Free The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford Page A

that, the old man was found dead from a heart attack. But get this, Wolfey got away. While we were out in the backyard up against the fence, he came to, pulled the metal thing out of his head, and split before the cops got there.
    â€œWe left Mars’s car where it was and he took the rap for the whole caper. Maria kept her mouth shut. We all went into hiding, laying low for a while. I had the chess pieces stashed under a loose floorboard in my mother’s bedroom. What was good was that I was pretty sure no one else even knew Desnia had the chess pieces, so the cops didn’t know they were stolen. I thought if we just chilled for a while, I could fence them and we’d be set. Still, I was spooked by what had happened, Johnny’s death and the way it went down. I could feel something wasn’t right.
    â€œAbout two months after the heist, I got a call at like three in the morning from Cho-cho. He said he knew he wasn’t supposed to call but he couldn’t take it anymore. He was having these dreams that scared him so much he couldn’t sleep. I asked him what he was dreaming about and he just said, ‘Really evil shit.’ A month after that, I heard from someone that he’d finished the job they started on him in Brooklyn when he was a kid. He’d hung himself in his mother’s attic.
    â€œThe year wasn’t out before both Maria and Wolfe went down too. I’d heard that he’d taken to staying in his grandfather’s shed all the time. She was joining him now on a regular basis, and they had begun taking pills, ludes and Darvon, and drinking while huffing the Zippoway, and that just ate what little there was of their brains, melted that Swiss cheese like acid one night. I should have been sadder at losing all my friends, but instead I was just scared to death and started living the clean life, laying off the booze and dope and getting to my crappy job at the metal shop every day on time. I never even went to Cho-cho’s funeral.
    â€œAfter that year ended, I let another six months go by before I started looking around for a fence. I knew it would have to be somebody high class, who dealt in antiques but was willing to look the other way when it came to how you acquired what you were selling. I did some studying up on the way it worked and spoke to a few connections. Eventually, I got the phone number of a guy in New York and the green light to give him a call. Nothing in person until he checked out you and the goods you claimed to have.
    â€œI got the pieces out from under the floorboards and really looked at them for the first time. The bigger pieces were about four inches tall, and the smaller ones, which I guessed were pawns—I didn’t know shit then about chess—were three inches. They definitely seemed to be made of solid gold. Half of them were figures of monsters, each one different, the work on them really detailed. The other half, I don’t know what they were, but I recognized one as being Christ. The smaller ones looked like angels. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
    â€œThe day finally came when I was supposed to call the guy, which I did, from the pay phone in the back of Phil’s barbershop. I was nervous, you know, sweating how much I was gonna get and still scared at all the ill stuff that had gone down. Well, the phone rings, a guy answers, he tells me, ‘No names. Describe what you have.’ So I told him, ‘Gold chess set from the sixteenth century.’ But the minute I started describing the individual pieces, the line went dead. That was it. At first I thought it was just a bad connection, or I needed more change. I called back, but no one would pick up.
    â€œThen shit started to really slide. Dreams like Cho-cho described, and I took to drinking again, but drinking in a way I never did before. I lost my job, and on top of it all my mother got the cancer. I was reeling and it took me a while, like two