Somebody Owes Me Money

“The heck,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“I thought you were guilty for a while,” she said. “And why would they come back after you again? Why follow you around?”

“Maybe they want to ask me more questions. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about. The next thing you’ll say,” she said, “is that you want to go home, just as though nothing had happened.”

“Well, naturally,” I said. “Where else would I go?”

“They’ll be waiting for you,” she said. “If you go home, they’ll kill you.”

“Kill me? Abbie, at the very worst they’ve thought of something else they want to ask me. In fact, I’ve got questions I want to ask them, like where I go to get paid. Unless you found out tonight at the wake.”

“I didn’t find out anything at the wake,” she said. “Chet, if you show yourself to those people, they’ll shoot you dead.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Did Tommy’s wife show up at the wake?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not being silly. I’m trying to save you from being killed.”

“I’m not going to be killed,” I said. “Will you stop talking about that? Wasn’t there anybody interesting at the wake at all?”

“Some of Louise’s relatives,” she said, “but none of them knew where she was. And some other people came, some of them looked pretty tough, but none of them would admit he worked for the same people as Tommy, so I couldn’t ask any questions. And you better not ask any questions, because you’ll get your head blown off for the answer.”

“This is the same kind of jumping to conclusions you did when you first got into my cab,” I said. “Then you were convinced I was a killer, and now you’re convinced I’m a killee.”

“A what?”

“Marked to be killed,” I said.

“Because you are,” she said. “Won’t you even consider it as a possibility?”

“No. Because it isn’t.”

“Chet, I don’t want to take you home. They’ll be watching your place.”

“Say,” I said. “There’s a flaw in your theory. Those people last night knew where I lived, they were waiting for me there, so they wouldn’t have to follow me anywhere. That had to be somebody else just now.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they want with you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

“But you don’t think it’s possible, whoever they are, that they might want to kill you.”

“There’s no reason,” I said, “for anybody to want to kill me. Will you get off my back about that? You’re too goddam melodramatic by half.”

“Chet, don’t be nasty. I’m just trying to tell you—”

“You’re just trying to get me caught up in your paranoia,” I said, being maybe sharper than necessary because the idea she was suggesting was very nervous-making. “Now,” I said, “I’ve had enough of it. It’s late at night, I’ve got to work tomorrow. If you’ve got nothing else to tell me about the wake, let’s just get going.”

I could see her controlling her temper. “You don’t want to listen, is that it?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“That’s fine by me,” she said, and faced front. She started the car, backed us out the driveway to the street, and headed back for the Expressway.

She drove the rest of the way maybe a little too fast and hard, because she was angry, but nothing outlandish. I spoke to her in monosyllables from time to time, giving her directions to my house, but other than that we didn’t talk at all.

When she pulled to a stop in front of my house, I said coldly, “Thanks for the lift.” If she could be hard-nosed, so could I.

“Any time,” she said coldly. So could she.

I opened the door, the interior light went on, I leaned toward the opening, and somewhere there was a backfire. Almost simultaneously, something in the car went koot and something fluffed the hair on the back of my head.

I looked around, bewildered, and saw a starred round hole in the windshield. “Hey,” I said.

Abbie yelled, “Shut the door! The light, the light, shut the door!”

I wasn’t thinking fast enough. I looked at her, confused, meaning to ask her what was going on, and then something very hard hit me all around the head and all the lights everywhere clicked out.

13

I thought: I’ve been drinking. It was the only explanation I could think of for the head I had. I thought it was morning, and I was waking up in the usual way, but with the kind of splitting headache I get from drinking Scotch or bourbon. I knew the cure was two aspirins and a quart of orange juice followed by another thirty minutes in the sack, but getting out of bed long enough to start the cure was going to be difficult. In fact, impossible, and as you recall, the impossible takes a little longer.

I knew one of the worst moments of the morning would be when I opened my eyes. Brightness was already beating against my eyelids, wanting to slice through my eyes and directly into my brain. Even with my eyes closed I was squinting, my face wrinkled up like a chipmunk. Tentatively I inched up one eyelid, testing my capacity to withstand torture, and what I saw made me snap both eyes open wide and lunge upward to a sitting position on the bed.