Lawrence Block - Time to Murder and Create

I guess it was about twelve thirty when I paid my tab and left. I eased the door open carefully, feeling a little foolish, and I scanned both sides of Ninth Avenue in both directions. I didn’t see my Marlboro man, or anything else that looked at all menacing.

I started toward the corner of Fifty-seventh Street, and for the first time since it all started I had the feeling of being a target. I had set myself up this way quite deliberately, and it had certainly seemed like a good idea at the time, but ever since the Marlboro man had turned up things had become very different. It was real now, and that was what made all the difference.

There was movement in a doorway ahead of me, and I was up on the balls of my feet before I recognized the old woman. She was in her usual spot in the doorway of the boutique called Sartor Resartus. She’s always there when the weather’s decent. She always asks for money. Most of the time I give her something.

She said, “Mister, if you could spare—” and I found some coins in my pocket and gave them to her. “God will bless you,” she said.

I told her I hoped she was right. I walked on toward the corner, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t raining that night, because I heard her scream before I heard the car. She let out a shriek, and I spun around in time to see a car with its high beams on vault the curb at me.

I didn’t have time to think it over. I guess my reflexes were good. At least they were good enough. I was off balance from spinning around when the woman screamed, but I didn’t stop to get my balance. I just threw myself to the right. I landed on a shoulder and rolled up against the building.

It was barely enough. If a driver has the nerve, he can leave you no room at all. All he has to do is bounce his car off the side of the building. That can be rough on the car and rough on the building, but it’s roughest of all on the person caught between the two. I thought he might do that, and then when he yanked the wheel at the last minute I thought he might do it accidentally, fishtailing the car’s rear end and swatting me like a fly.

He didn’t miss by much. I felt a rush of air as the car hurtled past me. Then I rolled over and watched him cut back off the sidewalk and onto the avenue. He snapped off a parking meter on his way, bounced when he hit the asphalt, then put the pedal on the floor and hit the corner just as the light turned red. He sailed right through the light, but then, so do half the cars in New York. I don’t remember the last time I saw a cop ticket anybody for a moving violation. They just don’t have the time.

“These crazy, crazy drivers!”

It was the old woman, standing beside me now, making tsk sounds.

“They just drink their whiskey,” she said, “and they smoke their reefers, and then they go out for a joy ride. You could have been killed.”

“Yes.”

“And after all that, he didn’t even stop to see if you were all right.”

“He wasn’t very considerate.”

“People are not considerate any more.”

I got to my feet and brushed myself off. I was shaking, and badly rattled. She said, “Mister, if you could spare. ” and then her eyes clouded slightly and she frowned at some private puzzlement. “No,” she said. “You just gave me money, didn’t you? I’m very sorry. It’s difficult to remember.”

I reached for my wallet. “Now this is a ten-dollar bill,” I said, pressing it into her hand. “You make sure you remember, all right? Make sure you get the right amount of change when you spend it. Do you understand?”

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“Now you’d better go home and get some sleep. All right?”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Ten dollars. A ten-dollar bill. Oh, God bless you, sir.”

“He just did,” I said.

Isaiah was behind the desk when I got back to the hotel. He’s a light-skinned West Indian with bright blue eyes and kinky rust-colored hair. He has large dark freckles on his cheeks and on the backs of his hands. He likes the midnight-to-eight shift because it’s quiet and he can sit behind the desk working double-acrostics, toking periodically from a bottle of cough syrup with codeine in it.

He does the puzzles with a nylon-tipped pen. I asked him once if it wasn’t more difficult that way. “Otherwise there is no pride in it, Mr. Scudder,” he’d said.

What he said now was that I’d had no calls. I went upstairs and walked down the hall to my room. I checked to see if there was any light coming from under the door, and there wasn’t, and I decided that that didn’t prove anything. Then I looked for scratch marks around the lock, and there weren’t any, and I decided that that didn’t prove anything either, because you could pick those hotel locks with dental floss. Then I opened the door and found there was nothing in the room but the furniture, which stood to reason, and I turned on the light and closed and locked the door and held my hands at arm’s length and watched the fingers tremble.

I made myself a stiff drink and then I made myself drink it. For a moment or two my stomach picked up the shakes from my hands and I didn’t think the whiskey was going to stay down, but it did. I wrote some letters and numbers on a piece of paper and put it in my wallet. I got out of my clothes and stood under the shower to wash off a coating of sweat. The worst sort of sweat, composed of equal parts of exertion and animal fear.

I was toweling dry when the phone rang. I didn’t want to pick it up. I knew what I was going to hear.

“That was just a warning, Scudder.”

“Bullshit. You were trying. You’re just not good enough.”

“When we try, we don’t miss.”

I told him to fuck off and hung up. I picked it up a few seconds later and told Isaiah no calls before nine, at which time I wanted a wake-up call.

Then I got into bed to see whether I could sleep.

I slept better than I’d expected. I woke up only twice during the night, and both times it was the same dream, and it would have bored a Freudian psychiatrist to tears. It was a very literal dream, no symbols to it at all. Pure reenactment, from the moment I left Armstrong’s to the moment the car closed on me, except that in the dream the driver had the necessary skill and balls to go all the way, and just as I knew he was going to put me between the rock and the hard place, I woke up, with my hands in fists and my heart hammering.

I guess it’s a protective mechanism, dreaming like that. Your unconscious mind takes the things you can’t handle and plays with them while you sleep until some of the sharp corners are worn off. I don’t know how much good those dreams did, but when I awoke for the third and last time a half-hour before I was supposed to get my wake-up call, I felt a little better about things. It seemed to me that I had a lot to feel good about. Someone had tried for me, and that’s what I had been looking to provoke all along. And someone had missed, and that was also as I wanted it.

I thought about the phone call. It had not been the Marlboro man. I was reasonably certain of that. The voice I’d heard was older, probably around my own age, and it had had the flavor of New York streets in its tones.

So there looked to be at least two of them in on it. That didn’t tell me much, but it was something else to know, another fact to file and forget. Had there been more than one person in the car? I tried to remember what I had seen in the brief glimpse I’d had while the car was bearing down on me. I hadn’t seen much, not with the headlights pitched right at my eyes. And by the time I’d turned for a look at the departing car, it was already a good distance past me and moving fast. And I’d been more intent on catching the plate number than counting heads.