City of Heretics Read Online Free PDF Page B

should feel something about having a son he knew nothing about.
    He was a father.
    No, that was bullshit. He was no father. Having a kid doesn’t automatically make you a father, does it?  Not in the strictest sense. He didn’t know the kid, didn’t want to know the kid, would never know the kid.
    But he wished she hadn’t told me about it. He couldn’t afford that sort of distraction.
    It didn’t change anything, though. He would have a great deal of money before this was all done and he could afford to throw some Dallas’s way.
    In the bathroom, he took a piss that seemed to last ten minutes, and then wobbled to the kitchen and found a box of saltines he’d bought his first day back. He sat in the easy chair and ate them, indulging his inner gourmet.
    He fell asleep in the chair for a while, which kept him from fretting about what to do for a few hours. He had fitful dreams about Dallas. He woke up about eight, had the usual moment of disorientation, wondering why his cell looked different, but shook it off, ate some more crackers and brushed his teeth.
    Then he set about putting together a make-shift sap. With a kitchen knife, he sawed a big chunk out of the back of the imitation leather chair, about two feet by two feet. He had a jar of change on the kitchen counter-- He dumped about three dollars’ worth of dimes onto the chunk of material, bundled it up, and secured it with a heavy piece of twine. The lump it made was about the size of his fist, and a good solid weight that he could swing easily. He shrugged on his suit jacket, shoved the sap in his outside pocket. He headed out the door.
     

Memphis had always been attractive to organized crime for the same reason Fed-Ex loved the place: location. If nothing else, Memphis is well-situated as a hub, a place to launch off from to someplace with better prospects.
    The Old Man had been a relic, even before Crowe got sent up. He was a hold-over from the days of the Irish mob that saw its hey-day in the fifties and early sixties. They’d never really got a great toehold in Memphis to begin with—while other cities had been easy pickings for crime families, Memphis was more or less protected by Boss Crump, an officially-elected criminal. But they managed at least to get by, under the radar.
    But by the seventies the L.A. gangs like the Crips had started setting up and it wasn’t long before others from Chicago followed. The meager old white guys had gotten lax and lazy, sitting around in diners or strip clubs counting money, while the young Turks took it to the street and got their hands dirty. The new generation had a sense of unity and purpose that the old guys had forgotten.
    The Old Man saw all these changes happening, but by the time he decided to do something about it, it was too late. He started courting the black gangs, making deals, treating them the way he would’ve treated any powerful rival—with respect. He started employing blacks and Hispanics into his ranks, even letting some of them into the inner circle.
    No one would ever have guessed the remnants of the Irish mob would ever make nice with the black gangs. There was too much animosity, stretching all the way back to right after the Civil War, when newly-freed blacks managed to snag the jobs in Memphis that used to belong to the poor Irish. Crazy that something like that would dictate the tone of relations for almost one hundred and fifty years, but that’s the way things worked.
    But the Old Man saw the writing on the wall and did what he had to do, and that was how Vitower eventually came to power. The white mob went down without a shot fired; it just transformed itself into a black mob. Easy as that.
    The Old Man was shell-shocked, out of his element, in those long years of transition before Crowe went to prison. He didn’t seem like the Iron Man he’d been before. He hesitated. He hem-hawed on important decisions. He knew he’d become a dinosaur, and that meant that Crowe was one too,