Cut by Cushman Adam

Author:Cushman, Adam [Cushman, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

14

Birds

“Safety is our first priority,” Lopez told me a week ago after the fight as I bled in his kitchen.

Wreck the world class surgeon cleaned and stitched and bandaged me while Fred whispered over one of my shoulders that Richie’s up next and if anything like what just happened to me happens to Richie, he’ll never see any of us again and we’ll go to the cops.

Fred whispered this to Lopez, behind my other shoulder as Lopez laughed a little and repeated, “Safety, young man, is our first priority.”

The priority didn’t end up applying to Richie though, who The Handle carved so perfectly across the belly he barely spilled a drop.

The Handle wiped his shiny gray blade on Richie’s jeans.

The three-piece-suit, the wired specs, the briefcase and the one glass eye that glares at you no matter where you are in the room, all of it scares me.

Fred told me The Handle is not The Handle’s real name. He said The Handle is a residential realtor, and not a successful one. He put his blade in his briefcase and left the six of us anesthetized. Except Wonkie.

Wonkie’s veins popped out of his arms when The Handle walked into the living room and casually slit Richie, before the hush of disbelief passed.

What tore Wonkie up the most was Richie went out thinking he’d been betrayed by the one guy who actually liked him.

Even The Beak came over to where we all sat and whispered in my ear how somebody fucked up, that he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea about Lopez and what we did in the living room, but with the remainder of my left ear bandaged, I wasn’t hearing any of it.

Besides, the giant TV screen kept looping my ear getting hacked off in slow motion.

My breakthrough performance.

My retirement party.

Then the Beak and Kuba carried off dead Richie with stuff spilling out of him and Fred stepped onto the tarp, twirling his blade.

A second later a lanky man wearing a faded Alligator shirt joined him.

Lopez saying go and Fred raising his arms, tightening his gut.

The Alligator Shirt’s knife entered halfway, silent, painless.

Pebbles told me Fred had done that before, let himself get stabbed so the other person could take the money and go solve their problems.

This time wasn’t like that though.

Fred’s expression in the driveway of Lopez’s house, reclined in the front seat of Wonkie’s Cadillac as Wreck sewed him up with fierce intensity couldn’t have been any different if one of us had suggested going out for some late-night donuts.

Wreck insisted on giving his patient some Demerol, or an exotic Morphine cocktail.

Fred laughed, flipping through radio stations and before my thought made its way into a question, he replied, “Nipples, are you even aware that Lopez tried to kill you tonight?”

The Beak knocked on my motel room door a few days after my opening night, sat me down and explained how it’s been decided that my services are no longer needed in a way that would require me to use a knife.

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