The guy at the counter says Banana Flambé doesn’t hit the stage until after midnight. I get myself a nice dinner up the street, sit there reading the paper, looking for word about the body. Nothing. Have a drink, have two, feeling the bulge of the .38, keeping my eyes out for trouble. They can do me in public and never get taken for it. It just ain’t fair.

I’ll tell you what ain’t fair. I mean, I’m up for a nickel, and I don’t open my goddamn trap to tell the fucking pigs Jimmy Silver’s fucking shoe size, for Christ’s sake. So the parole board, they hear about how I’m an uncooperative prisoner, no matter how many times I scrub the fucking floor of my cell. Five fucking years. Who ever heard of serving five years on a nickel? And what’s the word I get from Jimmy Silver’s people inside? Jimmy can’t associate with me, I’m too hot. All because I went up on a drug violation.

So Jimmy let me rot, and he never once said so much as thank you, Jake, for doing your time and keeping your fucking mouth shut.

That doesn’t bother me half so much as it will if the cops get an ID on that body. I killed a made man without getting an okay from his boss first. Not only that, but Jimmy and Frank shared blood. I’m fucked.

The only thing that kept me alive through five years in the joint was that the body was never found. So what? Fucking goddamn lousy timing for them to find it now—if I hadn’t been up for a nickel I could have driven up and taken care of the body when I heard they were building that housing development right where I’d whacked him. I could have kept it under wraps, just like it had been for five years. Jimmy never knew what happened to his brother that night, and if it wasn’t for me serving the whole goddamn nickel, he never would have known.

Too fucking late now. Now Jimmy will figure out what happened, figure out who did his half brother, and there’s some sort of poetic justice in that.

Frank. Fucking prick. That son of a bitch deserved to die for what he did to Connie. It still made my trigger finger itchy thinking about how she must have felt—

So I did him, wearing the hat of the pale rider, as the bringer of divine retribution, but funny thing, I don’t think Jimmy will see me as the hand of God. How could that son of a bitch let his brother treat a beautiful, innocent girl like that and think he can get away with it—

Easy. I tell myself. Nobody knows a fucking thing—yet.

I finish my second drink and walk up the street to the Uptown.