Before noon on that same day, Cronley became at last what it had for so long appeared to be: deserted. Guffey, freshly shaved, garbed in the best of the professors’ stolen clothing, dismantled rifle and more clothing stowed in the knapsack on his back, marched out of Cronley and across the rock-strewn desert toward his long-deferred destiny.
By early evening, he’d walked and hitchhiked as far as a town with a state police barracks, where he reported the hit-and-run driver, offering a description of the car and its license number, plus the welt on the back of his head for evidence. They took the license number and description and ran them through their computer, and they took the welt on the back of his head and ran him through the hospital, giving him the softest night’s sleep and the best food of his entire life, and almost making him give up the quest right there. All a fella had to do, after all, to live in the lap of luxury like this, was step out in front of a bus seven or eight times a year.
But duty called, particularly when the cops came around the hospital next morning to say they knew who’d hit him but there wasn’t much to be done about it. (He’d been counting on this official indifference.) The car, it seemed, was a rental, picked up at the Oklahoma City airport the same day it hit Guffey and turned back in the next day. The miscreants—“New Yorkers: you might know”—were long gone. There wasn’t the slightest mark on the car, nor were there any witnesses, nor had the hospital found anything at all seriously wrong with Guffey (amazingly enough), so there simply wasn’t enough of a case to warrant an interstate inquiry.
Guffey, humble as ever, accepted everything he was told, and asked only one thing in return: Might he have, please, the name and address of the person who had rented the car?
One of the cops grinned at that request and said, “You wouldn’t think of taking the law in your own hands, would you?”
“I’ve never been out of Oklahoma in my life!” Guffey cried, truthfully. “I just want to write that person and tell him I forgive him. I’m a Christian, you know. Praise the Lord!”
When it looked as though Guffey might intend to start preaching in their direction nonstop, the cops gave him two names—Tom Jimson, who’d rented the car, and John Dortmunder, who’d driven it—plus one address in New York for both of them. (Tom Jimson, huh? Tim Jepson, Tom Jimson, huh? Huh? Huh?)
There was a little glitch when the hospital said they wanted to keep Guffey a few days longer for observation, but when they discovered he didn’t have any insurance they realized they’d already observed him long enough, and he was let go. And then, for the first time in his life, thumb extended, Guffey left Oklahoma.
The trip northeast was fairly long and adventurous, punctuated by a number of crimes of the most cowardly and despicable sort: church poor-boxes rifled, cripples mugged for their grocery sacks, things like that. And here at last was New York. And here was the address. And here was John Dortmunder.
Tim Jepson wasn’t here right at this minute, unfortunately—killing him in his sleep would be the safest way to go about it, after all—but that was all right. John Dortmunder was here and John Dortmunder could tell Guffey how to find Tim Jepson.
And he would, too. Oh, yes.
SIXTY-FIVE
“Well, no,” Dortmunder said, trying to sound like a reasonable person in control of himself and his environment, rather than a terrified bunny rabbit who’s just been awakened by a madman with a rifle. “No, I don’t know where Tom—Tim is.”
“Lives here,” the madman corrected him. “Said so when you rented the car.”
Dortmunder stared, astonished at the madman’s information, and the madman cackled, rather like Tom himself, except that his mouth opened plenty wide enough to see the shriveled and darkened toothless gums. “Didn’t know I knew that, did you?” he demanded, the rifle as steady as a courthouse cannon in his wrinkled old hands.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh, I know all sorts of stuff, Mr. Department of Recovery. Tim Jepson calls himself Tom Jimson now. He paid for that rental car. You drove.”
“Well, gee, you’re pretty good,” Dortmunder told him, thinking like mad.
“You know what I’m really good at?” the madman asked him.
“No, what’s that?”
“Shooting.” The maniac grinned, cheek nestled against the cold rifle. “I been shooting for the pot for years now,” he explained.
“Don’t you ever hit it?” Dortmunder asked him.
Which made the old guy mad, for some reason. “Shooting for the pot!” he repeated, with great emphasis. “That means shooting food! Coyotes and rabbits and gophers and snakes and rats! That you put in the pot! And eat!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Dortmunder told him, very sincerely. “I’m a city person, I don’t know these things.”
“Well, I do,” the touchy countryman said, “and let me tell you, Mr. City Person, I’m goddamn good at shooting for the pot.”
“I bet you are,” Dortmunder told him, filling his voice to the gunwales with admiration.
“You get a little squirrel out there,” the madman told him, “it don’t stand still and let you aim, like how you do. It keeps moving, jumping around. And yet, every blessed time I pull this trigger, I hit that squirrel just exactly where I want. I never spoil the meat.”
“That’s pretty good,” Dortmunder assured him.
“It’s goddamn good!”
“That’s right! That’s right!”
“So, then,” the madman said, settling down once more, “what do you think the chances are, if I decided to shoot that left earlobe offa you, that I’ll probly do it?”
“Well, uh,” Dortmunder said. His left earlobe began to itch like crazy. His left hand began to tremble like crazy, thwarted in its desire to scratch his left ear. His left eye began to water. “Uhhhhh,” he said, “I don’t think you ought to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, uh, the noise, the neighbors, they—”
“What I hear about New York City,” the madman informed him, “when the neighbors around these parts hear a gunshot they just turn up on the TV and pretend it didn’t happen. That’s what I hear.”
“Oh, well,” Dortmunder said, “that’s just people out in the sticks knocking New York the way they do. This city’s really a very warm-hearted, caring, uh, for instance, people from out of town are constantly getting their wallet back that they left in the taxi.”
“Well, I don’t leave no wallet in no taxi,” the madman told him. “I only know what I hear. And I figure it’s worth the chance.”
“Wait a minute!” Dortmunder cried. “Why do you, why do you want to do such a thing?”
“For practice,” the madman told him. “And so you’ll take me seriously.”
“I take you seriously! I take you seriously!”
“Good.” The madman nodded agreeably but kept the rifle aimed at Dortmunder’s ear. “So where’s Tim Jepson?” he said.
SIXTY-SIX
“Uh,” said the man on the bed.
Guffey frowned at him. “Uh?”
“I don’t know!”
“If you really don’t know,” Guffey told him, in all sincerity, “that’s a pity, because you’re about to lose an ear.”
“Wait a minute!” the man called John Dortmunder cried, waving his arms around, kicking his legs under the blanket. “I do know, but wait a minute, okay?”