Free Snitch Factory: A Novel by Peter Plate Page B

sheets. I’d have to vacuum the bed before we slept in it again. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off, but the rumbling of the homeless and their shopping carts on Lexington Street had rousted us from our sleep. He put a hand on my thigh, fishing for the warmth between my legs.
    “Well,” he said. “Another day.”
    “Yeah, no shit.”
    “Did you see the newspaper last night? It said a social worker…it said Harry had been shot. How come you didn’t tell me?”
    A gent in the bathroom next door was coughing, hacking his lungs to shreds. The absence of soundproofing in our apartment made me claustrophobic. There were twenty inhabited units in the building; a Victorian tenement where we were lucky to get a studio for a thousand a month. That was after being on a real estate agent’s list for two years.
    What would’ve been the sense of telling Frank about Hendrix? It had been absurd: the waiting room, the Pinkertons, the scared shitless social workers in the corridor,
the policemen and their flashlights. When I stood next to Rocky and looked down at my drinking buddy, I saw the end as it would be for everyone. Fuck right I didn’t want to tell my husband about Harry.
    “Who did it?” he asked.
    “Rocky said it was a client.”
    “Jesus, why would someone do that?”
    Whoever killed the caseworker wasn’t important, and it was immaterial that Hendrix had become the target. It could’ve been any of the social workers at the DSS. The perpetrator could have been any one of our clientele. Authorship was extraneous; it wasn’t crucial. Something else had been, and it was this: I had seen in Hendrix’s unseeing eyes the hex of a snitch.
    I could only guess that my fellow co-worker had failed to deliver on a bargain struck between himself and the other party. The social worker, distracted and self-centered, hadn’t fulfilled a promise, something that meant everything to his client.
    “What are you going to do about this, Charlene?”
    The light from the window facing the street slanted across Frank’s crewcut hair, his hunky shoulders and chest.
    “I’m just doing my job, and I’ll ride out whatever fucking nonsense that comes. What else is there?”
    A woman’s word was her life. If someone didn’t come through in our line of business, you could forget charity and forget about human decency. The devil would have his due and on a certain day, if you didn’t take care of the tri-flings, you’d end up bleeding to death on the dirty brown linoleum floor in the waiting room.
    “It’s just one of those calls that turned out bad,” I said. “The grapevine has it, Hendrix refused the guy benefits. He thought the data on the application was a crock of shit.
Hendrix blew it. The first time you do that, can also be the last time.”
    “Petard called here yesterday.”
    “That’s not funny.”
    “Why would I make a joke like that?”
    “I don’t know…ah, hell, don’t mind me. It’s just…shit, he shouldn’t do that.”
    “Well, don’t take it out on me.”
    I was suspicious, hearing my boss had phoned. I didn’t even know how the dickhead got our number. It was unlisted; nobody at the office had it.
    It was seven in the morning and things were turning ill-starred. Scarily, I didn’t mind. I thought about my briefcase bursting with food stamps stashed away under the bed. Frank had assured me that he wasn’t selling any of them on the street. And Petard? He was weakening. That’s why he was reaching out to me, to get his hooks into me and to drag me under with him.
    “What did he want?”
    “It was like he was drunk or on anti-depressants. He kept slurring his words, and he wouldn’t finish his sentences.”
    Petard was on a binge. In the past, when I wasn’t married, I’d accompanied him on several prolonged drunks. They’d been loads of fun. But things had changed, and who knows what he would have made of Frank.
    When my boss and I had been close, he’d evaluated my choice of spouses with a