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A knock on the door made me jump. "Mr. Evans?"

It was Sheila's voice. I got over there and pulled the door open. She was standing outside with a paper cup of coffee in each hand, looking remarkably healthy and unconfused in the shortsleeved white shirt and tan cotton pants in which she'd crossed the country with me some weeks earlier, now crisp and clean again. Despite the pants, which are my least favorite feminine garment, she looked more like a woman and less like a disturbed child than any time since I'd known her.

She stepped past me. I closed the door. She was looking at me hard when I turned. "What's the matter, darling?" she asked. "You look awful. Are you having some kind of a shock reaction? Let me look at that shoulder."

"The hell with the shoulder," I said. "Are you all right?"

She frowned slightly. "Why shouldn't I be all right.

Oh." She looked up at me and laughed. "Heavens, have you been having an attack of conscience, or something?"

"Or something," I said grimly.

She said, "Here. Drink your coffee and try to be sensible."

I said, "I'm sensible as hell, now. But Dr. Tommy would have me shot, and quite justifiably, if he knew-"

"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Dr. Stern is an idiot if he thinks… What does he think?"

"Well, I'd say seduction is the last medicine in the world he'd prescribe for this particular patient."

"That's what I said," she murmured, "he's an idiot! I've been married, darling. I've been… Well, it's not as if I were an innocent virgin, is it? On the record, that's the one thing in the world I'm not. Why should it hurt me to go to bed with a man I like, for a change?" She laughed. "Anyway, who seduced whom?"

I looked down at her, reflecting that things and people never seemed to turn out quite the way you expected, particularly people.

"You're a shameless wench, Skinny," I said.

"Of course," she said calmly. 'What did you think I was?

All you had to do was look at the file and you'd know that after all that I had to be a shameless wench, or dead." A little hardness had come into her voice. "Don't worry about hurting me, darling. It's been tried by experts, and I don't mean just the ones in Costa Verde. I'll tell you about my marriage sometime. It was a dilly. I'm not really fragile, you know. Just because I'm not built like a… like a brick outhouse doesn't mean…" She stopped.

I grinned. "Here we go again."

She laughed and said, "Honest, I wasn't really thinking of Catherine Smith when I said that. Well, maybe I was.

•.. Eric?"

"Yes."

"Last night I… I said a lot of silly things, didn't I? Don't take them seriously, please."

I regarded her for a moment. "Sure," I said.

She went on quickly, "I mean, we're not going to be silly and talk a lot of nonsense about love. After all those weeks of being an animal in a cage, I was ready to… to attach myself to the first person who treated me as a human being. You don't have to feel, well, obligated. I'll get over it." She gulped her coffee and glanced at her watch. "Well, I'd better get going."

"Where?"

She looked surprised. 'Why, one of us has to get over to Saguaro Heights and relieve Max, remember."

"That's right, I'd almost forgotten." I hesitated. "Okay, But watch yourself."

"What do you mean?"

"They're probably playing us for suckers," I said. "Catherine and Max. That's all right. That's what we want. For one thing, it cancels the mutual-assistance pact, and I'd much rather have the other party pull the doublecross. It's a matter of principle. I'm a very high-principled guy. Sometimes."

She smiled and stopped smiling. "You're being clever," she said. "And you don't want to tell me."

"I hope I'm being clever," I said. "And I'm not telling you because not knowing will save you some acting. Besides, I could be absolutely wrong."

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Of course, these people do have a legitimate claim to von Sachs, if you want to put it like that."

"They are entitled to have him arrested legally and extradited legally, if they can. They have no legitimate right to kidnap him for his past crimes, any more than we have to kill him for what he's cooking up for the future. We're all operating equally far outside the law." I looked down at her small, scrubbed, neatly lipsticked face. "And just keep in mind that even if their motives are perfectly wonderful, they aren't really very nice people. Keep your eyes open."

Sheila checked in a couple of times during the morning.

When I drove by at noon to find her, she was sitting in her little blue car watching the automobile agency where Ernest Head worked. It was a busy, bright street near the center of Tucson. I tapped my horn lightly as I passed and turned the next corner and found a vacant meter at which to park.

Presently Sheila got into the station wagon beside me. I moved some packages to give her room.

"Nothing," she said. "As I told you on the phone, he drove to work right after I got on the job. He's been in there all morning. He'll probably go out for lunch pretty soon, or maybe he'll go home. It's Saturday. Maybe he only works half a day." She paused. "I was followed earlier this morning."

"Who? Max?"

She nodded. "I think he was just checking up on me. White Falcon station wagon, Arizona plates. Regular tires in front, mud-and-snow treads behind."

"Sounds like they're ready for some tough driving. Or think they are."

Sheila glanced at me curiously. 'Why did you tell Miss Smith the road was good?"

"That's not what you told me." I said, "If she gets herself a jeep, she'll have no trouble, and we'll need a jeep to keep up with her. If she goes in her own car, she may run into difficulties that we can take advantage of. At least she'll have to take it very slow and easy. It'll be a lot harder for her to pull a fast one. I don't want her in a jeep. Okay?"

Sheila laughed. "It must be nice to be so clever," she murmured.

"Is Max around now?" I asked.

"No. I'm almost certain, anyway. What's all this stuff?"

She looked curiously at the packages on the seat.

"Just some things we may need later. I've been laying in supplies," I said. "We're ready to roll as soon as we know where we're going and get the rifle sighted in. It's in back. I thought we'd grab a hamburger and go take care of that little chore."

"What about Ernest?" she asked.

"He'll keep," I said. "Don't worry about Ernest."

She studied my face for a moment. "I suppose you know what you're doing."

"Sure," I said. "Making you curious as hell, that's what

I'm doing. Go back to your car and drive straight ahead, but give me a couple of minutes first to get around the block behind you. I want to make sure Max doesn't see us taking off; it might worry him. I'll pass you when I'm satisfied we're in the clear…"

Nobody tailed us. We had a hamburger at a drive-in, and headed out into the desert, where I'd earlier scouted an arroyo where we could improvise a private hundred-yard rifle range with a high dirt bank for a backstop. I set up some targets and had Sheila bring down the rifle and fire a few rounds at short range to see where the gun was shooting.

We got the telescopic sight roughly centered, so the shots would at least go on the paper at a hundred yards, before we backed off and started shooting for group with the various loads I'd brought along.

"You're going to have to do most of the work, Skinny," I said. "My shoulder's in no condition to take a pounding. Give me five with each bullet weight. Hold as close as you can, exactly the same way every time."

Watching her shoot, I was glad I hadn't bought a Magnum.

Even a standard.30-06 is a lot of gun for a small girl to shoot from rest, prone, where the body can't rock back with the recoil but has to stay and take the punishment. I squatted behind her with a pair of binoculars I'd picked up.