SHADOWS EVERYWHERE

By John Lutz

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

Digital Edition © 2011 John Lutz

Cover Design By: David Dodd

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INTRODUCTION

Old friends. Roaming back through my file cabinets and through the years to assemble this collection, that's how I came to think of the shadowy people of my earlier fiction. Like real-life old friends revisited, some of them had aged more gracefully than others, some seemed outdated, some improved with the passage of time. Most of them, I am happy to report, held up admirably under the weight of the years.

A few sentences into each of their stories, my memory clicked and I knew them well again. The high-spirited, don't-give-a-damn trucker in "Explosive Cargo" remained every bit as volatile as what was in his truck. The victim in "A Verdict of Death" still evoked a sympathy that was the flip side of the loathing inspired by the victimizer. The hardscrabble farm woman of "The Midnight Train" continued after all these years to exert the subtle but irresistible siren's pull on the hapless traveler. And there as ever was "The Lemon Drink Queen," caught on life's wild side and finding herself a catalyst of fate. Once more the husband of a poor household in an impoverished country made the sacrifices necessary for the survival of his family in "Hector Gomez Provides," a theme that too often mirrors hard actuality. In "A Rare Bird," I found myself again intrigued by the odd adventure of the tentative blackmailer.

Please excuse my lack of modesty when I say that I'm proud of these shadowy people whose fates play out in worlds of my creation. I'm also proud of my art of storytelling, and of my colleagues who face with me the same formidable obstacles that need to be overcome with each telling of a tale. It's quite a responsibility, delivering to the reader what, at least for the duration of the reading, must seem to be flesh and blood characters with emotions that can he understood and shared. That's what fiction is all about, engaging the reader's emotions. A writer can do that in only a limited way with situation, setting, or theme. Even, or perhaps especially, in the mystery, where the clever puzzle and solution, where plot and intellectual engagement, are so important, good fiction continues to rest primarily on good fictional characters. They are the way to the reader's heart.

One of the reasons an effective short story is more difficult to achieve than an effective novel is that the writer has limited space and time in which to create individual, recognizable and real characters. What might be done in paragraphs or pages in a novel, must be accomplished within sentences in a short story. Substance must be achieved under the constraints of brevity.

So I'm particularly pleased that the characters in the following stories emerge from the shadows of my file cabinets and the past to become real enough to make the stories in which they exist real and interesting. Real and interesting to me, anyway, admittedly a biased reader living them again after the intervening years. If these stories still work, it's because of the individuals who people them. As I assembled them for this book, it was my pleasure as their creator to experience the almost instant familiarity of meeting long-time, long-absent acquaintances, and feeling that I'd chosen my friends carefully and well.

So let me introduce you to my old friends. I think you'll like some of them. Some I think you'll hate.

Either way, I think you'll be glad you met them.

Contents

Introduction

Shadows Everywhere

The Lemon Drink Queen

A Rare Bird

A Verdict of Death

All of a Sudden

Living All Alone

Garden of Dreams

Prospectus on Death

Fair Shake

The Midnight Train

Hector Gomez Provides

Explosive Cargo

Copyright Information

SHADOWS EVERYWHERE

"You want what they all want," Garvy said. "There isn't any need to be shy about asking." He was around forty, a wide man–not fat, but wide – with a sharp-nosed, Roman sort of face and dampness beneath the arms of his pale blue dress shirt despite the frigid air-conditioning in his small office.

The boy, in his early or mid-twenties, squirmed in the chair before Garvy's desk, crossing and uncrossing his ankles. "Nobody recommended you or anything. I saw your classified ad in the paper: Garvy Detective Agency— Shadows Everywhere. Idon't know much about hiring a private investigator."

"It's like any other business arrangement," Garvy said with a reassuring smile, "only what you're paying for here are facts–cold facts. Obtaining those facts is my business. You might say, corny as it sounds, that I'm dedicated to pursuing truth."

The boy, who'd said his name was Dan Windemer, sighed as two vertical frown lines appeared above the crosspiece of his heavy-framed glasses. He was a slight, nerve-ridden youth with pale, quick hands. "I guess we can do business, then, because the truth is what I want to buy."

"Be sure, now," Garvy said, leaning back weightily. "Sometimes my clients get too much for their money."

The pale hands darted together, fingers laced. "I'm sure. I have to know about her."

"Your wife?"

Dan Windemer nodded. "Janet. I think she's seeing somebody behind my back."

Garvy struck a match to a cigar. "Who?"

"I'm not sure." Pale hands unlaced, spread, laced. "I just know there's somebody."

"By the way she acts, I suppose," Garvy said thoughtfully. "A man can tell about his wife. You want her followed and reported on?"

"I do," the boy said solemnly, then his wan face twitched out a quick, nervous grin as he realized the customary usage of the words in such solemn tones. "If that's the way you do it."

"That would be the method," Garvy said smoothly. "Thirty dollars a day plus expenses is my usual fee."

"Of course I wouldn't want her followed every day," Windemer said. "Could I let you know when I thought she was... going out on me, and you could tail her then?"

Garvy ignored the TV police talk. "If that's what you want. Why don't you tell me something about your wife?"

Windemer nodded, swallowed. "Janet's a secretary at Sanders Electronics. She gets off work at five o'clock, but lately she's been getting home late, sometimes an hour or so after me, and I get off at six. She always has an excuse; car trouble, reports to type, someone she had to drive someplace. Maybe I am too jealous like she says, but... well, I just have to find out."

"Sure," Garvy said. "Why not put your mind at ease? One way or the other, at least you'll know for sure."

"That's the way I look at it," Windemer said, jerkily tracing the crease in his trousers with his thumb. "Tomorrow night Janet's supposed to be going out to eat, then to a show, with another girl who works at Sanders. That's something else she's been doing more and more often lately–saying she's going out with girlfriends."

"And you want me to latch onto her when she comes out of work and give you a report on her activities for that evening."

"Right," Windemer said with a nod.

"I'm free tomorrow night," Garvy said. "I'll be glad to take your case."

Dan Windemer grinned thankfully and took out his checkbook. While Windemer was writing out a check for a retainer, Garvy said, "Do you have a photograph of your wife?"

Windemer said he did, handed Garvy the check along with a color snapshot of a slim blonde girl. She might have been fourteen instead of in her twenties, long hair combed straight down, and a toothy, wholesome grin.

"She'll be driving a red Volkswagen," Windemer said. "The girl she's supposed to go with is a short brunette and drives a convertible."

"I'll know your wife when I see her," Garvy said, tucking the photo into his shirt pocket. "I can mail you the report later this week."

"No, no, don't do that," Windemer said. "Janet gets the mail sometimes."

Garvy wasn't surprised. "All right, you can drop by the office if you like and pick it up." He stood and held out his hand. Windemer shook the hand and thanked him, moving backward to the door.

At the door the youth stopped and shrugged. "I just have to know for sure, that's all..."

"That's all there is to it as far as I'm concerned, too," Garvy said. "I understand perfectly."

Windemer smiled and left, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

Garvy sat for a while, doodling exquisitely graceful curved parallel lines on his scratch-pad. Then he tore off a fresh sheet of paper, jotted down some notes, and placed the paper and Janet Windemer's photograph into a yellow file folder. He made a notation on his desk calendar: Five, Sanders Elec., Janet W.

Sanders Electronics occupied a long, low, absurdly clean-looking building in one of the spanking new business communities that were springing up west of town. As Garvy sat behind the wheel of his gray hardtop across from the building, he listened to the radio with half his mind while the other half concentrated on the sun-glazed glass entrance to Sanders Electronics. He was patient, used to his work by now, and he didn't even bother to glance at his watch as the minute hand edged toward five o'clock.

Garvy couldn't count the times he'd sat patiently one place or another in similar situations. There were hundreds of thousands of suspicious husbands or wives in the city, cheating husbands or wives, wondering, never sure. Every weekend in the Security, Private Investigators column of the paper's classified section Garvy ran his short, simple ad. Bait cast out into the sea of the city; and invariably some of those countless husbands or wives came to him.

Immediately Garvy's mind tuned out the soft radio music entirely as Janet Windemer walked from the Sanders Electronics building into the hot, late-afternoon sun's harsh, angled glare. She was striding loosely, swinging her long-strapped purse carelessly. There were a few men around her, but none seemed to be paying too much attention to her–only a word exchanged now and then. She was prettier than her photograph suggested, heavier and more shapely, but still extremely young-looking. She appeared to be the type that might giggle a lot.

Garvy watched her walk to the red Volkswagen, roll down the windows, then stand outside the hot car as if waiting for someone.

Within a few minutes a short, dark-haired girl emerged from the building and walked with quick mincing steps toward Janet Windemer. They talked for a while, then Janet rolled the Volkswagen's windows back up and both girls got into a tan convertible with the top down and drove away. Garvy followed.

The first stop was an Italian restaurant where the girls each had pizza and salad, then on to a department store where they spent an hour browsing, making Garvy's feet ache. From the department store they drove to a popular gangster movie, MARIJUANA MAMA, that had been showing for three months at a midtown theater. Garvy rather enjoyed the movie.

After the movie the two girls drove to a nearby lounge and had two whiskey sours each while they talked, interrupting each other with animated gestures. Then Garvy followed them back to Sanders Electronics' dark parking lot where Janet Windemer said goodbye to the brunette and drove off in her Volkswagen. She went straight home; a modern-looking, cheap apartment in the north end, and by one a.m., she was, no doubt, in bed beside her husband where she belonged. After the apartment lights had gone out, Garvy fired up a cigar, waited another half hour, then drove away listening to the radio.

It was Thursday, just before Garvy was ready to leave the office, when Dan Windemer came for the report on his wife's activities. He seemed even more nervous than on his first visit as he sat down jerkily in the chair before Garvy's desk and waited.

"No need to act like it's the end of the world," Garvy said with a smile.

No return smile. "Where did she go?"

Garvy rested his elbows on the desktop and looked steadily at Windemer. "To a restaurant, a department store, a movie, a lounge, then to bed."

At the word "bed" the pale flesh beneath Windemer's eyes ticked, remained drawn.

"You're not the first husband this has happened to," Garvy said.

"Who was the man?" Windemer's voice was high and tight.

Garvy handed him a large brown envelope. "Description's in there."

Windemer leaned forward in his chair, within an inch of tottering. "What did you actually... see?"

"I saw them go into a motel room, then come out an hour later," Garvy said calmly. "That's all."

"That's all!" Windemer's face was contorted with barely harnessed rage.

"I couldn't very well go up and peek in the window," Garvy said. "And you only hired me to follow your wife and report on her activities. For all I know, nothing went on in the motel room."

"Nothing went on? Are you serious?"

"I suppose not," Garvy said, spreading his hands. "I see your point. It's just that in this business I know you can't assume anything. You have no real proof. Why don't you take the report home and read it, cool off some, then you can decide where you go from here. I'll be glad to help if you feel you have to know more, have definite proof, photographs. But first cool off, and think about it."

"What did he look like?" Windemer asked.

"Medium height and build, maybe a little tall, middle-aged, dark sport coat, bit of gray in his hair." They always worry about the young ones going for the middle-aged men, Garvy thought as he talked, and his description was vague enough to include most middle-aged men; only enough detail to make the man seem real in the client's mind, though there was plenty of meaty, lurid suggestion in the report.

Windemer's jaw muscles worked relentlessly as he nodded his head several times. He clutched the brown envelope tightly and stood. In a choked voice he thanked Garvy.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Windemer," Garvy said. "1 tried to warn you that sometimes the truth can be something other than what we want."

"I just had to know," Windemer said as he opened the door. "It was driving me crazy. I don't regret finding it out for sure." He left quickly, close to tears.

Garvy had a drink from the fifth of Scotch he kept in his bottom desk drawer, then after a few minutes he stood and turned out the office lights. He knew that Windemer would return. They were always driven to find out more, to try to obtain enough evidence for divorce, seek the lurid details. Morbid curiosity usually prevailed in types like Windemer. His wife's unfaithfulness would be like an irritating scab he couldn't leave alone, and at thirty dollars a day it was, for Garvy, a profitable irritation. The Windemer kid would be good for at least another couple hundred dollars before he had to be told it was simply impossible to obtain photographs, that his wife and her lover suspected they were being followed. Suppose Windemer, or any of Garvy's clients, figured out he'd been swindled? (Not that it had happened yet.) What could he do? Make it all public, confess to his wife he'd hired a private detective to watch her? Slim odds on that–and even then it would he the wife's word against Garvy's.

Garvy was humming as he locked the office door behind him and walked jauntily down the hall.

The next morning, as was Garvy's habit, he didn't glance at the paper he'd bought until he'd reached his office and was seated behind his desk with a cup of black coffee. A bomb might have exploded at the unfolding of the paper for the shock it caused Garvy. He sat blanched and stunned, confusedly frightened.

A picture of a smiling Dan Windemer peered out at him from the front page, along with two other photographs and the headline: MAN SHOOTS WIFE, SUITOR, SLAYS SELF. Garvy bent forward, pinning the outspread paper to his desktop as if holding it against a wind as his eyes raced over the print.

Last night at Sanders Electronics, Windemer had been waiting for his wife in the parking lot. Without a word he'd opened fire on her with a revolver, then walked past her body into the office of the president and shot one Raymond Sanders three times. Windemer then locked himself in a washroom down the hall and, as the police entered the building, he turned the gun on himself. Police said that Windemer had left a note.

Garvy's eyes darted to the two other photographs at the top of the page: Janet Windemer, and a handsome, middle-aged man with a touch of gray in his hair. One of the perils of making the description so general, Garvy thought. Only this time it hadn't been general enough.

Sitting back from the paper, Garvy tossed down his steaming coffee in one long gulp. It helped jolt him into a frame of mind where he could think more clearly, try to reason out the mess. The paper had said that Sanders was married and the father of three daughters, the oldest one sixteen. The man was wounded only superficially in the arm and side, and from his hospital bed he was denying everything found in the suicide note of his secretary's husband.

Garvy walked to the electric percolator and slowly poured himself another cup of strong coffee. Would anybody believe Sanders? His wife? Friends? Business acquaintances? Some would, some wouldn't; but enough wouldn't. The main thing was whether the police believed him, and whether they would track down Garvy's connection with the murder-suicide. If that happened, Garvy had to be prepared to testify that he'd observed Sanders and Janet Windemer conduct an illicit affair.

The story made good newspaper copy, and for the next week or so it occupied a position of prominence on the front page as Raymond Sanders' personal life was dragged out and shaken before the eager public. His neighbors said that he'd always seemed a loving husband and father, but on the other hand there'd been a coolness about him, and he was seldom home. At the end of the third week the papers reported that Sanders' wife had left him.

At the beginning of the fourth week a mustached homicide detective named Soreno knocked on Garvy's office door. They had found the report beneath one of the floor mats in Dan Windemer's car.

Somehow the newspapers got hold of snatches of the report, and they appeared in the evening edition alongside Garvy's photograph. Garvy stood by his report, signed a statement for the police, and refused adamantly to talk to reporters.

That Friday, as he was eating lunch in a small quasi-western steak house near his office, Garvy was surprised to look up from his sirloin and see that Soreno had taken a seat across the table. The dark, mustached detective was looking at him with professional blankness, but Garvy disliked the faint glitter in his brown eyes.

"Mr. Garvy," Soreno said evenly, "you are one rotten operator."

"I've been told that several times," Garvy said calmly, taking another bite of steak.

Soreno's large eyes were fixed like painted mannequin eyes. "We checked out that report of yours. A girl named Fay Colter says she was with Janet Windemer all that evening. The waitress at Harmon's Restaurant remembers serving them because they forgot to leave a tip. The barmaid at Rico's Lounge remembers serving them whiskey sours. The desk man at the Kingsland Motel doesn't remember either of them at all–or Mr. Raymond Sanders."

"The world's a busy place–who pays attention?"

"Mr. Galloway does."

Garvy sipped his iced tea. "So who's Mr. Galloway?"

"The man Raymond Sanders was talking business with most of the evening of your report," Soreno said, a brittle note of hatred edging into his voice.

Slowly Garvy chewed another bite of steak, then just as slowly dabbed at his mouth with his white napkin. "Okay."

"Okay what?"

"I lied. It isn't a crime to lie, only a sin."

Soreno stared at him now with open disgust. "It's a sin and a crime to murder, Mr. Garvy!" he said in a low voice. "Sure as that two-dollar steak is tough, you just murdered two people and almost ruined a man's life!"

"Not technically," Garvy said, matching Soreno's rigid stare. "Not legally, either."

"After the publicity you're going to get, you won't be in business in this state tomorrow!" Soreno said viciously. "You won't have an investigator's license or a shred of professional respect! The law can't touch you because you didn't pull the trigger, but you're a murderer all the same!"

"You're getting carried away," Garvy said. "It was Windemer who killed his wife and himself. He was unstable."

Soreno stared at him unbelievingly, as if it were Garvy who'd sat down uninvited at his table. Then the homicide detective stood abruptly, whirled and walked away.

After watching Soreno angrily push aside the restaurant's thick wooden door and disappear into the street, Garvy started on his dessert. The worst had happened, and he knew he could live through it, could let most of it roll off him. One of the benefits of long years in his business was the formation of a very thick skin. He had endured the worst before.

Soreno was right about the unfavorable publicity. Then came the revocation of Garvy's investigator's license pending further examination. Garvy finally made a formal statement of the truth rather than continue to be hounded by the police and reporters. The truth exonerated Janet Windemer of suspicion of adultery, and in the papers the next morning Garvy read that Raymond Sanders had been reunited with his wife and daughters. A genuine Hollywood ending, Garvy decided, as he cleaned out his desk.

For Garvy, however, it would be the beginning of a new script. There was always some business a clever operator could pursue profitably, maybe even another detective agency in another state. It was a big country, with plenty of fools waiting to be parted from what Garvy wanted. He realized, as he packed his files and office equipment, that the whole mess had taken more of a toll on his nervous system than he'd let himself believe. It would feel good to make a fresh start in some distant, anonymous city.

As Garvy was reaching back into the shadowed depths of his bottom desk drawer to make sure he wasn't forgetting anything, he heard a peculiar sound from the hall on the other side of the door–a sort of hollow, ripping sound. Garvy straightened in his chair, stood, and was about to go investigate when the office door opened.

On the floor behind the man who stood in the doorway, Garvy saw the leather gun case whose zipper he'd heard. The gun itself was a long and expensive, beautifully carved, twelve-gauge double-barreled skeet gun, the kind wealthy sportsmen used to shatter clay pigeons on boring weekends. It was held expertly in the hands of Raymond Sanders, and he didn't look bored.

Keeping the powerful shotgun leveled on Garvy, Sanders closed the door with a backward motion of his foot, and took a step closer.

Garvy had only had a gun pointed at him once before, and he was frightened, but he kept his voice steady, tried to throw Sanders off guard. "Have a chair," he said, waving at the cushioned chair by the desk.

Sanders ignored the offer. "You've caused me a lot of grief, Mr. Garvy, more than you'll ever know."

"You'll have even more grief if you pull that trigger," Garvy said, staring at the two gigantic apertures of the shotgun barrels. He knew what a gun like that could do at close range. One twitch of Sanders' finger could shatter Garvy like a flesh-and-bone skeet target.

"I doubt if I have the capacity to experience any more sorrow," Sanders said in a weary voice.

"There's no need to," Garvy said quickly. "The whole thing's over. There's no harm done to you–you're back with your family, your reputation's clear–your wife will love you and trust you all the more!"

"No harm done," Sanders repeated in a low, oddly laughing voice that sent a blade of fear through Garvy. "No harm done ..."With seeming pain he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and sighted down the long barrels at Garvy.

"Sanders, wait! You've no reason! I don't even know you! I never meant you any harm! Didn't cause you any harm–everything's the way it was before! Please!" Garvy's heart was crashing against his ribs. He felt an overpowering urge to run for the side door, yet knew he shouldn't.

"You don't understand," Sanders said in a soft, drained voice. "I loved Janet Windemer very much... very, very much!"

The two men's eyes locked in suspended time. Then suddenly Garvy did run for the door, exploded into the frenzied motion of panic from where he had stood behind the desk. There was a loud, split-second double roar as, leading him perfectly, Raymond Sanders brought him down in mid-flight.

Thirty seconds later came the sound of another, single shot.

THE LEMON DRINK QUEEN

She almost begged to be kidnapped, so I intended to oblige. Thana Norden was her name, the wife of Norman Norden, the millionaire lemon drink king. Old man Norden–about seventy years old–kept to himself in their big house on Florida's ocean coast, while his young wife Thana kept the bartenders busy in the big hotels up and down Collins Avenue.

Norman Norden worshipped his wife, and in the news releases concerning his civic activities, and in the society page write-ups, he never failed to mention the fact. "Worth all my money," he had said of her in one TV interview. That had stuck in my mind.

Thana acted the part of something worshipped. She was a very well-built brunette, of medium height and weight, about thirty, with large, slightly tilted brown eyes, long legs and a flaunting elegance about her. Her specialty, the way I heard, was to lead men on and then not deliver. She might not have been rare that way, but she was rare in a lot of other ways, and she loved to bring it to everyone's attention. I sat and heard her hold court with her bought friends in a lounge one evening. "My jewels... my car... he'd do anything for me... flying to Paris next Tuesday...why, he'd give a fortune to kiss my hand. Those were the sort of remarks that dotted her conversation.

After watching Thana for a few weeks, I found that her favorite pastime also fitted in with what I had in mind. She liked to take long, solitary walks on the beach. I'd sit concealed in my old car and watch her stroll in the moonlight, and I'd consider the possibilities. I was almost forty now; the big break had never come. Everything I'd ever done had always started sweet and ended sour. Was I considering something stupid out of some mounting desperation, or had I realized finally that I had to take a chance?

I can't say I made up my mind all at once, or even consciously, but one day I realized that I had made up my mind.

So that night I took one final draw on my cigarette, took one final look through the windshield at the small figure of Thana Norden below me on the beach. She was walking barefoot in an evening dress, about to disappear around a gentle rise of sand. A long swelling wave rose from the dark ocean and rolled toward her to sigh and splay gently about her feet. In the moonlight she glistened like pure gold.

The kidnapping itself would be the easiest part; but where would I hide a package like Thana Norden?

I figured the answer to that would have to come later. The thing for me to do now was to learn all I could about Norman Norden himself. That way I'd know better how to proceed, and how much to ask for ransom.

It was easy to find out what I wanted to know about Norden–so easy it kind of scared me. He was more important than I'd thought, worth more than I'd thought. He'd inherited over a million dollars and the Norden Lemon Drink Company from his father, Milton Norden. Then, with the increasing popularity of concentrated frozen lemonade, he'd built his father's business to ten times its former size and branched out into manufacturing other food products. Alone, without an heir until Thana, Norman Norden had acquired a huge home in New England, a plush New York town house, two swank penthouse apartments in Miami and a vacation 'cottage' in the Bahamas. He spent ninety-nine percent of his time in the sprawling mansion in Miami Beach, and from his office there he conducted his vast business.

On a particularly broiling, humid afternoon I lay on my back in bed and decided after some deliberation to ask $250,000 ransom for the precious Thana. With that figure in mind, I fell asleep listening to the rain begin to fall.

That evening, before it began to get dark, I had a quick snack, then drove to look over Norden's Miami property. I'd learned that both penthouses were used for business purposes only, and that they were seldom used at all. If someone very important came to town on Norden business, the larger penthouse with its pool atop the Brently Building was opened and put at the client's disposal.

I parked near the Brently Building and looked up at its top floor. According to the business-magazine article I'd read at the library, this, the more used of the two penthouses, was occupied for only a few weeks out of the year.

Squinting up into the sunlight, I could make out long rows of draped windows. A little casual conversation with the doorman told me the penthouse was unoccupied now, and the tiniest seed of an idea began to sprout in my mind.

When I saw the site of the second penthouse, smaller and less expensive than the first, on the top of the twenty-story Martinaire Hotel, that seed took root. The Martinaire was part of a section of older buildings, onetime fine hotels that depressed economic conditions were forcing out of business. What interested me most about the old but stately Martinaire was the vacant west wing. That wing, I discovered, was being remodeled to contain fewer but larger rooms. The front of the building was a sheer twenty-story rise, but the west wing rose only twelve stories to stair-step into the main section of building. I investigated further, then walked back to my car, smiling.

I had everything planned and was ready to act two evenings later. I tried to make up my mind when to perform the actual snatch, and as I followed a slightly drunk Thana Norden out of a bar that night about eleven o'clock, I decided then was as ripe a time as any if she were heading for her late walk on the beach.

Thana must have been even drunker than usual, for I had some trouble keeping my old sedan up with her fast and reckless driving. She pushed her little red sports car so hard it was almost suicidal, her dark hair whipping behind and around her in the wind. She was something, Thana Norden was, like a heroine from a book.

Finally she parked the car where she usually did, ran down to the beach and bent gracefully sideways to remove her shoes. I parked down the road about a hundred yards in the direction I knew she'd be walking and sat waiting, my hands clenched on the steering wheel.

After what seemed a long wait, I saw her below, walking slowly and carrying her shoes in one hand, looking out as she often did to the rolling dark sea. I got out of the car, shutting the door softly behind me, and watched her walk past before I started down toward her.

The sighing of the waves kept her from hearing me as I approached from behind, and when I touched her shoulder she whirled with a startled look in her pale face. "Thana Norden?"

'Yes...?" she said, frowning as if I'd interrupted her from complex thought. "What do you want?"

