?”

“Never mind—c’mon.” Oswald drags the skinny pimp back across the leprous grass toward the pavilion.

Staggering along on watery legs, the Candy Man keeps babbling, “You want crystal, I got some great laboratory-grade shit, you want a new car? I got Cadillacs, I got SUVs. I got Humvees—you want a Hummer—?”

“No, I don’t want a Hummer.” Oswald drags the Candy Man toward the public restroom.

“And when I say Hummer I’m talking about the car, not the blow-job. Which I could get for you, too, by the way, no problema. Blow-jobs, hand-jobs, B&D-shit, around the world, pile-driver with two bitches, or a foursome, I could get you a foursome, with maybe one that pisses on you, or maybe all the bitches pissing on you at the same time—”

“Enough!”

Oswald pulls the pimp over to a knotty little pine shack about the size of a toolshed, adjacent to the pavilion, embedded with two doors marked MEN and WOMEN. The doors are scarred with graffiti, and the structure reeks of a miasma of urine and grit and methane. Oswald kicks open the door and yanks his hostage inside.

The airless interior of concrete slab flooring and cheap timber stalls is bright with dirty fluorescent light. The stench of human waste is so thick it hangs in the flickering glow like a penumbra.

Oswald kicks open a stall and slams the Candy Man against the wall. “I need some information.” Oswald thrusts the barrel of the .45 into the spongy mass of the pimp’s Afro. “That’s all I need.”

The Candy Man closes his eyes. “Anything, brother, anything.”

“I need to know who’s on the Ferris’ to-do list.”

The pimp opens his eyes. “Say what?”

“Who’s on the books to get bagged?”

The pimp licks his lips. “Brother, I don’t got that kinda intel.”

The hammer clicks back. “Think hard, Candy, or I’ll put your limited amount of brains all over that wall right there.”

“Awright, awright, awright, awright—be cool—I seem to remember the Ferri crew farmin’ out a job like—lemme think—it was last week, like Monday, Tuesday.”

Oswald shoves the gun harder against the pimp’s skull. “Gimme a name.”

“C’mon, Chief, chill on down now, I’m thinkin’—yeah—it was this motherfucker from Hammond, this stupid-ass gambler, got his ass in too deep with the casino down there.”

“Name?”

“El-something, Elkhart—no!—Elgart, Billy Elgart—that’s it.”

“Who’d you give it to?”

The pimp looks at him. “C’mon, now, Chief—you know I’m a dead man, I tell you who’s on it.”

“YOU’LL BE DEADER IF YOU DON’T!!”

The sudden bark of Oswald’s voice makes the pimp flinch against the wall and slam his eyes shut. “I got the Ice Man, I got the Ice Man to do it!”

Oswald sighs. “Wachowski? You’re shitting me. You got Bernie Wachowski to do it? That asshole couldn’t hit an old lady in a barrel.”

“C’mon now, Chief, ease up on that gat now,” the Candy Man pleads, trembling against the wall.

“What else you got?”

“That’s it, Chief, I swear on my mama, that’s all I got right now, I swear, but lookit, lookit, I’ll feed ya whatever comes in, I swear to Christ I will.”

Oswald thumbs off the hammer, easing the muzzle back just a tad. “Okay, I got one more thing, one more thing I need you to do for me.”

“Anything, Chief.”

Unsnapping his denims with his free hand, holding the gun on the pimp, Oswald lowers his pants.

The pimp stares. With great effort Oswald is peeling the seat of his boxer shorts away from his rear-end, which is sticky and sodden with shit. He displays his soiled nether-regions to the pimp.

“Candy, I’m gonna need you to go grab some of that toilet paper over there, and then I’m gonna need you to come back here and wipe my ass.”

16.

The next forty-eight hours of Oswald’s life come to a crashing halt like a film that has jammed in a projector. He spends most of this time pacing the shopworn hardwood of Gerbil’s apartment in his underwear, tending to his injuries, eating junk food, trying to stay sober, trying to heal, trying to figure things out, and watching with great dread the moon rise a little fuller each night.

He attempts to track down “the Ice Man,” aka Bernie Wachowski, through various contacts with mobbed-up attorneys and crooked private investigators, but nobody’s seen hide nor pubic hair of the Russian in ages. Oswald calls the Candy Man back at least a dozen times, trying to glean when and where the Elgart hit is scheduled to go