I’ve had this story in my head for a while, and today was the day I decided to start writing it. I have some hope that it will be, ah, controversial.
People had to call Bad Jack ‘John Steelman’ now. That was because he was respectable now, too: he wore socks with his shoes and changed his clothes every day (with clean ones!) and had a dentist brought in to deal with his teeth. Bad Jack didn’t even fuss when the dentist had to go in with the drill and the numbing goop. Or at least, John Steelman didn’t fuss, either in public and in private. In the back of his head, Bad Jack was pissed and thinking about how a dentist didn’t need good knees to keep working, right?
But that was a loser thought, Bad Jack told himself. The kind of thoughts bandits had, and Bad Jack wasn’t no bandit no longer. He wasn’t even a bandit chief. No, he was a manufacturer now in the Hershey Consortium, and for that you need polish and restraint. At least where people could see.
And, hell, the teeth did feel a lot better. Better enough that he was gonna keep this dentist around for the next time he needed one. Bad Jack didn’t know how to make the dentist stay under the new rules, but he was sure there was a way. That was what rules were always for; making sure that the people on top got what they wanted, and now he was one of the ones on top.
Not at the very top, though. But close enough. Besides; maybe there was a way to get even higher than Bad Jack was now. You just had to wait and see it.