"You're coming with me," I said, watching her eyes for the fear that would allow me to manage her; but there was no fear–only annoyance, indignation.

"You must be out of your mind!" she snapped.

"You must be. A solid-gold girl like you, in the habit of walking alone on the beach at night. You were bound to be stolen."

"Stolen?" Now she looked at me curiously. "You're kidnapping me?"

"You've guessed it."

"You're serious?"

I nodded, drawing the small .32 revolver from my belt.

She looked up at the stars and laughed. "All right," she said when she was finished, "I'm kidnapped. You go ahead and call the shots."

"Walk along with me," I said, motioning with the revolver, and side by side we began the walk toward my car. Thana didn't seem frightened at all, didn't even seem nervous, though in a way she seemed excited, almost like a pretty girl embarking on a much anticipated date.

When we reached the sparsely grassed earth we stopped so she could put her high-heeled shoes back on. Then I prodded her ribs with the gun and we walked on faster toward the car.

I let Thana drive while I sat beside her with the revolver leveled at her side. I was glad to see that in the confines of my car she seemed more frightened than before.

"Back to the city," I ordered her.

"My makeup is in my car," she said as we passed her parked red convertible.

"It stays there. It won't matter what you look like for the next few days."

She drove on, staring ahead at the curving dark road.

"How much ransom are you going to ask?" she said after a while.

"More than you're worth."

"I'd like to say you can't get away with it, but you probably can. My husband will pay plenty to have me back."

"Thanks for the moral support. Now be quiet and drive."

"I'm not stupid, you know," she said lightly, "even though I am beautiful. I know I'm worthless to you dead, so don't bother with your threats."

"A lot can happen to you without your dying," I told her. That seemed to get to her, and I saw her jaw muscles tense as she tried to concentrate on the road.

"I said I wasn't stupid," she remarked after a few minutes. "After you get the ransom money I will be worthless to you, and you've let me see your face. You know I'll be able to identify you."

"Sure you will, only you'll never see me again, and I can change myself enough so no one will be able to identify me from your description." What I told her was true. Acting had been one of my many short-lived careers that had turned out to be something other than I'd thought, so the art of altering my appearance wasn't new to me. My normally sand-colored hair was dyed black now and combed low over my forehead, and the shape and thickness of my eyebrows were subtly changed by dark pencil. The fashionable dyed mustache I wore could also go when the time came. Naturally I wouldn't he seen anymore at my usual haunts, because my old life as a self-described beach bum would be over.

A tractor-trailer whined past us with difficulty, doing over seventy. I cautioned Thana to stay below the speed limit. Death-defying driving seemed to be a habit with her.

When we reached the Martinaire Hotel I had Thana drive around the block and park in the alley alongside the vacant west wing. I moved quickly, with the smoothness and economy born of careful planning.

After reaching into the back seat and grabbing the duffle bag I'd brought, I shoved Thana roughly from the car, followed her with the gun pressed against her. Through a lockless wooden door I took her inside the empty wing to a small room that probably had been used to store linens or cleaning equipment. A light in that room couldn't be seen from outside, and by the glow of my flashlight I bound Thana tightly to a metal support and pressed adhesive tape over her mouth. She sat limply without a suggestion of struggle, and her dark eyes were trained on me as I took one final look at her by the flashlight beam, then walked from the room and closed the door behind me.

Within twenty minutes I was back, and when I opened the door to the small room and switched on the flashlight, Thana was looking at me as she had when I left. I'd parked my car ten blocks away in the garage I'd leased and taken a cab back to within two blocks of the Martinaire Hotel. From there I'd walked the rest of the way.

I untied Thana but left the tape across her mouth, and jabbing the small of her back with the gun barrel, marched her outside again into the alley. With one deft toss I looped a thin, weighted rope about the bottom rung of the counterbalanced steel stairs of the old fire escape and pulled them down. Then I slung the duffle bag over my shoulder and motioned Thana to climb ahead of me.

It seemed like an hour, that climb. We passed darkened window after darkened window as we rose. During the day this part of the building would he teeming with workmen, but at this time it was completely deserted and ideal for my purpose.

We were both breathing hard when we reached the top window. I'd taken care of the latch earlier, and I slid the window open and pushed Thana inside, cursing softly for her to be silent. I used my flashlight with a dark handkerchief over the lens to guide us, but I knew where we were going, could have stage-directed the whole thing in my mind even in the dark. I let Thana, struggling for air, lean against the elevator well as I pressed the button. She didn't seem afraid, and from time to time her frantic breathing even seemed to take on the aspect of exhilarated laughter behind the adhesive tape.

Now the riskiest moment: we had to negotiate a short stretch of hall that passed occupied rooms.

The elevator doors slid open onto the empty hall, and we moved through the door at the end of the hall and up the narrow, steep stairway to the roof. Now I felt sure we'd make it as I gripped Thana's elbow and walked with her across the tar and gravel roof of the twentieth story of the Martinaire Hotel, the roof of Norman Norden's penthouse apartment. Near the center of the roof, we stopped.

I bound Thana's hands behind her, and crossed her ankles and bound them tightly. Then I took a longer piece of rope from the bag, looped it beneath her arms and tied it behind her.

I'd already forced the lock on the small opaque skylight to Norden's apartment, and I raised it and propped it open carefully. After dropping my duffle bag through the opening, I gently lowered Thana into the darkness below. The lack of vibration in the rope told me she was completely relaxed and cooperative. I tucked my flashlight downward through my belt so I could see below, then hung by my hands from the skylight for a moment before dropping to crouch beside Thana on the floor.

I'd brought it off! It would have been impossible to get into the penthouse unseen through the main part of the hotel, past doormen, guests and an army of bellhops. Yet here I was, in the least likely spot. While Norden fretted and sent out his private searchers, or even if he called the police, here I would he above it all in the plush penthouse of the lemon drink king himself. The irony of it really got to me, made me feel terrific. I almost laughed out loud as I straightened and moved the soft beam of the shielded flashlight about the room. Thana was sitting awkwardly cross-ankled, staring up at me, her idle hands still bound behind her.

After making sure the heavy, lined draperies were completely closed, I turned the lights on low. Very, very nice. The large living room we were in was furnished modern and plushly carpeted in beige, with a jagged stone fireplace on one wall. The whole thing was in the subdued taste of extreme wealth.

I walked over and untied Thana's ankles, then helped her to her feet and removed the long rope from beneath her arms. After promising to knock her unconscious if she screamed, I peeled the tape from across her mouth.

"Ever been here before?" I asked her.

She nodded her head yes, working her lips together to ease the sting from the peeled-off adhesive tape. "A few times."

"Plush," I said admiringly. "And private."

"Now what?" Thana asked, walking as if to loosen a stiffness in her legs, moving her slender shoulders as if they ached. "Am I supposed to spend the next several days with my arms tied behind me?"

"Not if you behave."

"It would be foolish of me even to consider misbehaving."

"I'm glad you see it that way," I said, but I wondered if she really did. I couldn't trust her.

I walked around, getting the layout of the apartment set in my mind: two gigantic bedrooms, two baths, a large kitchen, a dining room with an oversize chandelier, and the room we were in, spacious and glassed-in on three sides hung with heavy draperies.

I untied Thana and told her to sit on the long, modern sofa. Then I disappointed her by showing her the simple device I intended using to limit her movements: a pair of handcuffs I'd bought at a magic shop. I snapped the cuffs about her right wrist and a polished wood arm support of the heavy sofa. Then I removed her gold wedding ring and dropped it into my shirt pocket.

"I have some gold fillings, too," she said.

"I'll remember." I patted my pocket and walked over to slouch in a soft chair.

In the early-morning hours, after tying Thana firmly to the sofa and gagging her, I climbed back up onto the roof and left the same way I'd gotten into the Martinaire. I wore dark overalls now, lettered 24-HOUR SERVICE across the back, so I'd attract a minimum of attention and be difficult to remember if someone in the hotel did happen to glimpse me.

From the phone booth on the corner I made the call to Norman Norden's residence. At first, whoever answered wouldn't put me through to Norden but when I mentioned Thana's name and said it concerned her safety, Norden was on the line in ten seconds.

Norden sounded anxious, overwrought. When I told him I was holding Thana for ransom he let out a long, old-sounding sigh, as if he'd expected something like this to happen and now his fears were realized.

When I told him how much it would cost to get her back, he simply said, "Very well," without even hesitating. I admired him then, and felt a little sorry for him, until I thought about his money. He asked me how he could he sure I had Thana. I told him not to worry, that I'd prove it to him, then contact him later. The agreement was the standard one, that he wouldn't call the police and I wouldn't harm Thana. He wanted to talk some more, get more assurance that his young wife wouldn't he touched, but I hung up on him to keep the conversation short. After slipping the gold wedding ring into the stamped envelope I'd prepared with Norden's address typed on it, I dropped the envelope into a mailbox near the phone booth. I bought a detective novel from a big all-night drugstore across the street, then went back to the dark alley fire escape of the Martinaire Hotel's west wing.

Thana was awake and uncomfortable. When I removed the tape from her mouth it released a stream of curses and complaints.

"Take it easy," I said. "You wouldn't talk to me like that if I had a million bucks."

"You'd need two million!" she told me, chopping the words off angrily. "What did Norman say?'

I looked up at her as I was untying the rope around her ankles. "That is where you went, isn't it? To telephone your demand for ransom?"

I nodded, unwinding the rope and standing. "Your husband's worried about you, and he didn't seem to think a quarter of a million was too high a price to get you back."

"Just the way you planned, hmm?"

"Just," I said, untying her arms, then handcuffing her right wrist to the sofa arm in such a way that she could stretch out and sleep.

"Don't think I'm not aware of what else you plan." She was glaring up at me with a dark, almost-a-dare defiance in her eyes, and I realized what she meant. "After all," she said, "rape carries the same penalty as kidnapping."

"Maybe you're flattering yourself," I told her.

"I know better!" she spat out at me. It was almost as if she were trying to argue me into it to prove she was right.

I stood looking down at her and she met my gaze without blinking. "You're a means of making a quarter of a million dollars," I said. "You don't have to worry about being molested by me–if you are worried."

I walked to the other side of the room where slanted morning light was beginning to edge in around the heavy draperies. When it was light enough out, they could he opened. That shouldn't he noticeable or remarkable from twenty stories below in the street, and 1 was beginning to feel like a prisoner in the apartment myself. Thana had been right to an extent. Desire for her would intrude itself into any man's mind after a while. However, one of the main reasons I never actually considered touching her was that I knew if I did, Norman Norden would never rest, would never let himself die, unless I'd preceded him. The money he could spare and forget, but I knew he had to have his wife back "as was."

I stretched out in one of the bedrooms and slept for a few hours. Afterward, I arranged things in the apartment so Thana would have a little necessary freedom of movement. First I closed and locked the kitchen and bedroom doors, then I checked in the hall bathroom and removed anything she might use for a weapon, then broke the lock on the polished gold doorknob. The telephone was my big worry; Thana had only to lift the receiver from its cradle to indicate to the hotel below that someone was in the penthouse. The phone was on a very long cord, though, so I set it high up on the top wall bookshelf where she couldn't reach it. I fastened the receiver down with adhesive tape so that even if Thana pulled the phone down by the cord it would hold firm. She thanked me when I freed her from the sofa and let her walk about with her wrists handcuffed before her.

Most of the day she just roamed around the apartment, sitting now and then to read part of the paperback detective novel I'd bought. I watched her try and fail to concentrate on the hook.

"You have lousy taste in literature," she said at last, giving up and throwing the novel across the room.

"I bought it for you," I said, getting up and walking to the long window overlooking the street. The draperies were open more than halfway and the view of the city was impressive. Below me I could see the ant-like cars feeling their way through heavy traffic to the stop sign at the intersection, where they paused and seemed to consider which way to go next before moving on straight or turning.

"This is intolerable," Thana said behind me.

"Be quiet and I'll fix supper," I told her without moving.

"Fix what for supper?"

"Bologna sandwiches."

"That was lunch."

"It'll be breakfast too," I said, and it was.

I listened to Thana complain the rest of the next day, then late that night I bound her to the sofa again and went out to make my second telephone call.

Norden had already received the wedding ring in the mail.

"I want this to be over with," he said in a shaky voice. "I have the money ready in small bills. I took the liberty of assuming you'd want it that way."

"And the police?"

"I swear I haven't talked to them, to anyone!"

"Tomorrow night," I told him, getting to the point to shorten the call, "send your chauffeur in your blue limousine, carrying the money packed in one suitcase. Have him turn north on Route Seven from Highway 5 at exactly eleven o'clock, and tell him to drive at exactly forty miles an hour. When he sees the flash of a blue light, he's to pull to the side of the road immediately, dump the suitcase and drive on. Understood?"

"Understood," Norden said. "What about Thana? Is she –"

"She's fine," I said, "and if everything goes right she'll be back to you in no time. If everything goes right."

"You can trust me," Norden said. "I swear it. But you mustn't harm her."

"I don't want to, Mr. Norden," I said, and hung up.

Of course it was true, I didn't want to harm Thana; and for some reason I believed I could trust Norman Norden not to bring in the police at this point. The old man, in my brief but tense conversations with him, had shown an admirable self-control and concern for the safety of his wife. I guess you'd say, a certain class.

I got back to the penthouse and untied, then handcuffed Thana to the sofa so she could sleep, and so I could sleep without worrying about her getting to the telephone or hurling something through a window at this stage of the game.

"I think our worries are about over," I told her. "Your husband's going to pay off tomorrow night."

She sneered up at me. "Did you think he might not pay to have me back?"

"Not for a second. I'm beginning to think I should have asked for more."

"You underestimated my value."

"Or Norden overestimates it."

She spat at me then, but I moved back and she missed. "How's it feel to be set up for life with millions of dollars?" I asked.

"It feels great! It's a feeling you'll never know."

"You sound like you're trying to convince both of us."

She laughed, a quick humorless laugh that was more a reflex from a touched nerve than anything else. The swiftness of her mood changes was startling, though for some reason the changes seemed to be only on the surface.

"You're partly right." She lay back and rested her head on the sofa arm. "It gets boring after a while... like anything else. You might find that out. You're the same unhappy you, with or without money."

"But it beats starving," I said.

Thana shrugged. "I guess anything beats that. Except maybe sleeping stiff as a board on this damned couch."

"One more night," I said, "and you can be free to recuperate on your yacht."

I turned my back on her and went into the bedroom where I began going over the way I had things planned for the next night's pickup. I'd turn north onto Route Seven two minutes after Norden's chauffeur had entered it, and drive the legal limit of sixty. Route Seven wasn't heavily traveled at that time of night, and if I did pass any cars between us I could look them over to make sure they weren't police. Our respective speeds would bring the cars together at the right spot. Then I would accelerate close to the limousine, blink my blue-lensed flashlight through the windshield, and drop back to wait for the chauffeur to pull to the side and dump the suitcase. I'd park well back of him with my headlights on, and when the limousine drove off I would speed forward, pick up the money, and a third of a mile down the road turn onto the cloverleaf and maze of roads at the heavily traveled state highway. A quarter of a mile from that cloverleaf was another one. If anyone were trying to trace me he'd have to reckon on the possibility of me traveling in any of eight directions, and Norden's chauffeur wouldn't even be able to identify my car. I wouldn't return to the penthouse. I'd check the money, then phone Norden and tell him where to find Thana. It seemed foolproof; as foolproof as you can make something like that.

As the next day dragged by, the waiting began to play on my nerves. Still, there was that feeling of anticipation–a good anticipation–because, unlike so many of my schemes, I was somehow sure the whole thing would work as planned.

Thana's nerves seemed to be wearing thin, too. She paced the large, luxurious living room, absently raising and lowering her handcuffed wrists before her as if completely absorbed in whatever she was thinking. The way she was acting kind of surprised me. I was sure she was convinced I didn't mean to kill her when I had the ransom money. She should have been feeling a pleasant anticipation too, an anticipation of freedom.

I tried to ignore her endless pacing, tried to ignore my own nervousness, and I made a good try at reading the paperback novel I'd bought three nights before, but the words were only words, nothing more. I set the book aside and checked my watch. Five o'clock. I decided it might be a good idea to try to get whatever rest I could before tonight's activity, so I handcuffed Thana to the sofa arm and slouched on the other end of the sofa myself. After what seemed like an hour, I dozed off lightly...

"Who the devil are you?"

"I'm his prisoner! He's kidnapped me and he's holding me prisoner!"

The question, asked in a man's incredulous voice, stirred me from sleep. The answer, screamed in Thana's shrieking voice, made my eyes open with a start.

There were two men, an older man in a well-cut, dark suit, and a short, mustached man in work clothes, carrying some kind of long metal toolbox.

I stood, not really knowing what to do, and I saw that I'd drawn my revolver and was aiming it unsurely at them. They both backed away slowly, then the mustached man suddenly hurled his toolbox at me. I raised my hands but not in time. The heavy box struck me full on the chest and I staggered backward. The gun roared in my ear and I found myself sitting amidst wrenches and lengths of cut pipe, the toolbox open and lying across one of my legs. The two men were gone.

I kicked the toolbox away with a clatter and stood up, trembling, wondering what had happened, how it could have happened. Thana was staring up at me from the sofa, her features set in a strange-looking sort of defiance.

As I walked toward her I saw blood on my hand that was still holding the gun. Something had cut my arm badly and the blood was running down in a thick, red current.

"Who were they?" I asked in a shaken voice, but Thana only stared at me with that same rigid look on her features. I backed away from her and went toward the bathroom to wash some of the blood from my arm and try to stop the bleeding.

Halfway down the hall, I knew.

I heard it first, rather than saw it. Then I stopped and looked down at the inch-deep pool of water I was walking in. I sloshed the last ten feet to the bathroom door and went in.

The cold-water tap in the wash basin was barely turned on, the water running silently in a twisting, steady stream that had filled the washbasin and caused it to overflow. As I went to pull the plug I saw that toilet paper had been stuck into the overflow drain at the back of the basin. Thana had engineered this earlier in the evening to signal for help. The water had finally run through to the floors below and was brought to the attention of the hotel management, who had brought it to the attention of a plumber.

Cursing the first time I'd ever seen Thana Norden, I splashed water over my throbbing arm, ripped off my shirt sleeve and made a tourniquet of it that helped slow the flow of blood from the jagged cut near my elbow. I'd known from the beginning there wouldn't be time to descend twenty stories to the street if the police were called, and as I walked back into the living room I could already hear the screams of faraway sirens.

Thana was sitting on the sofa calmly now, staring up at me with certainly more defiance than fear.

"You fool!" I almost screamed at her. "Why did you do it? You knew it was almost over, you were almost free! Why did you mess up the whole thing?"

Her face shone with intensity. "Did you think 1 believed what you told me about not killing me? Believed anything you said?"

"It was true! I thought you knew it was true!"

The sirens were much louder now, and some of them stopped directly below. I ran to switch off the lamp in the corner near the fireplace, and the room was snapped to near total darkness.

The telephone rang. I walked to it, my numbed legs moving jerkily, and untaped and lifted the receiver.

"I advise you not to harm the girl," a slow but tense, deep voice said in my ear. "Have you?"

I waited a long time before speaking, listening to the even breathing on the other end of the line. "No," I said. "She's all right. I was never going to harm her."

"Then you're smart. You should he smart enough to know the only thing for you now is to come down unarmed and turn yourself over to us."

I thought about that while I squeezed the receiver so hard my hand ached. The penalty for kidnapping was death; I could he turning myself over for death.

"The building and the entire block are completely surrounded," the voice said. "There's nothing else for you to do but surrender. It will go easier on you since you haven't harmed Mrs. Norden."

I hung up.

There had to be something I could do. Something! Escape down the fire escape would he virtually impossible–but what else was there? One other possibility: I could use Thana as a hostage and make them let me out, make them give me a car and a head start.

Yet I knew that was almost no possibility at all.

Powerful spotlight beams hit the windows then, bathing most of the room in a chalky white light, changing night to fierce day outside the top floors of the Martinaire Hotel. The draperies were opened wide, and I moved along the wall to their edge and stared down, but all I could make out were the incredibly bright lights aimed up at me.

"Your whole idea's turned rotten on you, hasn't it?" Thana said behind me.

The telephone rang again, and I went quickly to answer it.

"I thought you were smart," the voice said. "Do the smart thing now."

"Maybe I'm not as smart as you think," I answered. "And I wouldn't try to come up if I were you. Mrs. Norden might get hurt." I knew that Thana was my only card left to play. If the little fool hadn't blown everything... .just when I'd almost brought it off!

"Hello... It was another voice on the phone, a familiar voice. "Norman Norden?"

"It is," the voice said. "Listen to me before you do anything else. Will you agree to that?"

"If you talk fast," I said.

"Fast and to the point," Norden answered. There was a decisiveness in the aged voice that hadn't been there in our earlier conversations. "We both know your situation is almost hopeless; your only chance of escape is to use Thana as a hostage, and that would he a slim chance. A deal is what I offer. I have money, power, influence–you have my wife. If you bring Thana down, unharmed, and release her, I'll see that you get a car and four hours of immunity from the law."

I tried to consider the angles to that sort of offer, but my arm was bleeding again and I felt faint. It was hard for me to concentrate on anything.

"I can offer something else," Norden said, taking my hesitation for consideration. "If you are apprehended later, I'll pull every string to see that you get off lightly."

"Why would you do that?"

"Why shouldn't I? I'm considered by some to be a mercenary man. In my youth I was even more mercenary. I can understand what you did and why you did it, so I bear you no personal animosity. And I've never broken my word on a business deal. My only concern is for my wife, can't you understand that? Please bring her down safely and I'll see that you're given a car, four hours, a chance! Please!"

"Can you really do it?"

"Of course I can. Thana's safety is the prime concern of the police, too. If I effect a deal to get her back unharmed, they'll go along with me."

I was sitting on the floor now, looking at Thana and thinking more clearly. "1 want something else."

"Something else...? All right, yes, you have it. I intended giving it to you for Thana in the first place. It was the hotel manager who recognized Thana and called in the police. The money will be in the car."

"Along with an electronic device so the police can trace me."

Anger and frustration welled up in Norden's voice when he answered. "Isn't there anything I can do to get you to believe me?"

I was surprised myself to find that I did believe him, that I trusted his word. I believed he'd do anything for Thana, and he and I both knew that what he offered was my only real chance.

"How soon can the car be here?" I asked.

"It's already here and waiting for you. The money will take half an hour."

"We have a deal," I said, and hung up. I made it to my feet and said to Thana, "I wish I had your kind of luck."

"What does that mean?" She was sitting very straight, glaring at me contemptuously.

"It means you're part of a trade. Your safety for mine. Your husband's down below worrying about you."

Thana didn't bother to answer, just stared at me for a long moment, then turned her head to watch the slight play of the bright spotlight beams over the wide windows.

I went into the bathroom again, found some gauze and bandaged the cut on my arm. Then I washed my face and hands in cool water and fixed my rumpled and bloodstained clothes so they looked almost passable. Then I waited for everything to develop.

A half hour hadn't passed when the telephone rang again. I got assurances from everyone: Norden, the hotel manager, the police captain in charge of operations below. A gray car with its motor idling would he parked directly outside the lobby entrance.

I told them I was coming down, and went to get Thana.

"Come on," I said, unlocking her handcuffs and holding her by the wrist. "We're going downstairs." As I pulled her to her feet her face was impassive, her body tense.

"Do you really think I believe you're turning me free?" she said. She gazed out the windows again at the brilliant white light sent up from the scene of excitement and turmoil below. As I saw the glazed shine in her dark eyes I knew for the first time that in a way she was enjoying being the center of it all.

Suddenly, with more strength than I thought she had, she jerked her wrist loose and was free of me. She snatched up a long-necked glass vase from a coffee table and backed away.

"Listen," I pleaded, "there's no reason for this now. What I told you is true. You can talk to your husband on the phone if you like." "It's a lie! It's all a lie!"

"Don't be crazy." I moved toward her, not understanding why she wouldn't believe me. "It's over. You're safe. You're going home."

She slashed the air with the long vase and I stepped back. We were near the windows now, and I had to shield my eyes from the light. I could hear Thana's breath hissing through her teeth. Then, when I saw the glinting, half-secret grin on her face, I realized that she did believe me.

I drew the gun from my belt. "No games now," I said, waving the barrel at her. "There isn't any reason to be afraid. All I want to do is take you downstairs. Now walk to the elevator." I motioned with the gun toward the entrance to the private elevator, but Thana moved the other way.

I lunged then and grabbed at her wrist, grasped it for a moment. She lashed down at me with the vase and I raised my other arm in defense. The vase glanced off my shoulder, and at the same time Thana twisted, twirled from my grip. I grabbed at her waist, felt the smooth material of her dress slip painfully from my fingers as she hurled herself out into the blinding light beyond the glass that had shattered behind her.

After the sound of splintering glass came her scream, a long, shrieking scream, a scream of terror to others who might have heard it. From where I stood paralyzed, however, the sound was different: it was a high, triumphant scream, a scream of deliverance.

In the echo of that scream I suddenly understood about Thana, about the reckless way she lived. I understood her fast and dangerous driving, her relentless drinking, her long nighttime walks looking out to sea. Yet here, twenty stories high and the focal point of concern, excitement, a thousand upturned eyes and dozens of brilliant, probing spotlights, I was the instrument she'd chosen.

I meant her no harm at all; I'd have done anything to save her and myself. That's the way it's been all my life. They say you learn from experience, but sometimes the trouble with that is, by the time you've learned, the experience is over and it's too late.

