Small Apartments Read Online Free PDF

life, Tommy decided. Kudos to Tony, the would-be hotel manager. His gravity bong was a complete success.
    “Fucking gravity bong, baby!” exalted Tommy to the four bare walls of his apartment.

CHAPTER
5

    F RANKLIN HAD TO use his own car to move Mr. Olivetti’s body and that was all there was to it. He had no idea how he was going to remove Mr. Olivetti’s Chevy from Garner Street, but he thought it best to worry about one thing at a time. What he did know was this: He had to do something, anything, with his fat, dead, Italian landlord before midnight.
    Then, like a thunderclap, the solution was clear. He could take Mr. Olivetti back to his own house in Lackawanna, a rural suburb of Buffalo. He lived alone, a widower, and he had a barn behind his house that he used as a workshop. Franklin had been there twice in his four years as a tenant at 100 Garner. The first time was to sign his rental agreement. The second time was to pick up the simulated-wood table that he was now leaning on, plotting the removal of Mr. Olivetti’s murdered corpse. Lackawanna was about twenty minutes south. If all went to plan, he would be back at the window, binoculars in hand, with time to spare. What worried him were the dark, country roads. Franklin did not much care for driving to begin with, but he despised driving in the dark. I’ll just have to gut it out, he thought. I’ll take this dead bastard out to his house and I will deal with his truck when I get back.
    Franklin stepped out onto the porch. The breeze was cool. He looked west to Dewitt and east to Grant Street. No one was out on the sidewalks or in the street. Music was blasting from behind Tommy Balls’ window. Franklin recognized it and began to sing softly, “I
feeeeel
good. You knew that I would.”
    He could see that the apartment light was on behind Tommy’s tie-dyed tapestry. Franklin knew Miss Parson from Grover Cleveland Elementary would be disappointed, but he was willing to assume that Tommy Balls was either sky high or passed out cold. He was right on both counts.
    Franklin groaned as he allowed gravity to suck his buttocks into the concave driver’s seat of his silver 1986 Pontiac T1000 hatchback. He settled in with a flurry of weight shifts and instrument adjustments, then pulled the Pontiac up to the end of the sidewalk in front of 100 Garner. Unless he could find a better solution he would have to drag Mr. Olivetti all the way from the front porch and hope for the best. Franklin groaned again as he lurched forward out of the Pontiac, leaving it rocking on its four bald tires.
    FRANKLIN SPOTTED A RED Radio Flyer wagon. He knew it belonged to the strawberry-haired kid next door with the giant melon on his shoulders who always wore the same dirty green T -shirt. The metal wagon was in the neighbour’s yard, just inside the picket fence. Franklin reached over the fence and snatched the wagon. He leaned it on the other side of the stone steps, out of sight, and went into the building.
    Mr. Olivetti was about an inch shorter than Franklin and not one chocolate chip cookie less than 220 pounds. Franklin rolled the body onto a green army blanket, then re-covered it with the blue wool blanket. He grabbed two corners of the wool blanket at Mr. Olivetti’s feet and pulled the body across the cracked linoleum floor to the door. Franklin maneuvered the body around the door as he opened it into his apartment. Out in the foyer, he dragged him the six feet across the hardwood floor to the inside door of the breezeway. He reached into the breezeway and clicked off the porch light. The inside door was spring activated and had to be worked around the body every few inches as it kept trying to close. Franklin felt the strain in his back and groaned as he slid the body six more feet across the checkerboard tile of the breezeway to the outside door. The inside door, which was being held open by Mr. Olivetti’s smiling head, slammed shut when he pulled the body all the way into