D2 ♐ { Rickie Gambino } ♐ WIP

"Can you hear me now?" Otto's voice cracked through the snail shell lodged in my ear. I thumbed around blindly until I could feel the small plate of the tuner and ironed out the static.

"Yeah," I murmured into the face of my watch, "You're on."

"Order a drink or something," he hissed back, "You're shaking like a sinner in church." And it was true. It was a hand bordering on epilepsy that waved the bartender away and my voice was laced with so many slurs and stutters I had no alibi in defending my sobriety. I hadn't had a lick of liquor all week, however. Didn't stop me from being drunk off anxiety and stupid off of fear.

"Ripred, you're pathetic."

"Big words coming from someone safe at home watching porn and playing online sudoku," I snorted back.

"Hey! I'll have you know I've never played sudoku willingly before in my life. And how could I know you look like a a choir boy who just wet his dress from my house?"

I spun on the polished wood of the bar stool to look about the bar, hoping to see Otto's flat, acne-seasoned face and find he came out to back me up, after all. Otto and I've worked for the Boss for five years, but up until now it was all paperwork and tax balancing and filing. After a recent blowout with a rivaling "company", the Boss's number of associates got severed in half and he turned to desperate measures to rebuild and cover his losses. Like send out a pair of accountants that, collectively, shave once a week, together to restock on munitions from the black market.

"Where the hell are you?" 

"On the roof of the condos across the street."

"Why the hell are you there and not at home?"

"Oh? You don't want me here? Okay, I guess you can just handle her on your own--"

"No! Dammit. I knew I should've picked scissors..."

"I'm just kidding, Lukas. If I let you lone wolf this the Boss is going to kill both of us. You hear what he did to Bugsy and his boys last month?"

"No..."

"Have you seen Bugsy or Arnold or any of those sorry sons of bitches since last month?"

"No..."

"Exactly."

"....we're dead."

"No we won't be! As long as we stick to what we read in the case file. You read her case file, right?"

"Yeah, she's Gambino's only kid. Frederica--"

"Lukas!"

"What?!"

"I knew you didn't read the case file."

"I got the general idea of it..."

"Call her Frederica and she'll find out where you live, cut your head off, and shove it up your own ass."

"...the girl is like seventeen."

"Then she'll light you on fire, and smoke a golden cigar over your incinerating body."

"I highly doubt she's capable of--"

"She's Gambino's kid."

Ignazio Gambino was the reason the monster under your bed hides under the rocket ship sheets of some goddamn seven year old for protection. The syllables of his name were fashioned from fear and cemented by the pasty ashes and blood of the ones who dared tell him "no". He was crowned with a billion-dollar dead-or-alive price on his head of a kingdom he could rattle and tip over like dominos if he was feeling charitable. Gambino built an entire empire in the shadows of District 2, extorting trillions when there was nothing good on the television, fencing stolen weaponry straight out of the capitol in his sleep.

"Right," my voice cracked on the burden lodged in my throat from biting off so much more than an army of trained bloodhounds could chew. "Rickie."

"It's time now. Drop it."

The nerves wiring all along my arm felt severed from one another. A limp hand choreographed by some omniscient puppeteer rather than my own free will slipped into my jacket pocket and wrapped my fingers around the black fountain pen inside. I grimaced at its touch, as one would knowing that the slight of their hand could very well release the guillotine.

I dropped the pen unto the ground and heard it clatter against the verawood floor once! twice! thrice! four times! fiv--

But after the second rattle the orchestra went from a minor fall to a major lift, and the sound was indistinguishable. The ticking of your last seconds on earth, the final beats your heart can bellow, the clinking of a woman's heels against the cold floor.

"Here you go," she said, picking up the pen, placing it upon the bar top, and taking a seat on the stool beside me. Her lips were glazed over in a spiced tonic of scarlet and curved upward in a skinning-blade smile. 

" I fall asleep in an American flag
I wear my diamonds on skid row
I pledge allegiance to my dad
For teaching me
e v e r y t h i n g   h e   k n o w s "
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