The arrest, the trial, the sentence–I went through the whole formality in a kind of detached haze. The upright citizens of the state would execute me a dozen times if they could. Murder, kidnapping, and the wrath of Norman Norden–I had about as much chance of surviving as Thana Norden did after flying through that plate of glass into the sultry Miami night sky. So the electric chair's waiting for me, and I'm waiting for it. I'll have to agree with the judge that in the penthouse that night a murder was committed, only there's some confusion in my mind as to who was the victim.

A RARE BIRD

"Oh, Glory!" Robert cried half-aloud. "An oriolus galbulus!" He pressed the binoculars deep into his eye sockets and watched wonderingly the small yellow and black bird which was perched on the branch of a fallen tree, pecking at the bark with its long bill.

Still peering through the binoculars, Robert reached clumsily into his breast pocket and pulled out his notebook and pencil. The branches pressing in on him rustled when he did this and the oriolus galbulus looked in his direction, then resumed its pecking. If it knew about Robert it didn't give a hoot.

So rare a bird to find here at this time of year, Robert mused. If only he'd brought his camera. Still, this would cause quite a stir at the weekly Audubon Club meeting.

Keeping a watchful eye on the bird, he began to write its exact description, checking his neat handwriting in quick glances. Robert was a small man, middle-aged, and beginning to spread about the waist. With his pleasant round face and thin beak-like nose he was rather like a bird himself, a comparison he would not at all have minded.

The oriolus galbulus suddenly stopped its pecking and fluttered off into the denser woods. "Oh, drat!" Robert said. He came to Memorial State Park every weekend and was aware of how thick the underbrush was in this area of the vast wood. Letting his binoculars swing free against his chest from their leather straps, he decided to follow the bird.

The fall undergrowth snared Robert's ankles with every step, and though he tried to walk quietly the carpet of dry leaves rustled and crackled beneath his feet. He knew the beautiful oriolus galbulus would flee before him if he made too much noise.

He was walking slowly, his myopic blue eyes scanning the foliage, when he heard the odd call. It was a loud and sudden "Caw!" Like a crow, yet strangely unlike a crow. His curiosity aroused, he stood for a moment, then began to move quietly in the direction of the sound.

He'd moved slowly and cautiously forward for some time when he caught a glimpse of movement through the mottled foliage. Crouching and scooting to the left so he could see better, he raised the binoculars to his eyes.

He heard his own little intake of breath as he watched. In a small clearing was a man and a beautiful blonde girl, both down on their knees, the man's fingers pressing into the girl's slender throat. As Robert watched, the man squeezed harder and shook the girl furiously. Again there was that strange crow-like sound and the struggling girl's arms dropped limply. Robert wanted to cry out, wanted to run and help the girl, but fear immobilized him and made his forehead clammy with sweat, his throat constricted.

The man released the girl and stood. Through the binoculars Robert could see the horrible expression on her discolored face before her body sagged to a heap among the leaves.

The man flexed his fingers as if to limber them, then wiped his hands on his tan sweater and looked about in a wide circle. Robert's heart thumped as the murderer faced him. He dropped the binoculars to his chest to reassure himself that the man was farther away than he'd appeared in the lenses. When he was certain he hadn't been spotted, he raised them once more to his eyes.

Now the man was dragging the blonde's body into the underbrush. Robert saw an expanse of pale thigh as her dress caught on a branch, and he was ashamed to feel quick interest stir within him. He hastily aimed the binoculars at the man.

"A grave," Robert muttered, as he saw the man give the body a final jerk and the blue of the girl's dress disappear. When he saw the man stoop and lift a shovel from the thick brush he knew that he was right. The murderer had come earlier and dug a grave for the poor girl, a grave that now needed only to he filled in and have dry autumn leaves kicked over it to prevent discovery.

Robert knew he must do something! Anything! And then he realized the man's car must be parked on the dirt road that led to the abandoned fire tower.

Still crouching, backing slowly and awkwardly away, Robert kept his eyes fixed on the movement of the shovel in the high brush until the foliage blocked his view. Then he turned and ran for the dirt road.

He spotted the car immediately, about three hundred yards away, a black four-door sedan pulled off the road by a picnic bench. Robert crossed the road so that he was directly behind it and, making sure he was well concealed, focused his binoculars on the license plate. Just as he'd finished writing the number in his notebook, the man appeared out of the woods.

The man looked around him again, but this time Robert screwed up his courage and continued to stare back through the powerful binoculars. He had an uneasy moment as the murderer's glance swept past him, but he didn't move a muscle. He watched as the man tossed the shovel into the car trunk, then got in and drove off, leaving a thick haze of dust hanging over the hot road.

When Robert started to drive home from Memorial Park, he'd fully intended to call the police and report the murderer's license number immediately–but now he wasn't so sure. A fantastic thought had crossed his mind, a thought so unlike any he'd ever had that it held him spellbound. Perhaps this was fate. He surely wasn't born to be a bank teller all his life, a bank teller who hadn't had a promotion in six years. Perhaps this was the one opportunity that strong men grabbed and the weak let slip past. And wasn't he strong? Hadn't he shown courage by not flinching when the murderer had looked directly at him that last time?

By the time he reached home determination was heating in Robert like a pulse. He drove into the garage and shut the overhead door. Then he went to his seldom used tool chest and got out a stout, twelve-pound sledgehammer. Steadying himself inwardly, knowing that with this one act he would commit himself to his plan, he stood alongside the car. Then, very deliberately, he swung the sledge at a level with the car's bumper and made a long creased dent along the bottom of the door and onto the rear fender panel. Pleased with himself, he went inside to wait for evening.

At exactly ten o'clock Robert phoned the police and told them that while he was driving earlier that evening his car had been struck by a hit and run driver.

The police sent a one-man patrol car out and Robert told the officer how he'd been driving on Willow Lane an hour before and a red convertible had sideswiped him with its bumper, then sped off. However, Robert had alertly gotten the license number, which he gave to the officer.

Only an hour after the policeman had left, a sergeant phoned and told Robert that the license number he'd given the officer belonged to a black four-door sedan.

"Are you sure?" Robert asked, careful to put puzzlement into his voice.

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said. 'There's no mistake about it. The plates were issued just a few days ago, transferred from Ohio plates."

So, the murderer had just moved here from Ohio but, drat it, why didn't the police mention the man's name? Calmly Robert said, "I was so positive about the license number. Perhaps the car has been painted, with a white top, and I mistook it for a convertible with the top up."

"Nope," the sergeant said. "I saw the car and talked to the owner. He and his wife were at the movies when you were hit. Showed me the ticket stubs and told me what the show was all about."

Robert waited until he was sure the sergeant wasn't going to suggest it, then he said, "Perhaps if I were to look at the car..."

There was a long pause on the other end, then a long sigh. "It's way over on Chambers Road," the sergeant said. It was obvious he didn't want to send someone out to drive Robert over there.

Robert wanted to ask for the address but was afraid to push things any further. "Well, perhaps I misread the number."

"Yeah," the sergeant said, brightening, "that happens a lot of times."

"And it was dark..."

"I'll tell you," the sergeant said, "if I was you I'd just call my insurance company and put it in their hands."

"I guess I'll do that," Robert said. "And thank you." He hung up and smiled. His heart was beating very fast.

Robert looked up Chambers Road on a street map and found that it was only six blocks long, one of those suburban developments of ritzy small apartments. The rent there must be at least two hundred a month, Robert calculated as he drove slowly down the street. Each building had a neat little concrete parking space for its occupants, but the murderer's black car was nowhere to be seen. Bitterly disappointed, but not discouraged, Robert drove home.

The next day he spotted the car parked in front of a corner building. He was sitting wondering just what to do about it when he saw the murderer emerge from the building. Robert recognized him immediately, the distinguished graying hair, the lean dark face with the piercing eyes. Beside him walked a woman on very high heels. The murderer politely held the car door open for her, then walked around and got in the driver's side and backed the car into the street.

As soon as the black sedan had disappeared Robert got out of his car and crossed the street to the swank apartment building. He was checking the names on the mailboxes when the door on the landing just above him opened and an old woman with dyed red hair looked down at him.

"Can I help you?" she asked suspiciously.

Panicky, Robert picked one of several names on the mailboxes. "I'm, uh, looking for Mr. Denton. I think he's an old school friend of mine."

"Mr. Denton's at work now, but I'm the building manager. Perhaps I can help you."

Robert, after a pause, said, "The Denton I'm looking for is about six feet, graying hair, dark."

The woman looked puzzled, then her eyes lit up and she said, "Oh, you must mean Mr. Emerick. He and his wife moved in two days ago–but he was transferred here from Cincinnati."

"Yes, Emerick," Robert said. "Didn't I say Emerick?"

"No," the woman said, suspicion again in her voice. "You said Denton."

She stood staring at him, and he could think of nothing to say. Finally he muttered, "I meant Emerick."

"Well, why don't we just go up and talk to him?" the woman said, ringing the bell lettered Emerick.

"Yes, why don't we?" Robert said cheerfully that they were not at home. He rang the bell again himself.

When there was no answer he shrugged and smiled. He could see the woman's suspicions had disappeared. "When he comes home, don't tell him I was here," he said. "I want to surprise the old son of a gun."

Because he'd just arrived in the city Emerick's telephone number was, of course, not in the directory, so Robert had dialed information. The operator had politely told him that the Emericks had an unlisted number which she could not disclose. Robert had slammed the receiver down and cursed violently. Somehow he had to make contact with Emerick.

Robert started parking near the apartment at night, hoping to catch Emerick alone. Slumped behind his steering wheel, he wished he could simply walk up and ring Emerick's doorbell and confront him in the living room, but Mrs. Emerick would be there, and the situation would not only prove fruitless but quite embarrassing.

Suddenly Robert sat bolt upright. They were going somewhere at last! Mrs. Emerick was dressed up, balancing precariously on slender heels even higher than the ones she'd worn before, and Emerick was wearing a dark suit.

Robert watched as they got into the black sedan, Emerick attentively opening the car door for his wife as before. When they drove away Robert followed, tremendously excited.

Emerick drove to the parking lot of a downtown theater. Robert parked almost next to him, and even stood in line behind the Emericks at the theater ticket window.

The previews were just ending as Robert followed the Emericks down the dimly lighted center aisle and took a seat four rows behind them. He kept a close eye on the silhouette of Emerick's head and Mrs. Emerick's little flat hat as the feature started with a blast of music.

Sitting in the darkened theater, Robert thought of how it must have been with Emerick: the familiar story, a young and beautiful mistress he'd taken up with on his previous trips to the city, the girl's possessiveness, her jealousy, and finally her threat to tell Emerick's wife when she arrived. Robert was surprised to find himself envying Emerick–up to a point.

Robert had to sit through half the feature, a senseless mishmash of a man and his wife exchanging corrosive remarks in a language that was truly shocking, before Emerick finally rose and walked up the aisle toward the lobby. After counting slowly to ten and wiping his sweating palms on his trousers, Robert followed.

When he reached the lobby, Emerick was standing by himself smoking a cigarette, leaning on the soda machine and looking with some interest at the young girl making popcorn behind the counter. Robert ignored his pounding heart and approached Emerick as casually and quietly as possible.

"I haven't seen you since Memorial Park," he said, because it was the opening line he'd rehearsed over and over.

Emerick turned and looked blankly at him. "Memorial Park?" The man's composure threw Robert for a moment. "Yes, you know!" he almost pleaded. "With the blonde lady."

"Blonde lady?" Emerick asked innocently, but there was electricity in his voice now and his dark complexion paled.

"The blonde lady," Robert said, for the first time looking Emerick in the eye. "It would be a pity if your wife found out."

Ernerick's cigarette dropped to the lobby carpet and he trembled so that he had to support himself for a second on the soda machine.

Robert knew he had the upper hand now and he intended to play it. "Someone always sees," he sneered.

Emerick collected himself admirably. He ground out the dropped cigarette with the heel of his shoe and lit another. Peering at Robert over the flame he asked, "How much?"

How much? Robert flushed and cursed himself inwardly. All his carefully laid plans and he hadn't even considered the amount he would ask. "Five thousand," he said, his mind racing furiously.

Emerick didn't change expression. So five thousand was nothing to him, Robert thought. Of course not, living where he did, driving that big car...

"When and where?" Emerick asked.

"Saturday afternoon. At one o'clock, in the parking lot of the Spoon and Kettle Restaurant on Route 21. And make it ten thousand."

Emerick's mouth dropped open at that, but his surprised expression turned with great effort into a broad smile as he looked over Robert's shoulder. Robert turned to see Mrs. Emerick crossing the lobby toward them. As he looked at the woman close up for the first time, Robert noticed through his sudden embarrassment that she was attractive in a blue-eyed, creamy way. There was a look of friendly curiosity on her face as she wobbled toward them on her high heels.

Robert's palms began to sweat again as he tried to think of a way to take his leave gracefully.

"Darling," Emerick said in a brave, high voice, as if about to introduce them. But Robert had spun on his heel and was walking hurriedly toward the exit.

The Spoon and Kettle Restaurant was a popular truck stop that shared a large parking lot with a service station. The restaurant was doing its usual brisk Saturday afternoon business, which was exactly why Robert had chosen it for his and Emerick's rendezvous. As he stood with one foot braced against the bumper of his car he was in plain view of at least half a dozen diners on the other side of a large plate glass window about a hundred feet away. Emerick wouldn't dare try anything violent with so many witnesses. The thing that was worrying Robert now, however, was whether Emerick would show up.

It was 1:15 when the shiny black sedan pulled off the highway into the parking lot. Emerick parked on the other side of the lot, then got out and stood squinting against the sun, holding a large dark briefcase. He spotted Robert and motioned him to come over.

Emerick's car was in view of the diners inside the restaurant, so Robert hesitated only a second. Elated and relieved that the risky business of blackmail was about to end profitably, he walked over to meet Emerick.

"The money's in there?" Robert asked, nodding toward the briefcase and trying to sound brisk and businesslike.

"No," Emerick said softly, "there are two things in here, but neither of them is money." He didn't seem at all frightened or resigned as he had in the theater. There was something in Emerick's steady dark eyes that preposterously suggested he was in charge.

"I don't understand," Robert said, noticing that Emerick had inserted his hand into the briefcase.

"There are two small pillows in here," Emerick said. "And between those two pillows is a gun–pointed straight at you. Now get in the car."

Robert felt himself grow faint. "You wouldn't do anything... in front of all these people. It's broad daylight...

"Oh, but I would," Emerick said, his dark face breaking into a confident smile. "The pillows will muffle the shot so that it will barely he heard inside the restaurant, and when you drop I'll simply pick you up and put you in the car. It will appear that you fell or took sick–if anyone is watching."

Robert knew that he had his choice: he could either turn and walk away, chancing that Emerick wouldn't dare fire, or he could get in the car and take his chances. It would take nerve to do either, but more nerve to walk away.

As he opened the car door, Robert was shocked to see Mrs. Emerick sitting behind the wheel. His heart hammering, he got in, followed by Emerick. The gun was out of the briefcase now, pressing painfully into Robert's ribs.

"To Memorial Park, darling," Emerick said.

Fright and bewilderment hit Robert with a wave of nausea "I–I don't understand," he mumbled as the big car pulled out onto the highway. "The blonde lady...the lady in the woods..."

Emerick laughed long and heartily, pushing the gun muzzle harder against Robert's ribs, and out of the corner of his eye Robert could see the woman's ruby lips twist up in a smile.

"Oh, that was no lady," Emerick said, the laughter still ringing in his voice, "that was my wife."

A VERDICT OF DEATH

Frank Seabold sat quietly alongside his lawyer, his hands resting steadily and relaxed atop the gleaming mahogany table.

His sensitive and rather elongated features were unreadable as he watched the jury, eight men and four women, file somberly from the courtroom to deliberate his case. Seabold turned his heavy lidded gray eyes toward the judge, but the judge had already left the bench and disappeared into his chambers to wait.

"This is the hardest part," Allan Gory, his lawyer, said to Seabold, "the waiting. If I know anything about juries we have a good chance, though I wouldn't want you to get your hopes too high, Mr. Seabold. You never can tell about juries for sure."

"I'm not worried," Seabold said calmly, and that was true. From the corner of his eye he saw Cory glance strangely at him, and he had to restrain a smile.

No doubt it did strike the little lawyer odd, that here sat a man waiting while twelve people decided whether he lived or died in the electric chair, and that the man seemed genuinely unworried.

The two uniformed bailiffs had approached Seabold, ready to lead him to the small cell in the courthouse basement where he would await the life or death verdict. They were both beefy, unsmiling men.

Seabold stood to accompany them.

"Don't you worry either," he said to his lawyer, leaning down and smiling for the first time since the trial began. "I'm not going to die in the electric chair."

He was aware of Gory watching him as he was led from the now empty courtroom.

In his cell Seabold removed his shoes and lay back on his cot. The courthouse basement was quiet in a hollow, faintly echoing kind of way. The only view from between his bars was the opposite green-tiled wall of the corridor.

Seabold folded his hands on his chest and stared upward at the ceiling with its undersized heating and ventilation ducts. He thought of Gracie and of the life they would lead with Nina's money.

Nina was Seabold's wife of ten years, and though they had never found her body, they were trying Seabold for her murder. Popular fallacy that they couldn't try a murderer without the body of his victim, Seabold thought. They could, all right, with enough evidence.

He had been smart enough not to pin his hopes on that.

Closing his eyes Seabold tried to create a mental picture of Gracie, of her soft blonde hair and eyes bluer than any blue he'd ever seen, eyes with a certain pinpoint of light deep within them. Lieutenant Craig didn't even know Gracie existed, and that was how Seabold wanted it.

He thought back to when he'd met Police Lieutenant Craig. Seabold had instinctively disliked the man from the first time he had looked at him across the threshold.

It was an unseasonably wintery day, and the lieutenant was wearing a heavy topcoat with the collar turned up against the few icy flecks of snow that danced in the air.

His hand had been moving to ring the doorbell again when Seabold opened the door, and he returned the hand to his coat pocket and narrowed his eyes above his long hawkish nose.

"Mr. Seabold?" Craig said.

Seabold nodded, and for the first time noticed the other man behind the lieutenant.

"I'm Lieutenant John Craig, Police Department." He quickly flashed his credentials. "Is Mrs. Seabold in?"

"No, she isn't," Seabold said. "She's away visiting relatives right now." He added in a worried voice, "Nothing's...happened, has it?" "Not to our knowledge," Craig said. "You mind if we step in?' Seabold moved the door a few inches nearer to the closed position and shook his head. "I'm busy right now, if you don't mind." Craig's eyes strained to see inside. "Could you answer a few questions?"

"Really," Seabold said, "I don't have time."

"You're being very uncooperative, Mr. Seabold. How long has your wife been gone?"

"Since last Saturday," Seabold said quickly. "Last Saturday. Now really...he began to close the door.

"And is she here in town?" Lieutenant Craig asked sharply.

The door stopped. "No, she's with her cousin in Seattle."

"What's her cousin's name?"

"Rogers, I think," Seabold said, "Donna Rogers."

"You think?"

"If you don't mind, Lieutenant...The door closed to within an inch of the frame.

"We'll be back, Mr. Seabold," came the voice from outside with the cold draft. "We'll he back with a warrant."

"You don't need a warrant," Seabold said. "I'll be glad to talk to you later, when I have time." Gently he shut the door all the way and stood with his ear pressed hard against it.

But Lieutenant Craig and the policeman with him didn't exchange a word. After a minute or so Seabold could hear their footsteps on the cement walk that led to the street.

Through a crack in the drawn curtains he watched the gray unmarked police car pull away and turn the corner in the next block. Could they have known he was listening?

It didn't take Lieutenant Craig long. He was back late that afternoon with a search warrant and the same policeman who'd accompanied him earlier, a lethargic looking man he introduced as Sergeant Tompkins.

This time Seabold opened the door wide and invited them to step inside. He led them to the living room and sat in a chair across from the two of them sitting on the sofa.

Lieutenant Craig removed his hat to reveal thinning black hair. "Has Mrs. Seabold returned?" he asked.

Seabold shook his head. "She intends to be gone for some time, I think."

Lieutenant Craig stared at Seabold, while the sergeant was looking slowly about the room as if someone had said something and he was trying to locate the owner of the voice.

"I'll be honest with you," the lieutenant said finally. "We got an anonymous phone call this morning telling us foul play had been done to your wife. We get calls like that pretty often. Sometimes they mean something, usually they don't. But combined with your actions this afternoon. . .you can see where we'd be suspicious, I'm sure."

Seabold nodded thoughtfully. "But Nina's in Seattle, with her cousin."

"Would it be possible for you to call her long distance?"

"It would," Seabold said, "only I can't remember the name and address of her cousin."

Lieutenant Craig sighed and crossed his legs. A very serious look suddenly appeared on the sergeant's face, as if he suddenly remembered he'd left the gas on at home.

Seabold bowed his head and stared for a long time at his angular clenched fists. "All right, Lieutenant," he said slowly, "I'll tell you what really happened, even if it's so simple it sounds suspicious. Nina and I had a big fight Saturday–probably one of the neighbors heard it and called you. After the argument we went to bed. I was awakened about eight the next morning by the front door closing and then a car door slamming twice. The bed beside me was empty. Nina was gone and so were two of her suitcases. Her car was still in the garage so I assume she left in a taxi. I haven't heard from her since and I don't know where she is."

Craig stared at Seabold curiously. The lieutenant's eyes were set very close together, peering intently past the protruding bridge of his long nose. "What was the argument about?"

"That's the funny part about it," Seabold said earnestly. "I can't even remember."

But that didn't strike Lieutenant Craig funny at all. He and the sergeant exchanged glances.

"Oh, now I recall," Seabold said suddenly. "It was about the house. I wanted to move into a larger house and Nina didn't, then one insult led to another and pretty soon it got loud and ugly."

"Then she packed and left," Craig said flatly, as if finishing the story for Seabold. "We did a little checking, Mr. Seabold, and we found that your wife was worth quite a bit of money, owned a large block of stock in a shoe company. What did you do before your marriage?"

"I worked for the shoe company," Seabold said. "I designed arch supports for women's feet, but I was on my way up."

"Yes," Lieutenant Craig said thoughtfully, "no doubt you had your sights set much higher than that." He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward as if getting ready to stand. "I think we'll look around a little, Mr. Seabold."

Seabold smiled forcedly. "You have your warrant." He watched Lieutenant Craig go upstairs, heard the sergeant walk into the kitchen and tread down the cellar steps. Seabold stood and moved to the front window. He saw the police car with the uniformed officer in it parked near the house, facing the house.

Ten minutes passed before the sergeant's urgent voice carried upstairs and through the house via the ductwork. "Lieutenant!"

Craig barely glanced at Seabold as he hurried down the carpeted stairs from above, jogged into the kitchen and down the steps to the basement.

Then Seabold heard him come back up the steps, taking them slowly. When he appeared in the living room his face was grave.

"There seems to be a fresh patch of cement down there, Mr. Seabold."

"Oh that," Seabold said. "The basement floor leaked there so I tore it out a week or so ago and repaired it."

"I see," Craig said, studying Seabold carefully.

The sergeant had entered the living room now and was standing with his arms crossed.

"Excuse me," Lieutenant Craig said, and he walked to the door and went outside. He returned in a few minutes with two uniformed officers.

"We think you should go down to headquarters, Mr. Seabold," Craig said in a friendly voice, "just for questioning. These officers will inform you of your rights."

One of the officers held the front door open for Seabold. "Headquarters?" Seabold said in a shocked tone. "Questions? Surely you don't think...That's preposterous!"

"Preposterous things happen sometimes," Lieutenant Craig observed as Seabold went to the closet and got his coat.

The two officers drove Seabold to Police Headquarters in the patrol car, and he was ushered into a quiet gray room furnished only with two wooden chairs and a battered desk.

He waited alone there for the next two hours, standing and staring through the dirty, iron grilled window at the Twelfth Street traffic passing noiselessly eight stories below.

Then Lieutenant Craig entered the room wearing a perplexed look of aggravation. He motioned for Seabold to sit in one of the wooden chairs, then he sat behind the desk and began to make low clucking sounds beneath his breath as he pondered.

"We're a little puzzled about Mrs. Seabold," he said finally.

"So am I," Seabold said.

Lieutenant Craig sighed. "We tore up that patch of fresh cement in your basement," he said.

"And you found?"

"Nothing." Craig screwed up his eyes to the slanting evening light and stared absently out the window as he continued. "Then we searched the house and the grounds around the house. We found a spot in your rose garden where the earth had been recently overturned."

"Yes," Seabold said, "that's where I was trying out a new fall fertilizer. I assume you dug there also."

Lieutenant Craig nodded. "And we found nothing. However there are some curious facts you might enlighten us on."

"Count on me to cooperate," Seabold said.

Craig grunted. "First of all, when your wife packed, what clothes did she take? It seemed to us she left a pretty complete wardrobe behind. Also her toothbrush, a lot of makeup, hairbrushes, mirrors, things of that nature that a woman would usually pack first."

"I really couldn't say what she packed, Lieutenant. She was mad. Perhaps she just overlooked those items."

"And you said she left in a taxi," Lieutenant Craig said evenly, "but no taxi company has a record of a call to your address on that date."

"I assumed she left in a taxi, Lieutenant. All I really know is that a car door slammed outside when she left. I suppose on reflection that it could have been a friend who picked her up."

Lieutenant Craig loosened the knot on his striped tie and licked his thin lips. "I don't enjoy playing games, Mr. Seabold."

