Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

“You are not involved!” Junior said. It was as if I wasn’t even speaking. Junior had his own script, and here I was interrupting it. He thought this was going to go down one way, and here it was, an all-new set of circumstances.

A rational man would change his tack.

A rational man might excuse himself and set up a new meeting at a later date.

A rational man might even just have his muscle pull out his gun and kill everyone. And Killa did have a gun. He walked like a guy with a bad knee and a gun shoved into his tailbone. Sam had noticed this, too, and was keeping a laser focus on Killa’s every move.

I’d spoken rationally thus far to Junior, and it frankly hadn’t done much to defuse the situation. Junior was quick to boil. The problem with speaking rationally to criminally insane people is that at some point, no matter how much sense you’ve made, they just won’t be able to process what you’re saying.

We’d already reached that point and had been talking for only about three minutes. So, when that point of stasis arrives, you need to get down to the level of your opponent, ponder what his next move might be and then make it before he did… which is why, during the second or two it took Junior to process what I’d just told him, I decided to shoot Killa in the knee with my big shiny gun.

Except it wasn’t a gun, of course. It was a paintball marker. But instead of paintballs, I’d filled this gun with rounds of a mixture containing primarily lortropic acid, which is a particularly voluble acid when it hits things containing water, since it actively repels the substance, which is why it works so well when you’re refinishing your deck. There wasn’t enough acid in the round to do much damage, apart from eat away a patch or two of skin, but when combined with the force of the shot, I knew in all likelihood the round would go right through Killa’s pulled-up sock and into his skin, where it would burn and sizzle and be plenty dreadful to look at, which is part of why I decided to do it.

The advantage was that the acid would actually cauterize the wound so, on balance, I was really doing Killa a favor.

Plus, my real plan was to sever his medial collateral ligament, or at least crack his patella. It would depend on how accurate the gun was. And that would help him in the long run, too. You can’t be much of a gangster if you can’t run after or away from people.

So, just as Junior was opening his mouth to respond, I slid my gun beneath the desk and with a single pop that didn’t sound like a gunshot (which is good, because a gunshot is pretty distinctive and loud and tends to bring in uninvited guests) dropped Killa to the ground in a screaming mess.

“My knee!” he bellowed.

Sam walked over to where Killa was writhing, knelt down, put a hand on Killa’s head to keep him still, and proceeded to pull a nice, little snub-nosed. 357 from his belt, which he handed to me.

Junior didn’t move. He just looked at Killa with something less than amusement. Killa’s knee was cut open in a two-inch gash that was, as predicted, bubbling but not really bleeding. A clean shot. Mostly, Junior seemed confused.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Junior, “but I don’t allow guns in here. It’s a church, you know? And I found his tone very disrespectful.”

“You shot me!” Killa said.

“Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said.

“Does that burn?” Sam asked.

“It’s eating my skin!” he said.

Junior kept his eyes on Killa, but said to me, “It is eating his skin.”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s got five minutes until it hits bone, so he should be fine provided we reach some kind of accord in, oh, four minutes and thirty seconds. He’ll want some time for the antidote to work its way into his system.”

“What did you shoot him with?”

“Trade secret,” I said.

Junior finally pulled his eyes from Killa and looked over his shoulder at Father Eduardo, who, amazingly, seemed pretty content with everything. It was all working out perfectly, and perhaps he saw that.

The only problem thus far was that Killa’s burning flesh smelled. The acid really wasn’t going to eat away at him until it hit bone-it would only burn off a few layers of skin, and, mixing with blood and the oil in his skin, would cause a lot of visual fireworks, but no real permanent damage. His destroyed ligaments were more his own fault than mine. They would have popped at some point. I just brought the future forward for him.

“Here’s what I want,” Junior said. “I need the printing plant. I will pay no fee for it. It will be mine. Eduardo can still print his newspapers and his flyers and no-drug pamphlets and everything else he wants. But I need the operation from midnight to six daily. There is no negotiation.”

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” Junior said. “Or else I kill Father Eduardo’s nephew.”

The element of surprise is really an issue of controlling morale. Shock your enemy, and you can expect that a feeling of hopelessness will descend upon him. He will begin to feel vulnerable both mentally and physically. His training, both mental and physical, will come into question. He might even turn on his leaders, thinking they are incompetent for not knowing what to expect in the heat of battle.

Not killing all of your enemies is actually an advantage, since the myth of your power will ripple throughout the ranks of your enemy and then you have the mental advantage. A spy feeds off this advantage, because once you’ve defeated an enemy from the inside, it’s much easier to defeat him from the outside.

The problem for Junior was that he probably wasn’t aware of this maxim. Or maybe he thought he was surprising me.

He wasn’t.

Maybe he’d surprised Father Eduardo, but since he was the one who used to control the Latin Emperors’ message, maybe it was an old tactic brought back for a good cause.

The one person who was surprised was Killa, since Junior had just put a death sentence on his son with Leticia.

“What?” Killa said. He didn’t quite have the language skills of his brother, but in this case there really wasn’t much to say. His boss had just said he was going to kill his son. And then there was the issue that the skin on his knee was bubbling away.

“You heard me,” Junior said to Killa. “Your son belongs to the Latin Emperors, and if I decide he dies, he dies. That’s just how it is. You have a problem with that?”

Killa didn’t know what to say. That was clear. He looked from Junior to Eduardo and even to me. He looked afraid, helpless-all the things you’d want your enemy to look like after launching a surprise attack. That Killa worked for Junior showed the level of depravity in the situation. Everyone was expendable. “He’s just a kid, Junior,” Killa said. “He’s not part of this.”

“Are you part of this?” Junior said.

“You know I am,” Killa said.

“Then he’s part of it,” Junior said. “You ready to have him die for this? Aren’t you ready to die? Because I know I spent a lifetime in prison willing to die for this, so you better be willing.”

It was actually rather fascinating to watch the skewed reasoning of men, particularly powerful men, and here on display was the old school and the new doing battle over what was, in essence, the future of the gang. They needed this place for the long-term survival of their clan. But bringing in a kid was a level of devotion I wasn’t familiar with and wasn’t comfortable with. I knew we needed to protect Leticia, but hearing Junior threaten the kid’s life in front of his father was a nihilism that told me all I needed to know about Junior: He knew this was his chance to make it. What “it” is to anyone is a good question, but for Junior, a man who’d spent thousands of days behind bars, clearly this was a chance at the life he felt he deserved.