Lucy pulled up to the table where Pollution sat holding a bottle of Irish whiskey.  She smiled at him and poured herself a glass.  Brennan’s Cellars was still closed for remodeling.  So, the two sat alone; his last question hung in the air between them still unanswered. 

She raised her glass slightly, making an unspoken toast, and then threw it back like a woman who aspired to be a better drinker than she was.  Her pink tongue darted out and across her lips, grabbing the last bits of bitter before she began pouring another.  Then, and only then, did she begin the story of how she’d gotten the name Lucky Lucy.

“The smell of Lucas Oil, that’s how I remember them both best.”  She swirled the golden liquid in her glass, watching it move intently, letting it take her back in time.

“Mother used it like priests handling sacraments.  You know, like a new lover finding her way around her partner’s body for the first time – cautious and with awe.  My father, now he used it with purpose.  It was almost as if he was angry that he had to be troubled with cleaning his gun.”  She smiled slightly as echoes of an Irish woman ranting about safety to her stubborn Italian husband seemed dance behind her green eyes.  As quickly as the memories came upon her, they passed.  She stopped spinning the glass and her voice came as almost a whisper. 

“The last time I saw him like that, I was wearing a bed dress, barefoot and shivering from something other than cold.  Lucas oil was all I could smell.  Stronger than whiskey bottles that filled the trash bin and more than the stench of a week’s worth of empty casserole dishes piled high in our sink.  Every wife from the family had brought one on the day of my mother’s wake.  We’d eaten better that week than I could ever remember eating in my whole damn life.”

“Mama was a fine woman.  Tough.  Bullheaded.  Honest and faithful.  But she was a shit cook.”  Lucy chuckled.  “Maybe that’s why dad supported her working when almost no one else did.  At least if she was out doing what she loved all day, she was bearable to live with on the days he was actually home with us.”

“She was the only woman on the force.  She never thought of it as being a 'real' copper, not until a week before the end.  They kept her in a steno pool.  She typed up reports.  That was as close to real police work as she would ever have gotten, if my Father didn’t love her so damn much.  I overheard a few guys talking about it at the wake.  Well… truth be told, I spied on them from the closet.  Bunch-a-rubes didn’t even know I was there.”  She shook her head.  “Made men, indeed.”

“Anyway… If my mother had known that the family had twisted her Captain’s arm to let her carry an actual iron and step outside of the precinct with it on… she never would have forgiven him.  Her police work was legit work.  She was as straight as they come, so much so that I wonder how the hell she ended up with a guy like my dad.  No, she never would have forgiven him for bringing the family into her work.  Which… ironically… I suppose was fitting thing because my dad never forgave himself either.”

Lucy took a swig of her second glass. 

“Stupid.”  She said decisively, through the burn of the liquid washing down her throat.  “Stupid of him because she wasn’t even on the clock yet when she caught that bullet.  Not like she died doing her job, or died crossing another family.  More like, wrong place – wrong time.  Way I hear it from the guys who were talking at her wake, Dad’s boss wasn’t even going to go up the line to ask for the right to take a shot over it.  The family that hit her was making amends in some way or another, not that anything was ever going to replace my mother or my father’s wife.  But… that’s how it works in the business.  My father knew that.  Sadly, he also didn’t care.  He loved her too much.”

“By the time the food and booze were gone, so was he.  But the Lucas Oil, it was still there.  He’d stared at it, my mother’s gun, and her badge in its black box display all day.  Laying across the couch in his white t-shirt and wrinkled slacks he might as well have been laid for his own wake.  And me, just a kid, the only soul keeping watch over him.  You know, to this day I’m still not sure that he even knew I watched him.  I couldn’t bring myself to say a word.  I just followed him around the house.  Kind of like a ghost.”

Lucy finished her second glass, but didn’t reach for another.  For a while she sat, lost in her memories and only after Pollution poured the third glass was she snapped out of her revelry. 

“When you grow up in a house like mine, you learn a few things about legit life… and, not so legit things.  The kids I played with, we had our normal childhood games, but we also had things that could be considered petty rackets.  Tommy Malone and I use to swipe papers and resell them to business men on the loop sometimes.  Heck, got my first kiss downtown runnin’ papers.”  She chuckled at the memory of Tommy’s sweet lips stealing from her what she would have given him freely ten times over, if he’d not been afraid of the other boys teasing him.  But she dismissed the pock-marked face of that little scamp and pulled herself back to the story at hand.

“Never could let mom know about that stuff, but my dad figured I’d grow out of it.  Or marry into it one day.  It never bothered him… he just expected that whatever road I walked, I walked it with my eyes open.  So, when my dad climbed into his car with her gun that day and fell asleep, I knew what had to be done.”

She picked up the glass that Pollution had poured and spun its contents.  “He wasn’t planning on just sleeping things off and coming out of that car to be a good father to me.  I knew that.  He was gonna wake up sober and not a drop of whiskey was left.  He’d still be heart-broken, and in his car with a loaded gun.  He’d planned it that way.  So whatever good sense, or maybe fear of his family, that he had left wouldn’t keep him from driving across town to pay the Whitehill boys a visit.”