"Nor do I," Seabold said crassly. "I was about to engage your department to search for my missing wife, but you seem to have made a botch of that job to this point."

The lieutenant rose and stood behind the desk. Sweat was beaded on his tan forehead. Seabold's face was dry as he regarded the lieutenant with calm gray eyes.

Lieutenant Craig opened his mouth as if to say something, then he turned and walked to the door.

"Lieutenant?" Frank Seabold stopped him. "Have you dragged the river?"

Lieutenant Craig stood with the door open, glaring darkly at Seabold. "As a matter of fact," he said tightly, "we're doing that right now." He slammed the door behind him harder than was necessary.

Seabold sat for a while in the chair, then his back began to ache and he got up and started to pace.

Less than fifteen minutes had passed, though it seemed longer, when Lieutenant Craig reentered the room. His tie was neatly knotted again and his hair was combed. He was almost, but not quite, smiling.

"Sergeant Tompkins telephoned me," the lieutenant said softly. "He found a ring engraved with your wife's initials in your furnace. And traces of dried blood with your wife's type in cracks on the basement floor." He leaned both hands on the desktop. "Come along with me now. I'm officially booking you for the murder of your wife, Nina Seabold."

A flicker of something crossed Seabold's gray eyes and a muscle along the line of his jaw twitched. "That blood must be from when I cut myself over a month ago," he said. "And if you'll check further with our family physician, you'll find my wife and I have the same blood type. You're making a mistake, Lieutenant–why, how can you have a case when you don't even have a body?"

Now Lieutenant Craig did smile, a rigid, humorless smile. "You might he surprised to know, Mr. Seabold, that we don't need a body."

Seabold stood motionless, framed in the diffused light from the filthy, barred window. "I think," he said calmly, "that I will exercise my right to call a lawyer."

"That would be my advice," Lieutenant Craig said.

Seabold's trial didn't come up for a month. His lawyer, Allan Cory, arranged for him to be released on bail and Seabold spent the time mostly at home, getting his affairs in order. He knew the police were watching him, and the only time he made any kind of contact with Gracie was when he called her on a pay phone. The police had no way of knowing who or where he was calling, and he had to talk to her, had to let her know what had happened.

Then, on the determined date, Seabold went with his lawyer and turned himself over to the authorities to await the beginning of his trial the following morning.

The arguments of both the prosecution and the defense could be easily summed up.

The prosecution maintained that Seabold had murdered his wealthy and heavily insured wife after a violent argument, apparently dismembered her and disposed of burnable parts of her anatomy in the furnace. The rest of Nina Seabold he had disposed of some other way, or perhaps buried someplace not yet discovered. Here was her platinum ring, charred almost beyond recognition but with her engraved initials plain to see. And if Frank Seabold had not murdered his wife, let him provide the answers to some serious questions. Why the fresh cement in his basement? Had it been to cover a grave, a method of disposing of his wife's body that he'd later decided against? Might the same thing be said about the digging in his garden?

And the ring, how did it get in the furnace? And the traces of dried blood on the basement floor? And if Mrs. Seabold had left of her own accord, how did she leave? Why didn't she take all her clothes? And, above all, where was she? If she were alive surely the publicity of the trial would have brought her forth. The prosecution ably established motive, opportunity, and method.

The defense's summation was equally convincing. The cement had been for a cracked and seeping basement floor. The digging in the garden had been for fertilizer. And the ring? It had been a gift from Seabold to his wife; perhaps in her anger at some time or another she had furiously hurled it into the furnace. Who really knew about something like that? As for the traces of dried blood, they were from the defendant when he had cut his hand months ago. It was his misfortune to have the same common blood type as his wife. And who was this mysterious neighbor the police say called and told them of foul play?

The defense couldn't say how Mrs. Seabold had left the house–perhaps with a friend. They couldn't say why she didn't take all her clothes–but did a spurned woman always act rationally? Regarding her present whereabouts and her failure to appear in the light of the trial's publicity, could it he she was hiding, making her husband suffer? At any rate, it was the job of the prosecution to answer those questions. Surely in the minds of the jury there had to be some doubt.

And when the jury had filed out to deliberate Seabold had seen that doubt and perplexity on their faces. He estimated he had a fifty-fifty chance, which was about what he'd expected.

Seabold stopped gazing at the ceiling and rolled onto his side to stare through the bars at the gleaming green-tiled wall opposite his cell. Footsteps were echoing through the courthouse basement, two men walking down the long corridor toward the cell. Seabold saw their hazy, distorted reflections in the tile, then the two bailiffs appeared and stopped in front of the cell door.

"They're ready for you upstairs," one of the bailiffs said, and he inserted a large key into the steel lock.

The judge, stenographer, a few spectators and some reporters were the only people in the courtroom besides Cory when the bailiffs led Seabold down the center aisle to the wide table. As he sat beside Gory the lawyer smiled at him.

"We'll know soon," he said encouragingly.

Seabold smiled back. "Don't worry," he whispered, "this is one case you won't lose."

A door behind them opened and everyone's attention turned to the back of the courtroom as the members of the jury filed back to their seats.

The judge stopped reading whatever he'd been reading and peered down at them, waiting until everyone was seated. Then he brought the court to order and everyone was quiet.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

The jury foreman stood nervously and swallowed. He was a middle-aged accountant for an automobile manufacturer. "We have, Your Honor," he said in a steady voice that belied his appearance.

"And what is your verdict?"

Seabold held his breath, aware that people were watching him, waiting."

"We the jury find the defendant, Frank Seabold, not guilty."

Seabold let out a long sigh, ignoring the buzz of voices, the pop of flashbulbs.

He was free.

Seabold went directly home and showered and shaved before going out again. Then he ordered a steak dinner in one of his favorite restaurants and went to call Gracie on the pay phone while the steak was being broiled.

"It's over," he said when she answered the phone. "I was acquitted."

"I know," she said. "I heard it on the radio. It's wonderful!" "Two more days," Seabold said, "to be on the safe side."

"If that's what you want, darling."

"You're what I want," Seabold said, and hung up.

Two days later, after driving around for a while to make sure he wasn't being followed, Seabold headed the car for Gracie's cabin high in the wooded hills. There, after waking from the effects of the powerful sedative Seabold had secretly given her before bedtime, Nina Seabold had been held captive for the past month and a half in a small, escape proof room. The only person she'd seen during that time had been Gracie, and Nina had never seen Gracie before.

No, if Seabold had been found guilty and sentenced to death or life imprisonment Gracie simply would have released Nina and up she would turn, the victim of mysterious abductors. Seabold would have been released with apologies.

But it was better this way. This was how Seabold had planned it, from Gracie's anonymous phone call to the police to his acquittal. He had hedged his bet, and the jury had decided Nina's fate.

Now that he had been tried and acquitted for his wife's death, it was perfectly safe to kill her. He couldn't be tried twice for the same crime, so in a way the state had given him license to murder. Not that they'd ever find Nina, buried deep, deep in the woods.

Nina was surprised and overjoyed when Seabold entered the room where she was held captive. She was even more surprised, though not nearly so overjoyed, when he struck her with the hammer.

ALL OF A SUDDEN

Detective Sergeant Sam Day stood near the swinging partition that gave access to the area behind the long, scarred wooden counter. The faint odor of sweat and varnish rose from the counter, a familiar odor to Day. He shifted his weight to his other leg and felt a trickle of perspiration down his back. It was hot outside, almost ninety, and the old Eighth Precinct air conditioner just wasn't doing it. Off to one side the switchboard operator sat, marking his chart to keep track of the Eighth Precinct cars, his ears alert to calls for those cars and those cars only, picking them out almost automatically from the constant stream of static-filled chatter that blared from the metal speaker near him.

Day saw that the door to the lieutenant's office was open about quarter way, and he heard voices from inside. Laughter, loud talking, silence, then "Oh, sure, sure, Harry," somebody said with emphasis, and there was another laugh.

Sighing with impatience, Day leaned against the counter. The desk sergeant, old Hap Kramer, continued bringing his records up to date, hunched over the long counter as if he were oblivious to anyone else's presence. Near the other end of the room several younger, uniformed officers lounged, talking while one of them finished a report to give the clerk to type. Behind them was the door to the holdover, about half full now, because the night had barely begun.

The Eighth Precinct house was a crummy place, Day reflected. It was really an old converted four-family flat, in a crummy neighborhood among crummy people. Some of the people he had to work with were crummy too.

Day caught himself and made his mind take some other tack. It was no good thinking that way. He'd chosen this for his career, and he was a thirty-four-year-old detective now, doing well enough...under the circumstances. Still, it got to a man every so often: the squalor of the job, the unappreciative, misunderstanding, even despising public. There was the hopelessness of trying to get convictions, of long hours of hard work going for nothing–hours he knew he should be spending at home with Audrey and his boy Greg. Sam Day had risen fast enough in the department, but only to a point, it seemed. Suddenly, men with less ability, even less time on the force, began to pass him, were given more responsibility, chances to prove themselves. He adjusted the chafing shoulder strap of his holster and silently cursed the heat, and despite himself he looked around him again and wondered if it were worthwhile.

The lieutenant's door opened all the way as there was another loud laugh, and a short man with a yellow face and thin wisps of black hair walked out, smiling to himself: Jack Vectin, Twelfth Precinct alderman. Idly, Day wondered what he'd been talking about with the lieutenant. Not that it mattered.

"Boston Eight," Day heard the speaker near the switchboard operator blare, "go 10538 Chambers Street and investigate a reported cutting."

Nothing for me, Day thought to himself as he half listened to the patrol car's laconic reply. For the present he'd been assigned to the burglary detail.

Then Lieutenant Harold Weston appeared in the doorway to his office. A man of medium height with a deceptive smoothness to his round face, a deceptive blandness to his eyes, he was acting captain in charge of the Eighth Precinct. He placed his cigar in his mouth and waved for Day to enter.

"How you been making it?' he asked Day, as he settled himself behind his desk and motioned for Day to sit in a nearby small wooden chair.

"Good enough, I suppose, Lieutenant." Day wondered why he'd been summoned, wished the man would get to the point.

"Don't get the idea I asked you in here to chew you out," Lieutenant Weston said. "Nothing like that. More just a word of caution."

"Caution?" Day began to feel uneasy. He knew he was talking to a much smarter man than appeared on the surface to anyone.

The lieutenant looked thoughtful, chewed on his cigar. "Maybe more like advice. I learned a few hours ago that Fred Brent left town and nobody knows where he went."

Day was silent; he knew what that meant. Brent had committed a large-scale burglary at Hollman's Department Store. The police were sure he did it, and in time they would have gathered enough evidence to bring him in. Gathering that evidence was Day's job, and the fact that Brent had cut and run meant that Day had not been quite careful enough and had somehow alerted him.

"A month down the drain," Day said to the lieutenant, "unless he comes back."

"He won't be back," Lieutenant Weston said, "not Brent. Somebody tipped him you were investigating him. You asked somebody the wrong questions."

Day didn't answer. He didn't feel like saying he was sorry. He felt like telling this good cop, Lieutenant Weston, just what he could do with the Brent case.

"You've been moving in on them too soon and too fast," the lieutenant said. "Hard as it is to get convictions these days, we've got to be sure."

"You and I both know he's guilty," Day said, and he knew as soon as he'd spoken that it was an inexcusably dumb thing to say. Lieutenant Weston stared at him.

"Sure, we know it, Day. But the judge doesn't, and the jury doesn't, and it doesn't matter a damn to them what we think we know. Our job isn't to decide guilt or innocence. You know that. We gather evidence we can hand to the prosecutor. We don't let personal feelings enter into what we do."

"I don't need a police academy refresher course, sir."

Lieutenant Weston laid his cigar in a brass ash tray and looked hard at Day, anger darkening his round face. "1 told you, Day, this is no chewing-out. No need to get so damn upset. Just don't do it again."

Day nodded.

The lieutenant picked up his cigar, then leaned hack and seemed to study Day. "I know it's hard," he said. "It's always been hard."

"I suppose it has, sir." Day really didn't want to argue with Lieutenant Weston. Like most of the other officers, he had respect for the man's professionalism and candor. A direct, almost crude man despite his shrewdness, Lieutenant Weston had a way of always letting you know where you stood with him.

"You've blown a few lately, Day," the lieutenant said. "You're expected to be more careful."

AgainDay nodded.

"I want you to take the office upstairs for the next two weeks. Handle the incoming calls while Rogers is on court duty."

"All right, sir." Day tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. The desk job he was being told to man was an empty, monotonous sort of job, with little real responsibility. It was always looked at as something of a put-down when a detective was assigned to it when Rogers was away.

The lieutenant was bent over his desk now, shuffling through some papers and ignoring Day. Day got up to leave.

"Remember," the lieutenant said as Day reached the door, "more careful, huh?"

Day walked from the precinct house, drove the unmarked car to the police garage and left it. Then he drove his own car home to his apartment on Grant Road.

He parked behind the apartment building and got out of the car to go upstairs. A tall, dark-haired man with blue eyes and a boyish face, he looked like anything but a detective, and right now he was wondering if he were a detective. More and more lately, the dream of police work was conflicting sharply with the reality.

At least he'd work fairly regular hours on Rogers' job, he figured, as he opened his front door. Audrey would be glad to hear that.

Day's four-year-old son Greg ran to him when he came in. Grinning, Day turned the small boy away and slapped his rear with mock viciousness. After wrestling for a few minutes, Greg playfully ran off to his room.

Audrey was in the kitchen, setting the timer on the oven. "I heard you come in," she said.

Day smiled. "I guess you couldn't help but hear it."

He looked at her, slim and beautiful in slacks and a sleeveless white blouse; but the lines about her eyes and about the corners of her mouth were new and didn't look as if they belonged. Day blamed himself for those lines.

"I'll have a desk job for a few weeks," he said, hoping to make her smile. "Daytime hours for sure. I was lucky to get it."

She didn't smile, only nodded and gave whatever she'd placed in the oven a final check.

"I thought maybe we'd eat out tonight," Day said.

"Too late for that. You should have called."

"Too busy," Day lied.

"Anyway," Audrey said, "I've got a roast in. That's your favorite." "Have a decent day today?"

"Good enough," she said.

"Greg behave?"

"Good enough."

Day turned away in discomfort. This was the kind of conversation they were having lately: trivial, circling conversations.

After supper that evening Day played with Greg, then watched TV for a while–news, followed by a program about some kids who solved crimes–but he couldn't keep his eyes away from Audrey, from the deepening lines in the smooth flesh of her face. She was only thirty-one. He wondered what she'd look like at thirty-five. At forty.

Things seemed to go better at home during the first week of the desk job, but work was a dull stretch of time that caused a backache. Nothing seemed to break the monotony, and Day wondered how it would be to have a steady desk job. Probably Lieutenant Weston wanted him to wonder that.

Then one clear morning, as he was driving away from the apartment on his way to work, something registered in Day's mind.

The small, tan foreign car behind him had been behind him yesterday morning, and there were other times he'd seen it in his rearview mirror during the past week or so. His memory was jarred by the slightly bent aerial on the car's fender, the dented grill.

Without moving his head, Day kept an eye on the car in his mirror as he drove. The driver of the car was alone, but he never drew near enough for Day to make out his features. When Day was a block from the entrance to the precinct parking lot, he saw the little tan sedan turn a corner behind him, so that it was impossible for him to glimpse the license plate.

During the rest of the week Day noticed the tan car only once more, one day as he was driving to a restaurant for lunch. He didn't waste time thinking too much about the tan car because he really didn't have enough information to think about, but in the back of Day's mind was the knowledge that the car turning up so often behind him was more than a coincidence of someone happening to drive the same routes as he did, and at about the same times.

That Saturday afternoon he was at the Quick Foods supermarket down the street from his apartment, looking for barbecue sauce, when he happened to glance through the wide windows past the checkout counters. The tan car was parked next to a line of empty grocery carts.

The driver was almost certainly in the store, but Day wasn't going to bother searching for him. He knew he wouldn't have to.

"Detective Sergeant Sam Day?"

The voice behind him was low and even, with a sarcasm in it that never quite surfaced.

Day turned around. The man who'd spoken was of average height and build, wearing expensive slacks and a sport shirt. He had a face to match his voice, regular features, rather long nose, and a mouth that was almost curved in a sarcastic smile. Sam knew the face but couldn't match it with a name or place.

The man took care of that for him. "Bill Grindle's my name," he said. "And you've probably seen me around."

Now Day remembered where he'd seen the face. "The only place I can remember seeing you is in your mug shots," he said. "Burglary, isn't it?"

Grindle nodded. "Three arrests, one conviction."

"I have noticed your car, though," Day said. "You've been following me for about a week. I would now like to know why."

Now Grindle did smile, but his eyes never blinked. "That's why I came here, to let you know. It so happens I've got something to tell you."

That surprised Day. Grindle had never been known to be a police informer.

"I've been watching you, Sergeant Day. You haven't been doing too well at your job, work's getting you down, like it gets a lot of them. A smart man eventually realizes what's going on."

"Going on?"

"In the department, I mean. The way most of the higher-ups got to where they are."

Day felt the anger come alive in his stomach and stepped forward. "Are you making me a proposition, Grindle?"

Grindle showed not the slightest sign of fear. "Now, Sergeant, I know you're a dedicated man, an idealist, but it's time to combine idealism with practicality. I wouldn't suggest anything to you that your superiors on the force hadn't done to get where they are. They realized earlier than you what they needed to do to be more efficient police officers. They knew they had to have their contacts on the other side to find out things for them."

Day still hadn't made out Grindle's game. It sounded now as if the man might want to sell some information, but that didn't quite add up.

A woman pushing a loaded cart came down the aisle, stopping to pick out a jar of pickles, and the two men waited until she'd gone.

"How would you like to solve a burglary next week, Sergeant?" Grindle asked in his soft voice.

"You know the answer to that," Day said irritably. "Keep talking."

"There's an estate out in the south end that's going to be burglarized sometime next week by two men, both old pros. Arresting either one of them would mean solving a lot of burglaries that have happened in the past year or so, a real cleanup that makes for better statistics."

"And you want money for telling me when and where," Day said.

"Not exactly, Sergeant. I plan to do more than just tell you when and where. I plan to tell you everything."

"In exchange for?"

"There's an expression, Sergeant, `quid pro quo.' Something for something. You've heard of it?"

"I didn't realize you were so well-educated. Stop talking around it and get to the point."

Grindle fixed cold eyes on Day for a moment, then nodded. "The point is, if I don't say any more to you, that burglary's going to happen and I'm going to be richer."

Day frowned and sighed. He didn't like the direction the conversation was taking. He didn't like this habitual crook keeping him on a string, keeping him wondering.

"Right, Sergeant," Grindle said, "I'll be one of the two burglars. And I'm willing to tell you how you can arrest my partner. You'll have him red-handed enough for a sure conviction."

"And what about you?"

"Why, I get away."

"With the loot?"

Grindle nodded. "All of it instead of half. And you get a feather in your blue cap."

Day clenched and unclenched his right fist. "How would you like me to take you in for attempting to bribe an officer?"

The sarcastic smile spread on Grindle's lean face. "How would you like to try to prove that? There's no need to get angry, Sergeant. I'm doing you and myself a favor. In a way, it's your duty to take me up on the deal–either it's one of us or simply neither of us."

"Then you'll be holding the whole thing over my head, Grindle. No thanks."

Grindle spread his hands. "Holding whatover your head? How could I tell on you without putting myself in jail? And who'd believe me, anyway?"

He had a point, Day had to admit. Maybe the best thing was to pretend to go along with him, tell the department and nab both of them. "Who's your partner going to be?" Day asked.

"Ned Davis."

Day's interest sharpened. Ned Davis would he quite a catch, one of the top burglars in the city.

"You have a score to settle with him?" Day asked.

"I've got my reasons," Grindle said blandly. "He'll he tucked neatly away and he'll never suspect me."

"I'll think about it. All right?"

"Sure, Sergeant."

"Get in touch with me in a few days. And I don't want to see that damn car of yours behind me again."

"Sure, Sergeant. Anything else?"

"Yeah," Day said, "where's the barbecue sauce?"

All that next week Day thought about Grindle's offer. He knew it wasn't meant to be a one-shot proposition. Grindle was willing to hand over a lot of ex-friends and a lot of information for safety and virtual immunity for himself.

Why shouldn't Day take him up on it? Ethics? He had found in the past several years that the whole world was unethical. Also, what was in it for Day? No profit of any kind. Promotions maybe; satisfaction in his job.

With a start he realized that dealing with Grindle would give him satisfaction; and it would rid society of some of its most proficient malefactors, while one would go free.

What really made up Day's mind was that he waited too long. He'd put Grindle off twice, trying to decide. Then he realized that after this long the department would know he'd been vacillating. They'd ask him why he hadn't said something sooner, and he'd have no good answer for that question. All the whole thing would amount to would be another gray mark on his record.

The next time Grindle contacted him, Day told him it was a deal. They arranged to meet later and talk over the details, and after Day hung up the phone he sat quietly for a long time. He didn't feel the same as he had before the telephone call, and he knew he never would feel the same again.

It didn't matter how he felt, he told himself. There was Audrey to think about now; Audrey and Greg. He didn't want to retire on a sergeant's pension twenty years from now, and that was the way things were heading.

Day and Grindle met at the Bangkok Inn, a little lounge with an Oriental motif. Over drinks they worked out the details, and it was agreed that Grindle would telephone Day a few days before the burglary so he could devise a plausible reason for being at the scene.

The details of the plan were simple enough to have that "can't fail" sureness about them, the residence to be burgled was the Kray estate on Farnham Road. It was a large house set well off the road on three or four acres. Grindle and his partner had already cased it and decided to go in through a side window. They would leave their car parked in a secluded spot near a grove of trees on Farnham, and when they'd got what they'd come for, leave by the same way they'd entered, cutting back across the property to the car. The main item in the big house that had attracted their attention was Jackson Kray's valuable coin collection. Grindle would see that he'd be the one carrying that and whatever cash they found.

Day would be waiting near the car, surprise them when they came toward it and order them to halt. Grindle would run, Day would fire a warning shot over his head, then another shot that would miss him.

At this point in the planning Grindle informed Day with a smirk that in case one of the shots did hit him, he'd taken care to see that the police department would subsequently learn about the arrangement they'd made, from letters he'd left with his wife.

"She's the only other soul who'll know about this," Grindle said. "But we're close. I'm a family man and I trust her. She knows this is like a business with me."

"And what if Ned Davis runs, too?" Day asked.

"You don't miss him, "Grindle said, draining the last of his drink.

That was something Day refused to let worry him too much. An experienced burglar like Ned Davis was not apt to run with a loaded revolver aimed at him.

Almost a week passed before Grindle called Day at home. Day moved around the corner, playing the long telephone cord out behind him, so that Audrey couldn't possibly overhear the conversation.

"Next Thursday night at eleven," Grindle said, no trace of the sarcasm in his telephone voice. "Jackson Kray's going out of town."

"You sure you've got everything worked Out?" Day asked nervously. "I mean, what about alarms? A watchdog?"

Grindle laughed, a low, confident chuckle. "You do your job, Sergeant Day, I'll do mine. Between the two of us we should rise high in our professions."

The tension in Day mounted as the time for the actual burglary and the apprehension of Ned Davis drew nearer. A few days before the action he mentioned to some of his fellow officers that an informant had told him the Kray residence was due to he hit. This caused no great alarm, and didn't even particularly attract attention. Daily, informants passed a steady flow of tips to various detectives, and many of them turned out to be untrue.

The night of the burglary Day got permission from Lieutenant Weston to take a uniformed officer on a stake-out at the Kray estate. They took Day's unmarked car and got to the Kray residence about nine o'clock. Day sent the uniformed officer, a young man whose name was Klutcher, around to watch the rear of the house, off to the opposite side from the window where Grindle and Davis would enter. Then he left the car parked down the road, walked back and settled himself in the shadows across from the closed gate to the Kray driveway.

From where he sat he could see the big house clearly. The only light was from the ornamental gaslight in front and from some lights left on in some upstairs rooms; no doubt to discourage prowlers. Day shook his head. When would people learn they weren't fooling anybody, that all they were accomplishing by leaving an inside lamp on was giving the burglars light by which to work. It was the outside lighting that did the discouraging.

Day checked the luminous dial of his watch: almost ten. He sat patiently and waited while the next hour passed, and then it was time for things to start happening.

Almost at eleven sharp Day's ears barely caught the faint rumble of an automobile engine. Headlights shone, then died down the street in the direction of the grove of trees where the car was to he concealed. Day felt the tension start in his stomach and spread throughout his body, and he tried to swallow the brassy taste in his mouth.

He waited a few minutes, then moved down toward the side of the house where he knew they'd he making their exit. For a fleeting moment he wondered if Officer Klutcher was still faithfully watching the rear side of the house. Then he reassured himself with the thought that Klutcher was the type of young policeman who followed orders to the letter, and Day had instructed him not to leave his post until he was called or heard shots.

Day crossed the dark road and stood near where the iron fence gave way to a low, ivy-covered wall, barely three feet high. He found that his throat was very dry now, so that when he swallowed it made a loud noise, and he absently reached inside his suit coat and touched the butt of his holstered Police Special.

Then he saw the movement near the side of the house, just a glimpse, brief but unmistakable, of a lithe, dark silhouette. Day vaulted the low wall and saw a second man emerge from the side window. The two men were moving side by side now, in a low, fast walk across the spacious, tree-dotted grounds toward where they'd left their car. Day followed them, broke into a jog and drew his revolver.

