Morally Ambiguous (Lo longer being updated)

Chapter 9

He slowly swung his around, clicking his vertebrae back into place. I’d given him quite the beating, one he wouldn’t forget for a long time, but first he had to explain to me just what was going. Otherwise, there would be a lot worse to come.  He spat blood and saliva, the foaming mixture collecting in the recesses at the corners of his mouth dripping into a disgusting red string. Then he began to speak, his voice warbling from the pain.

“Man, you got it all wrong. Well, not all of it, but most of it. You know who we are, you know what we do, you’ve been hunting us for weeks personally. Drug trafficking from eastern Europe and Mexico, big business over here. Big demand down in Hoboken for anything at all, and we were the best at supplying their demands. Until your piece of shit commissioner tried to get in on it.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about, the trouble down in Hoboken was known citywide. Substance abuse from every guy and his grandmother down in the shanty of New York. This mafia boss, John, sounded like he might have come from there originally. Faint New Jersey accent mixed with the traditional Italian New Yorker dialect. Every “R” became an “au” and so on. That really ground my gears, listening to them mispronounce almost every word. I had to grind through it listen to this fat bastard though, as he continued on.

“See, Commissioner Franco seems to think that he’s above his own law, and that blackmail works on the mob. He obviously doesn’t know our old, Mafia family business. But, the New Jersey boys, the new mobs moving from the north, they don’t have any respect for the history, they’ll do anything to get their cut of the profits as fast as they can, so they pay the Comish a small fee for every shipment and he makes sure it gets through unmolested by the pigs… I mean cops.”

Why the fuck was he explaining this to me? It had nothing to do with anything and I made sure he knew that.

“Get to the point. Where does Sarah fit in?”

I think he knew I was going to do my best to hurry him, and had his answer prepared.

“You know where your wife works?”

I really had to think about this one. Whenever she talked to me about her job, I tended to just block her voice out and concentrate on whatever I was doing. She would just drone on for hours about this and that, some bitch talking behind someone’s back, some idiot losing all of her work.  I did occasionally pick up little tidbits of information though, and I was sure she worked in media.

“Some newspaper or something, I dunno. She’s a journalist.”

He nodded his head and said “Exactly. Specifically she was working on the crime stories, political stuff and corruption.”

It was all starting to come together, the red string connecting all the points on the mind map.

“She started looking a little too deep into what you were doing, she saw that your unit suddenly started getting interest in the Mafia and wanted to make a story. What she found was a little worse. They’d upped the manhunt to cover it up, you know, hide the dealings in plain sight. If everyone thought that the Mafia were being taken down one by one, who’d look into their dealings? They weren’t sending you against the New Jersey mob, the one’s the Comish was getting paid by. Just us, the old school Mafia.”

The picture was put together, framed nicely with a lovely caption underneath. How didn’t you see this you stupid fuck? It explained why the Commissioner was acting so strange, why his briefings were so, well, brief, and why we stepped up organised crime operations so fast. I made sure I had the major points down, running them by him to confirm the story.

“So, your lot were paying us to keep your deals a secret, we started covering up by stepping up our ops against you, Sarah caught wind of it and now what? Who’s got her, where is she? And who from the precinct would’ve known?”

He coughed up a cascade of blood as he tried to clear his throat, eyes clenched and his knuckles white as he clenched them tightly. I’d really messed him up bad, his face pummelled into a pulpy mess. He was really going to need some serious medication to clear up his throat, otherwise he’d be bleeding from his mouth for the rest of his life.

“First, not our lot, the New Jersey mob, and I don’t have a clue. The police are going to be taking her somewhere, probably making her out to be a criminal being extradited. Airports, ferries, I don’t know, you’d have to ask your boss. As for who’s in on it, anyone in a position of power must have known, otherwise they’d have taken him down. They’re probably getting a share.”

I knew exactly what to do next. I sauntered over to my bedside table and slid open the draw, revealing a Glock in a holster, three mags, a butterfly and a torch. I tossed my jacket onto my duvet, before sliding on my holster with the Glock fit snugly inside the brown leather. Slowly and deliberately, I slid each of the fifteen nine millimetre rounds from each magazine and placed them in front of me on the floor. I slid my back down the wall and flicked the knife out, twirling it gracefully in the air.

As John Coulter looked on, bemused and in intense pain, I tossed him a bottle of painkillers and picked up a single nine mil round. Like a factory line, I cut a half centimetre cross into the top of the first bullet, effectively making a homemade hollow point round. One by one, I crossed a bullet, placed it into its magazine and picked up the next, repeating the process. My eyes stared intently at my hands as they slowly produced the tools for my next mission. If my ex-buddies at the precinct wanted a war, they were gonna fucking get one. And I was going to bring it to their front doorstep.