Yazoo, Mississippi, 1922-v2
Mercury Cotton Plantation, 6:23am
- Two-for-One
I sat at what was once my father’s desk. It was an old mahogany desk he got from a Honduran magnate on a trade. He traded fifty bales of cotton for it. That might sound like a lot, but we were selling and shipping thousands of bales a year at our peak, so to my father, fifty bales was basically a few pennies.
The desk sat in front of the floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor, overlooking the field behind the house. He liked it there because the sun wouldn’t shine in until later in the day. I reached into one of the drawers near the top and pulled out a piece of paper that had Bill of Sale written across the top of it.
It’d been four years since my father had been murdered. I spent those four years doing everything I could to manage the business in my father’s permanent absence, but both customer distrust and my own grief made everything go downhill. I started selling off everything I could to make sure our workers stayed fed and housed, but eventually even they ended up sold off to trusted neighbors. Even farms as far south as Ocean Springs and as far north as South Haven were calling me with intent to purchase. They didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t feed them or house them any longer. They couldn’t own land, so I was in no position to give it to them.
The cotton fields of Mercury Cotton Plantation were no more, and this Bill of Sale was the final nail in the coffin.
In the time between then and now, I obsessed over finding my father’s killers. I hadn’t been able to sleep very well, getting no more than two to three hours a night, because I kept remembering that day in a memory so vivid, it’s as if I were reliving it all over again. I remember the weight of my father on top of me as he protected me to his death, the smell of his blood mixed with burnt hair and flesh pouring out of the bullet holes in his body. I remember Amelia screaming in the kitchen, her voice echoing horror in my fifteen year old ears. The sounds of bullets splintering wood and shattered glass raining down on the floor.
The police came shortly after, but the trail ran cold faster than a snowflake in a snow storm. It was passed off as a tragic accident, but with these men being from another country, the police washed their hands of it completely.
No one would act. It was just a tragic case that would go unsolved.
I couldn’t stand by and let my father die without vindication.
I studied the crime scene for years, tracing every bullet that entered the house to where it landed. Two hundred bullets total. I found a hundred and eighty-five of them and kept them in a mason jar on my father’s old desk. Of the missing fifteen, seven made it inside my father. The other eight ended up out in the field on the other side of the house. I dug out the seven fragments from my father, melted them down, and cast three bullets; two for the men who pulled the trigger, and one for the man who sent them.
At the time, I’d never heard of a weapon that could sling lead that quickly. Rumors of a military weapon spread through the CSA they were calling a submachine gun. Some US brigadier general named Thompson invented it to help them fight Germans or something like that. Word is, it’s handheld and can hold up to one hundred rounds in a single magazine.
Insane. Everything in me wanted one for myself.
But, how did a couple of thugs from up north get their hands on something so new? I pulled some resources my dad had written down in his bureau. I called most of the numbers on the list until I finally got something. It was my father’s shipping guy. His name was Carl Overton. Carl was a regular guy with a regular life up in Missouri. But, this regular guy knew some irregular names up in Illinois that liked doing irregular business with people from down south.
I asked him, “What kind of business, Carl?”
Carl spooked easily, but he told me in a hushed tone. “Look, kid. There’re some seriously bad people up there. The kind of people who can make anyone disappear, especially people like me. But, you seem like a nice kid, and your pops was a great man, so I’ll throw you a bone for his sake: the name you want is Giovanni Gabridone.”
I felt hope for the first time since my father’s death. A name. Finally, a name.
Was it the end, or the beginning? Was he the first of a long line of people, or was he the end of the list? Whatever it was, my life in Mississippi was over.
I called around to more people, and people who knew people, and people who knew people who knew people. I found out that Giovanni Gabridone was the name of a mafia Don who resided and reigned with terror in the city of Chicago Prime.
No one wanted to talk about him. He had bought-and-paid-for people all across the USA, and maybe even parts of the CSA. He had connections in other countries to get things no one else could get. He bought the law. He owned the politicians. He held the pen to the moral code.
Even if Gabridone wasn’t responsible for my father’s death, there’s no doubt he’s brought unspeakable torment and pain upon other innocent people.
But if he is, then it’ll be a two-for-one special.
