Knockout by John Jodzio Read Free Book Online Page A

closet. The room smelled like incense, not death.
    â€œIt’s four hundred dollars a month plus utilities,” Jayhole told me. “What do you think?”
    I quickly weighed the pros and cons. Had I showered in the sink of a Burger King bathroom that morning? Yes. Did my car reek of steak and ferret? Uh-huh. Was I going to die just because the guy who lived here before me died? Probably not.
    â€œIt’s perfect,” I told Jayhole.
    F or our first few weeks, Jayhole and I got along great. I made him a shark’s-tooth necklace and he gave me a punch card from a bagel place that only needed three more punches to get a free sandwich. One night I grilled him a stolen sirloin and he showed me his scrapbook.
    Jayhole’s bounty hunting scrapbook was full of pictures of him standing next to bail jumpers he’d tracked down over the years. In the pictures, he was always smiling and laughing and the people he’d brought to justice were always frowning and bloody. In some of the pictures, Strangles was draped around Jayhole’s neck like a scarf.
    â€œIt looks like you loved your work,” I told him.
    Jayhole stared out the window into our backyard where a stray dog was nosing through a garbage bag. He scratched behind his ear and some flakes of dead skin floated down among the crumbs on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t difficult to see Jayhole missed the rush of bounty hunting, that it was his one true calling, that he hadn’t found anything that would ever replace its powerful and enticing high.
    â€œI don’t want to sound like some sad sack yearning for lostgridiron glory,” he told me, “but those were absolutely the best days of my life.”
    O ne night I brought my tackle box of jewelry-making supplies into the kitchen to work on some new broche and stickpin designs. Jayhole saw me sitting there and got his storage tub of pictures and scrapbooking materials. For the rest of the night we worked side by side, him with his glue stick and me with my soldering gun. While we worked, Jayhole told me stories about the people in his scrapbook.
    â€œThis guy tried to get away from me by climbing into the ductwork of an auto parts store,” he said, pointing to a picture of a man with two swollen eyes and an ear that was partially torn off. “He didn’t think I’d go up there after him, but I tossed Strangles up into the vent and that dude jumped down real quick.”
    Each page of Jayhole’s scrapbook held a picture of someone who thought they could outsmart him, who thought they could disappear off the grid. I didn’t have any sympathy for these dopes. I often liked to imagine them sipping a piña colada at a beachside bar thinking they’d gotten away scot-free until Jayhole leapt out from behind a palm tree, yelled “Surprise!” and tasered the shit out of them.
    While Jayhole showed me some more pictures, the man who lived in the upstairs part of the duplex, Caruso, started to tromp around above us. Caruso was a fat, pasty guy who occasionally deejayed birthday parties and weddings. He had an English accent that disappeared whenever he was angry or drunk. Both Jayhole and I hated him. Whenever Caruso walked around or danced to one of his new mashups our ceiling shook and the pots and pans on our stovetop rattled. Jayhole had spoken to him a number of times about wearing noise-dampening slippers or simply walking around less, but Caruso never listened.
    â€œStop tromping!” Jayhole yelled up at him through the ceiling. “Stop deejaying, quit making your stupid mashups and dance jams!”
    Jayhole took an aluminum tentpole that was sitting next to the refrigerator and he pounded it on the ceiling. A minute later Caruso tromped down the front stairs and into our kitchen.
    â€œGimme it back,” Caruso yelled, poking Jayhole in the chest with his index finger. “Gimme it back right fucking now.”
    Jayhole handed me his