Saturday Morning Breakfast Serial

Bowl? Milk? Here we go:
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Chapter 3
Never Reason With a Crazy Man


"Hello Jo."

"Snake." I did my best not to stare. The man looked terrible. I mean, he's never been a looker, and the scars that drag from just below his right eye down his throat from the business end of a broken bottle don't exactly enhance, but he always managed to pull off enough of a menacing bad-ass vibe to pull it off.

Now he didn't.

He was emaciated, frail looking, with a fey glint in his dark eyes that spoke of a kind of madness that might actually make him more dangerous. As if he needed it. Had he been eating at all? Maybe not. Most people think poison, they start watching what they eat and drink. But while it's certainly the most obvious means, it's not the only one.

He was sitting at a table in the middle of the room, staring down at something. It took me a minute to realize what it was. A Ouija board. A freaking ouija board? Wow. Okay. He'd lost it. I mean, the Ouija boards aren't really considered to work reliably back on earth. What in the hell made him think it would do any better here where nobody believes in ghosts at all?
"Bout time you got here." He scooted his chair away from the table, turning to face me.

I didn't answer. There wasn't anything I could say.

"Laura's pregnant."

Laura was his mistress. She was as beautiful as he was ugly, and just as lethal. The fact that the two of them had actually bred was seriously terrifying, but I smiled and said "Congratulations," like a good little lackey.

"I want to live to raise my kid. You're going to tell me how to do that."

He was serious. Great.

"Give up the life, get off planet, live in a monastery?"

He growled, a gutteral, menacing sound that made all of his "boys" come on alert, their hands hovering close to their various weapons.

I tried to make him see reason "Seriously snake, I don't make the future, I just see it. You knew when you got into this line of work that none of us live to see old age."

He smiled, and it sent shivers down spine.

"True. But if I'm going, you're going first." The boys must have been expecting that. Or maybe they'd been through this before, because as a unit they began shifting furniture out of the way, and moving to stand along the walls, giving us fighting room. Bizarre. What in the hell had been going on around here since I left?

"I don't want to fight you Snake." I really didn't. Because even if I won, I'd lose. If he didn't kill me, his men would. I'd be the first person they'd take out in the scramble to take over the business.

He smiled, and it was pure evil. "Then tell me what I want to hear."

"I can't do that."

"Then we dance."