Free Nobody's Angel by Jack Clark Page A

thing turning all night long.
    "Three days," he said after a while. "You believe that?"
    "Whatever you say," I said.
    "I used to be out for weeks," he said. "I don't know how I did it."
    "We're almost there," I said.
    "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," the guy said softly.
    "Sixteen forty," I said, when we pulled up at the hotel. The twenty was to look for his car. The trip to the hotel was a separate matter.
    He went searching through his pockets again and finally found the roll. He looked from the bills to me, to the meter, back to the bills.
    "Sixteen forty," I said again.
    He still looked puzzled. "What happened to the car?"
    "You decided to call Hertz in the morning," I said. "It's sixteen forty."
    He pulled another twenty off the roll and held it out. I grabbed it. "Sixteen forty. Out of twenty," I said. But I didn't move to make change.
    He looked at the bills again and dug through and found a five. I grabbed it before he could change his mind.
    "Thanks," I said. I got out and opened his door. "Welcome to Rosemont."
    It took him a while to get out, and all the while he was struggling I was watching the floor where a couple of bills were getting trampled under his feet.
    "Three fuckin' days," he said as he staggered towards the lobby.
    I waited until he was through the revolving door then I reached into the cab and picked up the bills. Two singles. Well, it was hard to complain. I'd gotten forty-seven bucks for a twenty dollar trip.
    I know there are people who would say I was a thief and they could probably make a case. But I didn't hit him over the head. And I didn't let him get behind the wheel of a car. And he didn't end up face down in an alley with all his money gone and a case of AIDS to boot.
    I was a cab driver. I did my job. I got him home.

 
    A chauffeur shall thoroughly search the interior of the vehicle for lost articles immediately at the termination of each trip.
    City of Chicago, Department of Consumer Services, Public Vehicle Operations Division
     
    I was on Lake Shore Drive and there was Lenny, out in the left lane, driving with no hands. Something moved and I spotted a black guy hiding in the darkness of his back seat.
    "Lenny!" I tried to warn him. But he didn't seem to hear. He kept smiling and waving his arms around.
    A balloon appeared in the back window and now I saw that it wasn't a guy at all. It was Relita. She was holding the balloon with one hand and playing a game of peek-a-boo with the other. She lowered her hand and flashed me a sparkling smile. I looked back at Lenny. He had a gun in his hand. He waved, pointed the gun at his own head and pulled the trigger.
     
    The next afternoon, as I cruised through the busiest intersection in shabby Uptown, two black kids began to wave. They were about sixteen and everything about them was wrong. They were both skinny, dressed in dark, ill-fitting ghetto rags, and obviously dirt poor.
    Lenny's murder had been all over the newspapers and TV and everybody was talking about all the cabdrivers getting robbed. And these two punks were so excited with their plan that they couldn't keep still. The guy on the far side of the street was jumping up and down so much that he kept scaring the neighborhood pigeons into brief, low-altitude flights.
    When I waved them off, they didn't try to argue or show me their money. One turned to Broadway, the other to Sheridan Road and they started up again, waving away. It didn't make any difference which way the cabs were going. Hell, they weren't planning to pay.
    But they were having a hard time finding a taker. Drivers were dropping their NOT FOR HIRE signs, turning their toplights off and locking their doors. It was hard to imagine that anyone would ever stop. But I knew, if the kids could just tough it out, sooner or later someone would.
    As likely as not, it would be a foreign driver. Somebody who came from a country where no one would ever kill just for money.
    Lenny wouldn't have stopped for them in a million years, I