The coffee cup was a thimble in Tommy the Pyro’s large, swollen left hand. It was a scarred hand, a hand that had spent at least some time clutching grimy prison bars and weathered card decks, a hand that had been tattooed and scarred over tattoos and scars until the wrinkles of his age were entirely irrelevant. He looked at me with seasoned, hard gray eyes as he sipped at the scalding liquid inside his cup.

“So, how did you meet Frankie the Fin?” He asked, not smiling. Suddenly, improperly, Jailhouse Rock began to play softly from speakers overhead.

“I did a small stretch in Gleason with him,” I said, returning his gaze and adding some rigidity of my own. “Two to four in the late nineties for B and E.” I poured myself a fresh glass of orange juice from a bowling pin-shaped carafe on the table between us. “He said if I was ever in Denver and needed heaters when I was on the outside, I come see you.”

“So he did,” he said, forking at his plate of pancakes. “So he did. Jackson, is it? What you need, Jackson?” He wiped his mouth on the rolled-up sleeve of his blue polyester shirt and his face held an expression of assumed abandon. It was an arresting face, one you would reluctantly recall from an ill-fated circus of bad dreams rather than from the pages of Vogue or Gentlemen’s Quarterly. I could not discern his age.

“Well,” I said, pausing to take a slight safety glance around the empty all-night diner. The sky was capped tightly shut on the other side of the window next to us, the bright stars blinking quietly about the dark canvas of the night. “I need a three-fifty-seven, a couple of eight-shot nines, a double-deuce, and a forty-four. And bullets for the lot, of course.” I wiped my mouth with my napkin and swallowed, hard.

“That’s a solid amount of firepower,” he said, glaring at me. He was trying to intimidate me, but failing. Guys like him been trying to intimidate me my whole life.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s solid. What of it?” I glared back at him, waiting. I would have glared to infinity and back. “What you gonna do with all that?” He asked, smiling. “Sell ‘em at recess?”

I looked away from him and nodded, more or less to myself. So this is how it’s gonna be, I thought.

“Listen, pally,” I said, leaning forward, breathing deeply. “I ain’t that young, but even if I was, I’d expect you to treat me with a little more respect than some two-bit shit brain on the bottom of your boot there. I got things to do and that’s why I’m here, because this is the first step on my way to doin’ ‘em. The guys I work for don’t take no for an answer, and if you ain’t gonna help me out I’ll get my answers for them someplace else.” I held his glare and calmly took a bite of my tuna sandwich, waiting for his play. “I had you fingered for a stand up grifter, but if you wanna play games…”

“Now wait a second.” He said, sipping his coffee again, staring into my eyes. “Nobody’s playin games here. You ain’t the only one who has to answer to somebody, Jackson.” His face was bunched up in a half-snarl, twisting the scars on his cheeks into a swirling, distorted, bleached country road map. “Say a couple a cops get mowed down with these guns, or a couple of school kids. Then the cops come looking for me, which means my guys come looking for you - and let me tell you,” he said, leaning forward for emphasis, “they’ll find you and they won’t even kill you right off.” He wiped the blue polyester over his face again and leaned back, his gray eyes staring at me behind the slow sweep of his arm. “You dig?”

I straightened up in my seat but my gaze was still steadily equal to his. “Yeah.” I said. “I dig. Just keep a clamp on that tongue of yours before it gets cut out.”

He let that last one float around the chill diner air.

“So where’s the paper?” He asked, sipping his coffee again.

“I can give you six,” I said without hesitation, sipping more orange juice. That’s the thing about these old gangsters, I thought. They give us young guys a hard time because they hate the way the world has changed. They hate the way the world has changed because they don’t run it no more. They don’t run it no more because young guys like me run it now, and we run it much more efficiently.

“Six now, six on delivery.” I said, chewing. Tommy nodded a sign of approval and then followed it with a grimace.

“I can handle that. So long as you are where you are when you say you’ll be there.” He said.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Who’s worried?” He asked nobody, shrugging his wide shoulders and looking at his watch. “Damn it’s late.” He nodded at my sandwich. “How’s your tuna fish?”

“Fine.” I said.

“You eat like a pig,” he said, smiling.