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

down, but the pimp just keeps pleading ignorance, which is not surprising from someone as ignorant as the Candy Man.

Throughout those two shapeless days, Oswald tries every trick in the book, and some that aren’t even published. He tries to get clever online with Gerbil’s laptop—maneuvering through back doors, hacking away at the website run by the mob’s law firm—but he soon discovers how hard it is to crack the firewall of the Ferri network. Homeland Security could not claim such rigorous privacy.

Oswald tries to track down the gambler, Billy Elgart, but Oswald is told by Mrs. Elgart that she hasn’t been married to that worthless son of a bitch for over a decade, and thank God for that.

Gerbil has to work for most of those agonizing forty-eight hours—putting in two late shifts down at the coffee shop—so Oswald finds himself alone most of that time, going out of his mind with cabin fever and the horrible feeling that he’s made a huge mistake. He cannot stop thinking about the forlorn hooker, Alberta Goldstein, and what would have been, what could have been, what should have been. He cannot stop thinking about that pathetic little Lucy Arnez wig bouncing off the windshield in flames.

Finally, late in the afternoon on that second day of waiting, fate deals Oswald a royal flush. He remembers a retired old enforcer from the Daley Machine days named Philly “the Gnat” Massamore. The Gnat has long been a paisan of the Russian and also hates Old Man Ferri with unbridled passion. Oswald locates the old cocker through one of the Candy Man’s girls, who regularly pays visits to the old geezer in a retirement village up in Wisconsin for a blow-job and bingo.

“What the flying fuck d’ya want with the Russian?” the old man’s voice wheezes over the line, only minutes after being rousted off the shuffle-board court. “I just talked to him last week. You thinkin’ of joining forces, startin’ a union?”

Oswald just laughs and then tells Massamore a lie about Elgart getting tipped off to the hit, and how Oswald is worried about Wachowski getting hurt.

“Well, you better hurry,” the old codger warns. “He’s doing the thing tonight in fucking Hammond, at some place called the Riverside, but you didn’t hear nothin’ from me.”

17.

The toxic atmosphere over northern Indiana—the tainted spoor of steel mills and machine shops—makes for exquisite sunsets. The hazy particulate matter hangs like a pall across the Bishop Ford Freeway to the west, and paints the horizon in Monet-like swaths of magenta, gold, and pink as the sun sinks behind derelict machine shops and fossilized factories clinging to the skyway. Tonight, en route to Hammond, hunched behind the wheel of his rattle-trap S-10, garbed like an orthodox Hassidim in his black peacoat, wrung-out and numb from all the painkillers, Oswald Means does not notice the gorgeous, deadly oil painting spreading across the western sky. He does not notice the ubiquitous burnt-metal smell wafting through the open wing of the pickup. In fact, he barely even notices the pale ghost of a moon rising to the south, a waxing gibbous wraith on its relentless journey toward fullness.

Only six days remain.

If Oswald’s math is correct, he has accrued three lives so far—Kornblum the bridge-jumper, the snot-nosed sniper, and the Candy Man (although the latter is open for interpretation)—but now Oswald is too jittery to even think about cosmic tallies and tasks and time ticking away. He’s too edgy, too preoccupied by peculiar feelings brewing inside him—feelings beyond his ability to articulate.

“I gotta ask you to do me a favor tonight,” he says, scanning the road ahead for Exit Thirteen, the turn-off for the Riverside Casino and Resort. His vision is slightly bleary tonight. His ears are ringing, and his skull is pounding, and he has a weird taste in his mouth—like he just bit down on a galvanized nail. The fact is, he has not felt a hundred percent since the incident in the park the day before yesterday, and he’s starting to think that maybe he should see a doctor. The shock to the bullet-proof vest was enough to send a shard of pain up through his spinal column and into his cranium, where it has settled, and now he feels as though the base of his neck is filled with ground glass.

“This thing is an amazing invention,” Gerbil Goldstein is muttering on the passenger side, staring down at the Kevlar vest, now folded into a dirty sandwich of thick, nubby fabric in her lap. Oswald purchased the vest off the black market years ago, during a time when he was paranoid about rival contractors taking him out of the game, but had never given it the acid test... until the day before yesterday.

For the last hour or so, Gerbil has been marveling at the charred dimple in the weave, prodding it with her finger, awed by this miracle of modern engineering. The sniper had fired a seven-six-two-millimeter, soft-point, copper-jacketed slug at the thing from a mere fifty yards, and the round had barely pushed through the outer shell. “Fucking amazing.”

“Did you hear what I said?” Oswald presses.

“About what?” She looks up at him with her trademark blank stare. Dressed in a black cardigan, black stirrup pants, and black Doc Martens, she looks like a refugee from a Charles Addams cartoon. About twenty miles back, she gobbled a half a burrito, and now the remnants of her repast lay like an abortion on top of the Kevlar vest, wadded in a nest of wax paper.

“I want you to lay low in the truck,” Oswald tells her. “While I do the thing.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious. I want you to stay in the truck.”

Gerbil shakes her head, wads up her wrapper, and angrily hurls it to the floor. “Why did you bring me then? Huh? Why am I here?”

Oswald keeps his eyes on the road. “I changed my mind, so sue me.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty.” Gerbil shoves