So Willing

by Lawrence Block

  As if in answer to his thoughts about coffee, a bum picked that minute to panhandle him. He was a short, scrawny, scrubby little bum, with a short, scrawny, scrubby little beard. He came staggering up, dressed like a picture on a CARE poster, with a pathetic expression on his rummy face and his filthy hand held out, palm up, and he whined, “You got a dime for a cup of coffee, Mister?”

  Vince just looked at him. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it again, and closed it again, and finally said, in a calm and reasonable voice, “If I had a dime for a cup of coffee, you stupid son-of-a-bitch, I would drink a cup of coffee.”

  The bum blinked, and looked aggrieved. “Jeez,” he whined. “You don’t have to get that way about it.” And he went staggering off to panhandle somebody else.

  Vince took off in the opposite direction. It was too dangerous to hang around in front of the hotel any longer.

  He’d walked two blocks, trying to think about what to do about Saralee and the car but managing only to think about the fact that what he needed now was a cup of coffee and a place to sit down and think things out, when he suddenly had a brilliant idea.

  He stepped into the next doorway he saw. He took off his tie and slipped it into his coat pocket. Then he turned his coat collar up, unbuttoned his white shirt halfway down and pulled one shirt tail out so it dangled down below the bottom of the suit coat. He rubbed his hands on the sidewalk until they were good and sooty, then rubbed them on his face until it was good and sooty. Then he stepped back out among the pedestrians and looked for a likely prospect.

  One came along almost immediately. A youngish guy in his mid-twenties, walking arm in arm with his girl. Vince figured a guy with a girl would be afraid to look cheap in her eyes, and so would be an easy touch. He stepped in front of the couple, a pathetic expression on his face and his now-filthy hand extended palm upward, and whined, “You got a dime for a cup of coffee, Mister?”

  The victim looked embarrassed. He stopped and fidgeted for a second, and mumbled something, while the girl with him looked curiously at Vince, and then he stuck his hand into his pocket and came out with a handful of change. “Here,” he mumbled, and dropped half a buck into Vince’s waiting palm. Then he hurried on by.

  Not only a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee and a hamburger. With onions.

  Sitting in the luncheonette, dawdling over his coffee and hamburger, Vince thought it out.

  Saralee was gone. So was the car. They were together, Saralee and the car.

  Vince needed the car. He was supposed to go back to the lake today, so his father could drive the car home and get back to work when his vacation ended.

  Vince wanted to kick the crap out of Saralee while wearing hobnail boots and brass knuckles.

  Vince had to have the car, and he wanted to get his hands on Saralee. And since the car and Saralee were together, once he had found one of them, he would have both of them.

  That brought up the first question. Where would Saralee have gone? Where would an ambitious, unscrupulous, good-looking nymphomaniac with a stolen car and about three hundred stolen dollars go?

  She wouldn’t go east because there was nothing east of New York but New England, and New England was kind of famous for prudery, and a girl like Saralee wouldn’t even think of going to an area that was famous, rightly or wrongly, for prudery. And she wouldn’t go north, because there was nothing to the north but lots of New York State, and then the Canadian border, and she’d never get over the Canadian border in a stolen car for which she didn’t have any registration.

  Come to think of it, Saralee didn’t even have a license. He remembered her telling him that, after she had driven the car from the parking lot to the hotel, and how relieved he’d been that she hadn’t been involved in any of the thousand minor accidents that happened every day in midtown Manhattan.

  Getting back to the geography, she wouldn’t head west because that way lay Brighton. The only direction left was south. Okay, she would go south. Now what?

  He turned it around and looked at it from another point of view. Where would a girl like Saralee fit in? Where would a girl like Saralee naturally gravitate for?

  Only two places: California and Miami.

  There were lots of things against California. In the first place, it was three thousand miles away. And Saralee only had about three hundred bucks left out of the five hundred she’d lifted from Bradley Jenkins. You don’t take a car three thousand miles on three hundred bucks. Not if you plan to do any eating yourself.

  In the second place, in order to get to California she would first have to drive toward Brighton.

  In the third place, Miami was to the south, which is the direction she would naturally take anyway.

  In the fourth place, Miami was only one thousand miles away, which a girl could do on three hundred dollars.

  Okay, that answered question number one. Saralee, without a shred of doubt, was headed for Miami. Now for question number two.

  Question two: How the hell was Vince going to get to Miami? Once he was there, how the hell was he going to find one sharp broad in a town full of sharp broads?

  He sat there for a long while, and he just didn’t get any answers to question number two. The coffee got cold, and the hamburger got colder, and the hamburger bun got hard, and he still didn’t have any answers to question number two. The waitress began to glare at him and he still didn’t have any answers to question number two.

  He finally left the place, noticing that it was now one o’clock, and Saralee now had a five-hour start on him.

  Saralee didn’t have a driver’s license and she was driving a stolen car. Therefore, Saralee was going to be obeying every speed law she came across. Which meant it would take her two days at the very least to get to Miami, and probably three. The first day, she would maybe be able to drive four or five hundred miles. Then she’d clock out at a motel somewhere, and start off bright and early tomorrow morning.

