The Long Wait (2 page)

A cab cruised in and slowed down. I picked up my case and walked over. The driver was a young kid with his hair slicked back and he gave me the eyes up and down while I opened the door. I said, “Town.”

The cop moved out of the shadows and stepped off the curb. The kid leered, “What do I get paid with?”

So I took out the roll in my pocket and riffled through the twenties and fifties until I found a pair of singles and threw them on the seat beside him. He tucked them in his pocket fast and got polite all of a sudden. “Town it is, friend,” he told me.

I shut the door and looked back out the window. The cop was still there, but his face was all screwed up in a scowl and he was trying to figure out how he had made such a big mistake twice in figuring me for a sucker and for a poor sucker at that.

The cab spun to the main drag and I settled back against the cushions after telling the kid to take me to the Hathaway House. I watched the pattern of the lights shriek into a blaze of color and thought that so far it had been a hell of a homecoming.

But it was about what I had expected.

THE CAB DRIVER and the bellhop had a signal rigged up. If I had gone in cold I would have gotten the treatment. The Hathaway House was the best hotel in town and it didn't take to anybody who wasn't lined with dough. The bellhop and the desk clerk had a signal system too, because I got a lot of smiles and nobody asked me to pay in advance. The hop did everything he was supposed to do and collected a five for it.

He laid the key on the table and said, “Would you like anything brought up, sir?”

I said, “What have you got?”

“The best of everything. Whisky if you want it. Women too.”

“What kind of women?”

“You won't be disappointed.”

“The woman might be though. Maybe some other time.”

“Sure, anything you say. Just ask for Jack. That's me.” He grinned on one side of his face. “I can get you anything you want in town.”

He had wise little eyes like he knew everything there was to know. “I might do that,” I said. He nodded and pulled the door shut. When he was gone I turned the lock and threw the bolt into the hasp and stnpped off my clothes. I took out some clean underwear and socks from the case, tossed them on the bed with my shaving kit and stuffed everything else back in the case. Tomorrow I'd throw the works in some trash can and start over fresh.

Tonight I was going to clean up if I had to ream out each pore individually, then crawl in between fresh sheets and stay there until I felt damn good and ready to get up.

 

It was the sun that awakened me. It started at my feet and warmed its way up to my face until I had it full in the eyes. It was a bright, beautiful day that had gotten off to a good start. I stretched, got up and took a look out the window. It was a very beautiful day. It even made the town look good. And from up where I was looking down you'd never know that the place was called Little Reno because the saloons and gambling joints were still closed and aside from the black dots that were women in the shopping district, the streets were peacefully calm and deserted.

No, not quite deserted. There was a drunk lying in the gutter down there. A dog came over, smelled him and backed away.

I took another shower to wash the sleep off me, shaved fresh and called up room service for a breakfast. When they took my order I had the switchboard girl put me on an outside line to a fancy men's shop and reeled off a list of things I needed. I had just finished breakfast when a beaming clerk from the men's shop came in with a tailor to finish me off in party clothes. Luckily for me I'm one of those guys who walk right into a ready-made outfit, so there wasn't much to be done except let out a few things. I'm not a small guy, either.

The clerk walked off happy with a couple hundred bucks, a fat tip and all I needed was a haircut. I got that downstairs.

Barbershops are funny places. Like the three monkeys, only in reverse. For some reason, barbers seem to be frustrated reporters, orators and G-men all wrapped up together. While they have you strapped down to a chair they make you listen to a summary of events that would make a news commentator blush. I told the guy working on me to cut it as short as he could get it and that's all I ever did get to say to him. He took it from there, started jawing about the people and the town and how he'd run it if he was mayor, got sidetracked into national politics then branched off into the first war, the second war and was well into his third.

If I had been listening I would have noticed the way he lost track of things and concentrated on shaving around my ears, but I was paying too much attention to the rhythm the old colored boy was putting into the shine on my new shoes and missed it all. He whipped off the towel and nodded to me in the mirror. His face looked funny. His smile was all porcelain when he took the buck and something in his throat made his tie bob up and down.

I was climbing into my coat when the bellhop who could get me anything in town poked his head in the door and grinned at me. “Thought I saw you come in here. There's a call for you at the desk. Guy says it's important and I told him to hang on while I rounded you up.”

“Thanks.” His fingers picked the quarter out of the air that went with it. I went back into the lobby of the hotel and he pointed to a row of booths.

“Number four. You can take it in there.”

I closed the door, picked up the phone and said hello.

I was thinking that I sure was a popular guy for somebody who had never been in the town of Lyncastle in his life. Maybe it was going to be fun after all. A nice, nasty kind of fun a lot of people wouldn't forget in a hurry.

The voice cracked in the middle when it said, “Hello ... hello, Johnny?”

I said, “That's right,” and waited to hear the rest of it.

“Well, speak up, boy. Good Lord, you had a nerve running off like that last night. Took me right until now to find the cabbie that brought you to town.”

He spoke like I was supposed to know him and I did. It was the old boy from the railroad station and he sounded like he was calling off trains. Everything all at once and jumbled. Like three trains on the same track at the same time. You know.

“Sorry, Pop,” I said. “Had a long trip and I needed some sleep.”

He exploded into a barrage of words. “Johnny, boy, are you out of your head? What's the idea coming back You git yourself outa that hotel right now and get down here. I haven't been able to sleep a wink all night just thinking. That's all, just thinking. You git caught up with and you know what'll happen. I don't have to tell you about this town. You know what's gonna happen soon as you step outside the door. Now you call a cab and get down here, understand? There's a bus going west in thirty minutes and I got your ticket all made out.”

