Let It Kill You

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Book excerpt

Prologue

       Manny's eyes were as big as silver dollars as he looked at Chino Genetti, holding a .45 in his face. “Please, no,” begged Manny. “Please don't kill me.”

       “Why would I let you live?” asked Chino.

       “I ain't so bad, man. I'm a good guy. Sure, I done killed a buncha motherfuckers and sold smack, but I'm a good guy, deep down.”

       Chino's phone went off. Chino looked at Manny, gun still in his face, and reached for the phone. “Hold on, I got a text,” he said. Chino looked at his phone, seeing the text was from Dobbs. It read: I'M AT GRILLBY'S. WHERE U AT?

       Chino looked at Manny. “Sorry. This'll just take a second.” Chino held up the phone, hit a button, and spoke into it. “Running late. I'm at work. Be there soon.” He stopped and looked at the phone, reading his message back. He looked at Manny, shaking his head.

       “Fuckin' speech to text,” he said. “You heard what I said, right? But speech to text thinks I said, 'Running laid. I'm a jerk.' You believe that?” He looked back down, continuing. “'Beater spoon.'” He looked at Manny. “'Beater spoon'? What does that even mean?” Looking into Manny's frightened eyes, he said, “I don't know why I use this feature. It takes me longer to fix the fuckin' message than it would to just type it. But I got fat fingers and I don't like to type.”

       Manny was looking at him crazy. “What the fuck, man?”

       Chino considered fixing the message but decided to wait. He stuck the phone back in his pocket.

       “What can I do to stop this?” asked Manny, frantic now. “I got money. You want money? I can pay.”

       “You wanna hear a joke?” Chino asked.

       “What?”

       “Knock knock.”

       Manny stared at him, trying to understand.

       Chino straightened the pistol, trying to intimidate him. “You say 'Who's there?' Let's try again.”

       Manny stared at him.

       “Knock knock.”

       “Okay. Who's there?”

       Chino squeezed the trigger, firing a round into Manny's face, dropping him. Standing there staring at the body, he considered messaging Dobbs. No, he would wait. He still had to do the thing with the ice picks.

One

       Chino had just killed Manny, and now Dobbs was giving him shit about being a mediocre hitter. “Listen, white boy, you don't know how to kill a motherfucker properly.” Of course this was bullshit. Chino was the most feared hitter in the city, but he let him have his fun and tell his jokes. And that's what they were—jokes. Dobbs, a decade older than Chino, had been a hitter once, too. This was back before Cocoa had taken over. Dobbs had been a good, solid hitman. But he wasn't on Chino's level. It was the difference between a career .280 hitter and Ted Williams. They both played the game, and they both played well, but they weren't close to being the same.

       Since Dobbs had retired, he'd spent his days drinking, chasing tail, and talking shit. They joked around and gave each other hell—Dobbs calling him an amateur, and Chino making jokes about Dobbs being an old man. But Chino and Dobbs were best friends. In fact, Dobbs was the only person Chino considered a friend at all. He'd walked away from everyone else after his wife and kids had been killed.

       Scratch that. Chino had two friends—Dobbs, and Jack Daniels.

       Chino knew Dobbs cared and that their relationship ran deeper than jokes because Dobbs incessantly griped about his alcoholism. “That shit's gonna kill you faster than bitches or bullets,” he always said. It wasn't like Chino didn't know; he just didn't care. Since he'd lost Aliesha, Tyrese, and Kailee, he'd lost his will to live. Now he functioned on autopilot. He was alive, but that was a technicality. That was what the world saw—a living, breathing human. But the reality was, Chino was as dead as his family.

       Chino drank. And when he drank, he drank beyond excess. He didn't know if it would be the whiskey or a bullet that would inevitably kill him, but he was ready either way.

       Dobbs was still talking shit. “You're a terrible hitter, Cheen.”

       “You think I'm a shitty hitman? Take it up with my mentor. I learned it from him, so he musta been shitty, too.”

       “Nah. I hear Dobbs was a world-class hitter back in the day.”

       “Oh, do you? This 'back in the day', when was this? Before TV? Back when there were dinosaurs and shit?”

       “You sayin' I'm old, motherfucker?”

       “I'm sayin' your ass was there when they invented dirt.”

       “You think you're funny, but you ain't. That's why you never made it as a comic.”

       This was another thing Dobbs gave him hell for. When Chino had been in his early twenties, he'd worked as a stand-up comic. But he'd failed, as most comics do. Once, when he'd performed at The Comedy Cellar, Colin Quinn told him, “Ninety-six percent of comics fail. Think about that. If you went in for a surgery and the doctor told you ninety-six percent of the patients who had that surgery died, you wouldn't go through with it.” And Chino ultimately became part of the ninety-six percent. He hadn't been the best comic, but he wasn't a bad one either. Just mediocre. He'd had his share of nights when the crowd laughed at every joke, just as he'd had plenty of nights when he'd been booed and heckled.

       Chino was never ashamed of failing though. Because of his failure, he'd then found the one thing he was genuinely good at—killing people. This wasn't the kind of thing he could put on his resume' or brag about, but he didn't need to. When you were as good a hitter as Chino was, people knew. Chino was afforded a level of respect in the crime world that very few people got, and he'd earned it. He'd paid his dues and he'd done his job well. You want proof? Just ask any of the sixty-four people Chino had put in the ground. Except you can't, cause they're all dead.

