Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard Read Free Book Online

helper. Sonny’d get girls for the doctor and the doc’d write drug prescriptions using fake names and Sonny’d go out and sell the stuff, mostly Quaaludes and Xanax, make himself some money.”
    “He got girls?” Dale said. “Whyn’t the doctor get his own girls?”
    “He use to, when he was married and playing around. He was always drunk or stoned,” Elvin said. “Till his daddy swore he’d cut him off if he didn’t behave hisself. See, this Tommy Vasco was a fuckup all his life. His daddy sent him to medical school down on one of the islands, set him up after, bought him this big house… His daddy use to be a doctor, owns all kinds of property down in Miami, a rich tightass kind of guy, real strict and he has this fuckup for a son. You get the picture?”
    “Wants the old man to think he’s a good boy,” Dale said, “so he pulls the shades down and does all his partying at home.”
    “There you go. And has Sonny get the women and the dope, all different kinds. But now the women, that’s something else. The doctor was partial to big blond women, no Latins. They had to be big but not fat and have good-size titties on ‘em.”
    Dale said, “How many women would he have at a time?”
    “Oh, he’d have two or three there for a party. See, what Dr. Vasco liked was for Sonny to take movies of him and a couple women in bed doing it. Then after, they’d sit around drinking, doing the cocaine and watch themselves on TV. Well, this one night… I forgot to mention, the doctor’s favorite was a woman name Pola from Lake Worth. Big woman almost six foot and built. Sonny said she was bigger’n he was and Sonny musta been, oh, five eight or nine and kinda chubby. I’d call him that sometime, ‘Hey, Chubby, look at what I got for you.’”
    Dale thinking, Jesus. Not wanting to hear about it.
    “And I’d give him a candy bar for being a sweetie. Anyway,” Elvin said, “this woman I mentioned, Pola, come by one night alone, no other women there. They have their party, chop some rails, put a movie on. This Pola says to the doctor she bets his daddy would just love to see one of these movies, kidding with him. Sonny thinks she didn’t mean anything by it, but he says the doc started to go crazy at the idea. He slaps her and she hits him back. They get in a fistfight and pretty soon she’s beating up on him. So the doc yells at Sonny to help him. But Sonny, not being a fighter, picks up a poker from the fireplace and hits her with it. This woman he says come at him like a tiger and he had to keep hitting her till he give her a good one over the head and it killed her. So then the doctor tells him what to do. Put her in her car and drive up to Lake Worth. The idea, leave the car on the street with her in it and it’ll look like she was mugged and the guy went too far, so take her purse. Sonny does all this, he’s getting out of her car, when who drives up shining a light on him…”
    Dale was nodding. Man, he could see it.
    “The police. Sonny was charged, he had her blood all over him, and convicted,” Elvin said. “He tried to tell them it was Dr. Tommy Vasco made him do it. They looked into it but couldn’t put nothing on the doc except the fake prescriptions he wrote. He got like six months and can’t practice medicine no more, which he barely did anyway. Sonny got life, the mandatory twenty-five, and is now keeping house for this buddy of mine. Okay. You want to know something else?”
    Dale said, “What?”
    “The judge that convicted Sonny and the doc is the same one gave me ten years straight up, minimum, and gave you five on that dinky violating probation charge. Judge Bob Gibbs, he must be one busy son of a bitch.”
    Coming to Ocean Ridge they had to stop at a light on A1A, dark and quiet out there, quiet in the pickup now, Dale seeing Judge Gibbs leaving the courtroom as he yelled at him. The judge walked out and now Dale tried to imagine a blond-haired guy hitting a big blond woman with a