Free 361 by Donald E. Westlake

okay.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Call us at the hotel as soon as you’ve got something. If we’re not there, leave a message.”
    “You aren’t going to move?”
    “Why should we? I told you, we want to find them as bad as they want to find us. We’ll stay at the same place.”
    He shook his head. “They’re mean bastards,” he said.
    “You okay now?”
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    We left and went uptown and checked into a hotel forty blocks north of the Amington. We hung around, and when I called the Amington they said there weren’t any messages.
    We bought a deck of cards and hung around the room. All we could do was wait.

Fourteen
    Bill woke me up at nine o’clock in the morning and said it was time to go to Mass. He wasn’t kidding. I said, “No.”
    “You need God’s help, Ray,” he said earnestly.
    I said, “Go away.”
    “You don’t think you do?”
    “The guys in the Chrysler didn’t.”
    “Who?”
    “The guys who killed Dad. And your wife.”
    “Ray, you’re still in the Church, aren’t you?”
    “Do I look it?”
    “You’ve lost your faith?”
    “They shot it out from under me.”
    “You’re one of those, huh? The first tragedy comes into your life, and you blame it on God.”
    I rolled over on my side away from him. “Go on,” I said. “You’ll be late for Mass.”
    He did some more talking, but I ignored him, so he got dressed and went out. I fell asleep again.
    I was awake when he came back. I was sitting by the window, looking out at the street and thinking about waking up in the hospital.
    He put a bag on the dresser. “I brought you coffee and a danish,” he said.
    “Thanks.”
    He had the same for himself. We were quiet and ate for a while, and then we both started to apologize at the same time. We broke off and laughed, shaking our heads. “Yeah,” I said. “I was tired, that’s all.”
    “I should of left you alone.”
    “The hell. I don’t like this waiting.”
    He grinned and shrugged. “We need to wait, that’s all. We’ve gone this far, now we wait.” His hand was wrapped around the coffee carton. He tilted it, finishing the coffee, and then tossed it into the can. “All we have to do is take it easy.”
    “Yeah.”
    I went over and called the other hotel and asked if there were any messages. There weren’t. I went back, and Bill had a rummy hand dealt out on his bed. I scooped up my cards and played standing up, walking around between draws. I went gin on his seventh discard and picked up forty-three points and threw the cards down on the bed and lit a cigarette. Bill told me to take it easy. I walked around some more, and then I came back and shuffled the cards and dealt out the second hand. By the time I went gin I was sitting down.
    At quarter to three, I went down and signed for another day and paid. Then I went back up and picked up the hand Bill dealt me and ripped the cards across the middle, so we went out and had hamburgers and bottles of Schlitz. Bill said, “I think we can go back and get the suitcases now. What do you think?”
    I shrugged. “What the hell. Anything.”
    We got the car. Bill drove and I sat beside him and chain-smoked. I looked out at the people. Two months ago less one day I was here with Dad. One of those people out there recognized Dad and went and made a phone call. Or shadowed us back to the hotel first. One of those people on the sidewalk. I wanted to know which one. I wanted to reach out of the car and grab him by the throat, and drag him along beside the door.
    We stuck the car in a parking lot and walked uptown and crosstown and came at our hotel from the back, where there was a dry-cleaning store. A little store in the back corner of the hotel, on the side street, open on Sunday for the tourists.
    We went in. There was a good-looking colored girl in a green dress behind the counter. I said, “Hotel maintenance. Survey check. We got to get into the cellar here.”
    She shrugged. “Okay with me.”
    I looked around and