Sublime

Leo Bianchi’s death set up a long-brewing war for control in Kansas City, one that would end with pretty much everybody losing and K.C. becoming a wide-open city. Rita, freshly paroled and anxious to do something beyond cook for and clean up after Harvey and his crew of assholes, took over managing the money and running the murder for hire side of

These were his people. Failed artists. Rejected musicians and writers. Part-time idealists and closet visionaries. As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt.

He gave them a grand up front to shoot a man named Gale Collins, recent resident of the federal prison in Joliet and now living in Kansas City. The man’s sudden parole was suspiciously coincidental to the capture of an Italian American fugitive who, until recently, had been living under an assumed name in Legion, Nebraska, for the past eighteen yea

Smith was not only a politician; he was a Tammany politician. In the simple Tammany code, the first commandment was Loyalty. Smith’s loyalty to his appointees was legendary. Once he gave a man a job, he was fond of saying, he never interfered with him unless he proved himself incapable of handling it.

Roy and the old couple, Harvey and Rita, were the only ones left. They brought Roy to New York when he was barely twenty-five and set him up running “errands” now and again for some heavy people in Brooklyn. As a rule, they didn’t trust him with anything too complicated, on account of they didn’t think Roy was all that bright. Outside of Albert, no

“His name was Horatio Brown. A throwback,” I said, smiling at the memory. “The type who kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk. Smoked three packs a day. Would occasionally flip through a thick file of his favorite dirty photos that he’d snapped on the job. Believed, as a physical rule of the universe, that every client was lying to him. In that, I’v