Excerpt: Scream of the Cicada

The Scream of the Cicada
by
William D Carl

PROLOGUE...

“Don’t look at me like that,” Steve Guernsey said around the fifty cent cigar sticking out of the corner of his wet mouth. “Like you never done this before. Don’t act like you’re above a simple killing.”
“It isn’t that simple. And you know I’ve never taken out one of our own men,” the killer answered.
“The idiot shoulda’ known better than to try and leave me. Nobody leaves Big Steve Guernsey. Nobody’s that stupid.”
“Well, this one is. I never thought you’d keep anyone that foolish so close to you. You getting weak, Steve. Or is this just a freak accident? This guy that important to you?”
“Dom was like a son to me.”
“And you want me to hunt down this son of yours and kill him?”
“No.”
“Then, what am I doing here. You’re wasting my time.”
“No,” he repeated, his voice gruff as sandpaper. “I want for you to find him, seduce him, make him fall head over heels in love with you.”
“That’s not what you pay me for. There are plenty of other girls who’d jump at...”
“Listen to me, damn it! Make him fall for you. Big time. Like a swooning little schoolboy. Then, when he’s looking deep into those eyes of yours - they’re pretty, them eyes, never really noticed it before - when he’s looking into your very soul, I want you to tear out his heart.”
“You should be in the PTA. This is someone who’s like your own flesh and blood?”
“Just like that. Only, a real son wouldn’t do me this way. A real son wouldn’t turn his back on his father when his Pops needs him. A real son knows respect.”
“Stop it with the Ozzie and Harriet number. You’re gonna make me start bawling.”
“I got no warning from the little bastard. He up and vanishes, and he leaves me a damn note. A note! Like we ain't worked together forever.”
“May I see it?”
“Take it and keep it for all I care,” Guernsey said, handing her a yellow sheet of lined paper. He puffed on his cigar, the smoke filling the small back room like the haze of Los Angeles smog.
She perused it a moment. The handwriting was sloppy, hurried, the scrawl of someone in the process of running out the door.
“You really, really want this?” she asked. “Because, once it’s started, you can’t stop it. There’ll be no changing your mind.”
“I want him erased outta my life. I want him, whadda they call it, excised. Wiped outta my thoughts.”
“Father of the year.”
“He ain’t really my son.”
“Oh, I know. You said he was ‘like’ a son.”
“A son needs to be punished sometimes. For his transgressions.”
“Pretty severe punishment, if you ask me.”
“Well, who’s askin’ you? The big jerk broke my heart. He was my favorite for years. Now, he’s nothing. Hear me, nothing!”
“He was a bag man. A heavy hitter, sometimes.”
“And a damn good one, too.”
“You have any idea where he might be? It’s a big wide world out there.”
“You’re gorgeous when you’re sarcastic.”
“Who are you kidding,” she purred. “I’m gorgeous all the time.”
“He’s got an uncle in Wyoming. Place called Sweetwater. Sounds like a shithole to me, but he always talked nice about it. In the mountains, by a lake. He always yakked about going fishing there and how the sun hit the water.”
“A regular Henry David Thoreau.”
“What racket’s he in?”
“Never mind. Sweetwater, Wyoming. Going to have to take a bus. That’s extra expenses.”
“There’ll be two hundred thousand waiting for you when you get back.”
“Plus expenses.”
“Of course. Of course.” He waved a hand over his desk. The blue smoke parted like drapes then swirled around his hairy knuckles. “Whatever you need. I just want it over and done with.”
The beautiful woman raised her eyes to her boss, her gaze cold and demeaning. Her contempt pulsed off her like radio waves. Slowly, her lips curled into a scarecrow smile, and Guernsey was taken aback by her icy beauty for a moment. She moved towards him, her hair falling forward, Veronica Lake style, to cover half her lovely face. She sat on the corner of his desk, leaned into him. He felt the caress of one of her breasts against his arm.
“Okay, big guy. I’ll do it,” she whispered in his ear before turning on her heel and leaving the room. “Don't forget about the expenses.”
Guernsey didn’t breathe again until the door closed behind her.

Chapter 1...

