Another excerpt

From the Scrooge book:

 

“Eb!  For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you now?”

“What?”

Allie rolled off of him and punched the pillow a few times before she flopped down, arms crossed in front of her. which only served to showcase those perfect breasts, propped up on the ledge of her forearms.  “Look if you can’t be bothered, neither can I.  What are you looking at?”

“Your tits.”

“Well stop it.”

“Why?  I paid for them.”

She rolled her eyes.  “Want them back?”

Eb laughed.  “No, they look pretty but they feel like oranges.  They’re too hard.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Not your fault, Allie.  I don’t see why they can’t get them right, considering how much they cost.  Anyway I was thinking of Izzy which always puts me off sex,” he lied.

She shrugged and got up to use the bathroom.  He reflected that there was nothing at all wrong with her ass, which he hadn’t paid for.  Go figure.

The phone rang.  It was Cratchit.  “This had better be important, Bob.”

“I thought you would like to know, sir.  Your former partner, Jacob Marley?  He’s dead.”

“Dead?  Wasn’t he just threatening to sue us?  Bastard can't make up his mind, can he?”  Eb chuckled at his own joke.

“He’s committed suicide, sir," Cratchit said with that annoying solemn half whisper people used when talking about things like suicide or cancer or bankruptcy.

“Shame all our expensive clients don’t take the same route.  It’d save us a lot of time and trouble.  Thanks, Bob.”

Figures that Marley would choose Christmas Eve to off himself; he was always such a drama queen.  Scrooge remembered the day he dissolved the partnership, and Marley babbled something about chains and responsibility like some drug-addled old hippie.  Scrooge’s attorney told him he was better off out of the partnership because Marley was probably insane, though frankly it didn’t matter if Marley was howling at every full moon; Scrooge and Marley Medical Corp. was in bad shape, and Scrooge wanted out before he lost everything.  That Marley hadn’t had the same idea wasn’t Scrooge’s fault.  It was a Scrooge-eat-Marley world, he reflected, and that made him laugh out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Allie shouted.

“I amuse myself,” he shouted back.  He switched on the TV and looked for sports or financial news.  He had every damn cable station ever invented and all he really enjoyed were sports and financial news.

Allie finally came back to bed.

“What do you women do in bathrooms for so long?”

“Jill ourselves off because our guys don’t do it for us.  God, more of this blah-blah?  Give me the remote.”

“No!”

“I mean it, give it to me.  I’m not watching these doofuses go on and on about money.  That may give you a hard-on, Eb, but it just bores me.”  He surrendered the remote and groaned when she switched to an old black-and-white film.  Something about Christmas, he supposed.  He hated Christmas.  Everyone standing around with their hands out, waiting for a gift or a bonus or some other expensive nonsense just because some baby was born poor back in the day and turned into a damned  Socialist, always feeding the poor and preaching about equality.  Religion was all well and good, but it shouldn’t cost anything.

"Jake Marley's dead."

"What?" Allie turned the TV off.  "What happened?"

Scrooge made a shot-to-the-head gesture.  "Suicide.  Pathetic."

"That's all you have to say about it?"

He shrugged.  "What do you want me to do, cry?  Chew the curtains?"

Allie turned the TV  back on.

“What’s on the agenda for the rest of the day?”

Allie sighed, turned down the volume and pulled a planner off the bedside table.  “Make money, make money, make money... lunch, make money...”

He grabbed it away from her and she went back to her movie.

“Ah, okay... address the troops, phone Saunders in Seattle to find out what the hell is going on up there, oh, and the party tonight.  Everything is set, right?”

“Hmmm?”

“The party.  It’s all arranged?”

“Totally,” she replied absently.

“It’s going to cost me a fortune, isn’t it?”

Allie shot him a look.  “Deal with it, Eb.  You want to cheap out on these people?  Want to give them bad drugs, bad booze?  Want to look like a piker?  Fine.  I don’t know why the hell you have money to begin with, you hate spending it so much.”  She got up and began to dress.

“That’s why... Where you going?”

“To do my job.  I’m sick of hearing about how much things cost.  Just deal, or quit the business and go sit on your gold in some cave like some dragon.  Go be a dragon for God’s sake and quit being such a pain in my ass.”

Related articles

• Time for an excerpt (tracyrowan.org)