Nobody's Fool (76 page)

"A

good-looking girl comes up to the guy with the rifle, so he clubs her with the gun, breaks her jaw in about fifteen places, then kicks her once or twice for good measure. That'd be against the law, wouldn't it?"

"He done that before I got there," the policeman said.

"I never saw him hit her."

Some more men on the way into the OTB also stopped now.

"Okay," Sully said agreeably.

"That's what I mean. I just want to understand how it happened.

So you pull up, and the guy with the gun is standing over the girl with the broken jaw who's lying on the ground. And he's pointing the rifle at her and saying what he ought to do is just blow her brains out.

That'd be against the law, wouldn't it?"

"Definitely," said one of the two men who'd stopped first. The policeman glared at the man who'd spoken for a moment before turning his attention back to Sully.

"I'm going to give you about ten seconds to get the fuck away from me. Sully." Sully consulted his watch.

"So what do you do? You let the guy with the rifle take a little girl, get back in his truck and drive away."

"It was a domestic dispute. A judgment call. They picked him up ten minutes later, for Christ sake."

"A judgment call," Sully repeated. Officer Raymer knew his mistake now. It was allowing himself to be drawn into this discussion.

"You should try being a cop for about one day, Sully," he said weakly.

Sully was grinning, and so, slyly, were the men who'd gathered.

"A

judgment call," he repeated as he turned to head into the OTB.

"You take care now.

Officer."

"I hope you don't ever catch fire and have me standing nearby with a hose," the policeman said to Sully's retreating form.

"That's where you'd be, all right," Sully said over his shoulder.

"Off at a safe distance, holding your hose." Inside the OTB were clusters of the windbreaker men, though most of these were now wearing their post-Thanksgiving heavy outer wear, and Sully spotted Otis right away due to the white bandage behind his ear.

"Oh, God," Otis said when he became aware of Sully standing in the doorway and grinning at him maliciously. Instead of having to deal with Sully once, midmorning, at the OTB, now, since Sully'd started working mornings at Hattie's, he got a double dose. Sully'd warned him against breakfasting at the donut shop, too, threatening to go down there and bring him back by force if he had to.

"Have mercy and stay away from me, will you? Can't you see I'm injured?"

Sully inspected the swelling behind Otis's ear.

"I worry about you, Otis," Sully told him.

"Well, don't," Otis insisted.

"Just stay away from me and I'll be fine."

392RICHARD R U S S 0

"I worry about a man who comes out second best to a ninety-year-old blind woman and then insists on going down into alligator country without a guide."

"You couldn't guide me to Albany." Sully threw up his hands.

"You want to try it on your own, be my guest. When they send your remains back home, what should we do with them?"

"He won't go away," Otis wept.

"Okay, I'll have to use my own discretion," Sully said.

"There probably won't be much to send back. All they usually find is a bloodstained shoe, maybe part of the foot still in it. Let me look at your shoes so I'll be able to make the identification."

"Dear God, take him." Otis looked up at the roof of the OTB.

"Open the sky and just take him." Sully spied Jocko leaning against the wall by the window.

"If it's you, I'll just put it in a shoebox and put it on my mantel."

"This man gives me nightmares every night."

"I'm just trying to make you watchful, Otis. There's danger everywhere."

"There's danger everywhere you are, is what you mean," Otis said.

"Let's go see this guy over here," Sully said to Will.

"Maybe he'll be more appreciative." Will was squinting at yesterday's results posted on the wall, but he followed along.

"If you won another triple, don't tell me about it," Sully warned Jocko, who looked up when they came over.

"Okay," he agreed.

"If you lost another one, I don't want to hear about that either.

Who's this?"

"Say hi to Jocko. He's our friendly neighborhood pharmacist." Will was still squinting at the wall.

"Speaking of which. I don't suppose you got any more of those you gave me the last time?"

"Not on me," Jocko said.

"I got some new samples in yesterday, though. I thought immediately of you."

"You're the boss."

"Come out to my office."

"Can you wait here a minute?"

Sully asked Will, who was tugging on his sleeve. A look of panic immediately swept Will's face.

"I'll only be a minute. Can you be brave that long?

I'll be in that car. You can see it from NOBODY'S FOOL 3 3 here. " He pointed out the window at Jocko's Marquis. " Go see what the triple was yesterday, and by the time you do that, I'll be back. Okay? " Will took a deep breath. Okay. Outside, Jocko rummaged through his candy store glove box holding up vials of pills to the light, glowering at them through his thick glasses.

"Here," he said finally, "eat these." Sully held them up, noted their color, pocketed them.

"I

wondered if you'd ever give me anything yellow. I've had just about every other color of the rainbow, I think. What are these?"

"Screaming yellow zonkers. One should do the trick."

"Okay."

"Let me know if they turn your pee yellow."

"My pee is yellow," Sully said.

"Oh-oh." Jocko grinned.

"It may already be too late." They got out of the car again.

"What do I owe you?" As usual. Jocko waved this off.

"Nada. I told you. They're samples."

"That's what you always say."

"That's what they always are," Jocko said.

"You're becoming a regular laboratory rat."

"I come from a long line of rats," Sully said. He could see his grandson at the window, watching anxiously, his courage nearly exhausted.

"Good-looking kid," Jocko remarked.

"He's a good boy," Sully said, feeling suddenly swollen with pride, just as he had in talking about Peter the day before with HCarld Proxmirc.

