The Hired Man Read Free Page A

pretty much tied up, but how about meeting me at Hughie’s Saturday afternoon around four-thirty?”
    “You still go to Hughie’s?” I asked, a little surprised at myself for being surprised to hear that he might.
    “I haven’t in a long time,” he said, “but I always say, you should never forget where you came from—you never know when you might have to go back there.”
    “Phil,” I said, “I somehow suspect you’ve moved a bit beyond Hughie’s. But it will be fun to see you, there or anywhere. Until four-thirty Saturday, then.”
    “Looking forward to it,” he said. “So long.”
    *
    When my crotch finally allowed me to tear my thoughts away from some very interesting fantasies involving Phil, I started calling the phone numbers I’d written down on the résumés. As so often happens, one minute it was 1:45 and the next it was 3:00 and time to call Mollie at the Clerk of Courts office. The three résumés I’d managed to go through produced nothing but good-to-glowingly positive ratings, and I was rather hoping Mollie might have at least come up with an ax murder conviction to make it interesting.
    No such luck.
    “A total of three speeding convictions,” she said, “one destruction of property conviction—breaking a window at an abortion clinic during a protest rally—one assault and battery charge stemming from a mini-riot after a football game, and one violation of a restraining order issued by an ex-wife filing for divorce. Kind of vanilla.”
    I agreed but noted the appropriate information on the appropriate résumé and promised Mollie I’d take her and her new lover Barb out to dinner one night soon by way of thanks.
    *
    By the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I had finished the background checks on all the résumés Anderson had given me and typed up my report. Not a single ax murderer among them. While assignments like this paid the bills, they are hardly the stuff of which impressive PI reputations—mine, in this case—are made.
    While I had resolved some time ago not to work on weekends, I stopped by the office Saturday morning just long enough to type up my bill, put it in the envelope with the résumés and my report, and bring it home so I wouldn’t have to take the time to go by and pick it up Monday morning.
    While I was really looking forward to seeing Phil, I knew my tendency to always be early, so I deliberately took my time puttering around the apartment until I was sure I had it timed perfectly to make it to Hughie’s by four-thirty. Of course, I arrived fifteen minutes early.
    Hughie’s was a time warp. No matter when you went in, no matter the hour or the day or the month or the year, it never changed. Bud, the bartender, was behind the bar as he had been all but a handful of times I’d been there. The individual hustlers changed, of course, and so did the individual johns, but they were still cookie-cutter hustlers and cookie-cutter johns.
    I ordered my usual dark beer on draft. Actually, I never had to actually ask for it—Bud only needed to spot me out of the corner of his eye as I walked in the door for his hand to immediately reach for the cooler where the iced mugs were kept. Something both a little comforting and a little disturbing about that, I thought.
    I sat at a stool near the end of the bar as Bud brought the beer over, flourished a napkin in front of me, and set the mug on it. As always, by the time I’d fished a bill out of my pocket to pay for it, the napkin had turned sopping wet from the condensation running down the sides of the mug. But it was part of the routine, as was Bud’s “How’s it going, Dick?” and my “Fine, Bud, how about you?” then his shrug, and his taking my money to the cash register.
    “Got a match, buddy?” a voice behind me said, and I turned to see…Tex. Not the new Phil from dinner but the original Tex/Phil I’d met in Hughie’s that afternoon that seemed now like an eternity ago. Full Marlboro Man drag—cowboy