Страница 24 из 46
That was all right, jumping cars with Bud Long; it was legal, or at least it seemed legal, and Bud knew what he was doing. But then a couple of the other guys started jumping cars when they wanted to go somewhere and didn’t have a ride and it was dumb to get involved in that. Ryan rode with them a few times when they came by for him. They’d drive the car downtown or wherever they were going and leave it. But one time-two thirty in the morning on East Jefferson near the Uniroyal plant-the dumb son of a bitch he was with, Billy Morrison, threw an empty beer bottle out the window with a cop car a half block behind them. They were pulled over, checked, and taken to the station on Beaubien and charged with car theft. Ryan called the older of his two sisters, Marion, whose husband was a lawyer, and told him what happened, and his brother-in-law, Carl, a sweetheart, told him to stay in jail, maybe it would teach him a goddamn lesson. He was arraigned on the warrant the next day, pleading not guilty; his bond was set at $500. But because he couldn’t afford the bond without his brother-in-law’s help, he spent eight days in the Wayne County Jail. At the Examination, Carl talked to Billy Morrison’s lawyer, the two of them standing, nodding at each other with the briefcases under their arms, and before he knew it, he and Billy Morrison had copped a plea of guilty to the charge of Unlawfully Driving Away an Automobile, UDAA, and were sent to Morning Sessions Court. Because it was their first offense, they were both placed on a year’s probation and his brother-in-law took him out to lunch so they could “have a little talk.”
The next day-and this, Ryan figured, must be the world’s record for poor timing-he was back in Morning Sessions sitting on the bench in the fenced-off section with the stew bums and colored hookers waiting to go before the same judge. Not Billy Morrison and Jack Ryan this time. Just Jack Ryan.
It was poor timing and it was also dirty rotten luck of the worst kind because it should never have happened.
He had gone to lunch with Carl for the little talk; he had gone to a movie and then home. He had to go home sometime, so he went home.
They were still living in the apartment in Highland Park: he and his mother and, for the past seven months, his other sister, Peggy, and her husband, Frank, who worked at a bakery on the night shift. Ryan was sleeping on the studio couch in the dining room again. The three of them were there when he got home. His mother told him how worried she had been and how Carl had told her not to visit him in jail or go to the court hearing. He remembered they had already eaten. (They ate at 5:30 because Frank had to leave for work by quarter to seven and he liked to sit and watch TV and let his di
He didn’t go to Safeway. He went to a bar on Woodward up near Seven Mile and drank beer. Maybe they were still talking about the A&P. The way it was before and the way he would always remember it, his father would be in the dining room playing solitaire and his mother would be in the living room with the radio on, the thin, slick-haired man and the lady begi
When Billy Morrison came into the bar, he felt like decking the son of a bitch, but Billy was gri
A gas station. This was about the craziest thing he’d ever heard of. Billy Morrison said, man, like getting your oil changed. The station attendant dialed a number. They waited about twenty minutes smoking cigarettes before a Pontiac station wagon pulled in with two guys in front, young guys, and a girl in back about sixteen with long, tangled brown hair and a tight skirt way up on her thighs. After you, Billy Morrison said, and Ryan got in the backseat with the girl. She was pretty, but she had on too much perfume and he didn’t like her hair; he didn’t like the two guys; he didn’t like anything about it, sitting in the dark with the three of them as they drove south on John R toward Six Mile. The guy next to the driver asked him if he wanted a beer. Well. Why not? He took the warm beer from the guy and the guy said that would be a buck. Ryan said nothing; he paid him. He asked the girl if she wanted some and she said no. That was all she said in the car. The one word. The two in front talked sometimes but mostly to each other and Ryan couldn’t hear what they were saying. He remembered how quiet it was in the car. Then the sound of his own voice asking where they were going. The guy next to the driver said over by a school yard. Sometimes they went to a park or over to a lumber yard, but tonight it was the school yard. There was a blanket in the back, the guy said. Ryan sipped the warm beer. After a minute, breaking the silence again, he asked how much it would be for all this great service and everything and the guy next to the driver, without turning around, said ten bucks.