My Lucky Day

My Lucky Day

I never liked the cocksucker. Tony Bracco. We'd been going at each other since high school—over money, over women, over a truck he wrecked and never paid me back for. Fifteen years of small-time bullshit between us. But I was desperate, and desperate men don't get to pick who they sit across the table with.

He called me on a Tuesday. Said he had something. Said it was easy money. I almost hung up on him twice before he said the word "Brinks."

That got my attention.

Turned out Tony's cousin worked dispatch for a private security outfit picking up the slack while Brinks was on strike—some no-name company running routes they'd never run before, half-trained, thin on the ground. Tony had the inside schedule. I had nothing but a bad trailer by an airport and a mouth full of debt. Neither one of us had enough to do it alone, and neither one of us trusted the other enough to want to.

That's the joke of it. Two guys who couldn't stand each other, sitting in his kitchen with a legal pad, because the money didn't care who we hated.

"You still sore about the truck?" he asked me, first five minutes in.

"You still an asshole?" I said.

He laughed like that settled it. It didn't. But we kept talking anyway, because that's what desperate looks like—you swallow fifteen years of wanting to put someone through a wall, because he's the only guy in your Rolodex with a schedule and a getaway plan.

We split the work along old grudges, like even the planning had to keep score. He wanted to run the timing because he always thought he was smarter than me. I wanted the guns handled myself because I didn't trust him not to get us both killed. We argued over who'd drive. We argued over the split. We agreed on nothing except that we both needed this to work.

Halfway through the planning, he grabbed the legal pad out of my hands to redo the numbers his way. I grabbed it back. For a second neither of us let go—fifteen years of grudge sitting right there in that torn piece of paper. Then he backed off. Neither of us could afford to walk away from the only plan either of us had.

He brought his dad's old hunting rifle—a 30-30 he'd never fired—and told me his buddy Chewy had sold him a handgun and a box of ammunition. I didn't love the setup. I didn't love him. But I didn't have another play, and neither did he, and that's the only reason two men who couldn't be in the same bar without somebody swinging ended up in the same kitchen, plotting the same job, pretending for a few hours that the history between us didn't matter.

It mattered. It just didn't matter enough to stop us.

—

Tony went for a piss. I grabbed the pistol off the table and started loading the magazine, thumbing rounds in one at a time. The spring was stiff. I had to force the last two. When I went to slam it home, it caught halfway—jammed at an angle, wouldn't seat.

I heard the toilet flush. Tony came back wiping his hands on his jeans.

"It's stuck," I said, holding it up.

He took it from me, turned it over in his hands. "Chewy said you just gotta pound it down."

He raised the gun and brought the magazine down hard against the edge of the kitchen table.

The shot was so loud I didn't hear it—just felt it, like the air had been punched out of the room. My ears went flat and hollow. For a second I didn't understand what had happened.

Then I saw Tony.

He was on his back, halfway between the table and the fridge. His legs were bent wrong. One arm was flung out, fingers twitching. The other hand was at his face, but there wasn't much face left. Most of it was on the cabinet behind him.

The smell hit me next—copper and gunpowder and something else, something wet and wrong that made my stomach lurch. I could see his chest moving, shallow and fast, like his body didn't know it was supposed to stop.

I stood there. I don't know for how long. My hands were shaking. I couldn't hear anything but a high ringing in my ears and the sound of my own breathing, too fast, too loud.

I should have called 911. I should have done something. But I just stood there watching the blood spread, watching his chest rise and fall, rise and fall, until it didn't anymore.

—

I don't remember walking outside. I don't remember sitting down. But that's where I ended up—in the backyard, in the shitty lawn chair, staring at planes.

One plane, then another. Every twelve minutes. I'd timed them before. I watched them climb into the sky, full of people going somewhere, and I thought about Tony — fuck that, I'm never getting on one of those planes again.

I went back inside. Stepped over him. The blood had stopped spreading. I grabbed another beer from the fridge, twisted off the cap. Reached over his legs and picked up the pizza box from the counter. Not one spot of blood on it. Unfuckingbelievable.

I went back to the chair. Drank the beer. Ate a slice. Watched another plane.

I kept thinking about what came next. Cops would come eventually. Someone would hear something, see something. Or they wouldn't, and I'd have to call them myself, and either way I was fucked. Prison. Years of it. Maybe all of them.

I thought about my brother. About the trailer. About fifteen years of hating Tony Bracco and how it all came down to a jammed magazine and a kitchen table.

I thought about how I didn't want to be here when they came.

I went back inside one more time. Picked up the gun. It was still on the floor where it had landed, next to Tony's hand. I wiped it on my shirt and walked back outside.

Sat down in the chair. Put the barrel against my temple. Felt the cold metal. Thought about nothing and everything. Thought about how this was easier than waiting.

I pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

The fucking thing jammed again.

I sat there holding it, staring at it, and then I started laughing. I couldn't stop. It was the funniest goddamn thing I'd ever seen—me, Tony, the gun, the whole stupid mess of it. I laughed until my ribs hurt.

That's when I heard it.

"Police. Put down the gun. Put down the gun, asshole, or I'll blow your fucking head off."

I kept laughing. Dropped the gun in the grass.

They cuffed me. Read me my rights. Asked me what was so funny.

I couldn't explain it if I tried.

—

The judge gave me ten years. I told him what happened—the planning, the gun, the accident, all of it. He didn't care. Manslaughter. Conspiracy. Ten years.

I did seven.

My brother picked me up the day I walked out. He drove me to the party store first. I bought a twelve-pack of Rolling Rock and a lottery ticket—same kind I used to buy before all this.

We drove past the old trailer. Someone else lives there now. I didn't ask to stop.

Seven years is a long time to think. Long enough to realize you don't get to shortcut your way out of anything. Long enough to know that every time you try, you just dig the hole deeper.

I'm out now. That's enough.

The lottery ticket's in my wallet. I haven't checked it yet.

Maybe I will. Maybe I won't.

Either way, I'm done trying to beat the house.