Somebody Owes Me Money

You talk about loud. Inside that cab, with all the windows shut except the vent on my side, that noise had nothing to do but ricochet, which it did, forever. It was ten times worse than having some clown explode a blown-up paper bag next to your ear, which up until then I’d always thought of as the world’s loudest and most obnoxious noise.

Well, it isn’t. Shooting off a gun in a closed car takes the palm, hands down. It immobilized the two of us for maybe half a minute, both of us staring, both of us open-mouthed, neither of us moving a muscle.

Happily, I recovered first. I grabbed the gun away from her, pointed it at myself, pointed it at her instead, and said, “All right, now. All right.”

She blinked, very slowly, like a mechanical doll coming to life, and said, in a tiny voice, “Are you hurt?”

That hadn’t occurred to me. Only the noise had occurred to me, not the fact that in conjunction with the noise a bullet had left this stupid gun and gone very rapidly through the air of the automobile to somewhere. To lodge in me? I looked down at myself, saw nothing any redder than usual, looked at her to see if she was dead and we hadn’t noticed, looked up, and saw a smudge in the top of the cab. The cloth up there had a dirty smudge on it, an inch or two across. Looking closely at it you could see a burned-looking tiny hole in the middle of the smudge.

“You put a hole in the cab,” I said.

She looked up at the smudge. “Somebody could have gotten killed,” she said.

“How am I going to explain that?” I asked her. “I signed this cab out, you know.”

“You’ve got the gun!” she screamed, staring at it as though it had just popped into existence this second. Then she threw her arms around her head, stuck her pressed-together knees way up in the air, and cowered back on the seat, rolling herself into as much of a ball as possible in the space available.

I stared at her. I couldn’t figure out what she was up to. She was acting as though she was afraid of me. What the hell for?

I looked at the gun, seeing it myself for what was in some ways the first time. The first time I’d ever seen a gun in my hand, that was a first. And also it was the closest to me I’d ever seen a gun. I’m not counting the ones poked into my back, because I didn’t see them when they were against my back. But this one I’d been holding high enough over the top of the seat so the girl could see it and not do anything crazy. I had the butt resting on the seat top and the barrel pointed generally out the back window, which made it only a couple of inches from my nose. I had to look a little cross-eyed to get it in focus.

How small it was. Handy for pocket or purse, I suppose, a small flat silver metal gun with what I guess was a pearl handle. It was an automatic, I knew that because it looked like the baby brother of Colt automatics you see in the movies. It looked about big enough to shoot spitballs, but it had sure put a hole in the cab roof.

I looked back at the girl and she was still crunched up against the back of the seat, nothing but black-booted knees and orange-furred elbows, with here and there a glint of blond hair peeking through. I said, “What are you doing?”

She said something, so muffled it took me a few seconds to make it out: “You’re going to kill me.”

“I am not,” I said. I was insulted. I said, “What would I do a thing like that for?”

Arms and legs shifted a little, enough for a blue eye to be seen way down in there. With a sort of brave but hopeless defiance she said, “Because I know too much.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

Legs lowered, arms shifted some more, and her head emerged like a beautiful turtle. “You can’t fool me,” she said, still with that scared defiance. “You’re an accomplice and I know it. I’d give twelve to one on it.”

“Done,” I said, and without thinking I reached my hand over for a shake, forgetting the gun was in it. Immediately the turtle popped back into her orange shell. I said, “Hey! I’m not going to shoot you. I was just taking the bet.”

She inched out again, mistrustful. “You were?”

I switched the gun to my left hand and held the right out for her to shake. “See? You give me twelve to one odds on a lock, you’ve got yourself a bet. How much? Ten bucks? Make it easy on yourself.”

The legs this time slowly lowered all the way to the floor. She kept looking at me, studying me, very doubtful and mistrustful, as though wondering if somebody had stuck in a ringer. She looked at my hand, but she didn’t touch it. Instead she said, “You are Chester Conway, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. I pointed the gun at my identification on the right side of the dashboard. “There’s my name and picture,” I said. “You’ll have to take my word that’s my picture.”

“And you are the one who found my brother dead.”

“Sure.”

“And you’re the one who’s been having an affair with Louise.”

“Whoa, now,” I said. “Not me, honey. Now you’re thinking about somebody else. I didn’t even know that woman’s first name until yesterday.”