Free Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston Page A

at my one eye.
—Better have some sharpshooter fucking aim you want that shit to do any good.
He thinks about that.
While he's thinking, I drop a twenty in the tray that cuts under the shield. —Just give me a couple packs of Luckys and some matches.

Jeo Pitt 4 - Every Last Drop
Cash changes everything, even in the hands of a guy clearly wearing someone else's polo shirt.
He drops two packs in the tray.
I look at them. —No, no, not that shit. Give me the real ones, the filterless.
He looks at the display of smokes behind him. —I got the filters or I got the filter lights. Don't got filterless.
I toss another twenty on the tray and point. —Give me that pair of scissors hanging there.
He rings up the scissors while I open both packs of smokes. I knock the bottom of one pack until just the filters stick out, open the scissors, and slice them off. I repeat with the second pack and leave the trash in the tray with the change from my purchases.
The guy points at the mess as I make for the door. —Not your garbageman, motherfucker.
I hold up one of my modified smokes. —Buddy, you're lucky I didn't burn this fucking place to the ground.
So much for keeping a low profile in the Bronx.
Then again, so much for the Bronx.
Rounding onto Rockwood I run my hand along the bars of the fence that separates the little playground on the corner from the rest of the world. My fingers snag one by one on the bars. Kids play here during the day. I know because I can hear them when I use my bolt-hole next door. This time of year they mostly run in and out of the spray from a little fountain, returning again and again to push the silver button on a red post, triggering the water when it times out.
Not a bad sound, those kids.
Sentimental. Romantic.
Predo knows shit. Just likes to throw words like that at me. Figures they'll get my goat. Figures I got some problem with being who I am. What I am. Figures he can worm under my skin and make me jumpy.
I ever bothered time on who I am, I might get worked up about it. But why fret on something you cant change.
I come even with tonights cave, one of a half dozen or so that I like to
rotate between. A crumbling garage surrounded by ruined cars at the back of a mechanics asphalt lot. The business itself is a block over on One Seventy-two. This place here the guy uses as dead storage.
I scale the chain-link, drop inside and edge between a wall and an old red van. Back of the van are a couple steps down to a door held shut by rusty hinges. A stone rams head worn smooth by rain is wedged into a notch over the door. The walls are crumbling stone and brick. A limestone foundation visible at the foot of the wall.
Its fucking old.
I push the door and it grinds open about eighteen inches before jamming on an engine block just inside. I work myself through the gap. Inside, I push the door closed. I could have gotten a lock for the door, but it was open when I found it. Figure the sudden appearance of a lock might attract someone s interest. Some places are so forlorn, figure they're safer if they look like anyone could come in and lie down to die anytime they please.
I reach inside one of the empty cylinder chambers on the big V-8 block and find my flashlight and flick it on. If the windows weren't all boarded, enough light would filter in for my eye to work with, but that's not the case. Pitch isn't so black.
The light shows me the piled heaps of twisted rust and grease. It looks like
someone bought the scrapped wreckage of a hundred demolition derbies and dumped it all in here until it could be made use of.
How lucky for me to find such cozy lodgings.
I skirt the piles, working my way to my burrow at the base of the north wall under the buckled hood of a 49 Ford. Behind the mix-and-match seats I've wedged together for a cot, I find a filthy nylon laundry bag.
Worldly goods.
A couple plain black Ts mean I can scrap the pastel thing I'm wearing. Rarely felt better about getting rid of an article of clothing.