The Deputy by Victor Gischler Read Free Book Online Page A

minutes after I’m gone,” I told him. “You can pick up the keys at the station house in the morning.”
    He fished the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to me.
    I turned back to the house, the open front door. “Molly, you lock up after we leave.”
    “Okay.” Her voice floated closer than expected from the dark innards of the house. I supposed she’d been listening the whole time.
    “Come on, Roy. I’ll walk you.” I offered my hand.
    He took it, and I pulled him up. He dusted himself off with clumsy ham hands. All the fight had gone out of him, and I think if I’d told him to lie down right there on the lawn and go to sleep he’d have done it. All I wanted was for him to get to sleep somewhere.
    We walked in and out of dim blotches of street light on the way to Howard Boyle’s house. Roy smelled like booze and sweat. He put one foot in front of the other like he couldn’t believe he was alive, like sooner or later gravity would just say that’s enough of you and drag him right down.
    “Her mother takes off, and I’m left to do everything. I mean, what the hell. I married her and she had a kid and all. I took her in. Both of them. Then Molly’s mother just fucking takes off. And now I got this girl on my hands like some kind of alien, the way she dresses and that freaky, dark-ass music she listens to.”
    I already knew Roy’s story, but he told it so sad I almost felt sorry for him.
    Almost.
    “She’s going to be out of your hair soon,” I said. “You know once she’s off to college she’ll never come back. Not here.” Saying it out loud like that hit me right in the gut. “Anyway, you can behave yourself until then.”
    “Can’t be soon enough,” Roy said. “Get my friggin’ life back.”
    Some life.
    Howard Boyle’s house was at the end of the street where the neighborhood petered out and blended into open field, and a half-wrecked windmill beyond. There were a hundred places like this in Oklahoma where a town suddenly stopped and you stood staring into wide open nothing. Boyle’s house wasn’t much more than a shabby shotgun shack, but it still had more room than my trailer. We climbed the steps, knocked on the door. It took a long time for Howard to flip on the porch light and open up.
    Howard ran the tire and lube store in town. He’d inherited it from his daddy and hit the skids in the late eighties. Some rich guy from Tulsa who made a habit of snatching up troubled businesses for a song bought the place but kept Howard on to run it. Looking at the slackbellied, balding fifty-something wreck in front of me, I saw a man who didn’t have a damn thing to look forward to when he got up each morning. No family. No legacy. No talent for anything accept changing a tire. Even his boxer shorts looked like they weren’t hiding much. Probably the perfect drinking buddy for old Roy. Sure.
    Howard squinted at us and scratched his belly. “What time is it?”
    “Late,” I said. “Or early. Depends if you’re coming or going.”
    “You arrest Roy?”
    “Not tonight. We thought he might crash on your couch.”
    Howard made a face, like maybe he wanted to know why but was just too tired to ask. “Yeah, okay.”
    Roy started into the house, paused in the doorway. “What’s a man supposed to do? I mean for fuck’s sake, can you tell me that? How does a man know?”
    I really couldn’t say what he was getting at, but I said, “We just do our best as we go along, I guess. And maybe it’ll seem like the right thing when we look back on it later.”
    This seemed to satisfy him. He nodded and went inside. Howard followed him in and turned off the porch light.
    I lit a cigarette and smoked my way back the way we’d come. What’s a man supposed to do? How does a man know? Damn right. Preach it, Roy. From the mouth of babes, the Good Book said. But once in a while a tumble-down drunk got it right too. Roy didn’t have the answers any more that I did, but at least he knew the