Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [14]
Two
His friend, the red-haired Denny Mellon, came into the drugstore about an hour later, and by this time Jack was almost going crazy from boredom. He was not the only member of the Broadway gang in the place, but he sat by himself anyway, to nourish his boredom; he did not like the bunch at the other end of the counter, grouped around Clancy Phipps. Clancy had just done six months in the county jail for stealing a portable radio out of a car, and everyone was listening to him be ironic and hard about life in jail. Denny sat down next to Jack and said, “Shit.”
“What’s up?”
“Oh, balls. I took this nigger kid up to the Rialto, meanin to hustle him out of all his gold. I had a great scheme goin. I was gonna get him to play snooker with Hatch and them old farts on the middle table, get his confidence all built up, you know, an then when you showed up, get him in a nine-ball game between you and somebody like Bobby Case, an cut him up. You know, you play safe, and Case shoot out. The best part is, he’d beat Hatch and them guys easy, see, and then we’d get all his gold an all their gold, too. Only, you didn’t show up an didn’t show up, and in comes Case with that crazy bastard Kol Mano, an they got him.”
“How much did they get off him?”
“Christ, about fifty bucks. Shee-fucking-it!”
Jack laughed. “It wasn’t your money.”
“It should of been.”
“So you’re broke, too.”
Denny showed his teeth in an Irish grin. “Nope. I got about ten bucks.”
“Loan me five.”
“Nope. In about ten minutes I’m gonna walk down to the Model Hotel and buy myself a nice juicy piece of ass. I been thinkin about it all day. I ain’t had a piece of ass in a week.”
“You’re a real buddy,” Jack said. Suddenly he wanted a girl, very badly. He had been to the Model and the Rex, and a couple of the other whorehouses, with Denny and alone, and right now that seemed like the most delightful thing they could do. It was so nice and businesslike, and the girls smelled so good, and seemed so attractive....
“Listen,” he said to Denny. “You got ten, we take five each and that gets us both in. You just can’t leave me sittin here.”
“Why not?” Denny grinned. “Tell you what: while I’m sittin there on the bed watchin the girl strip, I’ll think about you, just once. Okay?”
“You prick,” Jack said, but he knew that Denny would take him along. It was one of the things he liked about Denny. Jack could not understand why Denny was so friendly, so open and so easy with his money, when he had any, but that didn’t make any difference. It didn’t bother Jack that he would be bumming Denny’s last five dollars, either. He reasoned that if Denny didn’t want to share it, he wouldn’t. He wasn’t forcing him.
“Let’s go,” Jack said.
“Naw, it’s too early. Let’s try to hold off. But man, I do really feel horny, don’t you?” Abruptly, he changed the subject. “That nigger kid just run away from home. Man, he shoots good pool, but he’s a fish. Anybody with larceny in his heart would of smelled a dead rat, the way them guys was cuttin him up. But he just looked more and more pissed off, and kep shootin better an better; but no use. The best fuckin stick in the world can’t beat that kind of action.”
“If somebody pulled that shit on me, I’d break their fuckin heads in,” Jack said.
“Sure you would, but what’s a little guy to do?”
“Fuck the little