Gamma Blade - Tim Stevens Page 0,6

hair. But in the clip, his angelic features were distorted in a terrible howling rictus of fear and despair.

There was no pain in the child’s face.

Not... yet.

Fuentes’ jaw was working, but no sound came from his mouth. He resembled to Brull a marionette, one wielded by an inexperienced puppeteer.

Brull said, in a tone of serene reasonableness: “Like I said, Carlos, I’m not going to hurt you.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I tell you what. Let’s make it ten a.m. on Monday. An hour extra. Since I’m in a pretty fuckin’ positive mood today.”

He beamed. He had a way of doing it that ensured the light flashed off the diamond crucifix embedded in his left upper canine. He knew such an adornment was regarded as a cliché by some, which was why he sported it. It was a kind of ironic statement, a massive screw you to anybody who might make the mistake of taking Brull for a lightweight, a mere wannabe gangbanger.

South Miami was his turf now. His.

Ernesto Justice Brull’s.

EJ’s.

*

Brull had worked his way up through the ranks of the city’s Cuban underworld doing the usual things: protection money collection, a little extortion here and there, a modicum of loan sharking. Sure, he’d gone along on a robbery or two, a couple of burglaries, but from the outset he’d distanced himself from the grunt work, the kind of stuff which often ended up in a shootout with the cops.

From the beginning, Brull had seen himself as a boss. And bosses knew when to delegate. Knew when their skills were better employed working things behind the scenes, rather than putting themselves in the line of fire.

When he’d at last branched out, and put together his own business, seven years ago, Brull had made a conscious decision not to follow the herd. Not to compete in the crowded marketplaces of gun-running and narcotics-pushing and the shaking down of local minor politicians. That kind of thing was for the mediocre. The unimaginative.

The small-thinkers, destined forever to be footnotes in the history of the Miami underground entrepreneurial sector.

Instead, Brull had begun building up his own unique operation. One which took years of exquisite, painstaking planning. One which hadn’t yielded immediate dividends, because he’d never expected it to.

Like a fine Bordeaux, his operation had matured over more than half a decade. Been carefully nurtured, kept in the right conditions and allowed to ripen, when other, more impetuous men would have cracked it open earlier and derived some pleasure from it, while squandering its potential.

At last, three summers ago, his business had started to turn a serious profit, and Ernesto Justice Brull had finally, fully arrived.

The other players on the Miami scene had tried to muscle in, of course. His particular niche was an underexploited one, and his business rivals had been quick to see the potential in it. Brull had been equally quick to show them, in no uncertain terms, that he wasn’t going to tolerate competition, at least not in this endeavour. He’d responded with maximum, wholly disproportionate force, and the city had seemed on the verge of all-out war when the other bosses had decided against letting everything go up in flames and had, grudgingly, conceded that Brull was the master of this particular game. They’d left him alone since then.

But Brull knew he could never, ever let his guard down. And so he displayed his unflinching authority at every turn, knowing that, according the principle of zero tolerance which had been employed so effectively by the New York Police Department in the 1990s, there could be no such thing as a minor offense, no transgression that could be declared too petty to be worth bothering about.

Which was why, when Carlos Fuentes, the grocery store owner, was unable to come up with the four thousand dollars he owed Brull, it was to be viewed as a matter as serious as if Fuentes had insulted the memory of Brull’s mother.

You tore up the weeds as soon as they first poked their shoots up through the cracks between your driveway’s paving stones, because if you didn’t, they were apt to form a network which would eventually undermine the foundations of your house.

*

Elon and Pedro ‘escorted’ Fuentes from Brull’s office, which meant they strong-armed him down the stairs and threw him headfirst through the door and onto the sidewalk.

They reappeared a minute later.

Elon said: “You want we should kill the kid now?”

Brull thought about it. The kid would die, of course. Fuentes