Stuff

Staying Dead

It was a complicated legal issue.  It was a lot more complicated than Charley Four-Fingers had ever expected.  Of course, all Charley Four-Fingers had been expecting was to remain dead.  That’s usually what happens when you’re shot twice in the head.  Charley didn’t remember being shot twice.  Truth be told, he didn’t have much memory of being shot once.  And he certainly didn’t have any memory of being dumped out of a boat in the middle of Winesap Lake with several cement blocks tied around his ankles.  What he remembered was waking up in the mud and muck that had until quite recently been the lake’s bottom, untying the ropes to the cement blocks that had sunk out of sight in the mud, and slogging his way to the shore.  That’s when things got complicated.

Charley Four-Fingers had been a contracted hit.  Frankie Marciano wanted Charley dead because Charley had killed Frankie’s brother.  That in itself had all been a big misunderstanding.  Charley had been trying to kill Frankie, mostly because Frankie had Charley’s finger.  It did, in fact, teach Charley not to go around flipping people off.  Granted, there’s a family resemblance, but it was still a pretty stupid mistake – not the cutting off of Charley’s finger, but the killing of Frankie’s brother.  So Frankie wanted Charley dead.  So Frankie hired Lennie “The Knife” Newsome.  Only Lennie doesn’t use a knife anymore.  He uses a gun.  Two shots, right to the head.  But then Lennie gets caught.  And then Lennie rolls over on Frankie.  So pretty much everybody ends up in jail, except, of course, for Charley, because he’s dead.  Only Charley doesn’t stay dead.

Call it a miracle if you want, but Charley comes walking into town just looking like hell.  You would, too, if you spent the better part of a year on the bottom of a lake after being shot in the head, twice.  Charley cleaned up pretty well, and you couldn’t even see the bullet holes if he wore a hat, and the lights were dim, and you stayed back, say, 40 feet.  Even at that, he wasn’t the kind of guy that you’d want over for the evening, unless you were having a Halloween party.  But then, he was pretty much that way before he was pitched in the lake.

At any rate, it was shortly thereafter that all the lawyers got involved.  The state contended that regardless if Charley came back from the dead, he had been dead, and therefore it was murder.  Frankie contended that you can only be convicted of murder, a conviction, by the way, that wasn’t too strong to begin with, what with there being no proof that he actually ordered the hit except with what Lennie was saying, and then Lennie was only trying to save his own ass... where was I?  Oh yeah, Frankie was contending that it was a crock to be convicted of murder while the guy you supposedly had kacked was alive and well (mostly) and trying to figure out where his wife went with the insurance money, which was another legal problem by itself.  And Lennie was just confused.  I mean, should he give the money back?  After all, it was one of those unwritten professional promises that the people you were paid to kill should stay dead.  Of course, Lennie could kill Charley again, but Frankie would still want Lennie dead for rolling over on him, which made Lennie hesitant about giving back the money regardless, or, for that matter, killing Charley again.  Did that make sense?

But then everything was settled when all the contesting parties, with the exception of Charley Four-Fingers, were allegedly blown to bits in circuit court by the Guido Brothers.  They really were blown to bits, it was just the part about the Guido Brothers doing it that was alleged.  They were wanting to take over the Urbana District of town, the Guido Brothers, that is, although why anyone would want the Urbana District is beyond me.

Of course, that just left Charley Four-Fingers, and he wasn’t a problem at all.  He had killed Sleepy Marciano, Frankie’s dim-witted brother.  He was convicted in nothing flat.  After all, he had shot him on Public Access TV where Sleepy worked as a sound technician.  Channel 47’s ratings were never better.  They got the death penalty.  The prosecutor, not the TV station.

And it was there, on death row, that the priest came to visit Charley in the waning minutes of his life – Charley’s, not the priest’s.  With no hope of a pardon or a commuted sentence, the last thing the priest ever said to Charley was, “Aye, there’s no hope now but for a miracle.”

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