Free The Burning Day by Timothy C. Phillips Page B

something.
    Big Thom died in his sleep one rainy day, though, and Longshot Lonnie, now a seasoned criminal of a much more pitiless stripe than his doting uncle had ever been, took over. He was tenaciously ambitious, and from the very first day he tested Don Ganato. And so began a long and trying struggle of nerves that lasted more than twenty years, and had seen many a thug end up in a North Side alley or floating face down in the Cahaba River. This was the long bitter fight of attrition that was finally threatening to boil over into an all-out death match between the two factions.
    I still have the silver token that Lonnie gave me on that long ago night, and I wear it around my neck on a chain. I don’t know if it possesses any powers, but I guess over the years I’ve grown a bit superstitious. I keep putting the thing in a drawer, but somehow it finds its way back around my neck. Maybe I’ve lived through enough close scrapes to learn that a little luck never hurts, no matter where it comes from.
    So I decided that my luck would hold, and I went over to the part of town where downtown starts running into Five Points, and visited a certain bar by the name of Finnegan’s. It was a nicely appointed place, a bit like something one might find in the British Isles not too long ago, a comfortable, quiet pub with some good music playing and a friendly atmosphere. (despite the fact that Longshot Lonnie O’Malley now kept his office in the back).
    I walked in and made my way straight to the back, and was immediately intercepted by a wall-eyed thug known as Murderous Pete.
    “Where do you think you’re headed?” Pete growled, putting one hand up in front of me, and fixing me with one gray eye. The other eye stared blankly at the wall to his right.
    “Easy, Pete, I just want to talk to Lonnie,” I replied, sensing another somebody behind me. “Could you tell him I’m here?” Pete shrugged and turned and went into Lonnie’s office.
    “You packing?” Came a voice from behind me. I recognized it as belonging to Mad Dog Maddox, another of Lonnie’s crazed gunmen. “What, did charm school get out early?” I asked without turning around.  
    Mad Dog actually chuckled. “Got to pat you down. Hold still.”
    I hadn’t worn my .45 into the bar, since I knew it would just get taken away from me, but I sighed and let Mad Dog do his thing. He patted me down and stepped back, all the while staying behind me.
    “Okay, you’re clean.”  
    Behind me I heard a little whimper.
    “Mad Dog, do you have a puppy?”
    “Yeah. His name is Oscar. He’s a beagle. I got papers.”
    He gave me a push and I took an involuntary step forward. Pete came out of the back and nodded. “He’ll see you, Longville. Go on in. Don’t get cute, or you won’t get out of here alive.”
    “Like I said, I just want to talk.”
    I walked into the office. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting all that I got. Longshot sat behind a desk with a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky parked on the blotter. From the level of the brown liquid inside, he’d been whittling away on it all afternoon. What threw me for a loop was the girl standing next to him. I had never seen her in person before, but I had seen her photo.
    She and some friends, all college dropouts, had once been professional shoplifters, or “boosters.” They’d made a pretty good living stealing high-priced items and moving them through a fence in north Birmingham. That is, until they’d stolen a certain something from a mob safe house that was masquerading as a failing antiques shop. The offended party had sent his dogs looking for Dextra and her dropout friends. By the time Broom and I had found them, most of the kids were dead. She’d been one of just two that walked away alive. Two out of six.
    She looked at me with a glare of the rawest hatred. I guess she’s seen my picture, too.
    “This is the son of a bitch got all of my friends killed,” she