Karaoke Rap by Laurence Gough

Author:Laurence Gough [Gough, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

23

Ozzie had forgotten to lower the blinds. The sun woke him early, but he managed to roll out of the sack and stagger over to the window and drop the blinds and fall back into bed without actually waking up. He slept until the ringing telephone woke him at just a few minutes past noon.

“Ozzie?” It was Dean. The shooter. He sounded excited, pumped. He reminded Ozzie this was the day they’d been waiting for. He pointed out that this special day was already almost half over. Was Ozzie sick or something?

Ozzie said, “I was up late, okay?”

“Wanna go somewhere, Denny’s, get some breakfast?”

Ozzie said, “Forget it. Dinner, maybe.”

He hung up and went back to bed, but the damage had been done. He was wide awake; there was no way he was getting back to sleep. He kicked free of the blankets, went into the bathroom, showered and shaved, washed his hair. He liked his hair cut short, but had let it grow the past few months, so it came down almost to his shoulders. As soon as he finished with Harold and Dean, he was going to get himself a military-style crewcut. Get his ear pierced, buy a gold hoop. Wear his Detroit Tigers baseball cap backwards. Create a whole new personality to go with his new look. Be a nice guy, someone gentle and kind, considerate.

In the kitchen, he made coffee, sliced a poppyseed bagel in half and shoved it into the toaster. Fucking Dean. The kid lacked patience, had to be kept on a real short leash, couldn’t be depended on for more than a minute or two at a time. He became aware of a stream of dark-blue smoke rising from the toaster. The smoke alarm stuttered uncertainly and then broke into a full-bore scream. What a racket! As if the goddamn Three Tenors had kicked in the door for an impromptu sing-along. He burned his fingers trying to fish the bagel out of the toaster, desperately yanked the plug out of the socket.

He waved yesterday’s paper at the smoke detector, trying to clear the air.

Nope, that wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t shoot the thing, either — too damn noisy.

He opened the living-room window and then went over to the door and yanked it open, and there was Thomas, the building’s chubby gnome of a maintenance man, crouched low in the hallway.

Thomas stood there, master key in one hand and fire extinguisher in the other, a startled look in both his close-set eyes, vodka fumes leaking from his open mouth. Ozzie glowered down at him, thrust a j’accuse finger at him and shouted, “What’re you, the bagel police?” Thomas flinched, and backed away. An ex-Hungarian, he’d fled his mother country back in the late fifties, when the Russkies invaded and the tanks started burning. The fifties were a long time ago, but he still suffered pangs of guilt. Ozzie had told him to let it go, that he was a man ahead of his time. It was the nineties.

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