Time Travelers Strictly Cash Read Online Free PDF Page A

behind you when you left?”
    Callahan went pale behind the bar, and his new cigar fell out of his mouth.
    “No,” she said. “What the hell has that-“
    “And you were too upset to think of-“
    “Oh, Christ,” she screamed. “Oh, no, I never thought! Oh, Christ, Wally, that dumb cocky kid. He’ll show up at ten and find the door wide open and figure I went to the corner for beer and decide it’s cuts to wait for me in bed, and-” She whirled and found the clock, and puzzled out the time somehow, and wailed, “No!” And I tore in half right down the middle. She sprang frbm her chair and lurched toward the bar. I could not get to my feet to follow her. Callahan was already holding out the telephone, and when she couldn’t dial it, he got the number out of her and dialed it for her. His face was carven from marble. I was just getting up on my hindlegs by then. No one else moved. My feet made no sound at all on the sawdust. I could clearly hear the phone ringing on the other end. Once. Twice, Three limes. “Come on, Cass, damn you, answer me!” Four times. Oh dear God; I thought; she still doesn’t get it. Five times. Maybe she does get it and won’t have it. Six times.
    It was picked upon the seventh ring, and at once she was shrieking, “You killed him, you bastard. He was just a jerk kid, and you had to-“
    She stopped and held the phone at arm’s length and stared at it. It chittered at her, an agitated chipmunk. Her eyes
    went round.
    “Wally?” she asked it weakly. Then even more weakly she said to it, “That’s his will in that manila envelope,” and
    she fainted.
    “Mike!” I cried, and leaped forward. The big barkeep understood me somehow and lunged across the bar on his belly and caught the phone in both hands. That left me my whole attention to deal with her, and I needed that and all my strength to get her to the floor gently.
    “Wally,” Callahan was saying to the chipmunk, “Waily, listen to me. This is a friend. I know what happened, and-listen to me, Wally, I’m trying to keep your ass out of the slam. Are you listening to me, son? Here’s what you’ve got to do-“
    Someone crowded me on my left, and I almost belted him before I realized it was Doc Webster with smelling salts.
    “-No,screw fingerprints, this ain’t TV. Just make up the goddamn bed and put yer cigarette butts in yer pocket and don’t touch anything else-“
    She coughed and came around.
    “-sure nobody sees you leave, and then you get your ass over to Callahan’s bar, off 25A. We got thirty folks here’ll swear you been here all iiight, but it’d be nice if we knew what you looked like.”
    She stared up at us vacantly, and as I was helping her get up and into a chair, I was talking. I wanted her to be involved in listening to me when full awareness returned. It would be very hard to hold her, and I was absolutely certain I couid do it.
    “Kathy, you’ve got to listen carefully to me, because if you don’t, in just another minute now you’re going to try and swallow one-giant egg of guilt, and it will, believe me, slick in your throat and choke you.. You’re choking on a couple already, and this one might kill you-and it’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not just. You’re gonna award yourself a guilt that you don’t deserve, and the moment you accept it and pin it on, it’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. Believe me, I know. Damn it, it’s okay to be glad you’re still alive!”
    “What the hell do you know about it?” she cried out. “I’ve been there,” I said softly. “As recently as an hour ago.”
    Her eyes widened.
    “I came in here tonight so egoceotrically wrapped up n my own pain that I sat next to you for fifteen minutes and never noticed you, until some friends woke me up. This is a kind of anniversary for me, Kathy. Five years and one day ago I bad a wife and a two-year-old daughter. Andi had a Big Book of Auto Repair. I decided I could save thirty dollars easy