Chapter 4 #2
Jayne nodded, in a resigned sort of way, then stepped up, put her hand on his forehead, and shoved. His skull rapped against the bricks behind him. He dropped his bottle of Coke. It hit the ground and foamed.
“Try six grand, shit for brains,” Jayne said. “Don’t play games with me. I can get a crack addict to face-fuck your mother with a shiv while
a guard keeps watch to make sure no one interrupts them. You want her to come home fucking blind?”
“That’s a lie,” Arthur said, but his voice came out pitched barely above a whisper.
“Which part don’t you believe? About the crack addict or about the guard? Who do you think handed me these Polaroids? There’s
plenty of men in blue, happy to make a couple bucks on the side and watch some crazy bitches rip each other up. Prison guard
pay is even worse than cop pay, and I got a couple cops in my employ too, bitch. There’s officers come in to Shut-Up-And-Eat-It
for a slice of pizza, a large Coke, and two hundred bucks under the table so we can run weed and PCP through this place.”
The rear door to Shut-Up-And-Eat-It swung open, and Tana came out. She cast a disinterested look at Arthur as she went by.
“My shift’s done,” she said. “Can we go? I got shit to do.”
Jayne caught her by one arm and whirled her around to face Arthur. “Soon.”
Tana didn’t look at Arthur, but Jayne held her arm and kept her standing there. “Hey, Artie, I get you’re angry. You want
to wallop someone, you can give my sis a few lumps. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t bother you. This twerp here saw police
pulling up in front a the house four weeks ago—state police, not our friendly local guys—and jammed sixty grand of rocket
fuel into the woodstove.”
“Rocket fuel?” Arthur asked. Arthur could read Old English, Welsh, and some Irish, but Jayne was speaking a language he didn’t
know.
“Angel dust. PCP. Sixty grand at least. Might’ve been able to stretch it to three times that once it was cut. Our momma was pretty steamed, I’ll tell you.” Jayne
peered down at the article Arthur had clipped from The Podomaquassy Record. “What about a letter from Walter Whitman? He famous, right?”
“I can’t,” he said.
“I think you can. It’s not like this stuff is locked up in a vault. And besides. It says right here in the article, you got access.” She said this last word with tremendous relish, as if it had erotic connotations.
“But you can’t even sell something like the Whitman letter. Buyers don’t buy rare and valuable literary goods unless they
know where they came from. It’s called provenance.”
“Not the Huck Finn,” Ronnie said, around a mouthful of cheesesteak. “First editions? Lotta those on the market. The Walt Shitman, that might
be harder to move, but I know an old lady in Boston, she says she can—”
“Hey, Ronnie,” Jayne said. “Put another bite of that sandwich in your mouth and shut the fuck up.”
Ronnie waved one hand in a lazy apology.
Jayne said, “We can move whatever you get us. And we aren’t greedy. We need to make things right with a guy and he’s going
to give us the time we need to raise the money. Soon as he’s got sixty large, your mom is off the hook.”
“You want me to steal . . . sixty thousand dollars of rare books from the Brooks Library?” he asked. His lungs tingled with panic. “I can’t do that. Someone will catch
me.”
“No one’s going to catch you. No one is even going to notice. It’s like when they bury someone with their jewels and rings
and shit. Why do they do that anyhow? It can’t do anyone any good under the dirt. The books on this list? They’re buried in
the library. That’s the real crime. Money sitting on the shelves, collecting dust. Get something by this weekend.
Something good. Tana will pop by your place on Sunday afternoon, take whatever you collect off your hands.
Get her the right books, we could probably settle up by Christmas.
” Jayne patted her sister on the head, then spun her and shoved her toward the car.
Tana opened the passenger door of the Ranchero, folded the seat forward, and scrambled into the rear without a look back.
Jayne stood holding the open door. “Hey! You know how your mom has her own book club, sharing the riches of literature with dangerous reprobates? You’ll be doing the same.
This will be like your book club—you’ll be enriching us with every pick.
It’s not a crime! It’s a public service. ”
Ronnie had polished off the sandwich. He drained the last of his bottle of beer and slung the empty at a streetlamp. It was
an incongruous bit of street furniture, a lamp that looked like it belonged in the London of Sherlock Holmes, not next to
a dumpster behind a strip mall. The bottle hit with a satisfying crunch.
Ronnie stretched and looked through the windshield at the girls waiting in the Ranchero. He glanced back at Arthur with a
sly grin and shook his head. “Well, I got to take the ladies home. Don’t look too blue, Artie. Things could be worse. You
could hafta live with them.”
The Ranchero peeled out so hard, the tires threw rocks. A couple of pebbles struck the wall around Arthur. One stung his shin.
He didn’t flinch, didn’t know he had been hurt until he took off his shoes later and found one sock soaked in blood.
Insult to injury: it didn’t cross his mind until the next morning that Jayne Nighswander had kept his hoodie.