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.
Abbie was beside me. A hundred people in tight black overcoats and black snapbrim hats were rounding the corner of the house. I grabbed Abbie’s waving hands and yanked. Something ripped, Abbie popped out of the hedge, my feet went away again, and I wound up on my back in the snow.
Abbie kept yanking at my hands, keeping me from doing anything about anything. “Get up!” she shouted. “Chet, get up!”
“Leggo and I’ll get up!”
She let go, and I got up. I looked across the hedge, and they were right there, on the other side of it. In fact, one of them made a flying leap over the hedge, arms outstretched, and I just barely leaped back clear of his grasping fingers. Fortunately, his toes didn’t quite clear the hedge, so the beauty of his leap was marred by a nose-dive finish as he zoomed forehead first into the snow. The last I saw of him he was hanging there, feet jammed into the top of the hedge and face jammed into the ground, while his pals, ignoring him, pushed and shoved through the hedge on both sides of him, trying to catch up with their quarry, which was us.
And which was gone. Hand in hand again, we pelted across the snowy back yard, around the corner of the house and out to a street exactly like the one Detective Golderman’s house faced on except that it didn’t have my cab parked on it.
Abbie gasped, “Which way?”
“How do I know?”
“Well, we better decide fast,” she said. “Here they come.”
Here they came. There we went. I took off to the right for no reason other than that the streetlight was closer in that direction.
What was it now, a little after eight o’clock on a Sunday evening? And where was everybody? Home, watching television. Ed Sullivan, probably. That’s what’s wrong with America, its people have grown lazy, slothful, effete. They should be out in the air, out on the sidewalks, walking around, filling their lungs with God’s crisp cool midwinter air, forming crowds into which Abbie and I could blend in comfort and safety. Instead of which that whole nation of ingrates was indoors sitting down with a can of beer in front of the television set, getting fat and soft while Abbie and I ran around in stark solitary visibility in the streets outside.
You want drama, America? Forget Sunday Night at the Movies, come out on the streets, watch the gangsters chase the nice boy and girl.
We ran three blocks, and we were beginning to gasp, we were beginning to falter. Fortunately, the mob behind us was in no better shape than we were, and when Abbie finally pulled to a stop and gasped, “I can’t run any more,” I looked back and saw them straggled out over the block behind us, and none of them could run any more either. The one in front was doing something between a fast walk and a slow trot, but the rest of them were all walking, and the one at the end was absolutely dragging his feet.
So we walked. I had a stitch in my side myself, and I was just as glad to stop running for a while. We walked, and whenever one of them got closer than half a block away we trotted for a while. But what a way to escape.
Finally I said, “Doesn’t Westbury have a downtown?” We’d traveled six or seven blocks now, three running and the rest walking, and we were still in the same kind of genteel residential area. There had been no traffic and no pedestrians, and looking both ways at each intersection I had seen no neon or any other indication of a business district. Sooner or later those guys back there were going to take a chance on opening fire at us and hoping nobody in any of these houses would notice, and for myself I believed none of them would notice a thing.
“There must be something somewhere,” Abbie answered, in reply to my question about downtown. “Don’t talk, just keep walking.”
“Right.”
So we kept walking, and lo and behold when we got to the next corner I looked down to the left and way down there I saw the red of a traffic light and the blue of a neon sign. “Civilization!” I said. “A traffic light and a bar.”
“Let’s go.”
<
br /> We went. We walked faster than ever, and we’d gone a full block before any of our pursuers limped around the corner back there. I looked back and saw there were only four of them now, and seven had started after us, so it looked as though we were wearing them away by attrition. I’d seen two quit earlier, falling by the wayside, sitting down on the curb and letting their hands dangle between their knees. Now a third must have done the same thing.
No. All five had been fine before we’d turned the corner, they’d been striding along like a VFW contingent in the Armed Forces Day parade. So where had the fifth one gone?
Could he be circling the block in some other direction, hoping to head us off?
“Oh,” I said, and stopped in my tracks.
Abbie stared at me. “Come on, Chet,” she said, and tugged.
I came on. I said, “One of them went back for a car.”
She glanced over her shoulder at them, and said, “Are you sure?”
“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!”
It was obvious what they meant to do. They’d ride the train up to where we stood, and then jump on us. Four against one and a half, which is about what we added up to, and the outcome was not in doubt.
“Oh, Chet. Chet, what are we going to do?”
None of them had gotten on the first car, or in the space between cars number one and number two. I said, “Honey, we’ve got to get on that train, too. It’s our only chance.”
“I can’t walk!”
“You’ve got to! Come on, now.”
I half-dragged her up the gravel slope, and saw the engineer of the train looking at us in open-mouthed bewilderment. His big diesel engine trundled by, and he looked down at the top of our heads, and I’m sure he kept looking back at us after he’d gone on by. I’m sure of it, but I didn’t look to check. I saw a chrome railing coming toward us, and in a car farther on I saw the first of the hoods, with his gun out.
I had one arm around Abbie’s waist, holding tight. She had both arms around my neck. I was about as nimble as a man in ankle chains wearing a straitjacket, but if I didn’t connect right with that chrome handle it was all over.
Here it came. Here it was.
I stuck my free hand out, grabbed that bar, and held on.
The train took me away.
Funny how fast it was going all of a sudden. And my feet were dragging in the gravel, while simultaneously my arm was being pulled out of its socket. I pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and Abbie babbled a million things in my ear, and I finally got my right foot up onto that narrow ledge of platform, and then it was possible to get the rest of me up onto the train, and there I
stood, with Abbie hanging on me as I held to the train by one hand and one foot.
Something went zzzt.
That louse hanging on the next car was shooting at us!
“Abbie!” I shouted. “They’re shooting at us! Get in between the cars!”
“How?”
“I don’t know! Just do it!”
So she did it, I don’t know how. It involved putting her elbows in my nose, one at a time, and spending several hours standing on my foot—the one foot I had attached to the train—but eventually she was standing on something or other between the cars, gasping and panting but alive.
So was I, for the moment. There’d been several more zzzts and a ping or two, but the train was rocking back and forth so much it would have been a miracle if he’d hit me. I was a moving target and he was a moving shooter, and since we were on different cars our movements were not exactly synchronized.
Still, I wasn’t all that happy to be out there in the open with somebody shooting bullets at me, no matter how much the odds were in my favor. Some gambles I’d rather not take. So I swung around the edge of the car and joined Abbie amidships.
It was very strange in here. We had three walls and no floor. A sort of accordion-pleated thing connected the end doorways in the two cars, so we couldn’t get inside, but fortunately the ends of the cars were full of handles and wheels and ladder rungs to hold on to, and there was a narrow lip along the bottom edge of each car to stand on, so it was possible to survive, but very scary to look down between your legs and see railroad ties going by at twenty or thirty miles an hour under your heels. I spent little time looking down.
In fact, I spent more time looking up. A metal ladder ran up the back of the car, and I wondered if we’d be safer on top than here. I called to Abbie, “Wait here! I’m going up!”
She nodded. She looked bushed, and no wonder.
I clambered up the ladder, my arms and legs feeling very heavy, and at the top I discovered that the top of a railroad car sways a lot more than the bottom does. It was impossible for me to stand, impossible to walk. So I inched along on my belly, and no matter how cold and windy it was, no matter how icy and wet my feet were, no matter how I ached all over, no matter how many people were after me with guns, I must say it did feel good to lie down.
Somebody Owes Me Money Page 19
