The Friends of Eddie Coyle Read Online Free PDF Page B

in American money is all that interests me. Same with the black guy. I was in Nassau for the weekend and I had me the sweetest piece of caramel ass you ever dreamed of, and that fat bastard that’ll take anything, he paid for it. I think it’s great. He can work for the Salvation Army if he wants, I don’t care. He just keeps bringing money, it’s all right with me.”
    “You do all right off me,” the bearded man said.
    “I give you twenty dollars apiece for iron that costs you fucking nothing,” Jackie Brown said. “You never got a bit of feedback from me. I don’t hassle you about nothing. I know what you’re dumping the money on, I know all right, but as long as you can function, it’s okay with me. You get my ass in the gears, I’ll turn up the flame under yours. You could do ten years for what you’redoing all by yourself. What you’re doing for me is a sideline, and I know it. But it’s a damned good sideline for you, and don’t you forget it. I got a phone too. I can call the cops in Springfield just as fast as you can call them in Boston.”
    “Fuck you,” the bearded man said.
    “I’ll see you next week,” Jackie Brown said. “I want at least two dozen. I’ll have the money.”

6
     
    Dillon explained that he was frightened. “Otherwise I would help you, see?” he said. He sat on the bench on the Common in the midst of the insistent November sunshine, hunched over to protect his stomach. “I mean, I understand, what it is you got in mind, that you’re willing to protect me. But I want to tell you this: you can’t do it, you can’t possibly do it. Because nobody can do it, you know? Nobody. This is something which I got into all by myself, and I am not going to get out of it.”
    Foley said nothing.
    There were seven derelicts working their usual station down at the subway entrance at the corner of Boylston and Tremont Streets. Six of them sat along the retaining wall and discussed events of importance. They wore overcoats and hats and worn-out heavy shoes in the sunshine, partly because they were generally cold and partly because they had memories enough to knowthat winter was coming again, so that they would need the warm clothing which they did not dare to leave in the empty buildings where they slept. The youngest of the derelicts accosted businessmen and women who had been shopping. He worked diligently to keep them in front of him, trying to block their progress so that they would listen to him. It is harder to refuse to give a man a quarter after you have listened to him for a while, and noticed him. Not impossible, but harder. The younger derelict was still agile enough to maneuver, and could raise the price of a bottle of Petri faster than the others. Dillon watched him while he talked.
    “I tell you what it is,” he said. “The principal thing which bothers me is the truck. Now I know that sounds kind of funny, because I suppose you would think that what would be worrying me would be the guys in the truck or some guy I don’t even know that I see maybe watching me pretty close in the bar or something.”
    North on Tremont Street, just beyond the Information Stand and the Fountain and the Parkman Bandstand, a couple of Jesus screamers were working a moderate crowd of clerks and secretaries and sightseers. The woman was tall. She had a good loud voice and a bullhorn to help it along. The man was short and walked around distributing leaflets. The wind delivered enough of what she was saying to distract Dillon from watching the derelicts.
    “Now there is a strange thing,” he said. “When I came up here I more or less take the long way around, to see if anybody else is interested and who that might be, you know? So I walk along and then I cross the street and come on back down past the pair of them there, and the woman says: ‘Unless you accept Jesus, who is Christ the Lord, you shall perish, perish in the everlasting flames.’
    “Now who am I to think about a thing like