"Scott Wolven - The Underdogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolven Scott)

= THE UNDERDOGS
by Scott Wolven

Co-published with Plots With Guns
http://www2.netdoor.com/~ansmith


After my wife divorced me last August, I left upstate New York and drove west. I passed gray cities and towns and felt sort of numb, with an intense desire not to see anyone I knew. My steady relationship with pills and booze was as close to a true marriage as I'd ever get, and as any drunk will tell you, real intimacy with liquor is best achieved in solitude. My plan was to hole up in Seattle, but money wore thin before I made it. I took a job as a fence cutter on a three hundred acre farm outside of Moscow, Idaho. The country out there was just mile after mile of grain and lentil fields, surrounded by the Rocky Mountains. The hard work suited me fine - I'd done a couple construction jobs back East and was handy with a chain saw. I rented a one bedroom, cinder block apartment that bordered some trailers on the north edge of town and settled into the lifestyle of a functional alcoholic. I drove out to the farm early every morning, worked all day, and bought my whiskey and beer from the package store on the ride home. In the space of two weeks, I was giving a neighborly wave to recognizable trailer tenants and making sure I didn't hit their children with my pickup truck when I pulled in front of my apartment in the late afternoon. And although I'm no prince in this life, I passed on a midnight offer of drunken sex from one of the semi-married women who always seemed to be out on their trailer porches, sitting, waiting for something. Life had lost a lot of its shine at that point and I didn't think encounters with angry husbands or boyfriends would be the right way to polish things back up.

I'd been there about a month when somebody knocked on my door around lunchtime on a Saturday. I opened the door and it was Gary-Greg. He was a big, sumo wrestler of a man, with curly brown hair and massive arms. He was wearing jeans, a denim long-sleeved shirt and a tan hunting vest, with black cowboy boots. He'd introduced himself to me one afternoon when I was drunk on my front porch, said he lived in one of the trailers with his girlfriend and her infant son and sold real estate for a living. I couldn't remember if his name was Gary or Greg and silently referred to him as Gary-Greg every time I saw him. He was one of the people I occasionally waved to as I pulled past the trailers. I smiled and he half smiled back. He nodded.

"Busy?" he asked. His voice was deep.

"No, not really," I said. "Come on in." He stepped over the empty case of beer and sat on my ratty couch. I sat in the chair across from him, sipping my beer. The once-blue fabric on the chair was so threadbare, the wood frame showed through. "Want a beer?" I asked.

"No," he said. He looked at his watch. "I got a proposition for you and I need a fast answer," he said.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'm listening."

"Good," he nodded. "Want to make five grand?" He watched me.

I scratched my chin. "Legal?"

"Sure, it's all legal," he said. He pulled out a wallet and handed me a business card. Greg Newell, Bounty Hunter and Skip Tracer, the card read. There were license numbers on the card, indicating he was registered with the State of Idaho.

"I thought you sold real estate," I said. I sipped my beer.

"I do. I also have an Amway distributorship. But this bounty hunting thing, that's where you make money." He nodded.

I looked at the card again. "How do you pronounce your last name?" I asked.

"It rhymes with jewel," he said.

"Newell," I said, rhyming with jewel. "Newell."

"You've got it," he said.

"Greg Newell," I finished.

"Right," he said. He smiled.

"So what's this about five grand?" I asked.

"There's a guy downtown right now, he's wanted by the US Marshal's." He pulled a small post office wanted poster from his vest. It was the tear-off type, half the size of sheet of typing paper, printed on thick, white card stock. He handed the poster to me. I looked at it. The wanted man's name was Ed Hurd.

"How do you know it's him?" I asked. I finished my beer and set the empty bottle on the carpet.

"I saw him. I'm trained to be observant. He's Ed Hurd. I recognized him from the picture." He pointed at the wanted poster in my hand.

I looked at the poster again and read what Ed Hurd was wanted for. He'd shot some cops during a Providence, Rhode Island, bank robbery in the middle nineteen eighties. A couple years ago, he'd shot three more cops in Chicago when somebody recognized him and tried to arrest him. I looked at his picture. He was a short, muscular white guy, with a crew cut and a flat face. The poster said there was a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for his capture. "What do you want me to do?" I asked.