would take only a day to pick it up and be on my way.
I was tired. I put the keys back in the wallet and shoved it in my pocket. Switching off the light, I lay back on the sofa. Faint bars of light were beginning to show through the Venetian blinds. It was nearly dawn.
I dropped off to sleep....
I was running down a street that had no end. It was night, but there was a light on every other corner. Far behind me somebody else was running. I could hear his footsteps pounding after me, but I could never see him. The single, empty street stretched away to infinity behind me, and ahead. I ran. And when I slowed I could hear him behind me, running. There was nobody, but I could hear him.
I was covered with sweat, and shaking. It was light in the room and little bars of sunlight slanted in through the partly opened Venetian blinds. She was sitting across from me on an overstuffed chair, dressed in her pajamas and the blue robe.
She was smiling. “You moan a lot in your sleep,” she said.
Chapter Fourteen
I rubbed my hands across my face. I sat up. The shaking stopped. It was only a dream. But that endless, empty street was still burned into my mind as if it had been put there with a branding iron.
“What time is it?” I asked.
She looked at her watch. “A little after ten.”
“How long have you been up?”
“About an hour,” she said. “Were you having a
nightmare?”
“No,” I said. I got off the sofa and went into the kitchen. There was a little coffee in a can in one of the cupboards. I filled the percolator with water, put the coffee in, and set it on a burner on the stove. If she’d been awake an hour it was a wonder she hadn’t done something about it herself. But maybe being waited on by servants all your life got to be a habit.
I went back to the living room. “How about taking the coffee off when it’s done?” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Are you going somewhere?” she asked, with faint interest.
“I’m going to take a shower. And shave.”
She looked at me with distaste. “Perhaps it would help.”
I had started for the bathroom, but I stopped now and turned around. She got a little hard to take, and if we were going to be here for a month or longer we really should work out some sort of plan for getting along together.
“We can’t all be beautiful, Your Highness,” I said. “So before we go any further, let’s get a few things straightened out. You’re here because you’re hiding from the cops. If they catch you they’re going to put you away
where you can spend the next forty years scrubbing floors and trying to fight off the Lesbians. This is my apartment. I’m not your servant. I outweigh you by about a hundred pounds. I don’t like you. I’d just as soon slap your supercilious face loose as look at you. You can’t yell for help because you’re not supposed to be in here.
“I may be a little dense, but I just somehow don’t see where you’re in any position to be pulling that Catherine the Great around here. However, if you do, don’t let me stop you. Just keep right on with your snotty arrogance and see what it gets you. Maybe a fat lip would be good for you. How about it?”
She looked up at me with perfect composure. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
“No. I’m just telling you. Get wise to yourself.”
She smiled. “But, I mean—you wouldn’t try to frighten me, would you?”
I reached down for her. I caught the front of the robe and hauled her erect. We stood touching each other, her face just under mine.
“Maybe you’d like to stand under the shower yourself,” I said. “For a half hour or so, in your cute pajamas.”
The big eyes were only amused and slightly mocking.
“All right,” she said. “But before we do, wouldn’t you like to hear the news I heard on the radio?”
“The radio?” I jerked my head around. She couldn’t have been listening to it while I was asleep. It was on a table at the end of the sofa I was sleeping on. But it wasn’t. It was gone.
“I took it into the bedroom so I wouldn’t wake you,” she said.
“What news?”
“You’re sure you would like to hear it?”
I shook her roughly. “What news?”
“That deputy sheriff you hit with the gun isn’t expected to live. Who did you say was hiding whom from the police?”
Because I was at least partly prepared for it, it didn’t hit me as hard as it would have cold. I managed to keep my face expressionless, and I didn’t relax the grip on her robe.
“So what about it?” I said. “In the first place, he’s not dead. And it doesn’t change anything, anyway. You’re still the one they’re looking for.”
“No, dear,” she said. “They’re looking for two of us. Your position isn’t quite as strong as it was, so don’t you think it might be wise to stop trying to threaten me?”
I pushed her back in the chair. “All right. But listen. You’re right about one thing: We’re in this together. They get one of us, they’ll get us both. So you do what I tell you, and don’t give me any static. Do we understand each other?”
“We understand each other perfectly,” she said.
I took a shower and shaved. I went into the bedroom in my shorts and found a pair of flannel slacks and a sports shirt in the closet. I transferred the wallet into the slacks.
She hadn’t made up the bed. Well, that was all right. She was the one who was sleeping in it, and if she liked it that way... Her purse was on the dresser. I opened it and took out the billfold. They were all fifties, and there were twenty-one of them. I took the whole thing out into the living room. She was drinking a cup of coffee.
“Just so you don’t decide to run away and join the Brownies,” I said, “I’m taking charge of the roll.”
Her eyes had that dead, expressionless look in them again. “So you’re going to take that too? And leave me without a cent?”
“Relax,” I said. “I’m just handling it. For expenses. And to keep you from running out on me. You’ll get it back, or
what’s left of it, when we get to the Coast.”
“You’re too generous,” she said.
“Well, that’s the kind of good-time Charlie I am. After
all, it’s only money.”
She shrugged and went back to her coffee.
“I’ll be back in a minute with something to eat,” I said.
I went downstairs and around the corner to a small grocery. I picked up some cinnamon rolls and a dozen eggs and some bacon, and remembered another pound of coffee. The afternoon papers weren’t on the street yet. There was nothing to do but go on waiting. The brassy glare of the sun hurt my eyes. I felt light-headed, and everything was slightly unreal. A police car pulled up at the boulevard stop beside me. I fought a blind impulse to turn my face away and hum around the corner.
Forty-eight hours ago they wrote traffic tickets, and you said, “Heh, heh, I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t realize... No, it won’t happen again.” Now they followed you through the jungle with their radios whispering, stalking you, and waiting.
When I got back to the apartment she had brought the radio into the living room and was sitting on the floor listening to a program of long-hair music. With a sudden sense of shock I realized this was exactly the same way I’d walked in on her the first time I had ever seen her, and that it had been only two nights ago.
Not years ago, I thought; it had just been days. And we had a month to go.
The recording stopped. She glanced briefly up at me and said, “The tone quality of your radio is atrocious.”
“Well, turn it off,” I said. “You want something to eat?”
