“They’re paying Napoli back!”
“That’s the way they’d think,” she said. “An eye for an eye.”
“Yeah, but it’s my eye.”
“But what if they find out,” she said, “that you didn’t have anything to do with killing Tommy? Then they won’t be after you any more.”
“Praise be,” I said. “Only, how are they going to find out this good news?”
“From me,” she said.
“From you?”
“I’m going to find out who the murderer is. I still think Louise had something to do with it—”
“She didn’t.”
“Whether she did or not,” Abbie said, “I’m sure she wasn’t working alone. There’s a man in the case somewhere, the man who actually pulled the trigger. He’s the one I’m going to find.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Then the mob will know it wasn’t you after all, and they’ll leave you alone.”
I shook my head. “I’m not hearing right,” I said. “Everything’s okay because sometime in the next two days you’re going to find Tommy’s murderer and prove he’s the murderer and turn him over to the police and then the mob won’t try to kill me anymore.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Abbie,” I said. I reached out to where her hand was resting on the blanket near my knee. I put my hand over hers and said, “Abbie, I don’t want to suggest I don’t have perfect faith in you or anything, but face it. You aren’t a detective, you’re a blackjack dealer.”
“Don’t you worry, Chet,” she said. “I’ll find him.” She slipped her hand from under mine, patted mine, and got to her feet. “You go to sleep now,” she said. “We’ll talk some more in the morning.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said. “I’m not tired.”
“The doctor said those pills would make you drowsy.”
The fact was, the pills had made me drowsy, but I was fighting it. “I’m not drowsy,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk in the morning, I want to talk now. I want to talk about what—”
“Chet,” she said. “I’m sorry, maybe you aren’t drowsy, but I am. I was going to take a shower when you woke up, and I really need one. I’m exhausted, I’m sore all over from helping carry you up here, and I’m still sticky.” She made still-sticky wiggles with her fingers.
I said, “Still sticky?”
“Well, you bled all over the place, Chet,” she said. “You should see the car. I don’t know what the Avis people are going to say.”
“Oh,” I said. I suddenly felt very faint, and twice as drowsy as before. I began to blink, blinking because my eyes wanted to be closed and I wanted them to be open.
“I’ll look in on you after I shower,” Abbie said. “And we’ll talk in the morning. Whatever we decide, Chet, it can wait till morning.”
“All right,” I said. I couldn’t struggle against it anymore, I was drowsy. I lay back on the bed, tiredly pulling the covers up to my chin. “See you later,” I murmured.
“See you later,” she said, and through my blinking I saw her in the doorway, pausing to grin at me. “You are cute bare-ass,” she said, and left.
That almost woke me up again. I stared at the doorway for a few seconds until my eyelids grew too heavy to maintain the posture, and then subsided. What a way to talk. Well, a girl who dealt blackjack in Las Vegas for a living, you wouldn’t expect her to be exactly a sheltered maiden. No, neither sheltered nor a maiden.
As my eyes slowly shut, I found myself counting the months. How long had it been since I’d been in bed with a member of the opposition? Six months? Seven months. Not since that girl Rita had last refused to come out to the track with me.
That’s a long time, seven months. I lay there thinking about that, listening to the far-off shush of the shower running, imagining the flesh that water was pouring over, thinking about pouring over that flesh myself sometime maybe, and in an oddly good frame of mind for somebody who had just recently been shot at with bullets I drifted very gradually and pleasantly into a soft and dreamless sleep, not waking till Abbie screamed.
14
I sat up, and the room was full of a man with a gun. He was standing one pace in from the doorway. The light was off now, but gray daylight ebbed in the airshaft window, and unfortunately I could see him. He was wearing a hat and an overcoat and a gun, and the gun was pointed at me, and his eyes were looking at me, and his eyes appeared to be made of slate.
Abbie screamed again, and something crashed. She was in some other room in the apartment, and she was in trouble, but I was convinced I was as good as dead, so I didn’t move.
In that other room something else crashed, and a male voice roared in what sounded like a triplicate combination of anger and surprise and pain. The man with the gun glanced back at the doorway in irritation, then glared at me again and waggled the gun. “Don’t move,” he said, in a voice that was forty percent gravel and sixty percent inert materials.
Move? Wasn’t he going to shoot me anyway? Wasn’t he the one who shot me last night? If not, what was he doing here? What was his gun doing here? What was his friend doing to Abbie?
Crash. The male voice roared again.
What was Abbie doing to his friend?
The man with the gun wanted to know that, too. He backed up a step, looking very irritated, and was about to bend backward and stick his head through the doorway when a table lamp sailed by from the direction of the living room. We both heard it crash, and then we both heard something else crash in or near the living room, and Abbie and the male voice hollered at once, and the man with the gun growled at me, “You don’t go nowhere, see? Not if you don’t want nothing to happen to you.”
“I don’t want nothing to happen to me,” I said, hoping his double negative had been bad grammar.
“Then just stay where you are,” he told me. “Don’t move outa that bed.”
“You can count on it,” I assured him, but I don’t think he heard me. He had already backed up through the doorway and was standing in the hall. With one last glare and gun-waggle at me, he took off toward the living room.
Nothing changed for a minute, the ruckus continued unabated, and then all of a sudden it went absolutely insane. The crashing doubled, it tripled, it sounded like St. Patrick’s Day on Third Avenue.
And then, abruptly, silence.
I squinted, as though to hear better. Silence? Silence.
What had happened? What was happening now? Was Abbie all right?
I should have gone out there, I told myself. Regardless of whether or not I could have gotten out of bed, regardless of the fact that I was naked and weaponless and too weak to move, I should have gone out there and done what I could to help. If anything had happened to Abbie—
Abbie came hurtling into the room, brought up against the dresser, spun around, and shouted at the guy who’d shoved her, “You stink, you bastard!” She was dressed but disheveled, hair awry, makeup smeared, clothing wrinkled and all twisted around. She was the most insanely beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
My old comrade with the gun came through the doorway, pointed the gun at Abbie as though he was pointing a finger at her, and said, “You ain’t no lady.”
“And you’re a gentleman,” she snapped. She turned away from him and came over to me. “How are you, Chet?” she said. “Did they do anything to you?”
I was lying flat on my back, sheet and blanket tucked up around my neck. I blinked up at her, and I felt like an absolute lummox. “How are you?” I said. “Did they do anything—”
“Them,” she said with total disdain.