Cold Stare

"Gaaaaah!!"

The thing about Sam is that he's a thieving shitbird. You have to keep that in mind, or the rest of it don't make sense.

Big Tony, the manager at the Admiral, liked his rum. Fitting, really - admiral and rum.

Like a lot of places, the Admiral didn't want their staff drinking. Yes, it's a bar. Customers drink, employees don't.

The girls could do whatever the fuck they like. If a couple of snorts of vodka makes it easier to suck some fat guy's sweaty balls in the back room, then have a couple. But of course the girls had to pay. Or get the guys to buy for 'em.

Anyway, this is about Big Tony. Well, Sam, really. We called Big Tony 'big' not because he was big, but because he was bigger. Little Tony worked in the back room, running the stopwatch for the "private" dance booths. All night long, he'd be back there with a dozen stopwatches and a microphone, calling out "Jesse, that's 2 ... Mercedes, that's 1."

When Little Tony came to work for Big Tony, you can see how we gave them the names. Fact is, Little Tony wasn't so little, and big Tony wasn't so big. But what are you gonna do?

Little Tony is important because it was his eye. Sometime way back he was in some kind of car wreck. He never told me nothing about it directly, I just heard it around. But Little Tony drank a lot, and was hooked on pain killers big-time. Not aspirins, either. I'm talking Percs, Oxys, morphine. Big. Time. It seems his back was fucked up, which caused constant pain. And a couple of limbs were bent. And he lost an eye, so they gave him a glass one.