Back To The Stars: ROMANCE: ALIEN (Alien Invasion Abduction SciFi Romance) (Fantasy Anthologies & Collections) (5 page)

They tried Senior and Junior separately, mostly because they were hoping that one of them would flip.

Senior has his day in court first. His trial went on four nearly three months, with most of it featuring Stanza up on the witness stand telling his life story and spilling every detail about Senior’s business. I remember reading the paper every day hoping for some juicy detail about a rival gangster that Senior ordered wiped out, or some drug deal. Personally, I was hoping Stanza would maybe drop a bomb shell or two about the JFK assignation, or where Senior buried Jimmy Hoffa. But, nope, all he spilled was grisly details about the murders of nobody’s and the tons of dope Senior flooded the mid-west with.

At the end of the trial, the jury found Senior guilty on every single one of the seventy-four counts he was brought to trial on, and the judge sentenced him to two-hundred-and-fifty years in Joliet. Senior was seventy-nine-years- old. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out the old man was going to die in prison. But here’s the thing, despite being one of the most ruthless men in the history of crime, Senior was as clean living as they came. He didn’t smoke, drink, or partake in any of the product that he littered the ghettos and school yards of Chicago with. He didn’t even whore around and remained loyal to Junior’s mom until the day she died. Even after that he kept it in his pants. So ten years after the trial, Senior is still in Joliet, healthy as an ox and working out twice a day. My old man’s in there with him, and the times I’ve gone down to visit him he’s told me that Senior is one of the most feared men in the yard, and not because of his former lofty position, but because he’s two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of stacked muscle who ain’t afraid to throw down with even the biggest and baddest multi-murdering-tattoed-from-head-to-toe skinhead in the place. Chances are Senior will still be around and kicking ass twenty-five years from now.

You can’t say the same for Stanza. You see, Stanza was the exact opposite of Senior. Seven years of living a double life had turned him into a bit of a basket case, and the guy has developed a few crappy habits over the years. Stanza was a doper, boozer, and coozehound supreme. The man was nothing but vice. He smoked three or four packs a day, kept himself pickled 24/7, and was a vacuum cleaner when it came to coke. The guy was a burnout, and despite being in federal custody, he still partook in all of his free man vices. And between the trials of Senior and Junior, Stanza’s lifestyle choices dropped him like a sack of potatoes. He dies of a massive stroke at age thirty-five, and because he was the Fed’s only witness against Junior, well, they didn’t have much of a case other than a ton of hearsay, so they ended up having to cut Junior loose.

But the Feds didn’t care, they’d caught their white whale and managed to keep Junior under wraps and off the street for over three years. When he was released, the family business was still in place, but now it was a mere shadow of what had once been. Over that three years, the Russian mob and the Mexican cartels (Particularly the cartels, those guys are Ruthless with a capital R.) had been chipping away at Junior’s empire. Pretty much all of his holdings and business relationships on the west coast was swallowed by the cartels, and the Russians tried their damnedest to get at everything else. But fortunately for Junior, the Russians had become the Feds organized target of choice mostly because the Russians would do anything for a buck, including smuggling Uranium and human beings. Post 9/11 America has been a boom time for organized crime, because most goodfellas may be scumbags, but they’re patriotic scumbags, and as long as they kept their noses out of Muslim countries, the Feds more or less left them alone.

So when Junior was back on the street, he pretty much had zero eyes on him, but almost zero power. Of course, he still had more money than most third world nations, and he had the business know how, so he started to rebuild, and within five years of his father’s conviction, he may not have controlled half the United States anymore, but he did control Chicago, and for Junior, that was enough.

There’s your history lesson kids—Chicago Mob 101.

So you can probably understand why I wouldn’t want to be involved with a guy like Junior, because despite the loss of power, he’s still downright ruthless, and because of the betrayal he experienced at the hands of his lifelong best friend, he doesn’t give a damn about loyalty. If he thinks you’re going to rat him out, he’ll kill you. If he thinks you’re using dope, he’ll kill you. If he thinks you’re going to try and skip out on a hundred-thousand-plus dollar debt, yeah, you guessed it, he’ll kill you.

