Don Claire was a hack, and he was proud of it.
He owned his own car. He paid his dues to
dispatch at the end of each shift; he worked when he wanted, which was often
seven days a week. Like a postman, come rain or sleet or snow, D.C. was on the
road; the weather did not matter, even on a stormy night like tonight, with the
rain flooding the gutters on Lake Street, he was ready to go roll.
He
didn’t have a family, he was just an Irish orphan, supposedly from County
Claire in the old-country; everyone who knew him called him D.C..
Don Claire liked going by his initials, not
because they were his, which they were. It was not because he had any
connection to the District of Columbia, which he did not. He like the moniker because
he was fast, like an electric-current; like a charged battery, he plugged in all
day and all night.
He preferred to work the southside of the city,
in the neighborhood where he grew up. He enjoyed thee nostalgia of pass the
Washburn Home for Boys on the hill above tangle town where he was raise.
At that very moment D.C. was waiting on
Lyndale Avenue for a fare to come his way. He sat in his cab with a thermos of
coffee watching the rain fall-thick as a velvet curtain from the dark and starless
sky.
There
won’t be much money to make tonight, he thought to himself…but whatever money
was to be had, D.C. was determined to get his piece of it.
So
he waited.
He
read the funny pages.
He
smoked.
He
listened to a little Glenn Miller on the radio.
He waited some more...
Eventually
a call came over the radio. It was just a courier’s gig, but D.C. didn’t mind,
running packages paid a lower rate, but it meant he was working. And there was
a pick up down Lake Street, off 3rd; pick up and deliver to a hotel
downtown/ D.C. knew the drill, the dispatcher trusted him to be professional
and so he often took these kinds of calls…it might be a package of powders or
it might be a live-girl. More often than not it was both, and though the rate
was low, there was usually a good tip at the end, which made it more than
worthwhile.
He rolled to a stop in front of Miller Field
where the game had been called off. Traffic was backed up for a few blocks, but
not because of the storm. There was some kind of police action taking place in
front of the Round-up.
D.C. called it in, and the dispatcher informed
him that a kid who worked at the Round-up had been struck by lightning and
killed out on the street in front of the bar.
D.C. felt a little mystified by that, it’s the
sort of thing you read about in the paper’s not the kind of thing that happens
down the street.
The dispatcher told him that the kid was
trying to make Karl Thorrson pay his bill after getting tossed out of the bar, “The
balls on him,” he said.
“Oh great…,” D.C. said to the dispatcher. “That
means the bullets might start flying…you might have warned me.”
“Not until the storm is over,” the voice
crackled over the radio.
D.C. figured he was right.
He slowly pushed his way to a parking spot near Franky’s and waited a moment for the package, which came in a brown paper bag with an address smudged on it in pencil.
Just the powder, he thought to himself as he backed up and pulled away.
Buy
Now on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment