Bang Bang

by Theo Gangi

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Stickup kid (n.): an urban gunslinger who preys on other criminals, often stealing already stolen property, using violence and intimidation. Izzy picks a bad time to have a conscience crisis. As a stick up kid in New York's underworld, he has a good thing going-robbing the worst drug lords in the city and leaving no witnesses behind. It is a game of high risk and high reward. There is just one problem: Izzy is in his thirties now, and for good reason, there is no such thing as a stickup man. When a job gets botched, leaving Izzy's psychotic partner guilty of yet another homicide, Izzy knows what he is supposed to do-kill the remaining witness or be killed himself. But a bystander named Eva seems different from others he has done before. Is she the exception to Izzy's number one rule? Izzy has never jacked himself into a problem he could not jack himself out of. But that was before. Now, on the unforgiving streets of New York City-where the skyline stretches out like a graveyard-there is a war on and there is no room for mistakes. His ex-partner is hellbent on revenge and is no longer acting alone. And as bodies start to fall around Izzy, he is left to take on both his enemies and his inner demons face first in a battle that has no questions, no conversation. Just bang bang. In this explosive debut, Theo Gangi redefines the crime thriller, delivering a pulse-pounding, white-knuckle ride through gritty back rooms, where justice is sealed with gunfire, no one can be trusted, and being innocent can get you killed. "Theo Gangi is a superb craftsman. His work displays diverse characters and wonderful dialogue that would make Elmore Leonard stand up and applaud. He is new talent that has finally arrived" -Eric Jerome Dickey, New York Times bestseller author "Theo Gangi portrays the people of the criminal world not only in a way that brings them to vivid life, but life felt at the extreme, out where suffering, pity, even

Release date: November 1, 2007

Publisher: Kensington

Print pages: 256

Sample

Izzy wondered what you called a stickup kid who was thirty-eight.

Leaning against a cement rooftop banister, a high wind smacking his ears, he scanned the modest Queens skyline, Manhattan looming behind like a graveyard. The street below was a residential wash of redbrick, from brownstones to small housing complexes with grassy courtyards. Through the misting rain an ethnic jumble of blue-collar and professional city commuters were gridlocked in their rush to unwind. Izzy intermittently glanced at a window through a pair of opera binoculars he had picked up in the West Village. He breathed in the moist evening. The dim gray sun waned as factory smoke became visible against the dark. These were familiar, tedious hours, a deep breath before the push.

“Ben doesn’t show up quick and I’ma cut his ass,” hissed Mal.

“No hurry. Their man’s not there yet,” said Izzy, in his easiest voice. No stress, don’t sweat Benny, relax, Izzy thought to himself. Izzy could always tell Mal to relax, even before they were about to rob somebody.

Izzy had never heard of a stickup man. His people never said it. Cops never said it. An eighty-year-old could rob a drug spot, and they’d call him a stickup kid. Maybe stickup boy. Spot rusher. Jack boy. But again, he’d never heard of a jack man. Cops might say holdup man. But that was for when legitimate spots, like a bank or a convenience store, got held up. Izzy never robbed a legitimate spot before. They didn’t really have cash anyway. Seemed wrong that robbing someone legit made you a man, while Izzy was stuck being called “kid.” He liked “Banger” better, like Mal had said after their first bang. “We the Bangers.” That way he didn’t sound like he was sixteen.

“You ever heard of a stickup man?” asked Izzy.

Mal shook his head. “Maybe someplace. Like in an old seventies cop show or some shit. But people always seem to say stickup kid.”

“You a kid?” asked Izzy.

“I’m whatever.”

Do-rag and hoody over his XXL ironed white tee, Mal would forever dress like he was sixteen.

“How ’bout ‘Banger’?”

“Why you care? You printing business cards or something?” asked Mal.

Izzy shrugged, turning back to face the street and checking his black rubber watch. “The first pitch ...” he said to himself, annoyed he was missing the game. He immediately regretted saying it, knowing Mal couldn’t stand to watch a moment of baseball.

“The national pas-time is victimless crime,” chanted Mal from behind, drawing out the rhyme. Maybe he heard Izzy, maybe not.

Izzy picked up on the song in Mal’s head, saying the next line to himself. Repeat it to yourself. This is a victimless crime.

The redbrick facade of the brownstone stood shoulder to shoulder with others just like it, nothing to indicate that twelve uniforms had once broken down the door and scaled the fire escape. Only the neighbors could know about the current of characters that Izzy and Mal had seen streaming through—short blacks in Big and Tall white tees; flashy Dominicans with gold sunglasses and cowboy boots; chickenheads with their hair and clothes in ribbons, popping gum in six-inch heels, pistols in their purses.

Izzy checked on the crew through his brass-rimmed binoculars. Within the oversized living room window Charlie Brown and his dumb hip-hop boys argued while playing video games—another in a series of middlemen who could afford to sell weight, not have to step on it and push vials. Izzy recognized their malaise of hustle and gratification, one second barking orders and making deals on a cell, the next blazing up and playing video games, watching TV, or getting ass; whatever happened to be in front of them. Izzy could see the electronic football play in Charlie Brown’s eyes, his mouth hanging open in focus like a nine-year-old’s. Half a mil in cash was on its way through, and this guy was running the show.

A while ago, Izzy had tried to be a hustler, but the relentless scheming and uncertainty were too much for him. He had known some who were good at it—too good at it. Men like Shea Mason, who kept so many transactions and facades in motion at once it seemed inevitable that gravity would catch up; well-connected men with a deal in every borough and a girl for every deal. That kept Izzy away—doing business meant deals, and deals meant trusting people, which Izzy didn’t do. Yet here he was, partnered up with a man he couldn’t call trustworthy. Not that Mal would snake him on the take; he just liked the violence too much, got reckless. But Izzy could trust him to get reckless, trust him to muscle up when he got scared, the way you could always trust a man to be himself.

The shorter, darker Mal paced the roof with the abruptness of an angry chef, curses announced by his posture. His small eyes restlessly shifted in his elongated head, bottom lip set just to the left of his upper, crooked face too big for his thin frame. Over his hoody, Mal wore a long, black overcoat to conceal his baby, a short-nosed shotgun with a pistol grip and a laser scope. Izzy would tell him it was ridiculous to have a laser scope on a sawed-off, but Mal got off on it, shining it in faces like a traffic cop with a flashlight. Stuck in his belt was a nickel-plated baby .22, with an expensive silencer. Even the shell casings they used were from robberies and wouldn’t help the police any. Izzy had two .22s on him just like Mal’s, wore a shoulder strap with a holster on either side for his pistols, and a pair of all black Gary Sheffield batting gloves.

Izzy bore the weight of the heavy steel naturally. It wasn’t that he loved guns. He figured one would kill him one day, but he was most comfortable with his enemy close by.

One rule was known between Izzy and Mal—you kill one; we kill them all. The only time they had to worry about the cops was if they killed somebody. Somehow, taking drugs, money, and guns off drug dealers never seemed to bother the NYPD. The bodies were the problem.

The only time they had to lay anybody out was on account of a woman. It was in a row house basement deep in East New York. Izzy could still smell that moldy draft, the sweat of panicking hustlers. All was well until the young one pissed himself. Izzy was tying the other’s wrist when Mal caught the scent.

“You call yourself a man? Fucking pussy,” Mal yelled, and cracked the kid in the head with his shotgun.

“You leave him alone!” A crazy lady with a pigeon neck and heavy arms started swinging on Mal. It was like she came from nowhere. Mal ducked and dodged until she caught up to him. Izzy couldn’t get a good shot, and the lady seemed even more fearless when she saw the guns, like she had a death wish. Mal granted it. She shook his head in heavy, ashy hands, repeating, “Leave him alone,” as Mal’s mask began to slide off his face. He freed his hand and popped her with the .22, blood misting on the wall as she fell. Izzy was relieved that Mal had used the .22. That shotgun would have been real messy. He fought away the image of what the shotgun would have done. Mal did the wet guy execution style, then looked at his partner. Izzy could still hear the sinister hiss and pop of the gun. He had heard a silencer before but never the sound of a head opening up. The bullet had forced a hole that was never intended, and the echoing pop crawled down Izzy’s spine.

The last thug was in a wild panic. His name was Won. That’s what he called himself. Like “I won.” Like “Won time.” “Won love.” His watery eyes swelled beneath the slanted imprint of a fitted cap brim. His face was fat and round, his nose and mouth flat like a pug’s.

“Do the last one,” Mal had said.

“You going just fine,” said Izzy.

Mal raised the .22 and pointed it at his partner. “You ain’t leaving here a witness, man, that’s the point, no witnesses. You either a killer or a goddamn victim.”

Izzy considered this. Won struggled and cried on the old, filthy cement—a fish caught in a dry bucket, awaiting the cleaver. The room smelled like sweat and piss. Mal’s logic made sense. Izzy didn’t want to do it, but it was too late for all that. He squatted down and held up a gloved hand to block the spray. With his other hand, he pulled.

In the car afterward, their masks off, Izzy told Mal, “Next time you put your gun on me will be the last time.”

It wasn’t the first time.

