Call Me A Cab E-Book

Donald E. Westlake

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The final unpublished novel by MWA Grandmaster – a wild, romantic road trip across America by taxi cab – demonstrates why this beloved author is so fondly remembered and so dearly missed."A book by this guy is cause for happiness."- Stephen KingDONALD E. WESTLAKEGOES OFF THE BEATEN PATHIn 1977, one of the world's finest crime novelists turned his pen to suspense of a very different sort – and the results have never been published, until now.Fans of mystery fiction have often pondered whether it would be possible to write a suspense novel without any crime at all, and in CALL ME A CAB the masterful Donald E. Westlake answered the question in his inimitable style. You won't find any crime in these pages – but what you will find is a wonderful suspense story, about a New York City taxi driver hired to drive a beautiful woman all the way across America, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, where the biggest decision of her life is waiting to be made. It's Westlake at his witty, thought-provoking best, and it proves that a page-turner doesn't need to have a bomb set to go off at the end of it in order to keep sparks flying every step of the way.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Acclaim for the Work of Donald E. Westlake

Hard Case Crime Books by Donald E. Westlake

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

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Afterword

Acclaim for the Work

of DONALD E. WESTLAKE!

“Brilliant.”

—GQ

“A wonderful read.”

—Playboy

“Marvelous.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Dark and delicious.”

—New York Times

“Westlake is a national literary treasure.”

—Booklist

“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

“Tantalizing.”

—Wall Street Journal

“A brilliant invention.”

—New York Review of Books

“A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

—Time Out New York

“The wildest, screwiest, fastest-paced yet…It is also insanely funny.”

—Des Moines Register

“Donald Westlake must be one of the best craftsmen now crafting stories.”

—George F. Will

“Suspenseful…As always, [Westlake] writes like the consummate pro he is.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Westlake remains in perfect command; there’s not a word…out of place.”

—San Diego Union-Tribune

“Donald E. Westlake is probably the funniest crime writer going.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Westlake is one of the best.”

—Los Angeles Times

I switched on the TV, settling down to watch the local news. You don’t really get local news in New York, because New York is too big. For an automobile accident, say, to make it on New York’s local news, it has to have taken place on the George Washington Bridge at rush hour, between a truckload of dynamite and a car driven by fleeing terrorists who’ve just kidnapped the Israeli ambassador. And sunk the bridge. In the sticks, for an automobile to make the TV news, all it has to do is hit something. Anything. A fire hydrant will do.

There came a knock at the door. It was Katharine. She looked slightly worried, but trying to hide it, and she said, “Barry would like to talk to you.”

I followed her across the hall. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Is that the driver?” He sounded less pleasant than when I’d overheard him before.

“That’s right,” I said.

“I’ve been following your route here, Fletcher,” he said, “and it doesn’t seem to me you’re coming out the quickest way.”

“Oh, no?”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t understand what you’re doing on Route 70. You taking her for a ride, Fletcher? You want to see Vegas at somebody else’s expense?”

“You work out the mileage, Mac,” I told him. “And then I tell you what you do. You don’t do any cab driving, and I don’t do any face changing. Here’s your intended.” And I handed the phone to Katharine, saying, “If I was on my way to marry that guy, I’d go by tricycle…”

HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS

BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE:

361

BROTHERS KEEPERS

CALL ME A CAB

CASTLE IN THE AIR

THE COMEDY IS FINISHED

THE CUTIE

DOUBLE FEATURE

FOREVER AND A DEATH

HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER

LEMONS NEVER LIE (writing as Richard Stark)

MEMORY

SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY

SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS

YOU WILL ENJOY:

LATER by Stephen King

THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

SINNER MAN by Lawrence Block

THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

THE LAST STAND by Mickey Spillane

UNDERSTUDY FOR DEATH by Charles Willeford

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY by Joyce Carol Oates

BLOOD SUGAR by Daniel Kraus

ARE SNAKES NECESSARY?

by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

KILLER, COME BACK TO ME by Ray Bradbury

FIVE DECEMBERS by James Kestrel

Call MEa CAB

byDonald E. Westlake

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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-152)

First Hard Case Crime edition: February 2022

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London se1 0up

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Donald E. Westlake

Cover painting copyright © 2022 by Paul Mann

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 978-1-78909-818-1

E-book ISBN 978-1-78909-820-4

Design direction by Max Phillips

www.maxphillips.net

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.

Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

For Abby—fellow traveler

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

1

She hailed me on East 62nd Street, not far from Bloomingdale’s. She was an attractive girl, wearing big-lensed sunglasses against the June glare, and carrying two plaid suitcases, one of which she waggled at me as I rolled down the street. “Say ‘Kennedy,’ ” I whispered, and eased the cab to a stop.

Opening the rear door, she shoved the suitcases in first, then followed, slammed the door, shoved the sunglasses up on top of her head, and said, “Kennedy.”

“You got it,” I said, and started the meter with a smile. Not only is the long expensive run from Manhattan out to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens one of the joys of a cabby’s life, but there’s no pleasanter way to drive anywhere than with a good-looking woman in the rearview mirror.

Unless, of course, she’s crazy. And in this instance the early signs were not good. This girl did not sit back in the seat as I started off, nor did she cross her legs and look out at the passing world, nor did she take a compact from her shoulder bag so she could study the present condition of her face; all the normal things a good-looking young woman does when settling down alone for a long cab ride. What she did do was talk to herself, muttering phrases I couldn’t quite hear. And she kept putting her hands up to both sides of her face like the blinkers on a horse, running her fingers through her long brown hair and then tossing the hair backward in a heavy double wave. And she frowned a lot, and made strange unpleasant faces, and stared at the floor or at the back of my neck. And sat forward on the seat, very tense and upset.

Part of the reason this behavior discomfited me was the lack of a safety partition between the back of my head and the passenger space. In New York City, all the major-company cabs are required to install that safety partition, but the law says private cab owners can decide for themselves, and the private owner of this particular Checker (who just happened to be my own father) had decided not to go the expense. Normally I like it that way, preferring the increased opportunity for friendly conversation and other human contact, but human contact with a crazy person is where I draw the line.

I endured it all the way down Second Avenue and through the Midtown Tunnel, but after I’d paid the toll and accelerated up to speed on the Expressway and she still hadn’t settled down I felt I had to do or say something to alter the situation. Frankly, she was making me nervous. So I looked in the mirror and I called, “Excuse me!”

She flashed a quick, irritable, distracted look. “What?”

I said, “You a jumper?”

At least I had her attention. “What?”

“Friend of mine had one in his cab,” I explained. “A suicide, you know? She wanted to jump off a building, but she was afraid of heights.”

She was staring now like Medusa. “A suicide?”

That was the wrong subject. “Afraid of heights,” I corrected her. “Try to keep up, will you? This girl’s idea was, she could get the same effect if she jumped out of a cab doing sixty.”

“I’m not a suicide,” she said. And it was true she now looked more outraged than despondent.

“That’s good,” I said, “because it won’t work. There’s too much air pressure against the door at this speed, you couldn’t get it open.”

She glanced at the door, then rather angrily at me. “I’m not a suicide,” she repeated.

“Fine.”

After that she settled back in the seat at last, obviously thinking things over, and I concentrated on the traffic until she herself picked up the conversation, out past the cemeteries, telling me, “I just have a decision to make, that’s all.”

So I gave her my philosophy, in a nutshell. “Don’t do it.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t make decisions. They can only cause trouble.”

“But I promised,” she said. “And I always keep my promises. Always.”

“Then don’t make promises.”

She smiled, a bit ruefully; meaning, it’s too late not to make this particular promise. Well, it wasn’t too late to break it, but who am I to lead another person out of confusion and into the light? I kept my advice to myself, and once again the conversation lapsed.

And once again she was the one to pick it up, just as I made the transfer from the Expressway to the Van Wyck, saying as though there hadn’t been any pause at all, “It’s about getting married.”

“Married?” I don’t believe in marriage. “Good luck,” I said, and some irony may have crept into my voice.

“It isn’t right,” she said. “I just keep turning the poor guy down.”

“Maybe he’s the wrong guy.”

“He’s the right guy,” she insisted. “He’s sweet and understanding, he’s handsome and rich, he loves me and I love him— what more could I possibly want?”

“Thursdays off?”

“I don’t know what I want,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s just such a big decision, that’s all.”

“Mm hm.” I’d already given my advice on decisions.

