Read Online Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter - Free Book Online

out of the orphanage—but that was different, because every man ought to be able to defend himself, with his fists or a knife or a gun or whatever came to hand. That was basic. No, he wished he had some
talent
, like Billy’s for pool, that would make him as busy with himself as Billy seemed to be. And anyway, a talent like Billy’s was worth money; that was the end result of talent—you made money against the less talented. So there he was again, back to the old need: money.
    Last night had been a failure. Fun, yes; but they had searched the house from top to bottom and found no ready cash at all. Of course, there were a lot of things they could have stolen and tried to sell: clothes, radios, phonographs, several cases of liquor (none bearing the Oregon State Liquor Tax stamps, Denny had noted with admiration), and more canned and dried foods than Jack had ever seen outside the orphanage, as if the Weinfelds expected another war and wanted to be prepared. But Jack and Denny had ditched the Cadillac and had no intention of going near it. They had even wiped their fingerprints off it, feeling both sheepish and hip. They couldn’t walk through residential streets carrying goods, even before dawn. So they had gotten drunker, played the radio, fooled around, cooked some food in the kitchen, and then slept. They had played rock-scissors-paper for the right to sleep in the big bed on the main floor and Denny won, but unfortunately fell asleep with one of Weinfeld’s big Cuban cigars in his hand and burned the gold satin coverlet pretty badly before the smell woke him up. There were three bedrooms upstairs, two obviously girls’ rooms, and Jack had slept in the boy’s room, so drunk he didn’t even bother to take his shoes off.
    But no money!
A day and a night had passed, another day was passing, and nothing had changed. He did not even have enough to buy some lunch. Of course he would not starve in the poolhall; he could always bum twenty cents for a hot dog; but that wasn’t any good. All his stuff locked up in his hotel room, the clothes he was wearing getting rancid (it had been a delight showering in the Weinfeld’s amazing five-spray, tiled shower, but when he put his clothes back on he could smell them, and they seemed damp against his skin, disgusting)...in fact, his whole life, since he had quit his second job two weeks before, had been rapidly going down the drain.
    He had been working as a delivery boy for a blueprint company, and quit after an argument with the manager. The manager, a gray man with yellowish eyeballs, had accused Jack of taking money out of petty cash. Jack had taken the money, all right—all the delivery boys did, as a matter of course—but he knew it could not be proved and he denied it. When the manager still looked suspicious, Jack told him he could take his job and stick it up his ass. Then he demanded the wages due him and walked out. He had hated the job anyway; running all over downtown Portland with huge unwieldy rolls of blueprints, always running, never enough time to walk, then sweeping the place out and having to put up with the bossiness of the printmakers, who for lack of any real authority tried to push the boys around. And besides, the place smelled of heat and chemicals, and nauseated him. He could not understand how people could work there and even claim they liked it.
    Since then he had been living on his wits, and not doing a very good job of it. Now he was really up against it, for the first time in his life; really at the point where he had to decide if he was going to let
them
run his life for him (as
they
always had in the past) or whether
he
was going to run it. So far, since his romantic dash for “freedom,” he had run it right straight into the ground. How easy it would be to just give up and let
them
take over again. Go back to the orphanage where he had a bed and meals and clothes issued to him, where he worked because they told him to work, went to school