Somebody Owes Me Money

21

We spent a quiet weekend, with me doing a lot of sleeping, a full eight or nine hours at night plus a couple of naps during the day. Every time I woke up I was a little stronger, and Abbie kept telling me I was getting color back in my cheeks.

She changed the bandage Friday to a smaller one, and Saturday to a still smaller one, and Sunday she took the bandage off and washed the wound and decided not to put a bandage on at all. “We’ll let it air,” she said.

It looked odd. Not horrible, the way I’d thought, just odd. There was a line along the side of my head above my left ear, about half an inch wide, in which there wasn’t any hair, just pink flesh, with some dark red scar showing. It was still very sensitive, not in a stinging way like a cut, but with a deep massive head-pounding thump of a pain if I made the mistake of touching the wound or the area around it. I always had to grit my teeth and hold on tight to the rim of the sink when Abbie was cleaning it, and each time I had a bad headache for about half an hour afterward.

We spent most of the weekend with a deck of cards in our hands. We played gin, and ah hell, and after we found the cribbage board we played cribbage. All for money, of course, but it was seesaw, neither of us ever more than a few bucks ahead.

Abbie also taught me a few stunts with the deck. It took me a while to get used to the mechanic’s grip, a funny way of holding the deck from underneath with the left hand so that the right hand can burrow into it like a mouse into a sack of grain without anybody being the wiser. It would take me years to learn to be as smooth with a deck as Abbie, but I did pretty well, and by Sunday night I was even faking her out every once in a while.

Our sleeping arrangements were less satisfactory. She insisted on me keeping the bed, since I was the wounded one, but she switched to the living-room couch. I told her I saw no reason to change the policy we’d established Thursday night, and she said I didn’t have to see any reasons, she could see them for both of us. “You trusted me then,” I said, and she said, “You were weaker then.”

Well, that was true enough. By Sunday afternoon I was just about my old self again, and beginning to get bored. I’d been here since Wednesday night, and I’d really had about all of this apartment I wanted. On the other hand, the outside world was potentially full of people who didn’t wish me well, so I didn’t chafe very much about having to hang around here. In between the card-playing I watched television or ate snacks or just sat around bored.

And I napped, whether I wanted to or not. Abbie insisted, and I believe her main concern wasn’t my health at all. She just wanted me out from underfoot for a while. Still, every time she hounded me into the bedroom for a nap I did actually go off to sleep for an hour or two.

I was asleep, in fact, late Sunday afternoon when the visitors arrived. What woke me was a scream. I popped awake, sat up, and saw Frank Tarbok, the blue-jawed questioner from the garage, standing in the hallway with his velvet-collared overcoat on, staring at me. The voice that had screamed was still echoing in my head, recognizable as Abbie’s, but I had already fallen flat again and thrown the covers over my head before it occurred to me the scream hadn’t been a mere and simple scream, it had been a word. A name. Abbie had screamed a name.

Why had Abbie screamed Louise?