Free Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block Page B

their whiskey," she said, "and they smoke their reefers, and then they go out for a joy ride. You could have been killed."
    "Yes."
    "And after all that, he didn't even stop to see if you were all right."
    "He wasn't very considerate."
    "People are not considerate any more."
    I got to my feet and brushed myself off. I was shaking, and badly rattled.
    She said, "Mister, if you could spare..." and then her eyes clouded slightly and she frowned at some private puzzlement. "No," she said.
    "You just gave me money, didn't you? I'm very sorry. It's difficult to remember."
    I reached for my wallet. "Now this is a ten-dollar bill," I said, pressing it into her hand. "You make sure you remember, all right? Make sure you get the right amount of change when you spend it. Do you understand?"
    "Oh, dear," she said.
    "Now you'd better go home and get some sleep. All right?"
    "Oh, dear," she said. "Ten dollars. A ten-dollar bill. Oh, God bless you, sir."
    "He just did," I said.
    ISAIAH was behind the desk when I got back to the hotel. He's a light-skinned West Indian with bright blue eyes and kinky rust-colored hair. He has large dark freckles on his cheeks and on the backs of his hands. He likes the midnight-to-eight shift because it's quiet and he can sit behind the desk working double-acrostics, toking periodically from a bottle of cough syrup with codeine in it.
    He does the puzzles with a nylon-tipped pen. I asked him once if it wasn't more difficult that way.
    "Otherwise there is no pride in it, Mr. Scudder," he'd said.
    What he said now was that I'd had no calls. I went upstairs and walked down the hall to my room. I checked to see if there was any light coming from under the door, and there wasn't, and I decided that that didn't prove anything. Then I looked for scratch marks around the lock, and there weren't any, and I decided that that didn't prove anything either, because you could pick those hotel locks with dental floss.
    Then I opened the door and found there was nothing in the room but the furniture, which stood to reason, and I turned on the light and closed and locked the door and held my hands at arm's length and watched the fingers tremble.
    I made myself a stiff drink and then I made myself drink it. For a moment or two my stomach picked up the shakes from my hands and I didn't think the whiskey was going to stay down, but it did. I wrote some letters and numbers on a piece of paper and put it in my wallet. I got out of my clothes and stood under the shower to wash off a coating of sweat. The worst sort of sweat, composed of equal parts of exertion and animal fear.
    I was toweling dry when the phone rang. I didn't want to pick it up. I knew what I was going to hear.
    "That was just a warning, Scudder."
    "Bullshit. You were trying. You're just not good enough."
    "When we try, we don't miss."
    I told him to fuck off and hung up. I picked it up a few seconds later and told Isaiah no calls before nine, at which time I wanted a wake-up call.
    Then I got into bed to see whether I could sleep.
    I slept better than I'd expected. I woke up only twice during the night, and both times it was the same dream, and it would have bored a Freudian psychiatrist to tears. It was a very literal dream, no symbols to it at all. Pure reenactment, from the moment I left Armstrong's to the moment the car closed on me, except that in the dream the driver had the necessary skill and balls to go all the way, and just as I knew he was going to put me between the rock and the hard place, I woke up, with my hands in fists and my heart hammering.
    I guess it's a protective mechanism, dreaming like that. Your unconscious mind takes the things you can't handle and plays with them while you sleep until some of the sharp corners are worn off. I don't know how much good those dreams did, but when I awoke for the third and last time a half-hour before I was supposed to get my wake-up call, I felt a little better about things. It seemed to me that I had a lot