So then he’d squirm just a little, with perhaps the slightest trace of a sigh. He’d wait a moment, looking off to one side, getting his thoughts lined up in order. Well now. I’ll tell ya, he’d say to the badge, his eyes patient and kind as though he was dealing with someone on the square side, someone who just didn’t know the score. You see, it’s like this—it’s a very poor neighborhood, the folks here get hardly any breaks at all. I know that for a fact, I was born and raised in this layout.

The deal is, jim, there’s an acute shortage of funds. So let’s take whiskey, just as an instance. A legitimate bottle, a fifth, it’s four dollars and up. The contraband booze, the cooked corn and goat-head, you get it for a dollar a pint. Of course sometimes it’s poison, but those times are very seldom. Maybe one batch out of five thousand, and you’ll admit that’s a tiny percentage. Chances are, when you drink the homemade juice you won’t be sick the next day. I’ve never had a hangover from the corn or the goat, and that’s more than I can say for some well-known legal brands.

Or take gambling. You get paid forty to sixty a week and you got a wife and four-five kids to feed. You just ain’t got the cash it needs to speculate in the stock market. You can’t afford the transportation that will take you to the tracks where the horses run, or join them certain private clubs that are never raided. The membership lists include big names and the big names have the pull and the cash, and that’s what counts—only that. So you live in this neighborhood and you wanna gamble. Only thing you can do is play the numbers or pull down the shades and get out a deck of cards. Of course that makes you a lawbreaker, what they call a culprit. Well anyway, you wanna gamble, you gotta have your mind at ease, you gotta be sure they won’t come bustin’ down the door and breakin’ in through the windows. Only way to be sure is to make a deal with some badge-holder.