Thieving Weasels - Billy Taylor Page 0,43
breakfast. And the other thing is, if they get you, they get me. And I don’t wanna get got. You hear me?”
I nodded.
“Good.” He reached into his nightstand and pulled out the anisette. “You wanna drink?”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Still playing the hard ass, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I honestly don’t like it.”
“Fair enough.” He poured himself a drink and said, “And just so you know the kind of people we’re dealing with here, let me tell you a little story. You know who Rudy Giuliani is, right?”
“The mayor from 9/11?”
“That’s him, but before that he ran the US Attorney’s office in New York. He and his storm troopers had a major hard-on for the mob, and they invested a ton of time looking for people to help them bust it open. They needed guys who were high up in the ranks, but who didn’t have any real power of their own. Guys like me. One day they hauled me in and laid it out. They had all the evidence needed to nail me with an extortion rap, and I was looking at four, maybe five years in prison. Then they made me an offer: If I testified against Fat Nicky, they’d drop the charges and give me and my family a new identity. If I didn’t, it was jail. I knew I shouldn’t have listened to their crap, but after a while I started to believe them. If they had their act together, I might have gotten away clean, but Nicky got off on a loophole and never even spent a night in jail.”
Mr. DeNunsio sniffed back a tear then pulled out his inhaler and lit a cigarette. “Three years and two months later I was at work when the phone rang. It was the police calling to say there’d been an accident, and my entire family had been blown to pieces. They said it was a gas leak, but I knew different. It was Fat Nicky’s way of making me suffer for the rest of my life.”
“That’s insane,” I whispered.
“Insane or not, that’s what these guys do when you cross them.” He emptied his glass and said, “So, consider yourself warned. And the next time you feel like doing something stupid just remember you could get us all killed. Capisce?”
I looked straight at him and did my best not to blink. “Capisce.”
21
DR. BRAUNSTEIN INTERCEPTED ME A FEW HOURS LATER ON my way home from work. I’d been avoiding my mother’s doctor for days because I didn’t want to hear how it was all my fault that she had tried to kill herself. I also didn’t know what kind of lies she had been telling him in her therapy sessions, and I didn’t want to get our stories crossed. That said, my real reason for avoiding Dr. Braunstein was less complex: I was afraid of psychiatrists. To me, they were like brain police who could look into your head and see your darkest secrets. And for a guy whose life was built on a foundation of lies, that kind of scrutiny was terrifying.
Growing up, the worst thing about moving around so much was visiting the school psychiatrist every time I enrolled in a new district. At first, I made up all kinds of crazy stories like how I was part Navajo and that my father was killed in Iraq. But this strategy backfired big time, and I was rewarded for my creativity with even more trips to the school psychiatrist. After that, I learned that the best way to work the system was to tell the psychiatrists exactly what they wanted to hear.
Except here’s the deal. Deep down, I wanted to tell them the truth. Because even in grade school I felt ashamed of who I was. I mean, what kind of family rents a hotel room for a week, visits every library within a twenty-mile radius, and applies for fake library cards so they can steal every DVD in town? Want to know what kind of family does that? Mine, of course. And the older I got the more frustrated I became by the sheer stupidity of my day-to-day existence. Take that little DVD caper, for example. How much money do you think we got for those DVDs? Three, maybe four bucks a pop depending on their condition. Subtract from that the money for the hotel, gas, and fake IDs, and we probably cleared less than ten bucks on the whole operation. Think about it. An entire town loses their