Oldfangled

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Levi Strauss remembered everything that’d ever happened to him. Yes, everything. In fact, his earliest memory was one of floating peacefully in his mother’s womb, enjoying her warm, relaxing amniotic bath, safe, secure and with not a care in the world. No ignoble enterprise to be engaged in, no grueling schedule to keep, no cabal of crooked loan sharks to answer to. Once, as a child, when he’d told his father that he possessed this remarkable eidetic gift, the old man had slapped Levi’s face and called the boy a liar. Levi Strauss would never share his secret with another soul.

Levi wasn’t the famous inventor of blue jeans, although he’d been born near about the same time. Nor was he a relation. No, Levi was an enforcer, a dragoon, a breaker of kneecaps and elbows. He’d fallen into the profession as a youth and hadn’t done anything much else since. After all, for a man with Levi’s gifts, the work suited him.

For the past eighteen years he’d been on retainer to Tommy ‘Chopstick’ Lee, the most foul-mouthed, incontinent prick of a mobster Levi had ever the displeasure of meeting. He chose to work for Tommy only to be certain he wasn’t at odds with the bastard. Not that he feared the man. Levi feared no man. He simply didn’t want the aggravation of being opposed to the likes of Tommy. Not that such promised any guarantee of a trouble-free life. Case in point: before Tommy, Levi had worked for the Sabatini family under much of the same rationale. Things hadn’t worked out. Several years in, the elder Sabatini, Guy, had Levi drugged and bound with telephone cable in a steel chair one night and loped off his thumb. The old man made his second mistake in thinking he’d broken Levi and letting him go.

The Sabatini crew was no longer in the business. Levi had been forced to kill the entire criminal enterprise—seventeen men in all—just to get out from under his problems with them. And, although his retribution was brutal and complete, Levi was left unsatisfied; he never got his thumb back. What a mess.

Levi Strauss had to lay low for a few years following that, but eventually he drifted back into the strong-arm, muscle-for-hire business. He’d tried a few other gigs, but in the end, what else was a guy like him going to do, he’d told himself. One thing led to another, and before too long, Levi discovered he could either work for Tommy ‘Chopstick’ Lee or move out of the city. He hated Tommy, but he loved the city. So that’s how it was and had to be.

Even after all the decades, Levi could instantly bring to mind each and every soul he had ever done business with. His recollections of every twisting, grimacing loser begging and pleading for just one more day to pony up the dough were as crisp in his mind after all those years than as if he had just broken those poor bastards not five minutes ago.

“C’mon, Mr. Strauss…gimme ‘til Saturday,” the man currently balled on the floor at Levi’s feet squeaked.

Just like all the others. “Nope,” Levi sighed. Just as he always did.

The only other two customers in the pool hall beat it out onto the street while the sweaty bartender fumbled a pitcher and open beer resulting in a shattering of glass. When Levi spun about to face him, the bartender scrambled and darted off into the back.

Levi thoughtfully selected a pool cue from the nearby rack and tested its heft. He tapped the heavy end into the palm of his thumb-less right hand.

The desperate man tried one last gambit. “I’ll give ya five hundred easy just to forget ya found me! Huh, whatdaya say? Easy-peasy!”

Levi looked him dead in the eyes. “Forget? Me? Not likely,” Levi said, bringing the stick up over his head.

Back out in the alley, Levi stopped to clean the brain matter off of his pants. As he popped the slick chunks into his mouth, only then did he remember that he’d forgotten to check the body for the $850 he’d come looking for. He shrugged. He wasn’t supposed to have killed the slob either, so what did it matter?