Read Online Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell - Free Book Online
Authors: Josh Bazell
Tags: Fiction, General, thriller, Suspense, Fiction - General, Medical, Thrillers, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Suspense fiction, Physicians, Fiction - Espionage, organized crime, Assassins, Black humor (Literature), American First Novelists
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believe that?”
He belched. “Absolutely. The guy doesn’t lie to me.”
Skinflick did seem to have an incredibly smooth relationship with his father, although the one book he claimed he’d ever read in its entirety was The Golden Bough, by James Fraser. Which, aside from being a weird choice for the only book you’ve ever read, is essentially about patricide, and how the origins of civilization lie in intergenerational struggle. The golden bough is what young slaves in a primitive society Fraser discusses pluck when they want to challenge the king to a duel to the death, with the winner keeping the crown.
Skinflick denied that this showed any hostility toward his father, though. He said he’d only picked up The Golden Bough because Kurtz is reading it in Apocalypse Now, and had stuck with it because its ideas about freedom and modernity appealed to him.
“For instance,” he once said, coincidentally while he and I were riding with his father in his father’s car, “people are always bitching about how their primitive fight-or-flight instincts are being repressed, and how they’re depressed because of it. But I can shoot a shotgun while I’m driving down the freeway . No one in history has been that free.”
“You can’t shoot a shotgun standing still,” his father said.
My own relationship with David Locano seemed unreal. He had insisted on giving me forty thousand dollars for killing the Virzis—“Throw it out if you want,” he had said—then never mentioned the incident again, even when we were alone.
Once, though, when I came over and Skinflick was out renting a movie, and Mrs. Locano was out doing whatever, he and I sat at the kitchen table and he asked me if I wanted another job.
“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’m done with that line of work.”
“This isn’t that line of work.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just talk.”
I didn’t stop him.
“Paranoid Russians won’t talk on the telephone,” he went on. “I need you to go to find some guy in Brighton Beach and ask him what it is he wants to say to me.”
“I don’t know Brighton Beach at all,” I said.
“It’s easy,” Locano said. “Particularly if you’re not me. It’s tiny. You go down to Ocean Avenue, ask in a bar called the Shamrock, they’ll know the guy. He’s a big deal guy.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Probably not as dangerous as driving there.”
“Huh,” I said.
I should back off for a moment and note that there’s a concept many criminals become obsessed with, which is the idea of turning out .
The template for it is the classic aspiring pimp who needs to find a woman to work for him. No professional will do it, because they all have pimps already. So he picks a girl from the neighborhood, as sheltered and unworldly as possible, and courts her. Plays up a big romance, then one day tells her he’s in big trouble if he can’t get some money fast, and that a friend of his is willing to pay a hundred dollars to screw her once. After she does it, he acts disgusted with her, and beats her and degrades her, then gives her narcotics for the pain. Once she’s hooked and working steadily, i.e., has been “turned out,” he moves on to Bachelorette #2. Lovely species we belong to.
Today the turnout can be found in any number of situations. The most literal is prison, where the idea is to progress as quickly as possible from lending your cellmate a cigarette to hiring him out to large groups in return for a double-A battery or some smack. Most instances of it are more subtle, though, and have to do with the many ways in which people enter into, or are led into, or believe they are led into, lives of criminality.
I knew all this. I’d read Daddy Cool . I knew that what David Locano was doing was turning me out. And that even if the job I’d just accepted didn’t require violence, taking it meant I was willing to get violent later on.
I just allowed myself to ignore those things.
I drove to
He belched. “Absolutely. The guy doesn’t lie to me.”
Skinflick did seem to have an incredibly smooth relationship with his father, although the one book he claimed he’d ever read in its entirety was The Golden Bough, by James Fraser. Which, aside from being a weird choice for the only book you’ve ever read, is essentially about patricide, and how the origins of civilization lie in intergenerational struggle. The golden bough is what young slaves in a primitive society Fraser discusses pluck when they want to challenge the king to a duel to the death, with the winner keeping the crown.
Skinflick denied that this showed any hostility toward his father, though. He said he’d only picked up The Golden Bough because Kurtz is reading it in Apocalypse Now, and had stuck with it because its ideas about freedom and modernity appealed to him.
“For instance,” he once said, coincidentally while he and I were riding with his father in his father’s car, “people are always bitching about how their primitive fight-or-flight instincts are being repressed, and how they’re depressed because of it. But I can shoot a shotgun while I’m driving down the freeway . No one in history has been that free.”
“You can’t shoot a shotgun standing still,” his father said.
My own relationship with David Locano seemed unreal. He had insisted on giving me forty thousand dollars for killing the Virzis—“Throw it out if you want,” he had said—then never mentioned the incident again, even when we were alone.
Once, though, when I came over and Skinflick was out renting a movie, and Mrs. Locano was out doing whatever, he and I sat at the kitchen table and he asked me if I wanted another job.
“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’m done with that line of work.”
“This isn’t that line of work.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just talk.”
I didn’t stop him.
“Paranoid Russians won’t talk on the telephone,” he went on. “I need you to go to find some guy in Brighton Beach and ask him what it is he wants to say to me.”
“I don’t know Brighton Beach at all,” I said.
“It’s easy,” Locano said. “Particularly if you’re not me. It’s tiny. You go down to Ocean Avenue, ask in a bar called the Shamrock, they’ll know the guy. He’s a big deal guy.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Probably not as dangerous as driving there.”
“Huh,” I said.
I should back off for a moment and note that there’s a concept many criminals become obsessed with, which is the idea of turning out .
The template for it is the classic aspiring pimp who needs to find a woman to work for him. No professional will do it, because they all have pimps already. So he picks a girl from the neighborhood, as sheltered and unworldly as possible, and courts her. Plays up a big romance, then one day tells her he’s in big trouble if he can’t get some money fast, and that a friend of his is willing to pay a hundred dollars to screw her once. After she does it, he acts disgusted with her, and beats her and degrades her, then gives her narcotics for the pain. Once she’s hooked and working steadily, i.e., has been “turned out,” he moves on to Bachelorette #2. Lovely species we belong to.
Today the turnout can be found in any number of situations. The most literal is prison, where the idea is to progress as quickly as possible from lending your cellmate a cigarette to hiring him out to large groups in return for a double-A battery or some smack. Most instances of it are more subtle, though, and have to do with the many ways in which people enter into, or are led into, or believe they are led into, lives of criminality.
I knew all this. I’d read Daddy Cool . I knew that what David Locano was doing was turning me out. And that even if the job I’d just accepted didn’t require violence, taking it meant I was willing to get violent later on.
I just allowed myself to ignore those things.
I drove to
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