Jeanette leaned over the table to check the angle of a shot
and her opponent caught a glimpse of her panties.
She sank three balls in a row and bent over the table again, this time giving
him a view of her cleavage.
She sank three more balls and he handed over his money.
Jeanette didn't need short skirts or open blouses to win
but an advantage was an advantage. She'd been shooting pool since age eight
and hustling in bars and halls since an underage sixteen. She really didn't
need to hustle either.
She had a day job in the Chicago criminal courts system.
She picked her bars, halls and opponents as carefully as
possible.
She had the sense to back off on the tease and the winning but the hustle wasn't
the same without a little tension, sexual or otherwise.
Friday night she stopped at her cop bar. Not even nickel
and dime stuff.
They'd sometimes buy her drinks for trick shots. You don't hustle the people
you work with.
Saturday she was in a bar in the burbs. There was a fair
sized crowd. She got in line to play, then sat at the bar and watched and waited.
The table looked ok, no cheat to it. Everyone ahead of her looked beatable so
far. A guy in a white shirt, the guy just ahead of her in fact, was looking
to be her toughest opponent. He won the table. She just barely beat him, then
ran off four other challengers and looked to get out.
She let some college kid beat her. She went to the bar and watched. White shirt's
turn came again and he lost and joined her. They talked a bit and he helped
her with her coat.
She got home, got out of her coat and went into her purse for her winnings and found none.
*******
This sitting in the bar, waiting, can be hard work. The
bartender can only take so many refusals
to his "Can I get you another?" until he wants me to get out.
The thing is I'm only in for today and I'm not sure when this guy will come
in.
I don't want to be drunk for this. Not that I'd drink anyway.
Finally, the guy I'm waiting for arrives with three of his friends. The barkeep
pours for them and with a raised wiggle of my glass,
I signal him I'll have another, to stay on his good side.
It's early, just after work, kind of early; so it's just
the six of us. Five drinkers and one barkeep.
I am three stools away from the guys. He's second from the left as you face
the bar.
The talk is sports. they turn to the bartender for his comments and to me for
mine. They seem like good guys.
Overdressed maybe but they're office types, lawyers. They want the pregame on.
While the bartender sees to that I leave my cash on the
bar and put my jacket back on.
Fortunately for me the stools have no backs. I'd have thought of something,
but no backs will make this easy.
I give each of the Armani suits a hard shot to the kidneys. That'll keep the
three of them from bothering me, not that they would,
and let my guy know I mean business. I grab him by his fancy suit collar and
pull him backwards to the floor.
His stool comes along and bounces off him and I have to kick it out of the way.
On the ground he's all covered up fetal balllike.
I kick him in the coccyx. I don't want to paralyze him,
I heard you could,
but that's where I kick him anyway and I think it breaks.
I make damn sure I screw up both his ankles too.
I'm not sure they break but a bad sprain can hurt just as long and he's got
two now.
"Pay up," I say and I'm gone.
Hey, I'm the good guy here. This guy's skimming from his
firm, and his bank accounts are full.
He's welching big time, on big bucks. We don't takes his bets anymore.
This is the first time in a long time I've had to do an "intervention"
so to speak.
We only carried this guy as a favor to a friend. "Don't hurt him too bad,"
she said. Not that we would.
You hurt them too bad their money, that should be yours, goes to medical bills.
Hey, muscle has to eat too.
**********
"Hey, Rob, you doing anything?"
"No, not really."
"Let's do this first then we'll see about lunch.
Come on."
Mark handed me a bookbag. He grabbed one of his own and a hard attaché case. I heard the peculiar toink a glass bottle of liquid makes when it hits a hard attaché case corner. I snuck a peak in my bookbag and saw a manuscript.
We took the elevator, nodding at co-workers, walked out into the lobby and then outside and around to the alley corner of our building. A few steps farther along and Mark fished a key from his pocket and opened a door. He flipped on some lights and we walked down four flights of sub basement stairs. He flipped on some more lights, we crossed a corridor and opened another door, and went down a final flight of stairs.
