Short Money Read Free

police. It was a decision to which he had come many times before. He would open a rib joint. A really great place where you could go to get some really great ribs. Better yet, he would go to Montana and play poker for a living. Buy into one of the poker clubs in Billings. Buy himself a nightclub. In Jamaica, a really cool place with reggae music and Red Stripe beer. By two-seventeen he was seriously considering learning to play bass guitar and starting the ultimate rock band. He drained the sixth can of Leinenkugel. As he laid out the last two lines of coke, he heard, faintly, a rapid series of explosions. A short burst, then a longer one.
    Crow frowned. The Murphys, running another hunt. None of his business what they did, but it pissed him off anyway, the untouchable Murphy brothers running their canned hunts, blowing away everything from antelope to zebra. He’d tried to convince his chief to have a talk with George Murphy about the machine guns. It just didn’t seem sporting. Orlan Johnson had listened, then told him he had to learn to mind his own “got-damn beeswax.”
    “You get a complaint from some citizen, Crow? I didn’t think so. Listen to me. George Murphy runs a nice clean operation. The man has a class three firearms license. You just do your job, keeping the streets safe, and don’t be worrying about a few got-damn zebras.” Police Chief Orlan Johnson was married to George Murphy’s sister.
    Crow leaned over the radio and sucked the coke into his sinuses.
    An hour later, his shift officially over, he was still sitting in his car, fighting the yen to drive the 150 miles into Minneapolis for another gram, thinking dark thoughts about his dead-end job, his troubled marriage, his hazy future. The rib joint now seemed like an impossibility, the rock-and-roll band another cokehead fantasy. He would grow old and fat, another small-town cop good for nothing but to provide a little sport for the local teenagers. Melinda would leave him, divorce him, marry a man with prospects.
    He felt the burning again in his gut. Stomach cancer, or worse. Something rotting in there. Thirty-three years old, and his innards were dissolving from all the coke, the booze, the fried food. What did he have to look forward to? Melinda had promised him a birthday dinner, something with plenty of red meat and wine. Too bad she was such an indifferent cook, especially when it came to meat, which she wouldn’t eat. They would eat dinner, drink a few glasses of wine, then she would try to start a fight—he could count on that—arguing over something trivial. He saw himself sitting there, staring wordlessly back at her as she yapped at him, numbing his brain with her New Age bullshit. Telling him something she’d seen in her tarot cards.
    Or they would have what he thought of as the “feeling fight.” He recalled the last one, Melinda’s voice hitting a new level of stridency when she told him he was a fish. “You are so unfeeling, so flat,” she’d said, “it’s like you aren’t really there. I get to one side of you, I can hardly see you. You don’t know how to share your feelings. You’ve got the emotional depth of a flounder.”
    And maybe she was right. Certainly he didn’t feel things the way she did, nor did he possess her rich emotional vocabulary. He had never cried over roadkill or felt the great bolts of joy of which she seemed capable. But he was not a flatfish. He’d said, “If I have so much trouble expressing myself, then how come you know so goddamn much about me?”
    As always, the snappy comeback had failed to enrich their relationship.
    Too bad he’d used up all the coke. When they were doing coke together, things usually went better. They were going through three or four grams a week lately, which was hell on the bank account but made it easier to be in the relationship. Sometimes he thought the coke was all that held their marriage intact. He knew it couldn’t go on, that sooner or later they would