Free Shoveling Smoke by Austin Davis Page A

the flat end of the axe.
    “What if I miss?” I asked.
    “Clay, there’s a woman back in town that’ll kill me sure as we’re standing here if she sees me with these handcuffs on. Now, I hope you don’t miss, but I’d a hell of a lot rather have a bashed hand than a slit throat.”
    I remembered the phone calls from the angry woman with the razor. “You know some dangerous women,” I told him, taking careful aim with the axe.
    “That’s the only kind God makes,” he replied.

CHAPTER 10
    Hardwick Chandler talked all the way back to town. His words came fast and high-pitched, with the vowels hemorrhaging in all directions, East Texas fashion. Talking was breathing to him; topic after topic tumbled out of him, each one dying away with the end of a breath, to be replaced by a new one unrelated to whatever had come before. He asked me questions about myself, my career, my law school days—we had both attended Baylor Law, though he had gone before me—and gave me no time to answer. He loved sports cars, he said, and expressed admiration for the Austin Healey, into whose passenger seat he was barely able to stuff his amazing bulk. He fiddled with all the instruments and ornaments he could reach, hunting with quicksilver fingertips for ways to unscrew or unsnap them. He offered to buy the car if I would name him a price, but before I could do so, he was asking me about the restaurants in Houston. He announced that he was a gourmet and loved a good meal almost as much as he loved the ladies. And that brought him back to his one recurring topic. Women.
    “Women,” he explained, “are my sole reason for living, my raison d’être. God help me, I love ’em. I love every single goddamn
part
of them.” He turned toward me in his seat. “You ever noticed the backs of their knees? The
backs,
not the fronts. I love the backs of a woman’s knees. I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t ticklish there.” He stuck his head into the slipstream and gave a rousing whoop.
    “That Deirdre,” he said, thumping the outside of the car door, “she could have been a contortionist!”
    Gilliam Stroud was right: Wick Chandler was hooked on nookie. I tried to ask him about the other woman, the one on the phone with the razor, but he got in ahead of me with a joke. Had I heard about the old boy who went to the costume party naked on roller skates and said he was a pull toy?
    What a contrast he was, with his rapid-fire speech and manic movements, to his partner Stroud, whose every utterance and gesture seemed carefully crafted, even when he was drunk. The only thing the two men’s conversation seemed to have in common was the ring of insincerity. They were both born liars. Perhaps that was what had drawn them together.
    Wick got onto the subject of ostriches. “You ever eat ostrich meat?” he asked. I told him that I had not. “It tastes a lot like roast beef, but it’s got only a fraction of the cholesterol of chicken meat. There’s not much about an ostrich that you can’t use. You can make boots out of their skin, clothes out of their feathers. They’re a fucking miracle.”
    Right now, according to Wick, it was a breeder’s market, because there weren’t any sizable herds. But one day there would be herds of ostriches bigger than any buffalo herd of the past. “Look out there, Clay,” he said. “Imagine those hills black with ostriches.”
    It was difficult to picture.
    “You can sell a live, fertile ostrich egg for almost a thousand dollars,” Wick said. “A pair of breeding chicks can go for upwards of three thousand. Takes money to set up an ostrich farm. Emus are getting to be pretty big, too, though I can’t see why, the shaggy bastards.”
    Wick explained that ostriches had become the preferred currency of the drug trade. “It’s true, Clay,” he insisted. “Look here, you’re a tax lawyer. What happens to any transaction involving more than ten thousand dollars in cash?”
    “A little bell rings at the