The Pariot GAme Read Free Page B

Excellency.”
    “
Ex
cellency,” Riordan said, having consumed about a third of the drink, “my goodness. We are moving up in the world, aren’t we?”
    “Also,” Doherty said to the waiter, “pay no attention to anything he says except when he orders a drink. He’s very disrespectful and he’s often insulting. I tolerate it because I’m charitable. You needn’t. Okay?”
    “Okay,” the waiter said.
    “You can bring me a vodka tonic,” Doherty said, releasing the waiter.
    “And another one of these little buggers for me,” Riordan said, swallowing another third of the screwdriver. He said, “Ahh.”
    “Wow,” Doherty said. “When did you start doing that?”
    “Nothing to it,” Riordan said. He belched softly. “Got the hang of it from an old buddy of mine in school when I was a freshman and he was instructing me in the sacred mysteries of bourbon.”
    “That must be where I went wrong,” Doherty said. “All my school chums ever taught me were the sacred mysteries of the Sacred Mysteries.”
    “Probably is,” Riordan said. He belched again. “No fun in that at all. Anyway, guy told me the way you avoid hangovers is by not stopping drinking, and I’ve followed his advice faithfully ever since. Especially when I’ve been flying all night, which means I have to get tanked up before I get on the plane and I can’t sleep after I get on the plane, so I keep drinking on the plane and by the time I get on the ground again I feel like I had a dead cat in my mouth all night and somebody’s fixing locomotives in my head. In addition to which, your beloved government makes me fly coach like all the other obstructionist bureaucrats, and I will tell you something, Paul: I am too big for coach. My legs’re too long and there’s too much of the rest of me, too. So by the time I get off, no matter how many times I stood up and walked around while we were in the air, I’ve got stiffness in the legs to go along with the stiffness in the head that I brought on myself because I hate flying.”
    “What were you doing in LA?” Doherty said as the waiter delivered the drinks he had ordered. Riordan finished his first and seized the second gratefully. “Run the tab,” Doherty said to the waiter. “This could take awhile.” The waiter nodded and left.
    Riordan sipped from the second screwdriver. “Marvelous restorative,” he said, setting the glass down. “IRA,” he said.
    “In Los Angeles?” Doherty said. “Did they move Ulster or something?”
    “Oh, hell,” Riordan said, “I don’t know. They’ve beengetting very nervous about the thing all over the damned country and as soon as they get jittery they send for me. That kid from Listowel that I grabbed … You know how you can tell you’re getting old?”
    “I certainly do,” Doherty said. “It’s when you finally wake up and you’ve got a hose in your nose that you notice first. Then it’s the tubes in your arms that draw your attention. Also the fact that you don’t seem to be in your own bed, although of course I suspect that’s a familiar discovery for the likes of you.”
    “No comment,” Riordan said, “but you answered my first question anyway. I appreciate the courtesy. Tardy, but appreciated.”
    “Yeah,” Doherty said. He toyed with his glass, making wet rings on the white metal table. “Well, I was sick.” He looked up at Riordan. “When I woke up I couldn’t remember anything. Where I was? Well of course I didn’t know where I was. The last place I’d been where I knew where I was was on the seventeenth at Boca Palm, lying two on the fairway with about a hundred-and-twenty-five yarder to the pin on a par-five hole. I was playing the best round of golf I’ve probably ever played in my life. There was a very good chance that I could birdie the eighteenth and come in with a seventy-nine. I’ve never shot anything under eighty in my whole career. There’ve been a lot of rounds when I would’ve shot myself,