Season 1, Episode 6 - The Tree Plot XIV - "Dogs Chasing Cars"
----------------------------------------
Babs kept her feet kicked up the entire ride home.
When she actually got home, though, she frowned. She hated the sight of the Dunn Electric Factory looming over her beloved Revere Arcade. The Factory's smokestacks stretched high into the gray sky, and she could occasionally hear the shrill whistles from inside the facilty. The first of its generators was set to activate this Thursday, far ahead of schedule.
Perhaps Babs and the Revere Gang would have to leave their headquarters far ahead of schedule, too. Not only were their operations outgrowing their humble abode, the influx of activity around the Factory meant that the Arcade was getting too hot to conduct the sort of business they staked their lives on. Well, Babs staked her life on it, at least. Nobody was nearly as enthusiastic about the Revere Gang’s expansion as she was. But that’s alright - the expansion also meant new subordinates, ones far more loyal, since they had the same vision of the future that Babs did.
When the gang exited the van and entered the Arcade, they saw many faces inside, unfamiliar to all of them except for Babs. Children, the local unemployed, and rural migrants who smuggled themselves inside the Pond’s walls scurried about the arcade, carrying boxes full of ledgers and goods. A false wall had been built along the length of the Arcade; all the machines were shoved to the front to give the illusion of an arcade to the outside world, while the rest of the building was dedicated for storage.
Babs nodded at an Asian mercenary leaning against a bookcase, a Type 11 rifle slung around his shoulder. Behind that bookcase was the recently-dug stairwell that connected the Arcade to the underground tunnels below the Pond and therefore the rest of the city. With so much equipment and machinery and general construction noises at the Electric Factory, nobody noticed that little side job going on inside the Arcade.
As Babs headed upstairs toward her office, she realized that the group from earlier today was still following her. Marty, Marie, Mallory, Martinez, and Samuel all followed her like lost cats.
“We’re all set,” Babs told them as she reached the top of the stairs. “You guys can go do whatever you want now.”
“But I guard the outside of your office,” Marty said.
“I have some accounting I wish to discuss with you,” Marie said.
“Ever since we got rid of the skeeball machines to make more room, I have nothing else to do,” Mallory said.
"I think we should discuss the growing size of the Free Corps," Martinez said.
“I just want to hang out,” Samuel said.
Babs sighed and wiped her face. That’s when Marty noticed two burly men in suits standing outside the office door. Each man had thick arms and a shiny gold watch around their wrists.
Babs noticed the look on his face. “Oh, those two? On the right you got Ahmet the Turk-”
Ahmet nodded.
“And this is Lewis the Wrath.”
Lewis nodded.
Babs looked back at her stunned group. “They guard the door now.”
Marty spoke slowly. “But…I guard the door. Guard the door and drive the van. Those are the two things I do.”
Babs tugged at her collar. “Yeah, about that…you see, Ahmet actually has his hoisting license, so he’ll be doing the driving from now on.”
Marty stared blankly, then made an utter noise of despair.
Babs then looked at Marie. “And…well, Lewis actually has a Master’s in Taxation, so he’ll be taking over the accounting from now on, too.”
“Indubitably,” Lewis the Wrath simply said.
Marie stared blankly, her eyes hidden behind her glasses.
“You guys remember who we bought those New York Minutes from, right?” Babs asked her downcast group. “When Lynn was with us? We bought them from Abdyl and Lumaj from the mob. Well, I’m waiting on some news from them right now, and if everything goes right, we’ll have a big shin-dig tonight. And it's the kind of shin-dig you bring guns to. So, sit tight, everyone! I think we’ll be having one hell of a time tonight!”
Babs strode off toward her office. After glancing at each other, the core members of the Revere Gang followed her after, looking more and more like desperate lost cats. Ahmet the Turk and Lewis the Wrath stepped out of the way to let Babs inside the office - since when did she have a metal door? - and then stepped back in front of it when the other gang members arrived. From the looks on the two big men’s faces, nobody was getting through.
