CHAPTER ONE
The city had a pulse like a wild jazz beat.
Sonny could feel it pound beneath his charcoal shoes with each stutter step along the cracked sidewalk. Sometimes, when he listened carefully, he could almost hear his own ill formed bones hum with the vibration. The steady rain drops beat in double time against Sonny’s head and hunched shoulder, sliding down his dark rain slicker and providing accompaniment in silvery puddles.
It was a good night to wear a hat. Too bad he didn’t have one.
There were a few others that had been caught in the rain with Sonny but they paid the hunchback little mind. He was tall for a hunchback, and when they did notice something unusual about him, like his hunch or scarred and slightly lopsided face, it would cause a short and quick turn of the head in the opposite direction. He didn’t mind much.
Particularly on this evening, because it meant that no one noticed the tip of the barrel of a Tommy gun peeking out from under the bottom of his long coat.
The traffic drizzled past. Sonny held the new automobile in a little awe and even had dreams of driving a Cadillac of his own. It was only that, a dream. He knew he would never be able to afford one. He would have to do better business. Maybe he’d get one of those tourers in the papers. Although, he would hate to be the one caught in lousy Chicago weather with the top of his automobile missing, couldn’t be worse than being without a hat.
Sonny picked up his pace to a rocking speed as a Model A zoomed past, throwing dirty street water at his shoes. It was the large truck which followed that held Sonny’s interest at the moment. The truck carried a heavy and high load from the looks of it. Maybe a cargo of illegal booze or a new line of coats headed for Marshall Field’s store, Sonny didn’t much care. He just needed a lift.
The truck passed by, Sonny leaped onto the back bumper in a motion so fluid that one would think him nothing but a flickering shadow cast by the street lamps. He’s always had a knack for jumping and climbing, came in handy when evading the cruel schoolboys set on terrorizing the odd egg with the hump and scary face. People seem to fear the unknown and what they fear they either turn away from or strike hard. Funny how it was the people that turn away that Sonny remembered the most.
Sonny kept his head down and his body close to the truck as it drove up to an apartment building with two men standing on the front steps. The men looked ordinarily menacing in fedoras and sharp coats.
The truck passed the building and slowed to make an oncoming turn. Sonny brought his Tommy gun up and sprayed bullets at the two men on the steps. The men jerked and flailed the air like marionettes caught in a sudden gale before falling to the ground. A woman nearby screamed.
Sonny jumped off the truck and darted up the steps to finish the job if he had to. He didn’t have to. The men were most certainly dead. Rain and blood swirled along the steps. One of the dead men had a hand gun still in his grip. The other man’s gun was holstered under his arm.
Sonny picked up one of the fedoras and placed it carefully on his own head. It fit nice and snug.
“Father, be with the families of these two men and may they look to you for comfort and grace. Amen.” Sonny whispered. He entered the apartment building.
The entrance of the building opened into one long hallway with a rectangle spiraling staircase in the middle. The thin hallway had paint peeling off the walls in places. The tiled floor had seen better days. Otherwise, it was a swell joint.
The sound of footsteps thumped down the staircase and echoed off the walls. Sonny took a peek up the stairs and saw they went several floors up and held a couple of descending shadows. He was about to have more targets.
Suddenly, a noise to Sonny’s left caught his attention.
“I want you to know I am calling the cops.” A woman’s voice shouted from behind the closed door.
“That’s probably a good idea.” Sonny replied just loud enough that only she could hear him.
He carefully balanced the Tommy gun on the bannister and railing of the stairs, the barrel of the gun pointed toward the entrance of the building. He let go of the Tommy gun with a magician’s flourish and waited a few seconds to see if it fell. It didn’t. He had a feeling that he may need that there for easy access during his upcoming hasty exit.
He pulled a handgun from under his coat and dashed up the stairs.
A volley of bullets stopped Sonny’s momentum after reaching the first flight. He tap danced to the outside rail of the stair case. He took a cautious look up the stair case and found a large face glaring down at him from a few flights up. A face with a gun.
The man fired again and Sonny sprinted up the steps. Sonny crouched in the corner of the bend of the staircase, his gun aimed up at the last visible step.
Several moments creeped past. Sonny kept his aim steady.
A soft creak of the stairs and Sonny fired one quick shot. Nothing appeared.
Sonny stuck his arm out and fired blindly up at the staircase. The man above dropped down over the railing and flung himself at Sonny like a fridge with elbows and knees. The impact hurt like the devil.
The big man and Sonny tumbled down the stairs to the next landing. Sonny couldn’t get a shot off between the alternating combination of the big man’s knuckles and the butt of a gun. Sonny took a deep breath, blocked the next hit with one arm, and managed to force his gun up at the gorilla’s chest. He fired.
