Most bars in Uptown (Starlight District) play trendy or relaxing music, and many have live singers.
The “cotton-picking experts,” after enduring countless hardships, had finally achieved complete freedom. But freedom left them dazed and at a loss.
In the past, although the farm owners and plantation owners would sometimes whip them, forcing them to work, work, work, at least the plantation owners would feed them until they were full. Even if the food wasn’t good, they would make sure they were full.
Some plantation owners would even find them wives. They didn’t have to consider any other external conditions to get a female slave and start their own small family.
With simple labor, without needing to think about anything else, their families could eat their fill and have clothes to wear.
Their children were the same, born with a job and a future from the moment they came into the world.
Although every day was exhausting, wasn’t that what life was?
But what about now?
They would no longer be whipped, no longer be forced to pick cotton, and no one would demand they do this or that. But what had they gotten?
Freedom?
No, they had gotten something even more terrifying—the shackles of life.
When these people needed to pay money to fill their stomachs, some of them felt anger and shame towards the ancestors who, under the slogan “We need freedom,” had launched the abolitionist movement.
They had only sought their own brief happiness and ease, but had caused these people to lose a life of guaranteed security.
They had to develop new professional skills, besides picking cotton and farming, to make a living.
Singing was a new talent they had discovered.
Perhaps those “experts” huddled in the shadows under bridges, hungry and with no idea where their next meal would come from, would feel an immense nostalgia for the great era their elders described with hateful tones—an era that they now yearned for.
Everyone had a job and could fill their stomachs.
In the Uptown bars, those guys would gently sway their bodies, their deep, textured voices smoothing out the wrinkles in people’s souls. Add a drink to that, and the whole person would relax.
But in Downtown, the Port District, or the Empire District, the bars were filled with the kind of trendy music that was thoroughly despised by the upper class.
It was common, easy to understand, and came with some cringe-worthy lyrics, just like at this very moment.
A middle-aged man in his forties stood on stage with a guitar, singing a recently popular song—
I can’t take a piss, oh, because I’ve got an STD.
I love that girl, but she gave me that terrible disease. If this is love, it must be a poisonous love…
The first time Lance heard that this kind of song was actually a “pop song,” his mind went completely blank.
What he found even more incredible was that the young men around him could actually hum a few lines along with it.
It was Elvin who explained to him that this was a song about the current generation of young people reflecting on promiscuity and love. It was very pioneering, very avant-garde. The original singer probably never imagined that the song would become so damn popular.
In fact, besides this song, there were also similar songs about gay relationships.
This era was a crucial period when passion, along with immune system diseases, was moving from the underground to the mainstream. Because of this new super-virus, coupled with some people’s propaganda and misinformation, the whole society came to believe that the wrong choices of gay people had angered God, so God had sent down a punishment to take away all the heretics who violated the Bible.
They frantically suppressed and attacked this group that deviated from the norm, and the pressure on this group grew immense. The conflict between the two sides was also constantly escalating.
They produced some cultural works, such as pop songs, in which the lover was no longer of the opposite sex. Unexpectedly, these songs also gained the support and love of many people.
Love is pure. In God’s eyes, we only have souls of black and white, not bodies of left and right.
The young people thought it was cool, so they would sing it, just like the song in the bar right now that linked sex, STDs, and love.
Bizarre culture began to emerge along with the economic depression. This was something that could be seen in almost every round of major depressions.
Society would become absurd, people would become absurd, and so would culture.
In the bar, men and women, drunk, were humming along. The bartender, while wiping the glasses, was observing the situation in the bar.
The bars in the Port District were mostly filled with people from the bottom of society. They not only had to bear the weight of their own lives but also the weight of the upper and middle classes of society. This weight was crushing them to the point where they could barely stand.
Alcohol would make them relax, but it could also make them lose control of their emotions and become crazy.
Controlling them before they caused greater damage was what the bartender and the security guards needed to look for and do.
Tonight, as usual, there were many people. They were drinking, chatting, and loudly singing along with those damn lyrics. Some girls even exposed their breasts and roared with laughter.
All the pain, whether physical or mental, at this moment, under the influence of alcohol, seemed to become less heavy.
No wonder people liked to drink. The more miserable a person was, the more they liked it. Not only did they like it, but they would also get themselves drunk.
Because only in this state could their brief lives feel no pain or weight.
During this period, because of the “war” with the Kodak Family, everyone was very careful and vigilant.
After watching for a while and seeing no problems, the bartender put away the glass that couldn’t be cleaned any further and picked up another one.
On the rooftop outside the bar, two guys with weapons in their hands were huddled together smoking.
Although the temperature had risen now, it was still a bit cold at night. Plus, the wind in the port was strong, whistling by. If you stood still for a little while, you could feel a bone-chilling cold.
