Rachel Caine - Godfellas

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2024-11-24 1 0 95.77KB 18 页 5.9玖币

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GODFELLAS, OR, VIC TAKES A ROOM AT THE MAGELLAN

anoriginal short story by RachelCaine

I suppose you might say I died happy.Couple bottles of gin, a hooker who looked exactly like Julia

Roberts, and one cigarette too many. See, I was laying there in the afterglow, lighting up, not paying any

attention, when the door opened and JimmyCassoli came in with his two ugly cousins and put a couple of

.375 hollow points through my forehead.

Didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would – big noise, big flash of light, and then it was all over but the

crying. That was the hooker crying, ‘causeshe had to get the hell out of the room without her best pair of

fuck-me shoes. JimmyCassoli must have known her or something because he didn’t pop her on the way

out, or maybe he was just more interested in making sure I wasn’t going to get up and follow her.

While they were going through my wallet for the green and grabbing up my working gun – I really hated

that, I loved that .45 – I realized I wasn’t actually laying there looking up at them anymore. I was

standing next to them, but it was like Iwasn’t standing there, because they didn’t see me. I took a swing

atCassoli , who wasyucking it up how I’d pissed the bed, but it didn’t connect. I kept trying, though;

nobody screws with VicDonato like that without paying for it.

Except maybe JimmyCassoli , who slapped his cousins on the back and took them down the stairs, out

for an evening of lasagna and big-man bragging. I was left standing there, fists ready and nobody to slam

them into except that poor bastard on the bed, who I then realized might really be me.

I had to sit down. See, that guy on the bed that looked like me wasn’t dead yet. Going, you know, but

not gone. Blood kept pumping, lungs kept filling,eyes kept staring straight up.Die , I kept thinking, like I

was the hitter, not thehittee . Only the guy on the bed didn’t die, not then. Not that quick. Took another

fifteen minutes for the cops to show up, guns drawn, take a look at him -- me -- laid out bleeding into the

bed, and call for an ambo.

So for the next twenty minutes or so firemen, cops, paramedics, goddamn Boy Scout trooped around

my fucked-up near corpse like ants around a picnic. Hell, I was the biggest tourist attraction since Father

CarmineOzowski hung himself from the sprinkler head while wearing a black leather teddy. Speaking of

priests, one of the cops – BillyTorreti , we’d been altar boys together – came up with one, dragged his

drunk holy ass out of some othershithole room, I guess, ‘cause I remember Billy propping the Father up

while he made the sign of the cross and gave me unction. At which point, I started shaking all over and

leaking brains out of the great big hole in the back of my head.

I felt it, that exact second when the guy on the bed ceased to be me and started being a decomposing

pile of meat. I felt it, but nothing happened. I didn’t zip off to heaven, or hell, or into the light with my

dead friends.

Nothing.

Happened.Not to me.

Eventually, the room got sorted out. Coroner carted out my smoking corpse, trailing cops and crying

hookers like a Saint Paddy’s day parade. I was already forgotten by everybody except the maid, who

was going to have to wipe soot off the walls and put in a new air freshener.Baddabing ,badda boom.

Game over.

I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do. Hanging around staring at the bloody mattress

sounded sick, but for the first time in my life I had no place to go.Nobody to see.Nobody to do.

Then this guy walked into the room.Just a guy, on the skinny side, medium everything. He didn’t look

like much of nothing, but unlike all the other mopes, he wasn’t looking at the bed. He was looking straight

at me, giving me big puppy eyes, and I was feeling just a little bit pissed off, so I snarled, "What the hell

you looking at, pinhead?"

"I don’t know, Vic. What am I looking at?" He had a medium voice, too.Some kind ofMidwestaccent.

He sounded mild and a little bit cocky, which pissed me off more.

I was about to tell him to fuck off when I noticed the wings. I’m talking real wings, sort of like a fan of

white light, so bright it should have set the dingy peeling paint on fire. Apart from the wings, he still

looked like the kind who ordered vanilla at 31 Flavors, which was crazy, right? How could he be an

angel? Angels were sexy babes in sheer robes and little fluffy wings, likeVictoria’s Secret models

I checked behind me. No wings.

"Not yet," the angel said, like he was listening to my head. "First, you have a few things to take care of."

Great.I couldn’t even go to hell without owing some asshole a favor. All of a sudden I felt tired, really

tired, tired of everything. My life had been one piece of bullshit piled on top of another. A giant mountain

of crap, and I'd been the king of thedungheap .Big VicDonato .

So what the hell?Might as well screw up my afterlife, too.

"Shoot," I said. He winced and looked at the bed. "You know what I mean."

I had some debts to work out.Of course.Which meant I had some time to serve, a cross betweenjuvie

detention and a Federal pen.

My sentence was two more years stuck inside the fucking Magellan.

Which just goes to prove, the more things change …

Two years later, on the last day of detention (say hallelujah),I sat on a plastic avocado-green couch in

the Magellan’s lobby and stared at the desk clerk, who was reading a thick paperback. He was new, I

noticed. I kept an eye out for that sort of thing around here.

"Hey," I said. The desk clerk glanced up at me, waved vaguely, and went back to moving his lips. "Hey!

Buddy!"

"Yeah?"He didn’t even look up this time.

"You ought to get a better job. This one’s bad for your health." If he was an innocent asshole working

the night shift, a little intimidation could save his life. Of course, if he was a genuine innocent asshole, he

couldn’t have heard me ask the question, ‘cause, of course, I was dead, and therefore that would be

kinda hard.

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