Snitch World by Jim Nisbet Read Free Book Online Page A

exhales sufficiently to flap his lips. I must have helped somebody, Klinger self-remonstrated as he shuffled up the sidewalk, with a buck, a meal, a pack of smokes, a bag of chips, a garbage bag to use as a rain suit—something, sometime, one thing, once at least. Yes? No?
    A man passing the other way delivered a blow to the trunk of his torso with a magnitude considerably greater than a jostle.
    “The fuck you watch where you—,” Klinger rebounded, both hands snatched from their pockets and ready to pound his impotent despond into the frame of the other, no matter the circumstance.
    “Tsk,” leered the other man, fashioning his several yellowed teeth into a close-up portrait of a window through which somebody has heaved a chair. “Kinda touchy for eight-thirty in the ayem, ain’t we?”
    Klinger’s vehemence, despite its being so suddenly uncorked, allowed for a moment’s pause, which allowed him to recognize his interloper before he punched him. “Frankie,” Klinger replied, surprised, but not so surprised as to forego appending “Geeze,” Frankie’s street moniker. They clasped hands, though not in the handshake known and employed throughout the developed nations, but each by lacing the knuckles of the right hand with the other’s as if grasping the handle on a stein of beer.
    “Frankie,” Klinger greeted him, “What the hell are you up to?”
    “Oh,” Frankie replied easily, “about a hundred a day.”
    It was a joke and Klinger laughed. But then, he squinted, giving Frankie the once-over, the joke may well also be the truth. “When did you get out?”
    Frankie shrugged.
    “Clear?”
    Frankie shook his head. “Parole.”
    “Does that mean you’re not supposed to be talking to me?”
    Frankie shrugged. “You never did no hard time—did you?”
    “Nah,” Klinger admitted. And, though it diminished his status with the likes of Frankie and Chainbang, he didn’t mind admitting it. Indeed, status with the likes of these guys seemed a very small price to pay for a dearth of prison time. Very small.
    “So let’s hang,” Frankie smiled.
    Oh joy, Klinger said to himself.
    “Care for a drink?”
    Klinger brightened. Frankie was the odd hophead who didn’t mind alcohol. Klinger could worry about the future later. “I care for a drink,” he said.
    “Know a place a man can smoke, too?”
    Which is how they wound up on adjacent stools at the Hawse Hole at 9:35 in the morning.
    “Excellent,” Frankie assayed, looking around.
    “Joint closes at two in the ayem and reopens four point five hours later.”
    “Half-hour after the sugar kicks in,” Frankie surmised, not without a hint of admiration. “Gives a man time to drag a comb over his head.”
    “Ya gotta think they know their client base,” Klinger agreed.
    The bartender swabbed the plank between them. “What’s your pleasure, gents?”
    Frankie gestured politely.
    “You holding?” Klinger asked frankly.
    Frankie laid a twenty on the bar.
    “Hot coffee with cream and sugar and a double-shot of Jameson,” Klinger said without hesitation.
    “You want the Jameson back or—,” the bartender started to ask.
    “The fuck kinda pussy drink is that shit?” erupted a man two stools beyond Frankie.
    “You look as if you’ve already had a hard day, pal,” Klinger told the interloper. “Me, I’m just getting up.”
    “How about you, buddy?” the bartender said, as he poured coffee into a white ceramic diner cup. “Same?”
    “I’ll have a stinger,” Frankie said deliberately, as if addressing their bellicose neighbor.
    “Okay,” the bartender said smoothly, as he backed up Klinger’s coffee with six cubes of sugar, a quart carton of cream, and four ounces of Jameson. “And how do you like your stingers?”
    “Brandy from the well.”
    “Yeah?”
    “White crème de menthe.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Maybe five to one.”
    “Gotcha …”
    “Ice.”
    “Sure.”
    Frankie waited.
    The bartender waited.
    “That’s it,” Frankie