Read Wild Thing: A Novel for Free Online Page B

purposes other than serving food. * This place isn’t necessarily that—I’m sure the world is full of restaurants that come by their shittiness honestly—but it’s strange.
    “Check it out,” Violet says.
    I follow her eyes to a sign on the wall: “KEEP COMPLAINING. IF THE LIGHTS GO OUT, I’LL KNOW WHERE TO AIM.”
    Violet says “What the fuck is wrong with this place?”

EXHIBIT C
     
    Debbie’s Diner
    Ford, Minnesota
    Still Thursday, 13 September
*
     
    Slamming back into the kitchen, Debbie Schneke wonders if you are for
fucking
serious. First Dylan and Matt fuck up the run to Winnipeg—come back
lit up
, they’re on so much fucking meth—then JD forgets to flip the “OPEN” sign, and two goddamn
cops
come into the restaurant.
    Just as she’s got three thousand tabs of pseudoephedrine ground up, washed, and mixed with brake cleaner in an Erlenmeyer flask on the counter.
    The whole fucking kitchen’s a disaster. What’s the special today—Frankenstein? And she’s supposed to cook a fucking
hamburger
for a
cop?
    Debbie goes to the screen door that leads out back. Through the mesh she can see a bunch of the Boys sitting on crates and trash cans and shit, but she knows they can’t see her. If they could, they wouldn’t be lounging around like monkeys.
    “FUCK YOU!” she screams, sending some of them scrambling.
    Debbie doesn’t even know if it’s safe to turn on the gas for the grill. She doesn’t think the mash has reached the stage yet where it plus propane turns into that shit they gassed people with in World War I, * but how the hell is she supposed to know for sure?
    Her decision: the gas stays off. Fuck the cop. She’ll microwave his hamburger. If he even
is
a cop. Him and that lady look like FBI or DEA or something. They’re too sexy for regular cops. Debbie wonders how long they’ve been fucking each other, and whether their spouses know.
    Oh, and—Oh, no way. No fucking WAY. Even if she microwaves the burger, how is she going to cook the fucking BUN? Or the French toast for the lady-cop? God DAMN it!
    Debbie goes beyond herself with fury. Yanks open the door of the walk-in refrigerator: Matt Wogum and Dylan Arntz, both bound and gagged with duct tape, blue and sluggish looking from the cold. Not even shivering anymore. One
more
thing she has to worry about.
    “God DAMN you!” she screams, and slams the door. This is all their fucking fault. She can’t believe she ever trusted them.
    What would be
enough
for these goddamn kids? She already feeds them, fucks them, and buys them cable. What else do they need? Debbie to jam an Xbox up her cunt, so they can multitask?
    And all she ever asks of them is to be one slightly
fucking
bit cool—and DON’T SNORT THE MOTHERFUCKING PRODUCT.
    Matt Wogum she’d known was hopeless. Even though he’d done the Winnipeg run with Greg Bierner a dozen times, he’d claimed he never noticed Greg was using. For that alone Debbie would have had him killed along with Greg, only then there’d have been nobody alive who had made the trip. At the time it seemed smarter to keep Matt around.
    Wrong
, what else is new. Dylan, the best one she had, the most trustworthy—the one who sometimes still goes to high school, who Debbie gives handjobs to because he’s too shy to come in her mouth—goes on
one
fucking trip with Matt Wogum and comes home too fucked up to blink right. Him and Matt Wogum telling some bullshit story—which, now that Debbie thinks about it, is probably true—about how
Wajid
, the fucking Yemeni kid, hadn’t been able to get the pills from the warehouse of his cousins’ pharmacy on time because the cousins were getting suspicious, but wasn’t willing to let Matt and Dylan wait at his apartment because he was holding a goddamn
religious meeting
there.
    That’s the problem with the goddamn Yemenis. They’re only in it to send money to Hezbollah or whatever. It’s not their money, so it’s not their problem. They don’t act like