The two were talking about some very ordinary things. The gang also had many interesting things, like who might be promoted to captain, who might get the management rights to a certain bar, and so on.
For these young men, the gang, the family, was almost everything to them.
Here, they could obtain everything they needed on their life’s path: wealth, status, and the affection of girls.
Gangsters were more likely to be pursued by young women with low education levels, which also became one of their topics of conversation: women and sex.
As the two were talking, they suddenly heard the sound of cars. They bent down, put out their cigarettes by stepping on them, and then stared at the cars at both ends of the alley.
“Doesn’t look like our own people,” one of them said.
After waiting for another ten seconds and seeing those people get out of the cars with weapons, the other one ran to the door of the rooftop entrance and slammed a red button.
The music in the bar suddenly stopped. The bartender frowned. The bar instantly became a little chaotic, and the manager also came out of his office with a weapon.
Someone said through the microphone, “We’ve run into a bit of trouble. There’s about to be a firefight here. Please leave through the door on the right. Thank you for your cooperation!”
Some people who hadn’t drunk too much quickly calmed down, finished their drinks in one gulp, and left with their friends through the door on the right.
But there were also some people who clearly didn’t believe what they were saying, or maybe they felt that… at this moment, even God would have to take a couple of punches from them before he could leave.
These people were clamoring to teach the troublemakers a lesson. In response to these foolish ideas, the bartender had the security guards use clubs to drive them away.
In the end, there were still a few who stubbornly refused to leave, even when hit with clubs.
Faced with such people, the bartender no longer tried to stop them.
A person’s life is a large-scale exam, one multiple-choice question after another.
You can get points for getting almost 99% of the questions wrong, but occasionally there will be a few questions that, if you choose wrongly, will lead to direct elimination.
As the main door of the bar was breached, the bartender opened fire at the entrance with a submachine gun.
In an instant, the flying bullets, wood splinters, and shattered glass fragments finally sobered up those drunks.
They trembled as they lay flat on the floor, unable to tell if their pants were wet from the drinks they had spilled or their own urine. The bravado of wanting to give God a couple of punches was completely gone.
In this kind of environment for a gunfight, the defending side definitely had more advantages than the attacking side.
Those people rushing in from the main entrance of the bar would have to face fire from multiple directions. It was difficult for them to organize an effective attack.
On the other hand, the people in the bar had long since chosen advantageous positions: behind the bar, behind tables, on the second-floor loft…
Originally, their plan was not like this. They thought there would still be many people in the bar, and when they rushed in, the bar side would definitely have a hard time organizing an effective counterattack.
All they had to do was shoot randomly. Whether they killed the customers in the bar or the people from the Lance Family, they could achieve the effect they wanted.
But they had not expected that the people in the bar would be evacuated so quickly.
The firefight did not last long, about five minutes. The Kodak Family’s men, seeing that they really couldn’t break in, finally gave up.
They threw in two grenades and then ran. The two on the roof shot down two or three of them. The remaining men dragged some of their wounded to the alley entrance and finally drove away.
When the manager and the bartender heard that the men had retreated, they had just breathed a sigh of relief when they heard the sound of police cars. The two looked at each other, disposed of the weapons in their hands as best they could, and then fled through a side door, leaving only a group of drunks who didn’t even have the strength to stand up.
Without a doubt, they had teamed up. This was also within Lance’s expectations.
Otherwise, the police would not have arrived so promptly. They had probably arrived a long time ago but had been waiting, waiting for the other party to leave before suddenly turning on their sirens and rushing over.
If the people in the bar resisted, then they would be charged with fighting the police.
If they didn’t resist, then operating the bar and possible “murder” charges would be enough to keep them in prison for a long time.
But this time, the police’s arrangement was very meticulous. They blocked almost all the escape routes. Not long after, some of the slower runners were tackled by the police in the alley.
This time, they did not resist or struggle, but calmly accepted the fact that they had been arrested.
The bartender’s face was pressed against the cold, damp ground. He looked at the manager, whose face was also pressed against the ground. The two of them showed helpless expressions.
At the same time, Lance put down his phone, his ten fingers interlaced under his chin. “Another bar has encountered the same thing.”
He looked at the familiar faces in the office. “The bar was attacked, and then the police immediately launched a surprise attack. Now the Bureau of Hazardous Materials is also getting involved.”
He shook his head as he spoke. “It seems they’ve all teamed up.”
Actually, there was no need for “seems,” because it was a fact.
The police response was not that fast. For the Federation now, as long as the police car arrived at the scene within thirty minutes, it was not considered too long.
