The Careful Implementation of External Pressure

Case #6: Cain Snider.

Case #6: Cain Snider.
Monday/April/15/2019/ 10:55PM

Cain Snider was an admittedly cowardice man. He would turn around and flee at the first sign of danger, but only his close friends and surviving relatives knew this. He overcompensated for this fact so much that customers turned away from his taxi at his unfriendly glance.

As such, when Cain pulled to a stop outside a nondescript restaurant in the upper west side, he was expecting the two figures who had hailed the cab to be a office-worker taking his pretty-ish wife out for a nice dinner on their anniversary, who would then stumbled their way through changing their minds at the sight of his burning cigar and gold tooth.

Instead, he found two young teens, neither dressed appropriately for the standard of the restaurant they had emerged from, entering his cab with no much as a syllable. And he knew they saw his unfriendly look because the taller of the two- with a burgundy leather jacket that was just big enough to not have been theirs- locked eyes with him and slowly blew a bubble of blue gum until it popped with a loud clap as they slipped into the backseat. The second to enter, the shorter girl, vacant of her jacket and left with bare arms, matched his glare until he turned away, and slammed the door a little harder than needed.

All at once, like the changing of a clock, Cain's facade crumbled.

Cain's brother was a much braver man than he was, with a much less honest job, and Cain was the frequent audience to the older man's drunken babble; meaning he had heard more than his fair share of stories about the two teens sitting in the back of his cab and it was impossible for him not to recognize them. Enough stories that the two would kill him if they realized he knew who they were.

He took a deep a breath as he could, eyes flickering up to the mirror above his head so he could look at his two passengers before he tried starting the car. The taller, whose red hair and condescending smirk gave her away as the famous(ly ruthless) Cookie- only Flix called them Thife-, had her arm thrown over the back of the seat and Flix's- only Cookie called them Locks- shoulders, whispering into their ear.

They were looking at him, rather than each other.

Cain fumbled with his keys and almost dropped them before he managed to get them into the ignition and car started. The radio flared to life, and Cain's seat-belt nearly locked with the amount of tugging his chest did on it when he dove across the small space to silence it.

"Club Tristis" Flix said, and if Cain was uncertain about who they were before, he definitely knew now.

Cain merged into traffic obediently, trying to keep his eyes on the road instead of flickering to the mirror every second. His hands were shaking and slick with sweat, leaving the steering wheel warm and sticky, but he didn't dare take his hands off the wheel. Dully, he registered that Club Tristis was on the lower east side, almost a thirty-minute cab ride with two teen mobsters in his backseat.

He didn't dare say anything, shoulders curling in on him as he hunched over the steering wheel, forced to listen to the muffled conversation the two were having and praying he didn't overhear anything.

The worst was the red lights, where he didn't even have the flow of late-night traffic to distract him from the presence of the two directly behind him. At some point, Cookie cracked the window and lit a cigarette, and well if it was anyone else he would have slammed the breaks and had them out of his taxi, he only shuddered when the cold air glided across his sweat-slicked skin.

There was a click from behind him, and his heart leapt into his throat, so much sour anxiety filling his stomach he felt nauseous, but an instinctive, terror-filled glance in the mirror revealed that Cookie was merely lighting the cigarette placed between Flix's teeth with her lighter.

The light in front of them turned green, and Cain resolved to ask his mother to borrow her bible when he got home.

-0-0-0-0-

As Thife and Locks' watched the small flame slowly engulf the end of the cigarette, Locks' turned their head just enough to whisper in Thife's ear, "That's Billy Snider's brother, you know," they mumbled, voice soft and content, merely observing a fact.

Thife hummed dually, and whether or not she had been aware of that before Locks' had told her was anyone's guess, clicking the metal lid of the lighter with a flick of the wrist and smothering the little dancing flame.

"Well," Thife started, and the light lost by the small flame was made up by the nearly glowing of her eyes, "we should tip him, then."