Nobody cared about Vic. Nobody hunted him. Nobody thought about him. No vendettas, no violence, no nothing threatened to come his way. Even the cops didn’t seem to care who whacked Sal.

Vic lived his dull life as a persona non grata chooch’s chooch, a well-known Fredo weakling nobody feared or respected. Vic might as well have been dead. People considered him so unimportant nobody wanted to put a bullet in his head let alone put him in the sausage.

The Godfather just joked about making Vic part of a family recipe to scare him into thinking that carrying out a successful contract on Sal would bring made-man status in the organized crime family. Vic’s slimy remains would have spoiled the gravy. Minghia, Sal and Vic should have been roommates instead of standing on opposite sides of a smoking Saturday night special. With Sal gone, the Godfather turned Vic into an even bigger laughing stock than he already was.

Not to mention Gina giving him the boot.

Mary, too.

Who’d she think she was?

One broad’s as bad as another.

But the worst of the bunch was the bird.

That flying snitch threatening to tell everybody about the streetlight that shined and placed the Mother of God’s image on the pizzeria wall. As long as Mary remained, Vic could mold some kind of related hustle around her presence. Selling healing holy water made the most sense, filling jug after jug from the tap in his bathroom and slapping Mary’s puss on the label, calling it Blessed Bath Water to sell to the customers standing in line. But if that frigging bird kept squawking about turning off the light and somebody caught on, Vic’s new business would go bust.

Yeah, Vic thought, it’s time to turn off the light, all right. Put out a contract on the bird and permanently ruffle some feathers. But you couldn’t just shoot him out of the sky. You couldn’t fight him fair and wring his scrawny neck. You couldn’t even poison him with a bad slice because Gina got a restraining order against Vic to keep him out of the shop.

Vic turned on the TV to relax with a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi when he saw the solution to his problem appear on the screen like a miracle.

Bird drones.

A killer bird drone would do the trick.

After emptying what was left of his bank account and taking a small wad of cash from the Adidas shoebox he kept under his bed, Vic placed his order by phone to a company in India. Within a day, the package arrived. After another day of struggling to put together the model, Vic stepped back.

The God Bless America Predator Eagle’s wings spanned such distance Vic worried he wouldn’t be able to get his mechanical attack drone into the car. But after a few tugs and pushes, Vic squeezed the machine into the back seat of his stolen black Caddy and drove to a secluded spot to set the weapon aloft. The God Bless America Predator Eagle seemed alive, real, ready to fly, hunt and kill, a symbol of liberty at its finest, poised to slaughter new people in new places for all the right reasons.

On the other side of town, Dillon slid his head through the fake diamond bracelet Sal bought Gina that Dillon swiped off the pizzeria counter. The words I Can’t Breathe spelled out in small zirconium stones shined like a call for justice from the grave. Wearing the bracelet around his neck Dillon looked like a militant mascot of some kind. After letting himself out of his cage, Dillon dropped to the floor of William’s apartment. Taking a running start on the linoleum on his spindly little legs he leaped to the window sill and took off, airborne for a cruise around town.

Dillon loved cruising, flirting with the female pigeons and landfill gulls, not the boys, just the gulls, soaring and swooping in a lazy dive that made him feel like a sleek, beautiful bird instead of an untamed creature that needed a beak job. Dillon also loved landing occasionally on the nursing home lawn where tired women leaning on canes and walkers fed him the raisin bread he fancied but made him poop in copious amounts, even more than when he devoured double cheese pizza. When that rectal urge hit, Dillon lifted off on a bombing run over the Chamber of Commerce building to target white businessmen eating lunch in the park in their starched long-sleeve dress shirts that turned yellow green with direct splats.

Flying high at 12 o’clock, Dillon spotted a blur against the sun that looked like a small plane coming in for a landing at the nearby airport. As the spot drew bigger and closer, Dillon sensed trouble. The God Bless America Predator Eagle drone locked onto Dillon with a technologically sound laser lock system that immediately lined up the kill. Sharpened darts rotated slowly on a small metal axis to place Dillon’s head into a computer operated sight that would soon send killer needles ripping toward the target.

On the ground below, stinking of cheap red wine, Vic played with the joy stick control. Thrilled when he saw his drone locate its target, he tugged hard to the left and programmed a lighting assault that should destroy the know-it-all bird a flash of pummeled plumage and bird brains.

Sensing death from above, Dillon climbed, banking right, circling until the massive automated eagle regained its bearings. Diving, Dillon passed so closely to the drone he peered into its red glass eyes and knew the robot couldn’t match his maneuvers for the same reason the Red Baron eventually died during World War I. Like the battleground risks of no man’s land, no guarantees exist in the no bird’s land of aerial combat.

Whistling Yankee Doodle he climbed, dove, climbed and dove again, Dillon lost the cumbersome automaton that couldn’t turn on a light breeze the way baby Dillon learned to do loop-the-loops at the wings of his mother. Dillon’s stomach began to growl as he acknowledged yesterday morning’s raisin bread feast that felt like lead in his belly, ready to be deposited wherever and whenever the spirit moved him.

Dipping and plunging, Dillon’s lofty sky ballet put any Blue Angel formation to shame as the God Bless America Predator Eagle lost him in the clouds. Out of nowhere, Dillon swooped, opening nature’s poop deck door and emptying his intestinal explosives with bird bowels bursting in air. When the crap hit the fan, its cascade of chemicals and falling fecal matter clogged the inner wiring of the drone’s computer generated flight system. The bogus eagle nosedived, picking up speed as it crashed and burst into flames beside a food truck selling chicken wing tacos.

Flying upside down as a show of burgeoning skill, Dillon coasted home.

The moral of the story?

Shit happens.