Read Online The Fool's Run by John Sandford - Free Book Online

evenings. It wasn’t that he was hustling all the time. He’d go to a party, sit on a couch. Twenty minutes later the most interesting women in the place were hustling him. One told me it was his eyes, big dark pools under an unruly shock of black hair. His eyes were still dark, but now, against his starved face, they looked almost lemurlike. His hair had thinned and was shot through with streaks of gray.
    The last time I heard about him, a mutual friend said he was spending his days in out-of-the-way bars.
    “Why don’t you buy me a drink?” I suggested as we shook hands.
    “Sure. If you want to crawl through a dive. I’ve got about four dollars on me. On the other hand, you could buy me a drink and we could go someplace decent.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I’m buying.”
    We skipped the aging elevator and took the stairs down.
    “You’re looking good,” he said. “Still training? Shotokan?”
    “Yeah. How about you?”
    “Shit, do I look like it?”
    “Hey, you look like you’re doing okay.”
    He grabbed my coat sleeve on the bottom landing before we went into the lobby.
    “Kidd, my boy, we have had some interesting times together, so don’t bullshit me. I look like a wreck. I can’t get a reasonable job. My wife dumped me and moved to L.A., and I don’t blame her. Let’s go have a couple of drinks, but no bullshit.” He was pleading.
    “All right. But I need to know something right now. How bad is the booze? You a drunk, or what?”
    Dace laughed, a high-pitched whinny that wasn’t quite a giggle. “Jesus, if I was only a drunk, I’d be okay. But if I take a fourth drink, I puke all over myself. Can’t keep it down. The doctor says it’s an allergy. Says I’m lucky.”
    “Okay. So let’s go have two or three.”
    Dace worked at the Post back in the Watergate days, when everybody there was young and hot and tough. He was an investigator specializing in the Pentagon. He had a nose for dirt. He did one story after another, probing the cozy relationship between the generals and the industrial complex. Then he found a big one. A group of ranking Army officers helped a defense contractor cover up critical faults in a particular run of artillery shells. Correcting the problem would cost a bundle. The Vietnam War was obviously winding down. If it had ended soon enough, the defective weapons could have been routinely retired and nobody would have known. But the war didn’t end soon enough. A dozen grunts were killed by the friendly fire.
    Dace had a leak, a disgruntled colonel with some combat ribbons of his own. The story was big. A brace of generals—a total of three stars’ worth—and a half-dozen colonels found themselves looking for work. Dace was on his way. Or so he thought.
    But the Pentagon was tired of Dace Greeley. When another story surfaced, even bigger than the first, Dace had it cold and had it exclusively. The Post ran it big, and it turned out to be a figment of someone’s imagination. Supporting documents were fraudulent; sources denied their quotations.
    Dace was held up as an overstepper, a reporter more intent on success than on the truth. Watergate had come along by then, with Nixon’s attacks on the press. Everything had to be squeaky clean. The Post dropped Dace like a hot potato. Nobody wanted to hear about a conspiracy of military bureaucrats: who believes in that kind of fairy tale?
    He went West for a year, worked on a solid, smaller paper, but he wanted Washington. There were no newspaper jobs, so he wound up in public relations. He was bad at it, but he was cheap and persistent, and eventually built a semipermanent relationship with a sportsmen’s lobbyist group.
    “I can live with myself,” he told me over the first drink.
    “You ever think about a book? A solid piece of work? You could do it.”
    “Who’s got the time? I have to eat,” he said. “I’ve got alimony. I’m four or five months behind, but it’s out there. I’d need two years to do something