WE’VE GOT THE PLACE SURROUNDED AND WE’RE ABOUT TO GO IN. I’LL CALL YOU ONCE WE HAVE THIS WRAPPED UP.
I read the text from Captain Marks right before I entered Pop’s hospital room, so I had a smile on my face as I walked in. God, I wished he was awake to hear the good news. It was only a matter of time before Brother X would be taken care of. I leaned in close, running my hands along Pop’s arms to warm him. All the machines in the room required the temperature to stay cool, but it also meant that he was colder than he should have been.
“Hey, Pop, I just want you to know that I’m about to have this whole Brother X thing handled. Trust me, him and his people are gonna pay. You’d be proud. It’s exactly the way you would have wanted it to go down.”
Now that I felt some control over this big situation, the smaller one nagging at me reared its head. I was going to have to sit down with Orlando and work things out. We were going to have to find a happy medium, like Pop and Uncle Lou had when they were younger, because this infighting was not what we Duncans were about. I knew Orlando couldn’t see it, but in the long run, it would ultimately tear us apart.
I took a seat next to the bed. “Pop, you know I don’t ask for much, but I’m begging you, please come back to us. Come back to me. I know we’re getting older and you trust us to run things—and Orlando is doing a good job, so you were right to give him the reins—but we all still need you. There is so much that we don’t want you to miss. Hell, I haven’t even had a kid yet.”
“Hey, man. You see Junior?” Orlando entered the room looking exhausted. I guess we were all tired. None of us had had a decent night’s rest since X escaped from prison.
“Yeah, he just left to get something to eat with Ma and Aunt Donna.”
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
“About what you’d expect. He blames himself.” We both looked down at Pop. “I swear sometimes I think Pop’s just testing us. Seeing if we can handle a crisis or if we’ll fuck it up.”
“Yeah, that would be just like him to put us all through this,” Orlando said with a sad laugh.
“I just want him to come back,” I said.
Orlando fist-bumped me, showing mad brotherly love. He obviously knew I needed it at the moment. Hell, who wouldn’t need some comfort sitting beside Pop’s bed? The closer you were to all those machines and tubes, the more you had to confront the possibilities.
“You and me should talk,” I told Orlando. I wanted to fill him in on the solution I’d come up with involving Captain Marks.
After we left Marie’s brothel, I had given Marks X’s location. Obviously the NYPD would have some interest in taking out the most wanted man in New York. The cops could take the place of our muscle, so that we wouldn’t have any losses on our side. It also meant we could avoid taking on partners like Tony the Pimp or Popeye Wilson, who would come looking for a piece of the pie when it was all said and done.
The real beauty of the plan was that X had basically given himself a death sentence when he took out the two corrections officers. I wouldn’t bet against the possibility that some cop would find a way for X to be caught in the line of fire before he ever made it into handcuffs.
At least that was the way I expected the plan to fall into place now that I knew Captain Marks and his people were making their move—until my phone rang and that fantasy came crashing down.
I looked down at the caller ID and saw Marks’s number. “Hey, O, you might want to hear this call. I might have just ended the war.” I pressed the speaker on my iPhone.
We heard police sirens and lots of shouting in the background. I could picture the chaos, and a smile came across my face as I imagined Brother X laying in a pool of his own blood.
“Hey, Conrad! How’d it go, man?” I said.