"It's all storage and shit down here," he said. "Don't worry."
I shrugged my ignorance. He lead me past some generators. He may have said something over his shoulder but I couldn't hear him over the hum. We walked past the boilers too.
"Boilers," he said.
"Big fuckers," I answered, just to say something.
We came to yet another hall. He flipped what I hoped was the final light switch. The hall had been created by hollow core doors framing those storage cage kind of things. The whole thing ran maybe thirty or forty feet. The last door, when open, would hit a dark concrete wall I took to be the foundation of the building.
"Get your book out," Mark said. He pointed his freehand at my bookbag. It wasn't my book. It was THE book, the latest from our house, soon to open at number one on the best seller lists.
"Put it down there," he said.
He pointed to the end of the hall.
"What's this?" I started down the hall.
"You'll see," Mark said to my back . I set
the book down.
"No, no, prop it up, face out." I did that.
"Peachy," Mark said. I started back up the hall, looking through the cages to see if there was anything worth seeing. I looked to Mark and saw he'd pulled a world war two .45 pistol from the attaché case. I kind of hugged the wall and ran back sideways, narrow profile like.
"Holy Shit, Mark!" I maneuvered to stand behind him. He had the pistol pointed down and away from both of us. He raised it and fired at the book, hitting it square on. He'd put a .45 size hole in it. It had fallen over, some of the pages were still coming down.
"Run down and set it up again would
you please?"
"You're fucking nuts," I said.
"Here," he took the clip out and gave me the pistol. Feeling safer, I went down and pulled the loose pages together and set the book up again. Mark had taken the bottle from the bookbag. It was a good whiskey not a great one. He'd taken a few pulls. He handed it to me when I reached him. I exchanged the pistol for the bottle. I took a pull and saw he was getting ready to shoot again.
"Wait," I set the bottle down and covered my ears. Mark fired again and the pages flew. "Holy shit," I yelled over the fading gunshot. I bent for another shot of booze.
"That's what it is, wholly shit,"
Mark yelled. The echo of the first round was still bouncing round, fighting
the echo of the second shot. He turned and took the bullets out again, handing
me the pistol. I handed him the bottle. "Once more don't you think? You
want a shot?"
"Nah"
"Just pull it into any kind of pile," He
felt in his pocket. "Oh, here's a big rubber band." I trotted down
one last time and spent about four or five minutes trying to pull loose pages
into some kind of something that would only be blown to hell again. "Good
enough," I thought I heard Mark yell.
I jogged back up the hall, traded the pistol for the booze, took a pull, set it down, covered my ears and by that time Mark was ready to fire again. Boom. There wasn't anything left of the manuscript. "Now, it's holey shit," Mark yelled. I started down to kick confetti into a pile. "Leave it," Mark yelled. "I've got a deal with the janitor." He started to put the pistol away. "Hey, look what I forgot," he tossed me a packet of those little orange ear plugs. He held up a package for himself.
"How long you think we'll be deaf?"
I yelled.
"It's like a rock concert. Not forever. Don't
worry about it." We took another several minutes drinking.
"What about spent casings? and shit?" I
asked.
"I got a thing with the janitor," he said
again. This time he made that fingerrub sign for money. "We just have to
make sure the lights are out and the doors are locked." "Oh. Why'd
we have to come this way?"
" You ever see anyone use the elevator to the sub basements? Too suspicious. Besides, they're keyed. Terrorists you know." Mark said. He turned out the last lights. "You knew it was shit from the first didn't you?" Mark asked as we stepped back into the sunlight.
"I thought so," I said.
"Well remember, it's quantity, not quality,"
he said. He squinted up into the sunlight. "Lunch?"
"I think we drank lunch," I said.
"Think we can take the rest of the day?" Mark asked. He squinted up into the sun again. "Better not," he answered himself. We looked ourselves over, brushing off. Mark took out a couple of packets of wet wipe napkin things and rubbed off the powder marks from his hands. We nodded to co workers on the elevator up.