Ventura Hellway

she...is he drunk or something?” I squinted at the man in eight-thousand-dollar clothes whose hands were shaking as he tried to snap a magazine into his pistol. “Fuck if I know.” Telaney leaned forward to better eye the man. “He’s got to be drunk or high. I expected him to send a hit man, or a hit squad,
not show up to a fight all by his lonesome decked out in a bespoke suit.” “Maybe that’s his fighting suit.” I snorted.
“It’s gonna be his burial suit,” Telaney added. Two months ago, Telaney had been late to a scavenge at a yoga studio where a man we’d called Big Studio Dude had killed his wife for screwing around on him with an equally Big Dude with the Palisades Militia. The militia had retaliated by bombing BSD’s limo. The bomb killed the driver as well as BSD’s friends who had borrowed the limo; the blast had turned the vehicle into twisted bits of blackened metal. Telaney’s intel was that BSD was going to make a move on the militia
—step three in this escalating mini-war.