Everyone stayed quiet for a moment. Then Marie started crying.
----------------------------------------
Babs stretched her fingers, then pulled her semi-acoustic out of its case. Guitar wasn’t a new habit for her, but this was a new guitar, purchased with the money she made by selling the last of the microwaves. She was just a gutter-punk kid at one point, but now she could afford a thousand guitars. And if Abdyl and Lumaj played their parts this morning…
Babs gently strummed her guitar at first, the pick moving lightly across the strings. Then she started tapping her foot, picking up the intensity, the electric noises from the semi-acoustic filling the room. She strummed harder, the guitar now wailing, bouncing around her walls.
----------------------------------------
In a diner in downtown Palmer Beach, Lumaj sat with the underboss of the European Mob Consortium, an angry man named Rusiko Petre. His anger wasn’t always apparent; as he sat at his seat, one leg folded over the other, puffing a cigar while reading the morning news, he spoke softly. The anger could be found just below the surface, merely radiating out of him instead of bursting in an expletive-filled explosion.
“Can you believe this nonsense?” he rumbled. Lumaj kept quiet, since Rusiko liked to do all the talking. Lumaj was just a soldier in the crime family alliance, his recent work earning him a spot among the men who carted Rusiko around town while he was on business. Rusiko chose Lumaj to eat with him because Lumaj kept quiet and they had a shared history of lost childhood love interests.
Despite his size and fully-grown beard, Lumaj was only nineteen, yet his eyes suggested he had seen a lot for his age. Everybody in the families had. His fellow soldiers waiting outside in the car - the driver and another bodyguard - had been pickpockets and thieves growing up, much like Lumaj.
Fortunes moved fast among the immigrants who arrived in New England’s rebuilding docks following the end of the First American War. There was work to be done, not all of it legal. Soldiers rose and fell; Lumaj managed to maintain his course to the top so far, but today and tomorrow would decide a lot of things.
Rusiko dropped the newspaper on the table then whacked a hand against a news article. “Worm syrup,” he muttered. “What a load of malarkey. My wife caught my niece with the stuff the other day. Kids these days, rotting their brains.”
Lumaj silently nodded, watching Rusiko work at his plate, fork in hand, while he rattled on about the crime rate and decay in the city.
“When we ruled the underworld, things were different,” Rusiko complained. “We had rules. Honor. Respect. We were professional about our business. Money wasn’t always everything. Now we got these Restorationist clowns running about, along with these…the hell do they call themselves?”
“The Dorrites,” Lumaj plainly answered.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“Bunch of loonies,” Rusiko murmured. “It’s not about keeping things stable anymore. Everybody’s got a plan to change the world. You think worm syrup is going to change the world?”
“Can’t say I do,” Lumaj answered, keeping his tone plain and neutral.
A waiter approached them, glass of water in hand. He refilled both of their glasses, but Lumaj caught him before he left.
“Glass of grape juice,” he requested, a knowing look in his eye.
The waiter wordlessly understood. He returned back to the kitchen, where the line chefs were waiting for the signal.
“Grape juice, I like it,” Rusiko commented. “You’re not like the other fools here, Lumaj. You got vision. You know that as long we keep things the way they were, keep our heads down and just do as we’ve done, then everything will turn out alright, for us and everyone.”
“Of course,” Lumaj answered, a hint of jovialness rising in his voice.
Keeping things they way they are is the complete opposite of vision.
Three line cooks burst out of the kitchen into the dining area. Opera masks covered their faces. All three of them pointed snub-nosed pistols at Rusiko and fired.
None of them missed. Rusiko looked at Lumaj in shock, grasping at the newspaper and plate before collapsing to the ground.
Lumaj had done nothing during the murder. He looked outside and saw the two soldiers get out of the car in a hurry. The bodyguard raised his pistol and pointed it at the line cooks; the driver raised his pistol and pointed it at the bodyguard.
