CHAPTER EIGHT
A souped-up old Buick Park Avenue sped past the gas pumps of Big Mo’s service station, the very same station Shake had robbed some ten months earlier and met his fate, and it stopped in front of the entrance. The man everybody called Knuckles got out. Limping on his bad leg, he hurried inside.
“Where is he?” he asked to the clerk behind the counter.
The clerk motioned toward the back. Knuckles hurried in that direction.
He knocked once on the closed door of the room in the back and then walked in, closing the door behind him. The owner of the station, Mo Lugar, the man that was never charged for shooting at Shake as he ran away from the store, was gambling at a table with two other men that worked for him. That gas station was a front for all the illegal activities Mo conducted on the East side of Jacksonville. And although everybody knew what it was, nobody in the community said a word to the cops. And the cops, paid off by Mo, turned a blind eye.
“Top that motherfucker!” Mo said as he threw out a card.
“Boss?”
Mo looked back and saw that it was one of his flunkies. “What?”
Knuckles exhaled. “We found her.”
Mo was about to look back at the table and away from Knuckles, who usually had nothing new to report. But then he realized what he had said. “You found her? Where?”
“At the Beverly Belle motel downtown.”
Mo sat back in his seat. “I’ll be damn.”
Knuckles was grinning. “I did good, didn’t I, Boss?”
“Yeah,” Mo said, his mind thinking about all the possibilities. “You done real good, Knuck.”
“Who is it, Boss?” one of the gamblers asked.
“Shake’s old lady.”
The man frowned. “I thought she got Life in prison.”
“She was supposed to get Life. That was the plan. But her ass got off practically scot-free. And I was the one had to clean up the mess.”
“Now what?”
“What do you mean now what?” Mo was getting angry. “Now it’s payback time. That’s what!”
Then he looked at Knuckles. “Handle it.”
Knuckles grin was gone. He understood exactly what the boss meant. “Yes, sir,” he said and left the room.
And as if there had been no interruption at all, Mo was the gambler again. “I put my card on the table,” he said to his opponents. “What you got?”