Donald Westlake - Smoke

But then he decided it didn't matter. He'd give her the twenty-five, and a little later he'd take it away from her again, and let her explain herself at home. He'd tell Freddie she'd left with the money, that's all, and Freddie would have to know what a sneaking liar this woman was, so he'd have to believe his old friend Josh, wouldn't he? And if he didn't, if he took the damn woman's part against his old friend, well, fine. If Josh never saw Freddie Noon again, that would be okay, too.

So he went back to the driver's window, and of course it was shut. He rapped more sharply on the glass this time, and when she opened it the usual inch he said, "S."

"Oh, good. Freddie will be very happy. This'll make him get healthy even faster."

"Out," Josh suggested, and turned the door handle, and it was locked. Damn woman!

"I don't need to get out," she told him. "You can just give me the money right here, and I'll be on my way. I don't like to leave Freddie alone when he isn't feeling well."

Stupid woman. The van's back doors were open; he could just crawl in that way and get his hands on her. So he turned away from her nasty smiling face and walked toward the rear of the van, and she started the engine. He looked back, betrayed, and she'd lowered the window more now and was looking back at him. "Don't go right behind there," she advised. "It might back up and hurt you."

He stood glowering, unable to think of a single thing to say. She waited, smiling, then said, "Just get the money, all right, Josh? And I'll be off. I don't want to smell up your place with the exhaust."

Money. All right, get her the money. We'll get her the money. And more. We'll see who's so smart around here.

Josh went through his storage rooms to his office, opened a safe, and took out five of the five-thousand-dollar envelopes. This time, he'd make her count the money, so she'd be looking away when . . .

Here was the rack of auto keys, the master keys for every kind of car, for this kind of car, that kind of car, and . . . Freddie Noon's van. Josh slipped the key off its hook on the rack.

This evening, a part of Josh's fashion statement was grimy shirttails hanging out. He pulled up the tail on the right side so he could put the key in the pocket of his baggy rotten trousers, then wiped his sweaty hands on the shirttail, picked up the five envelopes, and plodded back to the van.

It still sat there with its engine running, but the rear doors were now shut. The exhaust smell was getting pretty strong. Don't want her to knock me out again, Josh thought, and grinned to himself, because this time he'd be the one doing the knocking out.

Window open one damn inch. Giving her the envelopes one at a time was like mailing letters. "Count," Josh ordered.

"Oh, that's okay, I'll just—"

"Count!"

"Okay, okay, I'll count," she said, shrugging, and as she looked down at the envelopes in her lap, reaching for one, he reached for the key in his trouser pocket and found his shirttail on fire.

Ipe! Josh jumped around like a Watusi, whacking at his right hip like a move in a Bob Fosse dance, while the damn woman in the van looked at him with the first honest smile he'd ever seen her wear.

How could he catch fire? Holy Batman, his whole shirt was on fire! What had he touched, what had he brushed against, how —

Yanking the shirt off to reveal the tattered and filthy sleeveless undershirt beneath, staring around in wild surmise, Josh saw, against the far wall, forty million dollars in counterfeit twenties in brown paper bags burning like a Magritte tuba.

Fire! Disaster! Shrieking, leaving the shirt to burn itself out on the elevator floor, Josh scampered to the bags of money, grabbing fur coats along the way, throwing the coats onto the flames, throwing himself on top of the coats, smothering the fire.

Creak/groan/creak/groan. Supine atop the smoldering minks, Josh looked up to see the van descending out of sight. Somehow, the damn woman had gotten out of the van and started the elevator. Josh couldn't run after her, not with everything on fire here. He slapped at flames, rolled around on flames, scrambled to his feet, threw more coats on the smoking mess, jumped up and down on it all, and at last felt it was safe to turn his attention to the elevator.

It was already at the bottom, down in the darkness there. The woman had the garage door open and was driving out. Josh stood panting at the lip of the big square opening, his nose full of burning fur and car exhaust and his own self, and her vicious voice came up to him from the blackness below. "I'll send the elevator back up."

Huh.

"And I'll send along a little something to remember me by."

What did she mean by that ?

"And next time, Josh, you be nice ."

Grungle-grungle, the delivery door closed down there. Kerough-kerough, the elevator started up. Snarl snarl . . . Josh peered, trying to see the rising wooden platform. Something was on it, moving . . . the Dobermans!

Josh ran for his life.

After eighteen rings, Josh finally gave up and answered the telephone: "Y."

"Peg tells me she had to set the dogs on you," Freddie Noon's voice said.

Four in the morning, and the Dobermans were still snarling and biting and hurling themselves at the other side of his secret mirrored door. God knows what they'd destroyed back there in the storage area. Tomorrow, the downstairs people would figure out how to get those murderous beasts back where they belonged, but for now, Josh's private space was ass-deep in Doberman pinschers. "Y," he repeated.

"Peg knew what you had in mind," Freddie said, infuriatingly calm. "She saw you get that key, she knew you were gonna try to attack her again."

Saw him get the key? Impossible, she was two rooms away in the van. Did she follow him? Was that possible? But how did that fire start? Did she start it? Did he brush by it without seeing it, and that's how it got his shirt? It couldn't have happened that way. "No," Josh said, meaning no to just about everything in the world.

Freddie said, "Josh, you and me, we've always had a good professional business relationship."

"S."

"And I want us to go on having that good professional business relationship, Josh."

"S."

"But, you know, I figure I'm gonna be laid up a while longer, so it's Peg you're gonna be dealing with, and she and me, we don't want her to have any more trouble with you."

She's having trouble with me ? Josh gritted his teeth, but kept silent.

"Josh? You hear me?"

"S."

"When Peg comes over there, she's gonna have the same good professional business relationship with you that I do. Right? Right, Josh?"

Josh's fantasies lay in crumbled ruins around his feet. Nearby, a Doberman flung himself yet again at the secret door. "S," Josh said, and hung up.

15

So this is what tobacco money buys when it's blowing the stink off, Mordon Leethe thought, as he got out of the taxi at the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility on East Forty-ninth Street. The taxi, driven by a recent immigrant from Alpha Centauri, zipped away, rattling, and Mordon climbed the slate steps in late-morning sunshine toward the well-polished old wood front door with beveled lights, his hand stroking the smooth thick paint on the rail. Thursday, the fifteenth of June, beautiful weather, three days since Mordon's meeting with Jack Fullerton the Fourth, and at last it looked as though some progress was about to be made. But first, ID.

Mordon reached the landing at the front door, saw the bell button beside the door, saw the small sign above it — PLEASE RING BELL — and rang it.

In the oriel to his right, a young black woman sat typing on a very new word processor atop a very old mahogany desk. When Mordon pressed the bell button, she paused in her typing, turned her head just enough to give him a look as flat and impersonal as the gaze of a parakeet, and then, having apparently decided he looked like the sort of person who was permitted onto these premises, she reached under her desk. A faint buzzing sound came from the direction of the door; Mordon pushed on it, the door swung open, and he entered.