The big man’s eyes went wide and he toppled back and off to the side, but not before getting off a shot of his own. The bullet caught Sonny in his right leg.
No time for pain. Sonny kicked the big man while he was down and dead, and scampered up the stairs, scooping up his crumpled fedora from the floor. He said a short prayer for the big man’s family on the way up to the next flight. He wondered how many more unknown families he would say a prayer for before the job was done.
At the top of the stairs Sonny stopped to catch his breath and compose himself. It would take the cops no time at all to show. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his coat pocket and read the set of numbers scrawled on it. He checked each door, one by one, on this floor of the building for a match. On finding the match, he pocketed the paper and kicked open the door.
Sonny’s gun was up and ready to aim at targets as they presented themselves. No one entered his field of vision so Sonny methodically went from room to room, searching for his quarry, never resting the aim of his gun. The apartment was nice with fancy furniture and Deco décor that shout wealth and style. Sonny had it on good authority that this particular wealth was gained on the sins of prostitutes, booze and gambling. He got paid no matter what activities the target happened to be into, but took satisfaction in also being used as God’s vengeance.
Sonny finally stopped at a doorway with only a dim light within. An old man sat in a chair with his head held proud and high, in acceptance of a certain fate. This was Jacob Gambolli; a professional would call him the mark.
Jacob looked not a year over seventy and wore fine clothes with a tie. The haggard lines in his face looked as though they were carved in oak with purpose, not added by aged flesh. In his lap sat a shiny ray gun like the kind you might see in a Buck Rogers comic strip. Jacob’s hands hung leisurely at his sides.
“I knew this day would come. I am ready.” Jacob said.
Sonny took aim at Jacob’s heart but kept a watchful eye on the ray gun. It may be a toy and it may not, either way he didn’t want to be shot again today.
“You’re the Blackstone boy, aren’t you?” Jacob stated more than questioned.
Sonny pulled the trigger and the gun clicked. He was out of bullets, a rookie mistake.
Sonny dropped his own gun and snatched the ray gun from Jacob’s lap. He once again took aim at Jacob’s heart.
The heavy lines in Jacob’s face curled into a grin, “Only the pure in heart may bring forth the thunder of God. I knew-”
Sonny fired before he could say anything else. A wicked blast of blue energy escaped from the ray gun. It knocked Jacob and the chair over. Smoke rose from Jacob’s body like from a snuffed cigarette.
“-your parents.” Jacob managed to finish with a hoarse whisper.
Sonny bent down to hear what Jacob had said. He waited for more but there was nothing but dead air. He looked at the ray gun again with more respect. That thing was for real.
Sonny stood and fired once more at Jacob’s head for good measure, but mostly because it was fun to fire the ray gun. The blast left a scar shaped like lightning across the old man’s face. A police siren came alive outside, maybe a couple of blocks away.
Sonny exited the room and took flight down the stairs. Upon reaching the first floor, he went to grab the Tommy gun he left for himself at the end of the rail along the steps. The gun was gone. Well, not gone, just in the trembling hands of a scrappy teenager. The kid tried to act like he knew what he was doing.
Sonny brought the ray gun up to aim at the kid and the kid’s eyes bugged out. The kid dropped the Tommy gun and shuffled backwards to hug the wall.
“Is there a back way out?” Sonny asked.
The kid nodded his head in the direction behind the stairs.
“Thanks kid.”
Sonny picked up the Tommy gun and ran down the hallway. He exited through a door and ended up in a dark alley to the side of the apartment building. A pair of eager policemen dashed past the mouth of the alley. Sonny turned and entered the shadows. A sliver of light glinted off the ray gun just as it was swallowed up by the darkness.
The rain had shifted to a steady drizzle by the time Sonny reached the skeleton of the church just outside his home. He called it a skeleton because that was what it reminded him of. The thick steel beams which supported the lone bell tower rose up like the beginning of a nose. Two large stained glass windows were mosaic eye sockets and the half-finished portico resembled teeth. Sonny imagined that, if he were to fly overhead, the construction would resemble a sacred skull.
His dad would call him morbid, but what better way to describe the dead building. It only looked that way because his dad never finished it. It was a wonder if he ever finished anything. The small two story house behind the skeleton of the church was quaint and seemed sacred in its own right when set alongside its haphazard brother. It was the last thing his dad had finished, and yet he still tinkered away on it.
Sonny hid the ray gun under his coat. He had stashed the Tommy gun in a safe place. He didn’t need his dad finding out about his newest line of work. He would never understand.