  If Vince had a car, he’d be able to at least catch up with her. He could drive all night, if need be, and finally he’d catch up with her, because she’d be obeying the speed limits, and she’d be stopping for sleep.

  But Vince didn’t have a car.

  And he didn’t have lots of time either. He was supposed to be back at the lake today. He might be able to get away with overshooting for a day, coming back tomorrow, but it just wasn’t possible to never go back there, or to go back without his father’s car.

  He wandered around and occasionally, when he saw a likely customer, he panhandled a bit, because he at least needed eating money, and within half an hour he had three bucks. Which was a pretty good wage, averaging out to six dollars an hour.

  He could always stay in New York, of course. Stay here forever, panhandling at six bucks an hour. Because he definitely could not go back to the lake without his father’s car. He definitely could not, and that was all there was to it.

  He saw a gas station, one of the cramped little hole-in-the-wall gas stations common to Manhattan, and stopped in, on impulse, to get some road maps. There wasn’t any one road map for all of the Eastern Seaboard, but he got a bunch of state maps, and could go from one to the next, and follow Saralee’s route from New York to Miami. Then he went down to 72nd Street and Broadway, where they had benches on the mall, and sat down to look at the maps.

  The thing was, there were so many roads. You had your choice of half a dozen roads going out of New York, and about half a dozen roads the rest of the way.

  But Saralee would be in a hurry. She would take the shortest, straightest route. Vince searched his pockets for a pencil, found one, and marked out on the maps what he thought would probably be her route. He worked at it slowly and carefully, and by the time was finished, he was ninety-nine percent sure he knew every inch of road Saralee would be traveling.

  It was two o’clock. Saralee was six hours ahead of him.

  He looked at his maps, and he swore under his breath, and he felt horribly frustrated. And al
l at once, he got his idea.

  It wasn’t a very good idea, but that didn’t matter. That didn’t matter, because it was the only idea. It was his only chance. He was sure of his reasoning all the way, sure that Saralee would be heading for Miami, almost dead sure he had figured out her complete route. If his reasoning was correct, his idea just might work. If his reasoning wasn’t correct, his idea didn’t matter and it didn’t matter what he did, because Saralee and the car and everything else were gone forever anyway.

  So the idea was worth trying, even though it wasn’t very good.

  He got to his feet and crossed the street to the subway station. He paid fifteen cents of his panhandled money and took the subway downtown. He made a couple of transfers, paid another quarter, and wound up on the H&M tubes, headed for Jersey. While in that last train, he put his tie back on, buttoned his shirt, turned his coat collar back down, and tucked his shirt-tail in. When the train reached the last stop in Jersey, everybody got off, and Vince was alone in the car for a minute. He pulled one of the advertising posters down from the row above the windows, hid it under his coat, and left the station.

  The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western railroad station was right next to the last H&M tube stop. Vince went over there and stopped off in the men’s room. There he washed the panhandling dirt from his face and hands, and carefully wrote “UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI” on the back of the poster, in large, thick, letters. Then he went out to the waiting room, found a likely-looking untended suitcase, picked it up, and left the depot. He spent a dollar and a quarter on a cab to take him to the highway, and then he stood beside the road, the stolen suitcase next to his feet, the sign in his left hand, and his right hand out, thumb extended.

  He waited five minutes before a new DeSoto screeched to a halt. He picked up the suitcase, ran to the car, and the driver, a thirtyish salesman type with horn-rimmed glasses, said, “I’m only going as far as Baltimore.”

  “That’s fine,” Vince told him. “Every little bit counts.”

  He tossed his suitcase into the backseat, slid into the front seat beside the driver, and said it again, his eyes staring down the road, southward. “Every little bit counts.”

  A truck took him from Baltimore to Washington. He didn’t get to see much of the country, because he slept most of the way. He knew he was going to have to be wide-awake later on, so he forced himself to relax and sleep while he could.

  Actually, it wasn’t that tough to get to sleep. He’d had a very active four days, coupled with some nervous running around today, and whizzing along a superhighway on a sunny summer afternoon was pretty relaxing anyway. He conked out within ten minutes in the salesman’s car, and didn’t wake up till they reached Baltimore. Then the salesman wished him luck, Vince thanked the guy for the ride, closed the door, stuck out his thumb, and a truck stopped. Just like that. He was running in luck, and he hoped it kept up that way.

  By the time he got to Washington, he was pretty hopeful. The salesman had driven like a madman, and the truck driver hadn’t been any slouch either. Both of them had gone a hell of a lot faster than Saralee would dare to, and Vince figured by now he couldn’t be more than four hours behind her.

  Then came Washington, and things slowed down to a crawl. For one thing, the truck driver let him off at the northern edge of the city, which meant he was going to have to work his way all the way through Washington, and he knew from experience that hitchhiking within a city is hell. For another thing, he was beginning to feel starved, and the money he could have spent on a fast cab-ride through town had to go for food. And the eating of the food took time, too, no matter how fast he tried to chew.

  Then he was back on the street again, thumbing once more. And, as he’d expected, hitchhiking through the city was hell. He did it in four short rides, with long waits in between. And the fourth ride didn’t turn out to be so short after all.

