“Barlow,” he said.
His face was neutral behind that long greying beard, but he didn’t extend his hand to me, so I didn’t extend mine to him. This would have been a lot easier without his subordinates in the room.
“Iron” Jim was looking a little less iron these days, but I knew under that gut was muscle almost hard enough to break your hand on, because he wouldn’t do business with me until we’d fought. For a guy in his fifties, he gave a pretty fuckin’ good account of himself.
“Jim. How much worse is it than I’ve heard on the news?”
“About ten times worse. We got most of ours out, and three of theirs. We left one of them, and didn’t have time to get the last six of ours before the police arrived.”
“Yeah, I thought you were supposed to keep the police away from our bar-” began one of Jim’s guys.
“Shut the fuck up, Ed, I’m talking here,” said Jim.
I answered anyway. “I’ve kept the police away from your business for two years, but this was an open gunfight. If police don’t show up, and fast, then we start having to deal with independent federal investigations. We don’t need that shit.”
“Thirty-seven dead, another dozen injured.”
“The reports said it was the Picollis. That true?” I asked.
That was the crux of the matter. That was what made this my business, and made this visit necessary. If this was no territory play by some other club, then the Picollis were not as scattered to the four winds as I hoped, but alive and organized.
“Yeah. They gave us a message before all hell broke loose. They said you couldn’t protect us.”
Inwardly I smirked in triumph. The Picollis had played them wrong. Saying something like that wouldn’t make Ex Machina run for the hills. It would simply provoke a violent response, given the chance. On the outside, I kept my poker-face on.
“You got their bodies back here?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re in there.” He pointed at a closed door. “We’re going to feed the motherfuckers to the dogs once you’ve had a look at them.”
Jim opened the door and held his hand out for me to go ahead. On the floor, stacked haphazardly, were three very well-dressed and very dead mobsters.
I crouched down and pushed the suit jacket back on the top one, before ripping his shirt sleeve at the shoulder. There it was, the Picolli family mark tattooed in dark ink. I used to have one myself, until I added a hangman’s noose around the design, and now it was unrecognizable.
“You know ‘em?” Jim asked, standing over me while his captains crowded round the door.
I took out my phone and took photos of each of their faces. “No. Just low-level soldiers, and new. After my time. Do you know where they came from? Where they went?”
“Nope. One of my guys followed them for a ways, but a pissed off biker is pretty fuckin’ conspicuous. He was lucky to get away alive. They went ‘west’ but that don’t help us none.”
I stood, bringing myself back past Jim’s height and looked from him to the blocked exit. They had me cornered. If they wanted to try and extract some revenge from me, this was their best shot. I took the time to look each one of them in the eye before gesturing out the same way Jim had gestured in.
After a tense pause, everybody headed back to Jim’s desk and he offered me a seat opposite him. I stayed standing up.
“I’m going to arrange a payment to you of ten thousand per head for the brothers you lost today. I’m not telling you what to do with the money, but I want it to go to their families if they had any. Two thousand to each of the injured. It’s not enough, but no amount of money is enough to pay this back. So with the money comes a promise. I will give you the opportunity to take part in a fucking massacre when the time comes. It might involve a road trip, but you still have wheels, right?”
Jim said nothing for a while. “We, the brothers and I, appreciate that you came down here. That shows respect. And balls. This.” He waved his hand around. “Doesn’t change anything about the agreement we have. I didn’t start this club to recruit a bunch of pussies who thought nobody would ever shoot at us. Did I, brothers?”
That got him a round of murmured “fuck no’s.”
“We’ll take you up on that offer,” he finished.
I paused, making sure he was done, and then slowly extended my hand out to him. Equally slowly, he reached out and accepted it, nodding and pumping once up and down.
“Tell the dogs to enjoy their dinner,” I said, and turned to leave.
Outside, it sounded like the party was really ramping up inside the other building, but I didn’t take the time to expand my musical horizons. I headed straight back to my car where my driver and Lorenzo were waiting, no doubt with their hands on the panic buttons in case shit hit the fan.
“Let’s go,” I said as soon as the door was closed behind me, and the car immediately started rolling towards the gates.
Lorenzo was looking out the tinted window with blatant disgust at the bikers he could see around the bonfire, the chaotic scenes everywhere. They were unruly, but if you knew how to point them in the right direction, then they could sure deliver some blunt force trauma.
The car pulled out to the road and we headed back towards the city. Lorenzo, sitting in one of the seats looking backwards, watched the Ex Machina headquarters fade into the distance, his distaste not abated at all.
“You look like you’re sulking,” I said.
“Back in the day we never would have stooped to making deals with animals like these,” he said.
“Well, it isn’t fuckin’ back in the day. Besides, after the little newsflash we got today we might need them more than ever. I didn’t think the Picollis would be able to muster up something like that.”
“What? Did you think they’d lay down and give up?”
“After losing an entire generation, all the heads, their funding and their army all at once? I didn’t think it was the end, but I thought they’d need more time to recover,” I said.
“Well, I guess they had some money you didn’t know about.”
“Probably. Or they got some help from out of town. Another family. Detroit maybe, because none of the ears we’ve got on the ground heard shit about this coming. So yeah, Ex Machina stays on the books.”
“Fuck ‘em. Cutting in on our profits. We could make this something great, something pure, but we can’t do it with them riding on our coattails,” he said.
“Fuck sake, Lorenzo. It’s that kind of shit that made the Picollis weak enough to take down. Last time I checked “back in the day” wasn’t so fuckin’ peachy for you. You’re as Italian as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but they never promoted you above soldier. This discussion is over.”
Lorenzo sat back and stewed in his own juices for a while as the city passed by outside. His attitude was getting on my fucking nerves.
Finally he spoke up again. “Tony said he’s got a new batch of girls at the club tonight, ready to start work tomorrow, if you wanted to help break them in. He said one of them can practically suck a man inside out through his cock.”
Ordinarily, I’d be all over that proposition. Some of these bitches could deep-throat a cock while yodeling the alphabet backwards and juggling three live cats, but you might want to use two condoms when you fucked them.
They weren’t even a shadow of a patch on what it felt like to fuck Kendall. They could never imitate the sexy way Kendall sounded when her pussy was wrapped around my cock.
They’d never look at me the way Kendall did. That might have been what I liked the most. In her eyes, I was a hero. I didn’t just fuck her so hard she couldn’t walk. I changed her life.
I’d seen lots of people who were scared of me. I’d seen professional respect. I’d seen bitches cumming so hard that they passed out, but I hadn’t seen anything like the way Kendall looked at me in over two decades. I wondered if it was a coincidence that she was the one asking me so many questions about that time in my life too.