I had nothing to say. What can you say to a thing like that?
“Don’t you understand?” Coretti said. “I almost murdered you. You’ve been my friend and my partner for ten years and I almost blew you away.”
“But you didn’t,” I said finally.
“But I almost did.”
“Money like that... it can do funny things to a man. Think how we’d be, what we might do, if we’d taken it.”
“Maybe you’re right. I still think we could’ve gotten away with it. Now we’ll never know. But it scared the hell out of me, what I almost did up there. I thought I knew myself, but now...” He shook his head.
“You think it was an easy decision for me, Bob?”
“I know it wasn’t. Don’t you think I know that?”
“The best thing for both of us is to try to forget it ever happened.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Coretti said.
My hand wasn’t steady as I reached into the pocket of my shirt for a cigarette. The pack was crushed and wet. I crumpled it, threw it into the back seat. Wordlessly Coretti extended his pack to me. I took one, and our eyes met again, briefly, then we both looked away.
I lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, feeling the smoke curl into my lungs. I stared out at the empty street and the falling rain, taking slow drags — and there was a savage tearing sensation under my breastbone, a fiery pain so intense I cried out. Then I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. My vision blurred. The last thing I saw was Coretti reaching out to me. And the last thing I heard was the high, keening wail of sirens slicing through the wet, black night.
I woke up in the hospital. Full of dope, hooked up to machines and an IV. I didn’t feel any pain, but my middle was a mass of bandages. A nurse came in, looked at me, went away again. Then my doctor was there. He asked me how I was feeling. I told him groggy and then asked him, “What happened?”
“Exactly what I warned you might happen,” he said. “Your ulcer perforated. You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Kelstrom. You almost died on the operating table.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky.”
“If you’d listened to me when I first told you you needed an operation, this would not have happened. As it is... well, barring complications you should be all right in time.”
“In time. What’s that mean? How long am I going to be in here?”
“A few weeks. After that, two or three months convalescence at home.”
“Weeks? Months?”
“Recovery from a perforated ulcer is a slow process, Mr. Kelstrom.”
“I’ve got a wife and kid. How can I support my family if I’m flat on my back?”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “but you really have no one to blame but yourself.”
He went away and the nurse came back and gave me some more dope that knocked me out. When I woke up again, Gerry was there holding my hand.
“Oh, Arne,” she said, “we almost lost you. Why didn’t you tell me how bad the ulcer was? Why didn’t you have the operation right away?”
“We couldn’t afford it. All the damn bills...”
“We could’ve managed. We’ll manage as it is, but—” She broke off and looked away. Then she put on a smile and said, “We’ll be all right. Don’t worry; everything’s going to be fine.”
I didn’t say anything. This time I was the one who looked away.
Later, Coretti and the captain came in. They stood awkwardly, Coretti not making eye contact with me. The whole time he was there he looked at a spot on the wall above my head. The captain said some things about what a good cop I was, how he was putting Coretti and me up for departmental citations. He said I’d get full disability while I was recuperating. He said that if it turned out I couldn’t work the field anymore, he’d see to it I had a desk job for as long as I wanted it. He didn’t mention the money, but he didn’t need to. We all knew that it would be unclaimed and eventually wind up going to the state.
Coretti didn’t say a word until they were ready to leave. Then he said to the wall, “Good luck, Arne. Take care of yourself.” That was all. After they were gone, I wondered if he’d be back to see me. I didn’t think he would. I didn’t think I’d be seeing much of him at all anymore.
I lay there and thought about the money. One hundred and twelve thousand dollars divided in two, fifty-six thousand dollars — the one big opportunity that I’d turned my back on. I thought about the fifteen years I’d been an honest, by-the-book cop, and all the bribes and payoffs, all the chances I’d had for some quick and easy cash that would have made my life and Gerry’s life easier, all those other opportunities I’d let slip away because of convictions that you couldn’t eat and couldn’t pay the bills with.
We’ll manage, Gerry had said. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine.
Well, I wasn’t worrying. Not anymore. And everything was going to be fine. Because now I knew with a brand new conviction what I was going to do when I returned to duty.
I knew just exactly what I was going to do.
A Craving for Originality
Charlie Hackman was a professional writer. He wrote popular fiction, any kind from sexless Westerns to sexy Gothics to oversexed historical romances, whatever the current trends happened to be. He could be counted on to deliver an acceptable manuscript to order in two weeks. He had published 9,000,000 words in a fifteen-year career, under a variety of different names (Allison St. Cyr being the most prominent), and he couldn’t tell you the plot of any book he’d written more than six months ago. He was what is euphemistically known in the trade as “a dependable wordsmith,” or “a versatile pro,” or “a steady producer of commercial commodities.”
In other words, he was well-named: Hackman was a hack.
The reason he was a hack was not because he was fast and prolific, or because he contrived popular fiction on demand, or because he wrote for money. It was because he was and did all these things with no ambition and no sense of commitment. It was because he wrote without originality of any kind.
Of course, Hackman had not started out to be a hack; no writer does. But he had discovered early on, after his first two novels were rejected with printed slips by thirty-seven publishers each, that (a) he was not very good, and (b) what talent he did possess was in the form of imitations. When he tried to do imaginative, ironic, meaningful work of his own he failed miserably; but when he imitated the ideas and visions of others, the blurred carbon copies he produced were just literate enough to be publishable.
Truth to tell, this didn’t bother him very much. The one thing he had always wanted to be was a professional writer; he had dreamed of nothing else since his discovery of the Hardy Boys and Tarzan books in his pre-teens. So from the time of his first sale he accepted what he was, shrugged, and told himself not to worry about it. What was wrong with being a hack, anyway? The writing business was full of them — and hacks, no less than nonhacks, offered a desirable form of escapist entertainment to the masses; the only difference was, his readership had nondiscriminating tastes. Was his product, after all, any less honorable than what television offered? Was he hurting anybody, corrupting anybody? No. Absolutely not. So what was wrong with being a hack?
For one and a half decades, operating under this cheerful set of rationalizations, Hackman was a complacent man. He wrote from ten to fifteen novels per year, all for minor and exploitative paperback houses, and earned an average annual sum of $35,000. He married an ungraceful woman named Grace and moved into a suburban house on Long Island. He went bowling once a week, played poker once a week, argued conjugal matters with his wife once a week, and took the train into Manhattan to see his agent and editors once a week. Every June he and Grace spent fourteen pleasant days at Lake George in the Adirondacks. Every Christmas Grace’s mother came from Pennsylvania and spent fourteen miserable days with them.