Some notable events:
June 18, 2001: One of the Comets, Grant Delmonico, was sitting in his old Dodge Super Bee at a country railroad crossing, the kind where there are only flashing lights, no gates. He was alone, according to police. Delmonico was on a long list of suspects after a Molotov cocktail was pitched through the window of the Kickstart the previous week, a little message to the Slots to back off on the drug trade, leave some business for them. The fire was contained quickly, and the bar was only out of business for ten days.
The Slots had put out the word that they weren’t going to take this shit, even though the police told them they would look into it.
What police figure happened was this: A truck came up behind Delmonico, a four-wheel-drive job, with plenty of traction, and shoved his Dodge right into the side of a fast-moving westbound freight. There were skid marks on the pavement, indicating Delmonico had stomped on the brakes, tried to hold his classic car in place, but the vehicle was no match for the four-by-four. Once his bumper was caught by the fast-rolling trucks of a tanker car, the Dodge was yanked off the road and dragged down the track, twisting and ripping apart along the way.
Delmonico was dead at the scene.
July 23, 2001: Sebastian Loone, loosely associated with the Slots, is found beaten to death out back of a Canborough butcher shop. This is assumed to be payback for the murder of Delmonico.
July 31, 2001: The Slots suffer another loss. This time, it’s the gang’s reputed second-in-command, Eldon Swain. The irony is, he dies in nearly the same manner as the Comets’ Delmonico, except Swain’s car doesn’t get pushed into the side of the train. It gets shoved into its path. The engineer was able to see the whole thing pretty clearly from the cab of the diesel, even though the incident happened at night. The headlight beam picked up the car, a small Japanese sedan, waiting at the flashing lights. With the engine only a few yards from the crossing, this big pickup appears out of nowhere, rams the sedan from behind, right in front of the locomotive.
Swain was declared dead at the scene, but they had to gather his various parts together before they could get someone to come look at the body for the purposes of identification.
April 9, 2002: The Kickstart, after hours. Someone bursts into the upstairs back room, where the night’s receipts are counted, and shoots Eldridge Smith, Payne Fletcher, and Zane Heighton. The shooter disappears, with the money. Gary Merker and Leonard Edgars, who were not in the building at the time, return to find the three men dead. Canborough Police steel themselves for an all-out war against the Comets.
It doesn’t happen.
The Comets deny any responsibility for the Kickstart massacre. As if they’d own up to it if they’d done it.
Police speculate that the Slots don’t respond because there aren’t enough of them left to mount a war. Merker lost his number two man a few months earlier. Now he’s lost three more. He hasn’t got enough soldiers left to go into battle.
But there are other questions, reading between the lines. Why was it that Merker and Edgars weren’t there? Merker, at least, was usually there to check the day’s tally. Was it possible he’d cut some deal with the Comets, that he’d set up his friends for some sort of reward from the other side?
It was all speculation. No one really knew what happened. And no one was ever charged in the deaths of the three men.
Nothing I read in the Canborough Times’ files indicated what was unusual about the manner in which the three men were shot.
People stopped frequenting the Kickstart. Who wanted to grab a beer where you stood a chance of getting your brains blown out? The strippers quit, found work elsewhere. Before long, Merker bailed on the Kickstart, and wasn’t much heard from again. He left Canborough.
The Comets, it seemed, assumed control of the drug and prostitution trade in the city.
All interesting stuff, but some big questions remained unanswered for me.
Where did Trixie fit into all this? Why didn’t her name even come up? What did she know that had her on the run from Gary Merker? What had she seen?
And there was another question I supposed I had to consider.
What had she done?
Gary was impressed with how you never had to say to Candy, “Get over it.”
He liked that she got over things so quickly. What a trooper.
Her boyfriend Eldon, the father of her kid, gets himself smacked by an oncoming train, she pulls it together. He and all the other guys except Leo, they get a little out of hand one night, treat her, he had to admit, a bit disrespectfully, and she’s back to work a couple of days later.