361 - Donald E. Westlake [60]
“That was when he needed you.” I got to my feet. “Take me up there.”
He was calming again. He brooded at the wall. “He shouldn’t have hung up on me,” he whispered. “He shouldn’t have called me boy. He’s a slick wop, he’s nothing but.”
“Come along,” I said.
He looked at me, and started to calculate. “You’ll put in a good word for me with Kapp?”
It was easy to lie to him. “I will,” I said. “You’ve got no reason not to trust me.”
“All right,” he said. And bought himself an hour or two more of life.
Twenty-Five
His car was this year’s Buick, cream and blue, half a block away in a tow-away zone. He had a special permit in the windshield that let him park there.
He drove across 110th westward and turned north and boarded the Henry Hudson Parkway. I sat beside him, Smitty’s gun in my lap. We didn’t talk.
He took the George Washington Bridge into Jersey, and 17 a while. General Motors cars are all very much alike. The last time I rode this way, it was with Dad in an Oldsmobile one year older than this Buick. I was sitting in the same seat. I felt the nervousness creeping up from my stomach.
He left 17 and crossed the Jersey border back into New York State, still heading north. I said the first words spoken by either of us in the car: “How much farther?”
He looked quick at me, and then out at the highway again. “A little ways beyond Monsey,” he said. “Up in Rockland County.”
“What’s this Monsey? A town?”
“Yes. Small town, built up in the last few years.”
“Then they’ll have a shopping center. Stop at a sporting goods store.”
“All right.”
After a while, he turned off the highway on a curving exit that took us under the road we’d just been on and, a little farther, over the Thruway. Then we were on 59, which was lined with newish stores fronted by blacktop parking spaces. Cheever braked nose-in before a sports shop with shotguns and hip boots displayed in the window.
I took the key out of the ignition. I’d already checked the glove compartment and it was clean. I said, “You wait here.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. He had some of his bounce back. “All I can count on now is you and Eddie Kapp. I won’t try to run away from you.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. The fact that, under other circumstances, I might have liked this smooth and quiet collegian only irritated me.
I bought, in the store, a .30-.30 rifle and a box of cartridges. It cost me a hundred eighty dollars, almost all I had with me.
Back in the car, Cheever drove again while I read the instruction booklet and practiced loading the rifle. Then Cheever said, “About a mile more up this way.”
We were passing an intersection. There was undeveloped land around us, and a general store called Willow Tree Corner. I said, “Is the house right out on the road?”
“No. It’s set back about half a mile. All uphill from the road. There’s a dirt road in.”
“Will there—slow down a minute—will there be people watching out at this end of the dirt road?”
“Yeah, there will. That’s why I had to get permission to come up. I wouldn’t want to turn in there without permission.”
“All right. Then go on by. But point it out to me.”
“All right.”
“You can drive faster again now.”
A couple of minutes later he said, “That’s it. On the right.”
I saw a dirt road that jolted down a bank and curved into the trees. There was a thick wood along here, climbing a steep slope away from the road toward the Ramapo Mountains. I caught just a glimpse of an automobile parked in the road under the trees.
Cheever said, “Now what?”
“Make the first right you can.”
About a mile farther on we turned right. It was a smaller road, asphalt, climbing steeply upward. Incongruously, there was suddenly, to our left, a small gravel parking area and a fireplace and picnic table and mesh rubbish basket. I said, “U-turn, and stop over there.”
The car was too big and the road too small. He had to back and fill. No other cars came along. It was Monday, the tenth of October, the wrong time of year for traffic on this road.
Cheever stopped on the gravel and pulled on the emergency brake. I got the