A Good and Useful Hurt Read Online Free PDF Page A

together, and he never once told me to keep my prick to myself. Quite the contrary, in fact. The last thing he wanted was for his death to ruin my life, and I know that Sidney would have felt the same for you.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “Don’t think, do it. You’ve got a beautiful young lady practically begging to be entertained, and you’re sitting on your hands. At the very least, you’ll get some practice talking to women for when you are ready to date. Now can we get back to my fucking leg?”
    Mike pulled a new pair of gloves on, picked up the machine, and tapped the foot pedal twice before dunking the needle at the end of the machine into the little cup of ink. He pulled the skin taut on Doc’s leg and started shading.
    Mike said, “Thanks, Doc.”
    Doc just smiled.

CHAPTER SIX
    Phil drove the truck to work, cursing all of the dumb fucking sheep that didn’t seem to understand the rules of the road. It wasn’t hard to drive a car, so why did some people make it so difficult? Phil downshifted the big Ford and crossed two lanes to the empty slow lane, then accelerated around the cars dragging ass in the other two lanes. As he passed them, Phil hung a thick, trunk-like arm out of the cab, middle finger on full display. The car closest to him, a Toyota Camry being driven by a little pencil-necked fucktard, responded in kind, but the hand disappeared back into the car when the driver looked over at Phil. The window rolled up and the hand disappeared, the driver staring straight ahead, uninterested now in a duel on the highway. Placated and smiling, Phil punched the accelerator.
    He parked the truck at the first stop of the day, an oil change place on Thirty-sixth. Phil used to hate delivering here because the rugs he picked up were always incredibly filthy. He understood the environment—you work with grease, stuff is going to get dirty—but this was far from the only oil change on his route, and none of the rest were as filthy as this one.
    Still, he wasn’t angry. These days, one of his girls worked inside.
    Phil hopped out of the truck and walked to the back, heaved open the doors, and clambered on in. The order was written on the clipboard he’d left in the cab, but he didn’t need it. Not everything came easy to Phil, especially reading, but he had memorized the delivery list down to the last detail. He grabbed the pair of three-by-eight rugs and one three-by-four, then hopped off of the truck. He walked towards the door carrying a load of rugs under one arm that few men could have managed with both, whistling a few bars of “Freebird” as he strolled on in.
    Phil saw that Hladini was working the counter as she most always was on rug day, and she was pretending not to notice him, just as she was prone to do. She was Indian—red dot, not feather. That was exactly the sort of shit that would have turned Phil off under normal circumstances, but this bitch had a seriously smoking body, and he could tell she’d be a good time.
    “I’m going to set these down right here, alright Hlad?”
    “That’s just fine. How’s your week been?”
    “Busy, just like always.”
    “Well, I won’t keep you.”
    Phil gave her a smile and went to gather the dirty rugs. No one else seeing the smile would’ve thought anything of it—if anything, they’d remember her acting interested in him , and that would be it. The dumb deliveryman too stupid to notice the obviously interested pretty girl would fall through the cracks, and that was a good thing, because tonight Phil was going to kill Hladini.
    If you had asked him, even Phil wouldn’t have known when it started. He’d had a decent enough family. His mom drank a bit too much and his dad wasn’t around all that often, but Phil had never wanted. His dad drove a truck and lived down in Florida now with his second wife—his parents had divorced the year after he’d flunked out of college. Big enough for football didn’t mean smart enough for