“How do they feel about me, Grant?”
“Opinion is somewhat divided, Coop. If a few were left around to answer questions, I think they’d like you better. And you were the boy they had qualms about! They thought you’d blow the works by cracking up at the wrong time.”
“I did crack,” Cooper said, remembering the scene in the bedroom.
“Sure you did. You got so nervous, you went all to pieces. Don’t forget, Coop, I’ve read the transcript of what you dictated yesterday. Hiding guns, playing one group against another, inventing snakes, then pulling a windup scene with Rocko that smacks of the days of the golden west. You cracked up great.”
“What will happen?”
“To you? The doc up in Washington will restore your boyish beauty to keep somebody who used to hate Farat from taking an unexpected crack at you. Then they’ll probably assign you to something easy to let you get your breath.”
A forgotten feeling flooded into Cooper. He felt once and a half life size. The world was a shiny red apple. Pick it up and take a big bite.
“What are you grinning about, chum?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re grinning and I haven’t even told you my news yet.”
“What news?”
“They’re letting you up today. But they want you to stick around. And to keep you out of trouble I’m giving you an interim assignment. To last until they order you north. I want you to stick with the Hutcheon girl. She’s pretty grim about the whole thing. I suppose that, in a way, we’re partially responsible. I’ve got a list of the sour balls in Carla’s organization. The kid sister will have to gather up the strings before it falls apart entirely — the legitimate enterprises. You can help the kid wash out the questionable ones and show her how to act like a boss. A million and a half worth of resort properties is a nice bundle, even after the tax hack.”
Ten days later Cooper, sprawled on the beach under the golden fist of the sun, heard Barbara say, at his elbow, “A big help you are!”
He yawned, stretched and sat up. He looked approvingly at her. She wore the aqua velvet suit he had first seen her in. “Taking time out for a swim?”
“No thanks to you, Mr. Cooper,” she said severely. Then her face lighted up. “Coop, I think we’ve found him. Wonderful experience and all that. He says that he can take over right away.”
“On the percentage we talked about?”
“Yes. Coop, will you talk to him too? Give me your opinion of him?”
“Aren’t you getting a little dependent on me, woman?”
She looked down and drew lines in the sand with her finger. “I guess so.”
“Is that good?”
“Doesn’t that depend on you?” she asked without looking up.
He thought then, of the quiet years, of the time when he kept to himself because there was nothing in him to give. No strength to share. He looked at her shining hair and thought how strange it was that in the very moment of his finding himself again, he should also find her, as though fate had kept her carefully in the wings until time for her to walk on stage.
Cooper reached out and took hold of the hand, stilled the drawing of lines.
“I wanted to give it a longer trial run,” he said.
“You either know or you don’t.”
“Since you put it that way, Barbara...”
Her lips had a warm firmness, a substance to them. Her hair had the smell of sun and sea.
He looked up then and said softly, “Darling, your whole big hotel is staring at us.”
“Our hotel, friend.”
She got up and started walking down toward the boom of the surf. She looked back over her shoulder with a manner and look distilled of pure femininity.
When he started after her, she ran, but it seemed to him that she wasn’t running as fast as she could. Deep in her glowing hair was the white patch that marked the place where the bullet crease was bandaged. He caught her approximately twenty feet from shore.