Nobody's Fool

the keys to the El Camino. “You drive,” he said.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with Alpo?” Peter wondered as he backed the El Camino out of the parking space and headed for the street.
    â€œI want to be sure,” Sully said, tearing the cellophane off the package. “This particular dog might not like Alpo.”
    Following Sully’s instructions, Peter headed out of town. Sully found the vial of Jocko’s pills in his pants pocket. From the plastic tube he extracted two capsules and buried them in the mound of hamburger. “That oughta do it,” he said, “don’t you think?”
    Peter looked at the meat blankly.
    Sully couldn’t help grinning. There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn’t understand something. His young philosophy professor at the college was that way, pretending he understood the sports talk that was always under way when he entered the classroom. “Maybe you’re right,” Sully said, extracting a third pill. Two had done the trick for him, but he wanted to be safe. He added the third pill to the hamburger. “Pull in here,” he said, pointing to the yard where Carl Roebuck kept his heavy equipment. “Go around by the back gate.”
    Peter did as he was told, still not comprehending.
    â€œStay here,” Sully said, and he got out.
    Rasputin, Carl Roebuck’s Doberman, was already snarling and leaping at the fence. Sully checked along the bottom, looking for a gap big enough to slide the hamburger through, while Rasputin, foaming at the mouth, lunged at the fence with undiminished fury. Finding a space, Sully set the package down and pushed it under with a stick. Rasputin stopped barking for about two seconds, long enough to inhale the package ofhamburger in one impressive gulp, then resumed his attack on the fence.
    â€œI hope you have better dreams than I did,” Sully said, recalling the one Peter had awakened him from the day before.
    â€œI can’t believe it,” Peter said when Sully climbed back into the El Camino. “I just helped you poison a dog, didn’t I?”
    â€œNope,” Sully said. “For one thing, it wasn’t poison. For another, you were no help. Your part comes later. We got time for one beer though.”
    â€œWhy not?” Peter said, with the air of a man whose day couldn’t get much worse.
    â€œYou had dinner?”
    Peter admitted he hadn’t.
    â€œGood,” Sully said, suddenly feeling hungry. “I’ll buy you a hamburger.”
    â€œI’m not sure I want to eat one of your hamburgers,” Peter said, pulling back onto the blacktop.
    Back at The Horse Wirf was right where Sully had left him. There was an episode of
The People’s Court
on the television above the bar, and Wirf and half a dozen other regulars were trying to predict how the judge would rule. This was an evening ritual. The regulars had a running contest to see who guessed the most correct decisions. Wirf was currently in fourth place behind Jeff, the night bartender, Birdie, the day bartender, who sometimes stuck around after her shift ended, and Sully, who wasn’t a big believer in justice and usually just flipped a mental coin between the defendant and the plaintiff.
    â€œThe defendant’s an asshole,” Jeff was saying. Jeff was opinionated and pretty good at predicting how things would go in the court. “The judge will never rule for him.”
    Birdie shook her head. “This is a court of law,” she said. “Being an asshole is beside the point.”
    â€œThat’s where you’re wrong,” Wirf said. “Judges don’t like assholes any better than you do.”
    Since Wirf hadn’t seen them come in, Sully nudged Peter to keep still while he snuck up behind his lawyer and kicked him hard in the calf of his prosthetic leg, so hard the leg flew off the rung of the bar stool and ricocheted off the front of the bar. “Jesus Christ!” Peter gasped, the same look of horror on his face as when he had realized his father’s intention topoison the dog at the yard. He couldn’t decide which was more bizarre, that his father would sneak up behind a man and kick him or that the kicked man registered no pain.
    â€œMove,” Sully said, sliding onto the stool next to the man he’d just kicked. “How come you always gotta take up two