Thank You for Smoking Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what I want to know? I want to know what are they so disgruntled about? We're the ones whose mail never comes."
    "Assault rifle?" Polly asked professionally.
    Bobby Jay ripped off a shrimp tail with his front teeth. "Under the circumstances I'm tempted to say, probably, yeah. 'Course, nine times out of ten what they call an 'assault rifle' isn't. But try explaining that to our friends"—he hooked a greasy thumb in the direction of the Washington Sun building—"over there. To them, my ten-year-old's BB gun is an 'assault rifle.' " He held up his fork. "To them, this could be an 'assault' weapon. What are we going to do, start outlawing forks?"
    "Forks?" Nick said.
    "Forks Don't Kill People, People Kill People," Polly said. "I don't know. Needs work."
    "It was a Commando Mark forty-five. You could, technically, consider it a semiautomatic assault rifle."
    "With a name like that, yeah," Polly said. "Maybe you should ask the manufacturers to give them less awful names? Like, 'Gentle Persuader,' or 'Housewife's Companion'?"
    "What I don't get is, the son of a gun was using hollow-point Hydra-Shok loads."
    "Ouch," Nick said.
    "That's a military load. They use those on, on terrorists. They blow up inside you." Bobby demonstrated with his hand the action of a Hydra-Shok bullet inside the human body.
    "Please," Polly said.
    "What was he expecting?" asked Bobby Jay rhetorically. "That the minister and the choir were wearing Kevlar bulletproof vests underneath their robes? What gets into people?"
    "Good question," Nick said.
    "So, what are you doing?" Polly asked.
    "And why is it every time some . . . nutcase postal worker shoots up a church, they come rope in hand, to hang us? Did we give him the piece and tell him, 'Go forth, massacre a whole congregation'? Redekamp"—a reporter for the Sun —"calls me up and I can hear him gloating. He loves massacres. Thrives on massacres, Godless swine. I said to him, 'When a plane crashes on account of pilot error do you blame the Boeing Corporation?' "
    "That's good," Nick said.
    "When some booze-besotten drunk goes and runs someone down, do you go banging on the door of General Motors and shout, 'J 'accuse!' "
    "You didn't tell him that?" Polly winced.
    "Okay," Nick said, "but how are you handling the situation?"
    Bobby Jay wiped a gob of tasso mayonnaise from his lips. A glint came into his eye. "The Lord is handling it."
    Nick knew Bobby Jay to be an upright, car-prayer-pooling citizen, who occasionally salted his language with biblical phrases like so-and-so had "sold himself for a mess of porridge, like Esau's brother," but he was not a nut. You could have a normal, secular conversation with him. But this suggestion that the Lord himself was engaged in spin control made Nick wonder if Bobby Jay was crossing the line over into the Casualties column. He stared. "What?"
    Bobby Jay looked over his shoulder and leaned in toward them. He said, "It had to be. Opportunities like this can only come from above. And they happen only to the righteous."
    "Bobby Jay," Polly said, looking alarmed, "are you all right?"
    "Listen, O ye of little faith, then tell me if you don't think the Lord was looking out for old Bobby Jay. I'm in the car driving to work—"
    "With Commuters for Christ?"
    "No, Polly, and I don't see the humor in that. It was just me. I'm listening to Gordon Liddy's call-in show—" "Figures," Polly said.
    "Gordon happens to be a friend of mine. Anyway, he's yakkety-yak-yakking about the shooting, his lines are lit up, and suddenly he says, 'Carburetor City, you're on the air,' and there's this woman's voice saying, 'I was in that church and I want to tell that last person you had on that he is just wrong.' I practically drove right off the road. She was saying, 'I own a pistol, but because the law in Texas says you cannot carry it on your person, you can only keep it in your car, I left it in the glove compartment. And if I had had that handgun with me there inside the church, that