The Strange Case Of Louie The Mutt

By Bob Liddil

“If it makes you feel any better,” Roberto was saying, “I tried to get the boss to change his mind.”

Louie just shrunk a little in his seat at the mention of the boss and tried not to think about what awaited him at the end of this, his last ride.

The car raced along through the Jersey countryside for another 15 minutes before anybody said anything else. Again, it was Roberto doing the talking.

“Sal, are we there yet? I can’t see a thing.”

Salvatore the driver growled, “Keep your shirt on. We’re turning just up ahead here.”

Nobody in the car was particularly enthusiastic about the job at hand, which was the killing and burying of Louie The Mutt. It was just one of those curve balls that life throws you from time to time. Louie came up short on his numbers collection, not a little bit, like he bought a soda or something, but a thousand dollars short. A thousand bucks, for the love of Mary.

“How could you lose a thousand bucks, you moron?” the boss had demanded to know, but Louie just stammered and stuttered and swore that he had never taken his eyes off the bag, and begged, “P-p-please, Boss, I’ didn’t t-take the money. I d-d-don’t know what happened. I - I swear it.”

The car turned off the main highway and onto a dirt road that was pitted with potholes and ruts. That it was a well-traveled road was little consolation to Louie, who’d never seen it before. After all, he was just a bagman, not muscle like the twins or a driver like Sal. It was sometimes called “the road to nowhere,” or “the dead end,” jokingly by the wise guys because the guest passenger never made the return ride.

The car turned one more time and then bumped and groaned to a halt. Sal switched off the motor, turned in the seat and said, “Bring him along, boys.”

Louie had never been much at manual labor. That was one of the reasons he’d joined up with the East Side Gang, instead of following his pops into the City Public Works Department. Having to dig his own grave was just another indignity in a really bad day.

Sal and the twins were having a smoke, when it happened. A bright light suddenly switched on from directly overhead and snuffed out the headlights from the car. That light caught the three wise guys so thoroughly by surprise that they were blinded. Blind or not, Roberto pulled the .38 from his shoulder holster, firing wildly, but ultimately hitting nothing.

By the time they recovered their eyesight things had changed considerably. For openers, Louie The Mutt had them covered. He stood facing them with a long barrel .357 Magnum leveled straight on them. It was more than that though, and stranger by far than anything they had ever encountered in all their many years in the mob business. There was more than one Louie covering them.

The second Louie the Mutt was by far better dressed than the bagman that Sal and the boys had driven out to the Dead End. He was older, too. Streaks of gray shot through his black hair and his face looked wrinkled with obvious signs of age. It was uncanny how alike the two Mutts were and yet how starkly different as well.

“Listen here you three and listen good.” This was older Louie talking and his voice had a ring of unmistakable authority that made the wise guys think for a second that this couldn’t be Louie at all. “You guys are going to go back to the city and bump off the boss.”

He might as well have been telling them to go to the moon for as much as they understood what he was saying.

“You are going to do it because I say so, because I’m going to be watching, see, and if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do, I’ll kill all three of you.” Old Louie flipped each of them, Sal and the twins, a silver dollar and said, “Look at the date, boys. You know I will know what you do.”

Old Louie and young Louie shook hands and the elder leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Young Louie nodded in understanding.

As if on cue, that light appeared again, this time as a rectangle of brightness about seven by five feet, into which Old Louie stepped and after he had done so, vanished.

It was pretty quiet for about thirty seconds until the car lights came back on, then Sal and the boys all exclaimed, “Jeeze!” at the exact same instant, and Sal said resolutely, “I guess we’d better get back to the city.”

A lot of mysteries popped up the following year, most of which never were solved. The boss turned up as a floater in the East River. Louie the Mutt became boss after him and was suspected of foul play but nothing ever came of it. The west side mob invested heavily in electronics and computers way before anyone else even thought about it. There was a rumor floating around for a while that they’d bought into Microsoft, which might explain their gradual withdrawal from the rackets.

It has been whispered over the years, that Louie the Mutt acquired an interest in time travel. A reporter interviewing the twins about something unrelated brought up the subject, and Roberto, ever the talkative one said, “Forget about it.”

He did say that a lot over the forty years after that night in Jersey that no one talks about. On the other hand, that bunch was always a little off the dime.