Ricardo

Fuck!

My knuckles cracked against his face. I’d told myself the only boxing I would do these days would be against a punching bag. I would change my ways and stop fucking hurting people.

Six months ago, I’d had a widow turn up at my door with her child, claiming I’d killed her husband. I told her I didn’t do it, but what I didn’t tell her was I had ordered the hit on him.

She was better off without him. The man had a woman in nearly every state and most likely more children, but it wasn’t my business to dig into her love life. No, I wasn’t any marriage counselor, for sure. But I did make a promise after seeing her son’s blue eyes swell with tears as his mom said, “This is the man who killed your father.”

I promised to stop being the monster I’d been for so long, and try and value the life in front of me, unless I really had to put it to an end. Just like a leopard couldn’t change its spots, I knew that I was kidding myself by making such a promise.

I knew even if he was a shit husband, he was a dad. I’d been paying all their living expenses since the day that had happened, but finding Pa dead made me break the promise I made all those months ago. Everything had gone through the fucking window.

What mob king didn’t inflict violence on another?

None.

I was fucking kidding myself if I thought I could stay in this line of work and not inflict harm on others. It went with the job description, the one Dad had told me from the start. We lived by violence, and we died by it. I had to get revenge on whoever killed the old man, no doubt, like me, he most likely deserved it.

“You going to talk, or you want me to do some real damage?”

Fuck, I sounded so old-fashioned, like I was in my sixties and not my forties. Pa was my only living parent. My mom died by a slit to the throat when I was five. It took Dad two days to figure out who did it and exact revenge, not only on the man himself but his whole family. He wiped out a whole bloodline when mom died. Dad had been dead a whole fucking week and so far, all I’d hit were dead walls. It made me want to take out my gun and pop Mario. There was no fucking way no one knew nothing.

Impossible. Someone knew. The issue was, no one was talking.

“Ricardo, think about mi mama, she’ll be alone if you do this,” Mario whimpered as I held his throat in one hand, his dark strands wet from sweat and fear thinking I was going to kill him. His dark eyes were half-closed, one eye because Juan had thumped him as soon as we took him. The other eye could barely manage to stay open. I had my gun in my other hand, just in case I got fed up and decided to pop him.

Sometimes, this was the problem with these interrogations. I wouldn’t get the answer I needed, and I would pop the mark by accident due to impatience. I didn’t want to do with Mario. I knew Ma, Mario’s mom, was powerful, and if I crossed the line, which I was already doing, it would end in a turf war. I wanted to know who did the hit on Dad and be done. This fucking game of someone does a hit on you; they tread on your toes, so you do the same on them, the classic cat and mouse, was tired and old.

Having the control and power to do whatever I wanted all the time, was a dream come true. Until I got older and lost friends, close friends were part of the circuit; they’d died. Always a horrible death and then the same thing would happen, like what was happening now, it was a vicious circle, and him talking about his mom wasn’t helping.

“How many people has Ma knocked off?”

He blinked a little too long for me to believe he didn’t fucking know. He must have been blind, deaf, or dumb not to realize his mom ran the Northside, not his uncle. Everyone knew his Ma was the balls of the family, but to her sweet innocent son, she was his Ma. Everyone called her Ma for a reason. It had nothing to do with her skills in the kitchen, but more to do with her organizational skills. The idea of him not knowing made me want to stop doing what my gut instinct was telling me to do.

And that was to take him out.

“None. Ma cooks and nothing else. She’s my Ma…” He was sniffing and crying like a baby. Not so much because of the possibility I was going to take him out, but because he was completely innocent.

Mario knew nothing; he didn’t even know his Ma was the Queen on Northside. I could tell him what he didn’t know and use him. Shit, everyone used someone, especially in this business, and I intended to do it now and use it to my fucking advantage.

I felt as if I was at peace, but I could see the horror on Mario’s face as I told him about his mom. All the hits his uncle had done had been in the palm of his Ma’s hand. They were nothing but puppets on a string. The woman was ruthless. One time, I could have sworn Pa was a little scared of her, and he walked around as if fear was his number one enemy, and he didn’t possess it at all or even have it in his vocabulary.

