Pain Killers Read Online Free PDF

Hebrew, and who is it? Bobby Bernstein.”
    “I know the name, I just can’t…Wait, was that Son of Sam?”
    “That was David Berkowitz.” He looked disappointed. “I’m surprised at you. Bobby Bernstein happens to be one of the baddest, meanest, toughest sonuvabitches in the ALS. And he happens to be a Semite.”
    “Isn’t that like a black guy joining the Klan?”
    “Apples and oranges,” he said. “You look at Bernstein. Shaved head. Ripped. Full carpet of white power ink.”
    He made a fist, straightened his arms. Tapped his left wrist—“Star of David over here.” Then he tapped his right—“Swastika over
here.
Now, I don’t meet too many sons of Abraham in my line of work, but am I goin’ out on a limb if I say Bernstein isn’t typical?”
    “No, he’s definitely not typical.”
    We were halfway up the dirt road to my trailer. My stomach lurched and he elbowed me. Rincin was turning out to be an elbower. “So what are you sayin’? About my idea, I mean.”
    “I’m saying, you want a sitcom, give it a twist. Forget the peckerwood. Put the Orthodox Jew in with the Jew who’s the Nazi. Mosher and Bernstein. Better yet, make them brothers.”
    “You mean black guys?”
    “What? No, no, I mean
real
brothers—so on visiting day their mother can come. A Jewish mother visiting her boys in jail—one’s a practicing Orthodox, one’s a big man in the ALS.”
    I could sense him squinting at me under his reflector shades. Suspicious. “I write the thing you just said, it becomes
Two and a Half Jews
—it’s your word against mine.”
    I clapped him on the back. “My gift to you. If it takes off and you want to give me a point, I wouldn’t say no.”
    “Are you in show business?”
    “Very peripherally.”
    “Well, what you want to do is establish yourself as consultant. That’s what guys do. I give you a consultant credit, that’s money in the bank. Who knows, you might go full Bruckheimer.”
    “A guy can dream,” I said. “So, you think the doctor’s the real thing?” I realized my blunder before it was out of my mouth. I’d been here five minutes and possibly blown my cover.
    “The real thing? The doctor? He the real old German guy?”
    He took a last swig of Coke, flattened the can and tossed it in the backseat with the others. We drove in silence across the main road where the ATM and the gift shop were. “Up here are the employee residences. Those are some nice little houses. You won’t be living in those.”
    He swung the Chevy up a bumpy dirt road that curved around the nice houses, toward a gravel lot onto which a dozen double-wides had been dragged and dropped. We parked at the far end beside a fresh-scrubbed trailer, water still plinking from the roof.
    Officer Rincin got out and tugged a ring of keys out from a pull string on his belt, then began flipping through them. He eyed me as he tried the first one on the door. As it turns out I wasn’t moving into the just-washed baby-blue double-wide. My new home was the wagon behind it. An old-time snailback, like something Lucy and Ricky would attach to the back of their sedan on a fishing trip.
    “Who lived here before me, a hunchback?”
    “Actually, the term is ‘scoliosis.’ My daughter is afflicted.” While I tried to swallow my tongue, he patted the trailer’s flank, waking a cloud of gnats. “I raised eleven children in this rust bucket.”
    “Are you serious?”
    He unlocked the door and let the key ring zip back to his belt, then gave me the elbow and burst out laughing. “Gotcha!”
    Before this I didn’t know what fun was.
    “Prison humor,” Rincin said, wiping his eyes. “Boy, you wanna make it in here, you gotta work on your bullshit filter. I thought you was edgy-cated.”
    “Edgy-cated, that’s good.”
    I chuckled along, big enough to have a little laugh at my own expense. I wasn’t thrilled about establishing my moron credentials so soon, but it was worth it if it meant he’d forget about the