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Falconer 73<br />
forty-five-thousand-dollar house in Leavittown, a great wife and<br />
two great sons: Michael and Dale. But I was in this bind. People<br />
with your kind of life style don’t ever understand. I didn’t<br />
graduate from high school, but I was up for an office in the<br />
mortgage department of Hamilton Trust. But nothing was<br />
moving. Of course, my not having an education was a drawback<br />
and they were laying people off, left and right. I just couldn’t make<br />
enough money to support four people and when I put the house<br />
up for sale I discover that every fucking house on the block is on<br />
the market. I thought about money all the time. I dreamed about<br />
money. I was picking dimes, nickels and pennies off the sidewalk. I<br />
was bananas about money. So I had a friend named Howie and he<br />
had this solution. He told me about this old guy—Masterman—<br />
who ran a stationery store in the shopping center. He had two<br />
seven-thousand-dollar pari-mutuel tickets. He kept them in a<br />
drawer beside his bed. Howie knew this because he used to let the<br />
old man blow him for a fin. Howie had this wife, kids, a woodburning<br />
fireplace, but no money. So we decided to get the tickets.<br />
In those days you didn’t have to endorse them. It was fourteen<br />
thousand in cash and no way to trace it. So we watched the old<br />
man for a couple of nights. It was easy. He closed up the store at<br />
eight, drove home, got drunk, ate something and watched TV. So<br />
one night when he closed the store and got into his car we got into<br />
it with him. He was very obedient because I was holding this<br />
loaded gun against his head. This gun was Howie’s. He drove<br />
home and we lock-stepped him up to the front door, poking the<br />
gun into any soft part of him that was convenient. We marched<br />
him into the kitchen and handcuffed him to this big Goddamned<br />
refrigerator. It was very big, a very recent model. We asked him<br />
where the tickets was and he said they was in the lockbox. If we<br />
pistol-whipped him like he said we did, it wasn’t me. It could have<br />
been Howie, but I didn’t see it. He kept telling us the two tickets<br />
was in the bank. So then we turned the house upside down looking<br />
for tickets, but I guess he was right. So we turned on the TV for
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