“I was angry too.  As angry as my father, but with me… it was cold.  It didn’t burn in me like it did him.  He’d see her face in his mind and he’d start ranting and raving at himself about the Whitehills & what a fool he was for letting her carry that iron.  Me… I wanted to cry, not a sad cry though.  My tears burned and my sobs were these… choked things.  It wasn’t even words just… noise.  Like an animal.  I haven’t let myself be that kind of angry.  Not since I saw what it did to my father.”

“He came out all fury when we got there.  Righteous like the angels.  He didn’t say a word, just went straight to it.  One bullet.  Another.  I watched my father shooting like I use to watch the motion pictures on Saturdays with Tommy.  Like it was happening to someone else.  Like it wasn’t real.  At least until my father caught one.  You expect it to look like it does on the screen, but killin’ men… it’s a whole lot messier than they show it.  Ya know?”

She shook her head and put the glass back down.  “At some point the pain must have gotten through to him, or maybe he saw me… I’ll never know, but he did head back towards the car.  I slipped down so not to be seen or hit.  I was scared.  I’ll be honest, I pissed myself.”  She blinked back a tear that threatened to fall.  “I thought I’d want to die with my father so I wouldn’t be alone, but all I could think about was surviving.  So... I made myself climb into the front seat.  Dad had left the keys.  I kept thinking that I might be able to drive.  If he could just get into the car… I could save us.  I'd be a get-away driver.”

Lucy’s right hand reached up and absently wiped at her eye and then rested just under her nose, as if she was controlling her emotion.  “He opened the door.  His eyes were empty before the last shot sprayed blood all over me and the front seat.”  She choked out the words, “So much fucking blood.”

She hit the whiskey again, steadying herself before continuing.  “I was trapped between the seat, the wheel, and my dad’s corpse.  I can tell you there was nothing professional about me… no matter what the story out of Chicago is.  The men in my father’s family back home, they’re good at two things… drinking and telling stories.  I guess it makes them feel real big to say that even their little girls can pull an iron and drop a wise guy like a pro… but it wasn’t like they say.”

“I had my mother’s gun because I intended to be a made man like my father.  I thought I could help him get revenge for her death… but in that moment, I was scared girl bathed in blood.  I was all alone and death was everywhere.  I could barely breathe, let alone think.  Back home they tell the story that Junior Whitehill walked up to make sure my father was done and then he pissed himself when he saw me pull my mother’s iron up and put a slug into his chest. Some variations involve me saying something poetic… but I did say a word.  I have no idea how I hit him, but it was damn miracle that I survived what happened next.”

“I pulled up my mother’s gun and I pulled the trigger.  I never aimed.  I had no idea if it would save me… but God was good.  Junior fell and his boys began emptying their guns into my father’s body and the car.  They must have thought my dad had taken the shot.  They couldn’t see me from where I was trapped beneath him.”

Lucy pulls her right leg out from under the table and rubs her upper thigh.  “I hate winters in the east… I can feel it, the cold, in my leg like old men can.  One went through right here.  It’s why I don’t wear dresses.  I’m always afraid someone will get a look at the scars.  It’s… not what most women would consider sexy.”

She chuckles.  “The other one I still have with me… it almost killed me.  They tried to pull it out of my guts at the hospital, but I wasn't awake for any of it.  I screamed and screamed like a banshee before passing out in the car, still trapped beneath my father's body.  The last thing I could hear, beside my own screams, was Old Man Whitehill yelling for Junior’s boys to stop shooting.  He’d seen me and that man wasn’t a murderer of children.  He hated that my Mother had been caught in that crossfire and while he’d just lost his son… I learned, some time later, that he figured my shooting his son squared up how I was made an orphan.  So… Whitehill never came for me.  Truth is, I did some work for his crew from time to time,but that was before I crossed paths with SMOG.”

“So… that’s why they call me Lucky Lucy back home.  Lucky to have survived.  Lucky to have taken a one-in-a-million shot on Junior Whitehill.  Lucky that Old Man Whitehill didn’t wack me for snuffin’ out Junior, but instead he took a liking to me.”  She shrugged, as if dismissing the notions of what other people felt was lucky.  

“When I met Tammy I figured I’d become a pro.  I mean, how does a girl who wack's her first Wise Guy before she's gotten laid for the first time NOT become a pro?”  From under her jacket she produced two guns and laid them on the table in front of Pollution.  One a very shiny Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum with serial numbers still visible – the gun of a legit law officer; the other a well-used Colt M1911 .45 ACP. 

“I’ve gone to the range again and again, but I haven’t taken a shot against anyone since Junior… and I don’t know if I ever will.  I mean, I would… if you asked me to, but I ain’t no pro.  No matter what the Chicago guys tell you about Lucky Lucy - the little girl who wacked a Wise Guy, that ain’t who I am…”  She finished her drink and as she put it down on the table she finished her thought, “at least not yet.”

Her eyes drifted down to the weapons in front of her.  One, the weapon of a woman on a legitimate path in life – taken before her time… the other the weapon of a family man whose bloodlust had led to his own death; her emerald gaze heavy with thoughts of the future, unspoken.