Philipp Meyer - American Rust

“Never thought about it.”

“Never?”

“Not really.”

“That's the beautiful thing about you, Bud. I could have told ten different people that same thing and all of them would be sucking my dick right now.”

“I better have a drink first.”

“Sure. You know where they're kept.”

Harris reached next to him into the cooler and found a High Life.

“From a professional advice standpoint, and, in having a few years on you, I wonder if it might be better if you stayed clear of Billy Poe vis-à-vis this thing in the newspaper,” said Patacki. “Which includes his mother as well.”

“You don't have to worry about me, you fat prick.”

“The only thing that gives me any hope is I hear that the case against him is airtight.”

“I did those things for his mother, not him. I always knew he was a lost cause.”

Patacki grinned. “You know you made it harder on yourself, not marrying. People want their public servants to act normal. Not have any vices. Like me.”

“I hear you,” said Harris. “You know I appreciate you going out of your way for me last year. Sorry it's coming back to bite you.”

“No, Bud, you're doing alright, I'm just an old drunk and I got worried, not to mention I had a martini powwow with that pussy Huck Cramer and he got me all in a lather.”

Huck Cramer was the mayor of Buell, and, like Don Cunko, he was caught up in the town's sewer- bidding problem. “Cramer might have other things he ought to be worrying about.”

“Keep in mind that your job is an appointed position, Bud. You end up taking your pension down there in Daniel Boone County, I give you a year before you eat your gun. You're a social animal same as the rest of us.”

Harris shrugged.

“I don't envy you, I know that. I heard about the goddamn budget, which I know means more of these part- time fucks.”

“It's the benefits,” said Harris.

“I can't even get your guys to write tickets anymore, half of them are working twenty- four hours straight, they pull a shift in Charleroi, head down to Buell, then finish up in Brownsville. Meanwhile they live in Greene County. No clue as far as the communities they're policing.”

“They're not supposed to work more than twelve straight.”

“To be honest I don't care what they do,” said Patacki. “As long as they write goddamn tickets. Even ten years ago I did six thousand cases a year, now I'm down to forty- three hundred. My office takes in four hundred and fifty thousand dollars where it used to take in over eight hundred. There's your budget cut right there. Hell, we used to take in one hundred thousand a year just from parking tickets, but now the girl we got working the meters, she's hardly ever out there.”

“It's all just symptoms anyway.”

Patacki nodded and checked his watch. “Late for my shot,” he said. “You mind?” He pulled his briefcase over and opened it and found a small syringe, then lifted his shirt and gave himself an injection into the pale skin on his belly. He smiled at Harris, slightly embarrassed. “They told me all this booze is probably what brought on the diabetes, but…”

“How's a man supposed to live?”

“My sentiments exactly.” He took another sip of his drink. “Let me give you a scenario I've been turning over in my head. What if, before all those properties got bought up and turned into HUD, we'd just burned them down, say around 1985, every vacant house in the city had been razed before all those people moved in. If you think about it, by now half the city would be all back to woods. The tax base would be exactly the same but with half as many people and none of the new problems.”

“Those HUD properties bought Danny Carroll his condos in Colorado and Miami. Without him …” Harris shrugged. “There's your problem right there.”

Patacki nodded. “A fact I find convenient to ignore, obviously.”

“Which is not how I meant it.”

“No offense taken.” He put up his hand. “Everyone knows you're a good man, Bud. Most of the guys running things are like John Dietz, skimming quarters off the video poker machines. But you,” he said.

“That's not my angle.”

“Your angle is Grace Poe. That's your slippery slope.”

“Not this again.”

“Do you still see her?”

Harris looked away, out over the river. It suddenly occurred to him that the Fayette prison, where they were holding Billy Poe, was in La Belle, just on the other side of the water. Less than a mile, probably.

“You should have been here for the seventies, Bud. The department was buying new cruisers with Corvette engines maybe every three years. And then came the eighties, and then it wasn't just that we lost all those jobs, it was that people didn't have anything to be good at anymore.” He shrugged. “There's only so good you can be about pushing a mop or emptying a bedpan. We're trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history, and it's not the kids with the green hair and the bones through their noses. Personally I don't care for it, but those things are inevitable. The real problem is the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.”

“Did the wife stop talking to you or something?”

“I'm old and fat,” said Patacki. “I speculate and theorize.”

“You ought to drink more,” said Harris. “Or get an intern.”

“I do. And I should.”

It was quiet for a minute. There were other people sitting on their boats, watching the quiet scene, the shorelines and the sun coming off the water, drinking like Patacki and Harris. Many of the boats never left the dock — gas was too expensive. People drove to the marina to sit and drink on their boats, then went home without ever starting them up.

“Who's getting the axe?” said Patacki.

“Haggerton. Also Miller and Borkowski.”

“The new guy?”

“He does more policework than the rest of the department put together.”

“Except Miller and Borkowski are lieutenants.”

“Just Miller,” said Harris. “Borkowski keeps failing the exam. Not to mention the new guy does half his work off the clock.”

“You'll have problems with the union.”

“I'll handle it.”

“This the Chinese guy?”

Harris nodded.

“I can tell you like him,” said Patacki. “That's a good thing.”

“I guess.”

“Permit me a final indulgence, Bud.”

“How final?”

“I would like to tell you about the best job I ever worked.”

“Why do I suspect that it's Magisterial District Eight?”

“Not even close. It was the Sealtest Dairy making ice cream. Sixty-four to sixty- seven, before I became a cop. This big building, it could have been a mill or something, only you would punch in and change into fresh clothes, then walk under a blue light before you were allowed to touch anything. You were never allowed to get dirty. Big buckets of pistachios and fresh fruit, peaches, cherries, anything you could imagine, mixing it up in the machines. You've probably never seen ice cream before it gets frozen, but I promise you there isn't anything like it.” Patacki sipped his drink. “It really was like heaven, just being in there. You'd finish each batch and then take the barrels into the hardener to stack and sometimes, because of the humidity from the door always opening and closing, it would be snowing in the hardening room, ice cream stacked to the ceiling and it would be snowing down on you in the middle of the summer. You're making ice cream, it's snowing on you, and you look outside and it's ninety degrees and sunny. I'd take that job again right now if they offered it. It really was like heaven.”

Patacki reached into the cooler and took a handful of ice and refreshed his glass. Then he splashed more gin into it. “Have you seen that lime?”