The Five Pearls (20 page)

Big Bill Hogan sat at his cluttered insurance desk and drank.
“Son of a gun. The dead man’s kid has her money,” he laughed. “Now why in the hell did he leave that old lady a chunk of it, too? Doesn’t make any sense to me. She was nothing to him.”
He sat at his desk for another hour until the whisky bottle and his brain were both empty. He was too drunk to drive home now.
But then again, everybody in America drives drunk. The odds are with me.
He careened to his feet, put on his suit coat and waddled to the door of the office. He stared back at the empty whisky bottle on his desk and cursed it.
“Nothing but grief from you,” Big Bill complained. He managed his way back to his desk and fumbled with the buttons on the telephone. A voice answered on the other end. “Honey? It’s me. Can you come pick me up? I’m too drunk to drive again.”
He pulled the receiver away from his ear as a scratchy female voice yelled at him. After a short tirade, his exasperated wife said she was on her way.
About the author

Barry James Hickey
was born in Chicago in 1955, lived in his twenties in Colorado and spent over a decade in Hollywood. He has always had a passion for writing. Besides successful careers as a screenwriter, musician, stage, film and television actor, he enjoyed a few years as an alternative high school English teacher on which this story is based. His adventures have taken him to such exotic locales as India, Thailand, the Philippines, Greenland, Greece and Turkey. He presently lives in Colorado with his wife and two dogs.