Fun With Problems by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online

dude?"
    Margaret raised a despairing hand and waved off the insult. Leaving, Cordelia slammed the door, her second slammed door of their brief evening. Margaret brooded for a while and then decided to call Cordelia's dearest friend. Some people actually called him Slash, but to Margaret he had always been just Donny.
    "Hey, Donny." She tried to keep her voice low for the infant's sake. "How's tricks?"
    "Yo, Slim," Donny said cautiously.
    "Could it be that you've just instructed my baby in the art of slamming?"
    "No way. She's a big girl. Either way, see what I'm saying, she gets more independent."
    "Are you hearing me, Donno? Don't you dare treat Cordy like some skeeza. I'm cross."
    "I hear you," Donny admitted.
    "Good. Because if you ever turn my daughter out, I think I'll kill you."

    "You are paranoid," Slash told her as firmly as possible. "You're, like, saying things."
    Margaret paused to let him reflect on how thin the joke was.
    "On a happier note," she said, "I have a joint for us. I've identified this awful man. House full of good things. So be here tomorrow midmorning and don't be hammered. Or is that a vain hope and it has to drop without you?"
    "I'm there."
    "Okay, and bring my daughter back here. I can't spend all day babysitting. I have a meet with the Smiling Lascar tomorrow."
    The man Margaret called the Smiling Lascar was a South Asian pharmacist in Bethesda with whom she could trade in pseudoephedrine. Victor moved it out to some country cousins in West Virginia who cooked it into pseudo-crystal for distribution by bike clubs around the upper South. Victor's overextended family was basically a criminal enterprise, and through him Margaret could maintain a phantom presence from the D.C. suburbs to the remotest hollow and never consort with ruffians.
    She did undertake a little discreet consorting, though. Exploiting the average psychopath's lack of social confidence, she was able to reach out past Donny to his own network and had already stolen a number of his supporters out from under him. Their shabby world was often exhilarating—the commerce in ginseng and bear livers, actual moonshine from traditional stills, marijuana, arms and ammunition, cars, speed, motorcycles. Donny's associates seemed to
think they rightfully owned all motorcycles, as the Masai thought they owned all cattle. These men, she thought, were irreplaceable, the sons of the pioneers. She even had a certain secret fondness for Slash and understood her daughter's attraction. Still, she considered him needy.

    "So you'll take care of that, no? And you'll bring a rental truck and plates? And you want gray coveralls or some neutral color."
    "You got it, Slim," said Donny Slash.
    "And you'll bring Cordy over here? And you'll show up? Scout's honor? Because this thing needs to be tomorrow."
    "I'll come over too, yeah. I haven't seen much of Little Jimmy."
    It was annoying the way he constantly referred to the baby as Littlejimmy, as though it were all one snively word. He had got Cordelia doing it. He had not seen much of the child because Margaret had various means of keeping him away.
    "No, you haven't," she said.
    "I mean, hey. This is my child here."
    "Certainly, Donny," Margaret told him. "If you say so."
    And that was that, and so, she thought, to bed. But no, the phone began its song and dance, and she had Kimmie on the line. Kimmie was Margaret's schoolgirl chum and former patient.
    "Oh, Kimmie," she said. "It's so late."
    Kimmie was a professor of composition at a small women's college in New England and a published poet. Margaret had been visiting with her on a business and shopping trip to the Northeast.
    "Margaret!" Kimmie said breathlessly. "Did you take my car? My car is utterly gone. Vanished from the driveway."

    "We discussed this, Kimmie."
    "We did?"
    "We certainly did. I borrowed it to drive to the train. I left it at the station. How can you not remember?"
    She and Kimmie had planned to shop for early-American art and