Somebody Owes Me Money

“I’m positive. The momentum of the chase kept them going this long, but sooner or later one of them had to remember they had wheels back there in front of Golderman’s house. So one of them just went back for a car.”

She looked ahead at that distant red light and distant blue light. “How much time do we have?”

“I don’t know. He’s tired, he’ll be walking, it’s about seven blocks. But we don’t have forever.”

“We should have gone zigzag,” she said. “Turned a lot of corners. That way maybe they’d be lost by now, and they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to the cars.”

“Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner,” I said. “Do you know this is ridiculous?”

She looked at me. “What’s ridiculous?”

“There are four guys back there who want to take us away some place quiet and murder us,” I said. “Plus three others somewhere else behind them. And we’re walking.”

“So are they.”

“I know it.”

“So what’s so ridiculous about that?”

“We’re walking and we’re having an argument,” I said. “That doesn’t strike you as ridiculous?”

“It would strike me as ridiculous if I tried to run at this point,” she said.

I looked over my shoulder. “Get ready to laugh, then,” I said. “Because one of them back there has his second wind, and we’re about to run.”

He’d gotten very close, much less than half a block away. About three houses away, in fact, so close that when we began to stagger into a sort of falling, weaving half-trot we could clearly make out the words he spoke, even though he was gasping while saying them.

We ran to the next intersection, and across, and I looked back, and he was walking again, holding his side. He shook his fist at me.

Abbie said, “Did you hear what he said he was going to do to us?”

“He didn’t mean it,” I said. “Just a quick bullet in the head, that’s all we’ll get.”

“Well, that’s sure a relief,” she said, and when I looked at her to see if she was being sarcastic I saw that she was.

How far were those blasted lights? Maybe four blocks away. Thank God it was all level flat ground. I don’t know about the mob behind me, but a hill would have finished me for good and all.

We went a block more and came suddenly to railroad tracks. Automatic gates stood open on either side. I said, “Hey! Railroad tracks!” I stopped.

Abbie pulled on me. “So what? Come on, Chet.”

“Where there’s railroad tracks,” I said, “there’s a railroad station. And trains. And people.”

“There’s a bar right down there, Chet,” she said.

“And there’s seven guys behind us. They might just decide to take us out of a bar. But a railroad station should be too much for them.” I looked both ways, and the track simply extended away into darkness to left and right, with no station showing at all.

“Which way?” Abbie said. “I suppose we have to do this, even though I think it’s wrong.”

“This way,” I said, and turned left.

There was an eruption of hollering behind us when we made our move. We hurried, spurred on by all that noise, but it was tricky going on railroad ties and we just couldn’t make as good time as before. We tried walking on the gravel beside the tracks, but it had too much of a slant to it and we kept tending to slide down into the knee-deep snow in the ditch, so it was the ties for us.

Abbie, looking over her shoulder, gasped, “Here they come.”

“I never doubted it for a minute.”

It was getting darker, away from the street. There should be another cross street up ahead, but so far I didn’t see it. And in the darkness it was increasingly difficult to walk on the ties.

Abbie fell, almost dragging me down with her.

I bent over her, heavily aware of the hoods inching along in our wake. “What happened?”

“Damn,” she said.

“Yeah, but what happened?”

“I turned my ankle.”

“Oh, boy,” I said. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t know.”

Light far away made me look in the direction we’d come from. “You better try,” I said. “Here comes a train.”

33

We stood in snow up to our knees in the ditch beside the tracks, Abbie leaning most of her weight on me. The train was taking forever to get here, just moseying along as though it was out for a little jog around the neighborhood, not going anywhere in particular.

At least the hoods had also stopped, and were also standing around in the ditch, watching the train. Four of them, all on our side of the track.

My feet were freezing. Abbie was protected by those boots of hers, but I was soaked and freezing from the knees down, and shivering from the knees up. And stupid from the neck up, since I had very obviously made a bad mistake coming in here instead of continuing straight on to that bar, where maybe I could have phoned the local police, or at least found a cab handy. Now Abbie could barely walk, we were moving deeper and deeper into the kind of darkness in which those four back there would have no problems about taking care of us for good and all, and to make matters worse, as the train ambled by them they began jumping up onto it, standing between cars or on the narrow platforms outside the closed passenger car doors.

“Abbie!” I shouted. “They’re cheating!”