I was halfway across Ohio when I fully realized what I’d done. Sweat started pouring off my forehead, and my hands shook so bad I had to pull the new Hudsun Hornet onto the side of the road. The car handled like a dream, and I parked under an oak tree. Acorns crunched under the tires. When I turned off the engine, my fingers slipping a bit from my sudden nervous attack, all I heard were the birds and the soft pinging of the cooling engine.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, wiping the flop-sweat off my face with a quivering paw. “I really did it. Finally left the bastard.”
The bastard in question was my old boss, Big Steve Guernsey, one of Pittsburgh’s biggest racketeers. There wasn’t a branch of government he didn’t half own. Some, like the cops, he held completely in his pockets...and those were some deep pockets. He was a dangerous man, ordering killings without the slightest twinge of guilt or malice. With Guernsey, it was all strictly business. Only, with his sort of business, people often got beaten up. Some got themselves killed. Some, well, I never learned what happened to them. They just disappeared one day. I had my notions, though.
I was a bagman, a collector of juice. That’s a pretty phrase for someone who demands protection money and beats the hell outta the guys who don’t pay until they cough up the required amount. I didn’t kid myself. I was one tough guy out of probably a hundred on the payroll, but old Steve had always been fond of me. He looked at me like I was the kid he never had. I believe, in his own way, he loved me. Like a lizard loves its young.
Which made my desertion of the gang all the crazier. I’d been pushed a little too far, seen a little more than I’d wanted to admit was going on, and I had flipped. Like, Daffy Duck flipped. I had my bags packed and I was handing over two weeks savings to some lucky son of a bitch slime-ball car dealer. By the time Guernsey got my note, I was probably just driving through Columbus, Ohio, the wind in my hair, the cars fins reflecting the gorgeous summer day.
Maybe, that was why I suddenly had such a case of the jumps. It was probably some psychic connection between us. He reads my little missive, and he goes into the expected convulsions, and I probably felt the tremors a hundred and seventy miles away. He was an demonstrably emotional guy.
And I was a knuckle-head for leaving in such a sudden way. As if I didn’t know what would happen next.
People who crossed Big Steve Guernsey ended up dead. There was never a discussion or a hashing out of feelings. You defied Big Steve and you ended up joining the ever growing population of the cement section at the bottom of the Monongahela River. Standing room only down there, I heard.
“Aw, Dom, what’d you go and do?” I asked myself.
He was probably sending out the assassins right now. Probably a bunch of them, all eager to net the reward money he’d eagerly pay out when they returned with my nut sack in a plastic bag like something from the Food Fair market. I had doomed myself by running away from the danger and leaving a note like some out-of-love schoolgirl.
But, I knew I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t stay there, couldn’t keep roughing up the old men who were late with payments for my gangster boss, couldn’t keep taking those few pennies out of shopkeepers’ hands, the bread from their mouths. Not after what happened in that downtown alley. Not after that.
“I’m not like all of them,” I said, pounding my big fists on the steering wheel. “And I refuse to become one of them. Refuse it!”
I wished my voice didn’t crack when I uttered my new mantra, but it did. Those waves of rage and hatred emitting from Pittsburgh and traveling across the flatlands of Ohio played havoc with my mind. All sorts of violent slaughter passed through my suddenly attuned brain.
“Hell,” I said, rubbing the perspiration from my eyes. It was starting to sting, and I was beginning to feel like a crying baby. “The world’s big enough for the two of us. Big Steve doesn’t have to chase after me. Live and let live. Right?”
I looked into the mirror for confirmation, but the face that stared back was the face of a hunted man - crazy, slightly hound-dog eyes, shaggy hair that needed brushed, big lantern jaw. My chin was a little weak, but it had a dimple in it. I noticed I hadn’t shaved that day, and the dimple looked like a cavern. A lot of people say I looked like the great Robert Mitchum. Me, I don’t really see it, except maybe around the eyes. There’s a recognizable sadness there, very similar to Mitch’s. Otherwise, I wasn't nearly so handsome. I'd never make it in the flickers.
“You’re gonna be all right,” I told this wild stranger in the rear view mirror. “You’re gonna get to your Uncle Robert’s place. You’re gonna fish all day and drink yourself into forgetting all night. Maybe, you’ll even get yourself a girl.”
The shabby looking guy in the mirror laughed, exposing a slightly too-small mouth and bright white teeth. He snorted once. Did Robert Mitchum ever snort like that? I wondered.
“Yeah, right,” the dude in the mirror said.
I found myself nodding. I was in deep trouble.
I started the car and pulled back onto the tarmac. The Hornet hummed under my steadying hands, and I switched on the radio for some company. It was still a long way to Sweetwater.
Paul Anka’s LONELY BOY assaulted my ears. Making a face, I switched the station till I found WATERLOO by the great Stonewall Jackson. I sang along with it, my arm hanging out the window, feeling the rush of July’s hot air blow across my wrist.
“Where will you,
Meet your Waterloo?
Every puppy has its day,

Everybody has to pay.

Everybody has to meet his Waterloo.”