Somebody Owes Me Money
DONALD E. WESTLAKE!
“Dark and delicious.”
—The New York Times
“[A] book by this guy is cause for happiness.”
—Stephen King
“Brilliant.”
—GQ
“I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.”
—Elmore Leonard
“A wonderful read.”
—Playboy
“Westlake is one of the best crime writers in the business.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Westlake is a national literary treasure.”
—Booklist
“Nobody writes comic capers as brilliantly as Donald E. Westlake.”
—BookReporter
“A load of laughs...Westlake’s characters [are] endearingly quirky, entirely believable, and outrageously funny.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Begin laughing right now...A top-flight caper from Westlake, who can out-connive anyone in the writing business.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Energy and imagination light up virtually every page, as does some of the best hard-boiled prose ever to grace the noir genre.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Tantalizing...The action is non-stop.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A brilliant invention.”
—New York Review of Books
“A mystery connoisseur’s delight. His plot delivers twists and turns...A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”
—Time Out New York
“Crime fiction stripped down
—
as it was meant to be...oh, how the pages keep turning.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Donald Westlake’s...novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you’ve been telling yourself about
War and Peace
and Proust—these are the books you’ll want on that desert island.”—Lawrence Block
I took the bus uptown and checked a car out and got my first fare half a block from the garage, a good-looking girl in an orange fur coat and black boots and pale blond hair. “2715 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said.
I said, “Brooklyn or Washington?” I kid with good-looking female passengers whether I’m worried about money or not.
“Brooklyn,” she said. “Take the Belt.”
“Fine,” I said, and dropped the flag, and headed south. My luck was finally in. Not only a good-looking blonde in the rear-view mirror, but a long haul at that, and it would end not too far from Kennedy.
The highways were all cleared, and carried way below their usual midday load of traffic. We got up on the West Side Highway at twenty to four and left the Belt Parkway at Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn at just four o’clock. In between I’d made a couple of small attempts at conversation, but she was the strong silent type, so I let it go. I’m content to look, if that’s the way they want it.
The first half mile of Pennsylvania Avenue is through filled-in swampland. There’s no solid ground at the bottom, just dirt piled into a swamp, so the road is very jouncy and bouncy, full of heaves and holes, and even though there’s little traffic at any time there and no housing or pedestrians around, you can’t make very good time. The snow plows, probably because of the uneven road surface, hadn’t been able to do much of a job here, so that slowed me even more.
Which meant I was doing about twenty when the girl stuck the gun into the back of my neck...
SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:
361
by Donald E. Westlake
THE CUTIE
by Donald E. Westlake
MEMORY
by Donald E. Westlake
LEMONS NEVER LIE
by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark
FIFTY-TO-ONE
by Charles Ardai
KILLING CASTRO
by Lawrence Block
THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER
by Roger Zelazny
HOUSE DICK
by E. Howard Hunt
CASINO MOON
by Peter Blauner
FAKE I.D.
by Jason Starr
PASSPORT TO PERIL
by Robert B. Parker
STOP THIS MAN!
by Peter Rabe
LOSERS LIVE LONGER
by Russell Atwood
HONEY IN HIS MOUTH
by Lester Dent
THE CORPSE WORE PASTIES
by Jonny Porkpie
THE VALLEY OF FEAR
by A.C. Doyle
NOBODY’S ANGEL
by Jack Clark
MURDER IS MY BUSINESS
by Brett Halliday
GETTING OFF
by Lawrence Block
QUARRY’S EX
by Max Allan Collins
THE CONSUMMATA
by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
CHOKE HOLD
by Christa Faust
Owes Me Money
by
Donald E. Westlake
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-044)
First Hard Case Crime edition: June 2008
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London SE1 OUP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 1969 by Donald E. Westlake
Cover painting copyright © 2008 by Michael Koelsch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-794-4
E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-102-9
Cover design by Cooley Design Lab
Design direction by Max Phillips
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Printed in the United States of America
Visit us on the web at
www.HardCaseCrime.com
1
I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn’t so eloquent. That’s always been my problem, eloquence, though some might claim my problem was something else again. But life’s a gamble, is what I say, and not all the eloquent people in this world are in Congress.
Where I am is in a cab in New York City. Fares frequently ask me how it is somebody as eloquent as me is driving a cab, and I usually give them a brief friendly answer which doesn’t really cover the territory. The truth is, my eloquence comes from reading rather than formal higher education, which limits the kind of job open to me. Besides, driving a cab gives me a chance to pick my own hours. Day shift when the track is closed, night shift when it’s open. If there’s a game somewhere I’m particularly interested in, I skip a night and nobody cares. And if I’m broke, I can work as many hours as I want till I make it up.
Also, driving a cab is a lot more pleasant than you might think. You’re dealing with the public all day long, but only as individuals, one or two at a time. People are best one or two at a time. Also, economics being what they are, you’re generally dealing with a better class of customer. You get to talk with lawyers, businessmen, actors, tourists from Europe, all sorts of that kind of people. You get to look at a certain number of pretty girls, too, and sometimes have nice friendly conversations with them, and on rare occasions make a date with one. Like the girl I went with last year, Rita, the one where it looked serious for a while, until the Big A opened and it turned out she
didn’t want to go to the track with me. She was down on gambling, is what it was, and the funny thing was she worked for a stockbroker. She kept wanting me to put money in the stock market. “Aerospace is undervalued right now,” she’d say, and things like that. Then I’d tell her I’d rather play the races than the market because I knew the races and I didn’t know the market, and she’d get mad and start claiming that horse-racing and the stock market weren’t the same thing, and I’d say of course they were and give her analogies, and she’d get madder and insist the analogies were false, and so it went until finally we gave the whole thing up and she went her way and I went mine, and that was about the last steady girl I had up to the time of which I wish to speak.
The time of which I wish to speak began with a customer I took from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. He started the whole mess I got into, and I never saw him again after that one time. He started it indirectly and inadvertently, but he did start it.
He was a heavyset red-faced guy of maybe fifty, he smoked a really rotten cigar and had two expensive suitcases, and he went to an address on Fifth Avenue below 14th Street. With a doorman. It was January and a snowstorm had been threatening for three days without yet showing up, and also he’d just come back from somewhere warm, so naturally we got into a discussion of New York City weather and what should be done about it. I cracked a few jokes, made some profound statements, threw in a few subtle asides about politics and scored a few good ones off the automobile industry, made a concise analysis of the air pollution problem around the city, and all in all I would say I was at my most eloquent.
When we got to his address the meter read six ninety-five. I got out and unloaded the suitcases from the trunk while the building’s doorman held the cab door open. The fare got out
and handed me a ten, I gave him change from my pocket, and then we just stood there on the sidewalk together, luggage on one side of us and doorman on the other, my customer smiling as though thinking about something else, until finally he said, “Now I give you a tip, right?”
“It’s the usual thing,” I said. It was cold outside the cab.
He nodded. “That paper I noticed on the seat beside you,” he said. “Was that the
Daily Telegraph?
”
“It was,” I said. “It is.”
“Would you be a horseplayer?”
“I’ve been known to take a chance,” I said.
He nodded. “How much of that six ninety-five do you get to keep?”
“Fifty-one percent,” I said.
“That’s three fifty-four,” he said, faster than I’d have been able to. “All right. I like you, I like the way you talk, you gave me a pleasant ride in, so here’s your tip. You put that three fifty-four on Purple Pecunia, it will bring you back a minimum of eighty-one forty-two.”