Four for the Money by Dan Marlowe

Author:Dan Marlowe [Marlowe, Dan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4118-6
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 1994-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The next morning a series of dull clunking sounds woke me. When I turned over in bed, the first gray light of dawn was coming in the window. I opened the door of my unit, and there was Smitty, stripped to the waist in the morning chill, busy with a shovel, scooping out dirt for his forms. I’d forgotten that in prison he used to do his muscle-building exercises before the rest of the population had staggered upright to contemplate the new day.

After a quick shower I tossed a mess of bacon and eggs onto a big skillet, then called Smitty inside and sat him down. I knew he was a man who really destroyed food. Eating was a serious business to him. He was no gourmet, fortunately, which was a good thing with me wielding the skillet. I’m what I call a good subsistence cook.

Since Smitty appeared serious about taking hold of the project of constructing the unfinished units, it seemed a shame not to take advantage of it For one thing, it would help to relieve an uneasy feeling I had about Proch. This was his town, and he undoubtedly swung some weight in it. The contract gave me a year to complete the units, but if I didn’t make a start on them, there was always the possibility that Proch might try for a writ of replevin before a friendly judge on the ground that his equity was being depleted by my ineptitude. With Smitty out there actually hammering nails, Proch could hardly have a legitimate complaint.

While Smitty was on his third cup of coffee I went outside to my car and operated with the glove compartment’s screwdriver on the fender well. I removed two thousand dollars from the fast-shrinking cache. Back inside I tossed the cash on the table in front of Smitty. “Since you seem bent on doing it, let’s do it right,” I told him. “Go downtown this morning and buy a secondhand pickup truck, because there’s a lot of stuff that will have to be brought over from Oscar Berg’s.” I explained about Sprochlov’s operating the only decent building supply business in the area and being a brother of Proch. “Once you’re connected with the work here, I have a hunch that Sprochlov’s will be out of everything you need.”

“Then while I’m downtown I’ll pick up enough two-by-fours an’ two-by-sixes to make my forms,” Smitty said. “You have a concrete man here day after tomorrow, an’ we’ll be ready to roll.”

“That soon?”

“Nothin’ to it,” he assured me.

“The world took seven days, you know. Don’t break your back.”

“Nothin’ to it,” he repeated, and left the table to return to his shovel. I thumbed through the Yellow Pages of the phone book and telephoned three contractors at nine o’clock, not the ones listed in block type with ads alongside, but three who seemed to be smaller operators. I asked them to come out to the Blue Ace and talk to Rory O’Toole about cement work.

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