Both figures stopped, straightened in surprise, and turned toward him.

"Stay where you are!"

As Day yelled, the figure on the left spun abruptly and began to run, clutching what looked like a small suitcase tight against his chest.

Day fired his warning shot, high into the air. The figure continued to run.

"Halt!" Day shouted again. For an uncomfortable second he had the vague desire to aim the second shot at Grindle's bent back. It would be a difficult shot, but possible. Then he elevated the barrel slightly and squeezed two shots into the air.

Grindle didn't even glance around. He disappeared into the darkness, and a moment later the roar of a car engine and the screech of tires sounded from the road beyond the small grove of trees. Day saw the flickering glare of headlights as the car accelerated past the tall iron fence.

Day had stopped near the burglar who'd chosen to stay, still holding the revolver steady to cover the man. In the brightening moonlight he could make out the bitter and disgusted look on the often-photographed features of Ned Davis.

"What happened, Sergeant Day? One of 'em get away?" Klutcher was breathing hard as he ran up to where Day was holding the gun on Davis.

"Yeah," Day said, "there was one more. I fired at him but missed."

"I saw the vehicle," Klutcher said. "It headed south. Want me to run to the car and call in?"

"Right. Did you get a description?"

"No, sir, just saw the headlights."

"Call for the wagon, too," Day said as he handcuffed Davis and prodded him to walk in the direction Klutcher had run, toward the unmarked gray sedan up the road.

During the next six months Day apprehended three more burglars in like fashion–and Grindle's tips helped the sergeant break several other tough and well-publicized cases.

To prevent his superiors on the force from picking up a pattern in his exploits, Day varied his reports on his cases, once reporting he saw only the burglar he apprehended and suggesting the victim was turning in a false insurance claim; another time stating he'd seen three burglars (the "good citizen" victim in that burglary unknowingly cooperated by reporting as stolen more valuable bronze statuettes than one man could possibly have carried); and claiming in another burglary that he'd wounded the escaped burglar. In that case Grindle feigned a long recuperative period for the benefits of his cohorts in crime. Also, two of the burglars Grindle arranged for Day to capture were wanted on more serious charges in other states and extradited to serve long terms in distant penitentiaries where they couldn't, even by remote chance, compare notes on their respective downfalls.

Apparently, whatever precautions Grindle took to guard his "reputation" worked, for soon the nickname "Lucky Bill Grindle" was added to his list of aliases.

Then there were no more set-up jobs, and Grindle contacted Day only once every few months to feed him helpful information.

However, now the impetus was there. Day's superiors seemed to regard him more and more highly. Opportunity was his, and he had the skill and guts to make the most of it. Within three years he was cited for bravery and efficiency twice and promoted to sergeant first class, which meant that he was in charge of two teams of detectives.

Audrey was happier now. Sergeant first class pay was better than a sergeant's, and if a sergeant first class still worked irregular hours, at least they were more predictable hours, and a measure less dangerous.

Day saw his wife's enthusiasm for life reborn, saw his marriage turn from something deteriorating to something growing. Only from time to time, on the edge of sleep or wakefulness, did he think of Bill Grindle, whom he hadn't seen in several years.

Day dedicated himself completely to his job, working harder and more diligently on each case, with each passing year, almost as if he were unconsciously trying to prove something.

His tireless work and dedication paid off. In early June there was a shake-up in the department. Men were demoted and promoted, assignments were shifted. Lieutenant Weston was made a full-fledged captain, in charge of the Mobile Reserve Squad, and Day was promoted to lieutenant to take his place in charge of the West Sector burglary detail. Day, Lieutenant Day, wasn't surprised.

He was surprised, though, six months later, when Bill Grindle called and wanted to see him. Distasteful as it was, Day agreed, and was instructed to be in the public library the next day at three o'clock.

At two the next afternoon Day got busy with some paper work, trying not to think about the impending meeting with Grindle. Using the knack he'd somehow acquired, he managed to lose himself completely in his tedious work.

Then the time arrived, and Day rose from his desk and left his office, nodding to the white-haired desk sergeant as he left the precinct house.

Day sat for what seemed along time in the criminology section of the library before he sensed a presence and looked up from the open, unread book before him to see the man he'd never wanted to see again.

The same vaguely sarcastic smile, the same amused eyes–the same in every way, only slightly older and heavier–Bill Grindle stood looking down at Lieutenant Day.

"Been a long time," Grindle said, seating himself in a chair across the table.

Day nodded. "Almost five years." He wondered what Grindle had on his mind, but he tried not to let that show.

"You look worried," Grindle said with a smile. "There's no need to worry."

"Why don't you tell me what you want," Day said, "then let me decide whether or not to worry."

Grindle snorted a little laugh and nodded. "No need to try to fool each other, Lieutenant, not old friends like us. I came here about the Bain Corporation warehouse on Palmer Road."

"Bain... They're drug manufacturers, aren't they?"

Grindle nodded. "And there's close to eighty thousand dollars' worth of amphetamines stored in their warehouse."

Now Day remembered the plant and warehouse. It had been robbed about three years ago. A low, spread-out, pale-brick building, it was completely isolated in an area that was just beginning to be developed. Since the robbery three years ago, they had installed bright outside lights and hired a night watchman.

"Why meet here and tell me about the Bain warehouse?" Day asked, but he knew why.

"We're partners again," Grindle said smiling. "You're going to assist me in stealing those amphetamines."

Day shook his head and said simply, "No."

"Come on, Lieutenant Day, you don't want me to tell the police board some things I know, do you? I have some very interesting old tapes. Then too, there's my wife's testimony."

"You'd be cutting your own throat."

"But it would be far from fatal, Lieutenant. It's a point of law that the statute of limitations for breaking and entering in this state is five years. Of course, you couldn't he tried for those early jobs of ours either–wouldn't he convicted on my evidence anyway. But on the other hand there's your career to think about, your family and reputation." Grindle's amused eyes were fixed on him like jewels in some sardonic mask.

Day rose from his chair in anger, but the eyes didn't blink, the mask didn't change.

"I told you before, Lieutenant Day, burglary's like a business with me. You were sort of my pension plan, and now it's time for me to make one big killing and retire."

Day sat back down slowly. The facts had arranged themselves in lightning order in his detective's logical mind, and he knew he was had. "How do I know you'll retire?" he asked Grindle.

Grindle shrugged. "At least you know you won't have to worry about me for another five years. You'll be a captain by that time."

"What about the men you set up? What will they do to you if they find out the truth?"

Grindle smiled and waved a hand. "They're either dead, in prison, or too small for me to worry about now."

Day sighed a long, deflating sigh, knowing that Grindle was right as usual. "What's your plan?"

Grindle glanced around him, amused by the idea of planning a burglary in the library's criminology section.

"Safe and simple," he said. On the back of an envelope he expertly sketched a detailed drawing of the Bain warehouse, then drew in a basic floor plan. "We bypass the alarm here, then we go in through this loading door at five a.m."

"We?"

"Myself and Rich Costa," Grindle said.

Day nodded. Rich Costa was one of the area's well-known burglars, one of the most careful. He was stepping into something not very nice this time.

With the point of the pencil, Grindle showed Day where the amphetamines were stored. There were so many of them that after they'd hauled them across the warehouse to the loading door, Costa was going to go out again and back the car into the dock so they could hurriedly toss the drugs down into the spacious trunk.

"What about the watchman?" Day asked.

Grindle looked up at him a bit surprised. "We take care of him, don't worry."

"How?"

"We wear stocking masks so he can't identify us. He'll be here, in this little office." Grindle drew an X on his floor plan. "We hold a gun on him, bind and gag him. He's an old man and can't give us much trouble."

"And for guaranteeing your safety I suppose I'm to get Costa."

"When we're getting into the car to drive away, you shoot him." Day looked up sharply, feeling something draw taut in his stomach.

"Shoot him?"

Grindle nodded, speaking through his sarcastic half-grin "This is a big job, my last, and I don't want to have to worry about somebody putting the finger on me for a better deal in court or for a parole later on."

"Do you know what you're doing?" Day asked in an incredulous voice. "You're asking a police lieutenant to commit murder!"

"I'm asking you to shoot a fleeing criminal. You'll probably get a citation. Some of the amphetamine is in powder form in plastic bags. I'll leave a five-pound bag next to the body to make everything look genuine. You put a couple of bullets in the trunk too, for them to see when they find the car. It won't hurt the narcotics. Just make sure you don't hit a tire or the gas tank."

Day got up and began to walk. He had to walk, had to work some of the nervousness out of his body. "This is crazy!"

Grindle shook his head, glancing about to make sure they were still alone before speaking in a raised whisper, "It's not crazy and it will work, and we're going to do it."

"I'm not a killer!"

"I know you're not, Lieutenant, you're a police officer doing his duty. And you might look at it this way: there is no statute of limitations on murder. I'll be absolutely sure of your discretion, and you'll be free of me."

That was true enough, Day reasoned with some relief, and he felt soiled that the idea of murder for personal gain should actually appeal to him. Day went back to the table and sat down. As he rested his bare, perspiring forearm on the tabletop the faint odor rose to his nostrils. Sweat and varnish, the same as the smell of a police station; sweat and varnish, and sometimes fear.

"Is there a patrol car cruising that area around five a.m.?" Grindle asked.

"I don't know," Day answered slowly. "I can find out."

"Do that," Grindle said, "then phone me and let me know where we can create a diversion to get the car out of the area before we go in.

Day nodded. It was as if the years hadn't passed and he and Grindle were plotting their earlier burglaries. Grindle scribbled a phone number on a torn-off corner of the envelope and handed it to Day.

"It'll be Friday morning unless you hear different," Grindle said.

Day didn't look at him as Grindle pushed back his chair with a scraping sound and left through a side door.

Thursday evening Day went to bed at ten o'clock, telling Audrey that he didn't feel well. He was telling her the truth. All that night after supper he couldn't stop thinking about what he was hiding from her, and for the first time he began wondering if she would think the price of her contentment were worth it. It occurred to Day that up until that time he'd only considered the deals he'd made with Grindle from a basically selfish point of view.

He didn't sleep much that night, tossing on the soft mattress and glancing from time to time at the glowing hands of the clock radio. The only thing that comforted him somewhat was that Grindle was right about the murder charge. It would free Day forever from him.

At four-fifteen, as he knew it would, the telephone rang. Day snatched up the receiver instantly, cutting off the first ring, but he sensed that Audrey was awake beside him anyway.

"This is you-know-who, "the voice said loosely, "and I'll meet you you-know-where."

"All right," Day said too casually.

"Remember," the voice said, "last time."

"I'll remember," Day said, and hung up the phone.

He was worried. Grindle had sounded as if he were high on something. There had been an electric undercurrent of excitement in the burglar's voice that Day hadn't heard before. As he climbed out of bed and flicked on the soft reading lamp he told himself not to worry. If nothing else, Grindle was a pro.

"What is it?" Audrey asked behind him. "Where are you going?"

"Some work to do," Day said, turning and smiling down at her. She was still sleepy and her face looked peaceful in the soft yellow light. "Duty to perform," he added.

"Again?" she said with drowsy irritation. Summoning phone calls in the middle of the night for Day were nothing new, but they never failed to annoy Audrey.

"You go to sleep and I'll be back in the morning," Day said gently, bending and kissing her forehead.

He went into the bathroom and got dressed quickly, mercilessly splashing ice-cold tap water over his face.

The low, rambling Bain Corporation warehouse was like an island of light in the dark night. The beige brick looked almost white and very clean in the harsh glare from the overhead dusk to dawn lights and the beams of the ground-level spots. Day parked his car off Palmer Road and walked back toward the light, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. To his right the skeletal beams of a half-finished building rose against the starless sky. He was approaching the Bain warehouse from behind and to one side, and when he saw the lighted loading and receiving dock, with its few trailers backed into some of the overhead doors, he grew more cautious.

Day saw that one of the trailers had been backed into a door next to the one Grindle and Costa would use. That would shield them almost completely from the street, and only darkness stretched in the other direction, dotted in the distance by some tiny pinpoints of light.

It was quarter to five. They wouldn't be here for fifteen minutes, and probably just about now were calling in and reporting a prowler at the electric company plant two miles away. Day worked his way closer, concealing himself in a deep shadow near a portable trash container right next to the side of the building. The trash had a sweet, nauseating odor, and Day didn't want to have to stay there long.

Grindle and Costa walked silently past, within thirty feet of Day, but they didn't see him. Day stayed in the deep shadows and drew his revolver from his holster.

He heard a slight metallic clanking and then the low rolling sound of the overhead loading door going up. He got between the building and the trash container, worked himself to the corner and peered around, but there was nothing to be seen. Grindle and Costa had silently lowered the door behind them so their way of access couldn't he spotted from outside. They'd also extinguished the outside lights near that door for added concealment.

Day waited, watching. When Costa left to get the car he would work in behind a nearby parked trailer where he could get off a clear shot.

As he waited, the brassy taste of excitement rose in Day's throat. Nervousness, he decided, as he inched forward. He took a deep breath, then smiled confidently to himself, and that's when he realized the guilt, the shame. For the first time he admitted it to himself. He was enjoying this. He was actually enjoying himself!

The shot from inside the building wasn't very loud, like the single, flat blow of a hammer.

Day straightened and caught the sweet stench of the trash. "No...he whispered to himself. "No!" Then he was running, away from the loading area and toward the front of the building. Within a minute he'd broken the thick glass of a front door with the butt of his revolver and was inside.

He ran through the offices, through a door into the warehouse area.

Everything was dark except for a feeble glow about a hundred feet off to the left. Day remembered the sketch Grindle had made of the building's floor plan and cautiously made his way toward the light. As he got closer he could hear a radio playing, tuned to some all-night-chatter and soft-music station.

Grindle and Costa had decided to eliminate every possible risk. The old watchman was lying on his stomach in a puddle of blood in the center of the tiny office's floor. His leather holster was empty, and his cap was half-on, half-off his head to reveal a slow trickle of blood through matted gray hair.

With a shaking hand Day picked up the telephone on the desk and dialed Headquarters. He asked to he put through to the Eighth Precinct and heard desk sergeant Hap Kramer's pleasant voice.

"This is Lieutenant Day, Hap. The Bain warehouse on Palmer Road is being hit right now. Get somebody over here."

"Yes, sir."

"There are two men in on it, Bill Grindle and Rich Costa. When they leave they'll he heading east on Palmer in a stolen car with a trunkload of amphetamines. Set up roadblocks around the area." "Narcotics in trunk, heading east. . .

"How do you know east, sir?"

"Because I helped them set up the job."

"Yes...You what?"

"I'll try to stop them here. They've already killed the watchman, and they'll try to kill anybody who gets in their way. Put out an 'armed and dangerous' on them. Now get busy!"

"Yes, sir..." The sergeant's voice was unsteady, puzzled.

Day hung up the telephone with a quick, silent motion and stared down once again at the old watchman.

Then cursing, near sobbing, Day ran from the office into the darkened warehouse. Staying low, he felt his way silently toward the other end of the building, toward the loading dock.

They were working by moonlight. Grindle and Costa were just about to close the overhead door and leap from the dock when they turned and saw Day.

"Hold it where you are!" Day shouted, leveling his revolver at them. "Both of you, Grindle!"

Grindle screamed something Day didn't understand, then the slug struck Day in the right side, slapping him to the cement floor. He shook his head and saw that only the gray nighttime sky was visible through the open loading door. Both men had dropped from the dock. Day struggled awkwardly to his feet, fell, dragged himself to the doorway.

They'd closed the trunk. Costa was already inside the car, on the passenger's side, and Grindle was just opening the door to get behind the wheel. Day aimed carefully and squeezed off two shots. Grindle fell without a sound, into the limp posture of a dead man.

Day saw Costa shooting frantically across the seat to get behind the wheel of the idling car and tried to aim the revolver again, but the gun was too heavy. The barrel wavered and dropped, and a reddish darkness enveloped Day as the car sped away and turned east. In the instant before his death Day saw that the left rear wheel had passed over the gun in Grindle's lifeless hand.

"It doesn't make sense," Captain Harold Weston said, looking down at Day's body.

The detective standing next to him nodded in agreement.

Captain Weston continued to look down at Day, a puzzled concern in his dark eyes. "He was a good, honest cop, one of the best, and with a future in the department. Then, bang, he goes bad all of a sudden!" Captain Weston shook his head slowly, like a man who has bet and lost. "I just don't understand it..."

"Probably nobody could explain it to you but Lieutenant Day," the detective said.

"Probably not," the captain agreed. "But what I can't understand is how he went bad in so short a time. All these years, not a black mark on his record...then all of a sudden this. They fool you sometimes, I guess...and fool themselves."

LIVING ALL ALONE

Miss Simms looked at the house and considered the possibilities. It was a small frame house in a very scenic country setting, in a flat green clearing almost surrounded by tall sycamores. Behind the house was a small, peaceful looking pond, still and green.

"I'll take it," Miss Simms said with decision.

"All right," Mr. Blacker, the surprised owner, said. "The, uh, price–“

"The price is fair," Miss Simms said in her clear, high voice.

"I don't advise it," her Uncle Dan said. "Why, a woman like you, all alone way out here. Ain't another neighbor in sight."

Mr. Blacker looked at Uncle Dan with faintly disguised irritation. "Will be, though," he said. "Mile or so down the road some contractor's puttin' in five houses."

Miss Simms stood calmly as Uncle Dan turned to look at her, his gray mustache seeming to droop more than usual. "A mile away, he said, Marybelle. Now, why do you want to live alone, anyway, much less as alone as this? You can stay with Grace an' me, an' you know it."

"I know, Uncle Dan, but this is a beautiful house. I've lived with Mother so long, took care of her for over fifteen years, and now I think I'd like to try living alone."

Mr. Blacker's blue eyes squinted in his seamed face as he watched Miss Simms. Though he wanted to sell the house, he had to agree with her uncle. She was, he judged, in her mid-forties, a spinster who would still be attractive to many men. The formless print dress did little to hide her still rounded and firm figure, and her graying blonde hair still caught the sunlight as it hung below her shoulders.

Uncle Dan sighed surrender. "I hope you know what you're doin', Marybelle. You've led somethin' of a protected life, and I don't think you realize the dangers to a woman like you who lives alone in an isolated spot."

Miss Simms smiled a slight smile. "A woman like me?"

"Yes," Uncle Dan said, embarrassed by her direct, questioning stare. "I mean to say, you're still an attractive woman, an' the wrong kinds of men are liable to get ideas."

"For the last fifteen years, Uncle Dan, I've been able to take care of both Mother and myself. I think taking care of just myself should be easier than the task I've completed."

Uncle Dan hooked his sausage-like thumbs into his belt. "Well, I'll help you all I can, Marybelle, with buyin' the place an' movin' in an' all."

Miss Simms' delicate face broke into a grateful smile. "I know, and I thank you, Uncle Dan."

"Come on an' follow me to my place in your pickup," Mr. Blacker said. "We'll sign the papers an' get things in order. We'll have to go into town to the title company tomorrow, too.”

As they walked away from the picture-book frame house with the steep roof, Miss Simms could tell what Mr. Blacker was thinking. He was surprised and glad to find someone who'd actually pay cash for his house without having to arrange for a loan, and like most of the men she knew, he was wondering why a woman like herself hadn't married by her age despite an invalid mother.

Uncle Dan wondered about that too, Miss Simms could tell. As far as he knew there had never been any men in her personal life, not even a casual beau. Well, let him wonder, she thought, glancing away from her uncle's thick red neck and behind her at her new home. Let them all wonder.

When the transaction was completed, Uncle Dan came out and helped her direct the movers. It was pleasant for a change, to be able to afford most everything she needed. Her mother's insurance money had enabled her to buy this home and, if managed properly, should provide for her for life. So there was no longer money to worry about, and of course there was no longer Mother.

Mr. Blacker was at the house too, the day Miss Simms moved in. He walked about in the yard with her after the movers had left, puffing on a long, foul-smelling cigar and explaining to her just where the boundaries of her property were, showing her the old unused barn concealed by the trees beyond the house. As he talked, Miss Simms was deciding where to plant her garden.

The first night in the new house was quiet; quiet in a lonely way. Mother had never made noise, crippled as she was, but at least she had been...well, she had been there. Now, when the wind moaned about the house or the floor creaked, only Miss Simms' ears heard.

She told herself it would have been twice as lonely if she'd stayed in the big old house in town, and she made herself ignore the creaks and the wind and the loneliness; but it was a long time before she slept, curled up in the center of the wide double bed.

Miss Simms had always been an immaculate housekeeper, and now with her own home, and her home only, she took even more pride in her housework. Everything was scrubbed or painted to gleaming cleanliness; every picture, every lampshade, every throw rug, was as straight as if it had been aligned with a ruler.

For the outside of the small frame house she hired professional painters. The color she chose was white, a marshmallow, cloud-like white that seemed to shine with a brightness of its own against the backdrop of green hills and far blue skies. It was the picturesque white of souvenir postcards; pure white.

There was a handyman whom Mr. Blacker sent around now and then to repair little things he'd agreed to fix. His name was Carl Orton. He was a big man with filthy hands who drank too much, sometimes even on the job, but he was a capable worker, with all his faults. Sometimes when he was supposed to show up, the day would pass and Miss Simms would find out that he'd disappeared again, driven away in his old truck to wherever he went, Saint Louis, maybe, to get drunk and stay drunk for long spells. Then, sometimes weeks later, he'd come back and act as if it all hadn't happened.

Carl Orton continued to come around and offer Miss Simms his help even after he'd finished all the jobs Mr. Blacker had given him, and he'd even gone so far as to fix the porch steps for her and not charge her. Miss Simms didn't like that. It made her feel indebted to him.

Once when Carl Orton had come to fix something, he'd brought another man with him, a younger, long-nosed man named Floyd, who did more staring at Miss Simms than work. Miss Simms sat on the porch and watched them as they sweated and toiled to put in more gravel on her long driveway. From the shade of the porch she would watch Floyd plunge his shovel roughly into the pile of gravel and glance at her with one dark eye from behind his extended shoulder.

Quite a few men from the nearby towns (nearby meaning sometimes over twenty miles away) somehow found excuses to come to knock on Miss Simms' door, offering to work or selling something. She would talk to them coolly but politely and let them know just what the result of any improper advances would he. She talked to most of the men on the shaded front porch, explaining that it was warmer in the house, though if they listened hard they could hear the soft hum of the air conditioner from around the back of the house. All that hot spring none of them ever got past the front porch to enter Miss Simms' immaculate white frame house.

One day Sheriff Brogan came to call on her. He was a very fat man who perspired a lot beneath his gray uniform, and he wore high-topped heavy boots, the thick soles of which were usually caked with mud. Miss Simms was cordial to him and served him lemonade on the front porch.

"I wondered if you'd been havin' any problems up here," Sheriff Brogan said as he sat ponderously in a small, webbed lawn chair and sipped his lemonade.

"Problems, Sheriff?"

"I mean, livin' alone an' all."

"I assure you, Sheriff, I'm quite capable. And there's always help to hire for any heavy work."

"Yes, ma'am, but that's not exactly the kind of trouble I meant. You know, an attractive woman like yourself, livin' all alone, can give some of the wrong kinds of men some pretty dangerous ideas. I just wondered if you'd been...well, threatened or anything."

"Threatened with what?" Miss Simms watched the sheriff's broad face redden slightly as he nervously reached down and adjusted his heavy belt and holster so he could sit more comfortably.

"What I mean is," he said, "over the past month or so, much as I get around, I heard a few things mentioned in the taverns an' such. Nothin' uncomplimentary or insultin', understand, but it's just that it seems pretty well-known by a lot of the rougher element that you're livin' up here all alone. I think maybe you ought'a be kinda careful with the men that do come up here and do odd jobs for you an' such."

"Oh, you needn't worry about me, Sheriff. I never even let them into the house. Usually I just pay them for their labor right here on the porch."

"Yes, ma'am."

"But if it will make you feel any better, Sheriff, I'll be sure to let you know if anything... suspicious happens."

"I think that'd be a good idea, Miss Simms. That way maybe we could stop trouble before it starts."

"More lemonade, Sheriff?" Miss Simms smiled her very fetching smile at him.

"Another glass would taste good, ma'am, hot as it is out here."

Sheriff Brogan drank two more glasses of lemonade, and as they sat and talked, Miss Simms discovered that he was gossipy. Though he told her some very shocking things, before her he was always careful to keep his language gentlemanly and polite.

When the sheriff did leave, Miss Simms stood and watched him strut pompously in his ridiculously heavy hoots toward his car. She wondered if Uncle Dan had sent him around to look after her.

Miss Simms went inside then, into the ordered coolness of the house, and began her daily ritual of straightening and cleaning.

Sometime later, Carl Orton was out in back cutting down some tall weeds Miss Simms had hired him to clear. Since the day was getting extremely hot, she felt it would he an act of kindness to invite him onto the porch for cold lemonade. As he sat in the webbed lawn chair, she knew he'd much rather have another kind of drink, but Miss Simms wasn't about to offer him any of that. He did seem grateful for the lemonade, drinking it so quickly and sloppily that some of it dribbled down his chin onto his bare chest. Miss Simms ignored this breach of manners and offered to refill his glass.

"Sure is a nice place you got here," Carl Orton said. Miss Simms could see that he felt awkward in her presence.

"I do my best to keep it that way, Mr. Orton." She raised her glass to her lips and took a tiny sip. "You're doing a very good job on the weeds."

