Nobody Runs Forever

But he didn’t reach into the box. Instead, he said, “Tell him, this is the one did it.”

Wide-eyed, she stared at the gun again. “Shot Jake? This is the gun?”

“Somebody told me Jake thinks I’m the one put the plug into him,” the man said. “Tell him, if I had a reason for him to be dead, he’d be dead.”

Now that the gun wasn’t being used to threaten her, she leaned closer to it, studying it. It was black. The handle was crosshatched, with a white circle at the upper end that showed a rearing horse under the word COLT. The same design, without the circle, was cut into the black metal of the gun above the crosshatching and below the hammer. The cylinder was the notched fat part, where the bullets would be and would revolve one step every time the gun was fired. The barrel was a stubby thing, with a simple sight on top and the word COBRA etched into the side.

“Oohh,” she breathed, “It’s hers.”

“You know about her.”

“The police said.” Still wide-eyed, she gazed at the man’s cold face. “She’s a suspect.”

“She didn’t do it to put him down,” the man said, “but to get him out of the way for a while. You tell him when you go see him.”

“I will.”

He closed the box and tucked it between her left side and left arm. “You keep this,” he said.

“I will.”

And later, at the hospital, in the very clean private room, she said, “Jake, you have some bad companions.”

7

He makes a perfect ex-husband,” Grace said.

Monica, who had one husband, no exes, shook her head yet again, and said, yet again, “Well, to me it seems weird.”

The two women, who clerked together in the claims office of one of the big insurance companies in Hartford, and who had been pals since both had hired on here almost ten years ago, were similar in kind: both rangy and sharp-featured, both pessimistic about life in general and their own lives in particular, and both choosing to face the world with a kind of humorous fatalism. They disagreed about very few things, but one of those things was Grace’s ex, a subject that tended to come up, as it had today, while they were on their ten a.m. coffee break in the ladies’ lounge, where they could have some privacy.

Monica was going to do the litany again, no stopping her. “You never see him,” she said.

“A good thing in an ex,” Grace said. “I got a memory bank full of pictures, I ever want to go stroll down there.”

“But I mean you never see him,” Monica insisted. “I don’t think anybody ever sees him.”

“No, that’s pretty true,” Grace admitted. “I guess he’s like the tooth fairy in that.”

“The tooth fairy!”

“Or Santa Claus. You know he’s been, because the tooth is gone or the presents are there, but you never see him at work.”

“Grace, he’s a criminal!”

“Another good reason not to see him at work. If people see Nick at work, they’ll dial nine-one-one. Right away.”

“Let me say this about Harold,” Monica said, referring to her husband, which sooner or later she always did. “Harold may not be the most exciting man in the world, or the most brilliant man in the world, but at least he’s there. And when he puts bread on the table, he puts it there with the sweat of his brow.”

“With the ink of his brow, you mean,” Grace said. “Monica, he’s an accountant.”

“You know what I mean. It’s honest money, honestly earned, and it puts honest bread on the table. Grace, you’re living off a gangster!”

“He is not,” Grace said. “In the first place, he’s not a gangster, he’s a heister, which is a very different thing. Gangsters deal in prostitution and gambling and drugs, and Nick would never do any of that. In his own way, he’s almost as law-abiding and moral as your Harold.”

“That’s why he’s in hiding all the time?”

“He’s not in hiding, he’s just very careful, because you never know. The world he’s in is full of dangerous people, so he’s smart to be cautious.”

“Harold can walk the street in the sunshine with his head up high and not be afraid of anything.”

“Monica, Harold lives in the world of accountancy.”

“Don’t try to make Harold sound dull.”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“Anyway,” Monica said, “not that I ever expect anything like this for myself, God forbid, but you don’t even have proper alimony.”

“That’s the other thing I was gonna say,” Grace told her. “I’m not living on Nick, I get a salary here, same as you do. I get a supplement from Nick.”

“When he feels like it.”

“Which is often. From time to time I can help him out a little, pass a message on, whatever, and from time to