And me, I ain’t a fan of being killed, so when Sal told me he sold my debt to Junior, I decided right then and there I would try my damnedest to pay it off as quickly as possible.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do alright as a PI. It keeps a roof over my head, the refrigerator full, and a few bucks in my pocket for drinks and nice dinner or two with lady friends. But Chicago’s expensive, and it’s becoming pricier everyday, so even though I do alright, my extra bucks was only going to go so far in paying off my debt to Junior. In fact, it really only covered the interest, and just barely at that. So the fact was, I needed to make extra money, and a lot of it to get out from under Junior’s thumb, and the only way I know how to make that kind of extra dough is by gambling. But, of course, the issue with that is Junior owns or has a piece of every book maker in Illinois, so I had to find some other avenue, some other activity that Junior didn’t have a piece of and that wouldn’t put me in harms way or be arrested.

And I found it—or at least I thought I did—in cock fighting.

Chapter 2:

I know what you’re thinking, what kind of lowlife son of a bitch would fight chickens for money? Now, I should probably start by saying that I had nothing to do with making the chickens fight. There are owners and handlers for that, all I was was a spectator. But you know what? Every time I hear people gripe about having animals fight, it kind of gets under my skin. I mean, they’re animals, they’re bodies are basically designed to fight and defend themselves. That’s why they have beaks and claws. That’s why dogs have teeth, they’re made to rip and tear. But what really gets my goat is that the folks who complain about cock fighting or dog fighting the most are usually fans of boxing or mixed martial arts or pro-wrestling, and basically all those “sports” are is human cock fighting. If you’ve never seen a mixed martial arts fight, I actually think they’re worse than cock fighting. Two guys go inside a cage and then pound on each other until one of them is broken and bleeding on the ground, and the guy who comes out on top usually doesn’t look much better than the guy on the ground; his face and body is undercooked hamburger.

Yeah, you’re not buying this line, are you?

To be honest, I don’t buy it either. But it’s something every non-hispanic spectator of cock fighting tells themselves. The very first time I hit one of these things up on the southside, I heard a half dozen guys all say it, and say it with conviction. It almost becomes a mantra of sorts, a mental shield, a way to justify—or moderately accept—the carnage of seeing one living thing rip apart another, all the while cheering your cock on.

After the first time I saw a cock fight, I threw up out of the window of my car six or seven times. Sure, I didn’t mind the eight-hundred bucks I’d won, but all that blood, feathers, and suffering. The second time wasn’t much better than the first, the only difference was that I walked away with two thousand dollars. The third time, well, by that point I started using the mantra, and suddenly it didn’t seem all that bad. Of course, I was making some serious money betting against and for these poor birds. By the time I hit my fifth cock fight, my roosters hadn’t lost once and I was up ten grand, and to be honest, I was starting to enjoy the camaraderie of the fights.

The thing with cock fighting is this, most of the caucasians who go to them are just like me, they love to gamble. They’re also just like me because they’re not welcome anyplace else in the city except for where they have cock fights, dog fights, and bare knuckle boxing. (And most of them aren’t welcome there, either, because bare knuckle fights are usually run by gangsters like Junior, or one of his more blood thirsty competitors.) They’re gamers who’ve run into a bit of bad luck and can’t go back to their bookies until they pay up a wad of cash that they don’t have.

What’s great about being around these guys is while the fights are going down, you don’t have to watch, you can just hang out by the makeshift bar and down cheap Mexican beers and talk stats. You talked about who’s on the injury list this week, who’s being picked up in the draft, who your teams are in the final four. All of the usual bar chatter, the only difference is instead of the sonic blare of a dozen different TV’s, you have hundred or so Mexicans screaming at the top of their lungs and the squats and cries of dying birds.

After a while, I was just another face in the crowd, a regular, and a well liked regular at that. The kid who ran the fights, Pablo, was a good guy who comped me at the bar anytime I walked in the door. Pablo was Spanish, not Mexican Spanish, but actual from Spain Spanish, and he looked like he could be a male model. 6’2, maybe 180 lbs, blonde hair, blue eyes. He was the type of kid Hitler had in mind when he talked about the “master” race. He told me that his father used to think that his mother fooled around and that his real father was most likely an American tourist. His old man would mention it at least once a week until Pablo turned sixteen and knocked his teeth in and stole a couple of thousands bucks from him so he could head to the states.

