Fatal Curiosity

"The Ramirez bitch knows something and your ass is on the line."

The crowd at Kelly's was unusually heavy for a Thursday evening. Just as well. It gave the two men anonymity in the crowd. They didn't have to worry about either being seen or overheard.

“If she keeps digging into this, things could get messy." The man seemed more annoyed than worried over what had transpired over the past couple of weeks.

"My ass is on the line? Who screwed up in the first place?” the other man shot back, not willing to take the rap on this one. "She didn't get any information from me. It's your accounting system that messed up, not me."

"You tend to forget who your dealing with, my friend. I squared things for you when you were up to your eyeballs in debt. I had to give personal assurances on you. When you welched on your bets, these guys wanted you dead...not just banged up, dead! They don't fuck around. If you owe them money, they expect to get paid. You don't pay, you feed the fish. Am I getting through to you?"

The tension between the two men was growing and nothing was getting resolved.

"O.K., we've got a problem but it may not be as bad as we think,” the man began again calmly. "I saw Jackie this afternoon and she had the file. Now it may have been nothing, I don't know for sure. But I know that she was looking for answers and she may have found the entry that I made in the accounts. I'll have to keep an eye on her for a while."

"I thought you said that you could cover the accounting entries so nothing would look unusual."

"Nobody should have found out. It was a one in a million shot. Two completely unrelated activities took place that never should have been tied together, but they were.”

"Well, do you have any ideas on how we should handle this?"

"Yeah, I think so. Tomorrow I'm going to talk to Jackie and tell her everything,” the man said as he took another sip from his drink.

"What! Are you nuts?" The other man’s eyes were about to come loose from their sockets, a wild look of disbelief written across his face.

"Take it easy, everything is going to be cool.”

The man needed something more than a mere statement that everything was going to be ‘cool’.

"Look, accounting errors happen all the time. I'm going to tell Jackie that I found the error and I corrected it. Everything will seem normal."

"But what if she doesn't buy it? What if she keeps digging and figures out what's been going on?”

"If she doesn't buy it, we fix it,” the man calmly replied.

“What do you mean 'we fix it’?”

"I mean the Ramirez broad has an accident.”