The Girl With the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block Page A

town, and he doesn’t have anything pressing for the next few days to get him sidetracked.”
    I didn’t say anything. I looked at him, and for a change I saw tension lines in that lover-boy face. They didn’t remain there long. A smile wiped them away.
    “This is big, Johnny.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “If you figure we ought to wait a while, about another week or two—”
    He had managed to pick up elements of a Canadian accent. It showed on certain words. About came out aboat . I still sounded the same as ever, but then I wasn’t posing as a native. I was just a transplanted American.
    “Now’s as good a time as any.”
    “Good,” he said. “There’s a couple ways to get there. You go to Buffalo first, and then south to Olean. There’s one plane a day from Buffalo to Olean, or you can do it by bus or train. I think the bus is a better bet than the train.”
    “I’d rather fly.”
    “That’s what I figured, and it makes more sense that you’d fly down for the meeting instead of wasting that time on a bus or a train. You fly American to Buffalo airport and then get a Mohawk flight to Olean, I wrote it out for you.”
    He left a few minutes after that. I stayed around for another drink, then walked back to my hotel. I knew I would have trouble getting to sleep. It was more trouble than I’d expected. I kept on thinking of the two bad things that could happen. I could hit a snag at the start, or I could rope him in neatly and then have a wheel come off later in the game.
    If it blew up in the beginning, we were out two months’ time and the money we’d spent so far. This was a tailor-made con. Gunderman might have been the only man on earth we were primed for, and if he tipped right off the bat we could junk the whole operation and forget it. Rance was out his stake, and I could flush away my plans for turning Bannion’s roadhouse into a Rocky Mountain Grossinger’s.
    If it soured later on, we were out more than time and money. If it soured later on, we would go to jail.
    I kept dreaming about that. About being locked away, locked up in a cell. I kept waking up in a sweat and sitting around smoking a cigarette and dropping off to sleep again and waking up out of another dream.
    The next night I puddle-jumped to Olean. That night I slept well. And woke up, and met my mooch and tossed that lasso around his manly shoulders.
    And waited now, in the lobby of the Olean House, for Evvie Stone.

Five

    She was five or ten minutes late. I waited for her in the lobby. I sat in a red leather chair in front of the empty fireplace and kept glancing over at the doorway. She came through the door and got about a third of the way to the desk, and I stood up and walked across the lobby to meet her.
    “Oh, Mr. Hayden,” she said.
    “Miss Stone.”
    “I had to double-park out in front, so if you’re ready—”
    We left the hotel together. Her car was a white Ford with a small dent in the right front fender. We got in and she spun a very neat U-turn, took a right on State Street and headed the Ford out of town on Route 17. She kept her eyes on the road.
    I kept mine on her. She’d changed her clothes for dinner. Now she wore a very simple black dress with a scoop neckline. A green heart hung from a small gold chain around her throat, a very deep green against her white skin. Jade, I guessed. Her arms were bare, her hands very sure on the wheel.
    “I’m supposed to be very nice to you,” she said suddenly. “I think I’ll like that.”
    We stopped for a light and she turned to look at me. Her eyes were larger than I had remembered them, and deeper in tone. “You surprised the hell out of me this morning,” she said. “You don’t look like a confidence man.”
    “That’s an asset.”
    “Yes, I’m sure it must be.” The light changed. “Mr. Gunderman doesn’t have an important engagement tonight, you know. He just decided that I’d learn more from you than he would.”
    “I guessed that. His idea or