The Walkaway by Scott Phillips Read Free Book Online

early evening, he would have seen Gunther’s picture staring back at him; instead, he sat down to look at a magazine.
    Sidney sat looking up at a picture of Jesus on the wall next to his office manager’s desk, swiveling and tapping his fingers on a crude flyer he’d drawn up with Magic Marker. He had planned to print up a few hundred of them on the copier, but after finishing the lettering he remembered he’d given the police the photo of Gunther he’d intended to use.
    Now he was trying hard to remember the married names of Gunther’s daughters. One was a nurse in Minneapolis and the other a housewife in Florida, and unless their financial situations had changed since he’d last heard, it didn’t seem likely that they were the source of the extra money.
    He opened an enormous Rolodex, a relic from an earlier incarnation of the business, when it had consisted of a single strip club in midtown called the Sweet Cage. Half the cards in it were useless; interspersed with entries for his own friends, family, and associates were cards for those of the previous owner, dead ten years now, and Janice had been trying to get him to weed out the outdated cards since her first week on the job. He shrugged and started with a card for Brennigan Vending Machine Service, which had once serviced the jukeboxes for the Sweet Cage and its sister club, the Tease-o-Rama, both now equipped with expensive, deejay-operated PA systems.
    He tossed the card into the trash; eventually he’d stumble across Gunther’s daughters this way, trimming part of the Rolodex and making his office manager happy in the process. After Brennigan was Bristol, Janice, herself; then Castle Beverage Distributors; and then a card that made his stomach muscles clench: Cavanaugh, Victor. One suburban address out west was crossed out and another, this one in Forest Hills, scribbled beneath it in his dead boss’s odd, square foreign handwriting. He plucked it from the Rolodex, crumpled it and flung it into the wastebasket, then flipped ahead to see if there was an entry for Bill Gerard, Cavanaugh’s boss. There was, with business and home phone numbers and the notation EMERG. ONLY next to the latter in block printing he also recognized as Renata’s. The day after Christmas, Sidney had opened up the Sweet Cage to find Bill Gerard lying dead on the office floor; several hours later the police found Renata dead on her hall carpet. Vic Cavanaugh, widely presumed to be the killer, was long gone, and now Sidney knew why he hadn’t ever gotten around to editing the Rolodex.
    Three days after Renata’s death Sidney was on the couch of his old house on Twenty-third looking without much hope through the Eagle-Beacon ’s classified section for a bartending job. He answered a knock at the door and found Gunther standing alone, gloveless hands in his pockets against the cold. Gunther had never come over without Dot before that he could remember, and he surprised Sidney by saying that if he didn’t make an offer on the club he was a fool. After the old man left, Sidney phoned Mitch Cherkas, a bank officer whose sole interest outside of banking seemed to be a series of painful, unrequited crushes on strippers. Mitch thought it was a great idea, and they set about raising the down payment. When he told Gunther this two days later, Gunther surprised him again by handing him a cashier’s check for twelve thousand dollars, almost the exact sum they needed to raise. Thus, at the age of thirty-six, Sidney McCallum—bartender, bouncer, part-time cabdriver, and occasional holder of illicit goods—had been reborn as a businessman. Within three years they’d expanded into flea markets and car shows, bought up a rival strip club outside the city limits, and started promoting oldies concerts with a local radio station, and Sidney found himself making more money than it had ever occurred to him to hope for.
    He had no idea, then or now, how Gunther could have afforded to loan him