Somebody Owes Me Money

I blinked at the closet. “Oh,” I said, out loud.

“Sst!”

I nodded, clamping my mouth shut, and we both listened for a minute. We could barely hear the humming at this end of the house, but it was continuing unabated.

Abbie poked through the closet and came out with a black-and-red-check wool mackinaw for me. I looked at it, looked at her, looked at it. She leaned close and whispered, “It’s warmest. An overcoat won’t do you any good, you don’t have a jacket.”

I nodded without pleasure and shrugged into the mackinaw while Abbie went through the closet some more, like one of those style-conscious women rejecting every dress in Lord & Taylor. Zip, zip, zip, pushing the hangers along one after the other.

Finally she settled, and I could see it was with vast reluctance, on a black cloth coat with a black fur collar. It had a tapered waist and silver buttons, and when she got it on, it looked pretty good on her. With the black boots it made her look vaguely Russian. More like the Cossack than his girlfriend, but that wasn’t so bad at that, and when she found a black fur hat on the shelf and put that on I felt like leaping at once into one of those Russian dances where you end every line by throwing one arm up in the air and shouting, “Hey!”

I also felt like shouting hey and throwing one arm up in the air when she came out with a hat for me, though not exactly in the same way. It was orange, it had a little peak and earflaps, and it tied under the chin. Apparently Detective Golderman spent his time in the woods hunting animals when not in the city hunting people.

I whispered, “I won’t put that on!”

She whispered, “Then you’ll freeze your ears off!” I think she said ears.

I whispered, “I’ll carry it, and if it’s really cold I’ll put it on!”

She shook her head, probably thinking about the vanity of the male and other examples of the pot calling the kettle black, and I stuffed the offending cap into my mackinaw pocket.

From the same shelf that had produced the hats Abbie now brought out gloves. Hers were sleek and black and went halfway up her forearm. Mine were brown leather, a thousand years old, with the first finger of the right hand poking through. They were also a little too small.

Abbie whispered, “Ready?”

I thought of a sardonic answer, but I nodded instead. Then I opened the door, silently opened the outer door, and we went outside, and my ears fell off.

“Brrrr,” I commented, and closed the door quietly behind me, and said, “Wait.” I then took the cute orange hat out and put it on. I even tied it under my chin.

“That’s darling,” Abbie said.

“One word,” I threatened. “Just one word.”

“I promise,” she said. “Come on.”

We set off down the walk toward the cab and were about halfway there when the two cars squealed to a stop in the middle of the street and all the guys came boiling out of them.

32

All I hoped was that Detective Golderman’s back yard wasn’t a cul de sac. I grabbed Abbie’s hand — I seemed to be doing that a lot lately — and we took off around the side of the house, headed for the back.

There was still snow in this part of the world. Not much, just enough to reach over my shoe tops and start melting in around my anklebone, soaking my socks and my feet. Not that I cared very much at that particular moment.

There was no shooting, and not even very much shouting. I suppose in a quiet neighborhood like that they would have preferred to take us without calling a lot of attention to themselves.

It was a cloudy moonless night, but there was enough spill from the back windows of the house to show me a snowy expanse of back yard leading to a bare-branched hedge that looked like a lot of scratched pencil marks dividing this yard from the one on the other side.

There was no choice, and when you have no choice it greatly simplifies things. You don’t slow down to think it over at all, you just run through the hedge. It rips your trousers, it gashes your skin, it removes the pocket of your mackinaw, but you run through it.

It also takes your girl away from you. Abbie’s hand was wrenched from mine, I tried to make a U-turn while running at five hundred miles an hour, I slid on the thickness of snow on top of grass, I made my U-turn while simultaneously going forward and falling backward, I landed on gloves and knees in the snow, looked up, and there was Abbie stuck in the hedge like Joan of Arc just before they started the fire.

“Chet!” she called, and reached her arms out to me.

Your feet are never there when you want them. Every time I got them under me they slid out again. I finally solved the problem by starting to run before I got up. I ran my feet up under my torso, made it through that chancy area of no balance, and ran into the hedge again, this time letting it serve as a cushion to stop me.