understanding, all right. But that’s not the same as a partnership.
Which he’d learn only if he did something a lot stupider than Lonnie Manes ever dreamed of. That’s when he’d find out that searching me for a tape recorder had been a waste of time.
Around these parts, the one thing nobody is surprised to see on your house is a satellite dish. All the time we were in the yard, talking, that dish was zeroed in on us. When I played back the recording, it was as clear as high- def TV can be. And the sound quality was as good as in an opera house.
I saved it to my hard drive, then I sent it to my coded box, just in case.
If that cop ever turned on me, he’d end up putting his own gun in his mouth. Even if he needed some help to do it.
ike I said, I was already out of the drug business the second that cop had opened his mouth. But I had my plans, and having a tape of him not only taking a bribe, but outright admitting he had to cut a whole lot of higher-ranking cops in on such a take, that could be well worth the money.
The insurance money, I’m saying.
wo different mobs pretty much had things around here all divided up between them: gambling joints, strip clubs, loan-sharking, protection coverage, and, of course, the tax collections.
The white-lightning guys were even smaller potatoes than the dogfighters, but that’s not why they never paid taxes. There’s folks around here who’ll tell you there’s nothing like shine—hits you harder than anything you could buy in a bar. But there was no real money to be made from it, and the only men still in the business, they were old men.
And those old men, they kept to the old ways, too. They were very seriously opposed to paying tax. Didn’t matter who came collecting. Racketeer or lawman, he might well be buried on the same ground he was dumb enough to cross without permission. If you wanted to visit, the only way to make sure you’d be leaving would be to leave their business alone.
For the two mobs, the dividing line was where County Road 22 crossed Route 76. It was as clear as a border crossing with armed guards: 22 ran north and south, and each mob had its own side, east or west. If you wanted to set up an operation, what you paid was the same on either side, but who you paid was determined by where you wanted to set up shop.
There was some poaching, of course. Not enough to start a full-scale war, but more than enough to get more than a few men killed over the years.
Whoever crossed the line, the mob they came from would always say they were freelancing. That’s what stopped things from ever getting out of hand. Even if one mob knew the other one was behind the poaching, they didn’t have to take all-out vengeance to hold their pride.
Around here, vengeance and pride are mated so close they can’t be separated. If someone does something to you and you don’t get back at them, nobody thinks too much of you. It’s even worse if someone does something to your family and you let it go. Then you couldn’t hold your head up ever again, not even in church.
oachers, that’s one thing. But outsiders, there’s a whole different story. Actually, it was outsiders who showed me the way I could make enough money to keep me and Tory-boy safe.
Maybe that’s an excuse, I don’t know. It’s what I felt at the time, but maybe there was something else driving me. That frozen conscience, it could have been. Or all that studying I did early on, about how to kill the Beast. But I never speculate on what I can’t change.
The real truth is that the Disability alone would have kept us safe. Add the money from selling my painkillers, that would have done it, easy. But our drug business was doomed even before that lawman showed up and sold me that insurance policy.
What I always told myself was that all I needed was to have money put away. But, inside me, I knew there never could be enough, not without me around to make it work.
That lawman’s visit kind of changed my perspective. He started me thinking about getting my hands on so much money that it could push buttons on its own—like setting an alarm clock, or programming a computer.
I thought about that a lot.
he outsiders who opened the door for me were a motorcycle gang. They set up shop on the East Side, in an old airplane hangar. At one time, that hangar was used to house small aircraft, and have work done on them, too. There was a landing strip and everything. But when more and more people got used to being out of work, that business had starved to death.
Later, some company had tried to set up their own airline. Just four-seaters, going over the mountains once a morning, returning that same night. But it didn’t take, so they took off themselves, leaving the building there, just rusting out.
I guess this motorcycle gang—MM-13, they called themselves—had just moved into the empty space.
At first, you hardly noticed them. They never bothered anybody when they rode through town, and they didn’t often do that. They didn’t tear up any of the bars, they didn’t try and muscle in on any of the strip joints.
Not only did they behave themselves, they always spent some money, too.
But then they started a meth lab.
t first, the meth had a hard time making a real impact. It seemed like it just wasn’t going to take hold. But as time went by, more and more junkies switched over to it. Maybe because it was new, but more likely because it was so cheap compared with any other stuff.
The bikers were about as mobile as you could get, so they sold on both sides of the line. They were too smart to refuse whenever they would run into a tax collector from one of the mobs, but that would only happen by accident—they didn’t have regular routes, and they didn’t sell out of any one place.
Even if a deal could have been struck, it was impossible to figure out how much the bikers should be paying —they made the meth themselves, so there was no import risk. And they could make it cheap—the street price was so low even the longtime dope fiends were moving over to it.
Anyone could see a showdown was brewing. When the bikers rode into town, there was never more than a dozen or so of them. But if you looked close, you could see it wasn’t the
he reason the bar was called the DMZ was because it was the one place where both mobs felt safe. Just west of 22, but the West Side mob never claimed it. There had to be
So the DMZ paid both sides, but no more than if they were paying just one. The gangs split that money, and put it around that if you started any trouble in there, you were on your own.
Even if somebody got themselves killed in the DMZ, any vengeance was strictly left up to their own people, not their mob.
Getting the bosses to both come there and meet with me—now, that was tricky. But there was no choice about it. I had to put my proposition to the bosses themselves, not go through any message takers.
So I left the exact same word with each mob. I knew they’d check me out first, and that was fine. They’d learn two things: Esau Till might be a crippled man, but he was a man of his word. And he was not only a for-real outlaw—he was smart. Real smart.
he boss of the East Side was Everett Lansdale. He looked like a man in his fifties who took care of his body—one look at his face and you’d see why he thought that necessary.
Jackhammer Judakowski ran the West Side. He was an older guy, pretty well larded—but only a fool would judge his character by his body instead of those ice chips he had for eyes.
I didn’t know Judakowski’s real name. Around here, folks would say “his Christian name,” no matter if he’d never been baptized, or even set foot in a church.
There were a dozen different accounts as to where the “Jackhammer” had come from. One thing I learned, if
