Free Bust by Jason Starr, Ken Bruen Page A

no problem, but the girl’s reaction still annoyed the hell out of Bobby. He wanted instant respect.
    Before the next job, Bobby watched Scarface like a dozen times, trying to get the whole Pacino badass shit down cold. He thought he had it, but when he went up to the window at the bank the same thing happened. He thought it must be nerves or something. When he pulled smaller jobs, at grocery stores and supermarkets, it waseven worse. He’d whip out his piece, say, “This is a stick up,” and his mouth would be dry and the words would come out sounding all wimpy.
    So he figured enough was enough and he signed up for the acting class. He felt out of place around all of the artsy-fartsy types, like he was crashing a party or something. He would’ve bailed but the teacher was this hot-looking little thing named Isabella. She’d been in something on Broadway and was in some soap opera for a couple of years. She knew her shit about acting and she gave great head too. Bobby stopped going to the class and got private lessons from Isabella. When she wasn’t going down on him, she was teaching him how to emote, use stuff from his past, shit like that. Sometimes they’d read lines from plays to each other. It took him a while, but he finally got good at it. Isabella said he should start auditioning and that’s when he knew it was time to dump her. From then on, whenever he pulled a job all he had to do was look at the fuckers and they knew what was going down. He probably could’ve robbed anyplace he wanted without ever showing a weapon.
    Since Bobby got paralyzed he hadn’t tried to act at all. But he knew that for what he had planned with Victor at the hotel, he was gonna have to have his acting skills sharp as a fucking tack or the plan would have zero chance of working.
    Bobby opened his old Riverside Shakespeare book to a random scene in Macbeth . He took a couple of minutes to memorize the line, then he looked in the mirror, trying to look tough, like DeNiro in Taxi Driver, and said, “Come to my woman’s breast and take my milk for gall you murthering ministers, wherever in your sightless substance you seek peace...”
    He tossed the book away, realizing this was a waste of his fucking time. He still had the magic.

    The townhouse was a lot bigger than Dillon had expected. He knew it would be big, but he didn’t know it would be like big big, like a feckin’ palace. There were three floors and the whole place was filled with all kinds of rich, ugly shite — couches, tables, chairs, mirrors, God-ugly paintings on the wall. Dillon couldn’t wait till he was livin’ in this gaff — then he’d make some serious changes. First he was going throw out all this ugly shite. Then he was going to put in a Shebeen bar downstairs with one of them giant screen TVs — like the kind they had in the sports bars — and then he was going to have his own feckin’ club — call it A Touch of the Green. Every night he’d be blasting the Pogues with his own private DJ, and he’d invite all his boyos to come down, and they’d rock the place with jigs and reels. He might even teach some bollix how to play the spoons. He already knew how to play the odds.
    Dillon still couldn’t believe that all this was going be his just for killing some rich old lady. Jesus, he’d offed fookers for the price of a pint.
    It was funny — before all this started he was getting tired of Angela and was thinking about dumping her when she came to him with this great idea. At first he thought it must be some kind of joke — it all seemed too easy. She said all she’d have to do was “fool around” with the guy and get him to want to marry her. The funny thing was, he didn’t care if she took him on and ten of his friends, just as long as he got the dosh.
    Dillon didn’t know why Angela thought that they were going to get married someday. Yeah, he had considered asking her to marry him, but what the hell did that mean? He’d asked lots of