Read Online Bangkok Knights by Collin Piprell - Free Book Online Page B

out of proportion to the circumstances. I guess it was
because he felt at a disadvantage, not speaking more than the most basic
Cathouse Thai.
    “Nothing,” replied Eddie, with a smirk as ugly in its own
way as #37’s smile. “Only telling her what a prince you were; what’d you
think?”
    Dexy took a long, hard look at Eddie, and momentarily the
oilman’s bluff, hearty persona dropped away, and you caught a glimpse of
something starkly dangerous. Then he roared with laughter, and turned back to
the bar. “Big Toy, let’s have a drink, goddammit; orange pop for my friend,
here, another one of these here for me, and another tequila for yourself. And
you better give Eddie a beer.”
    He turned around again, but Eddie had already moved away
to the other end of the room, where Leary was talking to some guys.
    “Oh, well, yeah. Just a couple, you know,” Leary was
saying. “Gosh-darned things hardly cost anything at all, anyway. Little bit of
food, some clothes. Like that. Maybe look after their schooling.”
    Seemed he was talking about kids — slum children who’d
been orphaned or else just abandoned. Some kind of foster-parent program that Nancy had gotten involved with. She’d had Leary convince Doc he should host a special night
at Boon Doc’s to help her off-load some needy children. Doc had said he would,
sort of in lieu of taking on a kid or two himself, since it was already all he
could do to maintain his own extended association of perennially needy kinfolk.
    But Doc still hadn’t turned up, and Leary had probably
recognized that soon everybody would be long beyond thinking about child
adoption, they were having such a good time. So he’d broached the subject
himself, a fairly heroic action for this notoriously voluble advocate of
Leary’s Law.
    Leary had already been embarrassed by his own admission
that he and Nancy were sponsoring two of these waifs. Embarrassed by his
embarrassment, then, he compensated by broadcasting the following directive in
his best Moses voice, scowling at his audience all the while: “You all want to
do your bit, and help out, here. Darn it These kids got every right to a
friggin’ life just like you do, and all they need is some of your spare change;
it’ll make the difference between a life worth living and years of nothing but
misery. C’ mon. Gosh, you don’t even need to have them underfoot; all you have
to do is sign one of these little papers, here, and write a pitiful little
check once a month. Or you can do it all in one lump sum — it’s hardly anything
at all—and set up a kind of trust for the tyke, and not be bothered any more.
Here — we got lots of these papers behind the bar, here. C’mon, gosh-darn it.”
    Leary had turned quite florid with his own eloquence, and
he was sweating profusely. He grabbed a fresh drink and rubbed the icy glass
back and forth across his fevered brow before downing it in one go and slamming
it back on the bar. He wiped at his face with a hanky and glared at everybody
within range.
    Meanwhile, Dexy had sashayed over to see what was
happening.
    Leary pointed a finger at him and boomed, “Dexy, you’re
going to take one of these kids, you hear me? Nothing else you ever done in
your life is any credit to you, you got to be the first to admit that. Just
this once you’re gonna do the right thing.”
    “You can go to hell, old buddy. I got enough on my plate
without taking care of some rug-rat You want to have kids, a bunch of rug-rats,
then you go ahead. But you should have your own. You adopt one of these here
poor trash, you don’t know what you’re getting. Yuh know what I mean? They
could be sick, and you might not know it. It could be the genes, you know. They
could have genes — bad ones, I mean.”
    This time I was sure I could hear Eddie grinding his
teeth.
    “You can look on it like a kind of tax,” Leary persisted.
“It’s not like you gotta bring’ em home with you—they got other people to look
after