No Man's Dog Read Online Free PDF Page B

teens when she realized, with a frisson of wicked delight, that her beloved father, Big Sid Sedlacek, surely was a gangster. But by then she had already lived the life of innocence, so this new condition was not nearly so amusing or even interesting to her. Nowadays, she thought of herself as having made an irrevocable choice when she decided to avenge her father: a road that led one-way and not toward any conventional domain of virtue.
    One of the things that both Helen and Joe equally enjoyed, however, was work. They had gotten very physically involved inthe building of their new home in Montana. The contractor was an amiable man named Anders Ericsson, from Missoula, a city about a hundred miles as the eagle flies from their building site up in the mountains between Butte and Helena. This contractor had to drive over from his home on Mondays, at least a hundred and seventy-five miles. He had a camper on his old Chevy pickup. He camped out at the site, with his irritable dog, a border collie named Skippy.
    Ericsson was about forty years old, a rangy, humorous fellow who, as a veteran of graduate studies in literature, was decidedly overeducated for his occupation. He had a thriving business in Missoula, but he enjoyed jobs like this, which were very lucrative and involved some unusual kinds of carpentry. He was also a man who liked to get away, from time to time, from a wife who was beautiful and talented but also critical about his taste for beer and an occasional toke of marijuana. It was this latter taste that had provided the point of contact, since Joe and Helen had purchased their remote property from a reclusive young fellow named Frank Oberavich, who owned about two thousand acres along a clear and cold and trouty stream called the French Forque, where he grew a strain of marijuana that was known in certain quarters as “righteous.” While at the university in Missoula, Oberavich had met Ericsson in a creative writing class and had even worked for him from time to time. They had kept up the friendship and when Franko, as he was known, built his own elaborate solar-, wind-, and hydro-powered hideway, he had naturally called upon his buddy Anders for assistance. He had recommended Anders to Joe and Helen for their place and it had worked out quite well.
    Anders was happy to take on Joe and Helen, not only as clients but as assistants in the building. It kept the number of strangers to a minimum, which pleased the couple, and they thoroughly enjoyed the labor. They were young, in their early thirties, and quite physically active and strong. They readily fell in with the regimenof hammering and sawing, nailing, learning new techniques like compressor-driven nailers, or by contrast the old traditions of framing or post-and-beam construction. Even the hauling and stacking of lumber and materials, which is so much of building, pleased them.
    They loved poring over plans and blueprints with Anders and considering the strategies of design and structure. The weather was great, the company fine. The two young people relished the feeling of being tired at the end of the day, of getting something positive done, and the wonderful license it gave them to leap into the river in the heat of the day, to say nothing of soaking in the hot springs along the river.
    So thoroughly had Joe immersed himself in his new straight life that he was surprised to get a phone call one day from Smokey Stover. This was the elderly owner of Smokey’s Corner, a Butte beer garden. He was an old mob contact for this area, a man who had gotten his fingers dirty in untold varieties of activities and now was placidly living out his years in boring comfort. He’d had at least a passing acquaintance with Joe’s old employer from Detroit, Humphrey DiEbola. Joe had almost forgotten that Smokey existed. But Smokey had intriguing news: someone had been asking about Joe.
    A few months earlier, Joe would have instantly pricked up his ears at this