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By the time I was thirteen, he had decided to enlist me as his confidante, the rightful heir to his empire, once he inevitably drank himself into an early grave. He would give me my own tumbler of whiskey once per week, creating an acquired taste in me so specific that it likely couldn’t be found in any other boy my age.
What he was wrong about was thekindof corruption that I would allow within my organization when I inevitably did take over for him. Corruption, to me, wasn’t the absence of the law. It was the kinds of laws that you were willing to break in order to get ahead, and some of them, I’m unwilling to bend on.
Distributing weapons and drugs is a very common practice of mine. In fact, it’s where I started when I began to learn the ropes of the mafia life from my father. The dealing of goods to willing buyers always struck me as a mostly acceptable form of corruption. The very police department who sought to ruin us brandished their weapons in the faces of innocent civilians on a daily basis, and at least a third of them held an obvious, if not socially acceptable, form of addiction known as alcoholism.
How was my work so reprehensible if I was just distributing goods and services that they themselves used? The only thing that stood between me and them was regulations, and regulations were something I was willing to forego if it meant I could be raking in millions for my trouble. There’s a price for everything, especially such a lavish lifestyle, but I was taught by my father always to honor my craft and never take anything, person or thing, for granted.
I hadn’t run into any issues with this philosophy until recently, when I discovered that sometruecorruption had been taking place within the industrial park that I’ve been conducting my business in.
This person has been using well-established mafia grounds for conducting human trafficking with the intent of pinning his operation on me if he were ever caught. It’s not the worst business plan, at least not for someone like himself, but as a human being with a set of values that I cling heavily to, I find it morally reprehensible. Drugs and guns are one thing, but I have never, ever dealt in human goods and consider anybody who does to be beneath worms.
Perhaps if I were a more efficient leader, I would just allow him to continue his own dealings without interfering in order to keep my own operation from being slowed. However, one thing that my father and I never had in common was his ability to turn a blind eye to injustice. Laws were made to be broken, but injustice has never had a place in my life – not for any price.
I’d been informed of this occurrence by one of my most trusted distributors a few weeks ago. He had run into a group of men unloading a cargo container that had skipped the weighing process before being emptied. He thought that the men were trying to interfere with the weight of a shipment of cocaine that had come through, but what he discovered upon investigation sent chills down his spine.
A group of at least twenty women, none older than twenty-three, was being herded off the boat into a warehouse that I had stopped using for distribution about a year ago. I have no idea how they found out about it so quickly, but regardless, he’d figured out a very sophisticated method of getting his girls through my men without anybody noticing. It’s taken me this long to figure it out, and it turns my stomach to think about how many women have been forced into that building against their will to be sold to men just as detestable as he is.
I knew that I couldn’t take the coward’s approach as my father would have, but acting irrationally wasn’t the right course of action, either. If I ran down to the warehouse to decapitate him as soon as I found out, I probably would have gotten myself exposed as well as him. That would have opened me up to police involvement that I didn’t need and would have played right into his plan to frame me as the leader of the operation.
Iwantedto find him and skin him alive with his own house key, but I needed to give a significant amount of attention and planning to this mission before I carried it out. I’ve spent the last five weeks securing the manpower necessary to take out the entire operation as quickly and efficiently as possible. The trick was to find a way to do it while keeping my own business running without interruption.
The day arrived faster than I anticipated, certainly more quickly than I was prepared for. I’ve taken on larger missions like this before, obviously, but the stakes have never been quite so high. It’s easy to throw yourself and your men full force into something dangerous when it’s happening on enemy ground, but to jeopardize your own livelihood, possibly forever, carries a different weight. I never would have placed my operation in a place that was so easy to target.
The world is changing too fast for the mafia these days. With the way the internet is evolving, anybody can put a tracker on someone’s car and follow them everywhere they go until they catch them in a dark alley. So far, only pieces of shit who get rejected by women do that so they can stalk and harass them. However, I can see this kind of tech becoming a very big problem for me.
Not to mention, everybody has a fucking drone now. A drone in the wrong hands could sink my business to the ocean floor if the information was used correctly. Depending on how far the damn thing can fly, it could spot one of my cargo ships from a mile away, preparing my enemies to rob me. I’ve never had to think about shit like this before, but now it’s on my mind constantly. I need to catch up before someone younger and more adept at new tech gets their hands on something important.
Another issue lies in how exactly my greatest enemies are gaining such intel about my company, about the movements within it and the decision to change locations. However, right now I don’t have time to worry about that. I’m about to move into the most dangerous mission of my life, and I have to put on a face that tells the rest of my men that I’m barely affected by it.
“You seem awfully unbothered by all this. What is this guy, like five-one?” asks my driver, David, as I climb into the back seat of my Bugatti. When he pulled up to the front of the house, I was standing tall as I held my AK-47 close to my body. My father always taught me to project confidence, no matter the circumstances, and I know he saw his share of mafia gun fights.
Still, I wish he was here to see me through this.
“Yeah, well, he’s a fucking idiot. So that helps. I doubt he’ll see us coming, likely won’t even be prepared for an ambush. We’ve been planning this for weeks while he was getting carted around the city to whatever rooftop bar he wanted. I’ve been keeping close tabs,” I reply, lighting up a cigar and rolling down the back window just enough to drag the smoke out.
“I know you don’t need to hear it from me, but I know you. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re a ruthless motherfucker,” David replies, squinting a bit as some of the smoke inevitably ends up at the front of the car.
He’s right. I don’t need to hear it from him.
I never liked how much of a hardass I’ve needed to be to people like David, but it’s the only way he’d ever respect me the way he respected my father. My father wasreallya ruthless motherfucker, but it was because he was without empathy in any sense.
“I’ve gone over the commands with the other drivers, so you don’t need to give me another run-down. Just don’t die. I can’t go back to waiting tables at the Cheesecake Factory again.”
Hilarious.
We start to drive, and I feel a familiar low humming deep within my soul. It’s the same feeling I had when I knew I was going to get my ass beat for skipping classes, and as an adult, that feeling mutated as I began to work for my father. That same, esoteric drone deep in my chest that screamsrun, fast, before you get yourself fucking killed.
All the other times, I knew I would come out alive if I played my cards right. This time, I’m not so sure.
When we pull up to the bay directly to the right of the warehouse, I take one last deep breath before I allow my nervous system to take over me like an ancient, unknown spirit. Perhaps if I allow it to guide me, I won’t fuck up as easily. What else would the point even be for something like adrenaline if it didn’t sharpen your skills? Some people just shit their pants and pass out, and I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that fate.
My heart vibrates in my chest, rattling against my ribs like a prisoner in the midst of a psychotic break. As I watch the fleet of SUVs pull in behind my car, I have a momentary flash of horrifying clarity: I might die in the next fifteen minutes, and it could be painful.
My clarity lapses back into intense focus, which is one aspect of the human brain that I’m thankful for. If I were forced to live with such a visceral understanding of my mortality at all times, I would self-destruct.
I’m able to count each head as my men pour out of the SUVs, each of them armed to the teeth like we’d planned for. We’ve formed our strategy around the low possibility of unexpected return fire, which I’m not anticipating. If things go according to plan, we could be in and out of there with few injuries in ten minutes.
As soon as I’ve spotted everyone, it’s time to move out.