After the 82nd Airborne, before Izzy’s first fall, he had tried hustling. After he saw how to cook crack, thinking he could sell some, Izzy hit the streets. He was a lookout, a runner, and for a while, he handled vials. He hustled enough to afford a gun, an old Detective Special. Then he figured he didn’t have to work for anyone on the arm anymore, so he set up a meeting with Mal to cop, and when Mal asked him for the money, he showed Mal the Detective Special instead.

“Give me the blow,” he told Mal.

Then he realized he was looking at a barrel himself.

“I’ll blow a hole in your fucking head,” said Mal.

Standoff. Shit. “How ’bout this? You hand over the product, I’ll let you live,” said Izzy.

“Fuck that, give me the cash right now.”

“Ain’t no cash.”

“Well, there ain’t no motherfucking blow!”

They stared at each other, in competition to see whose expression could show less. The weight of the Detective Special was heavy, but Izzy felt he could hold it for hours. The temptation to pull the trigger was immense. Desperation put him there, but logic told him to shoot. There was something counterintuitive about showing a gun and not firing it, like putting your hand on a light switch and not flicking it. He wanted to shoot. The warning that both guns would go off kept his finger still. He just wasn’t sure, even then, how much that would have bothered him.

Nobody moved. Then Mal smiled. “I been looking for somebody like you.”

Izzy had to admit. He liked Mal’s style, standing there with two live guns, recruiting a partner.

There was still something about Mal that invited attack, an impulse Izzy often had to resist. The entitled cock of his skinny neck, the way he would cross people’s boundaries within minutes, made Izzy feel like a father who was about to beat his son. On that Queens rooftop, Mal bit his lip with sharp teeth like a restless child. Izzy always thought of Mal as a child, as children were capable of anything.

“This bitch-ass fucking failure,” muttered Mal.

Izzy rolled his eyes, well accustomed to Mal’s temperamental fixations. He shrugged, and repeated his message. “Chill. Their connect still didn’t show up.”

“But when he do, we got to be in there. How hard is it to steal a van, anyway?”

Izzy stepped aside and put his finger to his throat, taking his pulse. The soft, fluttering rhythm was all that resembled peace when Mal was around.

“How’s the count?” interrupted Mal.

Izzy maintained concentration. Not hearing Mal, the patter of rain, the hum of cars streaming through the wet pavement below, only that faint beat, pulsing from neck to finger.

“Doctor!” said Mal, abruptly, unleashing his hyena cackle.

Izzy exhaled. “Good. Seventy-seven. Usual.”

“Feeling accurate?”

Izzy took the binoculars from Mal. “Deadeye.”

Izzy could dot the i of a Pepsi can with a handgun from fifteen yards consistently. A racing pulse never helped him. He knew how to breathe, knew how to control his heart rate and focus when necessary. Pulse at eighty, maybe he’d put a hole in the P. Ninety, stand clear. You couldn’t be a professional anything at ninety.

A professional stickup kid. Stickup man. A professional jack boy. Jack man. Banger. He did need a business card.

Why was he trying to label himself? He was older, sure, but that’s why bangs were getting bigger and less frequent. He had done two jobs in the last three years and lived well. Why did he care if he was a stickup kid or a stickup man?

Oh, right. The girl, from earlier. Eva. Great name.

“Jack,” said Eva, and got a warm, fuzzy feeling anticipating the drink, deciding to make him her new boyfriend.

“You want some water with that?” asked the bartender, pouring her the Tennessee whiskey.

“Water? Never touch the stuff,” she said, and leaned in a bit closer, her tone conspiratorial. “You know fish have sex in it?”

The bartender didn’t get it. Someone did, laughing a few seats down. Nice-looking, café au lait with green eyes. The bartender slid the glass to her. The rust-colored liquor splashed and settled at the bottom.

After the burn distracted her from the feeling, and the feeling distracted her from her thoughts, she remembered why she came to this bar, drinking by herself in front of a ball game like an escaped husband. Her fucking cousin.

Not just her cousin. First, her day. Eva was a social worker who ran a Catholic Charities program providing housing services to former offenders, drug abusers, and the mentally incompetent. On that day, the police called her because someone complained about a smell coming from one of her apartments. Eva was the one with the keys who had to let the police in. She gagged on the smell, a monstrous, overwhelming decay stronger than industrial bleach. She had been to that small apartment many times, picked out the secondhand table and chairs that were now upside down and splintered. Her client was on the bed. Her name was Elma, and her arms were strewn across the unmade sheets like she was reaching for a hug. Her skin, once a healthy chestnut, was now a pale bluish green, with crusty white lips and a thick bruise tracked around her neck like a choker. Her eyes were open, staring up into an abyss. Eva stared back with the irresistible conviction that Elma deserved what she got.

