The Mortal Nuts Read Online Free PDF Page B

of their business what I do, my own damn property.”
    â€œThis is a nice part of town. Don’t your neighbors complain?”
    â€œSure they do. I get letters and shit from the city telling me to get rid of ’em. I send ’em to my kid’s lawyer, he takes care of it.”
    They were looking at Sam O’Gara’s backyard in the company of eleven vehicles in various degrees of disintegration. There were two Volkswagen Beetles, a ’67 Camaro, three Chevys from the early sixties, an unidentifiable car with fire-blistered paint and all its windows blown out, the front half of a hood-scooped early seventies Dodge Charger, and three trucks: a badly rusted red flatbed and a green step van, with Axel’s ’78 F-150, the newest addition to Sam’s auto graveyard, tucked between them. Sam’s mongrel hounds, Chester and Festus, had tired of growling and snarling at Axel and were busy christening the new truck by pissing on its tires.
    â€œLooks to me like it’d take more than one lawyer,” Axel said.
    â€œYeah, well, this fella, he’s a good one. Tells ’em I’m an artist. These ain’t cars, they’re sculptures. He gives ’em a bunch of First Amendment shit, scares hell out of them. It won’t be no problem, you leaving your truck here. It’s got this aesthetic appeal, kind of like that Venus of Milo.”
    â€œIt’s still a good truck. Never know when I might need a backup.”
    â€œThat’s the way I figure it. You was right to hang on to her. You can’t have too many vehicles.”
    â€œI don’t know about that,” Axel said. “You might just have done it, Sam.”
    â€œYeah, well, one more sure as shit ain’t gonna make no difference. How you like your new one?”
    â€œIt’s okay. Real smooth. No rattles or anything, except ever since you disconnected the air bag there’s a sort of clicking in the steering wheel every time I turn a corner.”
    Sam shrugged and looked away. “That ain’t nothing.”
    â€œAnd I still haven’t figured out how to work the radio.” Axel looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. Got to pick Carmen up. Thanks again, Sam. We ought to get a game up someday. You and me and Tommy.”
    Sam said, “Yeah, we got to do that, Ax. Sometime we got to do that. Been too fucking long, the three of us.”
    On the way across town to the airport, Axel amused himself by trying to figure out just how long it had been since he’d sat down at a card table with Sam O’Gara and Tommy Fabian. It didn’t seem that long ago, but the last specific game he could remember was the one in Deadwood, South Dakota. That had been in ’63, he believed. Axel was sure they’d played cards on and off for a few years after that, but Deadwood was the last game he remembered clearly.
    They’d been at a hotel called the Franklin, playing draw poker, he remembered. Never his best game, but one he could win at if he played his cards right. Sam was sitting on the biggest stack that night, maybe seven or eight thousand, a lot of money back in those days. Axel wasn’t far behind, having just raked in a nice pot on the strength of a pair of kings. Even Tommy, who’d been hitting the sauce a little too hard, was a few hundred dollars to the good.
    The other four players—a rancher named Bum, who claimed to own his own spread out near Belle Fourche, a pair of cowboys who worked for him, and a businessman who’d driven up from Rapid City—were steadily losing. The rancher and his boys had pumped about three dimes each into the game, with the businessman down only a few hundred. The way Axel recollected it, he’d had a feeling about those cowboys from the start, though he hadn’t said anything to Sam or Tommy at the time.
    As usual, Sam and Tommy and Axel had been exercising their three-way partner routine, signaling the