Authors: Donald Westlake
“Tall building,” said Dortmunder.
“You can laugh, Al,” Tom said, though Dortmunder had done no such thing. “But from Myra’s room up there on the top floor, you could see for miles.”
“See
what
for miles?”
Tom did his chuckle. “Well, us, for instance,” he said.
And what if it was — Guffey’s leathery old hands trembled on the stock of the rifle — what if one of them was
him?
Tim Jepson. At long long last.
“The fella that ruint my life,” Guffey whispered through dry cracked lips. He lowered the rifle and his rheumy old eyes watched unaided as the small white car rocked and bobbed slowly this way. Tim Jepson.
Except it wouldn’t be, of course. It never had been yet, no matter how long he waited, no matter how much he cultivated his patience. In twenty–six years, it had never once been Tim Jepson coming back to Cronley, coming back to pick up his fourteen thousand dollars.
But it
would
be! Someday! Someday it would be! But never today.
At first, in the early sixties, the occasional visitor — trespasser? invader? transient? — to the recently dead town of Cronley had been mostly just another looter hoping to find plumbing fixtures or brass doorknobs the previous looters had missed. Those had been tough, gritty, nasty city people in greasy green work clothes, driving slat–sided trucks and smoking cigars. They reminded Guffey of the toughest element back in prison, and so he kept out of their way, moving his few possessions with him, and not one of them had ever even known Cronley still possessed one last resident.
In the latter sixties, a different kind of visitor started to arrive: young dropouts in bright–colored clothing and headbands, like goofy Indians. They came in beat–up Volkswagen buses, they lit a lot of campfires, they played mopey music on portable phonographs, and they planted corn and tomatoes and marijuana. Only the marijuana came up, and soon each hopeful band decided to drop back in; Guffey would watch their buses jounce away over the ridge.
Very few of the dropouts became aware of the old hermit of Cronley, though a few of the girls did catch him peeping at them while they skinny–dipped in the river. Most of the girls got scared and mad, and told their boys, and Guffey would have to go off again and hide in the woods for a few days until they stopped looking for him; but one girl had beckoned with a crooked little finger and a crooked little grin, and my
goodness!
That was Guffey’s only sexual experience since before he’d gone to prison — over forty years now, it must be — but it was a humdinger. Well worth remembering. Kept a fella going when the nights got cold.
The hippies and yippies and trippies and flippies thinned out in the early seventies, and for a few years Guffey had Cronley absolutely to himself. Then, starting in the late seventies, the professors began to show up: archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, social historians. Men and women alike, they wore khaki trousers and heavy boots and lots of clothing with labels that read
L.L. BEAN.
(Guffey stole some of their gear to replenish his own worn–out stuff.)
Eventually, though, grant money must have veered off in some other direction. It had been almost ten years now since Guffey had seen a safari–hatted, heavy–booted professor out around these parts. More recently there’d been a little spate of carpenters and architects and interior decorators looking for wood; barn wood, staircase newels, old and interesting panels. They encouraged the further deterioration of Cronley pretty well, but that was a short–lived fad, over and done with while the town was still moderately full of good wood. Guffey guessed it must be three, maybe even four years since another human being had ventured out this way.
And now this little white car. With his natural sense of caution, as the car approached the outskirts of town Guffey gathered up his few belongings, left his room on the top floor of the Cronley Hotel, and made his way down the peeling, scabrous hall to the stairs. The elevator hadn’t worked for years, of course, and in any event Guffey would never ride that elevator again. That or any other elevator, but especially
that
one.
That
elevator was where his troubles had begun.
It was him and Eddie Hobbs and Tim Jepson when it started. Jepson was older than him and Eddie. They knew he was a hardcase, and they wanted to be hardcases just like him, and when he invited them to throw in with him on the hijacking, it had just seemed like a lark, kind of. They weren’t going to rob anybody
good,
after all, but were going to hit up a card shark, a fella that had been taking advantage of the returning GIs. That’s the way Jepson had presented it, and him and Eddie, nineteen and dumb and fresh off the farm, had gone right along with it.
And Jepson had betrayed them. Stuck them in an elevator without any power and took off with the loot. Him and Eddie were frantic in that elevator, in the dark, and things didn’t improve any once the lights came back and the elevator started again to move. When it reached bottom, they knew, when it reached bottom and the door slid open, all hell would break loose.
And it did. The trouble was, nobody
else
bought the idea that him and Eddie were stealing from a card shark. The way everybody else saw it — including the soldiers who’d been in that room with playing cards in their hands when him and Eddie and Tim busted in with guns in their hands — who him and Eddie were stealing from was
soldiers.
Brave soldiers, just barely home, the war just barely over. People who would steal from soldiers didn’t get much benefit of the doubt in those days.
In the next few years, Guffey got beat up a
lot.
It started the instant that elevator door opened, and there were all the soldiers who’d been playing poker in that room upstairs. The cops were there by then, too, but they were in no hurry to break up a good solid thrashing, so it was quite awhile before him and Eddie were carried from the hotel to the hospital.