“For two years I’ve been trying to marry him,” she said. “That poor guy, I’ve left him waiting at the marriage license bureau, at the church, and on the JP’s front porch.”

“He puts up with a lot.”

“He’s very understanding. That’s why I love him so much. But now he says he can’t wait anymore.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He says he wants to marry me, but he says he also just wants to get married.”

“Determined fella.”

“So I promised him, faithfully, just now on the phone, I’m coming out to Los Angeles—”

“That’s where he is, huh?”

“And when I get off the plane, I’ll either say yes or no. If it’s yes, we’ll get right in his car and drive straight to Nevada and be married today.”

“Wow,” I said.

“If it’s no,” she said, “he says we’ll shake hands and part, and I can take the next plane back to New York.”

“So it’s do or die. The crunch. Down to the bottom line. This is the nitty gritty.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Five hours from now I’ll be in Los Angeles, and I have to be sure by then.” She shook her head fiercely, agitating her heavy hair. “How can a person make a decision for their whole life in five hours?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “With me the question has never come up.”

And once more the conversation waned, as she settled back in the seat, biting on the knuckle of her right thumb and brooding about this crisis point in her life. I continued to drive, she continued to brood, and then I became aware that she was staring at the back of my neck; fixedly, the way I imagine a vampire would. I was beginning to get nervous again when she called out: “Say.”

“Yeah?”

“This sign here,” she said. “Ask Driver For Out Of Town Rates.”

Ah; that was the notice glued to the back of my headrest, so it wasn’t my throat she’d been studying after all. I said, “Yeah?”

And she said, “How much to Los Angeles?”

“A hundred million dollars,” I said.

“No, I mean it,” she said.

She couldn’t possibly mean it. A little annoyed, I said, “Come on, Miss.”

“Listen, umm—” she said, and leaned forward to look at the license mounted in front of the glove compartment. She wanted my name. “Thomas,” she said. “Listen, Thomas, I’m serious. I told Barry I’d make up my mind by the time I got to Los Angeles, and I promised him I’d leave today, but I just can’t do it in five hours. How long would it take to drive there? Five or six days?”

I was reluctant to be in this conversation at all. “Probably,” I said.

Her expression became almost dreamy. “Away from all distractions,” she said. “Away from the office, just driving, plenty of time to think. By the time we got there I’d know, I’d be sure of myself.”

It was time to bring her down from the clouds, so she could catch her plane. “It’d be goddam expensive,” I said.

“How much?”

“You want me to find out?”

“Yes, please.”

So I switched on the two-way radio. We belong to one of the radio-dispatch outfits—Speediphone Cabs—but unless a fare leaves me in some outlandish backwater I prefer to cruise and find my customers on the street. The kind of people who phone for a cab instead of going outside and hailing one usually live in outlandish backwaters themselves, where there aren’t any cabs to hail. In any event, the radio had been off, but now I switched it on, and immediately the cab filled with the harsh voice of Hilda The Dispatcher: “…to Madison and 35th. One-eight.”

Pressing the button on its side, I spoke into my mike, giving my call number: “Two-seven.”

“One-eight,” Hilda insisted, that being the guy she’d decided to talk to next.

Phooey. “Two-seven!” I said, more forcefully.

“One-eight!” she said, much more forcefully.

So I tried tact. “I’ll be one-eight if you want me to be one-eight, Hilda,” I said, “but I’m really two-seven.”

“Tom? Get off, I’m trying to talk to one-eight.”

“But I’m ready to talk now.”

Hilda’s sigh came across the airwaves like static. “All right, Tom,” she said. “What is it?”

“I got an out of town, she wants a price.”

“Where to?”

“Los Angeles,” I said.

There was a little silence, and then Hilda said, “One-eight!”

“Listen, Hilda,” I said, “this is on the level.”

“A cab to Los Angeles?” She remained dubious, for which I could hardly blame her.

“That’s right,” I said. “The customer’s in the cab, she wants a price.”

“Jesus,” Hilda said. “Shut up, one-eight, I got a problem. Tom? I’ll get back to you.”

“Right,” I said, cradled the microphone, and turned the receiver volume down to where I could barely hear it.

The passenger said, “Shouldn’t we head the other way now?”

