Free Run For the Money by Eric Beetner Page A

his dealer, a guy named Crankhead Bob, a take-off on the Howard Stern character they all thought was funny as shit.
    Mr. Marcus found Bob at his apartment. Bad idea. Bo had never even been there. There’s a place to do business and that wasn’t it. Crankhead Bob didn’t come to your place and you sure as shit don’t go to Bob’s.
    The story went around the neighborhood that Bo’s dad died of a heart attack. Bo believed it too for about three months until he ran into an associate of Bob’s who told him the real deal. When Bo found out, he was pissed no one knew the real story. Made his dad seem a hell of a lot more badass than just an old dude whose ticker gave out. Kids in the neighborhood even spread the rumor he died on the can, Elvis-style. If they only knew.
    Crankhead Bob went missing that night so the story had been pieced together from neighbors who heard the noise, a few tweakers who were in the room but offered a slightly less than reliable testimony, and the super of the building who saw the room before the cops came and cleaned it up.
    The story is that Bo’s dad showed up, knocked on Bob’s door and wouldn’t go away when Bob told him to fuck off.
    There was a lot of, “You can’t fuck with my family,” and “I’ll bring the cops down here,” but Bob didn’t open the door until Mr. Marcus said, “You don’t leave my family alone I’ll find your family and fuck them up. Your mom? My bitch!”
    That didn’t sit too well with Bob. Momma’s boy doesn’t begin to describe it. Is it possible to be pussy-whipped by your own mom? If so, he was.
    The door opened and Bob led with the gun, used his other hand to grab Bo’s dad by the wrist and pull him inside.
    Mr. Marcus had been holding a wooden chair leg, a remnant of a project he had going out in the garage for over a year. It was finally going to get some use. He thrust out like a fencer with the club hitting Bob in the right eye. The soft circle of the eyeball popped under the pressure of the chair leg which almost touched the back of his eye socket. Thing didn’t need to be sanded and stained to make a guy blind in one eye.
    Bob screamed and went down. The three other tweakers in the room stared. Bob shot a round into Mr. Marcus’ foot.
    No one knows exactly what was said in there. Whatever happened, Mr. Marcus was relieved of his chair leg, tied to a chrome chair of Bob’s and beaten to hell. Bob told the tweakers to mix up a shot of meth. A big one. Sniff it, smoke it, shoot it – shooting it gets it there faster.
    Word is it took him a while to find the vein with that one bad eye. When he did he pushed in enough crank to kill a horse.
    Trouble is, the lethal dose didn’t settle in until after it surged through Mr. Marcus and gave him something like superhuman strength. Here’s where the tweakers can’t be taken at face value, but they say he tore off the straps holding him to the chair like the Incredible Hulk, smashed the place up and down. Piles of dope waiting for delivery went up in clouds of white, stacks of money flew like spring leaves. Somehow Mr. Marcus got the gun away from Bob and shot him five times before his heart stopped and he collapsed. Word is, most of those shots were to the face.
    So, heart attack? Technically, yes. What brought it on is the part no one ever talked about.
    Either way Bo held a secret pride that his dad took down Crankhead Bob, even though a new dealer took his place within twenty-four hours.
    Bo turned down the familiar street, stopped at a familiar door and knocked. The door opened.
    “Hello, Mom.”

CHAPTER 15
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    F eels like Halloween , thought Slick as he strode down the street in the priest collar.
    First stop – breakfast. Scratch that. First thing was to call Emma. No doubt she’d heard about it on the news by now. At the far end of a mini mall parking lot he saw a pay phone, a species as rare as a snow leopard these days. Slick walked to the silver box bolted to a