"I like having him around.

He's a little on the nervous side, like his father always was."

"They get that from Vera," Jocko said thoughtfully.

"She and her husband have sure had their share lately."

"I don't know much about it," Sully admitted.

"I know Ralph's been in the hospital." ^ "In and out," Jocko said.

"They're about a gazillion bucks in debt.

Got to be. "

" I doubt it," Sully said. " Ralph worked for the post office all those years. He's got to be covered. "

" Insurance usually gets the first eighty percent," Jocko admitted. " You ever tried to pay the other twenty after something major? "

" I'm not saying they don't have problems," Sully said. " I shouldn't tell you this " Jocko began.

"Then don't, for Christ sake," Sully said.

"Okay," Jocko said agreeably enough. Sully studied him sadly. He waved at Will, who waved back.

"What?" he said finally.

"Just be careful of Vera if you run into her," said Jocko, owl-eyed behind his thick glasses, unusually serious.

"I'm always careful around Vera," Sully told him.

"I wear a cup, in fact."

"You miss my point. She's the one I worry about, not you." Sully frowned. Jocko, a pharmacist, often knew medical information about people in town.

"She isn't sick?"

"Not exactly," Jocko admitted, adjusting his glasses up the bridge of his nose significantly.

"If this goes any farther, you're going to have to find a new source of pain pills." Sully promised not to tell anyone.

"About a month ago, one of my clerks caught her shoplifting.

I got back just in time to keep her from being arrested."

"You're kidding," Sully said, because Jocko so clearly was not kidding.

"I wish."

"I can't believe it."

"Neither could I. I took her back in the office and she came unglued. Un-fucking-glued, Sully. She scared the shit out of me. I thought she was going to have a breakdown right there.

Sobbing about disgracing her father. Sixty years old, and she's worried about ruining her father's reputation."

"What'd you do?"

"Gave her a Valium and sent her home and told her to forget it. She hasn't been back since. She's shopping at the drugstore out by the interstate now."

Sully nodded.

"No good deed ever goes unpunished."

"I'm grateful," Jocko said as though he meant it.

"When I was a kid, one of my friends stole a toy truck of mine. I saw him take it, and I could never face him afterwards. I felt more guilty than if I stole his truck." Will met them at the back door. He was holding a ticket.

Sully had given the boy his triple ticket the day before to hold on to for luck. Sully couldn't quite read yesterday's results from where they were standing.

"What was yesterday?" he asked Jocko.

"Four-five-seven." Sully nodded, took the ticket from Will, glancing at it with disinterest.

3 5 "I haven't been off the schnide all week. You're supposed to be able to pick one of the three, aren't you?"

"Just as well you didn't hit yesterday," Jocko commiserated.

"The payoff would have just pissed you off. Nice two-eight daily double, though, for the magician who could have picked it." Sully blinked at the ticket Will had handed him.

Two-eight, it said.

"Here's the magician right here," he told Jocko.

He'd completely forgotten he'd bought the boy a ticket, let him pick the numbers. In fact, he'd been about to tear the ticket up. Jocko examined the ticket, then the board, then Will, who was beaming and blushing.

"That's the genuine article. Hundred and eighty- seven fifty."

"How do you like that?" Sully said.

"You're rich." Jocko handed Will his racing form.

"Who do you like today, kid?" Sully and the boy had been sitting outside at the curb for nearly five minutes when Rub, who had all kinds of things to tell Sully, couldn't take it any longer.

First Sully didn't come, and then he sri ll didn't, and then he finally did come, and now he was finally here but still wouldn't get out of the car. A lot had happened since Rub and Peter had left Hattie's over three hours ago, and Rub didn't approve of any of it. It wasn't bad enough that Peter had just gone off like he was the boss and could give himself orders, leaving Rub to work all by himself and take messages for everybody in town who wanted to leave one. But now when Sully and the boy finally did come back, they had to just sit there by the curb while he was inside doing his work and everybody else's, full of longing and the morning's unspoken wishes and messages and information.

To Rub's way of thinking, there were suddenly too many people in the world, and two of the extra unnecessary ones were Sully's son and his grandson who, together, had sort of made Rub himself disappear. So he went out to where they sat at the curb and reasserted his existence.

He went around to the driver's side and knocked on the window. Inside, Sully and the boy kept talking.

Actually, Sully was talking, and Rub thought he had an idea what he was saying. He was telling the little boy to pretend he didn't see Rub, who was standing right there in plain sight.

"Don't look at him," Sully was saying, the words barely audible outside the glass. The little boy tried not to, but he kept darting furtive glances at Rub, who understood that this was one of Sully's games. One 396 of the ones designed to make himself feel like shit. Which was exactly how he did feel already. So he rapped harder on the window. This time Sully noticed him, and he mouthed the words, "Hi, Rub," as if he and the boy were a long way off, too far for a human voice to carry. Then he whispered something to the boy and they waved at him together. For Rub there were a great many mysteries, but none was more perplexing than the way his best friend would team up with any human being on earth against himself. It was almost enough to make Rub doubt that they were best friends. When Sully and the kid were through waving at him. Rub made a circular motion in the air to signify that Sully should roll down the window.

That way, at least, Sully couldn't pretend not to hear. Not that Rub expected this ploy to work, and indeed he was not surprised when Sully feigned confusion and made the same motion back at him. Slowly, silently, Rub mouthed the words "roll down the window." Sully rolled it down.