The Rat on Fire by George V. Higgins Read Free Book Online Page A

through talking there last night, it was about ten, I guess, I have to let him have fifty, on account of how he is out of cash and it’s too late to cash a check.”
    “He had a date, I assume,” Fein said.
    “Of course,” Leo said. “The guy don’t know anything about that kind of stuff. He’s fooling around with this broad that’s a secretary over in the Registry. She’s about twenty, twenty-one, and more guys’ve had her’n’ve had Budweiser. Nice lookin’ kid, but she was going with a friend of mine when she was seventeen or so, and then she met another guy she liked better because he had more money or something, I guess, and then she dropped him and starts hanging around with this guy that was the bouncer at that club with the zebra stripes in Kenmore Square. Then he gets himself shotone night in a little argument with a fellow, and she was playing around with this guy that used to be on the City Council over in Chelsea and then she got tired of him and run into Billy Malatesta and that’s what he needs the fifty for.”
    “Jerk,” Fein said.
    “I dunno,” Leo said, “he’s not a bad guy, but what’s he gonna do that’s better, at his age? The old lady’s a lush, the kids’re killing him with expenses, he hasn’t got enough time in to retire and take the pension and get another job, but too much time in to retire and kiss off the pension. Guy’s trapped. Only thing he knows how to do is be a cop and he’s not a very good cop or he wouldn’t be inna fire marshal’s office. He’s not a bad guy. He just didn’t get any luck and by the time he figured out what was happening to him it was too late to do anything about it.”
    “Lots of guys’ve got problems,” Fein said. “Look at you. You got problems. Paper out all over town, and you can’t meet it. Look at me: real estate out all over town. I could kill myself. I make a few dollars and I am still pretty young, I was only thirty or so, and I think, well, I’ll have some security, myself and my family, because after all, maybe it is not my good fortune, year after year, I am booking the hot acts all the time and making a bunch of money off of it. Maybe in a few years I will be getting old or I will be losing my judgment or something, or maybe I will not be as lucky, and then I will be spending all my time getting jobs for drummers in third-rate joints and making ten bucks for it on a good day. This will not keep my elderly mother in knishes in Brookline and she will not be going to Lake George in the summer every year and spending the month, July, telling all her friends while they’re sitting on the porch after lunch so they can rest up good for dinner, what a nice boy she’s got that sends her to Lake George every summer and don’t even let her see the bill because they send it to him.
    “No,” Fein said, “this I am not going to be able to do, I go around thinking that because now I am hot, I will always be hot, because I know something about the various aspects of this business from having studied it pretty close, and one of the songs I hear when I was doing my studying was that one about how nobody loves you when you’re down and out. I see a few guys that were and nobody did. Not even me. When you are in that situation, what they do is
shun
you, Leo, and if you were to go around town and ask people that didn’t even know you, and you didn’t tell them your name, if you did that they would tell you that Leo Proctor, poor bastard, hasn’t got it anymore and he is all finished. And that is all you need, my friend, because when people you do not know are saying that you’re finished, you are.
    “So,” Fein said, “I think about all of this, and my family and my poor old mother, and I decide I will get some security for us.
    “Now,” Fein said, “unless you have a job with the government that will keep paying you as long as you keep breathing, you got to get something else. The trouble is that I do not know what else to