The bullet caught the bodyguard through the back; he fell in a heap. With business settled, Lumaj rose while the line cooks collected Rusiko’s body. As they arrived outside, the driver already had the car running. Lumaj dusted off his suit, nodded as the two corpses were thrown into the trunk, then slid into the passenger seat, the line cooks taking up the back.
----------------------------------------
Babs windmilled her arm above her guitar, imaging gunshots and orchestras playing across the city that would soon be hers. Then she jammed the pick into the strings, sending off a sharp chord.
----------------------------------------
The boss of the entire Mob Consortium, an old man named Cosmo Tore, waited in the backseat of his black car, watching trees and guardrails slide away behind him as his convoy cruised down a freeway outside of Fore River.
Abdyl sat in the passenger seat, waiting for showtime. He was another caporegime within the family, making a spectacular rise through the ranks due to his ability to move all kinds of merchandise quickly and cleanly. Today, he would be making another sort of move; he wanted to say that he prayed it would also be quick and clean, but he knew it would be. He had the utmost confidence in himself; otherwise, how else would a once-illiterate stowaway have risen to his position?
“Abdyl,” Tore said, his voice raspy with age. “What do you think of the situation on the ground?”
The don and company were coming from a meeting with Captain Firmino, the head of the Fore River Military Police. Simply put - if he wanted that regular stream of cash into his Squanto Bank account to keep moving steadily, he would need to put some pressure on those alleged nobodies, those Dorrite revolutionaries that had been steadily encroaching in Fore River. They had been selling right under his nose, for crying out loud!
New York smuggled products used to be sold to the mob who handled the distribution. But in the past decade, New York had gradually shifted its sales to those Second Restorationists once it became clear the mob wouldn’t sell drugs on the scale the New Yorkers wanted.
That influx of wealth to the revolutionaries put the mob on its backfoot. The Restorationists steadily gained power in areas that were once mob strongholds; all gambling and racketeering operations in Neponset now belonged to them. Abdyl had once been the mob’s man in Elizabeth Pond, but the Restorationist operation at Hayman gradually put him out of business, too.
Fortunately, Abdyl shifted his turf to Fore River over time, making one last deal with the Revere Gang before the territory was lost for good. The Revere Gang picked up their home district once the Restorationists were pushed out of there, of course, and were now making inroads elsewhere, allying themselves with the resources and might of that growing Dorrite movement. Somehow, they took over importing the smuggled goods from New York, and were now directing the profits toward the Dorrite movement (and themselves, of course).
Abdyl smelled opportunity. Outside of breaking poor Lumaj’s heart (how could she reject someone who could cook so well?), Babs had a smart head on her shoulders with equal cunning to boot. Sure, she had a mean and occasionally irrational streak, but that would serve Abdyl well now, when he needed her violence to knock off those above him; that same side of her would serve Abdyl equally as well when the time came to knock her off.
The Revere Gang were little more than kids playing with fire. Sooner rather than later, they would get burned.
“I think we can trust Captain Firmino,” Abdyl informed the don. It wasn’t a lie; Abdyl and his wife were regular house guests of Firmino, their children often playing soccer in the captain’s spacious backyard. A backyard (and house, for that matter) purchased with the cut Abdyl always paid out to the good captain. In return, Firmino kept the peace and made sure nobody else encroached on what was clearly the mob’s territory.
Yet Firmino seemed awfully slow with getting rid of the Dorrites infecting his territory. It didn’t take a smart man to realize that Firmino was actually allowing them into his territory at the expense of the mob. Perhaps the steady flow of income to his bank account courtesy of the Revere-Dorrite alliance was bigger than what the mob could offer.
But Abdyl had a plan for Firmino. He unconsciously tapped the breast pocket of his suit, the calling card for the State Police representative tucked away carefully inside.
