The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,4

I did have that scar from being stabbed, and I was shot at more than once by unsatisfied johns and once was threatened by a purchaser of black market gasoline who wanted the stuff for free. A colleague of mine made sure he didn’t come around any more, and I never knew exactly what happened, but I have a suspicion that the answer lies at the bottom of the Tiber.

IT WAS A Thursday, and I was looking at the Evening Beacon in Red’s, a roadhouse five miles east of the Wichita city limit on 54. You could do a fair number of theoretically illegal things at Red’s, as long as you knew how to ask and didn’t make a spectacle of yourself. Kansas was a dry state, and if you wanted anything stronger than 3.2 percent beer, you had to go across state lines or to a blind pig or to a roadhouse like Red’s, whose owner paid the authorities well to look the other way. There was an interesting article in the Beacon about a foot somebody found underneath a bridge in Riverside. It was a man’s right foot, the article said, size eleven, and there was a pretty good quote from the elderly fisherman who found it: “I hate to think of somebody gimping around missing a foot.”

The Beacon was a better read than the rival Eagle if you were looking for sex and mayhem. When a car hit a train, the Eagle would report the casualties but the Beacon would be there with a photographer to record the blood and guts and tortured metal, and I felt sure the Beacon’s editors were bitterly disappointed at their failure to get a picture of the foot.

“How’s that pretty wife of yours,” Everett Collins asked me, one elbow on the bar, annoyed that I was reading the paper instead of listening to him.

“Same as ever,” I said. The fact that he wanted so badly to screw my dear Sally was one of several things that kept me employed and relatively free of actual day-to-day responsibility. “How’s yours?”

He stared at me for a second like he was going to lose his temper, then he laughed, just drunk enough to find my impertinence funny. I couldn’t have imagined needling the boss before the war, but I wasn’t scared of him any more. He slapped his palm down on the bar. One of his ears was missing its lobe, having been sliced off in some long-ago cutting scrape he never elaborated on, and that ear always got redder than the other when he got mad or drunk.

“Thinks she’s going to outlive me. When I croak, you make sure the cops take a real good look at her. I got it in my will if I die before she does I want a full autopsy.”

“I’ll see that she gets the chair whether she’s guilty or not.”

He laughed again. “I like that. Maybe I should just have her framed for something while I’m still kicking, then I’d get to watch her burn. You ever see that picture of Ruth Snyder in the chair?”

“No.”

“Some reporter snuck a camera into the witnesses’ gallery, strapped it to his shin, snapped one right when they turned on the juice. Kind of blurry. Strapped into that chair with a hood over her head, body all tensed up with the current running through her.”

“Never saw that.”

“January ’28. I was in New York talking to the bankers the day it ran, took up the whole the front page of the Daily News and I tell you what boy, I had to have a call girl sent up to my room so I didn’t walk into those bankers’ offices with a goddamn hard-on.”

At times like these I almost liked him. Hung over, which was as close as he got to sober any more, he was a surly mean son of a bitch, and much drunker than this he’d be pissing his pants and throwing wild punches, protected by his money and his power in these parts as much as by the presence of Billy Clark, the ex-cop who followed him around most nights to make sure he got home in one piece.

It was only seven o’clock, and I guessed Billy had another seven or eight hours to go. The bartender, an old-before-his-time hillbilly named Jake Bearden with eyebrows like blond sagebrush and deep furrows running from his nose alongside his mouth, looked like he wanted to say something but he kept his counsel.

“I