"Thanks, Miss Simms. Hot day for it, I can tell you. An' those weeds are thick as fur."

"It's amazing how they grow and grow," Miss Simms observed. "Soon they blot out and kill the good grass and flowers."

"That's what they do, all right."

Miss Simms crossed her long legs and twirled the ice in her glass with her little finger.

"I ain't tryin' to be nosy or disrespectful," Carl Orton said, "but livin' all alone up here, don't you ever get...lonely? There's plenty of good places you could live in Bradley or Union or Bakerston."

Miss Simms stopped stirring her lemonade and looked at Carl Orton. She understood his question perfectly. "I like it where I am, thank you," she said.

"Yes'm."

She stood, looking down at him, and stretched languidly against the sun. "I'm going inside for a nap, Mr. Orton. If it's all right with you, I'll pay you for cutting the weeds now."

"Fine with me, Miss Simms."

When she'd given Mr. Orton his money, Miss Simms went inside and locked all the doors carefully. Then she went upstairs and watched him for a while as he stood in the waist-high weeds near the lake and swung the heavy scythe, stopping now and then to wipe his brow with a large red handkerchief and glance up at the back of the house. Miss Simms lay down and thumbed idly through a dress catalog for a while before dozing off.

At about ten that night, when she was cleaning the kitchen for the final time that day, she heard the uneven, rising rumble of the truck engine. She turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs.

From her bedroom window Miss Simms saw the twin lights veer slowly off of the long gravel drive into a grove of trees not far from the house. Even before the truck stopped the headlights faded, and outside there was only darkness.

Miss Simms stood at the window, her breath dragging in her throat. She felt a tightness spread all through her body. She knew by the sound of the motor that it was Carl Orton out there in the darkness. Probably he was drunk, still drinking. She knew he drank Mellow Springs bourbon; she'd seen the empty bottles one day on the floor of his battered truck.

Well, let the fool sit out there, she thought, switching on the light.

Without pulling the bedroom window shade, Miss Simms casually got completely undressed for bed. After removing her clothes, she didn't put on her nightgown for a while before turning out the light.

Lying there alone in the big bed, she heard the noise outside, a faint noise, a scraping kind of shuffle. It was a wonder she heard it at all, the way the crickets were raising such a racket. It seemed like the crickets were actually screaming that night.

Had Carl Orton gotten tired of sitting there, drinking and watching the square window that was like an eye in the pure white wall of the house?

It was then that Miss Simms remembered she hadn't locked the front door before coming up to bed. For a moment she lay there, her senses straining, then she got quickly out of bed and went noiselessly down the stairs to the hall closet where the deer rifle Uncle Dan had given her for protection was leaning.

Five minutes later the front door of the white frame house opened slowly. At first there was only faint moonlight, then Carl Orton's dark shape was there, and a little unsteadily he leaned forward and walked into the house.

A light came on.

Orton straightened and gasped. Miss Simms was there, as he had seen her through her bedroom window, only she was aiming a rifle at him.

Between them there was a silence, and even the mindless screaming of the crickets seemed to hush.

The crack of the rifle sounded loud in the house and rolled for miles over the hills, but far out in the country nobody paid particular attention to a solitary, distant gunshot.

The next day Miss Simms scrubbed the hall thoroughly and then drove Mr. Orton's battered truck into the old barn beyond the house. Then she drove to a nursery near Bradley where she bought a fair-size plum tree and had it loaded into the back of her station wagon.

She wielded the shovel in the cool of the morning, beating the heat of the rising sun, and by noon the plum tree stood in a circle of crumbled earth near the edge of her property, away from the house, and Carl Orton lay below its grasping roots.

Of course, no one inquired about Carl Orton, and when they would think to inquire it certainly wouldn't be here, at Miss Simms' house. Undoubtedly when he'd paid his nighttime visit he had done so secretly.

Nothing had really changed inside the immaculate white frame house; nothing had changed at all.

By mid-summer there were five plum trees, in a perfect line near the edge of Miss Simms' property. Though still small, they all seemed to be thriving in the rich, dark soil.

Everything was fine, as it had always been, until Mr. Blacker came to talk to her.

He had sold her the house, which he'd built long ago for his sister, and he still lived down the highway near Union, and since he was up that way he'd decided that he'd be the one to let Miss Simms know.

"That contractor's started work on his houses down the road a piece," he said, removing the cigar from his dark crinkled face.

"I'm glad to hear," Miss Simms answered. She thought about offering him some lemonade.

Mr. Blacker stood with one leg propped up on the second porch step, and he peered up at her with his clear blue eyes. "I'm afraid you’re gonna hafta transplant those plum trees," he said.

Miss Simms felt her heart stir to frenzy, then controlled it. "Why would I have to do that?"

"Cause of the contractor. He asked me to come tell you about it."

"About what?" Miss Simms dug her nails into her palms.

"Tomorrow mornin' the electric company's gonna lay the underground wiring for them homes, so I thought I oughta tell you about the easement."

"Easement... ?" Miss Simms had no idea what an easement was. "Yes, ma'am. Electric company's got the right to lay their wire or whatever in a five foot strip along the edge of your property."

"But... it's mine! I bought it, it's my property!"

"Oh, you own it, all right. It's just that the electric company's got them particular rights. Won't make much difference anyways, after the grass grows back. If you'd like, I can try to get a man up here today to move them plum trees wherever else you want 'em. Late in the summer, but they might live."

"But I want them there!"

Mr. Blacker shrugged. "Talk to the electric company. Probably it'd interfere with their wirin' if you put 'em back there after they was done diggin'."

Miss Simms didn't answer him, only stood and stared at the neat row of plum trees.

"Anyways," Mr. Blacker said, "if'n you want, I'll see if I can get somebody to transplant 'em."

"No...Miss Simms said. "Thank you, no, Mr. Blacker."

"Well, least you know about it," Mr. Blacker said, taking his foot down from the porch step and moving back. 'Evenin', Miss Simms," he said as he walked toward his car.

Evening! It was evening, and he'd said the electric company work crew would he there tomorrow morning!

Miss Simms went into the house and walked heavily into the kitchen. The iron rooster clock on the wall above the stove read ten minutes after six. She sat for a while at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of ice water and trying to gather her wits. Then she rose and went upstairs to change into her old pair of slacks and a faded blouse, her work clothes.

The electric company crew found her at nine the next morning. Each plum tree had been dug up and was lying on its side next to a hole in the earth. Miss Simms was sitting cross-legged before the row of holes, staring vacantly, holding the shovel gently across her lap. At first, the work crew thought she'd been taken sick, and tried to help her, and then one of them happened to look into one of the holes by the plum trees. On the other side of the yard one other hole had been dug, but that one was empty.

Miss Simms didn't seem particularly upset, except they couldn't get her to talk. The men took her into the house and called the sheriff, then they all sat quietly and waited.

Miss Simms heard the patrol car brake to a stop on the gravel drive, and she heard the slam of the door. After a little while she heard Sheriff Brogan's loud footsteps on the wooden porch, and he came right into the house, walked right in without knocking. There was a great deal of mud on his heavy hoots and on his hands, and he tromped right over the immaculately polished tile of the entry hall, one hand brushing the white wall and leaving a long dark smudge. Miss Simms could have cried when she saw that.

GARDEN OF DREAMS

Mr. John Staples closed the door behind him and walked with straight, brisk strides past his secretary, Mrs. Carvelle, who was watering an arrangement of peonies in a vase atop a filing cabinet. With a curt nod he entered his own office, sat behind his curved mahogany desk and waited for Mrs. Carvelle to enter. Enter she did, with an automatic smile and an unusually thick handful of mail.

"These are the pertinent ones," Mrs. Carvelle said. "There's another stack of letters in the outer office."

Mr. Staples drew a deep breath, held it as he spoke. "Appointments?"

"I canceled most of them, as you instructed. Mr. Brogan at eleven o'clock is still pending."

Mr. Staples lighted a cigarette, took two puffs, snuffed it out in the gold ashtray that had been a gift from the company. As Mrs. Carvelle walked out, he stared at the neat stack of letters she had left on the gleaming desktop. Then he looked around at the sumptuous paneled office that had been his for two years. It had been a long climb here to this office in the huge Consolidated Natural Gas and Power Company Building, a long, hand-over-hand climb from Jack Staples, office manager, all the way to Mr. John Staples, Regional Director–and now this damned thing had to happen.

Yesterday his own personal project, the laying of the gas line across the river bend, had failed. The engineers to whom he had listened had turned out to be wrong–or at least they had turned out to look wrong–which from Mr. Staples' standpoint amounted to the same thing. A valve had not been turned, pressure had built up, metal had ruptured, and four square miles of the tenth biggest city in the country had gone without gas power on one of the coldest days of the dying winter. Thousands of people were without heat, thousands inconvenienced by unusable gas appliances, hospitals switched to auxiliary power; and for this monumental mess Consolidated Natural Gas and Power, Mr. John Staples, Regional Director, bore the brunt of the blame. The letters, the phone calls of complaint, would continue to pour in for weeks.

An aura of gloom hung about Mr. Staples' carefully cultivated executive's face–iron-gray hair combed straight hack to accentuate the broad forehead, and firm countenance flushed by telling high blood pressure–a youthful, dynamic fifty-two.

At the buzz of the intercom, Mr. Staples' tapering, manicured hand reached out. "I instructed you not to disturb me, Mrs. Carvelle."

"I'm sorry, sir, but it's a man from the police department, a Detective Mungweather. He says it's official business."

A vein in Mr. Staples' forehead throbbed colorfully. He hadn't planned on seeing anyone while this mess was being investigated, but a policeman… Enough had public relations, he decided, and he pressed the intercom button. "Send Detective Mungweather in, Mrs. Carvelle."

Mungweather, a small man in his late forties, with thinning hair and a quiet smile, didn't look like a cop, but he had on a cop's cheap suit and he had flat-blue cop's eyes. As he moved toward the desk across the soft carpet, Mr. Staples saw that there must be a tightly wound strength in the small body. He was carrying what appeared to be a box of long-stemmed flowers.

"Detective Mungweather," he said, shaking hands with Mr. Staples and settling himself into the chair before the desk, with the long white box nestled in his lap.

"I suppose it's about some legal ramification of the power failure," Mr. Staples said, sliding a box of cigars toward Detective Mungweather.

Mungweather shook his head at both suggestions. "It's about these," he said, lifting the lid from the florist's box. He parted folds of white tissue to reveal a bouquet of different types of flowers–withered and dead flowers.

"I guess you'd better explain," Mr. Staples said.

Detective Mungweather flashed his gentle little smile. "Mr. Staples," he said, "inadvertently you are involved in one of the most bizarre cases of murder in the history of crime."

"Murder?"

"The facts haven't been made public yet," Mungweather said, "so I'll have to start at the beginning. Are you familiar with those old houses on Maden Street, the big ones that have become a little run down?"

Mr. Staples nodded. He had seen those blocks of houses from an earlier, more prosperous era, brownstone and brick, with high gables atop three stories of hideous pseudo-Gothic architecture. Half of them were rooming houses now, with dirty windows and sloping terraces and gardens given back to nature.

"There was a man who lived alone in one of those houses," Detective Mungweather went on, "a man who inherited the house from his mother over a dozen years ago. This man–we're not at liberty yet to give you his name–had a small greenhouse built onto the back of his house, a hothouse about ten feet square and constructed entirely of glass. It was situated in such a way that it was hardly visible from the street, and most of the glass panes were soaped on the inside, partly to control the sun's rays, partly for privacy. Our man took great pains with his hothouse, even going to the expense of having a special gas heating unit installed in it to insure perfectly controllable warmth all year round."

"Nothing bizarre so far," Mr. Staples said, lighting up another filter-tipped cigarette. "Just a slightly eccentric horticulturist."

"More than slightly eccentric," Detective Mungweather said. "You see, besides being interested in the beauties of flowers, our man was also interested in the beauties of womanhood. He'd had two wives, both of whom supposedly ran off. The last one disappeared four years ago. Now it turns out that there were many women in his life, a dozen in all. He murdered all twelve of them and buried them in his indoor year-round garden."

"Murdered a dozen women?" Mr. Staples half stood and sat back down again.

"Murdered," Detective Mungweather said clearly and calmly.

"But just a moment," Mr. Staples said, his cigarette poised before his lips. "You said they'd all been buried inside his hothouse, and you did mention that it was small, only ten by ten."

"That's true," Detective Mungweather said with his little smile. "He buried them all upright, with their heads a few inches below the ground. The tops of their skulls had been removed and a flower had been planted in each head. Marvelous fertilizer, I would think."

Mr. Staples almost doubled up in his chair. Images of those grotesque flowerpot heads beneath cool dark soil made his stomach wrench. "Good heavens, you can't he serious! You can't be!"

"I am, though," Detective Mungweather said. "They were women with pasts mostly their own, prostitutes, transients... women no one would really miss. Our man would strike up their acquaintance and go from there. Some of them lived with him for a while before their murders. I suppose he must have had a certain charm."

"But the flowers...why?"

Detective Mungweather leaned back in his chair. "Well, you must understand that this man identified the beauty of certain types of women with the beauty of certain types of flowers. We got this from his diary. One woman was named Laureen, and she was to him like an orchid, soft and delicate, with a perfect roundness and fragility about her. Then there was Rose Anne, his pink rose, blushing and pure, and looking younger than her years." Mungweather had reached into the florist's box and removed a withered rose on a long stem, a crushed and shriveled yellow tulip, a dried, once-delicate chrysanthemum. "Marlene, Doris, Barbara, Eunice... He had a flower for each of them."

"Insane!" Mr. Staples said.

Detective Mungweather nodded agreement. "But you must understand that this was how he possessed these women; to him, these soft petals whose stems and roots were nourished by the bodies of his loved ones were his women. These once-beautiful plants were the flesh of his beloved."

"Revolting," Mr. Staples said. "But I still don't see how all this concerns my company anyway."

"This man was out of town yesterday," Detective Mungweather said, "when the gas failed. These," he nodded at the white box of withered flowers, "were all that was left in his hothouse when he returned. They are dead, and he holds Consolidated Natural Gas and Power, and you as Regional Director, directly responsible for the death of his loved ones."

"What!" Mr. Staples' voice was incredulous. "Responsible? How did you find out about this maniac and arrest him?"

"That's just our problem," Detective Mungweather said with his little wisp of a smile. "He hasn't been apprehended, and, as I said, he holds you directly responsible for what happened."

Mr. Staples brought his open palm down on the desktop. He'd had a hard last couple of days, and now this ridiculous business was just too much. "That's preposterous!"

"A lot of things are preposterous," Mungweather said. "For instance, when I came in here, you didn't even ask to see my identification."

Mr. Staples' eyes fixed on the dark and withered flowers in the white box for a full ten seconds. His Adam's apple jerked and disappeared below his starched white collar. "Now see here..."

"See where?" Mr. Mungweather asked, drawing from beneath his suit coat a pair of long-bladed pruning shears with red handles. He inserted his fingers within the handles expertly.

"I don't believe a word of this! I don't!" Mr. Staples said in a desperate, choking voice. He placed his hands on the edge of the desk and stood.

But Mr. Mungweather had stood also, his arm drawing back the glinting shears in what seemed, through Mr. Staples' horrified eyes, to be slow motion. Only Mr. Staples, still not believing, couldn't move–he couldn't move!

"Directly responsible!" Mr. Mungweather repeated through clenched teeth each time he lifted and plunged downward the red-handled glistening shears.

PROSPECTUS ON DEATH

Roger Tabber sat quietly behind the wide desk in his private office, listening to the muted sounds of the traffic streaming below him on Seventh Avenue. He was visible really from three angles, for the plush office was furnished with several huge mirrors stretching from floor to ceiling, to give the impression of space. It was the nature of Tabber's business that he spent much time confined to his office, and he wanted to spend that time in an unstifled atmosphere conducive to decision-making. The three Roger Tabbers were men of about fifty, beginning to gray, with handsome, aggressive faces becoming slightly padded with the excess flesh of middle age. They lifted their right arms simultaneously and picked up the telephone receiver.

"Louis?" Tabber said into the telephone. "Give me a quote on Laytun Oil."

"I see," Tabber said after a pause. He drummed his fingers on the smooth desktop, letting the man on the other end of the line wait. "Buy me five hundred shares," he said then. "I'll talk to you later, Louis."

Tabber hung up the phone and gazed around him at the many handsomely framed charts hanging on the walls, at the wide table in the office corner covered with more charts and graphs, financial reports, figure sheets on great corporations and small alike. With his pencil, with his ascending and descending lines and sheet after sheet of figures, Roger Tabber was able to keep his finger on the pulse of the stock market. As an independent speculator and investor he had to in order to stay in business.

Tabber was intimately familiar with the countless graphs around him, and he believed in them. If all the pertinent facts were known, almost anything could be reduced to a graph, could be analyzed, plotted, and, more importantly, predicted, at least to the degree that Roger Tabber had made a profitable business out of it.

When he'd returned from Haiti last year he had started the business, working out of his apartment, but soon the reams of graphs and assorted information, the tools of his trade, became too numerous. He was making plenty of money, so he rented this office on Seventh Avenue, had it lavishly decorated and had two telephones installed. Here, alone in his office with his charts and telephones, he was building his fortune.

Tabber gave a little start behind his desk at the knock on his door. It was most unusual for anyone to be calling on him at the office. He straightened his tie and called for the visitor to enter.

A tall, dark-complected man stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, though the trim cut of his dark-blue business suit made him appear almost slender. With a wide smile on his pleasant face, he glanced around him at the imposing graphs hanging upon the walls before advancing on the desk.

"Mr. Tabber," he said, extending his right hand, "I am Siano... of the Leasia family."

Tabber's heart leaped as he shook hands. Well, there was nothing this man could do about it now, even if he were fully aware of what had really happened.

"Yes," Tabber said, "I know of the family from my stay in Haiti. And I have heard of you."

"I'm honored, sir," Siano said in his velvet, high-pitched voice. It was a cultured voice, grammatically precise, and Tabber could almost see the verbal punctuation in the air. "I have been a long time away from the island. It surprises me that you have heard of me."

"I heard you mentioned in a conversation about your father," Tabber said. "Your father, you know, is rumored to be a… What is it?"

"A houngan," Siano said pleasantly, "and it is good, sir, that you know I am of his family."

Again Tabber felt an irregularity in his heartbeat. He remembered now–native superstition. A houngan, or shaman as he'd heard them called, was a voodoo witch doctor. There was always talk of such nonsense when he was on the island; it had developed into quite a gimmick for the tourist trade. And this was Siano, one of the Sons of the Leasia clan, well-traveled and educated in Europe–on some kind of foundation grant, no doubt.

"Well," Tabber said, "what is it that brings you to New York?"

"I will be here for some time," Siano said, "staying at the Hilshire, and I thought I would talk with you about the Sweet Kane Sugar Company."

"But...Tabber shrugged, "it no longer exists."

"I am aware," Siano said in a sad voice behind his smile. "Bankruptcy, liquidation–it was cruel."

"Cruel?" Tabber shook his head. "It was unavoidable."

Siano's smiling dark eyes met Tabber's directly. "You, sir, as the manager, should know better. After an entire tribe of people had migrated from their homes, after they had been promised wages to live on, you got them to help you strip the land and then liquidated the company, paying them no wages, leaving them to poverty and hunger."

Tabber pressed the flat of his hand on the desk. "But there simply was no money! Don't you understand?"

"I understand, sir, the mechanics of business," Siano said. "I know that the profits of Sweet Kane Sugar went to the parent company that owned most of the stock, that all assets went in various ways to the parent company so that when liquidation occurred there was nothing for the people. I am not inexperienced in the world of finance, sir."

Tabber drew a gold fountain pen from his pocket and began toying with it. "Well," he said, staring at the pen, "it does no good to talk about it now."

"That's true," Siano said, "but I must tell you that my people will not tolerate what happened. I, too, have called the Loa, I am also a houngan, and I have been sent to New York to see that death visits you."

Tabber's body stiffened in sudden shock. "And how to you propose to do that?" he asked in a tight voice.

"You needn't fear death by the hand of man," Siano said in his pleasant, smooth voice, "but death will come to you; death is on the way to you."

Tabber felt himself getting angry. "What the hell do you intend to do, stick pins in a doll or something? I don't believe in your malarkey any more than I believe in leprechauns, and I'm surprised an educated man like yourself does. You must know that voodoo works by the power of suggestion; the intended victim must believe in it or it's worthless. And I assure you I don't believe in it!"

"I am aware," Siano said calmly.

"I am aware, too," Tabber said angrily. "Now get the hell out."

He watched Siano smile and get up slowly. Tabber felt the hardness of his walnut desktop for reassurance. Around him were the wall charts, the square-cornered filing cabinets, the accouterments of commerce, of civilization, while below him he could hear the Seventh Avenue traffic passing below his window in an endless stream of reassuring noise and gleaming metal. This was New York, not Haiti. Was this savage in an expensive business suit out of his mind?

Siano turned and walked gracefully to the door. Tabber expected him to turn back and say something before leaving but he didn't.

Tabber sat motionless for a while, looking at the blank panel of the closed door. Then the heavy quiet of the office was broken by the jangle of one of the telephones on the desk. It was Louis, calling to tell Tabber that he had been able to buy Laytun Oil at 24 1/4.

Within a week Tabber had forgotten about Siano's visit, and there was no reason for him to remember it when he received the piece of mail from Snowden Investment Research advising him to consider buying Belfor Electronics. The letter, an ordinary form letter, was like hundreds of others that Tabber received each year. He was always deluged by mail from private research firms, hoping to get him to subscribe to their weekly or monthly newsletter at bargain rates; and like Snowden Investment Research, they often supplied sample tips to lure customers. Tabber tossed the letter onto a pile with the rest of his correspondence and promptly put it out of his mind.

Three days later he noticed that Belfor Electronics had risen almost three points, from 30 5/8 to 33 1/2. He began to watch it more carefully.

That same day another letter arrived from Snowden Investment Research, advising him again to buy Belfor Electronics. Tabber folded the letter and placed it in one of his desk drawers.

Belfor remained at around 33 for the next week, then Tabber received another letter telling him that, due to certain information they couldn't divulge, Belfor's stock was due for a sudden upsurge.

Tabber stared at the letter for a long time. Then he picked up the telephone and called his broker to inquire about Belfor Electronics and to ask for a prospectus.

Louis knew nothing about the stock that might suggest it would rise. Belfor was a fairly large company that made radio parts and showed a steady increase in earnings each year, though last quarter they had taken something of a beating due to the expense of opening a new plant.

The next day the prospectus on Belfor Electronics came in the mail, along with another letter from Snowden urging again the purchase of shares in the company. This time the letter was accompanied by a set of graphs showing the expected curve of Belfor's sales and profits into 1972. Tabber compared the graphs with the information on the prospectus and found that up to the last quarter they tallied exactly. Apparently Snowden Investment Research had done some accurate homework. But would their upward sweeping curve into the future be correct?

Belfor seemed to be a solid company at least, so after studying the prospectus Tabber picked up the phone and bought a hundred shares, just for a feeler.

Within a few days Belfor Electronics stock was up to 38 1/4. Another letter and set of graphs arrived from Snowden Research, telling Tabber that Belfor was still a smart buy despite the rise, that the stock was destined to move higher very shortly. Tabber talked to Louis, who told him that there were rumors about Belfor now, about possible takeovers, mergers, government contracts, but only rumors. Tabber studied his charts from Snowden carefully, called Louis back and bought 500 shares.

Profit-taking drove Belfor stock down to 34, then it began to climb steadily on heavy volume. The news broke in the papers that Belfor Electronics had been awarded a fat government contract to make components for the space project, and by the end of the month the stock had soared to 47 3/8.

A letter came from Snowden Research, advising Tabber to hold all his Belfor stock, and this time, along with the letter and graphs, came a curious thing.

It was a carefully composed actuary chart from one of the biggest insurance companies in the country, showing the decreased life expectancy of people with a history of heart trouble at various ages.

There was no explanation, only the chart. Perhaps it had been placed in the envelope by mistake–but Tabber had a history of heart trouble.

When the next letter from Snowden arrived, Tabber got a momentary jolt. Along with the usual information was a chart listing the unfavorable life-expectancy statistics for people who had suffered exactly the same type of heart attack that Tabber had suffered three years before. Smoking decreased the number of years these people had to live; being overweight cut more years from their lives; working in professions that tried the nerves were unfavorable; married ex-heart patients tended to live longer than those unmarried; rural patients outlived urban dwellers. As Tabber's eyes studied the deadly statistics he realized that all of these things, all of them applied to him.

It was then that he remembered Siano's visit and a flash of indignation and anger shot through him. Of course Tabber's heart attack hadn't been a secret, and Siano would have the money and resources to research him quite thoroughly. Imagine trying something like this! He lifted the telephone to call Siano at the Hilshire and vent his anger, then he thought better of it and replaced the receiver in its cradle. Why give the man the satisfaction of knowing he'd gotten his intended victim angry? Tabber cursed himself for becoming upset over such superstitious harassment and crumpled the information from Snowden and tossed it into the wastebasket. He noted as he did so, however, that Snowden still advised holding Belfor Electronics.

The next week, out of curiosity, Tabber inquired into Snowden Investment Research's address in Brooklyn and found it to be the address of a mortuary. That, he thought, was a nice touch.

