FOR BLOOD AND LOYALTY

Chapter Eight

Victor walked into the gym the next morning but didn’t find Bobby at the desk. Instead he was on the floor, doing pull-ups and push-ups, the jail workout.

            “Trying to make a good impression?” Victor asked him.

            “For you, always,” Bobby replied.

            But the truth was, Bobby, in a wife beater, he looked great. He was in the best shape of his life and those lion tattoos on his shoulders with the tribal bands underneath still hadn’t faded. And neither had the letters O.S.N. that were written across his upper back. Victor, on the other hand, had slimmed down a little. Not to as skinny as he was before he started to fill out though, when he stopped boxing, when they went to jail. However, Bobby was confused. “I thought I was gonna meet you over there?”

            “Plans changed. I gotta go see an old friend first. One of your old friends too. Take the ride with me.”

“What are we doing down here?” Bobby asked as Victor pulled into the outdoor parking garage by the 109th precinct.

            “Well we’re not turning ourselves in,” Victor replied.

            But Bobby just looked around. “This fucking place hasn’t changed at all.”

            “It’s gotten worse,” Victor told him. “Gooks, everywhere.”

            “Jesus Christ,” Bobby said as they got out of the car, surrounded by Koreans.

            “They’re trying to take over Bayside too.”

            “A day I hope will never come.”

“If I could run them out I would. Fucking parasites.”

They were in Downtown Flushing, where all the shops were as well as where all the Asians in Queens congregated, by the bus depot and the 7 train. Most people called it Main Street and when they were younger it was an adventure taking the bus down there to buy clothes or take the subway into the city. But the thing was, since dozens of buses intersected down there on Main Street and all kinds of people passed through the neighborhood on a daily basis someone had to serve them food, which made Bobby happy as a motherfucker to see someone he’d forgotten about.

            “Holy shit,” he said as Victor smiled. “Jimmy, that you?”

            “You weren’t lying,” Jimmy said to Victor as they walked towards his cart. “Let me see if I remember. If I remember your favorite,” he told Bobby. “Shish kabob, on bread, with lemon, barbecue and hot sauce.”

            “You fucking asshole,” Bobby smiled. “That was everyone’s favorite.”

            As far as they were concerned Jimmy, a fat, gregarious, middle-aged Greek guy ran the best shish kabob stand in New York. So he asked Victor, “What can I get for you today?”

            “The usual,” Victor replied, as he slipped him $5. Because even though Victor was a drug dealer and an enforcer, he was also a growing loan shark and got 505 hundred dollars in cash back from Jimmy inside a brown paper bag that included two shish kabob sandwiches. There was no way he was charging him for it, but they still had to look good for the cameras.

            It was nice to see a friendly face though, Bobby thought. And likewise, Jimmy was happy to see Bobby. He was always appreciative of the time Victor, Bobby, Bell and another of their friends named Dino, some wild Puerto Rican-Italian kid they grew up with kicked the shit out of a pair of black kids from the nearby Bland Housing Projects who stuck him up and gave him a black eye back in ‘89. One of them even ended up with a cracked skull because Dino went too far. It must have worked though because no one from those projects ever bothered Jimmy again. Especially when word got out that he was under Jackie’s flag.

            Needless to say, Jimmy hooked Bobby up with a nice box of shish kabobs to take also. And Bobby, upon seeing that Jimmy still had the same dog, a big, beautiful mutt that was half German Shepherd and half Boxer, pet it while it just sat there next to the cart waiting for the next plate of food to arrive.

Bobby always liked dogs. And so did someone else, he thought.

            Forward motion, he told himself.