Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 11

Klick and the Black Bitch Part One

PART ONE: TICKET TO RIDE THE CLIENT REVENGE THE COURTHOUSE THE STATION FRANKIE IDLE TIME A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY….

THE CLIENT

…that’s what my new client, Clarence McGillicutty, called his ex-wife, ‘The Black Bitch’. I studied the picture he’d handed me; the Ex-McGillicutty looked as white as me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mcguilicuddy said. “Why do I call her ‘black’ bitch?”

“As a matter of fact—”

He tossed a book big enough to smash an iguana onto my desk. “There’s this character in there, Inez Scull,” he said. “Almost fell out of my chair when I came across her. Biggest married whore this side of the Mississippi.”

The book was The Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry. I’d read his Lonesome Dove: Pretty good. Almost zoned me to sleep the first hundred pages, then picked up when those Water Moccasins swarmed that character in a river.

“I laughed at first, then cried,” McGillicutty said. “Damn woman ‘trots’ with just about every major character in the book…just like my Lucy did.”

I plopped the book down, making my gray metal military-auction desk hum. “Trot?”

“Yeah, you know, straddle, poke, fu—”

“Okay, okay!”

He pulled a handkerchief from his yellow blazer jacket and wiped his eyes. “Then I got this idea. I don’t know where it came from, really. There I was reading, saw this Black Bitch Inez as my Lucy, started laughing, then crying, then…. I don’t know, maybe it was the fact it was writing, you know?”

I was struggling not to ask him if he’d ever watched I Love Lucy, but managed to restrain myself. “No, don’t know where you’re going with this.”

Clarence’s eye-burning yellow blazer seemed to match his lime green trousers. White socks and tasseled brown loafers rounded out his ensemble. In other words, Clarence was not a man that wore suits too often. Fact was, he owned a three-pit Oil Change business.

But he had hopped a wad of rubber-banded cash across my desk when he walked in with his request. Just so happened I had a lawyer to settle with who needed just such a wad of money.

Lawyers…the very blip of the word in my thoughts made me turn and spit out the second floor window of the Iron Works building without thinking about hitting someone on the sidewalk below. I gazed at the faded glory that was the Tarrant County Convention Center — someone really ought to paint that dome a new color — before returning my attention to Clarence.

“Revenge,” he said. “I want revenge.”