Honor Among Thieves
Elle Pepper
January 2006
January 2006
And I understood why people held so tightly to his name. When he gave you his name, he trusted you with this side of himself: with his humanity. Most people thought he was some unfeeling, uncaring killing machine. And yes, he was efficient, but now I knew that he didn’t enjoy it. It was his duty. It was required of him. It was required of me also. We had promised, and it was worth blood.
The gun finally came up, pointed at my head. The sadness reflected in his eyes almost broke my will. Once again, he was doing what sometime, long ago, he had sworn he would never do. He was, once again, killing a friend.
Neither one of us wanted to be here, in the Heights, doing this thing, but we also both knew that it was unavoidable. I had transgressed, I had killed a friend, and I had tried to murder a man I had sworn to protect. My word was worth blood, now it was time to pay.
"Vince, I wish it didn’t have to end like this."
The tone in his voice was somber, but begging me to back out. Begging for me to save him this task. Begging for me to make some sort of sign that I would live. He wanted some excuse to save my life, and I had none to give.
The silence went on for a long while.
"Why?" he broke his silence at last.
"It started as revenge Matt."
"I told you to leave them be." I could hear the icy anger in his voice.
"I know. I couldn’t do that. For the same reason you couldn’t let Alis’ killers go."
"You promised me."
"I lied."
DiAmbrosi hung his head as if I had slapped him. "Did you ever really mean it?" his voice was that of a defeated, broken man.
That was a low blow, and yet I could hear the earnestness in his voice, he really wanted to know if I had always been a traitor.
"It didn’t start this way Matt."
"I spoke for you."
"And I was grateful."
"Now you aren’t?"
"Shit Matt, I don’t know what to think. I almost had it all."
"When Mario and Sal fingered you, I spoke for you. I argued, I told them you would never do such a thing. How could you do this?"
I shrugged. I certainly hadn’t expected this. Was the best losing his touch? Was he beginning to have second thoughts? I needled him, I knew if I could get him mad enough he’d shut up and shoot me. "An inch higher and we wouldn’t be having the conversation." That was how far I had missed Mr. DiAmbrosi by. A mere inch. The bullet streaked over his shoulder hitting the Don. Finally it clicked. He was blaming himself for not taking the hit.
"I knew your routine Matt, I planned it all." At last I had given him what he was after. I had confessed to the planning. He knew I had paid for the men, but he didn’t know if I was the mastermind. Had this all been a trick to work a confession out of me? I pondered that for a moment. No, if he really had wanted an answer, he never would have let me come here. The question was his own, it wasn’t information his boss wanted, it wasn’t anything anyone else would know. If Geo had wanted that info I would have been at the docks with the "Docs". I was getting a bit giddy, the fear was finally getting to me.
I could see the hatred in his eyes, but it wasn’t for me. He thought he was a failure, he hated himself. I had been his project, I had failed; therefore he had failed.
"You saved his life. If you hadn’t shoved him, he would be dead. So damnit Matt, do your job." I hated to see what this was doing to him. I really hated to see it, but it was the way things had to be. "Just, when it’s over," I bit back tears. "Take care of Lilly, my Lilly."
I still held on to the hope that I wouldn’t die. That someone would give me a reprieve, but I couldn’t ask him to stand in my place, this was my crime, my punishment. Someone told me once, and maybe it was my dad, that he believed that Goodbyes should never be said to the living.
He paused for a moment, to let me speak if I wanted to, and then nodded. He wasn’t going to make me beg, I was too good of a friend for that. And I knew, at last, he had made his peace with this. And I watched in a fascinated horror as he chambered the round that would kill me. His motions now were that deadly, practiced calm I had always known, but his eyes were still soft, those of Matt, not of Mr. DiAmbrosi, the DiMarco enforcer.
Finally he said the words I had been dreading, "Goodbye Vince."
Pause, I guess I’d better tell you how it came to that, before I continue the story. Otherwise it won’t make any sense. It started in the sixties when Mike DiMartelli knew me in the Bronx. We worked together. All he knew of me was that I was a cop with a shady past stamped "Top Secret." I don’t remember if I had gotten my brass shield back then or not… Come to think of it, I guess I had. Just. That was back when I was using another alias, one not so blatant as my current one.
Those who know me, still call me Griffin, the name of the foster family that adopted me, and in fact, I think that was the name I was using. Yes. I had gone back to my ‘real’ name. Mikey D knew me pretty well, he was a good cop, and I was a good cop gone bad. I was under as a deep cover dirty cop. But the case was starting to mushroom out around me. I found out that the corruption went far beyond what I thought.
Mike had been assigned to me because he was the new guy, but already he had refused to take bribes, even what the cops called ‘clean graft’ or bookie money, he turned down, living on what he made with his own two hands.
He knew me as a dirty cop, but he didn’t know I was deep cover. When he threatened to turn me in, something that would blow my cover if I didn’t want to spend twenty years in jail, I had him arrested on false charges, and then I went to go talk to him in private.
"Griffin?" He stood up, still pacing. "Come to turn the knife?"
"Look, yeah, I turned you in. I had to, you were going to surface me, what did you expect me to do?"
"Surface?" He paused to think about that for a moment.
"Undercover?"
"I’m part of a taskforce to bring in bad cops, so they have me playing a bad cop."
Elle Pepper is a young college graduate from Fresno, California. This is her first time seeing something she wrote go from the front of her fridge to the real world, but we think it won't be the last.
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