The Adjustment Read Online Free

things worked in the big city. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
    We went across the street to the drugstore and sat down. “Anything you like, boys, it’s on me.”
    A couple of uniformed officers were enjoying their complimentary breakfast at the other end of the lunch counter, and glancing at the brothers, they surely pegged them for the recently sprung drunks they were. Back at the pharmacy counter I could see the pale, baldheaded druggist staring daggers at the freeloading cops. He hated giving away those free meals, and locating his drug store across the street from City Hall turned out to be the worst mistake he’d ever made.
    The Gertzteigs ordered up t-bones and fried eggs, sunny side up, and hash browns and toast, both of them, and they attacked the meals when they came in exactly the same order: potatoes, eggs, toast, steak. They weren’t twins, as far as I could tell, but they matched each others’ motions pretty well. I wouldn’t have wanted to get into a fight with them, especially with a wobbly drunk like Collins on my side.
    “So here’s the deal, boys. You know the old man you hit?” I asked between mouthfuls of corned beef hash.
    “Only hit the old guy but the one time,” said the bigger of the two. “In the ribs.”
    “Once’t was enough,” said his brother.
    “We wasn’t mad at him so much, it was his friend.”
    “The old man feels bad you spent the night in jail, and he wants to give you a little something to get home on.” I handed them each an envelope containing a fifty dollar bill. Examining the contents they grew more slackjawed than before.
    “Golly damn,” said the bigger one. “That’s purt square of a feller just lost a fight.”
    “He doesn’t want you boys to walk away from Wichita thinking that’s the way things usually go in the big city. Now can I give you boys a ride to wherever your car is so you can get on back to Butler County?”
     
    I DIDN’T BOTHER phoning Collins to tell him about it. He’d grouse about the expense and indignity of having to pay off the cretins who’d broken two of his ribs, but in a day or two he’d see the logic of it, and he’d be as grateful as I was for the knowledge that the Gertzteig brothers had no idea of the identity of their assailant-turned-benefactor. And my next task was unpleasant enough without Collins making it worse. By ten AM Billy Clark had already been before the judge and released, and I called him on the phone and told him to meet me at Red’s.
     
    I WAS STASHING the receipt for the boys’ bail in my inside overcoat pocket when I noticed an envelope I’d almost forgotten. It was addressed to WAYNE OGDON COLLINS AIRPLANE CO. WITCHATA KAS, and it had nonetheless managed to make its way to my desk a mere two weeks after someone mailed it from Salem, Massachusetts, a town I had never visited and from which no acquaintance of mine had, to my knowledge, ever sprung. I guess I’d had it sitting there in the pocket for a week or more, some irrational sense of dread having stopped me from opening it when I saw it laying there on top of some reports I didn’t intend to read.
    Inside was a penciled note, crudely printed in block letters:
    YOU SON OF A BITCH THIEF THERES’ BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. ERUOPEAN LADYS ARE DELICATE AS FLOWERS.
     
    Something went sour in my stomach, and I tried to put it down to the corned beef.
     
    THAT NIGHT WE sat in Billy Clark’s usual booth. It was another quiet night at Red’s, but we were familiar enough from our visits with the old man that the b-girls didn’t bother us, though one of them kept giving us cold, appraising looks that gave me the fantods. “What are we going to do about this?” I asked him.
    “Don’t know,” he said. He had two black eyes and a split lower lip, and his right index finger was in a little metal splint wrapped with surgical tape.
    “You should have told Mr. Collins when he hired you that you couldn’t fight worth a damn.”
    “You didn’t