Somebody Owes Me Money

Abbie also taught me a few stunts with the deck. It took me a while to get used to the mechanic’s grip, a funny way of holding the deck from underneath with the left hand so that the right hand can burrow into it like a mouse into a sack of grain without anybody being the wiser. It would take me years to learn to be as smooth with a deck as Abbie, but I did pretty well, and by Sunday night I was even faking her out every once in a while.

Our sleeping arrangements were less satisfactory. She insisted on me keeping the bed, since I was the wounded one, but she switched to the living-room couch. I told her I saw no reason to change the policy we’d established Thursday night, and she said I didn’t have to see any reasons, she could see them for both of us. “You trusted me then,” I said, and she said, “You were weaker then.”

Well, that was true enough. By Sunday afternoon I was just about my old self again, and beginning to get bored. I’d been here since Wednesday night, and I’d really had about all of this apartment I wanted. On the other hand, the outside world was potentially full of people who didn’t wish me well, so I didn’t chafe very much about having to hang around here. In between the card-playing I watched television or ate snacks or just sat around bored.

And I napped, whether I wanted to or not. Abbie insisted, and I believe her main concern wasn’t my health at all. She just wanted me out from underfoot for a while. Still, every time she hounded me into the bedroom for a nap I did actually go off to sleep for an hour or two.

I was asleep, in fact, late Sunday afternoon when the visitors arrived. What woke me was a scream. I popped awake, sat up, and saw Frank Tarbok, the blue-jawed questioner from the garage, standing in the hallway with his velvet-collared overcoat on, staring at me. The voice that had screamed was still echoing in my head, recognizable as Abbie’s, but I had already fallen flat again and thrown the covers over my head before it occurred to me the scream hadn’t been a mere and simple scream, it had been a word. A name. Abbie had screamed a name.

Why had Abbie screamed Louise?

22

When nothing happened for several days, I peeked up over the top of the covers, blinking and wincing already from the bullet I was sure was coming.

Nobody was there.

What? I pushed the covers down completely off my face and stared at the doorway, and it was absolutely empty. Nobody standing there at all. Not Frank Tarbok, not Louise McKay, not anybody.

Had it been a dream? Had the scream been real and all the rest a dream, or had the scream also been part of the dream? A dream scream. Was I going loony?

I sat up, looked around the room, looked at the empty doorway again, and heard voices. They seemed to be real voices, and they were coming from the direction of the living room. Male and female both.

I got out of bed. My shirt and pants — back from the cleaner’s — were draped carefully on a chair; shoes were on the floor beside the bed. I dressed hurriedly, left the bedroom, and walked down the hall to the living room, where Frank Tarbok was standing and talking, Louise McKay was standing and talking, and Abbie was standing and talking.

Maybe I was still asleep. Maybe this was part of the dream, too. I said, “Hey,” and several other things, trying to attract everybody’s attention, and then I realized I was standing and talking like everybody else, so I said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and went away again. If the world wanted to be crazy, I could be crazy, too. With Frank Tarbok and Louise McKay actually standing and talking in the living room, I went out to the kitchen and made myself a liverwurst sandwich. I also heated the coffee, a pot of which we kept permanently on the stove since both Abbie and I were endless coffee drinkers.

The yammering in the living room gradually settled down, but I could not have cared less. Here I’d spent five days terrified that Frank Tarbok or one of his minions would find me and shoot me, and when Frank Tarbok finally did show up he didn’t even pay any attention to me. Stared at me through a doorway for a second, and that was that.

As for Louise McKay, her husband had died a week ago, she’d disappeared without a trace, and all of a sudden there she is in her own living room, standing and talking as though she’d been there all along. No, it was all too crazy to be contended with, particularly when I’d just come out of a nap. Particularly when I’d just been thrust out of a nap by a scream.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating liverwurst, drinking coffee and reading the News, when they came looking for me. Abbie came in first, the other two behind her. She said, “Chet? Are you out of your mind?”

“Murmf,” I said, with a mouthful of liverwurst. I also shook my head, meaning no.

“Don’t you see who’s here?” she demanded, and actually pointed at Frank Tarbok as though she thought I couldn’t see him for myself, standing there as big and ugly as life.