Taking It on the Lam by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Unholy Trio

My partners and I only got together to take care of business.

It’s best that way for reasons one uninvolved might not imagine.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is a minor one. Breakneck Bill and Stoneyard Steve are not their real names, and I’m not the nosy type. They call me Li’l Dill, not because I’m a pickle freak, but because they like goofing on my hero worship of John Dillinger, and also because they have no interest in knowing my real name. Goof as it is, I find L’il Dill to be preferable to my real birth name of Eugene Franks.

Bill and Steve have a lot in common, though neither of them knows where the other lives and doesn’t want to know. They are content to be lone wolves, crooks, and some say hatchet men, though I doubt the latter amounted to anything other than a trumped up charge and/or a need for self-defense. It’s not anything about morality. It’s just the pragmatism of not wanting to bring down upon one’s self the fury of deranged murder investigations. Sure, robbery gets investigated too, but not with the fanatical zeal attached to murder. There is no benefit in grandstanding unless you’re a legal provider of entertainment, and even then it can get tricky due to certain crowd and “comrade” expectations. Sam Spade may have said it best with; “When one of your organization gets killed, it’s bad

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business to let the killer get away with it.” It’s not personal.

You just happened to be there, that’s all.

We meet up through the message board at Pop Tate’s General Store. Pop likely knows what’s going on, but he hates the Feds with a passion he usually reserved for the pansy Commie infiltrators. He says; “Truman says that ‘the buck stops here.’

That’s the one thing he’s not lying about. The bucks stop right in his office, and gets disbursed to his cabinet and their contributors. It never makes it to the rest of us, for whom the Great Depression has still not ended.”

Pop lied about his age to get into WWII, wrongly thinking at the time that it was the ultimate fight of good versus evil. He was pushing fifty in late forty-one, when the US finally got involved in “Europe’s war,” but got away with saying that he was thirty. He came back with a Purple Heart and a land mine induced limp on a plastic and metal leg which “acts up” when it’s humid.

While he was gone his idle farmland was sold off for mortgage arrearages, at less than 25% of the low assessed value to the mayor’s chief counsel, Merrill Garfinkel. Unsubstantiated rumor which I wouldn’t try to dare confirm says that Pop had a wife and a couple of kids who fled to parts unknown after the re-possession, blaming him for queering their lives. Pop now lives in the three rooms above the store, which he rents on a month-

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to-month basis from Garfinkel’s “secretly owned” corporation; Repo USA, Inc.

Sometimes I think that he might have met Breakneck Bill and Stoneyard Steve while he was in the US Army, but this can’t be verified as true without imposing upon their desire for anonymity. There does seem to be a trusting comradery which is fostered best by deeds done while lives are on the line in combat. The only thing I know for sure is that Pop once told me that I was a replacement for an original partner who quit. He wasn’t the greedy sort, lived modestly, and had accumulated enough to last him for some time. With the business arrangement in place this was no problem. Life membership was not required when one is in no position to broadcast their partners racket.

I remembered how we once shared a point of view about a newspaper story.