Free Setup on Front Street by Mike Dennis

gonna have
a beer before the pizza gets here."
    She playfully slapped my arm.
    "No-o-oo. You know what I mean.
What're you gonna do from now on?"
    I pushed the remote button to lower the TV
volume.
    "Like I told you, this week I come
into some money. It'll be a lot, and it can hold us for a good while, but not
forever. We will have time to plan things out, though."
    I held her closer to me, then lowered my
voice accordingly. "Think about it, honey. It's gonna be a little easier.
No more pressures of having to make the rent. Or a car payment. We can have a
few nice things. A little breathing room for a change. And now that you're out
of the Fun House, there'll be no going back. How do you like that?"
    "Oh, it sounds wonderful. Just
wonderful. I hope we can 'plan things', as you say, so that we won't have to go
back to the way things used to be."
    She turned her head up from my chest so she
could look at me.
    "You know, a couple of months ago,
there was this guy on Oprah who said planning a better life is something
everybody ought to sit down and do. Like, he said you should sit down with a
pencil and paper and actually make a list of things in life you want to do. But
he said that sticking with that plan is really, really hard, and that most
people fail. We won't fail, will we, Don Roy?"
    Before I could tell her no, she sighed,
"You know, all I want...I just want us to have a … a … future."
    That was a word she'd always had trouble
with. The concept was pretty hard for her to comprehend.
    Fact is, I'd never really had a solid grip
on it myself.
    I'd always lived in the weedy undergrowth
of straight society, raised in one of those dried-out-white shotgun houses on
the edge of Old Town, scraping through on a mix of wits and muscle. My adult
life was a blur of moving from score to score, then back into the safety of the
shadows.
    I usually got by all right, but how could
I, or Norma for that matter, see our "future" the way everyone else
saw theirs? Our futures growled in front of us, like a dark, curvy, mountain
road full of big potholes and upturned nails.
    Small wonder, with the way we were brought
up, the way we steered our lives. Very few doors were ever open for us, so we
took what limited choices we had.
    Shit, who could blame us?

THIRTEEN

 
    IT was barely dawn Monday morning when the repeated pounding on the door woke me
up. Not with knuckles, but with a fist.
    The sound was unmistakable.
    Cops.
    Norma threw on a robe. She stood at the
door yelling, "Who is it?"
    "Police! Open up."
    As she opened the door, I already had my
pants on. I heard his distinct Cuban-Conch accent.
    "Where is he? Where's Doyle?"
    Ortega.
    He shoved his way into the apartment,
followed by his plain-clothes partner and two uniforms. Norma's objections trailed
off into space.
    I moved out into the living room. As he
approached me, the only thing between us was his attitude. It was way out in
front of him, like cheap cologne.
    "Looks like you fucked up big-time,
Doyle."
    His sneer really got to me. I wanted to
slice it right off his wise-ass face.
    "Today's April Fool's Day, Ortega.
This your idea of a joke?"
    "The joke's on you, big man. But you
probably won't think it's too funny."
    I could tell by his smirk he thought it was
hilarious.
    "Okay, it's tearing me up. Now, what's
your beef? And make it snappy. I want to go back to bed."
    "You might be sleeping in county
facilities by nightfall. Where were you last night?"
    "Right here. What's the deal?"
    "Can you prove it?"
    His eyes wandered downward to my bare
shoulders and chest, checking out my jailhouse tats.
    "Yeah. Norma here was with me the
whole —"
    "Oh, right! This bitch. Like she's a
real reliable fucking witness."
    "Witness? To what? What's this all
about?"
    The uniforms had unhooked their clubs from
their belts. They were slapping them into their palms, almost in sync with one
another. Warning me not to get out of line, yet itching for me to do just that.
    He got right up in my