Many patrol officers would not take the initiative to respond to alarms, especially in cases where a gunfight had occurred.
When the radio broadcasted these cases to the police cars on the street, it would also include the code for “firefight,” which was also to protect the safety of the officers.
Many officers, as soon as they heard the key codes “gang” and “firefight,” would pretend not to hear.
And they were indeed not encouraged to handle these cases, to avoid unnecessary casualties.
Usually, the police department would dispatch special heavy-duty police to handle the cases, so it would take even longer.
For a situation like this, where the Kodak Family’s men had just withdrawn, and the sirens suddenly blared and surrounded the bar, it could only mean that they had already ganged up.
The expressions of the people in the room were all ugly, but no one expressed any opinion, just looked at Lance.
Lance unclenched his hands and leaned back, resting his hands on the armrests of his chair. “To be honest, when they stop caring about face, they do cause us a lot of trouble and difficulty.”
A problem between two gangs alone would be like the result of the bar firefight just now. Either they would beat Lance’s men, or they would beat the other party.
Then they would go about their business. Those who needed to run their business would run their business, and those who needed to go to the hospital would go to the hospital.
But with the addition of the police, and even the Bureau of Hazardous Materials, it became very bad.
Lance would not only lose this group of men, but the bar would also be shut down, and he would lose a sum of money.
Because they had completely broken through the lower limit and united together. But this also showed that Lance had really pushed them to the edge.
“Let’s have the other bars suspend business for now.”
After thinking it over, it seemed that this was the only way.
Moreover, they still didn’t know the situation at the scene of the attacked bars. If some “innocent civilians” had died, the problem would become bigger and more troublesome.
There was another problem. Those who were caught, would they sell him out? Would they sell out the family?
This was also something he couldn’t guarantee. Never underestimate people’s loyalty, but also never overestimate it.
If those people were all the people in this room, whose interests were highly tied to Lance and the Lance Family, Lance would not be worried, because betraying the family would be like lying in their own coffin first.
But those minor characters, some of them might waver between a heavy sentence and being a witness for the prosecution, finding it difficult to make a decision.
Hiram picked his nose and asked, “Are we just going to avoid them like this?”
As he spoke, he stuck the booger under the table. Lance rolled his eyes. “You’d better use a tissue to clean up your booger, or sooner or later I’ll cut off your nose with a knife!”
Hiram shook his head, took out a tissue, wiped the spot where he had stuck the booger, and threw it in the trash can.
Lance glared at him again. Elvin said with a laugh from the side, “He’s just like that… What should we do next?”
He brought the topic back to the main point. Lance lit a cigarette. “If they gang up on us, we’re definitely no match for them. With the referee and the other player fighting us together, even God would have to take a couple of punches.”
“First, let’s find a way to split them up.”
“Have someone keep an eye on those people from the Kodak Family, and also Hunter.”
“Are we going to make a move on Hunter?” Elvin asked.
Lance did not deny it. “Yes. Since he’s determined to oppose us, then we’ll replace him.”
“As for the others, we don’t need to worry about them for now. Our money is enough for us to use for a long time. The temporary closure of the bars won’t affect our financial situation.”
“The shipments from the valley and the farm won’t be affected either. So right now, our main job is to deal with this small group of ‘rebels’.”
“Of course, the most important thing now is to have Roben the lawyer provide them with help, so that those brothers don’t have to worry. Even if they have to be locked up, I’ll get them out as soon as possible.”
The purpose of them notifying the Bureau of Hazardous Materials this time was actually to make the sentences for these people heavier and longer.
For the sake of Prohibition, the Prohibition Committee allowed local courts to impose super-heavy sentences.
The funny thing was, first-degree murder was not necessarily a death sentence, but if you transported and sold smuggled liquor, there was a considerable probability that the sentence would be longer than for first-degree murder, and there was even a certain possibility of being sentenced to death.
All night, the sounds of sirens and the flashing of red and blue lights filled the Empire and Port Districts. Everyone was guessing what was happening.
But no matter how they guessed, the “protagonist” of the story was only one, and that was Lance, and the Lance Family.
The Empire and Port Districts now only had one gang, the Lance Family. For so many police cars to be in action, it must be targeting them.
For a time, many people were asking around, wondering if the Lance Family was finished…
At a little after 11 o’clock at night, Director Bruce—there was only one Forest Police station in Golden Port, so he was now the complete director.
But this director was not as good as being a precinct chief in Golden Port.
He drove to Lance’s company. The company was brightly lit, and there were many people still there, even coming and going.
In Lance’s office, Director Bruce sat across from Lance.
He already knew what had happened and was very worried, worried that Lance would really fall in this round.
So as soon as Lance summoned him, he came immediately.
(End of a Chapter)