Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

flow would be tapped. Whatever extra Angie and Turnip had, the neighborhood figured it came from those little jobs they did on the side.
    Entering Muzzie’s one afternoon, Angie and Turnip were surprised to find, lounging on a platform above the round bar, a woman wearing only a purple boa and shoes that seemed made of glass. Last time they were here, they had seafood with a marinara sauce so spicy Angie knew Big Muzz was hiding two-day-old scungilli.
    “Muzz,” said Turnip as he mounted the three-legged stool, “what happened to the scungilli?”
    “There’s the scungilli,” Little Muzz said, nodding up at the stripper. He was checking pilsner glasses for cracks.
    Propped on an elbow, the droopy blonde filed her nails.
    Turnip held up a finger. “Yeah, but what’s she do?” he asked the bartender.
    A Ping-Pong ball shot from her
fica
, just missing his head.
    “That,” Little Muzz said.
    “Who says?” Turnip asked.
    Inching away, Angie already knew the answer.
    “Who?” Little Muzz replied with a dark shrug. “Like you don’t know who.”
    Big Muzz’s voice rumbled from where the kitchen used to be. “Turnip,” he bellowed. “Soldato wants you. Now.”
    Turnip frowned as he faced the red-velvet curtain.
    “Muzz? Now? I ain’t here for three months,” he said. “What’s ‘now’?”
    Little Muzz spoke soft. “Maybe he seen the car.”
    Turnip drove a ’69 canary-yellow Super Yenko Camaro 427 with a V8, an M-22 four-speed manual transmission, and custom-made spoilers front and back. Zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds on the ramp to the turnpike. Now it was parked in the bus stop on the sunny side of Polk Street.
    “Soldato wants me?” Turnip whispered. Without thinking, he tapped the .45 in his jacket pocket.
    “Apparently,” Angie replied, knowing full well the car had nothing to do with it. Big Muzz made a call. Which meant Soldato had an eye out for Turnip. For what, who knows?

    T URNIP GOT HIS handle when some roly-poly ice cream man translated his surname to impress the other kids on line. That evening over dinner, he asked his father why the wiseass threw him a new hook. His father, who knew damned well
rapa
was Italian for “turnip,” said, “Because you look like a fuckin’ turnip, that big fat ass you got.”
    Later, Angie told Turnip his old man must’ve been thinking of a butternut squash or an eggplant, a turnip being more or less round. Either way, Turnip was displeased and he took to weight lifting to change his body shape. It worked, even if the name stuck, and now he looked like he didn’t need Angie knocking the Webers of the world off his back.
    At about the same time, Angie realized that he wasn’t going to be much bigger than his old man, who went about five and a half feet in work boots. Also, he’d have to wear eyeglasses. But by then, he’d been discovered to have an IQ of 154 and was in a class for the advanced. Soon, it was common knowledge that Angie, the toughest kid in Narrows Gate, was also the smartest.
    About fifteen years later, it dawned on Silvio Soldato that Angie and Turnip were a dangerous duo.
Very dangerous, these two
, he mused. Brains and brawn. Mind and muscle. Hmmm.
    The problem in this case, he noted, was that usually when you had a Hercules and an Einstein, at the same time you had a moron and a weakling. Not so with these two. Turnip had a fresh head, especially with numbers and mechanics, and little Angie was
pazzo
times three — everybody in town knew he’d crammed those turnips down the ice cream man’s throat when he was ten years old. Each time a guy turned up on the waterfront with his shins shattered or his ears pinned to his cheeks, Soldato made Angie for it, wondering how he always walked away clean.
    Soldato wanted them broke up, now and forever, and for six weeks he thought about how to do it. Killing them both would look desperate, he reasoned, and killing one would send the other one seething toward revenge. He considered having the brakes go on the Camaro as Turnip and Angie headed down the viaduct, careening them to a fiery death at the Getty station. But then he started thinking maybe Turnip could figure some way out of the crash, twisting and maneuvering, tires squealing. Kid drives like he was born behind the wheel, that son of a bitch, him and his Camaro.
    Then he decided, the lightbulb going bright.
    Now Soldato was sitting in his booth at the Grotto, enjoying a late-afternoon meal of
zuppa di vongole
over