A Perfect Crime Read Online Free PDF

the steel-tipped pole onto the truck bed. “No harm intended.”
    The guy just looked at him.
    A bus drove up, number 62. He checked the social worker’s handwritten instructions: his bus; it stopped a block from the halfway house. But Whitey didn’t get on. Instead he set off toward a neon-lit intersection he could see in the distance, the kind of intersection where there might be liquor stores, bars, women. Whitey felt in his pocket. He had thirty bucks, plus four hundred and some in the bank account the social worker had helped him open the night before.
    What would thirty bucks buy? A Pepsi, for starters. They hadn’t had Pepsi inside, just Coke, and Pepsi was Whitey’s drink. He went into the first convenience store he saw. “Wow,” he said to himself, or maybe out loud. There was so much stuff. He went to the cooler at the back and found the Pepsi. They’d changed the design on the can. He liked the old one better. Had they fooled around with the taste as well? He remembered hearing something about that.
    Whitey took a six-pack, went to the front of the store, laid it on the counter next to a cigar display. “With you in a sec,” said a voice a few aisles away.
    Whitey eyed the cigars. Weren’t cigars in these days? He’d never smoked a cigar, not once in his whole goddamned life. Whitey glanced around. There was a video camera, but it hung loose from the ceiling, all askew. Whitey boosted the biggest cigar in the box, slipping it up his sleeve in the familiar motion of a man patting his hair in place.
    The clerk appeared. “Anything else?” he said.
    “Matches,” said Whitey.
    “Matches are free.”
    Whitey took two packs. “Thanks a bunch.”
    He walked another block toward the neon intersection, stopped, cracked open a Pepsi, tilted it up to his mouth. Christ, it was good, even better than he remembered. He swallowed half of it, then lit the cigar, filling his mouth with a thick ball of hot, wonderful smoke, slowly letting it out, curling through his lips. He was alive. Standing outside an electronics store—a banner on the window read: ARE YOU READY FOR HIGH DEFINATION ?—Whitey sipped his Pepsi and puffed his cigar. A gorgeous weatherwoman on a big-screen TV was pointing at flashing thunderclaps on a map of some European country, France, maybe, or Germany. European weather: this was the big time. Whitey watched transfixed until he happened to notice the price sticker on the TV. And that was the sale price. He walked away.
    Cigar in his mouth, the remaining five cans of Pepsi dangling from the empty plastic ring, Whitey reached the intersection. Liquor stores, yes. Bars, yes. Women, no. He went into Angie’s Alligator Lounge and sat at the empty bar.
    “What can I get you?” said the bartender.
    Alcohol was out: halfway house rules. “What’ve you got?” said Whitey.
    “What have I
got
?”
    “Beer,” said Whitey, first word that came to mind. “Narragansett.” That had been his beer.
    “Narragansett?”
    “Bud, then.”
    The bartender served him a Bud. “Buck and a half.”
    Whitey gave him two bills, waved away the change, just waved it away with his cigar, very cool.
    “I’ll level with you,” Whitey said. He waited for the bartender to say something or change the expression on his face. When none of that happened, he continued, “The truth is I been away for a while.”
    The bartender nodded. “Narragansett is kind of a collector’s item.”
    “And a little company would be nice, you know?Someone to talk to,” he added, but the bartender had already picked up the phone. He spoke into it quietly for a few moments, not looking at Whitey once, hung up. Less than a minute later, a woman walked through the front door, sat down beside Whitey; the bartender found something to do among the bottles. Whitey laughed, more like a giggle that he modulated at the end.
    “What’s funny?” said the woman.
    Whitey took a hit off the cigar. “Inside you get shit,” he said. “Out in