Read THUGLIT Issue Four for Free Online Page B

say something brilliant but he couldn't quite figure out how to put it. One never went anywhere without the other. If Vincent stood up to go to the bathroom, then Mancini would go too. It was like they were afraid to be alone, even just for a few seconds. They'd only split up if the job absolutely called for it.
    They were an odd pair.
    That Tuesday night the drive was easy. I got there in record time. The hotel bar was part of a little place out in Seaside. The Outfit doesn't do much out in Seaside, but I knew my way around. It was a quiet little place with a long wild beach and Cape Cod-style architecture wind-bitten from the cold. A low fog rolled in off the Pacific Ocean and clung to the windows of the hotel bar like blood clots. Vincent and Mancini had beaten me there, I don't know how, and they looked up at me as I came through the door.
    "Hey, fucker," Vincent said. "Are you the guy?"
    "Yeah," I said. "I'm the guy."
    "Then open a tab already."
    And that was how we met. I laid my credit card down on the bar and ordered a double bourbon, neat.
    When I first saw these guys a few months ago, Vincent and Mancini had been all expensive suits and ties. This night, though, they had switched back to what I could only presume was their usual attire: leather jackets, blue jeans and no-bull cigarettes. Mancini had perpetual stubble and hair as slick and black as a beaver pelt. There was a scar the size of a dollar bill along his cheek that turned pink when he drank. Vincent spoke to his brother in Italian and laughed loud enough to scare people. He was thinner and had cheekbones that sunk into his face like strip-mining pits.
    I was ostensibly there to show them a good time, but I knew what was expected of me. Guys like these attracted trouble like flies to vinegar. Hitmen aren't like normal criminals. Normal criminals try to be subtle, but hitmen don't mind being noticed. They'd shoot a little girl in front of her parents, if they wanted to. I took the barstool next to them and Vincent clapped me on the back and tried to talk to me, but all I could think about was whether or not at the end of the night he was going to slit my throat and kill me. We fell into a conversation of sorts, but I can't remember half of it.
    A lotta time passed that way.
    I drank with Vincent and Mancini for hours. They ran up a six-hundred-dollar tab on my credit card, buying rounds for everybody in the place. Gran Patron. Johnnie Walker Blue. Grey Goose. Vincent's voice had a little squeak at the end of it, and when he drank it got louder and louder. The three of us moved to a back booth after a while, where nobody would bother us. After a few more rounds, Mancini took out a small mirror. He used the edge of a black American Express to cut cocaine into lines. Vincent and Mancini cut a whole bag into big, fat lines and did a couple though a five-hundred-Euro note. Mancini came up off his line with a look like molten lead on his face. It was something like pain, almost, but I couldn't tell. He was the kind of guy where you couldn't tell.
    Vincent slapped him on the back and told him to do another.
    I drank another bourbon and half-listened.
    "Hey," Vincent said. "You smoke?"
    I looked up from my drink. "What?"
    "Come on," Vincent said. "Lets go outside and have a cig."
    "Outside?"
    "Yeah. Outside. Let's go."
    Vincent basically picked me up by the collar. I got the impression I didn't have a choice in the matter, so I followed him out to the parking lot. Mancini followed me, flanking me between the two of them. It was half-raining, like it does by the coast, where the water pools up in the cracks in the pavement and sinks into the soft brown forest earth in great big sludge-like pools.
    Vincent lit a Marlboro Red for himself and then another one for Mancini back behind the neon sign. The two just stared at me for a while, like I had just appeared out of the ether and they didn't know what to make of me. We stood like that for a while, in the rain, and