Rose Madder by Stephen King Page B

halfbreed cockgobbler with a very troubled life. I think you better tell me what I want to hear, don’t you? And what I want to hear right now is what kind of problem you’ve got. Say it right out loud.”
    â€œI’m up on a dope charge,” the man with the Errol Flynn moustache said. He looked sullenly at Daniels. “Sold an eightball to a narc.”
    â€œOoops,” the man with the tennis ball said. “That’s a felony. It can be a felony, anyway. But it gets worse, doesn’t it? They found something of mine in your wallet, didn’t they?”
    â€œYeah. Your fuckin bank card. Just my luck. Find an ATM card in the trash, it belongs to a fuckin cop.”
    â€œSit down,” Daniels said genially, but when the man with the Errol Flynn moustache started to move to the right side of the bench, the cop shook his head impatiently. “Other side, dickweed, other side.”
    The man with the moustache backtracked, then sat gingerly down on Daniel’s left side. He watched as the right hand squeezed the tennis ball in a steady, quick rhythm. Squeeze . . . squeeze . . . squeeze. Thick blue veins wriggled up the white underside of the cop’s arm like watersnakes.
    The Frisbee floated by. The two men watched the German Shepherd chase after, its long legs galloping like the legs of a horse.
    â€œBeautiful dog,” Daniels said. “Shepherds are beautiful dogs. I always like a Shepherd, don’t you?”
    â€œSure, great,” the man with the moustache said, although he actually thought the dog was butt-ugly and looked like it would happily chew you a new asshole if you gave it half a chance.
    â€œWe’ve got a lot to talk about,” the cop with the tennis ball said. “In fact, I think this is going to be one of the most important conversations of your young life, my friend. Are you ready for that?”
    The man with the moustache swallowed past some sort of blockage in his throat and wished—for about the eight hundredth time that day—that he had gotten rid of the goddam bank card. Why hadn’t he? Why had he been such a total goddamned idiot?
    Except he knew why he had been such a total goddamned idiot—because he’d kept thinking that eventually he might figure out a way to use it. Because he was an optimist. This was America, after all, the Land of Opportunity. Also because (and this was a lot closer to the nub of the truth) he had sort of forgotten it was there in his wallet, tucked in behind a bunch of the business cards he was always picking up. Coke had that effect on you—it kept you running, but you couldn’t fuckin remember why you were running.
    The cop was looking at him, and he was smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes. The eyes looked . . . famished. All at once the man with the moustache felt like one of the three little pigs sitting on a park bench next to the big bad wolf.
    â€œListen, man, I never used your bank card. Let’s just get that up front. They told you that, didn’t they? I never fuckin used it once.”
    â€œOf course you didn’t,” the cop said, half-laughing. “You couldn’t get the pin-number. It’s based on my home phone number, and my number’s unlisted . . . like most cops’. But I bet you already know that, right? I bet you checked.”
    â€œNo!” the man with the moustache said. “No, I didn’t!” He had, of course. He had checked the phone book after trying several different combinations of the street address on the card, and the zip-code, with no luck. He had punched ATM buttons all over the city at first. He had punched buttons until his fingers were sore and he felt like an asshole playing the world’s most miserly slot machine.
    â€œSo what’s gonna happen when we check the computer runs on Merchant’s Bank ATM machines?” the cop asked. “We’re not going