I, Racki (Part XIV)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.

The rest of the afternoon I spent nailing down details for that evening. Knowing only the vague outline of Salome’s plan wasn’t something I was terrifically thrilled about, and despite the fact that I was going along with it, it bugged me a little bit, tainting my enthusiasm about doing Hannibal this big favor.

The isolated fragments I had almost made sense… one guy was going to go down to the boiler room and plant a bomb. The other two, also from Killianfield, had fairly simple jobs. Anybody with half a brain could tell this wasn’t going to be a simple prank. Things like that happen in Stone Creek from time to time, but who cares? Once you cross the Mayor or his family you’re finished in this town. A line in the sand you definitely don’t want to cross.

I met my team inside the Tripoli Pizza Monarch, where the heavy smell of cheap sausage and tomato sauce covers you like a blanket, and they were already mowing a large pie down. This wasn’t a group of National Merit scholars here. These guys were chumps but they were leadable and they were unknowns. There was a waitress who saw me join them and she might have bothered us if I hadn’t told her I’d beat her with a pepper grinder if she came by again.

Kynedyr Woods savaged his mouth with a napkin and then crumpled it into a ball. “You want some pizza?”

“I don’t see any ham on it. Forget it.”

“Ham’s a breakfast food.”

“My fists are an all-you-can-eat buffet,” I told him.

Harold Banamun yawned and leaned back as if he were going to take a nap, all sleepy and doe-eyed. Turns out he always looked like that. “You have our money?” I just looked at him. “I hope you have our twenty percent.”

“Are you going to deliver?”

“Bite me. You got it?”

“Here.”

A wad of bills in a manila envelope may have been more dramatic, but a money order is what they got. It was the lavender paper of the Community Bank of Stone Creek and the three of them stared at it like it was Monopoly money, but after a few seconds Tidy Boy and Sleepy Boy seemed to figure it out so I gave a long hard stare at Stevie DeVries.

“It’s money,” I said. “Your gal pals can explain it to you. Don’t blow a fuse trying to think it out all by yourself. Are we done?”

“Not quite. The busboy outfit I got doesn’t fit me.”

“Look at my face and you tell me if you think I care.”

“How are we going to get off the boat?” Kynedyr asked me.

Harold roused himself somewhat out of his little siesta he was taking and said, “You have to address this. I don’t want to be there when the boiler blows.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way off,” I said.

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