Tom Piccirilli - Headstone City

“You poor twisted kid,” Phil said, and Dane's scars began to burn.

The flickering image of Vinny appeared all around the Cadillac, wearing a black Armani suit and an open leather overcoat. In several spots at once-holding a cigarette, hands in his pockets, clutching a gun. It was just beginning to rain, but Vinny was already drenched like he'd been in the storm for hours. Dissolving and solidifying, finally, into one figure, he stood there outside of the passenger door, grasping a.38.

Dane reached into his jacket pocket for his own gun and it wasn't there anymore.

Vinny had it. In some other track he'd gotten into the car, wrestled with Dane, and managed to grab hold of the pistol.

Now he was out there, pointing it into the Caddy. Grinning with those dentures. The fake eye with emerald flecks watching. Another boy with a sick brain.

You wait so long for the moment to come, imagining what it'll be like and how you'll feel about it, and when it finally arrives you feel nothing.

Staring at the man who, out of everybody in the world, still knew you the best.

Teeth bearing down on the tip of his tongue, Dane let out a soft, loose growl.

Vinny fucked around for another minute, aiming the barrel first at Dane's face, then at Phil's, then back again. Letting out a soft hiss of empty laughter every so often, like it was a game he'd played so often it had driven him crazy with boredom.

With an easy glide, Phil's right hand started to work down into his lap, reaching for the 9mm.

“Don't,” Dane told him.

The water dripping down his face, funneling through the dent across his brow, Vinny let the wind flap his overcoat open behind him, trailing in the breeze whistling through the cemetery gates. He motioned for Phil to roll down the window, then looked inside and told Dane, “He killed your old man.”

“I'm not so sure anymore.”

“It's true. If you want, I'll help you bury him. We could drive down to the Jersey Shore. Or we could do it right here, inside. No one will ever find him.”

Phil started to protest several times, but he fudged his words. He wasn't so much scared as he was doing his best to play the situation right, but he just didn't know how. “Look-look, Vincenzo, this, this here, it's-look… I'm… I'm not-”

“Tell him that you killed his father, Phil.”

“No.”

“Do it. Make it right after all these years.”

“I didn't shoot my partner,” Phil said flatly, staring straight ahead through the windshield, so if Vinny did pull the trigger, he'd have to shoot Phil in the temple. Dane looked over and saw that he was telling the truth. Phil Guerra hadn't killed Sgt. John Danetello.

“Let him go,” Dane said.

“You certain about that?” Vinny cut loose with another hollow giggle, only a dim echo of real emotion.

“Yeah.” Dane turned to Phil and said, “I'm gonna keep the Caddy for a little while longer, Uncle Philly. You'll get it back soon though, I promise. Now take a walk.”

Phil climbed out. With more emotion than Dane thought possible, the man said, “You two have had this coming for a while. Good luck on settling it.”

This was the kind of thing that Cogan enjoyed about Brooklyn. Only here could you point a gun at somebody and nearly bury him in somebody else's plot, only to have him wishing you well two minutes later.

“Shut up, you dirty rat bastard prick,” Vinny snarled as Phil backed down the street. The wind took his toupee and hurled it into the street. Vinny laughed and cocked his chin at Dane, still not climbing in. “He really did put one in your dad's head, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If he hadn't, he'd go run over to those cops in front of your house and call them down here. But look what he's doing.” Vinny craned his neck and let out a merciless laugh. “He's ducking and pretending not to see them.”

“Maybe he just wants us to finish it without anybody else getting between us.”

“There's always somebody in the middle.”

Even now. There was someone else there, in the backseat. Dane couldn't stop sweating, his hair almost as wet as Vinny's. He hoped it wasn't his father, appearing just to tell him what a foul-up Dane was, letting a killer go free.

He checked the rearview. It took a while but he eventually recognized her from the night of the accident. It was the girl Vinny had laid down in the Jersey dunes, who'd been pissed that he'd offered her cash afterward. The one who'd called the cops.

She said, “Kill him. He murdered me. After he got out of the hospital, he came back and found me and stuck a knife in my back. Eleven times. He took his time. He dumped me behind the same dune where he fucked me. Kill him.”

Vinny clambered into the Cadillac. He shoved his dripping hair back off his forehead, then plied the fabric on the seat. “This is that Fleetwood Sixty metallic shit.”

“He got screwed by the restorer.”

“Did a nice job otherwise.”

Dane started the car and drove back around Headstone City as if experiencing it for the first time. Sensing more beauty here than he'd seen the past couple of weeks, and feeling even more at home. This town took your marrow but replaced it with steel.

“Please, kill him now,” the girl said, smelling like the morning tide.

“I heard Fredric Wilson is dead,” Vinny said. Letting it out without any emotion.

Dane looked at the side of Vinny's scarred face. “So you knew his name the whole time.”

“Of course. I wondered when you'd take care of that.”

That put things in perspective.

Dane finally realized that Vinny was harder and stronger than him. He'd never be able to beat Vinny, ever, at anything. He didn't have the fortitude it took to do the things that Vinny was capable of. “And you never went after him? The guy who sold your sister the poisoned flake?”

“It was your debt. I figured you'd eventually handle it.”

“And you didn't put the contract out on me. It was Berto. But you didn't lift it either.”

“Appearance's sake and all that. Besides, I knew he wouldn't be able to find anybody worth a damn, the cheap fuck. Five grand. He was degrading himself. That disgusting finocchio prick, always down at the bridge looking for drag queens, he's lucky one of the other made guys didn't catch him. They'd have broiled his nuts with a blowtorch for a weekend.”

“Joey said they were getting ready to ice him.”

“They should've moved faster.”

They passed police cars prowling the neighborhood. Some of the cruisers going by with their lights flashing, but none taking a second glance at the Caddy. The rain came down a little harder but Dane didn't need to turn on the wipers yet. Watching the world through the smears and dapples, even Vinny got into it, the poetry of their town. Holding his palm up to the lightly throbbing water on the other side of the glass, Vinny said, “Every once in a while, it breaks your heart.”

“I'm not doing what you want anymore,” Dane told him, wincing at how weak it sounded. There was always one person you'd always be inferior to, no matter what you did.

“Don't you get it, Johnny? Nobody pushed you. Everything you've done is because you wanted to do it. You stand or slump on your own.”

“What do you want?”

“Rispetto.”

“You're not respected enough already?”

“I'm talking about you.” The fake eye fixed, seeing deep into Dane's brain, peering through the fractures that would never completely heal. “I told you. I had something special in mind for you. What's mine I give to you, Johnny. You're taking over. You're going to finish what you started. You're going to kill my father and take what's his.”