The Adjustment by Scott Phillips

tomato. “I’m paying, where the hell do you get off saying no to a free piece of ass?”
    “Hey, fellahs, not in the hallway, please,” the girl said, trying to usher us into the room. “There’s still citizens live in this hotel.”
    “I’ll get a cab,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
    “How about you?” he asked Park. “You a fucking water lily too?”
    “I’ll have me a piece, sure.”
    “Good. Go on get in there. Ogden, you’re fired, you lousy little queer piece of shit.”
    Without turning around I waved them goodnight. This wasn’t the first time he’d fired me in such a state, and in the morning he’d be lucky if he remembered enough to regret it. Everett Collins didn’t know it, but he’d just sent me on a much-needed vacation.
     
    I HAILED A cab on North Main and told him to drive out toward Red’s. I shouldn’t have gotten to thinking about Italy, where I was my own boss, even if several thousand men could legitimately claim to have the power to give me orders. I pulled from the inside pocket of my sport coat a letter I’d been carrying for two weeks, from my old buddy Lester, stationed now in occupied Japan. After the usual pleasantries and perfunctory asking after my family, he got to the real gist of the matter:
    You ought to be here, Oggie, there is action all the time and guys arriving looking for a game or a girl or a fix and man oh man its wide open. Local enforcers are all on the run and that’s the way it is going to go around here till they get thereselves ready to re-join civization. Come on back to Mother Army, Oggy, all is forgiven. If you re-up there is strings can be puled and you will end up here and not Europe where the game is already winding down.
     
    Red’s was no busier than I’d have expected on a Tuesday. My b-girl Barbara was sitting with the off-duty bartender who’d given me the dirty look before, and she made a point of looking away from me when I passed by. I was almost glad for her, and it simplified things around Red’s if she wasn’t looking for another turn.
    I didn’t see any other girls that appealed, though. I hurried through a whisky soda and stepped outside into the night air, warm and still for a Kansas March. I was on the verge of going inside to phone for a cab when I saw what looked like an old friend sitting in the far corner of the lot. It was a 1916 Hudson, a Phaeton Super 6, identical to the one I’d owned as a boy, painted white or something near it. Someone had taken good care of it; it gleamed in the moonlight, and I wanted to hear if it ran as nice as it looked.
    Before I’d considered what I was doing I found myself climbing in and fooling with the starter, and then I was driving eastward toward town. The Super 6 ran as well as mine ever had, and I wished I could congratulate the owner; maybe someday I would; maybe I’d even let on that I was the one who’d stolen it that beautiful spring night back in March of ’46.
    What the hell, I was going to Kansas City to get my ashes hauled and to talk to the owner of the Nonpareil Photographic Studio. Lester could probably use the connection even if I couldn’t.
    I tried not to wake Sally as I rummaged the bedroom closet in the dark, but she wasn’t sleeping well. “You’re packing a bag?”
    “Ssshh. Go back to sleep. Business trip. Five-fifteen train.”
    “You never said anything about a business trip.”
    I buckled the suitcase shut and gave her a peck on her cheek, cupping her left breast as I did so. She smelled like soap and cigarettes, and for just a second I loved her as much as I ever had.
     
    BY THE TIME I abandoned the Super 6 in the parking lot of Union Station, it had started to get cool. Inside I waited in line behind a stout lady in a mink coat topped with a fox stole. The fox’s glass eyes were both loose and hanging from its furry face by what seemed to be strips of rotten suede, and he stared wall-eyed at the early morning crowd while his mistress sorted