I had been looking out the window of the booth and saw them come in. Two of them. One was the bruiser who guarded the railroad station after dark. The other was a little smaller, not quite as chunky. His face was all happy-looking like he'd just stepped on a snake and there wasn't any fingers on his hands because they were all rolled up into fists. He had a bulge on his hip too. A pair of bulges. One on each side.

I said, “Too late, Pop. They're here now.”

“Oh, my God, Johnny!”

“See you later, Pop.” I hung up and opened the door. The bruiser was watching the elevator and didn't see me come out. The other guy was just getting the clerk's attention and had the guy reaching for the registry cards when I walked up and stood beside him.

Maybe he didn't expect anything like that at all. He was looking at the card with “John McBride” scrawled across the top line, cursing silently to himself, when I said, “I'm not hard to find, friend.”

Fingers seemed to crawl up his neck under the skin and peel the flesh back from his face. He dropped the card and I saw his hands start to come out slow and deliberately to take me apart right there and I looked down at him some and said. “You put your hands on me and I'll knock you right on your goddamn ass.”

His hands stopped halfway to my neck and his eyes got wider and wider until there wasn't any place else for the lids to go. The bruiser came up on the double with a billy out and ready, looked at me, then his partner while he said, “This the guy?” caught the faint nod and came back to me again.

“Well, well,” he said.

I grinned at the both of them. “Don't let your positions go to your heads, pallies. Take me rough and I bet they carry three people out of here.” I grinned some more and kept my eyes on the billy.

The guy with the billy worked up a passable smile. “You sure sound tough. You sure do.” He made like it was all a surprise to him, but he put the billy away. The other guy was staring at me in utter fascination. His hands had dropped, but his eyes hadn't. They were gone, completely gone. They were lifeless without being dead, yet there was death and hatred in them like I had never seen before.

Then they squinted a little bit shut and his face twisted wryly back into shape. “Move, Johnny. Stay in front of me and I hope to hell you try to run for it. I hope to hell you try so I can break your spine in half with a bullet.”

I don't scare easy. In fact, I don't scare worth a damn. Anything that could ever scare me had already done it and now there wasn't anything left I'd let push me. I looked at each one of them so they'd know it and they knew it. Then I walked out front and got into the police car and let the bruiser and the other guy squeeze me in. The bruiser grunted to himself a couple of times, a sound that meant he was enjoying himself. The other one just sat and when he wasn't staring at me, stared straight ahead.

His name was Captain Lindsey. The sign on his desk said so. The other was either Tucker somebody or somebody Tucker because that's what the captain called him. Being in the room didn't happen just like that. There was more to it, a kind of open-mouthed wonder about the whole thing like the janitor who let his broom drop and the desk sergeant who stopped talking in the middle of a sentence to a guy he was bawling out and the news reporter who yelled, “Gawdl” and dashed into the press room for his camera.

He didn't get any pictures or any story because Lindsey took me into his room where there was a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. The two of them took the chairs and let me stand there.

When I stood there long enough Lindsey said, “You're a nervy bastard, Johnny. I never thought I'd see it happen like that.”

I pulled out a smoke and took my time lighting it. Now it was my turn. I said, “You sure you're not making a mistake?”

The two cops exchanged glances. Lindsey smiled and shook his head. “How could I ever forget you, Johnny?”

“Oh, lots of people make mistakes, you know.” I let the smoke stream out through my nose and decided to make it short and sweet. “If you're holding me on a charge, name it or shut your face. I don't like being hauled into a crummy police station and talked to.”

Lindsey must have been saving that one sneer up for a long time. “I don't know what kind of an angle you think you're playing, McBride, and I don't give a damn. The charge is murder. It's murder five years old and it's the murder of the best friend a guy ever had. It's a murder you'll swing for and when you come down through the trap I'm going to be right there m the front row so I can see every goddamn twitch you make and there in the autopsy room when they carve the guts out of you and if nobody claims the body I'll do it myself and feed you to the pigs at the county farm. That's what the charge is. Now do you understand it?”

Now I was understanding a lot of things including the way Pop's voice cracked over the phone. They weren't so pretty. This game was dirtier than I thought and I didn't know whether I was going to like it so much.

Murder. I was expected to shake in my shoes.

Like I said, I didn't scare easy. They saw it on my face again and were wondering why. This time I leaned on Lindsey's desk and gave him a mouthful of smoke to let him know how I felt about it. “Prove it,” I said.

His face was cold as ice. “That's a crappy angle. That's real crappy, McBride. The last time you didn't stay around long enough to know what we had, did you? Don't mind my laugh. I'm getting a charge out of this. I love every bit of it. I want to see you go right through all the stages until there's nothing left but jelly. You didn't know we found the gun and got the best sets of prints you ever saw, did you? Sure, Johnny, I'll prove it. Right now. I want to watch your face change.”

He pushed himself away from the desk and nodded for Tucker to get behind me. We went down the hall where the reporter was screaming to be let in on the deal and into another room with a lot of tricky gadgets and a sign over the door that said LABORATORY. Lindsey must have looked at the card so often that he knew exactly where it was. He pulled it out of the file, stuck it in the slide of a projector and switched on the light.

They were the prettiest set of fingerprints I'd ever seen in my life. Nice and clear with some real tricky swirls in the middle. Tucker tapped me on the shoulder. “Over here, tough boy.”

Lindsey was waiting at the desk with a brand-new index card in front of him. He squeezed a quarter-inch of printer's ink out of a tube into a glass plate and began spreading it out with a rubber roller. When it covered the plate the way he wanted it he picked up my hand and pushed the tip of my forefinger in the mess.

Maybe he thought I messed up the card purposely. He grabbed my finger and did it carefully this time.

The same thing happened again like I knew it would and he said something foul.