Gift From The Bad Boy

“You’ve always been an optimistic one, Ben.”

“Compared to you, I’m a beam of fuckin’ sunshine, buddy.”

“More power to you. One of us has gotta be the realist.”

We sat smoking in silence for a while. My eyes kept roaming over the mountains of cash in front of me. I felt like that old cartoon where the miser duck dives into the vault of coins. Everyone made fun of that greedy bastard, but if you asked me, that was just because they didn’t know how goddamn good this felt.

“So is that it?” I asked after a few minutes. “Anything else?”

“Not really,” he answered. “Aside from the numbskull younglings, it was more-or-less textbook. Just like we planned.”

I looked over at the big whiteboard next to my desk that still bore the traces of the plan we’d laid out weeks prior. It was pretty much as simple as they come. A few months back, we’d noticed some unusual movement right on the fringe of the territory controlled by the Wild Kings and decided to devote spare resources towards keeping an eye on a seemingly empty warehouse there. Lo and behold, it turned out that the Kings had expanded some drug shipping operations to this new location. What was even more exciting was the discovery that not only were they conducting business there, but they were using it as a stronghold for cash that was waiting to be laundered through the variety of outlets they used for shit like that.

Slick and Jay, along with a few of the other lieutenants, and I had agreed it was in a prime location for us to take a swipe at it. The trick was avoiding retribution from our rivals, so it had to be a quick job, one that couldn’t be traced back to us. The diagrams on the whiteboard laid out exactly what needed to be done: take down the two guards at the side door, send one man down through the roofing into the storage room, bust it open from the inside, and get out before the rest of the patrol detail noticed. From what Jay said, most of it went well, and now we were reaping the benefit of one of the ballsier moves we’d pulled of late.

“James’s gonna shit himself when he finds out,” Jay added.

I grinned ear to ear. “That’s the best part,” I said. “My only regret is that I can’t be there when it happens. Just to see it for myself.”

Chapter Three

Carmen

The house was silent when I walked in. “Daddy?” I called into the musty stillness. “Daddy, are you home?”

No answer. I didn’t see any lights on the ground floor. Dropping my keys into the dish on the island counter in the kitchen and slinging my bag to the floor, I padded upstairs to check his office.

As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw the door to his office was shut, but I could see a thin sliver of warm light coming out from under the bottom edge. He must be inside.

I stopped in the darkness, one hand on the railing, and closed my eyes. C’mon, Carmen, I thought to myself. Just go in there and state your case. Tell him you’re eighteen years old now and all you want to do is go on a simple date with a very nice boy. It’s just dinner, nothing more. Not a thing in the world for a father to worry about. I let out my breath in a long, slow exhale. Then, steeling myself, I knocked on the door.

“Daddy, it’s me,” I called through the thick wood.

“Come on in, Car Girl,” he said back, using the nickname he’d had for me since I was just a little girl.

I twisted the knob and walked in. His office was fairly sparse, with only a rickety desk and a small lockbox safe tucked in one corner. He was seated behind it, calmly flipping through the folder he held in front of him. With his reading glasses on and a long-sleeved Henley shirt covering up most of his tattoos, he looked like the world’s most normal dad. He could have been an accountant or a lawyer or some other ordinary, suburban job like that, the kind of dad who told corny jokes and brought home flowers for his wife in the evenings. He wasn’t any of those things, of course. But sometimes I liked to pretend.

“Hey, sweetie,” he said, looking up and smiling at me as I entered. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” I said. “I just studied at the park for a bit, then I went to Lori’s.”

“Ah, the infamous Lori Greene. How’s she?”

“She’s good.” I was dying to get past the small talk and discuss what I really wanted to talk about, but I was too nervous to jump straight into it. Besides, maybe it would help to warm him up a little bit first, just so he was in a better mood when I finally got down to it. “Same as always,” I added.