Page 14 of Kingmakers, Year Two

Sabrina locks eyes with me. There’s no hint of fear or remorse in her face. Just pure, burning fury.

It doesn’t appear that they roughed her up, so maybe Poe isn’t as stupid as he looks.

He does look plenty stupid. He’s a walking cartoon character—his blocky, rectangular head sitting on a neck of exactly the same thickness, so it forms one long pillar from skull to shoulders. His face is shaved so high that his pouf of gingery hair perches on top of his head like a toupee. Add to that a drooping mustache and Bugs Bunny teeth.

Still, it would be a mistake to find him comical. Poe is no stranger to violence. The most dangerous man is one who has nothing to lose.

Poe is a six-time convict, petty drug dealer, and fentanyl addict who’s about to lose his last meal ticket. He’s going to cling to Iggy until his fingernails tear off. Unless I put a stop to this once and for all.

“You’re fuckin’ disrespectful, boy,” Poe hisses. “You throw a party for Iggy’s album, and you don’t even invite his manager?”

“You’re not his manager,” I reply. “And you’re right, I don’t respect you. You’re a leech. You’ve been bleeding Iggy dry since he posted his first song. You don’t do fuck-all for him.”

“I do everything for him!” Poe rasps, outraged. “Who helped pay his mum’s rent after his dad died? Who bought his Christmas presents?”

“You threw them fifty bucks here and there so you could use their house to stash your drugs. And the only Christmas I remember seeing you is the one where you had an ankle monitor and you needed a permanent address for your parole officer.”

If anybody paid Iggy’s rent it was my dad, who helped Iggy’s mom land a job as a PA at City Hall after his father dropped dead from a stroke at only forty-eight years old.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you!” Poe howls, his face turning the color of a turnip. “You think you can take my nephew away? Well I got yer fuckin’ cousin. So you can tear up that bullshit contract with Virgin-fuckin-whoever-the-fuck, or I’ll tear her pretty little face off instead!”

I give him a second to recover his breath. Then I reply, calmly, “That’s not happening. Iggy’s leaving. You’re staying here. It’s already decided. But I’m willing to discuss terms—we can all walk away happy tonight.”

“Fuck yer fuckin’ terms!” Poe laughs in my face. “Look around you! There’s four of us and one of you.”

I pretend to look at his three goons with something approaching respect. Really, I’m just confirming their exact positions. And Poe’s, too.

I give him one last warning. “No need for this to get ugly.”

“Oh, we’re way past ugly,” Poe sneers. “You think you’re making a deal here? I’ll shoot this bitch in the face just to set the table!”

He yanks a battered .45 out of the waistband of his filthy jeans and points it at Sabrina, cocking the trigger. Sabrina’s nostrils flare. I figure I have about two more minutes before she does something crazy. Which aligns nicely with my own timeline.

Poe doesn’t want the carrot—it’s time to bring out the stick.

“I’m glad you brought up firearms, Poe,” I say.

I’m slowly walking forward so that I can position myself between Poe and Sabrina. Poe doesn’t care—he’s fine with pointing his gun in my face instead. He turns his body, arm outstretched, so that his back is to the ivy-covered wall and Poe’s two goons are behind me.

“It’s hard to get rid of a gun…I mean, really get rid of it. You can file the serial numbers off, chuck it in a river. But it’s still there, just waiting to be found. And sometimes you don’t want to throw it in the river. The damn things are expensive. Sometimes the temptation to keep it is just too strong . . .”

“What the fuck are you blabbering about?” Poe’s mustache twitches.

“Iggy and I have been friends a long time,” I say. “Like that Christmas we were just talking about. I spent half the holiday at his house. You probably remember . . .”

Poe narrows his eyes at me, finger curled around the trigger of his gun. I don’t love that he’s holding it that way. He’s jittery enough to shoot me by accident.

“Iggy and me had just started smoking weed. I think we were fourteen, fifteen maybe. We had to find somewhere to hide his stash so his mom didn’t give us shit. We ended up taking down the air vent and putting our baggy in the ducts. Funny, though . . . we weren’t the first people to hide something in there . . .”

Poe has a sense of where I’m going, but he doesn’t quite believe it.

“You had just gotten out of jail after knocking over the 7-11 on Kedzie with a couple of your buddies. Somebody shot the cashier . . . oops. He died two days later. Cops thought it was you, but they couldn’t prove it from the security tape, and they didn’t have the murder weapon. You hid the gun. But you didn’t hide it very well. Uncles and nephews think alike I guess, ‘cause Iggy pulled it out of the wall.”

“Bullshit,” Poe hisses. Though he’s shaking his head, he takes a step back so he’s almost pressed up against the ivy.

“I’m afraid not,” I say quietly, “ ‘Course I didn’t know what that gun was at the time, or where it came from. But when you started demanding that Iggy pay you a forty percent commission . . . I dug up your old case file. I checked what caliber bullet they pulled out of that cashier’s neck. And I remembered what we found that Christmas. Only took me an hour to visit Iggy’s house and check the vent again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Poe’s jaw is stubbornly set and he’s sweating.

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