Knuckleheads Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’s finished he flips you his smirk which says damn right I closed the deal, and you realize his plan actually makes sense.
    Later, after the staff meeting and a bout of unsuccessful cold-calling, and lunch with the people from the discount furniture chain which looks like it might lead to something promising even though you hate their revolting cheerleader jingle—
couches, coffee-tables, touch-lamps more/ let us decorate your living-room floor
—you give Daniel the thumbs-up and you can see him giggling as he jots down notes from the city’s web site that will tell you which neighborhoods will be flaunting their recyclable materials curbside tonight.
    The two of you lean over your desk like a couple of hardcore analysts from the slaughter-all-the-terrorists weekly drama that’s the network’s highest rated Sunday night hour, and you glance to the corner of your office and try to channel the steely gaze of the life-sized plastic model of John Benson, the show’s twice-divorced, sometimes coke-addicted hero. The thing is essentially a six-foot-tall doll, and he stands before you, arms crossed beneath his train-car pectorals, with a silver pistol poking from his waistband like a gleaming erection. You stare down Benson’s empty eyes and his hyper-masculine carriage reenergizes something vital in your chin-cleft and you and Daniel huddle over the map he downloaded. You participate in several minutes of squinting and nodding, plot makeshift parabolas and hypotenuses, then decide, yes, it’s got to be the area known as Lower Edgar Park. That’s the closest neighborhood to the Safeway, the neighborhood with the most houses with the most children who drink the most soda and the most bottled water—and the most dads, like you, with beer-fridges in their garages—and that’s where she’ll be tonight.
    “I’ll come by your place at midnight,” Daniel says. “She won’t be out before that. Recycling pirates wait until everybody’s asleep, then they creep out and lurk. Then they skulk around and plunder the bins.”
    You like that Daniel called them pirates. Skulkers instead of scavengers. As if they’re committing a despicable unlawful act, not just trying to survive by sifting through other people’s garbage. The pirate label makes you feel better about trying to apprehend one of them, as if, well, if you don’t draw the line here, what will she do next? Cans and bottles to Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts to wallets and jewelry and firearms. This is a nation of laws and nobody’s above them. Daniel’s getting way too excited though, speaking in a near-whisper about how he’s going to ride up on his bike and how you should have your bike ready too, how the night will be a slow cruise, kind of a mobile stake-out from block to block, and how it would never work with a car because you’d make too much noise and spook her.
    “Dude, hold on,” you say, thinking how Daniel’s got no wife or children so he shouldn’t just make assumptions about your availability for this kind of adventure, even though Emily and the kids will already be asleep so it won’t be a problem for you to sneak out. “Listen,” you tell him, “I’m up for this, but if you show up in a black turtleneck and a watch-cap, I’m gonna beat you with a bucket.”
    He doesn’t. Just a navy windbreaker and a backward Dodgers hat, and some eye-black under his eyes as if the streetlights might blind him, but you don’t say anything because you’re excited too. You even spent twenty minutes in the garage spraying WD-40 on your gears and chain to minimize squeaking, and you set your phone to vibrate on the off-chance your father with the emphysemic wheeze will die and somebody will call to tell you at two in the morning. When you swing your legs over your bike like the Caped Crusader hopping into the Batmobile, Daniel has to reach out and grab your arm. “It’s a slow cruise, remember?” he says. “We need to sneak up on her while she’s in the