The scratch on the fender was minor, but it had sent the boss into a rage. Chuckie looked on as the driver put up his bloody hands, shaking and dripping, even as his head was slammed into the brick wall again, over and over until the muscles in his arms could no longer hold them up in protest. Soon, the splatter of blood and brains was beginning to be redundant, even as the lifeless shell hung off the meaty fist of the boss.

         “Ya done?” Chuckie asked quietly into the silence that hung between him and the boss as he let go of the guy’s shirt, wiping his hands on the hoodie that no longer clung to the now dead body. He had thrown him around to the point that the kid had tried to escape by slipping out of the jacket, but this had only enraged the boss more.

         As a side note, it was becoming more and more clear to the guys to never enrage the boss.       

         It was deadly.

         Geoffrey Gillespie shot a look at his second in command, then nodded his head, continuing to wipe off the now sticky mess he had made of his thick fingers.

         “I gotta wash up.” He said, almost in a murmur, but the echoing in the garage sent the sound bouncing around until it was ringing. Chuckie winced as he shook his head. This was the second driver this month that Gill had pounded into oblivion. He wasn’t sure if they were going to have any guys left if this kept up.

         The phone rang, and Gillespie’s voice changed. Clearly it was his new, nubile wife that had kept Gill happy and sated for the last six months. Every time she called, things were a little better for a good hour, but only for that hour. Gill was ruthless and without remorse. The body on the floor was just the latest in a string of incidents that were beginning to create a myth around the guy. Chuckie had known him forever, but this was a whole new kind of bad, and he wasn’t sure he wanted any part of it.

         He was pretty sure he could never escape it either.

         He got a tarp and laid it next to the kid whose wheezing and last gasps had long since stopped. Gingerly, he rolled the body onto the tarp and began to wrap up the bloody mess of bone and flesh. He tried to ignore the sounds of the guy’s bowels as they continued to vacate, even in death. He heard gurgling in the chest, and a rumbling from the belly, or was that his? He suddenly knew that he was going to lose his lunch, but he had to get somewhere kinda non-chalant like, if he was going to keep Gill’s respect. This was no job for the faint of heart.

         He tied up the package, then stood and sauntered toward the bathroom, stopping to adjust a drawer, then sliding around the corner where he made a quick move to get to the door. He barely slid through when he tasted the bile fill his mouth as he leaned over the toilet, brown and stinking as it was, his throat releasing a torrent of ill as he pushed out all of the disgust that had attacked him as he looked at the meat sack that was once a young, good-looking man. He was nothing but swelling and busted skin now, and this made Chuckie’s stomach lurch again.

         He wondered if he would ever get used to the gore of this new life under a friend he never saw coming as a ruthless crime boss. He wondered where the control over his own destiny had gone, and if this was now the road that he would follow, one that was closer to Mad Max than a Sunday drive in the country. He wondered for a moment if he could just get himself a little farm down his imaginary country road and raise pigs.

         Of course, he knew nothing about pigs other than they could devour a body in a couple of hours. He wasn’t even sure how he knew that, but figured at this rate, he may have to buy some pigs for the salvage yard.

         He wiped the sweat from his face and sucked in a breath, feeling some tears around the edges of his eyes that he wanted to avoid letting fall. Gill could never know that he objected to the way he was conducting business. If he suspected, he could also believe that Chuckie would turn state’s evidence at some point in the future, and that could mean a tarp was laid out for him someday.

         No, he had to do nothing but show support for the way that Gill was running things.

         But he did secretly resent being dragged into this violent world where the wrong look could get someone damaged. He would have preferred to lean legitimate, rather than leaning toward the bloody side of organizational crime activity. He would rather not think that a tarp may lay in his future rather than dying old in some nice hospital.

         Yeah, he was not set up for this life of blood and guts. He just wasn’t made that way. The thing was that Gill was able to expand the business so that they were running a lot of Warrick Falls these days. It hadn’t taken all that long to connect themselves to most of Main Street, and a lot of the peripheral businesses in the small hamlet. Gill was going to own most of the town eventually, and the cops were just none the wiser. He had managed to keep himself indistinct and appear as nothing more than the owner of a nice little salvage yard. His dogs were now a bunch of guys chomping at the bit to keep out the riff raff, but a dog was still a dog, even if dressed in human clothes. The business had changed pretty dramatically ever since Gill had it in his head to own the city, but Chucky was not all that sure that he wanted this type of business.

         But Gill was positive that this life was exactly what he wanted.

         Chucky had already established that he would follow Gill wherever he wanted to take his business. Chopping up cars and selling the parts had only been the beginning. Even Chucky thought it was a stroke of genius to appear to just be doing petty stuff, which kept the cops from sniffing around too much. They could build their empire behind closed doors, and while Chucky expected there would be an expiration date, that was going to be a long time coming. He and Gill would play out their roles as ruthless crime lords, running the world behind the face of simple shady business dealers. Shady was not the same as full on violent, but who would guess that the flannel shirt, jean wearing crew that they kept chained to their door had anything to do with the sophisticated network that Gill had spread throughout the city, taking in percentages, giving out high interest loans, and taking parts of businesses that couldn’t pay up. He sometimes took parts of the debtors too, but they weren’t gonna talk.

         They wanted to keep what was left.

         Yeah, it had been genius alright, and Chucky was now thick in it. This wasn’t the first body he would get rid of for Gill, and he suspected it wouldn’t be the last. He was now an accessory to murder several times over, if someone bothered to look hard enough. The swamps were gonna swallow the body, but that was beside the point. He figured one day someone would miss one of the victims that Gill sent off in a tarp enough to push for more evidence, and then the whole house of cards would fall. No amount of glue and sticks would hold together a house of cards that had such a bloody foundation.

         Chucky knew that there was someone out there that would eventually bring them down. In fact, he pretty much figured that there was someone inside the organization that would turn on them, and it was just a matter of time.