Read Online The Speed Chronicles by Joseph Mattson - Free Book Online

runaway mom. Believe me, if the situation was reversed there’d be divorced dads support groups all over the case, but believe me too when I say nobody likes a runaway mom, especially when the youngest one wasn’t even talking yet when I left and Kurt has trained her to call me Torie instead of Mommy, and Kurt’s new wife Perfect Stacia gets called Mommy. Stacia who totally had her sights set on Kurt way, way before I split, who was licking her chops like a Doberman eyeing a three-legged kitten when she heard I’d blown. Like I give a shit anyway.
    â€œWe could get it,” I tell him.
    glen
    My first thought was: kill Jerry and make it look like a stickup, take the money and the woman both. Jerry’s always treated me like a schmuck, even when I’ve helped him out of a couple of legal scrapes, including one serious count of selling liquor to a minor. That one was no walk in the park, and all he did when it was over was piss and moan about the bribe money he’d had to lay out. And then there was the question of Frank Sinatra’s desiccated organ. I was tweaking when I got hold of it, and I’d been tweaking ever since, and Jerry’s dismissive attitude slammed home the obvious fact that I had no way to prove whose junk I was carrying, short of calling up Frank Jr. and asking for a DNA sample. The fantasy mountain of pure crystal and pussy and cash created by the tectonic activity of my overstimulated cerebral cortex collapsed instantaneously into a crevasse of despair and cheap-ass street meth. I had hit the wall, and just as I was running out of crank.
    Yeah, I could have killed Jerry with no compunctions.
    chuck
    It is easy enough, I suppose, to underestimate the intelligence of a man who sells pot next to a dumpster behind the Choose’n’Save, especially for someone like Glen, who thinks himself a sharpy in the vein of a Hugh Hefner or a Warren Beatty or a Gary Hart. You know the kind I mean. When he sees a woman that pleases his eye he sets that eye on her until his filthy ends are met, then he loses interest in that particular lady who no doubt is or was the most precious flower of another. He did this to my own precious flower six years ago, when my girlfriend Gretchen was facing a charge of possession with intent to distribute.
    Marijuana. Cannabis sativa . I was a slave to it as much as to her at that time; the fact that she had an ounce and a half of it on her person upon her arrest was strictly due to my own baleful influence. Enter, in the outward guise of savior, my friend (I thought) Glen, hotshot attorney and drinking buddy, occasional purchaser of my wares. He worked the case without recompense, for which I was grateful.
    Then, six months later, Gretchen and I were going at it hammer and tongs over her little dachshund Tami’s tendency to shit in my loafers—I did hate that awful farting bitch something fierce—when she pulled out the big rhetorical guns and announced that yes, in fact, Glen had charged a fee, and that it had involved her mouth and his organs of regeneration. I threw her and Tami out. Ever since I have been waiting for the moment (never really believing it would come) when I might pay Glen back for his perfidy.
    torie
    Jerry keeps a couple of grand in cash taped to the underside of his sock drawer, which is stupid. Right? Isn’t that stupid? That’s the kind of guy Jerry is. Smart and stupid both, sometimes in the same sentence.
    glen
    The woman was a mess and she smelled like chicken soup and swamp water, but she was the first human female in close to a year who’d consented to lay with me free of charge and I wasn’t about to fuck that up, especially when she looked ready to fly the coop on Jerry. It cost me the last of my meager stash to get her out to the Lexus, where I explained to her about the five hundred dollars and the cold medicine. She didn’t have it, she told me, and she pointed out that if we borrowed