Dante's Fire

Chapter Thirty Four: Big Jack

BIG JACK

Joaquin returned from the drive-by shaken, his fingers numb.

It was a sight. Joaquin trembling, his hands shivering from much more than the cold. It was a very frightful sight. Joaquin who moved with a gracefulness that any ghost would envy. Joaquin who could, at fourteen, whip and twirl guns round and round his fingers like a gunslinger out of a western-style movie. Joaquin who had no qualms about leaving the province in which he had been born, breed, and raised into a young adult, to babysit another oblivious, somewhat entitled young adult, a job which other young RWDs would have balked at

There he was, at a bar a few clicks away from the motel, drinking Old Crow with shaky fingers.

Big Jack had nearly began to forget that the boy was, at the end of the day, still that: a boy. Barely as old as his own daughter. Big Jack liked to think of himself as a sort of father figure to the men he and Raymond had taken off the streets. He had been so, had he not?