Mohawk

afternoon, three days before the biggest trial in the history of the tri-city region, the Mohawk County district attorney called a press conference to announce that all charges against Randall Younger were being dropped because the prosecution had zilch. Then, after telephoning theSelective Service, the district attorney went south on vacation. He had three weeks coming and intended to use every minute of it.
    The media were still gathered outside the courthouse when Randall Younger was taken from his cell to the second floor for final processing of his release and the restoration of his valuables, a wallet with forty-two dollars cash. From the window above the street, Randall looked down at the mob scene in the street. Directly below near the front of the crowd were two men in sedate three-piece suits and sunglasses. They seemed far more patient than the rest, and for some reason they reminded Randall of the Cobras, who had lounged idly at the base of Nathan Littler’s statue outside the junior high. He slipped his wallet in his pocket.
    “Well,” said Dominic. “That’s it. Say what you want when we get outside. Don’t be afraid to rub it in.”
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” Randall said.
    “Go ahead,” said his lawyer. “Piss away. You’re a free man.”
    The men’s room was two doors down and nobody followed Randall in. A single window high on the wall opened on the alley in back of the courthouse. There was also a vertical drain pipe.
    The reporters and the two men in the conservative suits had to settle for zilch.

65
    Benny D. had a rough night, and as usual it was all Dallas Younger’s fault. He’d started looking for Dallas eight o’clock the night before, and when the sun peeked through the trees around seven the next morning, Benny was still looking. Somewhere in the course of the long, dark night he’d forgotten precisely why he was looking for his friend and sometime mechanic, but it would come back to him eventually, and in any event the quest itself had proved sufficiently absorbing.
    Dallas hadn’t been to work in the three days since his kid’s release and disappearance, but word of his exploits had filtered back to the Pontiac dealership. The first night Dallas had closed down a bar on the Albany road and was so drunk that he backed his car into the Mohawk River, barely escaping with his life. Somebody had called Benny D. the next day and he’d taken the wrecker to haul it out. Dallas himself wasn’t there, but for some reason the car was, its rear wheels and trunk underwater, its front wheels and hood on the dry bank. To Benny D. the car looked like it was trying to climb out of the river on its own. It took him an hour to haul it onto the highway and back to the lot at the Pontiac dealership, where he locked it up safe behind the chainlink fence. He would’ve asked thecops to drag the river for Dallas, but somebody claimed to have seen a man clawing his way up the muddy bank, and the police were inclined to go with the hypothesis that Dallas had made it.
    Indeed he had, for no sooner did Benny D. sit down at his desk than simultaneous reports of Dallas’s activities began to come in from such far-flung corners of the county that Benny D. began to suspect that his friend had died and spawned nine new alcoholic lives. At the Fall Inn he bought drinks for everyone in the house and disappeared before the bartender could collect. At Greenie’s he was said to have cornered Untemeyer in the sour men’s room, pinned him against the wall and forcibly removed a valuable diamond ring over the man’s chubby knuckle.
    Since Benny D. figured Dallas was having a hell of a good time, his first instinct was to join up. No one was more fun than Dallas on a binge. Unfortunately Benny D.’s wife, who three years before had walked out on him for the second time, had suddenly reappeared. He was so surprised and, at the moment, delighted to see her that he unthinkingly promised to mend his ways and act right. He promised other things, too, things he knew he would regret deeply, but which could not be undone. In Mrs. Benny’s three-year absence she had taken an associate degree in business, and as one of the provisions of her resumption of wedded bliss obliged her husband to turn over to her day-to-day management of the garage and dealership, along with the checkbook. “I don’t even get to write no checks,” he asked. “We’ll see,” she answered.
    Still, all around, he was