The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page A

said. I’d been trying to dodge it, but that was stupid. I knew we were going to have to go through this sooner or later, get it over and done with and behind us, once and for all. It might as well be now. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more.
    “It’s your job,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “Clay, don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I’m shocked or anything, about you being a big bad crook or something stupid like that. It’s just that—it’s just the coldness you show sometimes, you—you’re, I don’t know, you’re two different people sometimes.”
    “Don’t be—”
    “Clay. Don’t tell me to don’t be silly. I know, I know, you’re fine with me, you’re a nice guy and we have a good time together, but—then you can turn around and be so cold-blooded, talk about giving somebody an accident when what you really mean is you’re going to go out and commit cold-blooded murder, and it’s just as though it doesn’t really mean a thing to you at all. There just isn’t any feeling there, any emotion. And that scares me, Clay. With me, you show feeling. One of those two faces has to be false. I’m just scared it’s the face you show me.”
    “You can’t feel pity for a guy you’re supposed to kill, Ella,” I said. “Or you couldn’t do it.”
    “Do you want to feel pity?”
    “I can’t. That’s all there is to it, I can’t. I don’t dare to.”
    “You don’t have to kill, Clay.”
    “I do what I’m told,” I said. “I’m Ed’s boy, he’s my boss, he says do, I do.”
    “Why? Clay, you’re smart, you don’t have to be Ed’s boy. You could be anybody’s boy. You could even be your own boy, if you worked at it.”
    “I don’t want to be my own boy.”
    “What’s Ed to you, Clay?” she asked me.
    I lay there through a long silence, my head in her lap, her fingers soothing on my temples. What was Ed to me? “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you a story.”
    “A true story?”
    “A true story. I went to college for three years, you know that, a jerkwater college in a jerkwater town upstate. Another guy and I, we were at this beer party, somebody bet us we couldn’t steal a car. Crazy bet, ten dollars or something. We said we could. This other guy, he was a science major or something, he rebuilt his own cars from junkyards, stuff like that. We went out, we found this car, with an MD plate. That was the one for us. Cops don’t stop an MD, no matter what he does. He might be on his way to an emergency. This guy crossed the wires, and we took off. We were both kind of high.”
    She interrupted me then. “What were you majoring in?” she asked me.
    “How do I know?” I said, angry at her. “Business administration. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Let me tell the story, will you?”
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “We took the car,” I said. “It was wintertime, this is up in the Adirondacks, a lot of winter resorts, ski places and like that. This girl came running out. She wasn’t a little kid, you know, she was twenty-something, a waitress at some lodge, she was running across the road because she was late for work. I was driving, I got all fouled up with the clutch and the brake and the accelerator. I plowed right into her, then I found the brakes. I clamped down on them, rigid, scared to death, and the car went sliding. It was a Buick, one of these big heavy jobs. It went off the road and hit a tree. The guy with me went through the windshield, got killed. The door on my side popped open and I went out. Nobody saw it happen. It was wintertime, you know, pretty late at night, cold as hell out. This car was coming the other way, and they saw what happened, but they were the only ones. They stopped and came over and one of them asked me what was wrong, how did I feel? All I could say was, ‘We stole the car, we stole the car, we stole the car.’ I could see my whole life shot, right there. I should have known better, I was twenty-three years old,