Boston Blackie

Boston Blackie

       By Execrable (Douglas) Eddie Wilcox

We are what we are.

We do what we do.

We are and do.

We do and are.

And the big egos of the writing world

Go on writing without reading.

You read them. They don’t read you.

Boston Blackie was a pitiful specimen. Dwarfish at six foot ten he exuded all the worst qualities of the adolescent at the age of sixty-two when most men reach their prime. Once upon a time, he would think to himself, I held this city in the palm of my hand. I stole diamonds at night when all slept. I entered the establishments where money was kept and, well guarded as it was, I made away with it under the noses of the vigilant guards. Smooth, swift, lethal, and in all ways ducky, I could and did elude the best efforts of the best constabulary in the Americas. This is what he thought. This is how he still imagined himself. In actual fact, he gave off the impression of never having been efficient in any way. Big in the waist, narrow of shoulder, thin of arm and pointy of chin, he resembled one of those odd cars one sometimes sees that one wonders who would have engineered it in the first place.

       Now as he washed his face the morning of his “last great heist,” Boston Blackie puffed out his chest as he toweled himself and watched for signs of strength in the mirror. The Diamond Factory was their destination; a ton of diamonds was their mission. A shipment of the precious stones had arrived cut and polished from Ukraine and his crew would attempt, despite one of the heaviest guard of all time, to seize the whole shipment and secret it in one of Blackie’s warehouses.

       The men stood in place. The trucks arrived. A hundred guards formed a phalanx from the payload vehicle to the Factory door. A small tractor lifted a great box from the semi to the ground and then drove it into the building. There it was set in the middle of a large cleared space and surrounded by sixty guards who would stay the night. The room bristled with rifles and guns. Night had already fallen. Blackie’s men moved swiftly to the side of the building. They attached a hose to the truck and pushed it into the room through a small round hole in the wall. All the men inside got heavy-eyed. They fell asleep as one and then the thieves went inside and hustled the ton of diamonds onto their own truck with the help of the tractor left inside and disappeared into the night.

       “We did it!” Blackie said to his men. He coughed and hacked and doubled over, shaking with glee. When he’d finished laughing he smiled at all of the men and handed them each a thousand dollars on the spot. He drove away and unloaded the loot himself. He only came back to this hiding place when he needed more money. He would go with a pocketful of diamonds to a fence he knew and get cash for himself. Yes, this man lived a good life till he died at the age of one hundred and two.