Chapter 166: 166. Looks Like Someone Is In Trouble With A Gang Member

The neighborhood casino near Harwick Lane operated with the particular atmosphere of a place that had been in the same location long enough to have become part of the local infrastructure, not glamorous but legitimate, with regular patrons who knew the staff by name and arrived with the resignation of people who had made peace with the specific thing they were doing there.

Mike came in through the east entrance and stood for a moment in the lobby, reading the room the way he always read the rooms he had just entered.

Blackjack tables on the left. Slots in the back section.

A poker room is off the right hallway. Bar along the east wall.

Gerald was not at any of the obvious positions.

Mike crossed to the bar and ordered something simple and stood with his back against the counter, which gave him a view of the entire floor.

The bartender was a woman in her fifties who exhibited the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing this job for decades, had lost interest in it to the point of either boredom or cynicism, and had instead reached a state of comfortable competence. She set his drink down without ceremony and moved to the other end of the bar.

Mike took a sip and muttered under his breath.

"Same damn smell every time," he said quietly. "Cheap liquor, cigarettes, and bad decisions."

Nobody heard him. Or if they did, nobody cared.

He drank slowly and watched the room.

The slot section was busier than the tables tonight. The Saturday pattern is as usual.

The blackjack dealer on table two was working through a run of house wins that had thinned his side of the table to two players, neither of whom looked like they were going to leave. The poker room hallway was quiet, which meant either nothing had started yet or whatever had started was settled in.

Mike glanced toward the hallway again.

"Gerald, where the hell are you..."

A man at the bar beside him laughed at something on the television overhead, loud and drunk and completely disconnected from everything around him. Mike ignored it.

He found Gerald at the far end of the slot machines, not at a machine but near one, wearing his jacket with his hands in his pockets and standing in a posture that suggested he was in the process of leaving but had not fully committed to a direction yet. He was standing slightly away from the main flow of the room, near the wall that separated the slots from the back corridor.

"There you are," Mike murmured.

Gerald was observing the machines in a detached manner, displaying the demeanor of a man awaiting something he had not consciously acknowledged.

And then a man appeared from the back corridor and walked directly to Gerald, and the quality of the interaction was immediately wrong.

Mike’s expression flattened slightly.

"Oh, come on," he muttered. "That doesn’t look shady at all."

The man was substantial in the sense that he was someone who was built for specific purposes rather than general ones. He had thick forearms below rolled sleeves and moved with the deliberate quality of someone who had learned long ago that the physical fact of him was enough to produce most of the outcomes he needed.

There was a tattoo on the right side of his face, starting below the ear and extending toward the cheekbone, dark lines that resolved, as Mike’s eyes adjusted from the distance, into the unmistakable shape of a bird in flight, wings spread, tail feathers trailing down toward the jaw.

A phoenix. Colored in red and gold against the man’s skin. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

"Huh...? Is he from a gang or some shit...?" Mike thought. "That ain’t suspicious at all..."

The tattooed man stopped close enough to Gerald that the interaction immediately became private by design.

Mike narrowed his eyes slightly.

"Gerald," he said quietly to himself, "what the hell did you get yourself into this time?"

Gerald did not look surprised to see the man. He looked like someone who had been expecting to see him and had been hoping the evening would run out before it happened.

The man put a hand on Gerald’s shoulder, not aggressively but with the particular weight of someone who did not need to be aggressive to convey a point, and guided him toward the back corridor without raising his voice.

"Let’s take a walk," the man said.

Gerald exhaled slowly through his nose.

"Yeah," he replied quietly. "Figured this was coming."

Mike watched them disappear into the corridor.

"Well," he muttered to himself, "that’s definitely not good."

He left the bar.

He followed at the distance that is both far enough to be invisible and close enough to be functional, which is a specific distance that varies by environment and that Mike had calibrated over years in corridors and markets and urban spaces where following someone without being noticed was a practical skill.

The back corridor was short, institutional, lit by a single strip overhead.

Staff doors lined both sides of the corridor, with one door propped open by a wedge, allowing the sound of refrigeration equipment to come through. The kind of corridor that exists between what a building presents and what it actually is.

As Mike moved quietly down the hallway, he could hear fragments of conversation ahead of him.

"You’ve been hard to reach lately," the larger man said.

"I’ve been busy."

"That right?"

Gerald didn’t answer immediately.

Mike slowed his pace slightly.

The back corridor led to a fire exit on the building’s east side, and the fire exit opened onto the alley that ran behind the casino block, which was one of those urban spaces that exists entirely because buildings need service access and produces, as a byproduct, a stretch of ground that is technically accessible and practically ignored.

The alley was poorly lit and quiet. A dumpster on the left side, a service door further down, and a chain-link fence at the far end.

Mike positioned himself inside the fire exit doorway, which gave him a gap of perhaps three centimeters to see through and a solid door to be behind.

The man pushed Gerald against the alley wall without excessive force, the way someone does when they want to establish position rather than inflict damage. Gerald went with it, which said something specific about how this particular dynamic had been established over time.

"You know the boss is getting impatient," the man said.

Gerald looked tired more than afraid.

"I told him I need more time."

"You already said that last week."

"And I meant it last week too."

The larger man stared at him for several seconds.

Mike remained completely still behind the door.

A second man came from the direction of the chain-link fence, smaller than the first, wearing a high collar that didn’t quite cover the phoenix tattoo curving along his neck. He reached them, said three words to the first man, and then checked his watch and looked down the alley in both directions before leaving the way he had come.

"Big G," Gerald said.

The first man looked at him.

"I don’t have it," Gerald said. "Not yet... I was going to, but tonight didn’t go the way—"

"Gerald," the man said.

His voice was lower than Mike had expected given the man’s size; it was controlled, resembling the voice of someone who had learned that being quiet is more effective than being loud. "I gave you until this week."

"I know... I know that already... But the account, Petricia found out about part of it, and she was already asking about the numbers, so I couldn’t pull the full amount without—"

"That’s a domestic problem," Big G said. "I don’t give a shit about domestic problems!"

"I have an arrangement with you, and the arrangement says this week."

"I’ve been losing," Gerald said. "You know I’ve been losing..."

"The dealer at the tables knows that the runs aren’t going; I’m not holding anything back."

"We’re not having a conversation about the runs," Big G said. "We’re having a conversation about what you owe and when you said you’d have it."

"It’s twelve thousand short," Gerald said. "Twelve... I have the rest."

Big G said nothing. He looked at Gerald with the flat patience of someone who had had versions of this conversation before and had a standard set of responses to the standard set of outcomes.

Gerald pressed on, which was what people did when silence refused to accommodate them.

"Three years," he said. "Three years of this, and I have never once tried to walk away from what I owe. I’ve always come back. Every time."

"I know you’ve always come back," Big G said. "That’s not the issue."

"Then what’s the issue?"

"The issue is that always coming back doesn’t clear a debt."

"It just means you keep owing." Big G looked at him with the particular patience of someone explaining something for the last time. "You’re not reliable, Gerald."

’You’re consistent! There’s a difference."

Gerald opened his mouth and closed it again. Whatever he had been about to say had not survived the distinction.

"The building," Gerald said. "The rent from the building this month and next month."

"I can give you that, cash, by Wednesday... The tenants pay on the first and the fourteenth... I can have it by Wednesday."

"That’s Petricia’s building," Big G said.

"It’s our building."

"Is it?" Big G said, and the question was not aggressive, just precise.