That was the last Guffey ever saw of Eddie, who had some sort of aunt who knew a state legislator or something, and so got his case separated from Guffey’s. Eventually, Guffey went on trial, where he drew the maximum, twenty–five to forty, because it was soldiers and because he’d been carrying a gun and because he already had a little record from some wildness in his youth (which was why he wasn’t in the army), but mostly because Tim Jepson had got away with all the money.
Guffey’s reputation had preceded him to the state pen, where first the guards beat him up and then the other prisoners beat him up and then the guards took a turn again. That slackened off after a while, but just around then some ex–soldiers began to show up in the prisoner population. Most of them felt they’d faced injustice in one way or another while they were in uniform, and Guffey was a handy way to gain redress.
Somewhere in through there, a fellow named Mitch Lynch came in, doing a heavy term for a long–con frammis against an oilman in Tulsa. Guffey didn’t recognize Lynch as the sharper him and Eddie and Tim Jepson had hijacked, but Lynch recognized Guffey as one of the assholes who’d come storming into his private suite with a gun in his hand, so Lynch set himself the task of beating the hell out of Guffey, only to discover it was already gone. The hell had
been
beat out of Guffey; having a go at that little fella was like punching out a mop. Lynch ran him around the track a couple times, but got no real satisfaction out of it, and gradually, in some weird way, Guffey and Lynch became friends. Acquaintances, anyway.
It was from Lynch that Guffey learned how Lynch’s girl Myra had betrayed Lynch for Tim Jepson, and then how Tim had betrayed Myra to Lynch before taking off with the dough. Or, not with the dough; that was the interesting part.
Myra had sworn to Lynch that Tim was stashing most of the sixteen thousand he’d taken in the robbery — fourteen, she was pretty sure — somewhere right in town, that he didn’t want to have to travel with a suspicious amount of cash on him, and that he figured he’d just leave the money there until he needed it someday.
Lynch had questioned Myra pretty rigorously on the subject of
where
Tim had hidden the fourteen thousand, and so he was damn certain in his mind that Myra didn’t know the answer, or she would have told him. “Someday I’m gettin out of here,” Lynch said, more than once. “And when I do, I’m goin back to Cronley, and I’m gonna wait. Get a job, do whatever, I don’t care. Because someday that son of a bitch is gonna show up.”
Well, so far, Lynch had been wrong on just about everything. He
hadn’t
gotten out of prison, not standing straight up; an exercise yard argument in 1952 had ended with a sharpened spoon handle stuck through Lynch’s ribs and into his heart. And even if he’d lived to get back to Cronley, it would have been empty by then, so there wouldn’t have been any job for him. And up till now, Tim Jepson had not come back for his fourteen thousand.
When Guffey had been released from prison, after doing eighteen years of his time, the man who’d come blinking out onto the street was a lot older than his chronological thirty–seven. He no longer had any of his own teeth. So many of his bones had been broken so often that he moved like an arthritis sufferer of eighty. And he’d pretty well lost all capacity to live as a social animal. He was a solitary, who either cowered or snarled. He couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t keep a room to live in, couldn’t get on a
bus
without making some kind of trouble. His parole officer hated him, and his parole officer was well known to be a living saint.
It was when Guffey found himself seriously considering what sort of crime he could commit that would guarantee his old cell back that he knew he had to take corrective action real quick, and that’s when he remembered Tim Jepson, the man who had ruined his life, and Mitch Lynch, the man who had planned to be patient and alone and await his revenge. The memory of those two men, and the thought that Cronley had
no people
in it, was enough. By bus, by stolen bicycle, and at last on foot, Guffey made his move.
For twenty–six years, Guffey had been Cronley’s only resident, waiting, nursing his resentments, rebuilding his shattered ego, creeping around the occasional visitor, waiting for the
one
visitor.
Over the years, too, Guffey had searched for that fourteen–thousand–dollar stash. He’d never found it, but he knew it was here. Tim Jepson would’ve been clever in how he hid it; that cleverness
proved
the money was here, somewhere in this town. And some day, Tim Jepson would come back for it.
Today?
The front marquee of the Cronley Hotel had long since fallen in. The sidewalk, where in the forties and fifties doormen had pocketed quarters from the drummers to hail them cabs to take them out to the illegal roadhouses outside town, was now a mess of ancient rubble, across which Guffey snaked and squirmed, toting his rifle and burlap bag, his knapsack (stolen from a professor) across his bony shoulders. The last rays of sunlight gleamed along the length of California Street. Down at the end there, the little white car jounced into view, turning this way, yellow sunlight glaring back from its windshield.
Not professors, these people, and not hippies. No, and not scavengers, either, in search of twentieth–century plumbing or nineteenth–century moldings.
Tim Jepson? Come for his stash at last? Guffey gripped his rifle tight and slithered away down the alley beside the hotel.
“Well, they’d have a room for us at the hotel,” Tom said. “No problem about that.”
“No? There are
some
problems.”
They were in the town now, on the main drag, and on both sides of the street were two– and three–story wooden or brick buildings with storefronts on the ground floor. All the glass had been broken out of all the windows years ago, and here and there structures had been partly consumed by ancient fires. The concrete of the main street and its sidewalks was all broken into great chunks, like ice floes, heaved and buckling, covered with dirt and debris, around all of which Dortmunder had to steer. A few business names painted over storefronts were still faintly visible.