The Bum's Rush by G. M. Ford Read Free Book Online

absolutely batshit, lofting a boiling pot of egg noodles at the
officer, whose Kevlar vest merely served to funnel the steaming mess
inexorably south. While Officer McNaughton was occupied with his
steaming briefs, Marlene wound up and skulled him with the pot,
shattering his plastic face mask and sending him spiraling to the
floor. Suddenly the room was full of cops. I stood on the brown lawn
and waited until things calmed down in the house.
    When I walked into the kitchen she was on the
floor, Maced and manacled, allowed to snuffle about on the worn
linoleum while the EMTs administered to the fallen cop. She gazed up at
me through swollen eyes. "You dirty bastard," she shrieked. "I put food
in your mouth. I fed you peanut butter and jelly, you ungrateful son of
a bitch."
    "Just peanut butter," I'd corrected. "No jelly."
    They'd found Adrian reclining in his BarcaLounger,
wearing a pained expression and a freshly pressed pair of baby blue
boxer shorts. The months of momma's cooking had ballooned him up
somewhere around two-seventy. As a pair of burly cops stuffed him into
a gray SPD sweatsuit and pushed him before them up the stairs, into the
hall, Adrian neither helped nor resisted. He merely stared out over our
heads as if focused on some distant beacon.
    Marlene Jolley was now seated at the dinette,
leaning forward out into the room, away from her cuffed hands. The
sight of her swollen eyes triggered some primal force deep within
Adrian Jolley. With the roar of a bull, he sent cops spinning from him
in all directions. "Momma!" he bellowed, lumbering across the room
toward his manacled mater.
    In the ensuing melee I was jammed hard against the
wall, nearly upsetting Marlene in her chair as I was forced back into
her. Perhaps, even in that moment of chaos, she knew it was me. I'd
prefer to think that it was merely a random act of violence. Either
way, when Marlene Jolley found herself confronted at close range with
the very stuff of one of her tormentors, she opted for one last angry
gesture. She bit me hard in the upper leg, fastening herself onto the
back of me like a mastiff, grunting and shaking her head, as if
determined to tear off a pound of flesh. I screamed and tried to push
my way to the center of the room. She held fast. I screamed again,
flailing at her.
    A blow from a metal baton loosened her jaws. Still
yelling, I shouldered my way out the door into the backyard, where I
walked in tight circles, flapping my arms, waiting for the pain to
subside.
    "Son of a bitch," I chanted. "Son of a bitch."
    An EMT appeared at my side. "Better let me have a look at that. Human bites are incredibly septic. Drop your pants."
    It was then that I heard it for the first, but most unfortunately
not the last, time. Standing out there on the lawn with my drawers
around my ankles. A low rumble of laughter from inside the house. "She
bit him in the ass," a voice said. Somebody snorted.
    "Hold on, now. This is gonna smart a bit," said the EMT.
    "It's in the upper leg, right?" I said through gritted teeth.
    He grinned up at me. "Whatever you say, buddy."
    After taxes, my 5 percent of the
half-amillion-dollar bond had amounted to a little under nineteen
thousand bucks. Color me irresponsible, but the combination of a sore
leg and having nineteen grand in my bank account pretty much made
honest toil out of the question.
    Not only was it the most money I'd ever had at one
time in my life, but the sudden riches also served to prove, once
again, that my old man had been right to leave the family fortune in
trust until I turned the ripe old age of forty-five. Whatever his other
failings, the old boy was universally renowned as an astute judge of
character. He'd sensed in i me something less than a wild-eyed
commitment to the puritan ethic and had arranged to protect me from my
own worst instincts. The result was a trust fund of truly Florentine
complexity. For nearly twenty years the trust had rebuffed all attempts
to break it. A succession of