Somebody Owes Me Money

“I only hope,” I said, “that when it’s over they don’t decide we’re a couple of loose ends that ought to be tied off. Like Captain Kidd taking care of the diggers after burying treasure. I wish we still had that gun of yours.”

“We’re better off without it,” she said. “It was just about useless anyway. It shot way off to the left all the time, you had to aim there if you wanted to hit over there, and it was so light even if you did hit somebody you wouldn’t do him much damage. And if we did have it and you showed it to that bunch in the hall, they’d fill you up with so much lead we’d have to paint you yellow and use you for a pencil.”

“You don’t have to paint me yellow,” I said.

She smiled and shook her head. “You’re braver than you pretend,” she said.

“Not me. You’ve got it wrong which is the pretense.”

Somebody shouted, angrily.

We looked at one another. We looked at the hallway.

Somebody else shouted, also angrily. Two voices shouted angrily at the same time.

I said, “The foolish thing is, I let them all in. I can’t remember why.”

Abbie said, “Do you think we’re in any danger?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re in a cage full of irritated crocodiles. There’s nothing for us to worry about.”

“Maybe we ought to get out of here,” she whispered.

“Have you seen lately what’s between us and the door?”

She leaned closer to me. “Fire escape.”

“What?”

She gestured with her head at the window beside which Mrs. McKay was sitting. She’d continued to sit there since I’d come into the room, ignoring the two of us, ignoring the shouts which had subsided now, ignoring everything. Her arms were folded, her back was straight and her jaw was set. She glared into the middle distance as though seeing an apparition there of which she disapproved.

I put my head next to Abbie’s and whispered in her ear, “There’s a fire escape there?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Where does it go?” I whispered.

“Away from the apartment,” she whispered.

“That’s a good place,” I whispered. “Come on.”

I got to my feet and hoisted Abbie up, and the two of us tippy-toed across the room. The only person in sight was Louise McKay, who continued to ignore us until we were almost on top of her, at which point she focused on me with a glare intended to rout me in case I had it in mind to start a conversation.

I didn’t. “Excuse me,” I said, and edged around between the chair she was in and the floor lamp next to it. I raised the window shade.

Mrs. McKay said, “What are you doing?”

I didn’t answer her, I was too busy unlocking the window, but Abbie said, low-voiced, “We’re getting out of here. Do you want to come along?”

“I live here!” she said, very loudly.

I raised the window, and an icy blast rushed in. I’d completely forgotten it was winter outside and here I was in shirt sleeves. Not to mention Abbie in a miniskirt.

Mrs. McKay shouted, “Close that window! What do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, you’re a pain,” I said, exasperated beyond endurance, and threw a leg over the windowsill. “Come on, Abbie, before this nut rouses the crocodiles.”

Abbie tried, low-voiced, to talk sweet reason to Mrs. McKay, who interrupted with another shouted question or demand or order or something. In the meantime I slid through the open window and out onto the fire escape. I turned around and stuck my head back in and whispered shrilly, “Abbie, come on!”

Mrs. McKay was really yelling now. For some damn reason she was tipping off the heavies. Abbie finally gave up her missionary work on the idiot woman, came hurrying around the chair to my frantically waving hands, and as I helped her over the windowsill I saw past her shoulder the other end of the living room filling up with mean-looking guys with guns in their hands.

“Stop!” somebody shouted.

Was he out of his mind?

26

Five P.M. of a freezing windy Sunday in late January, the sky a solid mass of gray clouds seven miles thick, the thin vague daylight already fading toward twilight, the temperature somewhere in the teens, and where am I? Standing on a fire escape four stories up in my shirt sleeves with gunmen shouting Stop at me. Not to mention the crease in the side of my head where I’ve already been laid low by one bullet.

The thing is, we’d been more or less safe up till now because nobody had really known what was going on, everybody had been confused and had wanted to find out which end was up before doing anything irreversible like bumping off witnesses. But now Napoli and Droble were working it all out in the kitchen, and whether they succeeded in reaching an entente or not was unimportant, because either way Abbie and I were about to become extraneous. We knew too much to be let go and too little to be kept around, and that left only one choice. Ergo, the fire escape.