Read Online Squid Pulp Blues by Jordan Krall - Free Book Online

coughed.
    Tommy put the car into gear and stepped on the gas. The car’s tires lost traction for two seconds but then regained control and moved quickly down the block. Jake turned his head and kept his eyes on the back windshield. A thin blanket of snow covered most of the window. “I can’t see a thing.”
    “What happened? Who’s following us?” Tommy’s voice was calm though inside he was as frantic as his friend. He knew that he had to balance out Jake’s emotional outbursts with a good amount of composure.
    Jake kept looking though he could barely see through the snow. “I don’t know. Everything got fucked up. It wasn’t my fault, no fucking way.”
    “Yeah, okay, calm down. What happened?”
    Turning to the front, Jake moved the rearview so he could keep an eye out. “Everything was going great. I was telling Aaron the whole plan and he seemed into it or at least that’s what I thought just by the way he was acting. But then Peachy walked in and everything got fucked up.”
    “Christ almighty,” Tommy whispered. Okay, I’m not going to freak out. I know damn well Jake’s a paranoid motherfucker. Stay calm…stay calm.
    “How the fuck was I supposed to know Peachy would be out already? He was supposed to do at least half of his time.”
    Tommy nodded his head. “Yeah, well, apparently he got out early. So go on, what else?”
    “I was nervous to begin with, then he walks in and just stares at me, fucking smiling at me. I lost it. I don’t even remember what the fuck I said. I just ran out.” He ran his hands through his hair.
    “What’d Aaron do?”
    “He looked at Peachy and then he said something like ‘I’ll have to think about it’. That was it. They smiled at each other and I just fucking ran out.”
    Tommy threw his hands up. The car jerked to the right. He put his hands back on the wheel. “And you RAN out? Jesus Christ…”
    “I’ve been in those situations before, I know what that fucking means. I’m not a complete idiot, you know. Trust me on this, will ya ?” Jake looked at   Tommy, waiting for an acknowledgement. Tommy kept his eyes on the road, careful not to get into an accident on the snowy, congested streets.
    “Jake, I trust you.” As it came out of his mouth, he realized that his tone betrayed the message even though he believed that statement whole-heartedly. “All I’m saying is that you might have, MIGHT HAVE, over-reacted. Look, is Peachy a back-stabbing prick? Yes, but that still doesn’t mean that he’ll cause problems at every step of the way. You could’ve stayed cool, kept talking to Aaron. Now they both know you’re fucking freaked out. There’s no doubt now that someone’s coming after us. Even if it’s just to ask why the fuck you ran out.”
    Jake sighed. “I don’t know, man. You know that creepy sonovabitch better than I do. Doesn’t he still blame one of us for that shit?”
    A year and a half ago Tommy and Jake worked a job for Peachy. The job went south and the two of them got pinched. By sheer luck, they were let go because the witness couldn’t, with one-hundred percent confidence, identify Tommy and Jake as the culprits. They were released soon after.
    However, someone had left a dirty diaper behind at one of the job sites and a dirty diaper at a crime scene meant only one thing to the Thompson Police Department: Peachy was behind the whole thing. With as much diligence as they could muster on a weekend, the cops cornered Peachy at the local pool hall where he was showing his fellow patrons how far he could stick the pool cue in his ear without damaging a single brain cell. He was arrested without incident but had squealed on Tommy and Jake as soon as he was taken into the station. Since they had already released those two and didn’t want to make it appear that they had made a mistake, the cops ignored Peachy’s accusations and charged him for the whole thing.
    In Tommy’s opinion, the two of them had every right to be pissed