Nothing More than Murder by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

was when you really got down to the bottom of the pot, how you’d get seventy-two hours on vagrancy as soon as you hit a town, how they’d float you back on the road again before you could get a job or even a good meal in your belly.
    “I’m never going to go back to stuff like that,” I said. “They’ll have to kill me first.”
    “Or?” she said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be ‘or’ before they get me down again.”
    I didn’t have to tell her why I was sticking to what looked like a pretty cheap job, because I knew she knew. Maybe she didn’t know any more about business and public relations than a two-year-old. But she could see an angle a mile off, particularly where it concerned me. Most of the time it was like we were looking out the same window.
    There were around fifty customers on my route. They bought product on everything from a two-day to a week’s option. I mean it was their right to keep it for a week if they wanted to, which didn’t mean that they always would. They just bought a long option to play safe.
    Well, suppose they decided to keep it four days or less, then turned it back to me for pick-up. I take it on down the road a ways and give another house a run on it for half price. The house is able to make one more change on the week than it’s been making and I pick up a ten spot or so.
    I had to be careful. Bicycling film is a penitentiary offense. But a guy that’s actually hauling the product—a guy that knows just who is buying from where—can get away with it. The exchanges can’t afford to check the small towns. They’ve maybe got a damned good idea they’re being roped, but unless it gets too bad they let it go.
    I never let it get too bad.
    Well, there’s not a lot more to tell.
    Stoneville wasn’t important enough as a show town then for the union to bother with, and Elizabeth had a punk boy working in the booth. One of those sharp lads who has to think ten or fifteen minutes before he can decide which end of the match to strike.
    His best trick was to get the reel in backward or out of sequence, but he had a lot of others. Missing change-overs. Forgetting to turn the sound on. Hitting the arcs before the film was rolling.
    It was the last one that finally got me.
    By this time I’d rearranged my route so that Stoneville was my last stop instead of the first one; and I’d stay there overnight before going back to the city— Sure, at a hotel. Where do you think?
    Anyway, I was sitting in the house that night when I finally got just as much of that punk as I could take. He’d already run one reel backward. He’d missed two change-overs, and he’d turned the sound on full and forgot about it. That’s more boners than a good projectionist will pull in a lifetime, but the punk wasn’t through yet. Right after the second miss, he caught the film on fire.
    If you’ve gone to many picture shows, particularly back in the early days of the business, you’ve seen it happen once or twice. The film will hit the screen like a still. Then it looks like someone is punching a live cigar butt through it from the back.
    That’s caused by not having the film rolling while the arcs are on. Because those arcs are just like a blast furnace, and nothing burns as easily as or faster than film.
    Projectors are fixed so that nothing but the film in the frame can burn. But not everyone knows that, and even if they did—what the hell? No one’s going to thank you for not roasting them. No one’s going to pay dough to sit in a dark house while some boob splices film.
    I climbed up into the booth without saying a word, and the punk didn’t ask me anything. I just took the splicing-knife and the glue pot away from him, tied the film back together, and started the projector rolling again. Then I walked over to him and stood up close. He wasn’t home talent. Any trouble that was made would have to come from him.
    “Which way do you want to go out of here?” I said. “Walking or