Friend of the Devil by James D.F. Hannah

Author:James D.F. Hannah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

Chapter 23

The EMT wheeled Teddy Oklahoma out of the pawnshop on a stretcher. I watched from a vantage point on the curb where I smoked a cigarette and waited for the cops to arrive. I had dusted off a clean spot on the pavement, kicking off the largest shards of glass from the shattered pawnshop window.

The EMTs rolled the stretcher, and Teddy screamed at me, “You son of a bitch! You fucking shot me in the goddamn foot! You ruined my goddamn boots! You shot me in the fucking foot!”

I watched as they loaded him into the back of the ambulance. About the time the ambulance drove away, Deputy Holland Oates pulled up in a county cruiser. He came out of the car with his service weapon drawn. He used the open door as cover, crouching behind it and aiming the pistol at me in the V of the door.

“Drop your weapon!” Oates said.

I took a drag on my cigarette. “I’m not holding a weapon, Deputy. I’m holding a Marlboro. Which you might consider a weapon against my lungs.”

“I am not fucking with you anymore, Malone. Put your hands in the air where I can see them.”

“If you got out from behind that door, dumbass, you could see my hands fine.”

Deputy Oates kept the pistol level in my direction. “Goddammit, are you trying to get shot?”

I pulled the last bit of carcinogens from the cigarette and flipped the spent stick toward the alleyway. “Trying to, no. Is it possible it’ll happen? Sure. But I’m a white man in southern Appalachia, and we seem all but bulletproof against cops, no matter our ignorance.”

Oates rose slowly, gauging his next move. The pistol and the baseball bat lay beside me. His eyes bounced between them and me, and when he seemed to think I wasn’t about to make a move for either of them, He slipped his weapon back into its holster and came around the cruiser toward me.

From the sidewalk gave you the best perspective of damage. Giant chunks of display case glass were scattered across the floor. The flat-screens were nothing but spiderwebbed displays now. Stanley leaned in a blank spot where there had been a wall of video game consoles and held a wet paper towel against his forehead. The consoles were piled on the floor in hunks of broken plastic. There was a bullet hole in the middle of a cuckoo clock, and the cuckoo hung at the end of its extended arm, seeming to contemplate one last jump.

Oates sat next to me on the sidewalk, and he shook his head. “You are nothing but a fucking pain in the ass, Malone.”

I considered lighting a new cigarette and decided against it. “Play to your strengths, I guess.”

He glanced back at the collected damage. “You did all that shit yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s that hippie friend of yours?”

“Elsewhere.”

“Goddamn. You must have been a man possessed.” He leaned forward a little. “You might be unaware of this, but my father, he owns this pawnshop.

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