The Girl With the Long Green Heart Read Online Free PDF

thing was as good as it sounded right off the bat. There could be snags he hadn’t thought of, rough spots he’d glossed over. On the surface, though, the thing looked beautiful.
    “It’s a new one,” I told him.
    “I thought it was.”
    “Of course, I’ve been out of circulation for seven years. But I think you actually found something new.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “Yes,” I said. And lit a cigarette and added, “But I’m afraid it’s not for me. I’m just not buying.”
    “Oh, I know,” he said easily. “I just wanted your opinion. I wish I could have you in on it, but you can’t win them all.” He got to his feet. “I’m going to split, Johnny. I’m halfway dead. I’ve got a room over at the Mountain Lodge.”
    “Where do you go from here?”
    “I’m not sure. I figure I’ll be in town until tomorrow night, anyway. Maybe we’ll get together, huh?”
    What a sweet soft hustler he was. I stood up. “Drop around. We’ll have lunch.”
    “Fine.”
    When he had his hand on the knob I gave him the first nibble. The words just came out by themselves.
    What I said was, “Just for curiosity, how big do you think you’d score on this one?”
    He pretended to think. “Hard to say. I know what I figured your end at.”
    “Oh?”
    “About thirty thou,” he said.

Three

    I tried not to think about it. I listened as his car pulled away, and I blocked out the echo of his parting line, and I got undressed and crawled into bed and found out in no time at all that I wasn’t going to drop off to sleep all that easily. I flipped the light back on and killed some time working on my correspondence course homework. Actually I was taking two courses at once, one in hotel and restaurant management and one in basic accounting. I worked out four of the accounting problems before my eyes started backing up on me. I lit a fresh cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed.
    So I thought about some of the things I hadn’t wanted to think about. Like how long it would take to save thirty thousand dollars, and how old I would be when I had it. Fifty at the earliest, and probably a lot more like fifty-five. I was forty-two, and forty-two was still young enough for big plans and hard work, but fifty—well, fifty was a lot closer to being old. And fifty-five was closer still.
    I thought about spending another ten years in that little room, scrimping and saving to beat hell. Adding up score sheets at the Boulder Bowl, grabbing quick lunches at diners and coffee pots. Dreaming through correspondence courses.
    I had liked that life, too. But a man can endure many things day by day that become unthinkable when seen as a larger chunk of time. My life was all right as long as I lived it a day at a time. See it as ten years of the same thing, with Bannion selling his place to somebody else somewhere along the line, with the dream evaporating and the correspondence courses discontinued and nothing left but the habit; work and sleep and save. See it that way and the window grows bars and the door locks itself and the eight-dollar room turns itself into a cell.
    Doug had left the bottle of Cutty. I let it alone. Dawn was breaking by the time I managed to get to sleep. I did not sleep well, I did not sleep long. There were dreams I don’t remember. Around nine o’clock I woke up, chilled and damp, certain at first that I was not here in my room in Boulder but back in my cell at San Quentin.
    I showered, I shaved, I smoked. If only there was something really wrong with his grift, I thought. If only there was a pretty snag I could catch around my finger. If only I could see the flaw. But on the surface it looked too very perfect, with a big payoff for maybe three months of work, and with no chance at all of a foul-up that could lead me back to a cell.
    Rance showed up at eleven-thirty. “I’m catching a four o’clock plane from Denver,” he said. “I’ll have to drive back there. Let’s grab lunch now.”
    “Come on