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Scene Title | This is What Happens To You in Twenty Years |
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Synopsis | Cassius is looking for Ricky Montana and generally up to no good, then tries to cheat Deckard out of his gun and information. Deckard has twenty extra years of experience and calls bullshit, then threatens with said gun. Cupcakes! |
Date | November 7 2009 |
It's midnight in New York City, six degrees above freezing, and most people are getting ready to go to sleep. Deckard, by stolid contrast, is only just waking up.
The building he spent the daylight hours in is on the northeast side of the island, and across the bay's calm, brackish water, Brooklyn and Manhattan are lit in sparkling flecks of gold and white. It's an excellent view, if you're into that kind of thing. Flint isn't sure he is, as he sips coffee tainted acrid with a burn that can't strictly be attributed to its luke warm temperature.
He is homeless, and he looks homeless, save perhaps for the odd, close-kempt order that's enforced in the buzzed off bristle of his greying hair. He needs to shave. He needs to shower. He needs to change into clothes that don't consist of socks, pajama pants, an old t-shirt and a grungy bath robe. But more than anything, he needs to get rid of the fucking raccoons that keep waking him up in the middle of the night. And that's probably why he has a revolver in his right hand to balance out the coffee mug in his left while he stands out here alone at the end of his building's concrete walkway and breathes steam.
Walking up the street, wearing his generally unkept black suit, Cassius is staring at a crumbled piece of paper, looking up every now and then until he's standing in front of Deckard's building. He looks up from the paper, then directly at Deckard, magnetism subtly frisking the homeless man's body before the 'bodyguard' walks a bit closer. "Hey, Old Man, Ricky Montana live here? And man, I can smell you from over here, you smell like you could use some hookers and a timeshare. You got cash stashed away?" He doesn't seem to be very bothered by the revolver, coming off as kind of a salesman or a crook (If there's a difference) at the moment.
Odds are, at least around this side of town, people wandering around in suits at all hours as standard as people standing around on sidewalks in bathrobes at all hours. Devoid of metallic accessories save for the revolver warm in his hand, Deckard looks Cassius over at a remove that is less sober than it could be and takes another, slower sip of coffee. Not a bandito and not a raccoon, so far as his dishearteningly mundane eyes can tell him in the semidark.
"Depends on what you need him for," decided at length, he lowers the mug and glances back over his shoulder at the shambled condo complex, where ten years ago, the price per square foot was probably costlier than the same area in angel tears or human souls. "And no."
"Business, man, business. Alright, how about this." Cassius reaches into his jacket, then pulls out two metallic dice, holding them inbetween three fingers. "You bet that shiny revolver you've got there, and I'll put up two hundred bucks and a bottle of booze in my car. You roll the dice and I'll call the outcome, if I'm wrong, you get it all, if I'm right, I get your gun and anything you know about Ricky."
There's a pause while Deckard considers it. And the way it sounds like it's a pretty good deal, of which there are few in New York and fewer still on Staten Island. "I don't gamble," is his eventual answer, honest as it is rough in his throat when his thumb hooks heavily back over the hammer.
"How about this. You get off my lawn and I don't kneecap you and take your suit."
"Oh, well now you're just being rude." Cassius says in a most casual manner, Deckard's bullets being unknowingly squeezed and crushed in a manner that's meant to lodge them in the barrel. "I'll go, mostly because my membership to a brothel expires in an hour, and I don't know whose old man you are, but I'll be back, maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in the next few weeks, but one night I'm gonna come down from a hooker high and just be entering a pot high, and I'll be there."
"I'm nobody's 'old man.' …And I'm 42." Sip. "Asshole." Unawares of the brutality being inflicted upon his twee bullets, Flint huffs out a longer breath into a sigh. Fog drifts slow away from flared nostrils and the hardened hood of his brow, but he doesn't actually raise the the gun.
"Save me a joint and then maybe we'll talk."