Free Good Neighbors by Ryan David Jahn

sorry?’
    ‘You don’t have to apologize,’ Alan says. ‘Just hang up the phone and walk away.’
    ‘I don’t think I understand.’
    ‘Hang up the phone,’ Alan says, ‘and walk away.’
    He walks his fingers across the air to demonstrate.
    Boil nods and his moonface shakes like gelatin, mouth agape. He hangs up the phone without saying goodbye. Then he looks at Alan as if awaiting further instruction.
    ‘Walk the fuck away.’
    Boil nods, ‘Right,’ then turns and heads off down the sidewalk. He glances once over his shoulder, but only once, and Alan thinks it’s fear on his face, nothing more. And fear is fine.
    Alan grabs his coffee and then steps into the booth. He picks up the phone, wipes it off on his uniform. He doesn’t think boils are contagious, but that was one filthy son of a bitch. Once the phone’s wiped off, he drops his dime into the coin slot and dials.
    ‘Charlie. Alan. What’s the news?’
    He takes a bitter mouthful of coffee and nearly spits it right back out, but manages to swallow. It goes down hard, like a stone.
    ‘He what? That motherfucker. Where’d he say to meet him? Tell him I’ll be there.’
    Alan slams the phone down and steps from the urinestinking booth. He looks at the coffee in his hand as if it’s an alien thing and then throws it against the brick wall in front of him. It explodes, splashing liquid in every direction, including onto Alan.
    ‘God damn it!’
    He kicks at the booth several times, grabs it, tries to shake it but it’s bolted to the concrete, steps back into the booth, grabs the phone, and repeatedly slams it into its pronged cradle until there’s nothing left of it but three mangled pieces of plastic held together by wires.
    ‘God fucking shit fuck!’
    He runs his fingers through his hair, tilts his head left to crack his neck, and then tilts it right, producing a sound like a playing card flapping against bicycle spokes.
    About six months ago Alan and Charlie decided to shake down a local drug dealer for a little extra cash. They thought it was a small-time operation: figured the guy had five or six people working for him who were throwing his mediocre shit to the niggers and spics. They figured on an extra forty dollars a month. Hazard pay, they called it. But when Alan and Charlie put the guy they thought was top in a corner, he squealed like a pig, oh God, man, please don’t send me to jail, I got six kids (six fucking kids) I gotta take care of, oh man, this is fucked, I’ll tell you whatever you wanna know, I swear, I’ll fucking talk.
    Now Alan and Charlie didn’t even know this dumb son of a bitch had anything worth talking about till he told them he did, but they went along with it, of course. What else are you gonna do? Someone starts telling you an interesting story, you listen to the end. The story led them to a bigger fish, who they paid a visit to the next day. At first Big Fish claimed he didn’t know what they were talking about, he’s a respectable businessman, the whole line of shit. But Alan can be persuasive when he needs to be, and he really laid on the charm, laid it on with a ballpeen hammer, first breaking the pinky toe on Big Fish’s left foot, and then the next toe, and then the next. Before Alan could get to the guy’s last toe, Big Fish was talking plenty, would have told them anything, would have told them his very own mother was a ripe cunt.
    So they managed to work out a pretty good arrangement, a pretty good deal that everyone seemed happy with: three hundred dollars a month to both Alan and Charlie and Big Fish gets to keep his operation going. Not a bad arrangement – not bad at all.
    Except now, after six months of everything running smooth as a baby’s ass, there’s a problem.
    Some son of a bitch calls up Charlie at home two days ago – doesn’t explain how he got Charlie’s home number either – and claims he knows what’s going on, has seen it several times from his office window across the