The three of us were unstoppable.
That’s when I started to hear the whispers about the Wolf.
*
In the old days the Wolf had owned this city. He was big and he was bad, but no one had seen or heard from him in years. There were rumors that he took a chunk of the pie from every operation, and those that weren’t willing to play nice risked having their houses blown in, so to speak.
Phillip tsk-tsked away my worry when I mentioned the rumors I’d been hearing; stories of a bushy-haired fella kicking in the doors of some of our smaller operations. We were in the back room of the bar my brother owned, the liquor sales and good-time girls up front a cover for the games in the back. Those days, Phillip spent more of his time playing cards than running things, so more and more of the day-to-day operations fell to me.
“There’s no such thing as the Wolf, Pauly,” Phillip said, throwing a card down on the table. “We would’ve met him long before now if he was a real thing. Quit worrying,” he said. “You’re gonna give yourself wrinkles.” Then he did that thing where he grabbed the back of my neck and shook me a bit.
I pulled free and gave him a nod as he went back to his card game, his hat cocked at a jaunty angle and a girl on his knee, that fearless grin I’d come to hate plastered across his face.
The next morning Peter found Phillip dead, his eyes staring wide and surprised. He’d been closing up, restocking, when someone had come in and iced him. No one knows what was said, and the drink straws scattered across the bar floor weren’t talking.
Peter and I gave Phillip the best funeral money could buy, and at the wake afterward, I pulled my brother aside.
“We need to look into this Wolf thing, Pete. You and I both know he offed Phil, and the last thing I want is this guy huffing and puffing all over us.”
My brother shook his big dumb head and drained the beer from the bottle in his giant mitt. “Never you mind, Pauly,” he said, his voice deep and rusty from disuse. “I’ll get him. The boys and I are gonna go out and rattle a few cages, see what shakes loose. You just keep everything running smooth like. Phillip woulda wanted it that way.” Then Peter went off to comfort his girl, who was standing in a corner crying pretty tears for a man she didn’t know.
I shook my head, feeling a dark sense of déjà vu. Phillip hadn’t listened to me either, and look where it had gotten him. But I knew better than to argue with big dumb Peter, and I let him do what he wanted.
Peter took out his grief on the city. Shopkeepers trembled in fear at the sound of his heavy boot steps, and the women in the markets whispered about whose husband had taken a beating recently. Peter worked his knuckles bloody trying to get answers, but he came up with nothing.
“Maybe it was an inside job,” he said one night as he sat on the couch in Phillip’s old office. It had been two months since Phillip’s murder, and I sat behind his big fancy desk, going through the day’s take. With my brother gone I had started meeting with the cops on our payroll and the bosses who ran some of our smaller operations. Although I wasn’t as good at it as Phillip had been, I was holding my own.
“It wasn’t an inside job, it was the Wolf,” I told Peter. “We need to find this guy and offer him a deal; otherwise we’re going to be next.”
My brother just shook his big dumb head and sighed. “I told you, there ain’t no such thing as the Wolf. It’s just an old rumor. Phillip was axed by someone in the organization. We just need to find out who.” My brother stood and put on his flat cap. “I’m goin’ home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
But I never saw my brother again.
*
They said it was a bomb, and that someone had snuck into Peter’s house during the day while his girl was out and planted it in the kitchen. When the thing went off it completely devastated his house and part of the neighbor’s. The cops never really found all of Peter’s body, just bits and pieces of it mixed in with the sticks of his destroyed house. Peter’s girl wasn’t home at the time, and for a little while the cops tried to pin it on her, but she wasn’t a killer. When she came home from her bridge game and saw the condition of the house, she broke down. The only damning bit of information the cops got out of her was that she’d been seeing Phillip on the side before he bit it. The poor girl was destroyed. Here she’d lost the two greatest loves of her life within a span of a couple months.
I paid for her to go upstate for some relaxation in a facility and thanked my lucky stars I was smart enough to leave the skirts alone.
But now I was all by myself, and I knew that the Wolf was real. Any day now he’d be coming for me, and I’d be ready.
I bought the building I lived in and evicted all the other residents. I fired the guard downstairs, giving him a nice bonus so he wouldn’t be too out of sorts, and I put my own boys in the front. I installed bars on all the windows and bricked up all the entrances except for the main lobby. Now there was only one way in and one way out, and you had to get past my boys to see me.
I was ready.
The bosses and dirty cops who reported to me thought I was losing it, that it had been an inside job, both Peter’s and Phillip’s murders. I took out hits on all of them. Then I found new guys, ones I could trust. I let them move up through the organization. I rebuilt my enterprise from the ground up.
And I waited.
Six, seven, eight months passed, and no sign of the Wolf. I relaxed my guard a little, started going out more. Dinner once a week. A show every once in a while. My enterprise flourished, and I was rich. I deserved to enjoy a little bit of that.
The Wolf found me one night while I was out at dinner.
I sat in the center of the restaurant, the only patron. I had taken to buying out the entire establishment when I dined so that I could eat alone, since people made me jumpy. I was less paranoid, but the Wolf could still be out there, waiting for his chance. I was enjoying a bowl of slop, the specialty of the house, when a bushy-haired man walked in. Both of my boys stood up, ready to escort him out, but he mowed them down without a word.
I jumped up from the table and ran, through the kitchen and out the back alley. I could hear the Wolf’s shoes pounding as he chased me down, and I gasped for breath, squealing as I ran. I was soft and large from too much food and too little movement, and there was no way I could outrun the monster I’d glimpsed back in the restaurant.
I skidded down an alley, coming up on a dead end. I searched around for an exit, but the only thing there was a pile of bricks and a few overflowing trash bins. I grabbed a brick and ducked down behind the garbage can, trying to quiet my breathing and hoping the Wolf hadn’t seen me.
Footsteps paused at the end of the alley and then began to approach. “Little pig, little pig,” a gravelly voice called, and chills ran down my spine. “You owe me.”