Were we really going to Los Angeles? So far everything was still on the meter, so it didn’t matter where we went. “Sure,” I said.

We were at that moment arriving at the junction of the Van Wyck and the Belt Parkway, just before the airport, and we did a sweep-around of rare and singular beauty, hardly slowing down at all. I took the second Parkway exit (northbound), looping down and to the right away from the Van Wyck like a fighter plane peeling off in a World War Two movie, then swept around onto the Belt, ran under the Van Wyck, took the next exit curving up and to the right, came out onto the Van Wyck in the opposite direction, and laid out toward Manhattan.

The passenger was very excited. She kept looking out the rear window, as though to see the plane she wasn’t catching, and she kept saying things like, “It’s the only way. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I can be sure of myself. Barry will understand.” That last part was said with a little less excitement and conviction, but she quickly rallied and repeated some of the other sentences some more.

It was perhaps eight minutes before the intermittent tiny squawking of the radio squawked my call number, and then I turned up the receiver volume, grabbed the mike, and said, “Right here.”

“Four thousand dollars,” Hilda said. “Plus your expenses.” Her tone of voice said, There. Now leave me alone with all this nonsense.

I looked in the rearview mirror. “Did you hear it?”

“Four thousand dollars.” She’d heard it, all right; she was pale and worried. “I have that much,” she said, more to herself than me. “In my savings account, for income tax. I could stall, just pay the interest—” She frowned and chewed her lower lip, working it out, while I drove not too rapidly westward. Then all at once she sat up straighter, her expression full of determination, and said, “Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“It’s worth it,” she said. “For peace of mind, the rest of my life? It’s cheap. The IRS can wait.”

“Okay.” Into the mike I said, “She says it’s a go. Tell my father, will you?”

“Cash, or certified check,” Hilda said.

“That’s fine,” the passenger said. “We’ll just stop by my bank, and we’ll be on our way.”

2

Well, of course, it wasn’t quite that easy. Back in Manhattan we stopped at her bank for the certified check made out to Harry Fletcher (my father), which I mailed to my parents’ house in Queens, and then we drove downtown to my apartment on East 17th Street. The passenger waited in the cab while I threw some clothing and a toothbrush into my old canvas bag with all the zippers—given me by my parents when I went away to college—and then I sat down at the dinette table to compose a note to Rita.

About Rita. She was the closest thing I had to an actual girlfriend at that time. She worked for a magazine company on the West Side, and sometimes she’d come downtown and stay with me for a couple of days. She had her own key, some of her clothing and cosmetics lived here, and if she made a long-distance call she always paid up when I got my next bill. “You only want me for my body,” I told her once, when she dropped in unannounced and I woke up to find her crawling to bed with me. “Bragging or complaining?” she asked, and I said, “What if I had somebody else here?” She said, “Then I’d tiptoe out again.” It wasn’t what you could call an intense relationship.

As demonstrated by the note: “Am taking a fare out of town, will be gone a couple weeks, phone you when I get back. Better smell the yogurt before you eat it.”

Outside, I put my bag on the front seat and said, “Well, Ms. Scott—” (I knew her name now, Katharine Scott, from the check) “—you still game?”

“Definitely,” she said.

“Fine,” I said, and took the FDR Drive and the Harlem River Drive up to the George Washington Bridge. All the way up, Ms. Scott sat in the back seat with that alert, scrubbed, determined, brave, optimistic look of someone who’s just made an absolutely right resolution, and hasn’t broken it yet.

Across the bridge into New Jersey, and I followed the signs for Interstate 80, lining out due west into what would have been the setting sun if it wasn’t still morning. Switching on my radio one last time, I said, “Two-seven. Two-seven. Two-seven.”

“Tom? Is that you?” There was a lot of static in the air. “I can barely hear you.”

“We’re on our way, Hilda,” I said, speaking loud and clear. “The certified check is in the mail, and we just crossed the George Washington Bridge.”

“Good luck,” she said, through the buzz of static.

“Thanks. See you in a couple weeks.”

She said something I couldn’t make out, with all the static. I yelled, “What?”

“Your father says don’t wreck his cab!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Tell him don’t worry.”

“What?”

“I said okay!”

“Okay! Drop us a postcard!”

“I will!” I yelled, and listened to nothing but static for a few seconds, and switched off.