After four short steps, Sonny entered the house through the front door. He tried to close the door behind him gently. As soon as he entered the front room, he could see his dad, or at least his dad’s legs, in the kitchen. Mr. Blackstone was under the sink, humming an old spiritual.
Sonny had to walk past the kitchen to get to the hallway and the stairs that led to his room. He took three steps.
“Sonny?” Mr. Blackstone asked.
Sonny sighed. “You need a hand dad?”
“Since you asked, turn the water on.”
Sonny strolled to the sink and turned the knob that ran the water. He leaned over to watch the water go down the drain.
“No leaks.” Mr. Blackstone said with a sense of accomplishment.
“You fixed something. Don’t get carried away now.” Sonny replied as he moved away from the sink and out of the kitchen. “Next thing you know, you’ll be building a church.”
Mr. Blackstone scooted out from under the sink but Sonny was gone.
Sonny lunged up the steps and into his room, shutting the door closed behind him. The room was small but comfortable with little in the way of furniture but a bed with no headboard and a dresser. A dozen books were stacked neatly on the floor away from the window, mostly literary classics and a bible. A few nicknacks and toys from his youth rested on top of the dresser. A small crate sat in the corner alone as if it were some kind of museum artifact. Mr. Blackstone had found him in that crate when Sonny was but a baby, left on the doorsteps of Holy Name Cathedral, abandoned and monstrous.
Sonny opened his bedroom window. There was a small ledge under the window for a potted plant to sit on. He placed one foot on the ledge and crawled outside, grabbed onto a ladder alongside of the house and climbed up to the roof. He walked heal to toe along the tip of the roof to the skeleton of the church building, and hopped across to a small landing.
A tarp hung over a pair of thick beams that led to the inside of the structure. The elements were held at bay only by the tarp. Sonny frequented this place often for its solitude and view. A stone gargoyle, shipped from France, crouched underneath the landing like a wary guardian.
Sonny pulled an overturned box to himself to sit on as a makeshift chair. He lifted the ray gun out from under his coat and examined it. The handle of the gun had an ornate lightning bolt carved into it. A few rounds of questions had rolled around in his head on the way home but answers that made any sense eluded him. This was certainly a ray gun if he had ever seen one but what was an old mobster doing with it? What was ‘the thunder of God”? What about his parents?
Sonny knew next to nothing about his parents outside of the fact they dropped him on Peter Blackstone’s doorsteps when he was but a baby. They hadn’t wanted Sonny, or they thought someone else could do better bringing him up. Sometimes, late in the thralls of a sleepless night, Sonny had ideas there had to be something else. Maybe, they were protecting him from something. Maybe they were heartless savages. Of course, he was a monster even as a baby. Who could you expect to love a monster?
He got lucky with his new dad. Back then Peter Blackstone was a man of the cloth, fresh out of seminary. Peter could no more turn away an abandoned baby then he could any child of God. Why he felt the need to raise Sonny himself instead of letting someone more capable was not something he talked about much. The few times Sonny had sought the answer, Peter would just say ‘the Lord gives what the Lord gives.’
Sonny was born into this world as a monster and he could no more refuse that than Peter could refuse the Lord.
Sonny held the gun out at arms-length and pivoted to aim at a street lamp across the street. He pulled the trigger and a beam of wicked light cracked through the air. The lamp shattered in a mini explosion. As if to reply in conversation a flash of lightning cracked the sky high above followed by a deep roll of thunder.
Sonny couldn’t help but grin. “The thunder of God.” He said.
“Sonny.”
He could hear his dad calling his name from the bedroom window.
“Not now dad.” Sonny yelled back.
“You are late for work.”
Sonny looked at his watch. He was late for work.
Sonny placed the gun under his coat and tiptoed his way back across the rooftops to his bedroom window. Peter leaped out of the way as Sonny spilled inside in a rush. Sonny was certain to keep his gun held under the coat close to his body.
“Out Dad. Privacy. I’m not a teenager anymore.”
“I know exactly how old you are. You’re 27 and if you had a place of your own you would have all the privacy you could want.”
Sonny scooted his dad out the door.
“I’m a monster remember.” Sonny managed to say before closing the door.
Peter talked to the closed door. “You are what you make of yourself.”
With a light shrug of his shoulders, Peter strolled down the hall. He knew to leave well enough alone. Most parents dealt with a monster during some point in child rearing, he had dealt with a monster for 27 years. The Lord must have dearly wanted to teach him patience and patience was what he had learned. The Lord gives what the Lord gives and Peter knew that the Lord had given something special to Sonny. He prayed each night that the devil didn’t snatch it away before his son noticed what it was.