Lawrence Block - No Score

I shuddered, then tuned Flick in again. “Where you made your mistake,” he was saying, “was that you came down here without you checked it all out with the sheriff. Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble. Now what you got to do is get on the phone and ring the sheriff and tell him what’s happening, and you can let me have a couple of words with him, and we’ll have this whole thing straightened out in a minute.”

“You and the sheriff are close, is that right?”

“The closest. And there’s no hard feelings, and to prove it there’ll be something in it for you fellows, too. More or less to make it up to you for your time.”

“That’s attempting to bribe an arresting officer,” the cop said. “Write that down, Ken.”

“You’ll have to spell it for him,” Keegan said, and then there was an oof sound, as though someone (like Ken) had hit someone (for instance, Keegan) in the stomach.

“Officer,” Hick said, coming down hard on the first syllable, “I think I have to spell it out for you. The fix is in.”

“Is that right?”

“You talk to the sheriff and—”

“I talked to him an hour ago. That’s his signature on the bottom of the warrant there, boy.”

“Like hell it is.”

A long pause. Then Flickinger said, “It says Harold M. Powers. Now who in the precious hell is Harold M-for-Mother Powers?”

The cops all laughed. They really enjoyed themselves. I guess when you’re a cop you don’t get all that many opportunities to cut loose and laugh, and they made the most of this one. “Now who in the precious hell,” one of them started, and they broke up for a while, and another finished, “is Harold M-for-Mother Powers?” and they all fell out all over again.

Until finally one of them said, “Why, I’ll tell you, boy, if you’re so close with him, how come you don’t even recognize the sheriff’s name?”

“What about Barnett Ramsey?”

“Why, we had an election some six or eight months ago, and old Barney got beat.”

“He lost the election,” Flickinger said. Heavily.

“After all those years. Yeah, it surprised a whole mess of folks.”

“Great bleeding shit,” Flickinger said. “Jesus frigging Christ with a tambourine. Holy laminated bifurcated ocellated Mother of Pearl.”

“I never heard the like,” one cop said softly.

“Sweet shit in a bucket,” Flickinger said. “I bribed the wrong man.”

Everybody started talking at once. I took a deep breath and said a quick prayer and rolled under the bed.

I didn’t really expect to get away with it. But they had been doing such a great job of ignoring me that I figured I ought to give them all the encouragement I could. The easier I made it for them, the better.

So I rolled under the bed, and since I was right next to it already, and on the floor, and more or less face down, it wasn’t that hard to do. In a sense I suppose rolled is the wrong word for it. I sort of crept on my belly like an earthworm. Sideways, though. Earthworms, as you probably know, tend to go back and forth. I don’t know how you tell an earthworm’s back from his forth. It was never very important to me. I don’t even like to go fishing, for Pete’s sake. I do know, though, that earthworms are male at one end and female at the other, so you know what they can do.

Lying under that bed, I decided that the police force of the fifth largest city in the state of Indiana could do the same thing earthworms can do, for all I cared. Because it occurred to me that they, were not only going to give me the royal shaft, but they were going to give it to me for something I didn’t do. In the first place I was only seventeen myself, so what I did to Cherry wasn’t statutory rape, and in the second place I hadn’t done anything in the first place.

Which seemed to indicate that as soon as I clued them in, they would let me go.

But I didn’t think they would. So I stayed under the bed while Flickinger told everybody who would listen that it would take a while to straighten everything out, but that he knew everything would be straightened out, because one thing you couldn’t deny was that he and his men represented Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc., and that DTE was no fly-by-night outfit but a company that had been a leader in its field for twenty-two-count-’em-twenty-two years, and that was by God a lot of goddamn years.

(This was the God’s honest truth, as a matter of fact. I had trouble believing it myself, but it was. The company didn’t ever do a thing that was illegal. If a crew boss ran things on the shady side, they didn’t want to know about it. If a crew boss ran things on the up and up, that was fine with DTE. Of course an honest crew boss couldn’t possibly clear fifteen cents a month, but that was the way it went. You couldn’t call the company crooked just because all its employees were crooked, could you?)

“We’ll be out of this in no time,” Flick said. “Youse guys just trust me on this without you all lose your heads and get rattled. All right, we gotta go see the Sheriff, that’s what we got to do. That’s all.”

They finished getting dressed, and they talked about things, and they asked the cops if Cherry was really only fifteen, and the cops said she was, and Lester asked one of the cops how often Cherry generally got statutorily raped, and the cop said as often as she possibly could, and Lester asked why anybody would make a fuss over it then, and the cop said it was because it was the sort of thing the city couldn’t take lying down, and Lester said that if Cherry could take it lying down, he didn’t see why the city couldn’t. The cop laughed and said that was sure a good way of putting it. I think this comes under the heading of Fraternizing With The Enemy.

And I kept waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, what happened to the kid we had to hit over the head?”

Or for one of the guys on our side to say, “Say, what the hell happened to Chip?”

Or for somebody, anybody, to sing out, “ Look who’s hiding under the bed!”

But they found other things to say, and the door opened, and they trailed out of it and left it ajar. I don’t know to this day where Cherry was during all of this. I didn’t see her or hear her, and I didn’t hear anybody talk to her, or say anything that gave the impression she was in the room. But I didn’t see how she could have been taken anywhere because all of the cops were still in the room, so who would have taken her away? I guess either they sent her home by herself or a matron came for her while I was unconscious. Or else she was what you would call a plant, and the police had sent her over there to begin with so that they could give us all the shaft. (I don’t really believe that last one at all. But I’m putting it in to give you an idea of how paranoid a person can get under the right set of circumstances. After all, somewhere out there is my old roommate Haskell, and I want to make sure the book has a certain amount of psychological significance so he won’t feel guilty while he reads it and turns the pages with one hand. Hi, Haskell, you hypocritical jerkoff!)

They left the room, as I said before I got off course again. They went out, and I heard them in the hallway, and I got out from under the bed, still waiting for them to wonder what had happened to the kid. I went over to the window and yanked it open. And somebody must have wondered about me, although they were too far away from the room for “me to hear them say so, because I heard footsteps racing back up the hall and a voice — Jimmy Joe, God bless him — shout out my name.

I stepped out of the window. It was the first floor, which was the one good thing that had happened that evening. And it was at the back of the motel, away from the parking lot and nowhere near where the other cops had been heading. That was the second good thing that happened that evening. And, because they come in threes, a third good thing happened that evening, which is that I ran like a cat with its tail on fire and got away without being spotted.