Joseph "Joey" Suka and his brother James "Jamie" Suka spent twenty years speaking with their best idea of a Russian accent to Italians and Mexicans and Jamaicans and Crips and Bloods and various others. Joey had explained to Jamie that Russians were scary. Being scary could be profitable. People paid debts to scary people. People changed testimony for scary people. People paid for protection from scary people. And Joey explained that while anyone could snap fingers or break knee caps or effectively place an ice pick in a liver, Russians were especially scary.
Nobody, not the Italians, the Mexicans, the Jamaicans, the Crips, or the Bloods thought they were Russian. But the story of how they brought back Anthony "Chicklets" Abato's teeth, all of them, to Giovanni Oddi made them scary. When they mailed pieces of Andrew "Chopper" Nocerino to every other person on the witness list against Paulie Schmidt made them scary. What they did to "Nuts" Pagono made them scary as hell.
They were ridiculous, but absolutely lethal. And scary. That made them valuable. That meant they were well fed. That meant they eventually had no necks. Just heads popped up six feet above the ground on round mounds of surprisingly muscular flesh. Six feet six inches of 322 pounds of twin - TWIN - terror. They saw the world in black and white and left it in red.
If the client wanted someone to disappear, then the Suka brothers were a waste of money. They could DO that, but...
If you wanted something done that involved a cleaver and a blow torch, the Suka brothers and their "moose and squirrel" fake Russian accents were a sound investment.
Brutality.
People paid good money for brutality.
But for good money, people wanted results. Proof. Driving around (never flying) with proof was risky. But people paid really good money for risk.
But there is a funny thing about risk. The first time you sneak out of your parents' house at one in the morning, it is nerve racking. The 33rd time you do it, it is just climbing out your bedroom window at one in the morning.
The first time you drive around the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with a dismembered body in your trunk it is terrifying. The 33rd time you do it, you stop for chicken fried steak at your favorite chicken fried steak place. And then you curse in broken Russian when you find your car stolen. All your plans for the intestines of Jimmy "Spaghetti" Spinnetti gone with your favorite cleaver and your vintage copy of James Agee's A Death in the Family.
For the first time in ages the twin terrors were afraid. They knew they amounted to middle management at best. Consultants maybe would be an even better description. If their Caddie turned up with Spaghetti in it and a cleaver and fingerprints and a certain ledger that even Jamie didn't know about, then both twins were sure to be expedited death penalty candidates in the extremely mortal state of Texas. Either by the citizens of the Lone Star State or the members of the Detroit Men's Swim Club.
That was when they met the young black man from Houston with a gun. He never showed them the gun. They never needed to see it. He knew it was there and so did they. The way he walked right up to them but stayed just out of reach. The way he kept the hip with the gun nestled against it away from them. The way... Joey was the one to notice this but once he said it out loud to Jamie it made sense.. the way his right hand looked empty, incomplete without a gun in it, spoke a violent dialect that these two violent men could understand all to well.
Things for the Suka's changed almost immediately after that. The car turned up. And the body was undisturbed. It was so convenient that Jamie thought the man with the gun must have stolen the car or at least arranged it. But the man with the gun made no demands on them. He just did them a favor. A favor that kept them out of hot water with the state of Texas and more importantly, the Detroit Men's Swim Club.
Things changed for the Suka twins after that. They still took freelance assignments and still made fear a fog, a film that settled over the ones meant to be afraid. But they added book making to their duties once they took out a bookie that had cheated the Swim Club of their proper cut. There was a drug dealer that had decided to testify about his bosses. Did you know that testify comes from the root word testes? The twins or the man with the gun apparently did. And so the Suka's entered the drug trade as on of the most secure networks imaginable.
They developed a reputation for over paying their help. People chocked it up to them remembering what it was like to be lower down the ladder. But if you worked for the twins, and you were good at your job, and you kept your mouth shut, you could make a lot of money.
The first time that reputation paid off for them was when the Redhead came to work for them. She was beautiful. Not pretty. Pretty implied an innocence. Pretty you could look away from. You could not take your eyes off of the redhead. For a hired killer that would seem to be a handicap.
But you would stand there with your mouth open and your hands limp and ... other parts of you forgetting the definition of the word "limp". The fact that she got in to see them without an appointment was one testament to her caliber. The ceramic straight razor that she had brought with her was another. She held it first against where Jamie's throat should have been and then teasingly against his nose when the man with the gun had shown her his properly adorned right hand.
She made a gift of the razor to Jamie whose pupils were still a bit dilated. She smiled at Joey and his nostrils flared. She turned to the man with the gun and pinched her lips together against the smile that wanted to blossom there.
"So you are the brains behind these two 'wild and crazy guys,' huh?"
End Chapter Five
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