“But now they’ve found out where we live, and they have the place surrounded. Barclay rented the house right across the street, and they watch me all the time. They’re waiting for me to lead them to him—”
“And they don’t know he’s inside?”
“I don’t think so. You see, they searched it the first time while he was actually gone. It was disguised as a burglary, but it was pretty transparent.”
“But didn’t you say they’d searched it again today? Yesterday, I mean?”
She nodded. “He’s in a sealed-off portion of the attic, and the only way into it is through the ceiling of a second-floor closet. He has to stay up there nearly all the time. All the time when I’m out of the house. I think they’re pretty sure he’s gone, but they know if they keep watching me I’ll lead them to him sooner or later. I hadn’t realized until what happened up at the lake that they might try beating me up. That scares me, because frankly I don’t know how much of it I could take.”
I thought of it, feeling the cold stirrings of anger and an increasing awareness of just how much more there was to this girl than her looks. She was cast out of the pure metal. No whining, no heroics—she simply said she didn’t know how much of it she could take and went right on with what she had to do. The next time that pug looked at me, I’d look back.
She went on. “And as to what’s in the plane, it’s money. About eighty thousand dollars, to be exact. All he has left. He can’t take much more, Bill. That plane crash did something to him—the crash, that is—and then being brought right back in the middle of them after he thought he had gotten away. And losing the money on top of it, so he couldn’t even run any more.”
“But you just wrote a check for fifteen thousand—”
“I know. Naturally, he had to leave me some so I could follow him. And I sold my jewelry, and borrowed what I could on the car.”
I began to catch on then. There’d been this $700 trap gun and three fathoms of Cadillac and all the rest, so I’d been hit rather a glancing blow by the fact that she was going to trust me out of town with $15,000 of her money. If I turned out to be a crook and ran off with it, it was such a bore to have to go down to the bank and tell them to transfer another bushel or two into the checking account. It wasn’t exactly like that. She was merely handing me the last chance they’d ever have. This girl was a plunger. If she said she trusted you she trusted you all over.
“Well, wait,” I said. “I can probably find a cheaper boat—”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go to sea in a cheap boat. And we’ll recover the money from the plane, anyway.”
“All right. But, listen. My God, do you realize the jam you’ll be in if something happens to me?”
“That was the general idea, Bill, when I said I wanted time to make up my mind about you. Remember?”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “Do you mind if I get a little personal?”
“Why, no. What is it?”
I tried to say it lightly. “I’ve been feeling sorry for Macaulay because he was up against a rough proposition alone. I’d like to amend that, for the record. I don’t know of anybody who’s less alone.”
She didn’t answer for a moment, and I wondered if I’d gotten it off as lightly as I intended. After all, this was an awkward situation for her, and she’d already shown me the road signs once.
It was almost too fast for me then. She slid toward me on the seat, murmuring, “Bill . . . Bill!” her face lifted to mine and her arms slipped up around my neck, and then I was overboard in a sea of Shannon Macaulay. My arms tightened around her and I was kissing her, assaulted by faint fragrance and the touch of her and the way she could overrun and flood all the last corners of consciousness, and all the time my mind was trying to regain that half second of lag and tell me it was an act and that the reason she was saying my name over and over was to keep me from having my head blown off.
It wasn’t thought. You couldn’t hold her in your arms and think, so it had to be instinct that told me what it was. She’d been looking beyond me, and must have seen him silhouetted against the sky. The surf and the pounding of blood in my ears drowned out any possibility of my hearing him, but he’d probably be standing at the window now, right at the back of my neck, and if she hadn’t already got across the fact it was somebody named Bill she was kissing, and not Macaulay, she’d have blood all over her before she could say it again.
A voice said, “All right, Jack. Break it up and turn round.”
I was so tight and the tension broke so suddenly I was conscious of an almost hysterical impulse to giggle over the idea. I knew now he’d heard her say Bill, all right, because he called me Jack.
Instead, that is, of just shooting me without bothering to say anything.
I turned. A light burst in my face, and another voice I would know anywhere remarked with urbane weariness, “I say, you people are oversexed, aren’t you?”
Two thoughts caught up with me at once. The first was that they hadn’t heard us and didn’t suspect anything. Her reaction time had been so fast they’d caught us kissing, just what you’d have expected of two people in a parked car along the beach. That was good.
But it was the second one that pulled the ground from under me. They had that light in my face. They’d be blind if they didn’t see the marks that pug had left on it.
I had never been more right. “Hmmmm,” Barclay said softly, somewhere in the darkness. “So that’s where he went.”
I didn’t say anything. I could feel the hair prickle along the back of my neck.
“Came to see you, didn’t he?”
“Who?” I asked, just stalling for time. I had to think of something. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t be dense, if you don’t mind. Chap you hit, up at the lake.”
If I denied it they wouldn’t believe me, anyway, and when he didn’t show up they’d go out there and ask the watchmen. They’d know then I’d done something to him. There was a better way: talk like a loud-mouthed fool, and admit it. It didn’t have much chance, but at least it had more than the other.
“If that’s who you mean,” I said. “He did. I guess you haven’t seen his face. And that’s not all. If you don’t keep him out of my hair he’s going to be bent worse than that the next time you get him back.”
“Where is he now?”
“How would I know?” I said. “Was he supposed to tell me his plans?”
It was creepy. I was scared and in a bad spot, trying to talk like Mike Hammer, and to nobody. There was just that light glaring in my face and a whole universe of blackness around it.
“Well, it isn’t important,” he said. “But there’s another matter. We’re about to suggest that you leave town, Manning, and do it immediately. These sylvan assignations of yours and Mrs. Macaulay’s are becoming something of a nuisance; this is twice we’ve been led on a fool’s errand just to find you rutting about the landscape. Get out of the car.”
I didn’t want to, but I got out. I heard her shaky indrawn breath as I closed the door. “No. No. No—”
It was a good, cold-blooded, professional job. Nobody said anything. Nobody became excited. I never did even know for sure how many there were besides Barclay. I swung at the first dark shape I saw, because I had to do something; the blackjack sliced down across the muscles of my upper arm and it became a dangling, inert sausage stuffed with pain. They pulled both arms behind me and bent me back and slugged me in the stomach. At first I tightened the abdominal muscles in time to the cadenced beat of it, slug, swing, slug, but after a while I lost even the power to do that. Somewhere far off I could hear her crying out and opening the car door, but then somebody pushed her and she fell.