Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Officer Raymer turned away, looked up the street in the other direction. Two men on their way into the OTB stopped to listen.

“So,” Sully went on. “You’re asked to go see about a disturbance. You drive up, and what do you see? There’s a man standing in the middle of the driveway with a deer rifle and he’s shooting out windows on a residential street. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but … that’d be against the law, right?”

Officer Raymer turned back to study Sully, noticed that the two passersby had stopped to listen, said nothing.

“A good-looking girl comes up to the guy with the rifle, so he clubs her with the gun, breaks her jaw in about fifteen places, then kicks her once or twice for good measure. That’d be against the law, wouldn’t it?”

“He done that before I got there,” the policeman said. “I never saw him hit her.”

Some more men on the way into the OTB also stopped now.

“Okay,” Sully said agreeably. “That’s what I mean. I just want to understand how it happened. So you pull up, and the guy with the gun is standing over the girl with the broken jaw who’s lying on the ground. And he’s pointing the rifle at her and saying what he ought to do is just blow her brains out. That’d be against the law, wouldn’t it?”

“Definitely,” said one of the two men who’d stopped first.

The policeman glared at the man who’d spoken for a moment before turning his attention back to Sully. “I’m going to give you about ten seconds to get the fuck away from me, Sully.”

Sully consulted his watch. “So what do you do? You let the guy with the rifle take a little girl, get back in his truck and drive away.”

“It was a domestic dispute. A judgment call. They picked him up ten minutes later, for Christ sake.”

“A judgment call,” Sully repeated.

Officer Raymer knew his mistake now. It was allowing himself to be drawn into this discussion. “You should try being a cop for about one day, Sully,” he said weakly.

Sully was grinning, and so, slyly, were the men who’d gathered. “A judgment call,” he repeated as he turned to head into the OTB. “You take care now, Officer.”

“I hope you don’t ever catch fire and have me standing nearby with a hose,” the policeman said to Sully’s retreating form.

“That’s where you’d be, all right,” Sully said over his shoulder. “Off at a safe distance, holding your hose.”

Inside the OTB were clusters of the windbreaker men, though most of these were now wearing their post-Thanksgiving heavy outerwear, and Sully spotted Otis right away due to the white bandage behind his ear.

“Oh, God,” Otis said when he became aware of Sully standing in the doorway and grinning at him maliciously. Instead of having to deal with Sully once, midmorning, at the OTB, now, since Sully’d started working mornings at Hattie’s, he got a double dose. Sully’d warned him against breakfasting at the donut shop, too, threatening to go down there and bring him back by force if he had to. “Have mercy and stay away from me, will you? Can’t you see I’m injured?”

Sully inspected the swelling behind Otis’s ear. “I worry about you, Otis,” Sully told him.

“Well, don’t,” Otis insisted. “Just stay away from me and I’ll be fine.”

“I worry about a man who comes out second best to a ninety-year-old blind woman and then insists on going down into alligator country without a guide.”

“You couldn’t guide me to Albany.”

Sully threw up his hands. “You want to try it on your own, be my guest. When they send your remains back home, what should we do with them?”

“He won’t go away,” Otis wept.

“Okay, I’ll have to use my own discretion,” Sully said. “There probably won’t be much to send back. All they usually find is a bloodstained shoe, maybe part of the foot still in it. Let me look at your shoes so I’ll be able to make the identification.”

“Dear God, take him.” Otis looked up at the roof of the OTB. “Open the sky and just take him.”

Sully spied Jocko leaning against the wall by the window. “If it’s you, I’ll just put it in a shoebox and put it on my mantel.”

“This man gives me nightmares every night.”

“I’m just trying to make you watchful, Otis. There’s danger everywhere.”

“There’s danger everywhere you are, is what you mean,” Otis said.

“Let’s go see this guy over here,” Sully said to Will. “Maybe he’ll be more appreciative.”

Will was squinting at yesterday’s results posted on the wall, but he followed along.

“If you won another triple, don’t tell me about it,” Sully warned Jocko, who looked up when they came over.

“Okay,” he agreed. “If you lost another one, I don’t want to hear about that either. Who’s this?”

“Say hi to Jocko. He’s our friendly neighborhood pharmacist.”

Will was still squinting at the wall.

“Speaking of which. I don’t suppose you got any more of those you gave me the last time?”

“Not on me,” Jocko said. “I got some new samples in yesterday, though. I thought immediately of you.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Come out to my office.”

“Can you wait here a minute?” Sully asked Will, who was tugging on his sleeve. A look of panic immediately swept Will’s face. “I’ll only be a minute. Can you be brave that long? I’ll be in that car. You can see it from here.” He pointed out the window at Jocko’s Marquis. “Go see what the triple was yesterday, and by the time you do that, I’ll be back. Okay?”

Will took a deep breath. Okay.

Outside, Jocko rummaged through his candy store glovebox, holding up vials of pills to the light, glowering at them through his thick glasses. “Here,” he said finally, “eat these.”

Sully held them up, noted their color, pocketed them. “I wondered if you’d ever give me anything yellow. I’ve had just about every other color of the rainbow, I think. What are these?”

“Screaming yellow zonkers. One should do the trick.”

“Okay.”

“Let me know if they turn your pee yellow.”

“My pee is yellow,” Sully said.

“Oh-oh.” Jocko grinned. “It may already be too late.”

They got out of the car again. “What do I owe you?”

As usual, Jocko waved this off. “Nada. I told you. They’re samples.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“That’s what they always are,” Jocko said. “You’re becoming a regular laboratory rat.”

“I come from a long line of rats,” Sully said. He could see his grandson at the window, watching anxiously, his courage nearly exhausted.

“Good-looking kid,” Jocko remarked.

“He’s a good boy,” Sully said, feeling suddenly swollen with pride, just as he had in talking about Peter the day before with Harold Proxmire. “I like having him around. He’s a little on the nervous side, like his father always was.”

“They get that from Vera,” Jocko said thoughtfully. “She and her husband have sure had their share lately.”

“I don’t know much about it,” Sully admitted. “I know Ralph’s been in the hospital.”

“In and out,” Jocko said. “They’re about a gazillion bucks in debt. Got to be.”

“I doubt it,” Sully said. “Ralph worked for the post office all those years. He’s got to be covered.”

“Insurance usually gets the first eighty percent,” Jocko admitted. “You ever tried to pay the other twenty after something major?”

“I’m not saying they don’t have problems,” Sully said.

“I shouldn’t tell you this—” Jocko began.

“Then don’t, for Christ sake,” Sully said.

“Okay,” Jocko said agreeably enough.