Lawyers, Guns and Money

SOHO, MANHATTAN

"Hey, buddy! Got a cig?" The old man stepped in Kane's path, unusually aggressive for a panhandler, even in New York. Kane was twelve blocks and ten minutes from the Jacob Javits Federal Center, walking north along Hudson Street, having crossed Canal and passing over the eastern terminus of the Holland Tunnel.

"I don't—" Kane began, but as the old man's eyes shifted past him, Kane reached for the forty-five and was turning, but a tad late. Stars exploded as something hard slammed into the side of his head.

It wasn't a TKO, but close. Kane went to his knees, still trying to draw his pistol, vaguely aware that the old man was running away. Someone wrapped Kane in a bear, more a grizzly hug around the chest, powerful arms, one of them covered in a cast bent at the elbow, which explained the 'something hard'. Kane was dragged to the curb where a black limousine awaited. He was tossed inside and someone snatched the gun out of the holster. He got his first look at his attacker and understood who and what he'd been hit with: Matteo, Sofia Cappucci's enforcer, and the weapon was his right arm in a cast covering from above his elbow to the wrist. The result of his last run in with Kane. There was a sort of irony in that, which Kane didn't pursue at the moment.

Matteo pushed into the back seat, shoving Kane farther inside.

Kane shook his head and blinked, trying to focus. That wasn't helped by the dim interior, the result of heavily tinted windows. There were four people across from him, seated facing rearwards. Two had guns trained on him, so Kane didn't go for the knife in the small of his back. There was a powerful odor which Kane couldn't place, but made him slightly nauseous.

"Can you hear me?" Sofia Cappucci asked, her heavy Brooklyn accent a bit echoey. "I said I wanted to talk to him, Matteo."

"Sorry." Matteo didn't sound sorry at all. "He can hear you. He's still conscious."

"Kane?" Cappucci asked.

Kane focused and now there were only two facing him, her and a guy with a gun. He was smaller than Matteo's six and a half feet, but the only size that mattered was that of the bullet in the pistol.

"What?" Kane said. His eyes were adjusting and the stars fading away. He'd been hit worse sparring but that didn't make it hurt less.

Matteo jabbed his elbow, his good one, into Kane's right side. Hard. "Talk nice to the lady."

"Right," Kane said. "What Mrs. Delgado?"

Matteo repeated his nudge. "It's Ms. Cappucci, asshole."

"Right."

"Enough," the recently widowed Mrs. Alfonso Delgado said. "I've decided my maiden name is more appropriate. Don't you think?"

Despite the heat outside, she had a fur coat draped over her Rubenesque figure. Which explained the air conditioner running full blast. She had black hair, made up in what looked like a pile to Kane, but his women's hair fashion sense was on par with his knowledge of ancient Greek, although he did know a smattering of Latin from his altar boy days. Her face seemed to glow, the result of heavy make-up, covering the remnants of bruises from a beating her recently departed husband had inflicted, and her lips were bright red. The beating had brought about Alfonso's death sentence by Sofia's father, the Don of the Cappucci family.

Kane nodded. "Sure. Good idea. Sounds much nicer, Ms. Cappucci."

The limo was moving north, slowly negotiating the double-parked trucks in the rundown Soho neighborhood.

"You been on my mind lately," Cappucci said. "And I was in the neighborhood and then Matteo sees you walking and I thought, how fortunate. I figured we'd give you a lift. Isn't that nice of me?"