Read Online Grinder by Mike Knowles - Free Book Online Page B

go of his throat and listened to his breathing start again. It sounded like a steam engine starting to move. “Forty,” he said between gasps.
    “What?”
    “Forty for the Internet. You said twenty. I want forty. Forty gets you the Internet, and I won't call the cops about the choking thing.”
    “I could just finish the job and shove a buffalo wing down your throat. The cops would buy that.”
    “Then you wouldn't have the password for the Inter-net. You'd have to go somewhere else. Be a pain in the ass killing me and then having to drive around town to find an Internet connection and a buffalo wing to bring back here. All that work for forty bucks.” He seemed to smile under his hands, which were rubbing his nose and throat simultaneously.
    I pulled out two twenties and put them on the counter. “Show me the computer.”

CHAPTER TEN
    The fat man told me his name was Louis while he pulled off the headband and unplugged the soldering iron. He said he'd always been into computers and after his parents died he just moved up from the basement into the rest of the house. The shop sprung out of the constant piles of circuitry he accumulated around the house. He locked the front door and flipped off the open sign then led me into the back room to a desktop computer.
    Louis brought the computer out of sleep mode with a fat finger. He opened an icon and entered a password I noted to be a random sequence of letters and numbers. He was right, if I had choked him out, the computer would have been useless. Once Internet Explorer was working, Louis took a step back and opened his hands in a gesture that said, “It's all yours.”
    I stood in front of the computer and called up the site Paolo had scribbled on the piece of paper he gave me. A black box appeared on the screen with a play button in the centre. I clicked the button and watched the file load, and do something it called buffering, in a matter of seconds. Beside the loading screen, I saw thumbnails of other posts by the boys — there were at least fifteen. Fifteen times at least, Army and Nicky had put themselves out on the Internet and let their mouths run.
    “Fast connection,” I said.
    “Oh yeah. Once you go high speed, there's no going back. I can download a song in thirty seconds —” The computer interrupted him as it began to play the file. “Who are they?”
    Two teenagers appeared on the screen in the little play window. Army and Nicky were brothers who were only a year apart, but they could have passed as twins. Both boys had tall over-gelled hair that stood in shiny triangular peaks. Their white teeth gleamed in their almost identical acne-speckled faces. Both boys got their father's pointy nose and their mother's full lips. The boys were pretty, not handsome.
    All of their prettiness ended when their mouths opened. They spoke in loud profane street language that all at once sounded inauthentic. It sounded as though they were mimicking the way they thought a real hip-hop gangster might speak.
    “Holla at your boyz! The Donati crew is back on the air,” Army said. “We still be bringing the thug to the world and ain't nobody going to stop us, ya heard.”
    “Nobody gonna stand in the way a tha' Donati crew, we gotz mad guerrilla tactics, yo.” Nicky brandished a gun, which came into view when he added his two cents.
    Army went on, “We got the roots everywhere — in the Hammer, even in the U fucking S. We the princes of the city. All of it gonna be ours. It's ours by blood. We own this rock.”
    “I'm gonna get me a blinged-out crown,” Nicky chimed in while mimicking putting a crown on his head.
    “Those goombahs won't be able to hold on ta what is rightfully ours. Fuckin' Bombedieri thinks he's big shit running numbers. Oh the ‘Bomb' is the man all right . . . with his calculator. Dom the Bomb is a real Texas Instrument kind of gangster. He's got a long way to go before he gets respect.” Army made a gun with his index finger and thumb and