The plan was simple. Abdyl, and Lumaj, and their loyalists in the mob would make their move. Then his new mob, Firmino, the Dorrites, and the Revere Gang would push the Restorationists out of the city. And then, courtesy of that calling card, the mob would have the ultimate power in the country backing their effort to take down Firmino, the Dorrites, and the Revere Gang and seize control of the country’s underworld for themselves.
With that much power behind him, with only an old captain, revolutionary dreamers, and a literal child facing him, Abdyl knew he would win.
But before any of that could happen, the next move needed to succeed.
“Abdyl?” Tore repeated in his husky voice.
“Ah, sorry,” Abdyl apologized, realizing he had been staring into space while watching cars pass by.
“I was saying, Firmino’s seemed awfully slow in consolidating his territory,” Tore repeated.
“Everybody’s a little spooked,” Abdyl commented. “The State Police aren’t exactly friends with the Military Police or even us.”
They certainly weren’t friends with Tore, at least. The elderly mobster had failed to act against Firmino when he had the chance. Of course Firmino was helping the rising Dorrites rather than the falling mob. That’s why Tore had to go first.
The freeway gradually turned into a big avenue inside a rotting industrial district in an eastern area of Fore River. Factories and warehouses lined the dirty streets, billboards hanging off of every building, advertising products ranging from furniture to prostitutes. A particular sign caught Abdyl’s eye - Narragansett Nut Company.
The company’s warehouse proved perfect for Abdyl’s plan. A well-placed donation to the company, along with a well-trained driver, ensured that right as the convoy neared it, a long freight truck attempted to back in across three lanes of traffic into the warehouse. It took its time, which wasn’t out of the ordinary - even the best driver needed perfect hand-eye coordination and talent to back their truck into that warehouse on the first try.
The driver sighed and complained about the warehouse’s location. He wasn’t in on the plan.
Tore paid it no mind. He had driven down these streets many times; such an interruption wasn’t unusual.
“I have my granddaughter’s wedding this Friday,” Tore commented with a small smile. “What awful timing she chose. Same time as the Cambridge-Institute game.”
Abdyl heard the roar of motorcycles in the distance.
“It’s a shame,” he mumbled. He caught a glimpse of the motorcycle riders weaving through traffic - they wore opera masks.
Abdyl ducked down as far as he could. The riders pulled up alongside the convoy just as Tore and the driver realized what had happened. Each rider had New England-made submachine guns that had gotten lost somewhere along the supply chain; they fired a long magazine burst into the backseat, the bullets shaking the car.
Even knowing ahead of time, Abdyl felt the thrill and excitement of the drive-by with each bullet, each falling shard of glass. He had his own job; he unveiled his pistol from his coat sleeve and shot the driver.
As the riders peeled off, Abdyl heard dozens of gunshots all around him on the freeway. Those loyal to him would be taking out those loyal to Tore. The sun shone brightly through the cracked windows as Abdyl poked his head up and turned around to take one last look at his former boss.
Don Tero wheezed softly, his body riddled with bullets.
“I suppose it was time,” he said softly. “Take good care of this city.”
Abdyl nodded, then fired his pistol once more.
----------------------------------------
Babs took a deep breath as she winded down her crescendo. The remaining sound reverberated around her office, gradually dissipating into a silence that seemed all too sudden.
She placed the guitar back in its case, then took up her usual spot, a lazy seat on her worn-out chair behind her desk. She took a long look at the map of Narragansett on her wall, her eyes enamored with the blue push pins that dotted the map, signifying her growing territory.
She had no doubt Abdyl planned on betraying her. He would be taken care of soon enough; all his men would soon be hers. All their connections, all their networks.
And once that was settled, she could get started on her true plan for the city.
But before that - her telephone rang.
Leaning back in her seat, Babs picked up the phone and cradled the cord around a finger as she brought it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“...h-hiya, Babs,” Lynn greeted.