Free Love and Other Wounds by Jordan Harper Page A

what I used to be able to do. Sometimes I forget myself.
    â€œAnd I thought,” I said, “that what I do in there or don’t do is exactly one hundred percent none of your goddamn business. Care to tell me how I got so misled about that?”
    Just then a waitress called out, saying Pinkle’s food was ready and that mine was getting bagged up.
    â€œThat’s a whole lot of food for a body,” he said as the waitress put my two bags on the counter. “Got yourself a tapeworm?”
    â€œGot something to plug that hole I’m getting ready to stomp into your head?” I asked back.
    â€œNot meaning to aggravate you,” he said, holding up his palms.
    So I took a few deep breaths and told myself that the dumb twidderpated motherfucker was too stupid to barely breathe, much less know when to leave well enough alone.
    I was wrong, it turns out. Pinkle really is stupid, just not as stupid as I gave him credit for. Not that I figured it out by his next move, which was to try to pay for his breakfast with a hundred-dollar bill. It was early yet and of course the joint couldn’t handle that, so I groaned and paid for his while mine was still being put together. I didn’t even ask where he’d gotten the hundred. I didn’t want to know.
    â€œCould you throw in a dollar extra?” he asked me with a sheepish grin. “I need me some quarters.”
    â€œYou need to be laying off that dope,” I told him, but pushed the quarters across anyway. “And you need to not think about setting foot in Jackie Blue’s until you’re ready to pay me back, hear?”
    He grabbed his food and hotfooted out the door. I went back to the waitress, who was kind of cute, and gave her a wink. Well, the goat had really woke up, hadn’t he?
    â€œSome dude, huh?”
    â€œYeah, people suck,” she said. “Bank on it.”
    â€œRosy disposition.”
    God, I wish I knew what it was about girls with too much eyeliner and a bad attitude that got to me. Then I thought of Jolene grabbing the brass pole that ran under the bar and I knew that I was good to go again.
    â€œMister,” she said, pushing my bag of food over to me, “work the night shift at a diner some time, and then you can tell me about how great people are. Especially people like that one.”
    I was about to tell her about how I worked a bar and knew how people could be when it struck me that there was something strange in the way she’d said “like that one.”
    She stressed the that like she could still see him, so I turned around, and there he was at the gas station across the street, jabbering into a pay phone. I didn’t like that. And then I remembered that hundred-dollar bill, and I liked it all even less. There was plenty of ways that a man like Pinkle could get some cash money, none of them nice. But to have a fresh hundred to spend on breakfast at the end of a binge, that didn’t set right. It was probably nothing, I thought, but decided I’d walk over there and see what he had to say. And then he looked up and saw me crossing the street and dropped the phone. A piece of paper fluttered to the ground in his wake.
    A big semi rolled past the road and by the time it passed, Pinkle had a good head start, and besides, I wasn’t going to win no footrace with a meth head. I stopped at the phone and picked up the paper scrap. Then I dropped the breakfast. There wasan out-of-town phone number scrawled on it, with one word under it.
    Cole.
    The chopper was a beauty, all silver fire and wheels. It slouched in front of the front door of Jackie Blue’s, which hung open. The wood around the doorknob was splintered like someone had kicked it open. He couldn’t have been there long. Less than ten minutes had passed since Pinkle made his call. In fact, when I climbed out of the truck I could still hear the bike’s engine ticking. Then that sound was ripped out of my