Crystal Meth Cowboys Read Online Free PDF

himself down on a stool and affected a BBC accent. "Cosmo, my good fellow. I should like a Stolichnaya martini, straight up, one olive.
Vedy
dry."
    Wes was surprised by the barkeep. He had expected a hulking brute with tufts of hair in his ears. But Cosmo was short and frail, his wispy silver hair parted in the middle and combed back on both sides. He wore a white serving jacket, a string tie and thick horn-rim glasses. He fixed Wes Lyedecker with an enormous stare. "Uh, make it two," said Wes, laying a ten on the bar.
    Bell leaned on his elbows wearily. "It's murder out there, Cosmo. Serious murder."
    Cosmo reached down to the freezer below the bar. "You fuckin' fuzz, you're unbelievable," he said, plunking a frosty liter of Stoli on the unvarnished oak. Wes detected a lilt of Irish in his speech, and the hard vowels of New York City.
    "You're on the edge, you're stressed out. You're this, you're that. As if I give a flamin' shit in hell." Cosmo poured a lethal dose of icy vodka into two conical glasses. "You could get out if you don't like it." He stabbed two plump olives with two tiny plastic swords. "Garbagemen in New York makin' 60 thou a year. Good for them." He drizzled one drop of dry vermouth over the two olives. "They yoosta come stumblin' in after work and say, moanin', the garbagemen moanin', 'Ohhh, I had such a tough day.' Who the fuck cares? That's what you're gettin' paid for!" Cosmo plopped the two olives in the two martini glasses and slid them across. "I never did go home to my wife and say I had a bad day. Never once in 36 blessed fucking years did I go home and say that."
    Bell lifted the goblet to his lips and sipped the crystal liquid as if trilling a '48 Bordeaux. He set the glass down gently. "Cosmo, you're a god."
    Cosmo locked his fish-bowl gaze on Lyedecker. Wes took a quick gulp, nodded and said "Mmmmm" though it felt like his mouth was full of lighter fluid. Cosmo returned to his stool under the mirror and folded his arms.
    "Shitforbrains!" called Bell to Renaldo Alarcon, who was down at the end of the bar debating jukebox selections with Jake Hansey and a gigantic rotund man of indeterminate age.
    "Dickcheese!" called Renaldo, a young Hispanic with a square body and a round face. "I hear you been a
muy malo
motherfucker, mang."
    Bell sipped his martini.
    Renaldo sauntered the length of the bar. He cocked his head and leaned in. "Chu gotta stop chooting all dese peeples, mang." Renaldo dropped the accent and lowered his voice. "Try
cuffing
them."
    Bell's eyelids drooped about a millimeter. "Renaldo," he said, "Your mother is a whore for donkeys."
    Renaldo grabbed one of the tiny plastic swords off the bar and brandished it at Bell. "Fu chu, mang. I cut chu. I cut chu up, down, deep and repeatedly, mang," said Renaldo, thrusting the plastic sword into Bell's gut. Bell giggled and swatted at him with long white mitts.
    Wes looked up from these hijinx. The head of a young buck was mounted in the top right corner of the wall behind the bar, his neck twisted toward the adjoining wall, toward the pert rear end of a white tail deer. The buck's leathery tongue protruded a great distance from his mouth. Wes chuckled. The Deer Lick Inn.
    "Those your diapers they found in the PD trashcan, Little Jim?," said Bell to the gigantic man, who now stood next to Renaldo, the skeletal Jake Hansey bobbing behind him like a pilot fish. He was referring to a recent apoplectic memo from the Chief, re: 'sanitary conditions'. "I know it's a long way down that hall to the bathroom."
    "I thought Depends was your brand, Bell."
    "Hey, what can I tell ya," said Bell. "It just feels so good to let go."
    Their laughter reminded Wes of sports commentators on TV. There seemed to be such an easy camaraderie among men of a certain age. Wes met his reflection in the antique mirror. His black eyebrows added some character, but what his mother called his 'peaches and cream complexion' reproached him with its unlined perfection.
    A brown