Nobody's Fool

way?” Bath would probably lose by more than twenty, but so far twenty was the most Sully’d heard anybody giving.
    â€œYou know Jerry’s brother Vince?” Jocko said.
    â€œYou mean Vince’s brother Jerry?”
    â€œThe one that has the Schuyler restaurant,” Jocko clarified.
    â€œRight. Jerry.”
    â€œHow can you tell them apart?”
    â€œApparently Jerry will give you Bath and twenty points. That’s one way,” Sully said. “Listen, what do I owe you here?”
    â€œNada. They’re samples. Let me know if they make you sick,” Jocko suggested when Sully opened the door and began the slow process of getting out. When this was finally accomplished and Sully’d limped back around to the driver’s side, Jocko was shaking his head. “You know what you should do?” he said.
    â€œNo, what?” Sully said.
    â€œYou should go back into the arson business.”
    Sully pretended to consider this. “It’s a thought,” he said, since Jocko was probably joking. Ever since he’d burned down Kenny Roebuck’s house, people kidded him about being an arsonist. Some of them, he’d learned over the years, really thought he was, thanks to Kenny’s publicly treating the fire as good fortune.
    â€œHell,” Jocko snorted, “if that theme park ever falls through, you’d have clients up and down Main Street. I might hire you myself.”
    â€œKeep the faith,” Sully suggested. “They’ll run again tomorrow.”
    Carl’s red Camaro was parked out front of the third-floor office and so was the El Camino, which meant that Carl was probably inside. Still, that was three flights up, so Sully made a snowball, went out into the middle of the empty street and tossed it at the row of windows that said TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION: C. I. ROEBUCK . The sound the snowball made on the windowpane was louder than Sully expected, and Carl’s face quickly appeared at the window behind the snowball’s powdery smudge. Also his shoulders, which were inexplicably bare. There was movement behind him too, a white, frightened face darting away. Carl raised the window. “I ever tell you what the C.I. in my name is for?”
    â€œYesterday,” Sully grinned up at him. A curtain in the next-door window that represented the outer office drew stealthily back. “Hi, Ruby,” Sully waved. “Happy Thanksgiving.” The curtain fell back into place.
    â€œWhat the hell do you want, Sully?” Carl said. “You’re supposed to be sheetrocking.”
    And you’re supposed to be home, Sully considered reminding him. Instead he said, “I missed you at the donut shop. You probably don’tremember saying you’d meet me there because that was where you were going to pay me.”
    â€œAnd when I’m not there that means you come here and give me a heart attack by throwing snowballs at my office window.”
    â€œIt’s a good thing I did, too,” Sully said. “It’d be just like you to let me walk up three flights of stairs and then not answer the door.”
    â€œWhy don’t I follow you out to the site in half an hour?” Carl said. On his face was a pleading, man-to-man, I’m-in-the-middle-of-something-here, have-a-fucking-heart sort of expression.
    Sully wanted no part of it. “Put the money in an envelope and drop it. It’ll take you two seconds. Even you can’t lose a hard-on that fast.”
    â€œIt must be a long time since you’ve had one,” Carl said. “You’ve forgotten.” He disappeared.
    In a minute he was back again with an envelope. “This is going to land on the ledge, you know.”
    â€œI’ll take my chances,” Sully said. “The money you owe me usually ends up stuck in your pocket, not on window ledges.”
    â€œThis is no way to do business,” Carl said, but he let go of the envelope, which cleared the second-story ledge and Frisbeed out into the street. Sully fielded it cleanly, opened the envelope, extracted the bills. “Before you go I got something else for you,” Carl called down, and when Sully looked up he saw he was being mooned. Carl’s white ass was sticking out the window, and there was the sound of female laughter inside. The ass disappeared before Sully could pack and deliver a new snowball. The window slammed shut.
    Sully was about to leave when he