Snitch World by Jim Nisbet Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
    “Yeah.” The bartender turned and began to search among the bottles behind him. “Aha,” he said after a moment. He set a bottle on the bar. “I only got the green shit.”
    “That’ll do,” Frankie told him.
    “On the rocks,” the bartender assumed.
    Frankie nodded patiently. “That’s the ice.”
    The bartender put it together, served it, went away. “When you don’t know what the fuck they’re asking you for,” Frankie observed, “always ask them how they would build it if they were in your shoes.”
    “Works like a charm,” Klinger agreed.
    “Especially in a shithole like this place,” said the man two stools away. His eyes were barely open. “Stinger my ass.”
    “You gotta point,” Frankie said, lighting a cigarette.
    Klinger raised the double. “Health and money.”
    The bartender put an ashtray on the bar in front of them.
    Frankie, blowing smoke at the ceiling, added, “And the time to enjoy them.”
    The whiskey tasted mighty fine, although Klinger noticed that it aggravated a certain tightness, one might even say a pain, in his duodenum.
    The man who had thought to object to Frankie’s taste in drink laid his arm on the bar and his head on his arm and went straight to sleep. A few stools beyond him, where the bar made a right angle and headed toward the toilets,despite a certain intervening gloom, Klinger could see that the vertex of the right angle was already strewn with glasses, an ashtray full of butts, and two or three eviscerated dollar bags of tortilla chips. Each of the two men standing there was showing the other his knife.
    Frankie fished an L-shaped piece of wire out of his pocket and twirled the longer leg of the L between the thumb and first three fingers of the hand between himself and Klinger. “Need a score?” He displayed the wire between them and below the edge of bar, so only Klinger could see it.
    “Sure,” Klinger said, “but I’m no dipper.”
    “Leave the dipping to me.” The wire disappeared, and Frankie gave his cigarette some attention. “But I been in school and I’m a little rusty. The other night—.” He directed a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “Anyway, I could use a shill.”
    The two men at the far end of the bar called the bartender, who attached his hand to an open quart of tequila on his way down there.
    “Since when don’t you go it alone?”
    Frankie drew an ashtray close enough to tap his cigarette on its rim. “Since my second strike.”
    The two guys standing at the far end of the bar clicked glasses, downed their shots, and slammed the empties onto the bar.
    Klinger sipped a little coffee. Really, really awful coffee. Plus it was cold. Plus it immediately aggravated the twinge in the lower forecourt of his gut. He traded the coffee for the whiskey and cleansed his palette.
    “That sounds like a good reason for you to be, say, delivering groceries to shut-ins.”
    Frankie affected to brighten. “Sign me up. I bet them shut-ins got all kinds of stuff laying around. Stuff they don’t need anymore. Gold chains and jewelry, for example. Watches. Hundred-dollar bills. Sterling silver bedpans.”
    Klinger laughed. “They haven’t been letting two-time losers have rings of keys to apartments all over the city since the dot-com times, Frankie, back when nobody could find good help.”
    “I was inside at the time,” Frankie agreed, “but I hear stories. Unbelievable stories.”
    “In every case,” Klinger assured him, “they were almost certainly true.”
    Now, at the far end of the bar, thumps were to be heard. One two three four, four three two one. Syncopated thumps.
    Klinger leaned away from the bar so as to see beyond the snoring drunk.
    “They said it was like the Wild West,” Frankie continued. “They said there was gold lining the streets, just waiting to be picked up. They said it was every man for himself, no quarter asked or given.”
    “That’s a damned accurate description of the dot-com times,” Klinger