Free Short Ride to Nowhere by Tom Piccirilli

nothing good.   
    “He’s dead,” Jenks said.   “I want to know what happened to him.”
    “How the fuck should I know?”
    It was a good question.
    “I just wondered if you remembered anything...noteworthy about the incident.”
    “Noteworthy?”
    “Yes.”
    “I was hungry.   I wanted the fucking Danish.   So I grabbed it.   He wanted it for his daughter.”
    “His daughter?”
    “Little girl, maybe eight, nine years old.”
    “He was with a little girl?”
    “Isn’t that what I just said?”
    Jenks nodded.   “Did he say it was his daughter?”
    “Who the fuck else is going to be a homeless guy in a shelter at eight o’clock in the morning surrounded by bums and winos and meth-heads and whores?”
    “What happened after the fight?”
    “Stop calling it a fight.   It wasn’t a goddamn fight.   I grabbed the stupid Danish and I told him to fuck off and then I went and ate it.   How is that a fight?”
    “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
    She smiled like she couldn’t believe the question.   So did the dude.   His cufflinks flashed with the rising sun.  
    “Get the fuck out of here,” the dude said, the world growing brighter, the guys in the street having missed their chance, beginning to drive off.
    Jenks got the fuck out of there.

12
     

    Retreat, regroup, reevaluate.
    Jenks did what he seemed to be doing a lot of since the bottom fell out.   He wandered for hours.   He drove without any idea or care about where he was going.   He circled Queens and then drove out along the North shore of the island and then circled back down Route 111 and picked up Southern State Parkway and headed back into Brooklyn.   He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and threaded his way up Manhattan and wound up parking again in the same garage right off Times Square.   He stepped out onto the street with no idea of where to go next.  
    He’d made a bad mistake.   He’d gone off track somewhere, following these empty, vague leads.   The question was where.  
    He turned the corner and there was the Hyena, alive and smiling like he happiest insane person on the planet.   Holding up three knockoff purses in each hand as he swung about his table and called to all the ladies.
    It wouldn’t have shocked Jenks any more to have seen Hale standing there with his warped and stained books.
    Jenks rushed over, moved up on the Hyena as the man spun one more time and looked at Jenks like he might be a customer.   Ferdie didn’t recognize him at all.   “Prada bag?   Gucci?   What you need for you wife?   Your daughter?   Your sexy little girlfriend, she at home waiting for you right now?   Think how happy she be when you give her a nice new Prada bag, man like you get lucky with a lot of love.”
    Jenks said, “There was a teenager here the other day.”
    “Huh?   What’s this?”
    “A kid.   Bobby.”
    “He’s my partner.”
    “He said you were dead.”
    “What the hell you talking about?”
    “The kid.   I asked him where you were and he said you were dead.   That you’d been stabbed.”
    “Why should he tell you anything?   Who the fuck are you?”
    Another good question.   Everybody had good questions except Jenks.   Who the fuck was he.   Why should anyone tell him anything?   He ran through the scene again, the way he’d come up on the teen, prodded him, eventually brawling with him.   Why the fuck would Bobby tell him anything.   Jenks had been too adamant, too eager.   He’d forced the conversation to go in the direction his imagination was pushing it.  
    At first the kid had just said that Ferdie wasn’t there.   When Jenks pushed it, looking crazy, getting mean, the boy wanted to get free of him and said that Ferdie was dead.   Who wouldn’t have made up a lie like that to get a crazy stranger off your ass?   It was Jenks who asked if Ferdie had been knifed.   And the kid had gone with it.   Yeah, he had his throat cut. You happy now?
    The Hyena was still smiling