That same afternoon another letter arrived from the fictitious Snowden Research, telling Tabber to sell Belfor Electronics. The letter stated that despite the government contract another unfavorable earnings report would drive the price of the stock down. There was another graph enclosed with the letter, a graph that made Tabber's breathing quicken and his right hand move unconsciously to his chest. At the top of the lined paper was the heading: Life And Projected Life Expectancy Of Roger Tabber. A thick black line started at the left side of the graph in a column marked Oct. 3rd, 1920, the date of Tabber's birth, rose through adolescence into adulthood, remained steady, curved downward into middle age, then dipped sharply at the date of his heart attack. Then the line went into a gradual decline, turned gray at today's date, extended to the end of the month and finally stopped completely.

Tabber reached for the telephone again to call Siano, but he paused, the receiver pressed to his ear, and instead called Louis and sold half his shares of Belfor Electronics stock.

A week later Belfor did issue a very unfavorable earnings report, and their stock plummeted. Tabber sold the rest of his shares at 43 and still made a nice profit. Letters from Snowden were arriving almost daily now, accompanied by graphs and information sheets that predicted Tabber's demise. Tabber was becoming nervous, irritated at the slightest things, but the last thing he would do, the most unwise thing he could do, would he to call Siano and ask him to quit. He could call the police, of course, but what would they be able to prove? They would think that he, Tabber, was the superstitious fool.

It was the day the elevator was out of commission that it happened. Tabber had to climb the six flights of stairs to his office, but he took the steps slowly and carefully. His heart had been beating quickly and irregularly of late anyway, and after the operation his doctor had told him not to exert himself. Nevertheless, when he closed his office door behind him he was breathing quickly, too quickly. From the corner of his eye he saw the top of an envelope from Snowden Research sticking out of the wastebasket. Did his heart skip a beat? A wave of fear went through Tabber as he leaned on the door. Of course his heart might have skipped a beat! That was normal, he was out of breath, it had skipped a beat before.

Tabber drew a deep, steadying breath and began to cross the office toward his desk, and his heart did skip a heat, it did! Hishand moved to his chest, wrinkling his white shirt front beneath his tie. Now his heart seemed to be beating irregularly, spasmodically!

Siano! Could it be possible? Was he actually able with his statistics and graphs to suggest to Tabber the moment of his death? Of course not! But he had been right about Belfor Electronics stock, and Belfor Electronics stock had gone down!

Then Tabber felt the pain. It was a quick, subtle pain that might have been all in his mind, or might not have been. He felt his heart leap beneath his clutching fingers and fear shot up in him like a flame. Clumsily, he stretched out his left hand and supported himself on the desk, waiting for the next pain. It came, searing through his chest like fire, moving up and out, cutting off his breath, turning his arm to molten lead! Gasping, his face mottled and distorted, Tabber struggled around the desk to the telephones and dialed the first person he could think of. "Louis..."

It was a massive heart attack, but not a fatal One. Afterward, though the doctors claimed Tabber was in critical condition and too ill to have visitors, they finally acquiesced to his demands to see his "old friend" Siano.

Tabber watched him come through the door to the tiny hospital room, somehow walking silently over the tile floor. Siano was immaculately groomed, as before, wearing a tailored dark suit and with the suggestion of a smile on his dark face. "They told me you wished to see me," he said pleasantly.

Tabber waited for the nurse to leave before answering, then he looked up at Siano. Siano had lost, Tabber told himself. Tabber had had his heart attack, but he was still living.

"You've caused this," he said to Siano in a hoarse voice. "You have caused me to be an invalid for the rest of my life if I'm wheeled out of here alive."

Siano smiled down at him. "You are the one who caused it, sir."

Tabber felt the anger stir in him, but he had promised himself that he'd stay calm. After all, it was just possible he'd have had his heart attack if Siano had never entered his life. That was the thing he really wanted to believe. He was not a superstitious man, but there was something he still didn't understand.

"I called you here to ask you one question," Tabber said, "and I want you to promise to tell me the truth."

Siano considered for a moment before answering. "I will give you that promise."

Tabber raised his head slightly from his pillow. "How did you know that Belfor Electronics stock would go up?"

Again Siano smiled down at Tabber, and his dark eyes seemed to grow deeper and darker. "I am on the board of directors, sir." He turned then, still smiling, and strode silently from the room.

From that day on Tabber struggled desperately to recover, but his heart had been severely damaged, irreparably damaged, and the chart at the foot of his bed showed a steady decline until death.

FAIR SHAKE

They were in the commissioner's office at headquarters. Snodman, with a B.S. in liberal arts, number one in his police academy class, ex-debating team captain and regional chess champion, adjusted his black horn-rimmed glasses with his little finger and peered down at the slip of paper the commissioner had handed him:

I know everything about my marks

At least I know enough

To catch them always unawares

They're never up to snuff

"Crude," Snodman said. "What does it mean, sir?"

"I've seen them before," Commissioner Moriarty said. "They're the work of a man the underworld calls 'The Snuffer.

"A professional assassin, sir?" Snodman asked, looking at Moriarty through emotionless blue eyes. It had always intrigued Snodman, the fact that a man named Moriarty would he decreed by fate to be a police commissioner and look so like the fictitious Sherlock Holmes would have looked, with lean hawk nose, shrewd gray eyes, even smoking a pipe the stem of which was at least slightly curved.

"Possibly the greatest hired killer the police have ever run up against," the commissioner said. "Rumor has it that he works for the syndicate no more than once a year and receives at least fifty thousand dollars a job. I personally know of six jobs he's definitely completed in various cities."

Snodman, who smoked a pipe himself, placed the stem between his thin lips and reached for his tobacco pouch. "How can you he so sure they were all the work of this... Snuffer, sir? Modus operandi?"

The commissioner smiled. "It is his M.O. that he is proud of. It varies with every job. In Chicago, concerning the sports fixing racket, it was an exploding basketball; two years ago Hans Greiber, the passport forger, was found drowned in one of those little German cars filled with water; and surely you remember when Joe Besini, who was going to turn state's evidence against the syndicate, Was found smothered by a hot pizza."

"Gruesome," Snodman said.

"Anchovies, too." Commissioner Moriarty shook his head reminiscently. "The fact is that in each of these cases the victim knew he was marked for death and had police protection. In each of these cases The Snuffer warned the victim with one of these little poems. A highly developed sense of fair play, if you ask me."

"Yes," Snodman agreed, shifting position in the leather office chair so that his trousers wouldn't become too wrinkled. He was one of the best dressed detectives on the force, and he was proudly aware of it. "I suppose every attempt has been made to trace him through the poems," he said.

The commissioner nodded. "As you can see, they're in hand printed ink on cheap stationery. The paper is too common to mean anything and Handwriting Analysis can't make anything out of the simple printing except that it's the work of a careful, precise individual, which I could have told you."

Snodman wrinkled his still youthful brow. "But why on earth does he send the poems? Doesn't he realize they merely increase his chances of being caught?"

The commissioner leaned over his desk. "Fair play, Snodman. The psychologists say that he's so clever and supremely confident that his conscience compels him to give his victims warning. They say that The Snuffer wants to preserve his anonymity yet boast about his work, so he writes poems. Some of them are quite good."

Snodman, who fancied himself something of an expert on literature, wanted to disagree with his superior but thought better of it. Besides, he was curious as to why the commissioner was filling him in on this subject, so he sat patiently and waited for his boss to get to the point.

"The point is," Moriarty said, biting on his curved pipe stem, "that a man named Ralph Capastrani has agreed to testify next month before a Senate Subcommittee hearing on organized crime. We thought it was a hush-hush thing, but kept Capastrani under protection anyway. Then, this morning, I received this poem in the mail."

"Does Capastrani know anything about it, sir?"

"No. We don't want him to die ofworry before the hearings. We're taking every precaution to keep The Snuffer from earning another fortune from the syndicate. Capastrani is under guard in a room at the Paxton Hotel, just two blocks from here. We moved him in this morning." The commissioner paused for effect and pressed his fingertips down onto the glass desktop. "Starting in ten minutes, your job will be to guard him."

"I'm honored you have the confidence in me, sir,"Snodman said, actually rather insulted that the commissioner should think he would have a hard time outwitting the composer of these jingling trivialities.

Commissioner Moriarty smiled his Holmes-like smile. "You are one of the most highly educated men on the force, Snodman, and in the few years you've been with us you've proven yourself to be an efficient and hardworking policeman. Few men of your caliber choose police work as a profession, and your dedication is unquestioned. I can think of no man on the force who would have a better chance of outwitting The Snuffer."

Snodman took this deluge of compliments with aplomb.

The commissioner picked up a silver letter opener and neatly opened one of the many letters on his desk. "Capastrani is in room twenty-four on the third floor," he said by way of dismissal. "I'll be over later myself to check on things."

Snodman rose casually and took his leave.

Suite 24 was small and sparsely but tastefully furnished. Shades had been pulled over the third floor, ledgeless windows; heating and air conditioning ducts had been blocked and the comfort was being inadequately supplied by a rented window air conditioner; food was brought up three times a day by a room service waiter who was duly searched before being admitted. Outside the door to the hall stood an armed patrolman; outside the door to the bedroom sat Snodman; inside the bedroom lay Capastrani, sleeping peacefully. Suite 24 was invulnerable.

Obviously Capastrani, a squat, hairy individual, had faith in his police department, for almost all of his time was occupied by sleeping and eating; but then, besides listening to the monotonous watery hum of the air conditioner, there really wasn't much else to do in suite 24.

Snodman's mind dwelt on how much the syndicate would pay to have Capastrani killed. It dwelt on Commissioner Moriarty and his thorough knowledge of The Snuffer. The commissioner had even consulted a police psychologist. Snodman had seen the gleam in the commissioner's eyes as he'd discussed the cunning assassin, and he was sure that Moriarty had dedicated himself to foiling or even capturing The Snuffer. A policeman's dream, Snodman said to himself, smiling.

The long day went by without event. The patrolman outside the door had changed when the three o'clock shift came on. Capastrani had emerged from his room only to eat a late breakfast and lunch, which he'd wolfed down before returning to stretch full length and fully clothed on the bed. Snodman had read a travel magazine three times. He yawned and looked at his watch: five o'clock.

At five forty-five he was speaking frantically into the telephone to Commissioner Moriarty. "You'd better come over here right away with a lab man, sir. I think somebody tried to poison Capastrani!"

Within five minutes the door to suite 24 flew open. Snodman's police revolver was out of its shoulder holster in a flash, but he relaxed as he saw it was the commissioner and a lab man. They looked in surprise at Snodman's revolver as Wilson, the uniformed patrolman guarding the hail, closed the door behind them.

"It's all right," Commissioner Moriarty said. "We should have knocked."

Snodman slipped the revolver into his suitcoat pocket. "Have a look at this," he said, pointing to the tray of food that room service had brought up for Capastrani's supper. To the lab man he said, "I think there's arsenic on the steak."

"I'm glad you called me personally," Commissioner Moriarty said. "You did the right thing."

Snodman smiled. "I knew you had a special interest in the case," he said. "I thought you'd want to come right over."

The commissioner nodded soberly. "That's why I chose a hotel only two blocks from headquarters."

The three of them leaned over the tray of food. "You can't see it now," Snodman said, "but there were traces of white powder on the underside of the steak when it was brought up. Most of it's dissolved in the juices by now.'

The commissioner picked up the plate and sniffed. "What made you suspicious?" he asked, replacing the plate.

Snodman shrugged. "A hunch. And I thought there was a peculiar odor about the steak."

"Check it out," the commissioner told the lab man. Then he drew Snodman over to the sofa to talk with him.

"Capastrani know about this?" Moriarty asked.

Snodman shook his head. "He's still asleep. I was going to wake him when supper came."

"Hmm," the commissioner said. "I don't understand how anybody could have slipped arsenic into that food. I toured the kitchen this morning and checked out the help myself. They're all trustworthy, long-time employees."

"Maybe somebody was bought," Snodman suggested. "The Snuffer would be able to afford it."

"Good point," the commissioner said. "Does Capastrani eat steak every night?"

"It's a standing order with room service. That's just the sort of habit The Snuffer would take advantage of. You said he studied his future victims carefully before each job."

"I didn't say that," the commissioner said. "He did–in his poem."

The lab man, a studious looking young fellow, walked over to them. "There's arsenic on the steak," he said. "I checked the salt, pepper, ketchup, coffee, even the cream for the coffee. Everything on the tray besides the steak is okay." Then he held out the slip of paper in his right hand. "This was stuck to the bottom of the steak plate, sir."

The commissioner took it, unfolding it slowly as Snodman watched closely. They read:

I am quite sure my little trick

Nicely stilled your Pigeon's song

'Cause a little bit of arsenic

Never hurt a soul–for long

The commissioner crumpled the poem and put it in his pocket. Then he turned to the lab man. "You can go now," he said. "On the way out tell the kitchen to send up another steak, and this time you stand right there while it's cooking."

"Right," the lab man said, and walked briskly and efficiently out of the room to implement his orders.

"We won't tell Capastrani about this," the commissioner said to Snodman. "He doesn't even know The Snuffer is after him. There's no point in rattling the state's star witness."

"Yes, sir," Snodman said.

The commissioner stretched his lean body. "You've been cooped up in here all day," he said to Snodman. "Why don't you go out for a while and get a bite to eat and some fresh air. The patrolman's outside the door, and I'll stay here myself and keep an eye on things until you return."

"Thank you, sir," Snodman said with appreciation. "To tell you the truth, I was about to ask that little favor myself. I could sure use some fresh air and a change of scenery." He walked to the door and paused. "Is there anything I can bring you, sir?'

"No, no thank you." The commissioner seemed almost eager for Snodman to leave. "Take an hour if you want, Snodman."

"Why, thank you, sir." He stepped into the hall and softly shut the door behind him.

Just after Snodman had left, room service arrived at the door with Capastrani's new steak. The commissioner let them in, examined the steak, made sure the patrolman in the hall was alert, then went into the bedroom to awaken Capastrani.

As he first emerged from sleep the squat little man was shocked to see the commissioner. Then he blinked his eyes a few times and recognized him. Without a word, he looked at his watch and rose from the mattress to leave the bedroom and eat supper.

With a smug little smile, the commissioner sat on the sofa and watched as Capastrani settled himself before the tray. Apparently the little man had been sound asleep and was completely unaware of the recent occurrence. Capastrani sprinkled salt and pepper liberally on his steak and buttered a roll. Then he unscrewed the cap on the ketchup bottle and tipped it. As was not unusual, nothing came out. He shook the bottle a few times, gently, then shook it harder. He was holding it upside down, looking at it curiously, when the force of its explosion blew out the entire third floor west wall.

As the ominous sound of the explosion reached police headquarters two blocks away, Snodman leaned back in his desk chair in his tiny office and smiled. He drew the genuine ketchup bottle from his shoulder holster and placed it in his bottom desk drawer. Then he picked up the slip of paper on which was the poem he'd just compulsively jotted down, tore it into tiny pieces and let the pieces flutter down into his wastebasket. For all his cleverness, the one thing he couldn't do was write poetry. Still, bad as they were, even in his lifetime his little jingles might yet achieve a certain degree of fame.

THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN

From far in front of Ulman the shrill, drawn out sound of the locomotive's whistle drifted back, long and lonely notes, like the forlorn wails of a distant siren. Ulman, bracing himself against a rough plywood wall, in the swaying boxcar, rose slowly. He could feel the train losing speed already as it slowed for the unmarked and seldom used crossing just outside of Erebville. It wouldn't do for him to ride all the way into the Erebville switchyard, for he'd been told that the railroad dicks were tough and eager there, especially this time of year, when the hoboes and migrant fruit pickers were moving west. Ulman had been told back east by a knowledgeable one-eyed hobo that the train would slow for this crossing about midnight, and that was the time to leap.

He made his way across the lurching car to the wide steel door that was closed all the way to a warped two-by-four, which he'd jammed in place to keep from getting locked in. He held on to the edge of the door for a moment, drew a deep breath, then with all his strength shot it sliding open.

Cool country air rushed in on him as he looked out into moonless darkness. He rubbed his grizzled chin, waiting for just the right moment. As the train rolled to its slowest point, then began to regain its speed, he leaped.

Ulman got to his feel slowly, slapping the dust off his clothes. His legs felt rubbery after the constant motion and his ears missed the constant roar. He grinned as the roar diminished and he saw the train's lights disappear in the distance. Tomorrow he'd hike to the other side of Erebville and jump the next twelve o'clock train west.

But where to spend the night? That was the problem, but a problem that Ulman had solved hundreds of times before. He stared about him into the darkness, and then he saw the lights. They appeared to be coming from the window of a house about a mile off.

It struck Ulman as odd that one of these country families would be up so late, and lucky, for he might be able to negotiate for a bunk in an outbuilding. If not that, at least he'd have a chance for a good feed in the morning. He made sure that nothing had fallen from his pockets, then set off walking.

It turned out to be a small frame farmhouse, and the only outbuildings were a ramshackle barn and a pigpen, neither of which appealed to Ulman as night quarters. He walked quietly toward the porch, noting that the usually present farm dog hadn't barked to reveal his presence. Before stepping up on the porch he decided to peek in one of the shadeless windows.

The inside of the house was dirty and cheaply furnished. The naked bulb in the ceiling fixture cast bright light over a worn carpet, ancient, ready-to-collapse chairs and a ripped sofa. Ulman decided to sleep in the open tonight and approach the house again in the morning for breakfast. He was about to turn away when a woman entered the room.

Her inexpensive flower-print dress matched her surroundings, but the woman didn't. She was about thirty, Ulman guessed, tall and graceful, with fine features, straight brown hair and very large blue eyes. Though the dress she wore was obviously cheap, it couldn't have been designed or worn better to show off her curvaceous figure. The hemline was well above shapely knees, the waist drawn in, the neckline low. She held a white cat cradled in her left arm while she idly stroked it with a graceful right hand. Ulman could tell somehow by her actions that she was alone.

Her beauty caused Ulman to draw in his breath sharply. The remoteness of the situation sent very evil thoughts darting across his mind, thoughts which he quickly dispelled, for Ulman was a poetic if not a literate man, a man who appreciated beauty and was at the same time bound by the peculiar morality of his type.

As he watched, the woman set the cat down and smoothed her dress sensually, seductively, with her slender hands. Ulman backed away from the window, frightened by the lust that was pounding through his veins, knowing to what it could ultimately lead. He turned and made himself walk quietly away. Then he made himself run.

Just after sunrise the next morning, Ulman rose from his cramped position beneath a tree, stretched, brushed off his canvas windbreaker, and began walking toward the farmhouse.

The house appeared more squalid in the daylight than it had the night before. Ulman noted that the fields surrounding it were grown over with weeds. He saw no stock except for a hog near the barn and several chickens in the barren farmyard. Then he noted two more hogs on the other side of the barn, but his eyes were trained on them for only a second. They switched immediately to the woman, still wearing the print dress, hanging a breeze-whipped line of wash.

She was aware of him, Ulman could tell, but she pretended not to notice him as she stretched upward to fasten clothespins as he approached. He stood silently for a moment, taking her in with his eyes, aware of the sharp, scrunching sound of wood and rope on wet cloth as she jammed down the final clothespin to hold a sheet to the line, then turned. There was no surprise or fear in her blue eyes, and this made Ulman even more ill at ease in the face of her beauty.

"Your mister at home?" he asked. He knew the answer to that.

"Ain't no mister here," she said, shifting her weight to one foot and staring frankly at him.

"I, uh, wonder," Ulman said, "if you could spare a bite of breakfast. I'd be willin' to work for it."

She ignored the question. "You hopped of'n that freight went by here last night, didn't you?"

Ulman's heart leaped. Had she seen him at the window? He decided to play it casually. "Sure did, missy. On my way to a job in California."

"California's a long ways."

"Sure is." Ulman rubbed his chin. 'How'd you know I come off that freight?"

"Lots of fellas do," she said. "For some reason they don't want to ride all the way in to Erebville."

"Railroad dicks," he said bitterly. "Always ready to lay a club alongside a man's head."

The woman smiled suddenly. "My name's Cyrila."

Ulman returned the grin, ashamed of his soiled clothes and dirty face. "Lou Ulman."

"Well, Mr. Ulman, you can wash up there at the pump an' I'll fix us some eggs."

Ulman grinned again, his eyes involuntarily running up and down the woman. "I appreciate it, ma'am."

Surprisingly the breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, fresh-brewed coffee, and a tall glass of orange juice looked delicious. Ulman sat down across from the woman at the table and began to eat with enthusiasm as he discovered the food to be as tasty as it looked. After the first few bites he realized she was staring at him.

"You say you live here alone?" he asked, wiping a corner of his mouth with a forefinger.

Cyrila nodded, her blue eyes still fixed on him intently. "Husband died five years ago."

Ulman took a large bite of bread and talked around it. "Quite a job makin' ends meet for a woman, ain't it? What do you raise?"

"Pigs, mostly. A few chickens."

Ulman nodded. "Them's nice lookin' pigs. How many you got?"

The woman sipped her coffee. "Bout a dozen. Hard to keep more'n that in feed. I sell 'em in the fall when they're fat enough and use some of the money to buy piglets."

"Start all over again then, huh?"

The woman nodded, smiling her beautiful smile. "Toilin' in the fields ain't woman's work," she said with a hint of coyness. "Pigs is about all that's left in these parts. Good profit in 'em if you can afford to feed 'em all summer long."

Ulman finished his eggs and licked the fork appreciatively.

"More, Mr. Ulman?" Her eyelids fluttered exaggeratedly and he suspected she was trying to use her feminine wiles on him, trying to lead him on.

He thought, looking at her, I ain't that lucky. "No, no thank you, ma'am. I'm full up."

"If you will, call me Cyrila," she said, toying with her coffee spoon.

Ulman hesitated, then smiled. "Sure will," he said, "Cyrila."

"There's a stack of firewood out behind the barn," she said smiling. "It does need–"

"Now, Cyrila," Ulman interrupted, "I said I'd work for my food an' I meant it. Just show me where the axe is."

After he'd chopped wood for an hour, Ulman found himself scything down the tall weeds behind the house, then mending the crude wire fence that surrounded the pigpen on the other side of the barn. Most of the time he worked he sang to himself, all the time watching for Cyrila as she worked in the house and yard. Now and then she'd smile and wave to him from a window, or turn from getting water at the pump and give him a warm look.

It must get lonely out here without a man, Ulman muttered, wielding the heavy hammer. It must.

It was almost sundown when he finished. He washed up at the pump while she stood gracefully on the porch, watching. He let the still-hot sun dry him briefly, slipped on his shirt, slicked back his hair with wet fingers and walked toward her, following her into the house.

It was cooler inside the house, and dim. The reverberating slam of the rusty screen door rang through the heavy air and left them in silence.

"You surely did a good day's work," she said. Her smile seemed a little forced this time, and she held onto the back of the old sofa as if for support.

He grinned and shrugged. "I guess you need a man around here, is all."

"Don' I know it, now?" She stepped away from the sofa. "I bet you sure worked up a thirst."

"Thirst? Well, yeah. It's close to that ol' bewitchin' hour, though, an' I gotta be on the other side of Erebville to jump that train. But if you got somethin' around..."

"I think there's some still in the cupboard," she said, the smile still set on her face. "It'll be old. Jus' use it for guests and medicine."

Ulman followed her into the kitchen. "The older the better."

His eyes roved up her as she stood on her toes to reach the top shelf. There were some cans and three bottles up there, two off-brand whiskeys and a more expensive bourbon bottle half full. She got down the expensive bottle and turned, handing it to him.

Ulman took a long swig, savoring the smoothness and warmth of the bourbon. The woman was watching him. He moved to hand the bottle back to her and her hand closed on his, squeezing the fingers about the neck of the bottle as if she meant for him to keep it. He was surprised to see that she was on the verge of crying.

"You're right, Mr. Ulman," she said, looking up at him. "I surely do need a man around here." She buried her head on his shoulder, sobbing, her body pressed against him. With his right hand Ulman held the bottle, with his left Cyrila's warm back. With his foot he kicked open the bedroom door.

It was pitch dark in the farmhouse when Cyrila rose. She stood by the bed, stretching languidly, then walked barefoot into the kitchen. She placed the bourbon bottle back in the cupboard, aside from the other bottles, and slipped into some old coveralls, rolled up at the sleeves.

Then the only sounds in the darkness were a heavy thump in the bedroom and the squeak of the rusty wheelbarrow axle. Sometime later, from the area of the barn, came the uneven gnashing of the chicken feed grinder working on something hard, amid the loud, thoroughly satisfied grunting and rooting of the pigs.

An hour later Cyrila was standing on the farmhouse porch. She had on her flower-print dress again, and behind her every light in the house blazed. A far-off wail, like a forlorn siren, rolled through the night. She stood listening to the approaching thunder of the distant train, heard it slow momentarily, then with a blast of new thunder begin to regain its speed. Gradually it left her in silence. She unconsciously smoothed the dress over her hips, sighed, then turned and walked into the house. The midnight train roared westward through the inky darkness–but Ulman wasn't on it.

HECTOR GOMEZ PROVIDES

Here, a hundred and fifty feet high on the ancient stone Tower of Saint Marcos, Hector Gomez felt free. The wind whipped about his lithe body, threatening to snatch him and hurl him out into high, cool space above the sea. A pelican flew past, lower than Hector, and gazed obliquely at him between wingbeats then soared in an ascending arc toward the sun. Below Hector the waves rolled in and became graceful ribbons of white surf, then boiling white water, against the rocks.