I signed the Bill of Sale and left it on the desk, the morning sun beginning to peek its head over the horizon on the other side of the house. I packed enough clothes to fit in one bag. I didn’t want to take my whole life with me. In fact, the only life I had ever known was gone. Had been for four years at this point. My new life was just beginning. Reborn in the ashes of my father’s death, a spirit of righteous vengeance burned white hot within my soul.
I grabbed my bag, my grandfather’s sword, and my father’s two 1911’s, and I took the first step towards finding and killing the people who burned my whole world to the ground and pissed on its ashes.
Chicago Prime, 1931-v2
The Silver Slipper, Atlantis
7:25pm
2. Simple Math
The green-suit who was guiding me brought us to an elevator at the end of the corridor. Even the elevator was made of gold. Lights in between the elevator doors illuminated from top to bottom as the car descended from the upper floors. The number blinked and dinged right before the doors opened, another sultry female voice announcing “Level one: ground floor” from nowhere in particular.
A man with a golden tuxedo and a money-green tie was standing inside the elevator waving us in. He placed one foot out of the elevator before looking for any other riders, stepped back in, and asked, “Which floor?”
My Green Guide replied “We’re going to Senator Callahan’s floor.” He didn’t even look at the gilded elevator man.
“Right away sir. 33rd floor.” The golden elevator man replied. He leaned over and pressed an ivory white button that had the number thirty-three on it, causing it to illuminate. The elevator made no noise, but I could feel the floor trying to push through my feet before I realized we were ascending.
I looked at the golden man and asked “How many floors does The Silver Slipper have?” I kept having to remind myself to sound like Morrison and not like myself. It’s harder than you think.
He gave me a look of shock. Not at the question, but simply at the fact that I was speaking to him so casually. He hesitated to answer initially, but then he began stumbling over his words trying to find them, “oh, uh, well, that depends. From the ground floor up, there are one hundred and fifty. From the ground floor down, there are ten.”
“A hundred and fifty-nine floors! Holy mackerel.” I whistled.
“I beg your pardon?” He begged.
My green guide broke in, “Morrison, are you retarded or something? He said one hundred and fifty up, ten down. That’s a hundred and sixty.”
I gave the jolly green thug a stone-faced look and replied, “I would be retarded if I were as innumerate as you. He said ‘From the ground floor up…’ and ‘From the ground floor down.’ Do you normally count the ground floor as two floors? Because if you do, I got bad news for you. It’s one hundred and fifty-nine floors.”
The green man looked like he wanted to murder me, but then his eyes drifted off into the corner of the lift as the rusty wheels in his brain began producing fire-hazard levels of sparks and smoke. His fingers came up–as if that would help him–and he began mouthing words like one, two, uh, three.
A smile so dense with joy, but so subtle appeared momentarily across the golden attendant’s face. He choked down any amount of laughter that tried bubbling out of him, cleared his throat and said, “That’s correct, Detective. One hundred and fifty-nine.”
The green man’s head snapped down and he spoke a disgusting curse at the attendant, telling him to be quiet or else.
“Ya know, he might not be able to do anything to you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.” I turned and squared myself with my feckless guide, reminding myself of the tight quarters. “If you ever feel froggier than your green suit, you let me know. Perhaps you’re better at fighting than you are at counting.” I shot him a wink.
At that moment, the door dinged again with the automated voice reminding us we had reached our desired floor. The door opened up to another corridor, but this time there was no railing we could look over. The corridor was dark, except for a cone of light that would shine on the red and black carpet every five or six feet. The walls were full of pictures of the various famous people and powerful people that had resided here over the years. I saw some faces I recognized from the newspaper and some I recognized from the wanted posters. Anyone who had been anyone had taken up a room here.
Red doors were spaced in between each portrait with a small glass spyglass in the center and a silver number to indicate the address.
The green thug stopped when we came to a door with an “11” on it. Callahan’s I assumed. He gave a couple knocks. After a few moments, the spy glass on the door darkened, then a muffled voice from the other side said, “who is it?’
“Detective Morrison is here for you, Mr. Senator.” The green human calculator replied.
“Oh, yes! Please…” latches and locks clicked and clacked and the door swung open. “...come in, lads!” Said Senator Callahan.
