“And he says,” Leo said, “he says, ‘Bullshit. Those tires’re all fine. They’re all that’s keeping that thing afloat.’ Which is when it occurs to me, maybe I better look at the tires, I’m gonna tell stories like that. I did. They were all fine. I wished I thought of doing that a little earlier, maybe before the cop showed up, so I didn’t try something dumb as that.”

“What’d he do?” Malatesta said.

“The fuck you think he did?” Leo said. “For Christ sake, you’re a cop. The fuck’d you do? You’d write me up. You oughta know.”

“Yeah,” Malatesta said, “I guess I would’ve. I don’t think the same I used to.”

“He ran me in,” Leo said. “Driving Under, Driving So As To Endanger. Drunk. The usual stuff.”

“What about the passenger?” Billy said.

“Locked him up to sleep it off,” Leo said. “Let him go the next day. Which was when, of course, I hadda call Fein.”

“Well,” Billy said, “you are a sorry son of a bitch if you had to call Fein, and I don’t rate your chances none too good if that jamoke’s going to defend you at a trial in a court of law and all that stuff.”

“Billy,” Leo said, “I admit to being stupid. You yourself can ask me, and I will personally admit it. I only got an eighth-grade education and the stuff was gettin’ a little hard for me the year before that. The nuns down Our Lady of Victory practically made a public announcement and printed it in the newspaper that Leo Proctor was thick as shit and would never get anywhere except in jail, and they should’ve known they were right in the first place when they let him in even though his father was English but they hoped his Irish mother maybe gave him some sense and she didn’t.

“Well,” Leo said, “they were right about the jail, but they were wrong about the other part, because I have gone and I have transcended what the nuns give me to the point at which I probably owe various people close to half a million dollars if I was to sit down and take the time to add them up, which I am not about to do, on account of how I do not need that shit.