New Reno Life
After that night with Sophia and the priest, things went on business as usual for a while, despite being married to a prostitute I only met twice. Things were weird and literally nobody in New Reno knew exactly how to "Be married." So, I did my job for the Bishops and Sophia did the thing she did at the Cat's Paw. Neither of us knew how to comprehend what happened that night, but the both of us knew that there was at least Some connection.
Eventually, I broke the silence by going to her place/room and chatting with her. Of course, I was offered a "Husband's Discount" but I just preferred to talk most of the time. I ended up spending every day or night when I got off work with her getting to truly know my, "Wife." I won't bore the reader with details about everything that happened between us, but over time things worked themselves out. It was a long time ago, but people used to ask how I could be comfortable those first few weeks when my wife was still a prostitute. The answer was simple: I didn't care. I barely knew her and got married after a night of drugs and alcohol. During those first few weeks of marriage, I didn't give a shit who was paying to plow her. Love at first sight isn't real. Love grows, and that was exactly what it did each day I spent with her… Anyway, I said I wouldn't go into details. Bottom line is: After a few weeks of being married, she quit her job and moved into my room in the Shark Club.
Days passed and I enjoyed getting off the job to open my door and get greeted by a smiling wife. She actually had a lot saved from her previous job and I made good money as a thug for the Bishops. The only big financial expense was our dual addictions to Jet. Jet was fairly cheap in New Reno but finding a good supplier was hard since most people were slinging it. I ended up buying our Jet from a bitter old idiot named Renesco. Renesco was a racist, tribal hating bastard (Despite the fact I wasn't a tribal), but his Jet was more concentrated, allowing me to dilute it better. Because of that, I never got truly high anymore, and my steady life with the Bishops allowed me to focus on cutting back again. I showed Sophia how to dilute Jet with water and we worked on overcoming or at least handling the addiction together. I told her about the detective and told her more stories of my life before New Reno. She returned with stories about herself.
Sophia never stepped foot outside of New Reno her whole life. She lived with her Brother Tuco on the streets of town just scavenging to get by. The two never really knew their parents, but they must have been pretty attractive. Sophia was absolutely stunning, and her brother was a pretty good-looking guy himself. When she was 15 and her brother was 20, Tuco got in with the Bishops through a few odd jobs. Tuco was a thug for a little while and provided for his sister, but was eventually assigned to some exploratory tasks. Tuco spent over a year as a gun out in the wastes doing whatever Mr. Bishop needed out there and gathered a lot of experience, but Sophia was left alone.
Sophia had no tie with the Bishops since her brother was never in town to put her up, so she had to get money somehow. She said that the girls at the Cat's Paw took her in and cleaned her up. Miss Kitty ran a fine establishment and took excellent care of her girls. Miss Kitty's place didn't belong to any of the other families and her girls had it made… At the expense of selling their bodies. Kitty had a strict, "No Drugs" policy for all her girls, which made Sophia's later developed Jet addiction a constant struggle to hide.
So, Tuco spent the next four years climbing his way to the top of Mr. Bishop's mercenary army while his sister spent her days at the Cat's Paw. Eventually, Tuco offered to pay Sophia's way out of there, but she knew what her brother did. The wastes were dangerous, and every time Tuco left could be his last. Sophia knew she had to be able to survive on her own and did so the only way a pretty young New Reno girl could. All that changed when I stumbled into town and got the more local job of "Casino Thug." Life was simply perfect next to my lovely but crude wife, and my job got more and more interesting over the next few months.
Before I explain how the monotony of New Reno thug life became more interesting, I feel that it's necessary to explain a bit about the city itself and the status of the different families.
I often wondered how a city in the rocky desert of far west Nevada got its start in the first place. I heard different stories from different people over the years, but this is what I got:
The city was hit minimally in the bombs of 2077, and the place was largely irradiated. Over time, the outskirts became less irradiated and survivors from the region eventually moved back in. When the city was destroyed, many scavers found that there was still a lot of salvage to be taken from the old world. As the scavers picked over the corpse of Reno, human nature set in and conflict between scavers was inevitable. Over the years, the city was essentially a warzone, but the old world had a lot of gambling establishments still standing. Scaver gangs took up residence in the old casinos and a small community was made based on the old ritual of gambling. There was never peace in New Reno since the bombs, but scavers restored the buildings and later the lights, making the place an actual town or settlement. Scaver gangs sent groups to gather water from the nearby Lake Tahoe, and a community was born out of scaver gangs in the city, drug makers on the fringes, and roving trader outfits who stopped by looking for shelter from the dust storms.
In the early 2200s, the city had become a town still ungoverned by anyone in particular, but still a decent community to trade at. New Reno's economy grew from trading with the warring scavenger gangs, gambling, drugs, and the general rule of, "Anything goes." Like I was told by my late guard friends; There wasn't any law, but anyone who desired safety needed to get themselves in with one of the families. The scaver gangs, chem pushers, and opportunists from the beginning of New Reno morphed into the families that currently inhabited the city based largely on the legendary "Mafia Families" from an era long dead. Like I say; as dangerous as the place was, it was way safer if a New Reno resident got themselves in with one of the families. I simply call them "Families" instead of the old phrase, "Crime Families" because of what Mac said; It's hard to call them "Crime Families" in a city with no institutionalized law. Anyway, I was fully content in my place amongst the Bishops, but the New Reno situation was volatile when I was there.
