The Baby Blue Rip-Off by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online

of dirt.
    “Go ahead.”
    “You guys are real morons coming around here.”
    Another voice. “We let you say something, and that’s what you say? Jesus.”
    “Kick him in the ass.”
    Somebody kicked me in the ass. The shoe connected with my tail bone and rearranged my spine a little.
    “We figure you don’t know who we are, Mallory. If we thought you knew who we are, we’d blow your goddamn head off. Do you know that?”
    I didn’t say anything. Nobody can say I never learn my lesson.
    “We’re responsible people, Mallory. We aren’t crazy. We didn’t mean to kill that old woman. We were just ripping her off, is all we were doing. And anyway, she was old, man. Maybe she’d’ve died of a heart attack about then, anyway. Without our help. Who knows.”
    The other voice said, “Let’s get out of here.”
    “Just a second. Mallory... Mallory, be a good boy. Stay away from us.”
    “He doesn’t know who we are; come on, let’s get outa here.”
    “Mallory, don’t try to find us. Don’t come looking to figure out who we are. Don’t try to be a hero again, like you did back at the old lady’s place. Or you know what?”
    He seemed to want me to speak, so I said, “What?”
    “Or we’ll kill you. That’s what. Kill you.”
    “Yeah, we’ll kill you, asshole.”
    And here’s the good part: they kicked me.
    In the ribs.

9
    The next morning was hot. That brief flash of October in the middle of July had gone away somewhere, and I woke up to sweat-dampened sheets and got the air conditioner going even before I brushed my teeth.
    It didn’t take long to cool down the little trailer. My quarters were small, but very nice; the previous owner of the old trailer had been as attached to the thing as I was and had taken the time and expense to remodel the interior, putting in dark paneling and a fairly modern kitchenette. The living room was crowded by the possessions that make life bearable: a nineteen-inch Sony TV, stereo tape components, brick-and-board bookcase full of paperbacks, and walls bearing posters from several of my favorite movies:
Vertigo, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Goldfinger, Caddyshack,
and so on. I used to have the Penthouse Pet of the Year on one wall, life-size, but too many discussions about my possible status as a sexist were, shall we say, aroused by her presence.
    By the time I had some clothes on, my ribs had started to flare up. I won’t bother trying to describe the pain. It hurt. I didn’t cry, but I thought about it.
    At ten o’clock I was in the hospital coffee shop having breakfast; at ten-thirty I was getting X-rayed; and at eleven-thirty I was being told my ribs (two of them, on the right) were cracked,not broken—which was good news—and was strapped into a harness—which wasn’t. If a girdle and a truss got together and had a kid, that harness would’ve been it. By noon I was pulling my van up in front of the courthouse, across the street from which is the jail. Brennan’s offices are in the front part of the jailhouse, a big light-stone, two-story building that didn’t look like a jail, really, except for the barred and caged windows and electrically fenced-in backyard, where the prisoners got their daily exercise.
    Brennan was brown-bagging it in his office, studying some folders at his desk. It was cool—all the offices were centrally air-conditioned, unlike the jail cells—a pine-paneled cubicle with pictures of ducks on the wall, and some framed newspaper notices of Brennan’s big murder case, where a local woman killed her husband with a pair of scissors and Brennan had caught her red-handed, you should excuse the expression. The woman is now serving sandwiches at Katie’s, up the street, since husband-killing is generally considered justifiable homicide. There was also a color photo in a gold frame on his desk: his son John in uniform.
    Evidently our temporary truce was still on, as Brennan treated me to a Pepsi, tossing me some change and telling me to