The Firecracker Has Legs

The bulletin from an across-the-pond firecracker sizzles the friend-to-friend-where-and-when on my main brain-frame. Now I’m a ten-notches-on-my-gun-butt kinda guy and I got obligations. I rocket the skinny to Greggie the Geek.
“Gotta ID the scribe,” I say.
“No can do. Bull’s eye’s in nonnative territory,” telegraphs GtG. “Fed Fuzz got laws sayin’ no easy foreign aid.”
I two-finger it back: “Ten-times-tens gonna be conflagrated.”
“Tell it to the justies,” he posits. “The bad guys got in-house story-rights.”
I pick up on the hiccup and chew over my druthers.
“Too late.” The Gregger doodles on my fifteen-inch. “Your popper just pulled the chord on his heavenly parachute. Nobody close. Looks like he’s soloin’ it to Paradise.”
So much for another notch on my gun handle. Of course, the go-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory Ali-Baba-Ally offed hisself so, far as I’m concerned, he can be counted as a nick since he’s on my bucket list.
I get out the trusty blade, sculpt ding number eleven on the butt of my roscoe and add another ten large to the tab for my next score.

Gationary:
brain-frame: n. computer.
firecracker: n. terrorist.
friend-to-friend-where-and-when: n. social media.
in-house story-rights: n. email privacy.
ten-times-tens: n. hundreds.

“Nine Notches”

The beauteous Belinda Beauvais is standin’ in front of me, one hand on hip, the other holdin’ a pic of the late Jimmy the Finger Doyle.

“It’s never been found, you know,” she says, battin’ the curly eye frames. “His body.”

“So?” I answer. “Tony D’Angelo’s rottin’ in the tank for offin’ him. Nobody seemed to care about the corpse then.”

“We do.”

Now I know the bodacious Belinda is an undercover Jane for the Feds so I tune up the old Dumbos.

“How come?” I ask.

“The pinstripes think he’s still alive. And that he’s got five million dollars worth of crack to finance his return from the great beyond.”

“What do you want with me?”

“For all intents and purposes, Jimmy’s dead. The Feds like it that way. And they want you to make sure he stays that way.”

Now I’m Sammy, the Gat: nine notches on my gun butt and a six-figure payoff when I work for the Feds. Better it goes to me than some phony penny-loafer consult.

“The usual, Belinda?”

“When you deliver the body, Sammy, not just information.”

We don’t even shake on it as Belinda and me, we got a thing and one touch would have us in the sack.

She takes off and twenty minutes later, I’m on my way to a field outside’a town where I know Jimmy’s body is stashed in the trunk of an old jalop.

I know, ’cause I put it there.

Got fifty g’s and half the snow from Jimmy’s widow for that hit.

 

“A Lollapalooza of a Contract”

I feel Tommy Tomato’s foot push against my sacroiliac as I exit the jump door of his WWII flyin’ coffin. I pull the rip cord and open the umbrella that’s gonna stop me from mixin’ it up with the terra firma below that’s comin’ up like roses on steroids.

As a top-notch hit man, I’ve had some contracts in the past that’ve fast-forwarded my aging process, but this one’s a lollapalooza.

To begin with, my ka-ching chump is newly black-listed Shoeless Solly, ex-Mafioso top gun who’s angered the zoot suiters. Solly knows he’s been marked so he’s got a goon brigade that’d turn the Godfather green.

I know what’s up. As soon as I get two feet flat, I gotta get into Solly’s iron-ringed compound, find the A-lister, pop ’im and take a quick powder before the turkey trotters start huntin’-n-peckin’.

I ain’t no dumbnik, I got a plan–as long as my go-to babe, Belinda Beauvais, don’t chicken out and leave me high and dry in the Alps.

The one carrot I didn’t put inta the pot is this unexpected bozo with the ack-ack standin’ in the middle of my landin’ sweet spot.

Kablooie. The bonny Belinda levels him with one shot and gets the bod outta the way.

I can see everythin’s percolatin’ clean beans with the B-girl and I’m on my way to collectin’ a cool half-mil from the mob.

“Bitcoin Biz”

I’m an ordinary hands-on, bricks-and-mortar, hit-man-for-hire, part-time-undercover-Fed kinda guy, so when fellow Fedster Belinda Beauvais hands me this Bitcoin gig, I balk.

No way out, she says, so this low-brow is stuck with IDin’ a high-brow scheme to sell smack online for computer-generated cabbage.

Now I got no smarts about tech, or nonexistent moolah, so I gotta find me a techno wizard to translate geek talk into mob moxie.

Johnny the Brain comes to mind, and after he finishes briefin’ me on the ins and outs of cartoon cash and hidden deep-web info, the bell rings, and like it or no, I’m on the clock.

 

“Sammy the Gat Bags a Jag–Ends up Time-travelin'”

“What tha….?”

One minute I’m cruisin’ along in my just-purchased-at-auction 1960 Mark 2 Jag (a cool tool like the one Chief Inspector Morse drives in Netflix reruns); next minute, I’m hangin’ out the door of a broken-down Chevy dinosaur in the ’teens—the nineteen-hundred ’teens.

I don’t get it. I got me a contract to off Tony D’Ignatio, the boss’s rival as the mob’s Time-travel Wizard. It’s a lucrative gig, big enough so I used the down-payment bucks to bag the Jag. If the boss wanted me to time-skip, he should’a date-zapped me to the ’seventies when Tony was a kid—not back forty-five years before he was born.

Suddenly, no jangle on the jingler is needed: I get why I’ve been buzzed back to the beginning of time. The boss spotted me in my new steel wheels.

I look around; I’m still in Chi. Bet my Jag stag is, too—in the boss’s garage, a hundred years from now.

 

“Shades of Sammy” (Prose Poem)

(See “Sammy Stories”, above, for more short tales.)

I open-close
the door
to the dive
on 29th Street
and head-to-toe
the crowd
that’s
swing-‘n’-swayin’
on the dance floor.

My eye digitizes
Izzy Cronin,
my go-after guy.
I slip-slide
through
the twinkletoes
and shoulder-tap
my pigeon.

His memory card
telegraphs
red-flashers
to his brain trust
and he
two-steps
it outta here

I slow-boat it
over to the bar
and two-finger
the hootch handler
for a double
on the rocks.

I’m a patient man.
I’ll pop Izzy later.

Thanks for visiting.