One of Da's
customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade
pharmaceuticals -- performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic
boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the
kind of things you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of
having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies,
hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything
that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old
country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit
over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of
his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of
printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been
brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and
let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car.
All the while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime
bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least 20 million in
contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.
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