Donald Westlake: Somebody Owes Me Money

“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.

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.”

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.”