Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

The fed shrugs. “Um... what is it... uh... ‘salvar’? Something like that?”

Rigby looks at the old man. “You see this big fella ‘salvar’ this man?”

Still with the blank stare.

Rigby shakes her head, turns to the field agent, and mutters, “There a payphone around here somewhere?”

Hanover looks at her. “A payphone?”

Rigby sighs. “Yeah—payphone—you know, you put quarters in ’em, make calls.”

The Fed is stymied. “You’re welcome to use my cell, Lieutenant.”

Rigby takes a deep breath, her graying flip tossing in her eyes. “Gotta be a payphone.”

Hanover stares at her. “I mean, sure, there’s a bait shop back down road—”

Rigby has already whirled, and is now trundling back toward the Illinois side of the bridge, her liver-spotted knuckles turning white with anger as she limps along, favoring her artificial hip, wondering just exactly who she has to screw to find a dad-burned payphone.

14.

“You didn’t really mean it, did ya?” Gerbil Goldstein comes through the adjoining doorway, drying her stringy, dyed locks in a motel towel. She’s got most of the limestone dust out of her hair and her pores, but can still taste it on the back of her teeth. A terrycloth robe, three sizes too big for her, hangs off her bony form.

“Mean what?” Oswald, across the ratty motel room, pushes an armchair into a corner. Clad only in his boxer shorts and Betadine-stained girdle, he looks like a mad housekeeper searching for an elusive stain. He started wearing the girdle years ago when the Wise Guys started teasing him about his weight. Somewhere along the line it became habitual, maybe even obsessive-compulsive. Now his oily black locks dangle down across his intense expression, and he moves with a pronounced limp, his lumbering movements bringing to mind a wounded bull. Something’s on his mind. Something major is going on up there in his addled brain. Gerbil can always tell when the Big Chief’s wheels are turning.

“All that shit about whacking those little girls,” Gerbil says.

“Of course not,” Oswald grunts as he pushes a tattered love seat against the wall. He looks as though he might be clearing the room for a dance contest. A three-hundred-square-foot chamber of sour-smelling carpet, shopworn furniture, and bad landscape lithographs, the room is the flagship suite of the Dew Drop Inn outside Galesburg, Illinois—the first roadside flop Gerbil and Oswald had come upon after dumping the dickhead from the bridge fiasco. For an eighty-buck swipe on one of Oswald’s stolen credit cards, they got two adjoining single-kings. Now Oswald appears to be in the throes of redecorating his side. “Gimme a little credit, will ya?” he says absently, ratcheting the shades closed. “I was just tweaking the guy—making sure he thinks twice next time. You think I’d pop a child? Jesus Christ.”

“Tell ya the truth, I don’t know what you’re capable of anymore.” Gerbil stands in the doorway, wringing her hands in the towel. She is torn—maybe as torn as she has ever been—about what to do. If she bails out of this idiotic wild goose chase, she might never see Oswald again. He might get himself killed or pinched or whatever. On the other hand, she can’t just keep blindly tagging along on these ridiculous fire drills. “I mean, I don’t know what it’s going to take to get it through your thick skull that this whole deal is nuttier than a soup sandwich.”

“At least we got one life saved now,” Oswald ventures, turning off the lights.

“Yeah, great—one life saved—in, like, two weeks?”

“I’ll make it, don’t worry,” he mutters as he locks the door, then turns off the flyspecked overhead light. The room is plunged into darkness. Only a lone bedside tensor lamp illuminates the cheesy interior.

“Did you even look at a Tribune this morning?” Gerbil asks him. “There’s only, like, ten days left until the next full moon.”

“I’m aware of that.” Oswald plops down on the bed and opens a cellophane-wrapped burrito, fresh from the vending machine. The bedside table is crowded with junk food, aspirin, booze. “I’ll make it.”

“Yeah, sure you will,” Gerbil mumbles, flopping down on the desk chair, poking around her crumpled pack of Camels for her last bent cigarette. She fires it up with the motel matches. “Look, I’m not in any way saying I endorse this crazy fucking shit, but have you considered a group save?”

Oswald is about to gobble the burrito when he pauses, the food poised in front of his mouth. “A what?”

Gerbil takes a drag, blows it out her nostrils. “A group deal.”

“Whattya mean?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Here’s an example. Say we went to an Army recruiter.”

“And?”

“And we save a bunch of dumb-asses from enlisting.”

He looks at her. “I like your thinking, but it would never work.”

“Why not?”

Oswald sighs. “First of all, what do you do with them? Kidnap them? Brainwash them? A dumb-ass is a dumb-ass—they’ll just go back and enlist the minute you cut ’em loose.” He uses the burrito now like a baton or a visual aid, punctuating his point with little thrusts and parries. “Second of all, how do you know you’re even saving ’em? They could go in, and then end up getting stationed in, like, fucking Lichtenstein guarding a golf course. Too many variables, Gerbil, it would never work.”

“Okay, here’s another idea. Think about all the assholes out there on the road. What if we just, like, hang out down-town, like, at rush hour, like, at some deathtrap intersection?”

“Gerbil, come on—”

“First old-fuck senior citizen comes along, weaving all over the place, we snatch their car. Take their license. Tell ’em we’re from the Traffic Division, something like that, put ’em on a bus.”

“Come on—”

“Save a million people in one fell swoop.”

“Except that I need to verify every single asshole I save. I need the math to add up. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Oswald, but we still don’t even know how many you gotta save.”

“I’ll figure it out.” He stuffs the burrito in his mouth and