Free Frag Box by Richard A. Thompson Page B

and tie at all times. But none of them made enough money to buy anything but off-the-rack suits and imitation silk ties. J. C. Penney’s spies. I thought they were adorable.
    I dressed better than any of them. In my early twenties, I thought of myself as a young professional, even though the job sometimes required more muscle than polish. I wore tailored wool-blend suits and button-down shirts made of the new permanent-press cotton blends. I preferred the wide ties that were popular then, but I wore narrow pineapple-knits, just to needle the feebes. I knew they weren’t allowed to have them, because Mort Sahl, the comedian, always wore one. J. Edgar Hoover thought Sahl was a communist, and he hated him.
    Fred’s numbers and bets always came to him by phone, but the money came to about two dozen collection points around the city, mostly in bars, corner groceries, and laundries. I made the rounds several times a week. Any time I accumulated more than about three hundred dollars, I would feed it into a hidden box that I had welded behind the dash of my ’72 Barracuda. It started its life as the housing for a defroster blower, so even if you stood on your head to get a look back there, it looked as if it belonged. If anybody ever demanded to know why I had $300 cash in my pocket, I would say I was going to buy a car from a friend. If they had been smart, they would have put some pressure on me by threatening to arrest me for failure to register for the draft, which was a federal misdemeanor. They had me there. The draft officially ended in 1973, but you were still legally required to register. But the feebes were never anything resembling smart. When Uncle Fred eventually went away for bookmaking, it was an undercover unit of the Detroit PD that nailed him. They weren’t hampered by cheap suits.
    Things were easier back then. Back then, it was a game. Now, my anonymity and maybe even my freedom were starting to feel a bit fragile, and it was not a good feeling at all.
    Ahead of me, the so-I-tole-that-bitch monologue was still in full boom, though the extra distance helped a little.
    “She so full of shit, I don’t even mess with her. I just slap her right in the face.”
    Again, no reaction from the small, sad woman.
    “That’s what I do, all right. I slap her right in the face, knock her down, one time. She couldn’t believe that shit. And then I says, ‘Listen, bitch…’”
    They stopped for a red light at Cedar Street, and I turned and walked south, leaving them behind me. I had no doubt that the loud one would keep retelling her story until Ms. Sad Eyes either became suitably impressed or told her she was full of shit. I was betting on her doing neither, and I wondered how many more times the routine would be replayed and how much more it would escalate. In half a block, it had gone from a story of mere bad-mouthing to one of physical violence. In another few blocks, it could well be up to murder.
    Somewhere once I read the number of times we can tell the same lie before we start to believe it ourselves. It was rather shockingly small. Something less than thirty. That probably meant that by this time tomorrow, the motor mouth would seriously believe she had assaulted somebody. That’s if the offending other person even existed.
    And maybe that didn’t even matter.
    That got me thinking about Charlie. He had decades to tell his stories. By the time I heard them, did they have anything at all to do with reality? Would he even know?
    I thought about the day I first met Charlie Victor a little more than four years earlier. He had come into my office to ask about a bail bond, even though he was obviously not under arrest at the time.
    Jackson Bail Bonds is the totally unglamorous name on my storefront, picked because “Herman Jackson, Bail Bonds” would have been just as unglamorous, as well as longer. But that’s who I am and what I do. The sign is unilluminated, some would say just like its owner, and painted in