In the main room of the abandoned warehouse, the
members of Vince's gang had rigged an improvised table of boards and concrete
blocks. It was usually a place for playing cards or throwing dice, but today
Ozone sat down with a cup of questionable coffee from a street vendor, smoothed
out a newspaper and began reading.
This sort of behavior didn't go unnoticed among some of the
other gang members.
"What are you wasting your time on now?" Speedball
asked.
"It's called reading," Ozone said without looking
up. "It's the sort of thing smart people do. You wouldn't know anything
about it."
Fausto looked up from cleaning one of his guns. "If that's
one of El Duque's papers, you'd be smarter to take it with you to the latrine
and use it to wipe your ass."
"There's important information here." Ozone
pointed to a headline. "Says here they're making improvements to the water
sanitation facility."
Speedball shrugged his big shoulders. "I only drink
alcohol, so who cares?"
"It's not like we have running water, anyway,"
Fausto added. "You're reading useless information."
"Oh yeah?" Ozone pointed to another story.
"Starting October 1st, we'll have electricity until 10 pm."
"I'll believe it when I see it," Fausto said.
"Besides, you don't need a newspaper to tell you if the electricity is
working. Just flip the light switch."
"Or stick a fork in the socket," Speedball
suggested. "I'll watch."
Ozone gave an exasperated sigh. "I can't help it if you
guys want to be uninformed about what's going on in this city. Go on and be
ignorant." He bent back over his paper,
but when Vince walked by a few minutes later, he called to him. "I picked
up a paper for us, boss. Want to take a look?"
"What kind of paper?" Vince ambled over, but when
he saw the masthead he frowned. "Government propaganda." He
picked up the paper and peered at it more closely. "Says here crime is down
in the city."
"Not if I have any say in it," Speedball muttered.
"They mean reported crime," Ozone said. He tried
to take the paper back, but Vince kept it out of his reach. "We're not in
the statistics because we get away with it."
"Then you admit this paper contains misleading
information." Vince tucked it under his arm. "I'll dispose of this.
Go do something useful."
When Vince got to his office, though, rather than throw the paper
away, he spread it out on his desk, poured himself a drink, and
perused the front page, chuckling over the stories. He found the next few pages
amusing, too, but when he came to the obituaries, he grew serious. A wealthy
man had died, with the burial to take place in one of the outer suburbs, where
those with enough money and connections could still sometimes get a plot.
Vince rubbed the blue stripe on his face and wondered what
kind of security would be at the man's house while everyone was at the funeral.
Breaking and entering wasn't really his thing, but he had a couple guys on his
team who might be perfect for that sort of job.
With a sigh of satisfaction, Vince took a pen and noted the
date and time of the funeral on the calendar he had drawn on the wall, then
picked up his glass of scotch. Ozone was right, there was value in reading the
paper. But the best things weren't from the front pages; they were what could
be found on the inside, and by reading between the lines.
This was written for Sunday Scribblings 2.