       Chino had first gone to work for Cocoa back in 1998, when he was twenty-five. He'd already worked as a knockaround guy for Sonny Debrezio and had made a name for himself as a standup guy. Then he'd started training under Dobbs to become a hitter. After Sonny Debrezio died and Cocoa took over, she reached out to Dobbs to come work for her. Dobbs did for a bit, but he ultimately stepped down. Chino then went to work in his place. Nobody had been all that sure about him at first. He was new and fresh-faced, and his cocky attitude made people skeptical. But that skepticism soon subsided after Chino had his first ten or twelve notches on his belt.

       Chino had always had a solid relationship with Cocoa. They respected one another, and truth be told, Chino had always found her extremely attractive for an older woman. But now, Chino being forty-six himself, he realized she hadn't been all that old. She was eleven years older than he was, making her fifty-seven now, and she was still as fine a woman as God had ever made. But she was attractive like a siren. She was drop-dead gorgeous, yes, but ten times as dangerous. In her two decades as boss, she had proven time and time again that she was more than willing to kill anyone who crossed her. And this was good for Chino, as it had given him steady work.

       Chino and Cocoa had slept together once, back in the beginning. She'd entertained him at her place, and they'd had a few drinks. This was before he'd married Aliesha, but they had been dating. Chino had never been particularly proud of this. Mostly because he'd cheated on Aliesha, but also because he could have ruined his career and ended his life by doing so. But both Chino and Cocoa had a good time that night, and neither of them ever spoke of it again. Cocoa would sometimes flirt with him, but Chino had learned over the years that she flirted with lots of guys.

       Today's mark, Chino's sixty-fourth, had been a Puerto Rican drug dealer named Manny Dominguez. Manny, like a lot of young bucks with newfound money and power, had gotten cocky and overstepped his boundaries. Cocoa had overlooked these faux pas for a while, until Manny blatantly disrespected her, calling her a black bitch. Cocoa then sent Chino to pay him a visit.

       “Tell me about Manny Dominguez,” said Dobbs.

       “You mean the late Manny Dominguez.”

       Dobbs chuckled. “That's the one. Tell me about 'im.”

       “Not much to say, really. I went over to his place, gaudy-ass apartment with pink neon lights on the walls…”

       “Puerto Ricans love that gaudy shit.”

       “Fuckin' guy had Elvis all over the place. Posters and gold records, you know. He had Elvis plates on the walls and Elvis statues on the tables. Elvis shit everywhere. It looked like Graceland had gone over there and thrown up all over the place.”

       “Lots of Elvis.”

       “Man, this dude had more Elvis shit in his apartment than the whole city of Memphis got. I bet Manny had more pictures of Elvis than Elvis' mama had.”

       “I ain't never seen a Puerto Rican loved Elvis.”

       “Well, now Manny can meet the motherfucker face-to-face.”

       Dobbs burst into laughter. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you are funny.”

       “Of course I'm funny, jackass.”

       Chino took a drink, and Dobbs looked at him, serious now. “How's the job?”

       Chino shrugged. “The job is the job. It don't change.”

       “How about Cocoa? Things good with her?”

       “I can't complain.”

       “Wouldn't nobody listen anyway.”

       “She treats me good, but I'm gettin' tired.”

       “Of the life?”

       Chino nodded. “You know how it is. Shit gets old.”

       “That's why I quit.”

       “I feel like I do the same thing every day. It's like I'm trapped in Groundhog Day, only instead of Bill Murray savin' people, my ass is killin' 'em.”

       “But you get paid well for that shit.”

       “That didn't stop you from leavin'.”

       “That's true. But I didn't make as much money as you.”

       “Would it have changed your mind if you had?”

       “Nah.”

       “You miss it though,” said Chino. “I see it on your face and I hear it in your voice. That's why you ask me about it.”

       “You don't know shit.”

       “You know I'm right, old man.”

       “I miss it a little, I guess. But I don't miss getting' my ass shot at, and I don't miss dealin' with asshole bosses.”

       “Sonny Debrezio was a piece of work.”

       “All of 'em. You really think Cocoa is different? 'Cause I got news for ya, Cheen. She ain't. At the end of the day, all them motherfuckers are the same. They're all out for numero uno. Every single one. It's all about the Benjamins. If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense. You stay around long enough, her need for you is gonna run out. Then where you gonna be?”

       Chino took a drink and looked at him. “I dunno.”

       “At the bottom of the Hudson. That's where.”

       Chino saw the truth in Dobbs' words. The crime world was the best job there was when things were good, but it rarely ended well. You usually ended up dead or in prison. Chino didn't care about dying, but he didn't wanna go to prison.

       “You gonna retire?” asked Dobbs.

       “It's just somethin' I'm kickin' around.”

       “But you're considerin' it.”

       “Yeah, but I don't know what I would do if I wasn't killin'.”

       “Your ass would drink.”

       “I already do that.”

       “You're damn right you do. You're drinkin' yourself into the ground. But if you quit, you'll drink more, and you'll get there faster.”

       “So what exactly are you tellin' me? You're tellin' me to quit or I'll die, but then you say if I quit I'll die faster. So what are you saying?”

       Dobbs turned his head, considering it. Then he turned back, looking at him. “The hell if I know. I always been full of shit. You know that.”

       “I never met a motherfucker was more fulla shit.”

       “How about Jimmy Cap? You remember him? That was a motherfucker fulla shit all day long.”

       “He was,” said Chino, nodding. “But guess what? You got him beat. You're the king of bein' fulla shit.”

       “That's prob'ly right.”

       “I'm always right.”

       “Motherfucker, you ain't never right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but not you. But if you wanna think you're right, you go ahead and think it. It'll just be one more thing you're wrong about.”