Each of the families of New Reno had their own focus and unique domination over certain aspects of the town. The Mordinos essentially controlled the drug trade in the city and most of the sex. Almost 80% of the drugs or prostitutes on New Reno streets were under Mordinos protection. Nobody knew where the Mordinos got the drugs from but some of the senior members of the Bishops remember a time when the Mordinos were just a big group of peyote farmers on the outskirts of town. It was only a few years ago that they rebuilt the Desperado Casino and only about a year prior to my arrival that Jet came to surface. I didn't link Jet to the Mordinos for a long time, but I'll get to how I did that later.
The Wrights were different from the other families in that most of their people were actual members of the Wright Family. They owned the local liquor industry and backed their control over other regional dealings with a number of hired employees like Sam Pritchard who was apparently trying to scout out that base for them. Ironically, the Wrights posted people across the Tourist Trap holding "Temperance" signs who preached about the dangers of drug and alcohol use. My late guard friend, Mac mentioned that the Wrights were only anti-drug because they don't hold any ground in that area. However, word about their stills shutting down reached me only a week into my time with the Bishops. There were rumors that "Mrs. Wright" convinced her husband and leader "Orville Wright" to take a more conservative approach to New Reno values and Mr. Wright shut down the stills (At least in theory). Despite the stills supposedly shutting down, there was still no lack of alcohol in New Reno at all. Things were fairly quiet in their territory, but a few months into my job, I heard that one of the sons was sold some bad Jet or something and died. I don't think it was bad Jet, I just think the little bastard overdosed. So, around July of 2241, word got out that Mr. Wright put a hit out on whoever sold the Jet to his son.
The other minor Family was the Salvatores. I remember Mac saying that they were, "Fucking shady" and that was the best description for them if any. Salvatore's Bar was west across the street from the Shark Club and that big lighted building marked the edge of their territory. Anything west of Salvatore's bar was firmly under their control, including Commercial Row. Because of that, it was obvious that the Salvatores dominated the extortion racket in New Reno. They extorted "protection" money from all the shops in Commercial Row and operated a seemingly nice bar. Their attempts to influence independent drug pushers was firmly ended by my initiation ritual. So, the Salvatores only took their cut of the New Reno pie from Commercial Row and their little night club.
I never entered Salvatore's Bar for fear of getting recognized as one of Bishop's guys, but I recalled some of the other things Mac mentioned. Though the Salvatores seemed to mind their own business, Mac told me that Salvatore's men butchered a bunch of Mordinos and Bishops several months back. The Salvatores had a fairly small operation, especially opposed to us and the Mordinos, but everyone described the event as a massacre. Somehow, the Salvatores got their hands on a bunch of high-tech laser weapons (Referred to as "Light Bringers" by the locals) and absolutely annihilated a whole bunch of well-armed thugs from the two most powerful families in a single afternoon. After that, everyone knew not to cross the Salvatores, and so the second smallest family in New Reno was the most feared. I was surprised I didn't consider it at the time, but looking back, I probably should have been more fearful in undergoing my initiation ritual. I suppose the Salvatores didn't really care about the hit I carried out on their aspiring employee, Johnny Double Ds. Either that, or they assumed he was shot by one of the thousand Jet fiends of the streets, especially given the absence of his hired goons after the fact.
The Bishops left the Salvatores alone for the most part, but we certainly kept our eyes on them. The New Reno Families were constantly spying on each other anyway. I just happened to be on a drop off in Wright territory when I got word from an informant detailing something interesting. The informant talked about the Wrights wanting to find that lost base in an effort to equip their guys for expansion into other family territory. However, when I was in New Reno, the Wrights were still the whipping boys of everyone else and nobody took them seriously. So, the base was still lost to the people of New Reno and didn't concern us, so we just put a few more eyes on the streets for the other families. I wanted to inform Mr. Bishop that I had a personal experience at the base the Wrights were looking for. Giving the Wrights access to the base and equipping them for a bloody war with the other families was just what we needed in order swoop in and maybe seize Commercial Row or east side. Although, despite my memories of the place and watching my friends die, I couldn't remember exactly where it was. Over the first two months of 2241, I was knocked out a dozen times, drunk two dozen times, high on hallucinogens for weeks on end, and went through a lot of traumatizing shit. Fragments of my memory were a giant blur, and so was the location of that military base.
So, as for the Bishop family. All the other families in town had their eyes focused on the city itself with the exception of us. The Bishops were the second most influential family operating obviously out of the Shark Club. Mordinos controlled drugs and prostitutes, Wrights held liquor (Sorta), Salvatores controlled protection, and we dabbled in a little bit of everything. We Bishops had our own chem pushers, our own prostitutes, our own stills in the wastes, and a few protection operations inside town (Just not in Commercial Row). But what made the Bishops unique were people like my wife's brother Tuco. Mr. Bishop understood the surrounding wasteland as well as the rising powers in the region. I didn't know about these operations in my time as a low-level thug, but I eventually heard of Mr. Bishop's dealings with The NCR and Vault City. NCR was that supposed country down south where my rescuer Detective Paul was from, and Vault City was a prosperous little community to the northeast. Mr. Bishop was able to see beyond New Reno itself and into the politics of other communities. He knew it was only a matter of time before his beloved New Reno got involved in something larger. From what I managed to gather over a few months; Mr. Bishop had an army of mercenaries out in the wasteland doing… Something? I wasn't sure what he was using his silent army for, but my wife's brother was a captain in that army.
Now that I explained the brief history of New Reno and present standings of the families, I mentioned that things were about to get interesting for me. After about 5 months under Mr. Bishop, it was August of 2241 and I was a trusted member of the family.