  It was a woman, driving a new Pontiac convertible, the incredibly expensive car for people with enough money to buy a Cadillac convertible and not enough sense to come in out of the rain.

  This woman was about forty. He didn’t know whether she had any sense or not, but she very obviously had money. She was dressed in an obviously expensive blue suit and, even though it was warm as hell in Washington, a waist-length fur jacket over it. On her head was one of those goofy hats that was one-tenth hat and nine-tenths veil. She was a good-looking woman for forty, as far as the face was concerned. The fur made it impossible to tell much about the body, though her nylon-sheathed legs looked pretty good from the knee down.

  She stopped the car next to him, smiled, and said, “Hop in.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and hopped in. He’d barely had his thumb out, not expecting a woman to stop for a hitchhiker, and the fact that she had stopped surprised him so much it took him a second or two to react.

  Once his suitcase and University of Miami sign were stowed in back, and he was seated in front beside the woman, the Pontiac slid away from the curb and purred southward through the evening traffic.

  After a minute, the woman said, “I went to Miami, too. Quite a number of years ago.”

  Vince tensed. He knew what was coming next, a lot of talk about the new buildings and the old professors and how the old town is getting on and all that garbage, none of which Vince would be able to handle, since he’d never been near either Miami or its university in his life. “Well, uh,” he said. “Uh, as a matter of fact I don’t go there myself. My brother does. I’m going down to visit him. This’ll be my first trip down there.” There, he thought, that ought to do it.

  The woman turned to look at him for a second, smiled and said, “Crap.” Then she looked back at the street.

  Vince blinked. He gaped at the woman, and waited for her to explain what that had been all about, but apparently she had no intention of doing so. She just kept driving along, a half-smile on her lips. He noticed that they were good lips, just slightly touched with lipstick, and that her hair was in a tight permanent that wasn’t blowing around even though the convertible’s top was down. Black hair it was, with just a touch of gray in some of the hairs at the side. It looked good on her, very sophisticated. She looked like a real heller who had grown older gracefully.

  They drove two blocks in silence, and then the woman said, “Well? Aren’t you going to defend yourself?”

  Vince decided the only thing to do was let this graying chick have the lead, until he could figure out where she thought she was going. “Defend myself?” he asked. “From what?”

  “You don’t have any brother in the University of Miami,” she said. She glanced over at him, smiled again, and looked back at the traffic. “That sign of yours is just something to make it easier for you to get a ride.”

  Vince shrugged. This time, he thought, the best thing to do was admit everything and say nothing. “It’s pretty tough to get a ride,” he said, “unless you do something like that.”

  The woman nodded. “I know it is,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.” She glanced at him again, looked back at the road, and said, “What’s that bulge inside your coat? Is that a gun?”

  “Gun?” Vince hadn’t even known he had a bulge inside his coat. He looked down, and realized all the road maps tuck into his inside coat pocket did make a healthy bulge. Now that he thought about it, with a bulge like that in his coat, it was a miracle he’d gotten any rides at all. And here this was the sixth person to pick him up. And this one was even a woman.

  “Well?” she asked him. “Is it a gun?”

  “No,” he said. He grinned uneasily, not sure what this crazy woman was leading up to. “Heck, no,” he said, playing it boyish. “Nothing like that. It’s just road maps. See?” He dragged them out of his pocket and showed them to her. “I really am going to Miami,” he said. “And I’ve got these road maps so I won’t get lost.”

  The woman looked at the road maps, looked at him, stopped smiling, looked out at the street again, and said, “How disappointing.”


  A nut, decided Vince. That’s what she was, a grade A, first-prize, number one nut.

  He didn’t know just how nutty she was. They were in the southern part of the city now, near the Potomac, and Vince was surprised to see that they were coming to wooded sections among the built-up areas. And he had the crazy feeling they were going the wrong way.

  The feeling got stronger, a lot stronger, when the woman suddenly made a turn onto an unpaved street and drove down past two rows of unfinished ranch-style houses to the end, and stopped.

  Vince looked around, half-expecting a couple of guys to come running out of one of the half-built houses and grab him. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What is this?”

  “You’re an awful disappointment,” the woman said. She was sitting half-turned in the seat, facing him, and she was half-smiling again, her eyes shining at him in the moonlit darkness. “I certainly didn’t expect anything like this when I picked you up,” she said. “You turned out to be a complete flop, do you know that?”

  “Well, for God’s sake,” Vince cried, “what the hell do you want from me?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?” she asked him. “I want you to rape me.”

  He could only stare at her. He couldn’t say a word or do a thing or move a muscle, all he could do was just sit there in the car in the moonlight and stare at her.

  “If you look over that way,” she said, pointing beyond him, “you’ll see lights. There are lots of houses all around here full of people. If you don’t rape me, I’ll throw you out of the car, and then I’ll tear my clothes and go to one of those houses and say you did rape me. And I don’t suppose it would take the police very long to find you. You’d be on foot, and you don’t know Washington at all.”

  A nut, thought Vince for the thousandth time. A complete and utter nut.

  The woman watched him, growing impatient. “Well?” she demanded.