Purest Fiction: Mob Ties

“There’s an apartment vacant?” Control your voice, don’t draw more attention.

This situation oozed into shape as smoothly as her first novel. It was almost enough to make her laugh aloud.

“Try me. I need a job and a place to stay while I work out some things. I promise not to hold parties above your premises.”
“G’wan, Lady, you don’t want to bus tables.” The owner snorted and scraped coins from the till for the remainder of her change. “The apartment isn’t much either. Three furnished rooms.”
“I do need work, and anything you’d pay me would stretch the money I have set aside. What terms do you want to set for the lease?” She held out her hand, and he laid a five-dollar bill in her palm, followed by a one, and the coins.
“Are you running from an ex, Lady?” He slammed the drawer of the cash register. “If some guy is going to come here and make trouble, I don’t need that.”
“No, I don’t have an ex. If you’ll let me see the apartment, I might take it, and then you’d have a bus person in time for your evening rush.”
“You gonna pay the rent with Visa, or Discover?” His stare, delivered with raised eyebrows, made her glance away.
“I’m paying with cash these days. It’s wiser.”

“You got mob ties? I don’t want them around either.”

“No, sir, I don’t have mob ties. Do you want someone to rent that apartment? Do you need someone to bus tables?” The writer watched his expression change. It was subtle, grudging, but he shifted his weight and turned away.
“The stairs are over here. I haven’t been up to see what kind of mess he left, but Tuesday nights are slow, so if you take the place you can clean it up.”
As he led her up the narrow flight, her nose met the lasting aroma of at least fifty years worth of frying bacon. She winced but continued to climb. At the top of the stairs was a short banister.
The paint may once have been white, but the cooking grease in the air turned it almost buff. When she lifted her palm from the newel, it felt sticky. Speckled windows looked out over the Laundromat roof and a scraggly ailanthus tree.
“I didn’t sack that lazy oaf a minute too soon.”
The proprietor stomped across the floor and ripped a poster off the wall. He wadded it and pitched the ball against a pyramid of beverage cans and plastic baskets that leaned against a cast iron radiator. “No wonder we were always short of baskets on fish fry night.”
“Lady,” he called her again, and the author shivered, “I don’t know you from Eve, but you have to be able to do a better job than he did. When you come in and out, use the backdoor. Never go through the seating area, you got that?”

Purest Fiction is a short story with twelve installments. Stay tuned for Purest Fiction: Just My Life No Wheels.
Read more of my published short stories here.

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