Read Online Clown Girl by Monica Drake; Chuck Palahniuk - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t come across as a joke. We were each in our own private cold sweat. That’s the problem—a cop is a loaded question. Let one cop in, and the rest of the picture is a whole new story.
    AT HERMAN’S, I TRIED TO CALL REX AGAIN FROM THE phone in the kitchen. Italia stopped licking peanut butter off a knife long enough to say, “Herman wants to know when you’re going to get on with your chores.” Her skirt barely covered her ass. She dropped the knife in the sink.
    “He asked you to ask me, or what?” I said.
    “Look, Herman can be an easy touch, and you’re a sad case. But that yard’s gone to weeds waiting for you to make a move.”
    With one ear to the phone, I put a finger to my other ear.
    “You heard me, clown.” She looked in the fridge and showed me her back, that cascade of ink, the geisha and blue waterfall. It looked as though a smaller, more demure woman in a tiny landscape stood in our kitchen.
    I picked up a dead fly from the windowsill. When Italia’s back was turned, I floated the fly on her coffee. The oldest joke in the book: Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup? Looks like the backstroke, Miss . Nyah, nyah, nyah.
    I took the phone to my room and called again. The machine picked up: “Yello, yello, yello! We’re off to the races, kiddos…” I lay on our mattress while the sun dropped lower outside my backyard windows, and I said an incantation: Call me, call me, call me .
    The third time I called, a man answered. He didn’t sound like a clown. There was no fun in the rasp of his voice. “Ain’t here,” the man said. “He’s out.”
    Rex was always out. “Could you ask him to call Nita?”
    “Will do.” Before I could get in another word, with a click the line went dead.
    Then I heard Italia sputter and cough in the other room. “Jesus Christ. Clown Girl!” She kicked my bedroom door open with one muscled leg. A canvas of Rex fell from where it leaned against the wall and hit the ground with a smack. I started coloring on the Missing Rubber Chicken poster again, fast.
    “What?”
    She said, “Don’t mess with my food.”
    I said it again, “What? I didn’t do anything.”
    She even had knotted muscles in her face, her cheeks. She said, “Look—mess with my food, and I’ll kill you. No joke.”

6.
    We’re All Chaplin Here
    “IT’S FOR YOU, NITA,” HERMAN CALLED.
    Ta da! Rex! It was about time. I ran for the phone; my bare feet slapped against the worn floorboards of Herman’s old house. “At last,” I said, breathless, into the receiver.
    “Now that’s a reception,” Crack coughed back, her voice in my ear. “Listen up. I’ve got a chief gig, a big check here. They want the three of us. A package deal, see? If one falls through, we’re all sunk. So go to Goodwill, get yourself an undersized suit coat—smallest one you can get your bones in—and a pair of baggy pants. Black. They’ve got a pile of’em. Meet us in the lobby of the Chesterfield, 6:30 tonight. Got it?”
    “Got it,” I said.
    She said, “What’s a matter? I hook you up with a sweet deal, you sound like I stepped in your birthday puddin’.”
    I said, “No, no, I’m glad. I just thought…”
    “Ah, you’re missing your man, is that it?” Her voice was a finger jabbing me in the ribs. “Well, the bigger the dog, the longer the leash. Let him roam,” she said. “Listen, here’s the lemonade to the story, right? With Rex out of the way, we can run this town. Take over the whole King’s Row. By the time you see his mug again, we’ll be flashing the cash. He’ll love you for that, see?”
    Right. I said, “Thank you. Thanks for bringing me along.” Before I met Crack, I advertised with an index card on a corkboard at the old Pawn and Preen, and got maybe one job a month.
    “No balloons this time,” Crack said. “No tricks, and no excuses. Leave the chicken, the popgun, and the exploding gum at home.”
    The chicken. Plucky. I wished Plucky were home.
    “This is the