Matchstick Men: A Novel About Grifters With Issues Read Online Free PDF Page A

the front windows. He’s only got one eye open, but he can see Frankie standing on the stoop. Pounding with his little fists. Kicking out with those little feet. Roy would laugh, but he’s worried he might throw up if he laughs. That’s a new one. Two days old now. He was lying down in the recliner, head back, eating a can of tuna, and he thought,
What would it be like if I throw up now? Would I choke on my own vomit? Would anyone find me before I died?
Since then, it hasn’t been far off his mind.
    “Roy, goddammit!” Frankie is yelling, his voice muted through the wooden front door. “I know you’re in there!”
    Roy doesn’t believe that Frankie really knows he’s in the house. Frankie bluffs, but he’s bad at it. Roy taught Frankie how to bluff, long ago, but Frankie didn’t want to learn about the tells. How to hide ’em, how to spot ’em. He just wanted to go right on bluffing his way through everything. Frankie needs Roy for the cover. Roy knows it.
    “I’ll call the cops, I’ll do it,” threatens Frankie. He pounds a few more times. “I’ll put all my shit where they can’t find it, I’ll call them and they’ll come down here and—well, hell, I’ll call them, that’s all I’m saying.”
    Roy knows Frankie would never do such a thing. He hates the cops. Paranoid about them. Thinks they have scanners, ways of knowing if you’re lying to them. Frankie can’t be on the same street as a cop. But the mere threat makes Roy move. For Frankie to even threaten that … To call the police. The police. To have to
talk
to them, to
speak
with them … Moving slowly, deliberately, being careful not to scuff the carpet, Roy lifts himself off the recliner and shuffles to the front door. He keeps the latch on tight as he releases the deadbolt and pulls at the knob.
    Frankie’s nose pops through the opening, lips following. “Jesus, Roy, you had me scared. Open up, lemme in.”
    “Take off your shoes,” says Roy.
    “What? Why?”
    “Dirt. Take ’em off, or you don’t come in.”
    “You gotta be kidding me. C’mon, it’s me, open up.”
    “Boots. Off.”
    Frankie pulls his nose back, sticks an eye in its place. Scans what he can see—the living room, part of the dining room, Roy, the eyeball dancing up and down as it soaks in the picture. Frankie steps back. “You stopped taking the pills, didn’t you?”
    “Are you taking off your shoes or am I closing the door again?”
    Roy can hear muttering from behind the door as Frankie struggles with his boots. He wants to laugh again, but stops just short as he feels the bile rising in his throat. He doesn’t want to vomit. Not here, not on the carpet.
    Frankie comes in holding his boots. His socks have holes inthem. Thousand-dollar boots and forty-two-cent socks. That’s Frankie. He’s got doughnuts in the other hand. “Breakfast of champions,” he says. Tosses them on the kitchen table. He looks around the place, walks through the living room.
    “Looking for something?” asks Roy.
    “My partner. You seen him?”
    Roy falls back into his recliner. “Came all this way to make jokes?”
    “I been calling for five days, a guy gets worried.”
    “I go places. I go outta town.”
    Frankie shakes his head. “Not this time, you didn’t. You been right here, I can see your lumpy ass print on the couch.”
    Roy shrugs. “Been busy.”
    Boots still in one hand, Frankie crosses the room and pulls open the front window shades. Sunlight streams in, slapping Roy’s face. He winces, covers his eyes with a thick forearm.
    “What’re you,” Frankie says, “a goddamned bat?”
    “You’re very loud.”
    “That’s just ’cause you ain’t heard normal speech in a week. This is what real people sound like, Roy. Real people in the outside world.”
    “You’re still very loud.”
    Frankie looks at his partner hard. Roy glares back. “You take your pills?” he asks Roy.
    “Fuck off.”
    “Did you take your pills?”
    “I answered you