Free Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo Page A

dragging the banner all the way up Main and finally out of sight.
    Sully, shoveling Miss Beryl's driveway as promised, looked up and saw the banner trail by, though he had no idea what it was. As much as Sully hated the idea, he was going to have to go find Carl Roebuck, who owed him money and refused to pay it. Sully was pretty sure what the result of this visit would be, too. He'd end up going back to work for Carl, something he'd sworn back in August he'd never do. Even worse, he'd sworn it to Carl, who'd looked smug and said, " We'll see. " Carl Roebuck was all of thirty-five and, the way Sully saw it, was threatening to use up, singlehandedly, all the luck there was left in an unlucky town. Just this year he'd won two church raffles and the daily number (on three separate occasions). Five years before that, just as Bath real estate had begun to appreciate, Carl, using part of the money he'd inherited when his father keeled over, bought an old three-story Victorian house on Glendale, getting it for back taxes and the resumption of a tiny 1940 mortgage when the elderly owner died intestate and without relatives. That wasn't enough. The first thing Carl did was to go up into the attic, where he'd found a box of old coins worth forty thousand dollars. The man could shit in a swinging bucket.
    CCarl's red Camaro was parked at the curb below his third-floor downtown office, right in front of the company El Camino. Sully double- parked his pickup so that both of CCarl's vehicles were effectively hemmed in.
    Carl was not above going down the back way when somebody he didn't want to see was coming up the front.
    "When are you going to spring for an elevator, you cheap bastard?" Sully called when he got to the top of the stairs and opened the door that read tip top construction: c. i.
    roebuck. CCarl's new secretary, hired during the summer, was a pretty girl, though not as pretty as the one she replaced. She made a face at Sully, whom she hadn't seen in three months and hadn't missed.
    "He called in sick, he's on the phone, he's in the Bahamas. Take your pick. He doesn't want to talk to you." Sully pulled up a chair, sat and massaged his knee, which was pulsing from the climb. He could hear Carl Roebuck on the phone in the inner office.
    "The Bahamas sound all right. Ruby," he said.
    "Get his checkbook and we'll go."
    "There's about a thousand guys I'd take with me before you," Ruby informed him.
    "Don't be mean," Sully said.
    "This is a small town. There can't be more than a couple hundred guys you'd prefer to me."
    "As long as there's one, you're shit out of luck," she smiled unpleasantly.
    Sully shrugged.
    "Okay, except the one you're after's no good for you."
    Ruby's unpleasant smile vanished, replaced by an expression even more unpleasant.
    "And who'm I after, in your opinion?" Sully realized he'd messed up. That she and Carl, a married man, had something going was common knowledge. The look on Ruby's face suggested she didn't know this. Luckily, before Sully could make matters worse, Carl Roebuck was heard to hang up the phone in the inner office.
    "If those are the dulcet tones of the long-lost and unlamented Donald Sullivan," he called, "send him in. Tell him I've got a job for him that even he can't fuck up." Ruby relocated her unpleasant smile.
    "Go right in," she purred.
    "Mr. Roebuck will see you now."
    Carl Roebuck was leaning back in his swivel chair when Sully opened the door, and the smug expression on his face was identical to the one he'd worn back in August when Sully swore he'd never work for him again.
    "How's my favorite cripple?" he wanted to know. Sully plopped down in one of the room's fake leather chairs.
    "In the world's worst fucking mood," he said.
    "I'd like to toss you right out that window just to see what you'd land on." Carl smiled.
    "I'd land on my feet." Sully had to admit this was exactly the way it would probably go.
    "We may have to try it some time, so we know for sure." Carl swiveled