Revolution Number 9 Read Free Page B

Flipper.”
    “Right. Flipper.”
    The two men fouled the air with smoke. Nuncio glanced at the clock. He had a nice round belly under his purple vest, and it liked to be fed promptly at noon.
    “Brucie?”
    “Yeah?”
    “This time you’re going down, son.”
    “What?”
    “To jail, Brucie.”
    “Jail?” Brucie was appalled. He was not the kind to do well in jail—or even survive.
    “They’ve got you by the balls, Brucie, and you’ve got nothing left to give them. No one to finger.” Had it been Churchill who had said something about giving me the tools and I’ll do the job? Nuncio took a drag on his twenty-five-cent cigar. “You’ve got to give me some tools, Brucie.”
    Brucie frowned. “Tools? You mean like the press and stuff?”
    God. “A body. Some crook to cough up to the D.A.”
    Brucie’s little eyes lit up. “I did driver’s licenses for some spics last month.”
    “Christ. What does the D.A. want with more spics? He’d probably tack on an extra year for aggravation if I even raised the idea. Think, Brucie. Think.” For a moment, Nuncio considered hiring a hypnotist, at Brucie’s expense. “Think way back into the past. Is there anybody you’ve worked with or done work for that the cops might be interested in?”
    Brucie scrunched up his face like a five-year-old asked tospell
dog
. It was a revolting sight. Brucie thought and thought. Nuncio’s stomach rumbled. Twelve o’clock. He started to get up. Then Brucie surprised him. He opened his eyes and said, “I got an idea.”
    “Yeah?” said Nuncio, sitting back down.

4
    B lurting the answer to twenty-six across in the Sunday
New York Times
crossword was the first big mistake Charlie Ochs had made in twenty years. Playing Ben Webster was the second.
    There had been other mistakes along the way, but small ones—once when a dog made off with a baseball, for example, and Charlie, passing by the field, had taken it from the animal’s mouth and unthinkingly zinged it to the catcher, over three hundred feet away, on the fly. That had been stupid, but without consequences. The ballplayers were kids and had soon forgotten. Charlie didn’t forget—and never touched a baseball again, although he sometimes recalled the feeling of that particular one, worn and slightly damp, in his hand.
    The crossword puzzle mistake did have consequences. It would never have happened at all if he had stayed in bed, or if a monster hadn’t crawled into one of his traps.
    But.
    Charlie had a little shingle house on Cosset Pond, bought at a time when you didn’t need a city job to afford one. Kitchen and sitting room on the first floor, bed and bath upstairs. He had a tumbledown garage where he kept his car, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with almost three hundred thousand miles on it and an engine he had rebuilt twice. He had a patch ofland, big enough to stack his pots, and a floating dock with
Straight Arrow
tethered at the end. He had no wife, no kids, no close friends. He had a silver saxophone he played at night.
    On the day of twenty-six across and Ben Webster, Charlie awoke at first light, as he always did. He rolled over and raised his head to look out the window. There was frost on the glass. Charlie scraped it away with his fingernails. He saw
Straight Arrow
straining its lines at the dock. White caps stormed over Cosset Pond, and heavy seas roiled outside, beyond the Cosset Pond cut. The flag on the roof of the Oceanographic Studies Center across the pond was flying straight out, and overhead, charcoal clouds sped by, fraying at the edges.
    Meanwhile, the bed was warm with the heat of his body. It would have been easy just to lie down, pull the quilt over his head, and listen to the weather, as though it were a New Age recording entitled
Nor’ easter
. But he hadn’t checked his pots in three days, and if he didn’t do it, someone else, someone who didn’t shrink from a little weather when there was a dishonest dollar to be made, would. Charlie