And what would be the use in trying to explain who Goodwin was and what he’d done? The fact that he’d broken the law in some banana republic sixteen years ago wasn’t going to cut any ice with a judge. It didn’t excuse our taking the law into our own hands. That’s fine, I thought bitterly. It’s nice to think about now.
I looked up. Shandy had finished with the telephone and was talking to the other cop. He nodded toward Bolton.
“This guy’s face is pretty banged up, Jim. Maybe you better take him on in so they can get a doctor or nurse to patch him up. I tell you. You take him and Prince Charlie and start booking ‘em. Sergeant’s sending over a couple of men, and they ought to be here by the time you get down front. One of ‘em can go back with you, and the other one can come up here and help me finish checking this money and gathering up their stuff, and then we can bring in the girl and this other guy. How’s that?”
“Oke,” Jim said. “You want me to put the cuffs on ‘em?”
Shandy shook his head. “Nah. These con men never get rough. Give the hotel a break. Looks like hell, guys going through the lobby in handcuffs.”
“Yeah,” Jim said. He jerked his head at Bolton and Charlie. “All right, boys. Let’s go.”
They went out. I lit another cigarette and walked over to the window to stare out because I couldn’t look at her. I just couldn’t. We’d been so near to making it. If it had broken the other way...
“Mike,” she said behind me.
“I’m sorry, Cathy,” I said. I didn’t look around. Early-morning sunlight was golden in the street. I saw the three of them come out onto the sidewalk below me. The other two policemen weren’t anywhere in sight yet. The cop called Jim said something to Charlie and Bolton, and they walked over to a black Ford sedan parked at the curb. Bolton got in front, and Charlie got in the back seat. The cop went around and got in behind the wheel. I saw the exhaust fog in the chill air as the motor started.
And then the cop got out again. He came around the rear of the car and up on the sidewalk, apparently looking for the men from Headquarters. He must be stupid, I thought. It had become strangely silent behind me in the room now, but I still didn’t look around. I was fascinated with the idea of his going off and leaving Bolton in the front seat of the car with the motor running. Then it happened so fast I could hardly follow it. There was a scream of rubber, and the Ford leaped ahead into the street. It must have been doing forty-five by the time it passed the corner. The short cop ran a few steps after it, waving his arms and yelling. He could have saved his breath.
I heard something behind me, and turned. Cathy was sitting on the bed with the pile of bills in her lap, laughing at me. The cop called Shandy was laughing too.
There had been too much. I couldn’t absorb any more. I just stared at them as she counted out some bills and handed them to him. “Here’s his, too,” she said. “Five hundred each. And you can keep the guns.”
I sat down weakly and watched them. It could have been a play I was seeing. I didn’t seem to have any connection with it yet.
He quit laughing and was looking at the money a little hungrily. “That’s a lot of dough, Red,” he said. “Mebbe we ought to have a bigger slice.”
She quit laughing too, and the brown eyes became very cold. “You know what you’ll get a bigger slice of if you try to squeeze me,” she said. “Impersonating an officer is a penitentiary offense.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I?”
He looked at her again, and must have seen the answer. “O.K., O.K. Don’t strip your gears. I’ll see you around.”
He was out the door by the time I’d digested what she had said about impersonating an officer. But he had called the station! I’d seen him and heard him. It hit me then. How stupid could you get? He’d had his back to us, and it was the simplest thing in the world to hold the other hand on the hook.
I was beginning to get up to date at last. Charlie and Bolton hadn’t double-crossed me at all. She just hadn’t come by to pick me up because she had other things to do. She couldn’t be bothered. She was too busy cooking up this act to double-cross them and take all the money. I could get out from under any way I could. I thought of the whole night in that boxcar sick with worry over what had happened to her.
She smiled. “I’m sorry I had to scare you like that, Mike, but...”
I got up off the chair and walked over to her. The whole room was going around in a dark whirlpool of rage. I reached down a hand and caught the front of her fur coat and yanked her up. I pulled her toward me and she looked at my face and tried to cry out. I opened my mouth, but there were no words. I threw her back across the bed with money scattering everywhere, and went out and slammed the door.
Twenty minutes later I was on the bus, going west. I didn’t feel anything at all, and I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t want to.
Nine
It was snowing when I got off the bus in Reno, dry powder swirling down out of the Sierra and softening the harsh blaze of neon along streets plowed out and drifted again. I left the bags in the station and walked over to Calhoun’s, feeling the wind search through my clothes. In the late afternoon the place was jammed with the crowd that seems to go on forever, and full of the whirring clatter of slot machines and the click of chips and a dice man chanting: “Here we are, folks. Get ‘em down. New gunner coming out.”
Wally Manners was in his office. He’s tough, but a good friend, and he was glad to see me now. After we’d shaken hands and I refused one of his cigars, he said, “I got your wire. You still want to go to work?”
“Yes,” I said.
“All right. Start tomorrow, after you’ve had some sleep. You look pretty beat.”
“Two days on the bus,” I said.
“How you fixed for money?”
“I’m all right.”
“Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. And Belen. Stay out of here on your time off.”
“O.K.,” I said.
“We’re not interested in winning back your wages. And if you get a hot streak, get it somewhere else.”
I thanked him and walked back to the bus station. After calling half a dozen rooming houses I finally found a place to stay and walked across town carrying the bags. It was a shabby, two-story mansion a little down on its luck. I paid a week’s rent, and after the landlady had brought me up to date on all the other tenants I managed to get away from her long enough to locate the bathroom. I took a shower and scraped off three days’ growth of beard. The cut on my face where Bolton had hit me had healed pretty well, and most of the puffiness was gone from my hand.
It was a stage set for a boardinghouse room. I sat down on the slab of a bed and lit a cigarette and stared out the window. It was night now, but I could see snow eddying silently in the darkness beyond the glass and farther away the reflected neon bonfire of Virginia Street. I tried to remember if I’d eaten anything lately, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. Nothing did. After a while I got into pajamas and turned out the light.
I’d been riding too long and the bed rocked the same way the bus had. I couldn’t go to sleep. I was empty and washed out and beyond caring about anything, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. They’d fly open and I’d be thinking about things, but the crazy part of it was that none of them seemed to make any difference. They didn’t matter in the slightest. The police were looking for me. I was practically broke. I’d never find Lachlan now. Who cared? I was through with her at last, once and for all, wasn’t I? After twenty-three years I’d got the last of her out of my system and she could go to hell, or Donnelly could use her for a clay pigeon, or she could find somebody else to double-cross.
So I’d been afraid Charlie would pull a fast one on her and take it all. I wanted to laugh, but there didn’t seem to be any laughs in me either. I was going to protect her from Charlie, because Charlie was a crook. It was a shame about the laughs, because there might never be another masterpiece like that. It
was a classic. Nobody would ever top it. Charlie, I suspect you of being dishonest, so unhand our little Nell. And tell her to give you back your arm.
I’ll come by and pick you up at noon, dear, in my little Cadillac. But don’t hold your breath.
I cursed and threw the blankets off and got up and dressed. The snow was slackening a little as I walked across town toward the lights. I remembered a little bar on a side street off Virginia and went in and sat down on a stool. A couple of shills nursed drinks at the blackjack table, the girl at the roulette wheel dribbled chips through her fingers, and a half-dozen people were shooting craps. Down at the other end of the bar four divorcees in slacks and fur coats were chattering over their drinks.
The barman remembered me, and nodded as he mopped the bar. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“I’ve been away,” I said.
He studied me. “Let’s see. Bourbon, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “With plain water.” I always drank Scotch, but it wasn’t worth the effort.
He peered down the bar toward the covey of quail and shook his head. He hated women in bars. “One Planter’s Punch, one Golden Fizz, one Orange Blossom, and one Alexander. And you know what?”
“No,” I said. I knew what, because I’d heard it before, but maybe I’d get my drink sooner if I went along with him.
“Every damn one of ‘em will pay for her own drink. With a fifty-dollar bill.”
“It’s tough,” I said. I sat for a long time with the drink and then had another, but they seemed to have no effect on me at all. If anything, I felt worse. I got up and walked over to the table to watch the crapshooters. They were mostly women, making two or three passes in a row and betting fifty cents each time as if they were playing a slot machine. I waited until they came around to me, put five dollars on the line, and picked up the dice.
I had no business in a crap game now, and I knew it. I had about fifty dollars to eat on until payday, and I hadn’t even started to work yet. If you have to win, don’t gamble. That’s not a sermon; it’s a brutal piece of truth. It doesn’t mean you’re going to regret it if you lose; it simply means you probably will lose. Gamblers have another way of saying it, which implies the psychological basis: A scared buck never wins. They call luck a lady, and gamblers found out a long time ago that scared indecision gets you about as far with one as with the other.
I tried to tell myself now to stay out of it because I needed the money if I was going to eat. The only trouble was that I didn’t care whether I ate or not—or very much about anything else that I could think of. I shook the dice and threw.
They came up aces. Craps.
I put down another five dollars and bounced the dice against the end of the table. It was eleven this time. I let the ten lie on the line and rolled. I read four. Three rolls later two deuces came up and I shot the twenty. The stickman changed dice on me and I rolled two sevens in a row. I had eighty dollars on the line, got six for a point, and made it on the next throw. I was warming up, but when the stickman shoved them back he shook his head.
“You’ll have to pull down sixty,” he said. “Hundred-dollar limit.”
I handed the chips over. “Cash me in. I’ll come back and match pennies with you some other time.”
You can feel it when it’s like that. I don’t know how to explain it except that there’s an uncanny certainty about the whole thing. You couldn’t lose if you tried. I felt that way now as I walked up the street through the snow, but it meant nothing at all. It just didn’t matter.
This was a gambling house instead of a bar, and there was a table with a limit you could work with. When the dice came around to me I dropped forty dollars on two straight craps and then started throwing passes. I banged into the limit on the sixth one, pulled part of it down, and then threw two more before I lost the dice. When they came around again I racked up five passes, bumping the limit every time, before I fell off.
