Free Every Man a Menace by Patrick Hoffman

It was one big sheet, the kind a painter lays out before a job.
    Shadrack, standing in the doorway, said, “Sorry, man. I liked you, I really did.”
    Movement came from Raymond’s right side. He looked that way and saw Gloria’s boy, the one with the mustache. He held a gun at Raymond’s head. “No, no, no,” said Raymond.
    Raymond heard the shot, felt his head swing like he’d been punched. He felt the ground pulled to his chest, saw his blood and brains thrown on the floor.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    “Hello friend,” said Mr. Hong, his mouth a few inches from Semion Gurevich’s ear.
    Semion sat at a table in the back of a club he owned in Miami. The table was raised up on a tier, overlooking a crowded dance floor. The bass from the speakers rumbled. The lights turned everyone red.
    “Join us,” he said, leaning back in his seat.
    He gestured at the table. There were two women and another man sitting with him already. They were all dressed and tanned for a night out. Semion watched Mr. Hong glance at them, smile shyly, and say he couldn’t. Mr. Hong looked, Semion sometimes thought, like the kind of man who always wins at the horse tracks. A perennial winner.
    The older man bent down to Semion’s ear again. “Usual,” he whispered. “Fish market, sometime now until one week. Have your boy bring the documents to my office.” Semion understood fish market to mean a warehouse outside Chiang Mai, Thailand. He understood documents to mean money. My office meant Mr. Hong’s lawyer’s office, in Miami.
    Mr. Hong pulled his head back and looked at Semion. “Good?”
    “Yes, good, you old bastard,” Semion said. “I love you, you know that? I love the way you dress!”
    “Good,” said Mr. Hong. He nodded to the other guests at the table, gave Semion’s shoulder a final squeeze, and walked away.
    Semion took a moment to reflect on how blessed his life had become. The man sitting across from him winked.
    “Who was he?” asked one of the blond women.
    “He’s a real estate man,” said Semion. “A rich bastard. I love him.”
    It was seventy-nine days before Raymond Gaspar would be killed.
    Semion Gurevich was thirty-five years old. He was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia; when he was three, his family immigrated to Israel. They settled first in Kiryat Ono, and then in the Yud-Yud Gimmel section of Ashdod. It was a rough neighborhood, but Semion learned to blend in. Even as a troublemaker, he graduated high school with decent marks. He scored a high health report as well, and shortly after graduation he was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces. After seven months of dusty calisthenics, endless target practice, bland food, and crowded dorms, he found himself stationed near the Egyptian border. He spent his days caught between boredom and tension. He did things that still bothered him even now during that time: he brokean old Arab’s nose with the butt of his gun; he tossed stun grenades at a group of children. But he survived.
    Semion had grown up around drugs; there was plenty of heroin in Ashdod. He’d smoked it a few times in high school; he sniffed dirty cocaine at parties. He’d even sold a bit of ecstasy during his final year of high school. It was only natural that he fell in with the few soldiers in his unit who sold heroin. We’re doing God’s work, said one of them. Selling drugs to Arabs. At that point they were still just making beer money.
    After finishing his service, he settled in Tel Aviv. A month later he began to think about selling drugs in earnest. With the contacts he’d made in the army, and the friends he’d made growing up in Ashdod, he was soon able to make good money importing heroin from Lebanon and selling it in the streets. His parents had raised him to be tolerant, and it served him well: he worked with Arabs, Africans, Bedouins, Jews, and Russians—and he insisted on mutual respect. He was a hustler, and he liked making money. It made him feel