Frag Box by Richard A. Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

it’s not worth much of anything.”
    “I don’t like this, Herman.”
    “You’re right, Aggie, you don’t like this at all.”
    The phone rang, and since Agnes was still looking a little stressed out, I picked it up.
    “Jackson Bail Bonds.”
    “Herman?”
    “Speaking.”
    “Yeah, say, Frankie Russo here, Herman. I just wanted to let you know it was nothing personal.”
    “Of course it wasn’t. What are you talking about?”
    “Jumping bail.”
    “Your trial isn’t for four days yet.”
    “Yeah, well I can’t be there, is the thing.”
    “Are you crazy? Failure to appear is a worse offense than the one you’re charged with, which is completely bogus anyway. If you hadn’t mouthed off to the judge, you’d be ROR. You said it yourself: the cops just want to harass you because they can’t legally close down your strip joint like the Mayor so dearly wants them to. If you skip, you’ll be doing just what they want.”
    “Yeah, well, I gotta skip.”
    “Why on earth?”
    “‘Cause this guy named Eddie stuck a gun in my face and told me to, is why. He threatened my family, too.”
    “Son of a bitch.”
    “Yeah, that would be him, all right. Look, I gotta go, okay? You take care.”
    “Hey, wait—” The line went dead.
    Frank Russo’s bond was for twenty-five thousand. And because he was no flight risk at all, I had carried it on my own.
    “Call Wilkie and tell him we’ve got a jumper for him.”

Chapter 5
    Layoffs and Other Labor Problems
    It’s a funny business, writing bail bonds. People like to say it’s like the insurance business, but it’s not. Except when it is. In any absolute sense, I’m usually not a bondsman, but a bonding agent, in exactly the same way that the guy you buy your car insurance from is an insurance agent. He doesn’t personally insure your car; he just represents a big company that does. And that is what the pinstripe goon, Bardot, was talking about when he referred to laying off the bonds.
    The thing is, he wouldn’t have used that term for it unless he had some kind of background in a different business altogether. Like bookmaking. “Laying off” a bet is what a bookie calls it when he has somebody make a legitimate bet at a legitimate track, to insure himself against a nasty loss on some suddenly popular long shot or other. And the fact that Bardot used that term meant that he also knew I would be familiar with it. And he wanted me to know that he knew.
    He also knew how much of it I did. Laying off, that is. Nobody lays off everything, because there are some clients that are just no risk at all, and you may as well carry them on your own and pocket the full bond fee. Like Frank Russo. There are others that just don’t fit any legitimate, regular profile, though they are still perfectly good customers. Those you also carry on your own, if only because you can’t sell them to your backup company.
    And then there are the bail junkies.
    You can’t daisy-chain insurance policies. That is, you can’t buy a policy against having your roof blow off, say, and when the roof does blow off, buy another one against getting water damage, and when that happens too, because now you have no roof, get still another one against getting sick off the mildew and mold, and so on. What sane person would write such a string of policies?
    A bail bondsman, that’s who. He can make a lot of money at that game, because strange as it sounds, there are people who are bail junkies, and they really, really want that daisy chain. It’s almost as if they don’t know they’re free unless they have to keep paying for it.
    So Bud Everett, for example, a good customer of mine, gets busted for getting falling-down drunk and painting some rather uncomplimentary things on the Mayor’s car, after he accidentally breaks the rear window and mistakes the back seat for a urinal. That’s not what the citation says, of course, but that’s the important part. And because it’s the Mayor’s car