My pop always told me it's best to try even when you're sure it ain't gonna work out. That's how I got the gig working the delivery circuit; I just kept bugging Link, the fella in the blue pants. I reckoned he was a real professional. I've seen plenty of hobby hunters in my day and he didn't strike me as one of them. See, weekend pleasure killers are more often than not just frustrated folk waking up before the crack just to stroke their woodies for armaments. They clean their rifles three times before Sunday and won't shut up about balance and range and stupid stuff like that. My cousin Jimmy, he's a groundskeeper at some golf course in North Carolina, shoots gophers with some piece of shit .22 when the club starts complaining. He couldn't give a dog's pecker about the make of his weapon, just that it does the job. And Link, he treated that rifle of his the same way. It was beat to hell and hadn't seen love or a display case since the background check went through. It put the quarries to sleep and that's all that mattered.
The way he told it, Link had been some problem child in Pennsylvania a while back. In and out of juvie, that sort of thing. Turned 18 and wound up on the wrong side of Oklahoma where he started chatting up what he thought was a French girl in some hick bar. Turned out she didn't speak English because she was one of them, all dressed up in people clothes 'cuz she got loose of some real estate dick who'd been using her pheromones to sell houses. It's hard as hell to say no when a man's got amorquendam juice all over his handshake. Her owner shows up in the bar and she takes to running. Link, still thinking he could get laid by her, follows her and tries to play the hero. Out in the parking lot she backflipped off a car and nearly tore Link's throat out. He managed to knock her cold before she could do any real damage. From then on, the real estate guy started paying him to round up fresh ones.
Business being what it is, Link got himself a reputation and a list of clients to go with it. Demand got so high he had to hire a driver just to bring all the catches around in the truck while Link did all the hunting. It just so happened that Bobby, the kid he had driving, got his spine rearranged by a Spotted Northern specimen in the woods outside Fargo about two weeks before Yuma. Lucky for me, I guess.
The gig paid pretty well. I got 7% of the sale and a quick delivery bonus if I made it catch-to-door earlier than scheduled. I've always been good with procedure, so the job was a snap. Link bagged the stoics, usually no more than two at a time, and we did a double-check test to make sure they'd be asleep for a while. Then we'd take them back to the garage or storage unit we'd rented, then tag them with the right code after making sure they had all the right teeth, tits and toes. Then I'd grab some sleep while Link stayed on watch.
You never, ever leave a naked stoic lesbian unattended. Not unless you wanna see some craziness straight out the Bible.
Amateurs waste a fortune on lorazepam for the delivery run. Sure, it keeps them quiet, but caramel has the same effect. Some kind of weird physiology thing, I dunno. A buck-fifty of gas station candy can put a stoic in a soft coma for 43 hours easy. On deliveries I drove and Link slept. The man could stay awake for three days at a time on a hunt, but put him on the road and he couldn't keep his eyes open long enough to finish Side A of a Stooges tape. For the first little while he didn't let me bring the orders to the door alone, but once he saw that I got the image down he eased up.
Truth is, I was always more personable than Link. Sometimes I'd catch him standing beside the truck just staring down at the delivery. Like he was trying to figure something out, like he was looking for something. I never did decide which was scarier, the stoics who might wake up at any moment or Link smoking Luckies alone in the middle of the night, thinking.
Printer-friendly version