I shook my head. ‘Michael sent me.’
Clarence tilted his head to the right and squinted at me. ‘Ain’t never seen you before. How the fuck d’you know Michael?’
‘We’re family.’
Clarence smiled wide and cheerful. ‘Well hell, if you’re family with Michael then you’re family with me… come on in, take a load off.’
‘I will,’ I said. I took a.38 from the waistband of my pants and pointed it directly at his head.
Clarence dropped the remote and the beer can simultaneously. He opened his mouth to say something, something loud and worthless no doubt, and I raised my left hand and pressed my finger to my lips. ‘Ssshhh,’ I whispered, and Clarence fell silent before a single word had escaped his trembling lips.
‘The guy downstairs… what’s his name?’
‘L-L-Lourdes.’
I frowned. ‘Lourdes? What the fuck kinda name is that?’
‘Tha-that’s hi-his n-name,’ Clarence mumbled. ‘That’s his name… Lourdes.’
I leaned back towards the door and shouted the Hispanic’s name.
‘What?’ he hollered up from below.
‘Up here,’ I shouted.
‘Up here what?’
I looked at Clarence. Clarence nodded.
‘L-Lourdes, get the fuck up here right now!’ Clarence shouted, like he believed that co-operating with me would make the damndest bit of difference.
Lourdes came up the stairs. I stepped behind the door, and when he walked in I shoved him hard and he went sprawling across the floor.
‘What the fu-’ he started, and then he turned and saw me standing there with a.38 and he shut up real quick.
From my inside pocket I took a knife, small and sharp. ‘Take this,’ I said, ‘and cut Clarence’s tee-shirt off.’
‘Wha-’
‘Do it.’ My voice was direct and firm. ‘Do what I say real quick and real quiet and maybe someone’s gonna walk out of here alive.’
Lourdes took the knife. He cut Clarence’s tee-shirt off at the shoulders, and within a few moments stood there with the filthy rag in his hand.
‘Now cut it in strips and tie Clarence to the chair over there.’ I indicated to the left where a plain deal chair stood against the wall.
They didn’t need prompting; the pair of them co-operated and said nothing.
Three or four minutes and Clarence Hill, shaking and sweating profusely, sat tied to the chair in the middle of the room.
‘Take the cover off the cushion and jam it in his mouth,’ I said.
Clarence’s eyes were wide and white; looked like two ping-pong balls balancing on his great fat face.
Lourdes did as he was told, and then he stood there with the small, sharp knife in his hand and waited for me to say something.
‘Now cut his pecker off.’
Lourdes dropped the knife.
Clarence started screaming, but with the material in his mouth he made barely a sound. He was thrashing wildly in the chair, every ounce of his strength fighting against the restraints that held him.
‘Lourdes… pick up the goddamned knife and cut that fat fuck’s pecker off or I’m coming over there and do you first.’
Lourdes, his whole body rigid with terror, leaned down to pick up the knife. He held it gingerly in his hand. He looked at me. I nodded in the affirmative.
Clarence passed out before the blade reached him. That was a good thing for him. Lourdes did what I told him to do, but it took a good five or ten minutes because he stopped to retch and heave about once every thirty seconds. The blood was unreal. It flooded out and soaked the chair, ran in rivulets onto the floor beneath, and soon Lourdes was nothing more than a gibbering wreck of a man, kneeling there on the floor in Clarence’s blood, in his right hand the knife, in his left Clarence’s pecker.
At one point Clarence seemed to come round, his eyes opened for a split-second, and when he looked down at his own lap he passed out once more. Ten minutes, maybe less, Clarence would be dead from blood loss if he hadn’t had a coronary seizure already.
‘You did good, Lourdes,’ I said, and then I took the cushion, pressed it down against the back of his head as he kneeled on the floor, and I shot him.
Lourdes collapsed forward, and within a moment you couldn’t tell whose blood was whose.
I tucked the gun into the waistband of my pants. I stepped out of the room and closed the door quietly behind me. I went down the corridor, passed a door through which I could hear some guy hollering
I paused for a moment, breathed once through my nose to remind myself of how goddamned awful the place smelled, and then I went out through the front door and closed it tight behind me.
Later, after dinner, I called Michael Cova at home.
‘Done,’ I said quietly.
‘Already?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, Ernesto, okay. Hey, how’s the wife?’
‘She’s good, Michael, thanks for asking.’
‘When’s the baby coming?’
‘June… should be June.’
‘Well, God bless you both, eh?’
‘Thank you, Michael… appreciated.’
‘You’re welcome. Tell her “Hi” from me.’
‘I will, Michael.’
‘See ya tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said, and hung up the phone.
‘Nesto?’ Angelina called from the front.
‘Sweetheart?’ ‘Come massage my feet for me, would you, honey? I ache all over.’
‘Sure thing, sweetheart. Just gonna lock up the front.’
I locked the door, flipped the deadbolt, and walked back in front to see my wife.
June seventeenth 1982, St Mary Magdalene Hospital on Hope Street near the park, Angelina Maria Perez gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl. I cannot begin to describe what I felt, and so I will not attempt to, save to say that there had never been anything before and nothing since that could even come close to what I experienced in that operating theater.
We had no idea there were two. I knew she was big, but big compared to what? I had expected one child. We were blessed with two. I counted their fingers, their toes. I held one within each arm. I walked around in circles looking down at them until I believed I would fall over with the sheer weight of joy and emotion and pride and love.
My babies. My blood.
At that time I did not question whether I would be caught in some conflict between the family of my business and the family of my blood. I questioned nothing. I asked for nothing. In that moment I believed that whatever God may have existed, whatever power was out there beyond the parameters of my understanding, I had been blessed with something priceless and beyond measure.
Three days later we took Victor and Lucia home. They cried, they were forever hungry; they woke us with their pleadings in the cool half-light of nascent morning, and we went from our bed with something in our hearts that had never been there before; something that we had once believed unattainable.
