Snitch World Read Online Free PDF

robbery. Nor of a subsequent arrest in the middle of Webster Street. This brightened Klinger’s outlook considerably. “Say,” he said, “how about another round?”
    The bartender poured. “This one’s on me. That was a good story.”
    “Well I’ll be damned,” Klinger said, genuinely touched. “Thanks.”
    “It’s that kinda joint,” the old man said, not without satisfaction. “So what if it’s in the Tenderloin?”
    “So,” said Klinger, after the first sip of his fourth drink. “What happened to that genius old drunk, anyway?”
    The old man regarded the shimmer atop his refreshed whiskey. “He quit drinking,” he finally said.
    “Really?” said Klinger.
    “Really?” said the bartender.
    “Yep,” the old man affirmed. He lifted his glass and toasted the room. “Then he died.”

FOUR
    It’s like some monotheistic entity damned me to a thousand years of insomnia, Klinger thought, just to demonstrate that he has the juice. There can be no other reason. I’m just not important enough to—. I’ve got to get some sleep.
    After any number of convivialities, free drinks, matched rounds, spillage, and forgotten knee-jerk quaffs, Klinger got out of the bar with $57.32 of the $120 he’d entered with, as drunk as a man of high rank in a feudal society, which he was not.
    Out the front door of the Hawse Hole a racetrack turn launched him up one flight of stairs into the lobby of the Tuolumne Meadows Residential Hotel. Against a blown-up backdrop of a Hetch Hetchy Valley photographed before the O’Shaughnessy Dam turned it into a reservoir in 1923, five years after the hotel itself was subdivided into ten by twelve rooms intended to accommodate merchant seamen returning from World War I, a sleepy clerk took $51.42 cash up front for three nights’ stay, leaving Klinger with $5.89 mad money, in exchange for which he received a key bound by a beaded chain to a plastic one-inch fisherman’s anchor.
    “Up three flights, take the hall to your left, Room 335. The moaner two doors down is a permanent resident, so I don’t wanna hear about it.”
    Klinger stared at the key. “Three-thirty-five,” he repeated. His breath came with some difficulty and not a little audibly.
    Having resumed his seat behind the counter, the clerk took up a large pair of tailor’s shears. “Right in one.” Without sparing another glance for Klinger, he resumed his close perusal of a celebrity magazine, open on the desk before him.
    “Moaner,” Klinger repeated. “Moaner …”
    “He doesn’t go on all night, as a rule,” the clerk said, as the twin blades of his shears carefully limned a starlet’s gam. He moved the back of his head toward a clock on the wall behind him, which had twelve Chinese ideograms on its face. “It’s already late.”
    “Already late,” Klinger repeated stupidly. Existentially, as he might have enunciated if he possessed breath sufficient to the task, it’s never been so Late as it is Now. If I just had another drink …
    “Run along,” the clerk suggested. The tips of his shears nipped the image of the actress just between arm and ribcage.
    Run
, Klinger was thinking to himself, as he bounced off the farther wall of the stairwell. As if with languor he arrested his rebound by clinging to the banister with both hands.
Run home.
    The room, once achieved, seemed hardly worth the effort. There was a window, nailed shut. There was a radiator, cold as a dead man’s armor. If they ever find the entropic core of the universe, Klinger mused, it’s going to turn out to be a lump of cast iron beneath a window that can’t be opened, and I’ll be in there with it. The floor had been carpeted wall to wall a long time ago, but now its polyester fibers yearned an inch or two into the foetid troposphere like hairs in the mouth of a feeding anemone—Take it easy, Klinger told himself, it’s just threadbare carpet. Merely sordid. Nothing new. Nothing terrible. Plus it’s dry in here. There’s a