Eva left the room and threw up in the toilet. Then she got as far away from the apartment as she could before the police detained her, and the detectives showed up to question her. They were big, gruff assholes, obeying some code of matter-of-fact suspicion that made little sense to her. They were so apathetic to another addict dying that Eva wanted to cry. How could she react the same as them?

She went home and did cry. It was after three. She set her purse down in the kitchen and the dam broke. She hurried into her bedroom the same way she had hurried into the bathroom to puke, and let out all the tears and sniffles. She couldn’t be seen crying in the kitchen. Eva knew what Theresa would think. As the tears dried, even Eva began to think herself a fraud.

She put Hendrix on, with his energetic and mournful guitar playing blues riffs in ways still unimaginable. His smirking voice eulogized;


Eva fell into a deep sleep dreaming of sand castles. When she awoke she brushed and gargled the taste from her mouth, feeling hungry again. She treated herself to her favorite Italian spot, with a view of the river, lights reflected in the dark evening water, trying to get the stink and sight of death from her mind. When she went to pay for her Seafood Fra Diavlo, she noticed her cash was gone. Fucking Theresa.

Freeloading Theresa, supposed-to-be-in-rehab Theresa, robbing her of money, time, space, and that day, her spirit. She knew what to say to family members of drug abusers; rehab isn’t necessarily a fix; it takes time; they can’t control themselves. But when it came to her own family, fuck that. Theresa could control herself.

“Would you rather I trick for it?” her cousin said when confronted by Eva. Like it was Eva’s fault. The drugs didn’t make Theresa nasty. Theresa was just nasty.

Before she went and ripped out the bitch’s weave, Eva went to see her man.

Jack. Ever reliable. Sure, he got around, but at least this was known. No tricks. Once he was in her glass, he was all hers.

Eva looked at the men around her. All blue collar, stinking of dry plaster, stagnant family lives, and domestic beer. There was the one who had laughed. Dreamy, calm face, nice hair. Looking hard now. He thought he was cute. He wasn’t wrong.

The light eyes moved, and Eva forgot them for a moment. Then they were right next to her.

“Hi. Buy you a drink?”

Original. Wearing a white T-shirt with the Exxon logo that said “Ex-Con” instead. He thought he was really cute.

“I’ve got one,” she said, holding up Jack. “And he’s the jealous type.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jack.”

The guy held up his own glass, looking similar. “Johnny. But I’m Iz.”

“That your street name, or government?”

“Iz, not I-s or anything. Short for Izzy. And you are?”

His eyes, a shade of green lighter than his skin, seemed disembodied, amused by some far-off comedy.

She considered going no further, because of his T-shirt. But she said, “Eva,” and shook his hand, because of his eyes. Then she looked demonstratively at his shirt. “So, what do you do?”

I’m a stickup kid. A grown-up stickup kid. Not a grown-up, really, but not a kid—grown. All the same, I rob drug dealers. And I’m thirty-eight.

Izzy didn’t want to answer that question. So he didn’t.

“You seem distracted by my shirt.”

She shrugged. She had smooth Indian skin, could be Indian hair, long, black, and straight, maybe straightened. She could be Indian, but also could have some black in her, so Izzy guessed Caribbean, West Indian. Almond eyes, long, white teeth that seemed to bite her lower lip when she smiled. It was different from how Mal would bite his lip. She was less sinister—playful, even if she didn’t mean to be.

“You seem proud of it,” she said, looking at her Jack.

Izzy grinned. “You a ball buster?” he said carefully, not to seem hostile.

“Hey, you came to me.”

“So I gotta take whatever you dish out?”

“Pretty much.”

Izzy nodded. “Fair enough.”

She smiled a long, white smile. The lines left her face. She looked younger. “So, are you proud of it?”

“I’m not ashamed.”

“You shouldn’t be,” she said.

Izzy sensed he was being toyed with. He was unsure if this was a good or a bad thing. “So, what’s the problem?”

“Who said there was a problem?”

Now he smiled, maybe nervous. Izzy didn’t know—he had trouble recognizing nervousness. He was something; unsure, making him call it a problem. Still smiling sheepishly, he glanced around at the bar. Dark, with colorful gambling machines and a jukebox, weak wooden booths, and a patchy pool table, like an unkempt lawn. What was this woman doing here?

“Where’d you do time?” she asked.

Was she making conversation? Or did she like cons? “Clinton, Green Haven. Also Baltimore, actually.”

“You from there?”

“No, just passing through. Stayed a bit longer than expected. In Steelside Corrections Facility, on Eager Street.” She was nodding. “In New York, they send you away, and most times, they send you away—upstate somewhere. In Baltimore, they send you to Baltimore. A jail, right in the heart of the city, on a street called ‘Eager.’ Tell me, who puts a jail on a st. . .