In a lot of ways, Pablo reminded me of Sal before he sold me to Junior, quick with a smile and a story, and more than willing to spot you some cash if you wanted to bet big on one of the fights. Unfortunately, this is what got me in bigger trouble than I already was.

I’d been going to the cock fights for around four months, and I’d only ever had one loser in the entire time. All totaled, I’d won thirteen thousand dollars. I was rolling and I was a natural when it came to betting the roosters. On my last night, I’d brought the entire wad and I was planning on either doubling it or tripling it and then handing the whole wad over to Junior and seeing if he would take a deal on a lump sum of cash for my debt. I doubted he would do it, but I was hopeful. But my biggest hope was that once he had the cash he would start letting me place bets on my teams again. Because even though I was a natural at betting the cockfights, it still made me a little queasy when I heard a bird in its death throes.

The reason I was feeling so confident was because of a two-year-old rooster named Coco. The thing was a giant among birds. It was nearly two feet tall and weighed twenty pounds. It was the Andre The Giant of Roosters, and he was going up against a five-year-old bird named Tandy. Tandy was a longtime veteran, had one eye and had been fighting three years, which is ancient in cockfighting. Most birds lasted six months at best, but Tandy had survived and had become something of a legend. Despite the advantage of age and weight, Coco was the 9-to-1 underdog. But I’d won a couple of grand off of Coco’s first fight, and the bird was absolutely vicious. He moved like rooster half his size and had crazy cannibal bloodlust.

I hit the bar up before placing my bet, and as usual Pablo was working it. He plopped a cold one in front of me and waved off my $5 bill.

“Are you betting tonight, Larry?” He asked.

“What kind of question is that?” I said. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

Pablo leaned in close and nodded for me to do the same.

“Tandy has a broken leg,” he whispered. “Juan has it taped up tight, but there’s no way he’s going to win tonight.”

When a bird get injured before a match, most trainers won’t pull their bird from competition because of the two grand Pablo made them put down to be in the ring. Owners and trainers operated on a shoestring, so two grand was a big deal. Sure, their bird may be hobbling around, but there was always the chance that they might fight through the pain and win, and if the odds are high enough against the bird, the owner looks to quadruple the ring stake and pull in huge on any side bets they’ve got going on. Considering Tandy’s age, Coco was pretty much a 100% win.

“No, shit.”

“Yeah, and the thing is, nobody knows about it, and Juan plans on keeping it that way. Tandy’s ranked 12-to-1 right now.”

My eyes turned to saucers and I’m not ashamed to say that I started drooling a little bit. 12-to-1 on twelve grand was huge; I’d have enough to pay off Junior, plus a little on the side so I wouldn’t have to worry about picking up PI work for at least a couple of months. But as I slugged back my beer, my lizard brain was going into overload. Imagine what I could make if I put down twenty or fifty grand? I’d be set up for four or five years if I played it right. The idea of it sent me into orbit, and then I opened my stupid mouth and said to Pablo:

“How much can you stake me?’

He ended up being able to front me only thirty grand, but Pablo knew it was a sure thing, and the whole reason he told me about the injury was because he was hoping I would hop at the chance to go big. Usually the house can’t put money down on a fight because the house usually knew the little ins-and-outs of what’s going on with the cocks. Plus, you’re taking food out of your partners mouths if another owner placed a bet, so they put money in the hands of shills like me. Yeah, Pablo would take a huge chunk of the take, but I would still get a big greasy hunk of it. The only downside was if Coco lost, because if that happened, I would expected to pay the mark plus its weekly interest. Yeah, it’s a screwed up little system, but you know what they say, if you want to win big, you’ve got to play big.

Pablo handed me the marker when the first fight started and the bar cleared out, and I went and laid down the cash, and then went ringside to wait for my easy money fight.