Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) by Jesse Sublett

want my doctor to get that twenty bucks. I don’t. Whaddya say?”
    “Go on a diet. Try oat bran.”
    “Come on, man.”
    “It’s not my problem. I don’t need the stress any more than you do. I just got off the road and I’m trying to reassemble my love life. Getting involved with this isn’t going to help that any. But mostly, I don’t trust you.”
    I got up to leave. He looked disappointed. Sweat poured off his forehead and plastered one of the curly strands of hair to an area just to the side of his right eye, suggesting a deep gash in his head. He made a fist and ground it into the table.
    “I wish I had some money to offer you, Martin. I don’t have more’n fifty bucks petty cash. Business been slow. I could give you a thousand bucks after I get the record money, should be some time next week. Whaddya say?”
    “We’ve all got problems. I don’t need yours.”
    “All right, fine, Martin,” he drawled, a big pout on his face. He stubbed out his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke over me as I got up. “You’re no more’n a little fixture in this town, you know, and you ain’t gonna get no bigger.”
    “You’ve got better things to do than try to hurt me.”
    “I don’t fucking need to, man. You’re just a goddamn bass player, rehashing the same shit every night with a bunch of white boys trying to do something black people do a hell of a lot better.” He grinned. “Ain’t the only thing they do better, what I hear.”
I felt my neck stiffen as his grin widened.
“Say, how was that black pussy, anyway?”
His head rocked back like a bowling pin when I slugged him.F
     
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    The next morning I went back to work at the collection agency. I didn’t want to, but we’d been stiffed by the last couple of clubs on the tour and the money from Sunday night’s gig had to go toward road debts. I had thirty-nine dollars in my wallet and a lot of dirty laundry. Welcome home. There was the An- tone’s gig this weekend and I had some money in the bank, plus I was expecting a royalty check from a song I’d co-written that was going to be a B-side of a single coming out on CBS in a couple of months. But a little running around cash would help, and with the resources at the collection agency I might be able to find out a little more about Retha Thomas and also Vick Travis, if I was so inclined.
    Lone Star Detectives and Collection Agency had moved into a little rectangular building that used to be a Mexican restaurant just down South 1st from my apartment. The detectives operated out of a small building just in back that was formerly a tortilla factory. The two buildings were now connected by a narrow corridor that doubled as a break room. I could smell the coffee burning in the bottom of the urn as I sat at the desk in my cubbyhole, trying to readjust. It was hard.
    I’d ridden, driven, and slept beside over eighteen weeks of highway, seen cars go off mountaintops, marriages break up, club owners go into DTs, flattened rodents broiling on the blacktop. There had been two or three governments overthrown, four US diplomats kidnapped or shot or both, a half dozen Texas savings and loans gone under, a number of wildlife species declared irrevocably extinct. But the office was the same. There was still an office fat girl pushing doughnuts and brownies to everyone who passed her desk, a bosomy redheaded divorcee who regularly teased me about accompanying her on one of her bimonthly Vegas junkets, a trailer house redneck who went to church every Sunday and K-Mart every Saturday, a couple of yuppie-wannabes who worshipped the Beatles, subscribed to Architectural Digest, and yearned for Volvos.
“It’s good to have you back,” said Jack Green, the office supervisor. “I guess you know what to do.”
“Sure.”
“We got a new computer system. You notice?”
    I shook my head. He did a poor job of hiding his disappointment. Just like the time I hadn’t jumped up and down