“I don’t believe it. She’s my Ma. She gave birth to me; she wouldn’t.”

I took off the rope that was around his legs to stop him running off, and sat opposite him, and talked to him man-to-man, I left out the gory details, not all of them, but the list was too fucking long of the number of people she’d taken out. There was one particular person I knew would be of interest to him. The love he lost, and the reason why.

The guy was hurting; he’d been living a lie. Sure, he was young and had been protected from being involved in taking people out, but he was still involved in some ways, even if he pretended he didn’t know what went on behind closed doors.

Sunday lunches, Ma invited the main guys over to talk business. And anyone she wanted rid of, she made them a special plate. So special she would put it in a tub for them to take home and made sure they never got home to eat it. Whoever left with a tub in their hand had been given their last supper. It was the sign for her men to take a hit on them.

Shit, when she found out Mario was gay, his piano teacher had been giving him two types of lessons, the teacher met his death not by his uncle’s hand, but by Ma’s. She did that one personally; she didn’t want anyone to have the pleasure of taking him out. She made him suffer, so Pa told me. But I spared Mario those details. I knew he was hurting enough, I didn’t have to rub salt on his wound.

Mario was crying like a baby because he believed his Ma had accepted him. She did, as long as he never slept with another man in his life. She made sure the word got out, no gay bar, club, or any kind would let Mario get in. He was young now, but he would have figured it out later, his Ma wasn’t the innocent one in the family. He’d spent so many years trying to figure out how to come out and deal with his sexuality, maybe he’d turned a blind eye to the truth behind his family and like Pandora’s box, I’d opened it up for him.

“Ricardo, tell me it’s not true. I loved him.”

No more did I have him bound up with a gun to his head; he’d suffered a loss like I had. A love so deep no one could replace it.

“Mario, listen to me. I need your help. I need to figure out who killed my dad. I need this shit to stop.”

He was distressed and tired as I cut him loose. The rope around his body was loosened, the ones that tied his hands behind his back were cut. He used his free hands to simultaneously wipe his eyes, and the blood which was pouring down his forehead from the beating I’d given him earlier.

“What do you need from me?” he said as if he had a surge of energy. Anger had taken over where fear once was.

“I need you to be in the house with your eyes wide open, and your ears sharp, after you tell her that you’re away for a few days. So, she doesn’t see the mess I made to your face. Besides, you’ll need time to heal. Maybe a week or two.”

He knew what to do, he’d been on the lookout for his uncle a couple of times and they said he was good when you gave him something to focus on. If you told him to do a job, and be present, he would be present.

She hated her son being gay; she’d voiced it many times behind his back, it was a case of everyone knew—everyone apart from Mario. The poor kid believed his ma had accepted him, but deep down she hated everything ‘his kind’ represented, which I thought was ironic.

They’d never killed or caused any harm to anyone, not like our kind; we fucking killed in the flash of an eye, yet Ma felt as if we should be accepted by society and her loving son shouldn’t be.

I couldn’t deal with all this shit. I needed to focus, and find out who killed my dad and then take revenge, even if it meant it would be the last time I would be alive. It was a risk I was willing to take. I’d never known anything other than the life I’d been brought up to lead and I didn’t know any better. Or rather I didn’t want to. I hated the idea of using Mario as a pawn because if it all went sour, then he would be the one to suffer for it. Besides, there wasn’t anything Ma didn’t know; she was sure to know something.

“I’ll make her pay for what she’s done.”

I nodded and signaled for Juan to set him free. I had to get the clean shirt out of the back of my car, look half-decent and get across town to repeat the same thing all over again. This time, I wasn’t sure if I would be so willing to let him go. I had so much frustration built up inside of me, one for thinking Mario knew his Ma was a monster, and then the other for knowing I’d turned him against her.

It should have made me feel better, knowing I would get the results I’d been trying to get every day during this week.

Nothing made me feel good, though.

Nothing.