To Hector's right was the Avenue Del Mar, where three turista buses were parked in a line at the side of the road. Along the top of the stone wall above the sea, Mexican vendors had their glittering handmade wares displayed on blankets for sale to the Americans.

Directly below Hector was a tiny, semi-isolated portion of the sea. Saint Marcos Cove. The swells roared into the miniature cove regularly and smashed in white foam over jagged rock along the shore. The sides of the cove, less than a hundred feet apart, were also lined with sharp rock. Only in its center, for brief moments, was the water relatively calm.

Three times a day, Hector Gomez dived from atop the Tower of Saint Marcos into the center of the tiny cove. He had to time each dive perfectly with an oncoming swell, hitting the water just as the wave rolled into the cove. Otherwise the water in the cove was only about four feet deep, and the bottom was lined with hard pebbles rolled smooth by the waves. It was indeed a matter of delicate timing, Hector's dive. And a matter of courage. Everyone, tourist and native alike, knew that the dive was extremely dangerous.

And Hector knew the danger. With the detachment and freedom he felt before each dive came the accompanying price of fear.

Below him the turistas wereall out of the buses, staring up at him, pointing, focusing their cameras. Sunlight glinted off Mexican silver spread along the sea wall, off the windows of the buses and off upturned camera lenses.

Hector's feeling of freedom passed. It was time for business; he had Maria and their two children to feed and shelter. And the bus driver-guides below had by now finished telling the turistasthe manufactured legend of Spanish gold hidden somewhere at the bottom of the cove. Perhaps someday the brave diver would emerge with a handful of doubloons and no longer have to risk his life; the prospect, said the guides, was what compelled him to face death daily, even though the gold was cursed.

Hector let the first two swells roll into the cove and break; they were too small and the water in the cove wouldn't be deep enough for the dive.

The third wave appeared large enough. Fear tried to crawl up Hector's throat again as he raised his right arm in a signal to the turistas that he was about to dive; that they should ready their cameras. Now there was no turning back and still living a man's life with self-respect.

When the glittering emerald swell was at just the right point, almost ready to roll into the cove, Hector swallowed his near-panic, flexed his knees, and hurled himself off the tower.

The freedom again. The fear. He had to leap far enough out to clear the outcropping of cliff below. Had to keep his back tightly arched before going into the vertical position, or he might flip over too far backward and land wrong, on his back, breaking himself on the water even before he struck the cove's bottom. Yet if he didn't straighten his body in time, there was the cliff.

He timed it, uno, dos, tres... and he aimed his outstretched arms forward and down and brought his feet up, legs strained straight and rigid. He willed his body out away from the cliff, clenching his teeth so hard that a sharp pain shot through his jaws.

The tops of his tucked-in toes brushed the outcropping of rock seventy feet above the water, and he knew it would be a good dive.

Barely had he realized this when his fists broke the rushing surface of the wave rolling into the cove. There was a crash of water that he heard only for an instant. He arched his back again, flattening out quickly beneath the surface to slow his descent. Still he struck bottom hard, scraping his chest and thighs even though he pushed away from the smooth pebbles with his palms. His breath rushed out from between his lips in a graceful swirl of pearl-like bubbles, his blood pulsed in his ears, and he forced himself to stay calm as he rose to the surface.

The turistaswere applauding. Even in the sun's heat, Hector felt the warm glow of their appreciation; they had been entertained. The Americans didn't know that this part of his act, reaching shore without being smashed against the rocks, was almost as dangerous as the dive.

Hector stroked cautiously toward where the surf broke over the rocks, watching warily behind him for the next wave to come crashing in through the mouth of the cove. When it came, he prudently ducked beneath it and let it roll over him, feeling its force pass him by, rather than let it carry him tumbling out of control toward the jagged rocks. As the wave receded and the water again became momentarily calm, he raised his head and stroked again for shore.

He had to deal with three waves this way before he finally was safe on the rocks. Smiling, he climbed up to the road and walked wet and triumphant among the turistas, gratefully accepting their compliments, pesos, and the admiring glances of the young women. The turistasvoiced appreciation of his great courage. He smiled and told them he hoped they had gotten good photographs to take home from their Mexican vacations.

When the turistashad left, Vicente Escobar, one of the silver vendors, walked over to Hector and stood with him watching the exhaust-darkened square backs of the departing buses. A few of the turistaswaved from the open windows, then quickly closed the glass to conserve the air conditioning.

"You're going to kill yourself," Vicente Escobar said. "Why do you continue to dive?" Even as he asked, he knew it was a question for which there was a universal answer.

"I do it for this," Hector said, holding up the fistful of pesos he had collected for his dive. He had in his hand over eleven hundred pesos. Almost seven American dollars.

At the end of the day, Hector changed from his low-cut black trunks into worn jeans and a sleeveless red T-shirt. Then, with his day's profits locked in a steel box in the car's trunk, he climbed into his ten-year-old gray Plymouth and drove south twenty miles to the village of Barbilla, where he lived with Maria, their five-year-old son Eugenio, and their six-year-old daughter Ramona.

The Gomezes' lifestyle was much like everyone else's in Barbilla. Their home was small, simple, with a dirt floor, and a sheet metal roof held down by nails driven through bottle caps whose cork linings kept out the seasonal rains. In the Gomez home was running water, and a bathroom. Because Hector dived rather than eke out a living as a fisherman, the Gomezes were only occasionally hungry.

Maria Gomez watched her husband walk up the path to their home. To her right, where the land overlooked the ocean, she knew that the American Martin still stood before his canvas and easel, painting another of his seascapes. She had gone up the trail to the rocks and talked to the American again today. Why not? She was lonely, with Hector always gone. To be alone with two small children was enough to drive any twenty-five-year-old woman loco, especially a woman as energetic and pretty as Maria. Probably, she thought, lowering her hands to wipe grease from tortillas onto her print skirt, Hector wouldn't object to her talking with the American Martin. But it would be just as well if Hector never found out. He had a man's foolish pride.

Eugenio saw Hector and ran out to embrace his father. Young Ramona followed. Hector hugged his children to him, smiling whitely, his lean muscles dancing and cording as he lifted a child in each arm.

"It was a profitable day," he said, as he lowered the children and bent to kiss Maria. "Almost four thousand pesos." He was beaming proudly, this man who risked death to provide for his family, so she smiled at him. "Soon we might have enough saved to move away from here, into Mazatlan."

Into a house almost like this only larger, Maria thought, though she said, "Supper is almost ready."

He walked past her. She could feel the weariness emanating from his body. Herself weary, she followed him into the house and tended to the rice and shrimp on the propane gas stove. If Hector moved them to Mazatlan Maria might have an electric stove; she'd heard they were better. But she wanted more than that, really. She wanted her meals cooked for her like the rich in the cities. She wanted not just better clothes, but fine clothes. For herself. For her children. For the foolishly daring Hector.

What she did not want was for Hector to time one of his dives wrong and die. Or worse, become a cripple she would have to support for the rest of their marriage. Maria, living in poverty, remembered abject poverty, and was afraid of it. When she passed a beggar in the square, pleading respectfully with the turistasfor money for herself and the children, Maria felt something cold crawl about inside her. She could be that woman, she knew. The difference between what she was and what she might become was only a fraction of a second, an insane risk taken three times a day every day twenty miles down the coast at the Tower of Saint Marcos.

Hector ate greedily, gratefully, complimenting Maria on her cooking. After supper he played with the children, laughing and making promises he couldn't keep. Though he was a man, and a good one, there was something childlike in Hector's dark, lithe handsomeness. His was a youthful, whipcord body that moved with a matador's grace and strength. Yet now he was thirty-four, and above his black diving trunks was the beginning of a stomach paunch. Maria knew that Hector was at the time of life when men's reflexes and timing were beginning to deteriorate without them even suspecting. This was a time of danger, especially in Hector's line of work.

In bed, he placed his lean, strong arms about her, and immediately fell asleep.

The next morning, the American Martin was again at his easel on the rocks overlooking the sea and a view of the coast, and was working on the painting he'd begun yesterday. Before speaking to him, Maria stood silently at the bend in the steep path, watching him work. His huge hands were gentle and sure with the brush, lending the canvas life. He was a tall, muscular man with pale blue eyes and a full red beard. Always beside his easel was a gray foam cooler containing ice and beer. Maria had heard that he painted dozens of pictures, then drove them into the Arts and Crafts Center in Mazatlan and sold them to turistas. She didn't know where Martin lived; no one seemed to know that.

He must have heard her, or sensed her presence on the path. "Good morning, Maria," he said, not looking away from his canvas. He was dabbing clouds in a blue sky.

She said nothing but moved nearer.

"What do you think?' he asked, nodding his shaggy head toward the canvas.

It amazed her that anyone could create a likeness so, accurately. "Bonito, "she said. Pretty. Not beautiful. Not majestic. Only Bonito.

The American Martin smiled bitterly. "Here," he said, moving away from before the easel. He gripped her elbow and positioned her to stand where he had stood, placed a brush in her hand and moved behind her. His thick arms, pale and dusted with reddish hair, slipped around her waist.

For the next two weeks, Maria went almost every day to the rocks above the ocean. The American Martin's gentle, thick hands did things to her that she had never dreamed possible, that Hector could never imagine. In Martin's loving clasp she poured out all of her fears, and he gladly accepted them and kept them safely where they no longer haunted her and foretold a bleak future.

During the third week, while Hector was at the Tower of Saint Marcos, Martin said, "Drive into Mazatlan with me. We can bring your children. There's a man I want you to meet. His name is Anderson."

"Hector will he home soon."

"It doesn't matter," Martin told her. "We'll be back within a few hours; Hector won't know you've been gone, unless the kids mention it."

"They won't if I tell them not to," Maria said. "And Hector will he tired and go to sleep soon after he eats supper."

"Then come with me," Martin coaxed. He kissed her. When his lips had barely left hers, he said, "Anderson can make us rich, you and me."

Maria knew that, like Hector, she was poised above a steep, exhilarating plunge. It would take courage to leap free.

She nodded silently, walked down the path and got the children, and they drove with Martin in his dusty Jeep into Mazatlan.

That Saturday, high above half a dozen tour buses and scores of American turistas, Hector stood poised on the Tower of Saint Marcos and felt the freedom, but not the fear.

That puzzled him. He studied the incoming swells, waiting for the right one to time for his dive. The ribbons of white surf along the coast beyond the cove seemed to undulate and move in unfamiliar rhythms and patterns. The sea was behaving strangely today. Perhaps that was why he wasn't afraid; the strangeness had something to do with his own new fearlessness.

At last Hector saw an oncoming swell that would provide deep enough water when it entered the cove. He watched it approach, a rolling, glittering vast hill of water, shot with sunlight as if it contained thousands of diamonds.

It seemed to take forever to reach the point Hector had chosen, where he knew it would begin to curl into a green, sloping wall for its assault on the cove. The point from where it would enter the cove only a moment before the plummeting Hector sliced into its cool depths.

In that last few seconds, Hector realized there was something wrong. The oncoming swell wasn't approaching smoothly; it was pausing, then rushing forward, wavering like a liquid rippling in a drunkard's unsteady glass. Hector didn't want to dive.

But his right arm was already raised, signaling to the turistas, all watching from below through admiring, apprehensive eyes. Many were peering through camera lenses, hastily setting F-stops and shutter speeds, not admitting to the secret desire to record on film a brave man's death. It was too late for Hector to turn away with self-respect.

As soon as he launched himself into the air, Hector felt his confidence return. Only when he had safely passed the outcropping of rock and his body was out of its arch and vertical, did he glimpse for an instant below him the backwash of blue-green water.

The wave was receding!

Terror clutched at his throat and contorted his body. There was no time to scream. He struck the water with a dark thunder that he knew was death.

"That's that," Martin said to Anderson, the next day in Anderson's cluttered office in Mexico City. Anderson was a gangly giraffe of a man who breathed through his mouth and perspired a lot. "Maria slipped him some peyote. It's a drug that distorts time and sense just enough. Will there be any trouble collecting from the company?"

Anderson shook his long, pale head and said, "No problem at all; no clouds on the horizon. Why should there be? A wife uses her husband's earnings to buy life insurance on him. And why not? He was in a dangerous occupation and she had two children to think about. Remember I'm Great Intercontinental Insurance's Mexico claims agent; I can verify Hector's signature on the policy. I'll recommend to the company that they pay his widow the settlement.

There's no way for Great Intercontinental, or anyone else, to know you and I are soon going to split that settlement fifty-fifty. And what they don't know can't hurt us. By the way, where's the wealthy widow?"

"She and the kids are getting into Mexico City tomorrow," Martin said. "After the funeral. I've already rented them a nice furnished apartment on the Reforma, where we'll live happily if not ever after."

"Can you get her to sign a policy with you as the beneficiary?" Anderson asked. "A genuine signature is always best. You can't beat the real McCoy."

"I'll tell her it's a form she needs to sign to collect the settlement. She'll believe that. She can barely read and write." Martin paced to the dirty window, gazed out at the traffic on Avenue Morelos, then bit the end off a cigar. He plucked the tobacco crumbs and leaf from his tongue and rolled them between his thumb and forefinger into a tight little ball, which he tossed on the floor. Anderson's litany of smug little platitudes irritated him. Yet he didn't want to do even one more canvas and sell it to oafs for an insultingly small sum. "I'm not so confident about this one, Anderson. Are you sure the company won't suspect?"

Anderson tilted back his narrow, balding head and laughed through his nose. "Do you know how many Maria Gomezes there are in Mexico? They're like Smiths and Joneses in the United States. Like pebbles on the beach. The company will pay; they'll never even know that this Mexico City Gomez was related to Hector Gomez of Barbilla. And your name as beneficiary won't ring any bells at the home office. Believe me, Martin, we're touching all the bases. We'll soon be home free."

"Okay," Martin said, lighting the cigar. He blew smoke off to the side. "Get the policy written up and I'll get Maria to sign tomorrow night, while she's still disoriented by the funeral and the trip here. There's no point in wasting time.”

"You're a man after my own heart," Anderson said, smiling and sliding open a desk drawer. "Time is money."

"For both of us," Martin said.

Or one of us, Anderson thought behind his smile. He was a man who planned ahead even as he tied loose ends.

So the Spanish gold in Saint Marcos Cove was not entirely a legend concocted for turistas. After his last and deepest dive, Hector Gomez did indeed produce a treasure. Complete with a curse.

EXPLOSIVE CARGO

It don't matter a whit to me. Nothing does. I wasn't supposed to be hauling that load. The schedule had me bobtailing my Kenworth tractor back to Saint Louis instead of pulling 60,000 pounds in a new trailer on a special run to Philadelphia. It's all the same to me. The trucking company knows it and that's why they gave me the unscheduled run. Because I don't live by any schedule or set of rules. They say Ruddy Kane don't give a damn if the sun drifts away like a red balloon, that he don't care for anything or anybody, including himself. They're pure right.

A big flatbed hauling steel pipe in the opposite direction on the divided highway had told me over the CB that it was clear of bears over his shoulder all the way to Allenville, so I was cutting a fat path, holding the big Kenworth well over the legal limit and damn near pushing the pesky four-wheelers into the slow lane where they belonged so I could pass. You get no argument out of anyone you outweigh by over thirty tons.

Just past the Route Nineteen cloverleaf I saw the hitchhiker, standing well up on a grade that I had to gear down to climb. He was a square-shouldered guy with a blondish heard, wearing a long-sleeved old army fatigue jacket despite the eighty-plus heat. One of his feet was propped up on a beat-looking black suitcase painted red at the corners. As I passed, he braced himself against the coming backwash of the big truck and made a sweeping motion with his thumb, already looking past me for the next vehicle. The company's got a rule against picking up hitchhikers. I pulled two quick blasts out of the air horn and let the grade help me slow so I could steer onto the shoulder and wait.

He had almost a half a mile to run with the old suitcase, and I sat watching him in the right-hand mirror. A string of four-wheelers swished by me on the left and headed like bright-colored darts toward the crest of the rise. The big diesel under the hood rumbled like it wanted to give chase.

The hitchhiker was breathing hard when he reached the truck. Even over the rumble of the diesel I could hear him panting as he opened the passenger-side door and hoisted his suitcase up onto the floor. The cab's seat was higher than he'd thought, and I reached over and grabbed him by the wrist to help him in. He seemed to resent that as he pulled the door shut with a slam and settled back in the upholstery. I dropped the Kenworth into low range and steered back onto the highway, working through the gears as I took the rest of the grade.

"Ruddy Kane," I said by way of introduction. "Where you headed?"

"Far as you're goin' in this direction."

He hadn't given me his name. That should have clued me. Up close he was a scruffy-looking little guy with a twice-broke nose and a U-shaped scar on his forehead. Too had he couldn't grow that beard over the rest of his face.

"I'll be turnin' north at Seventy-seven," I told him.

"My name's Brogan," he said, as if he'd thought it over. I nodded like Brogan was everybody's name. "I'm headin' east to get a job."

"What do you do?"

"Most anything."

What he was best at was being vague. I caught a faint mildewed odor from his wrinkled fatigue jacket and faded denim Levis, and I recognized what that scent might mean. I'd slept outside on the ground before.

The hell with it. None of my business.

"You had supper yet?" I asked Brogan.

He looked sharply at me and shook his head no.

"Place up there around the next curve I usually stop at," I told him. "Dale's Speed Grill. They serve top hamburgers fast and so are the waitresses."

Brogan said nothing, dug his hands into the baggy pockets of his jacket.

We took the curve and I saw the big neon hamburger on the roof of Dale's, bright red and green in the fast-fading light. The restaurant was small and kind of dumpy-looking, but it was neat and clean inside, and almost everyone who traveled this highway regularly made it their meal stop if they were in the area.

I slowed the Kenworth, waited for a station wagon to pass, and edged into the right lane. There were half a dozen road rigs parked in Dale's big graveled lot, and a Highway Patrol car nosed up against the side of the low building.

Brogan's hands came out of his jacket pockets. The right one held a revolver. I couldn't say I was surprised.

"Keep right on drivin'," Brogan said.

I hit the accelerator and glanced at him as I shifted gears. "To where?"

"Wherever I tell you."

He pressed the barrel of the gun into my ribs to show me he was sincere. I saw Dale's bright neon hamburger fall away and disappear in the right outside mirror.

"The law on you?" I asked.

Brogan looked at me from beneath the curved scar on his forehead. You could've chilled beer with his eyes. "You don't need to know nothin' except how to drive this hunk of iron."

I made high range and considered. "And when you don't need me for that anymore, you don't need me at all."

He held the gun out where it would attract my eyes. "You scared, Mr. Driver?"

"Some." I concentrated on my driving with half my mind while the other half wondered just who this mildewed little desperado thought he was.

"Stick to the speed limit!" he ordered, purposely working the pistol barrel on my ribs to produce pain. I edged back to within the law.

"Somethin' you oughta know," I told him. "I'm haulin' explosives. Quick-dry cement and blasting powder for a big engineering project in Pennsylvania."

Brogan shrugged. "If it wasn't safe, you wouldn't be haulin' it."

"It's safe as long as I'm on smooth highway. Otherwise it could blow a fifty-foot crater in the ground. I thought you should know that in case you got plans to take this rig anywhere it's not supposed to go."

Brogan's grin was yellow in the glare of oncoming headlights, crooked in contrast to his pale level eyes. "I'll tell you when it's time for you to know my plans. This thing got plenty of fuel?"

"I topped the tanks just before I picked you up," I told him. "That should add to the explosion if anything goes wrong."

He ignored me, still grinning, and settled back in his seat with the gun still pointed at me.

We drove for almost an hour that way, without talking. When we reached the Route Twenty-two intersection I veered gently right and downshifted for a steep grade. Brogan didn't move beside me. He might have been sleeping, sitting the way he was with the back of his head against the upholstery. I got the impression maybe he wanted me to think he might he asleep so I'd try to get tricky.

Now that the sun was down the evening was cool, so I cut the air conditioner and rolled down a window. That caused Brogan to stir, nothing more.

The Highway Patrol weigh station was ahead on the right. As we approached I saw that the barrier arm was up and the station was open. There were two rigs waiting to drive onto the scale, where a trooper we called Rock Face Evans would be waiting to record their axle weights to make sure they weren't beyond the legal limits. I didn't slack speed as I went past.

We'd gone another four miles before I heard the siren.

Brogan sat up straight, swiveled his head. He couldn't see behind us from where he sat, but I could see the flashing red lights in my rearview mirror.

"State Patrol," I said. "Want me to stop?"

The gun barrel raked down my ribs. "I want you to drive," Brogan snarled, "like you never drove before!" He was some pumpkin.

I worked the gears and took us up to seventy. Wind screamed around the mirrors and diesel stacks and Brogan looked a little alarmed. I checked the mirror and saw that we were being pursued by two cars now. They were half a mile back and closing.

"No way to outrun 'em," I said. The sirens continued to wail behind us over the sound of the wind. I took us up to eighty. Brogan began to squirm in his seat.

"If you don't want to get caught," I told him, "there's only one thing to do."

I yanked on the wheel and we were off the pavement, bouncing across the wide grass median toward the other two lanes of the divided highway.

"Get us back on the road!" Brogan shouted. "The explosives!" He jabbed with the gun.

The truck hit a grassy rise, jounced to the side, wind and sirens still screaming at us. There were some small trees along the center of the median. Brogan's eyes were as wide as his gaping mouth as we mowed down the trees, picking up speed. Dust and a few leaves swirled inside the cab. "They can't follow us!" I yelled as the truck bounced back onto cement and we roared easy in the westbound lane with the right wheels on the shoulder. I took us up over ninety. The diesel howled.

"Gawdalmighty!" Brogan screamed.

Oncoming headlights flashed past us at a combined speed of a hundred and fifty. Brogan was staring straight ahead, sitting so stiffly pigeons might have lit on him. I looked over at him and spit on his gun hand, holding the wheel firm as the side of the truck shot sparks as we scraped the concrete rail of an overpass.

We both saw the roadblock ahead, two cars with flashing lights, parked to block the highway, distant small figures running in the shadowed red glare. On either side of the highway at that point the ground sloped up at close to a forty-five degree angle.

"We can go around 'em!" I called over the wind and the roar of the diesel.

Brogan was shaking now, the gun forgotten. I laughed at him. The world's Brogans don't like being laughed at, but who does? "It's a roadblock!" he screamed. "You're crazy!"

"Let's crash it!"

His eyes were wide and straining, his mouth working so that his beard hobbled up and down as if his teeth were chattering. Maybe they were.

"Don't worry about flippin' on that hill!" I shouted.

"We'll turn over! Stop this thing!"

I paid no attention to him and swept to the side of the Highway Patrol cars. We heard shots.

"Please!" Brogan screamed.

I stamped on the accelerator. The trailer was whipping behind us and I wrestled the wheel as we jolted and tilted to the left so far that Brogan's limp body slammed against me, then back to the right so he flew to the other side of the cab and slumped against the door.

I braked the rig to a slow, hissing stop.

They were coming on foot and by car behind me. I sat and watched them in the mirror. The passenger-side door was yanked open and Brogan would have fallen out if two troopers hadn't caught him and lowered him to the ground. One of them eased the revolver from his hand.

My door was pulled open. More guns.

"Hey, crazy man!" Rock Face yelled at me. "What in the hell was this all about?"

"He had a gun on me," I said, climbing down on rubbery legs, "made me drive him where he wanted to go."

"This is Dennison!" one of the troopers said, as a handcuffed and staggering Brogan was led around the side of the truck. "He's wanted for three drug murders in Saint Louis!"

I stared. "He told me his name was Brogan. I picked him up hitchhiking."

"You should have known better," Rock Face said.

"I should have," I agreed.

Rock Face squinted at Brogan-Dennison from under the wide brim of his trooper's hat. "What did you do to him?"

"I told him I was hauling explosives. Guess it wore on his nerves. And all I've got is a load of foam insulation."

Rock Face shook his head, then chuckled.

I chuckled along with him. Then he laughed aloud and I laughed.

More patrol cars arrived. The questions and answers began.

They didn't hold me long, and soon I was back on the road, feeling the numbing beat of the wind through the rolled-down window. When I looked at my watch I saw that I wasn't too far off schedule.

There was a steep grade ahead and I built up speed so the weight I was hauling wouldn't slow me too much as the truck climbed. Cement and blasting powder was what I was hauling, not foam insulation. But I couldn't tell that to Rock Face.

I was overweight on both axles. I couldn't have stopped for that scale.

Copyright Information

This collection originally published by Mystery Scene Press as their Author's Choice Collection #7–©1994 Mystery Scene Press.

"Introduction" © 1994 by John Lutz

"Shadows Everywhere" originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, June 1973.  © 1973 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"The Lemon Drink Queen" originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, February, 1974. © 1974 by H. S. D. Publications, Inc.

"A Rare Bird" originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, August, 1967. © 1967 by H. S. D. Publications, Inc.

"A Verdict of Death" originally published in Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine, May, 1974.  © 1974 by Renown Books, Inc.

"All of a Sudden" originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, August 1974  © 1974 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"Living All Alone" originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, May, 1972  © 1972 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"Garden of Dreams" " originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, June 1971  © 1971 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"Prospectus on Death"  " originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July 1971  © 1971 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"Fair Shake"  " originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April 1968  © 1968 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"The Midnight Train"  " originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March, 1968  © 1968 by H.S.D. Publications Inc.

"Hector Gomez Provides" originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August, 1985  © 1985 by Renown Books, Inc.

"Explosive Cargo" originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October 1977,  © 1977 by David Publications, Inc.