It was crazy. It was the wildest, most erratic streak of luck I’d ever run into in my life. They changed the dice on me until they got tired of it. I made wild bets—the field, on elevens, hard-way sixes and eights, and nothing made any difference. I won just the same. The crowd started to gather. I cashed in, went outside, took a cab to shake them, and moved on to another place.
I lost a thousand dollars there before I made a point; then I got hot and ran out a string of nine consecutive passes. My clothes, even the coat pockets, were full of money because I kept cashing in and moving around. The crowds made me angry. The word had spread now, and there was no getting away from them. Sometime around midnight I hit a run of bad luck and started losing heavily. I cut down the bets and zigzagged up and down for hours before it started running my way again. And it didn’t seem to matter whether I was winning or losing. I felt just the same. It was just something I was doing to pass the time because I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t remember when I’d slept.
It must have been around five in the morning. I was no longer conscious of anything but a blur of faces ringing the deep-walled pit of the dice table and of the dice themselves rolling out, bouncing, and spinning, and then being raked back. My eyes hurt. There was a tense quiet except for the stickman singing the point. I was trying to make a nine, and had five hundred dollars riding on it. Every number on the dice except nine and seven rolled up, over and over, until my arm grew numb. I wanted to take the dice and throw them against the wall or into the sea of blurred, white faces staring at me. I had just picked them up and straightened a little to ease the kink in my back when I saw her. Her face swam slowly into focus, straight across the table from me. I was going crazy. She couldn’t possibly be here.
I shook the dice and threw them. They bounced, and one caromed off another cushion and came to rest six up. The other was spinning on one corner. I watched it. It stopped. It was the three.
I pushed in the chips. Everybody wanted to talk at once, and they all wanted to talk to me. I stuffed the money in my pockets and shoved impatiently through the crowd. I wanted to get outside in the air and just walk through the snow.
“Mike, please!” She had hold of my arm. I turned. I wasn’t going crazy. The collar of the gray coat was turned up against her cheek and her eyes were very big and pleading. And they were very tired. She must have been driving all the time I was riding the bus.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Pick me up sometime. Bring your knife.”
I turned away. She held onto my arm. “Mike, will you listen?” she pleaded desperately.
People were beginning to stare at us. And you never knew what she might do next. She was just as likely as not to start screaming and accuse me of wife-beating or poisoning her mother.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll buy you a drink. You can tell me your little story, and then you can beat it. Or I will.”
We went over to the bar, but people were still following me. She looked helplessly around at the sea of faces and begged, “Mike, can’t we get out of here? What I’ve got to tell you is very important.”
“All right,” I said. Anything to get it over with. I’d had enough for one lifetime. I could get used to being dead if she’d just quit digging up the corpse.
We went out into the street. The snow had stopped, and beyond the glare of neon you could see stars like a million pin points of frost. A car went past with its tire chains slapping, and snow creaked under my shoes. She slowed. “The car is right here.”
We got in. There was just enough reflection from the neon signs for me to see her face very faintly. It was as lovely as ever, but it was awfully tired.
“All right, get with it,” I said. “It’s cold out here.”
“Couldn’t you do anything about that?” she asked quietly.
“No,” I said. “Let’s have the sob story.”
“You still think I double-crossed everybody, don’t you?”
“Why, of course not,” I said. “How could I ever th
ink a thing like that?”
“Mike, darling,” she said almost tearfully, “haven’t you guessed yet what actually happened?”
“Sure. Everything just went black. And you only did it because you loved us.”
“Mike! Please stop it. And listen to me. Don’t you see yet? They double-crossed us. It was supposed to be Saturday.”
“What?” I swung around and caught her by the arm. “No. Don’t give me that. It was Friday. And you didn’t come, so if it hadn’t been for that freight train—”
“Mike, it was Saturday. Remember? Nine days after the beginning date of the option, which was Thursday.”
She was right. They’d moved it up a day, knowing that if she didn’t come by to pick me up they could ditch us both. I wanted to shout. I wanted to grab her and just yell. I wanted to—crawl under something out of sight, I thought.
“I’m sorry, Cathy,” I said. “I’m sorry as hell.”
“It’s all right, Mike. You don’t have to apologize.” She smiled a little. “But it’s still cold in here.”
We found that together we could do something about it. Those two awful days ganged up on me all at once and I held her very tightly, trying not to think about it.
After a while she stirred a little and we got back to what had happened.
“It wasn’t too hard to guess what they were up to,” she said. “When I came back from Houston I had an idea they were speeding things up a little. I called the hotel at Ludley Friday morning, and then called Houston. And when Charlie wasn’t at either place I knew our laughing boys had their shoes in their hands and were headed for the door. I tried to call you, but you were out. It was too late by then to pick you up, of course, but with luck I might get them before they could get away from El Paso. Of course, I could have just gone to them and demanded our share, but since they wanted to play winner-take-all—” She smiled coldly. “Well, they asked for it,” I said.
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