Somebody Owes Me Money

But he wouldn’t. He just kept looking at me, and the unfinished sentence hung in the air between us like a snake hanging down from a tree branch, and I finally said, “To offer my condolences.”

He moved his head slightly, but he kept looking at me. “To offer your condolences,” he said.

“To the widow,” I explained. “Mrs. McKay,” I explained further. Then, beginning to warm up to the lie, I said, “The last time I saw her, she was pretty hysterical, I didn’t get much of a chance to say anything to her.”

“I see,” he said, and it was pretty plain he didn’t believe me. He looked past me at the building front, then up at the upper-story windows, then at me again. “Was she home?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ll probably try again,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to be casual. “If I’m in the neighborhood, I guess.”

“It isn’t all that important,” he suggested.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s just sort of a nice gesture, you know?”

“Uh huh,” he said, in the flat way of a man who doesn’t believe a word you’re saying.

I considered telling him the truth, but it was just impossible. Gambling is against the law, and it didn’t matter if this was a homicide cop or not, I just couldn’t come right out and admit to him that I made off-track bets. I mean, he knew I did, he knew the whole thing anyway, but I couldn’t say it. All I could do was stand there and act stupid and feel guilty and make him suspicious of me.

I broke an uneasy silence that had settled down between us by saying, “Well, I guess I better get going now, if I want to get some time in today. In the cab.”

He nodded.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

“See you around, Chester,” he said.

9

I really did go to work. I went over to Eleventh Avenue and took the bus uptown to the garage and checked a car out and got my first fare half a block from the garage, a good-looking girl in an orange fur coat and black boots and pale blond hair. “2715 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said.

I said, “Brooklyn or Washington?” I kid with good-looking female passengers whether I’m worried about money or not.

“Brooklyn,” she said. “Take the Belt.”

“Fine,” I said, and dropped the flag, and headed south. My luck was finally in. Not only a good-looking blonde in the rearview mirror, but a long haul at that, and it would end not too far from Kennedy.

The highways were all cleared, and carried way below their usual midday load of traffic. We got up on the West Side Highway at twenty to four and left the Belt Parkway at Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn at just four o’clock. In between I’d made a couple of small attempts at conversation, but she was the strong silent type, so I let it go. I’m content to look, if that’s the way they want it.

The first half mile of Pennsylvania Avenue is through filled-in swampland. There’s no solid ground at the bottom, just dirt piled into a swamp, so the road is very jouncy and bouncy, full of heaves and holes, and even though there’s little traffic at any time there and no housing or pedestrians around, you can’t make very good time. The snow plows, probably because of the uneven road surface, hadn’t been able to do much of a job here, so that slowed me even more, which meant I was doing about twenty when the girl stuck the gun into the back of my neck and said, “Pull over to the side and park.”

I immediately froze, my hands gluing themselves to the wheel. Fortunately my foot hadn’t been on the accelerator at that instant, so it stayed paralyzed in mid-motion and the cab began at once to lose speed.

My first thought, when I finally had a thought, was: Did she have to run up six bucks on the meter first? Thinking, naturally, that I was about to be robbed.

But then I had a second thought, scarier than the first, and this was: This girl is no mugger.

Tommy again? Something more?

The cab was down to about three miles an hour now, but until I touched the brake or shifted out of drive it would go on doing three miles an hour forever. Across the entire United States and into the Pacific Ocean, at three miles an hour. I put my foot on the brake and shifted into neutral.

There was a cab coming from way behind me, there was a little traffic going the other way on the other side of the center divider, but for all practical purposes I was alone in the world with a girl with a gun.

A little over half the cabs in New York are equipped with bulletproof clear plastic between the driver and the passenger, but naturally this was one of the times when the long shot came home, because I had nothing between me and my passenger but extremely vulnerable air.