Deadlock

3

A ghost ship.

Now that really took the old cake and sucked up the frosting to boot. It was like something from an old movie. I’ll give you $50,000 if you can spend the night aboard her. Wasn’t there an old movie with Vincent Price like that? Charlie couldn’t remember, but it seemed familiar.

Arturo thought Charlie had some real balls and, truth be told, he did. Usually. It was just good that Arturo didn’t know how Charlie was feeling on the inside when he walked into his office: absolutely white with terror. He wasn’t worried about the gambling debts. A guy like Arturo had ways of collecting in other ways and especially with someone like Charlie. There was always pick-up work to be done, maybe a robbery here or there, some package moved over the state line, a torch job or two. Things that fell between the cracks that his hoods didn’t have time to deal with.

So, it wasn’t the debt that was bothering him.

It was Pam.

Pam was Arturo’s wife and Charlie and she had been banging skins for like three months by that point. It was a very discreet arrangement. The sort that was born out of mutual physical attraction rather than any emotional entanglements. Simple. Straight forward. They met in out of the way places and only when Arturo was down in New York City or Miami, out in Chicago or Kansas City. Nobody knew about it but the two of them.

Of course, Arturo was powerful. He was also jealous, greedy, and suspicious by nature like all made guys were. Charlie wouldn’t have put it past him to have his wife followed. If that had been the case, though, there was no way in hell Charlie would have walked out of his office alive. Arturo would have had a couple heavies waiting there. They’d slug him, shoot him up with something, take him out somewhere peaceful to finish it up.

But nothing like that had happened.

Charlie had been sweating bullets when he went to see Arturo, but he had seen nothing that tipped him off that the man was onto him.

Still… he was paranoid.

A ghost ship? A fucking ghost ship?

It seemed too unbelievable, too staged. Then again, if Arturo wanted to whack him, why all the melodramatics? Unless, of course, that was part of the set-up. For all he knew, Arturo might have a couple meat-eaters waiting for him on the boat. Bing, bang, done. But Charlie wasn’t naïve. He had told three people where he was going and who he was going with. If something bad came down, Arturo would be looking at twenty years for murder conspiracy.

Maybe you shouldn’t have been fucking his wife. You ever consider that?

He had. God, how he had. Pam was something else, though, and he just couldn’t get enough of her. She was just like heroin, that girl. Once she got in your system, forget it. She owned you.

But Arturo was no dummy.

You could fill a graveyard with the guys who’d made that mistake. And Charlie had no intention of being one of them. He was going out to the ship tonight and he was going to be carrying. Worse came to worse, there’d be more than one body dropping.