Pagan Babies Read Online Free PDF

state," Fran said, "claimed they were losing a hundred and fifty mil a year in tax revenues, so they made an example of the Pajonnys, hit 'em with five to ten. Johnny's already out."
    Debbie said, "Johnny Pajonny. It gets better. Was he in any trouble before?"
    "On occasion, but he'd never done state time."
    "What about Terry?"
    "Never in any trouble before this--even though he was always kind of a tough kid. When we were little and I was what you might call pudgy?"
    "What're you now, hefty?"
    "Be nice. Who else comes to visit?"
    "The other kids picked on you."
    "The morons, they'd call me Fat Francis, make fun of my name. 'Oh, Fran-cis, where're your dolls?' Or they'd call me Frannie, which I hated. But if Terry was around, uh-unh, they left me alone."
    "Your big brother."
    "Actually he's two years younger, but was a real hardnose, played football three years in high school, liked to box--he'd take on bigger guys, it didn't matter. Even if he was getting beat up he always hung in." Fran's expression softened, seeing Terry the priest now in his white cassock. He said, "I've been thinking, five years in an African village--he comes home, I might not even know him."
    "Maybe he's a saint," Debbie said.
    Fran smiled at the idea. "I wouldn't go that far. But who knows?"
    Ten women, seven of them black, occupied the wooden benches that faced the TV set in C dorm, waiting for their favorite sitcom to come on. Debbie came down from the second-floor tier above their heads and stepped in front of the TV set.
    "What she doing?"
    "Gonna try her act on us."
    "I'm still working on it," Debbie said. "How I got conned out of fifty thousand and ended up in the joint."
    "Is it funny?"
    "That's what I want you to tell me."
    "Fifty thousand? Where you rob that kind of money from?"
    "I worked for it."
    "Hookin'?"
    "Shame on you. Debbie's a lawyer, fucks people in court 'stead of the bed."
    "I'm not a lawyer. I took pre-law, but that was it."
    "Then why you go to school?"
    "I thought I wanted to practice law." Debbie paused, changed her mind about trying out the bit and said, "Let me ask you something. What's the best way to make a lot of money without working for it?"
    "Hit on the five-number lottery."
    "Find a man has some."
    "Yeah, and have to put up with his shit."
    Debbie said, "What about armed robbery?"
    "You want to get high, you rob."
    "Have any of you ladies ever robbed a bank?"
    They looked around at each other saying, "Yeah, I know people have." Saying, "Rosella in B has. You know who I mean?" Saying, "Yeah, Rosella." Saying, "Rosella owed five hundred to a shy. She went in the bank with her boyfriend's gun and said, 'Gimme five hundred dollars, girl,' to the teller? Took it and paid the shy."
    Another one saying to Debbie, "What you think is the best way to make it?"
    "I want to do stand-up," Debbie said, "but I also want to con the son of a bitch who conned me."
    The mother of this group, twenty-four years inside for killing her husband with a cast-iron frying pan, said, "Save the comic shit, baby, and do the con. You haven't said nothing funny since you been standing there."
    Driving back to Mary Pat and his two little girls, Fran turned on his current favorite daydream:
    Debbie comes out and he has a furnished apartment waiting for her in Somerset, where she used to live, not four miles from his home in Bloomfield Hills. He helps her get settled, maybe paint a room, rearrange the furniture, get in some groceries, booze. They have a drink, kick back. "Boy, it's good to sit down, huh?" Debbie gets high. Naturally she's a little horny, not having been with a man in almost three years. She gives him the look . . . one Fran has been waiting for ever since he and Debbie met and she started doing investigations for him: the look that says it would be okay to become intimate, not seriously intimate but for fun. Fall into it and say, after, "Wow, how did that happen?"
    He had told Terry one time, years ago, he had never picked up a girl in a