Cases

Chapter Forty-seven

Dunc could remember going to only three weddings; the best had been when he’d served a Summons and Complaint on the groom in San Mateo. Reno’s Little Chapel of Eternal Love (“No Waiting, No Delay") reminded him of that occasion, in fact: a single room with fake stained-glass windows and cupid figures and big red plush hearts. “Here Comes the Bride” from a record player while he and Penny were motionless in front of the justice of the peace.

Penny was wearing a rose suit with a fitted jacket that emphasized her waist, and a longish black skirt that followed the lines of her body. Just dressy enough for the occasion, but suitable for an office job if being assistant chef in training for a dude ranch didn’t pay enough.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together...”

The J.P. was a tall thin man wearing an embroidered western suit and a cord tie with a silver bull’s-head clasp. High-heeled boots chased with silver. Spurs. Even a fake six-gun. Penny avoided Dunc’s glance not because she sensed his hidden reservations, but because she was fighting back laughter as hard as he was. Suddenly he loved her very much.

“... authority vested in me by the State of Nevada...”

Penny squeezed his fingers gently after he had slipped the plain gold band onto her finger. She lifted smiling eyes to his. The dimples at the edges of her mouth — the girl of his dream.

“You may kiss the bride...”

He did. With all his heart.

“Champagne!” yelled Drinker, bigger than life and redder of face than usual, wearing a western suit of his own. The J.P. set out four plastic champagne glasses, went out to the next couple in the anteroom. He stuck his head back in a moment later.

“Y’all mind staying a few minutes extra to witness these here lovely folks’ wedding?”

Sherry and Drinker went out to warm up the car. While they waited, Dunc and Penny witnessed the other wedding, then bundled up in their coats and went out into the cold to get into the backseat.

“Now the four of us are gonna go out to a new steakhouse and casino I heard about a couple miles outta town.” Drinker drove them through the icy Nevada evening; there was banked dirty snow along the sides of the road. “You know, if you put a marble into a glass jar every time you do the deed during your first two years of marriage, then take one out for each time after that, it’s a scientific fact that you’ll never get ’em all out again.”

“My Uncle Carl and Aunt Goodie actually did that,” said Penny, “just to see if it was really true.”

Sherry turned to look at them. “Well? Was it?”

“They have to keep buying more marbles,” said Dunc.

Penny gave him a little shove on the arm, but her look was warm and grateful. The anxiety he’d noticed before was gone from her face. The heater was finally warming up the car.

The Roundup was a long low flat deliberately rustic building built to resemble a big old Southwest cattle ranch, but the blaze of lights prevented any confusion with the real thing.

“Here’s the place I should work,” said Penny as they entered.

“They just opened it a month ago because their gaming license came through,” said Drinker. “The grand opening won’t be until the better weather comes.”

“Think I could buy it?”

“I imagine the big boys’ll move in on them if they make a go of it.”

The big boys. Reno brought back memories of Las Vegas. Artis’s story about Bugsy Siegel moving in on the owner of the Flamingo; the fat man who buried Lana Turner in the desert and took over the Gladiator after Carny died.

The greeter wore a ten-gallon hat and blond cowhide chaps that swished when he moved; there were longhorns over the dining room entrance. A maroon velvet rope across the doorway kept you from stampeding in and grabbing your own table.

Sherry said, “I put our names in, Drinker, but there’s almost an hour wait to get a table.”

A folded bill changed hands. Drinker came back to them.

“We’ll wait in the piano lounge.”

There were no empty stools at the long bar under the windows, and the perimeter stools of the block-long Steinway grand against the far wall were all taken, too. But a table between the fireplace and the window had four conspicuously vacant chairs waiting around it.

“Well, what do you know about that?” marveled Drinker.

“Thanks, big guy,” said Dunc.

“Hell, kid, it’s your night.”

A waiter brought a silver bucket holding two bottles of Cordon Rouge. Dunc was caught by the music; “Moonlight in Vermont” had been followed by an evocative, somehow familiar one he couldn’t name that then segued into “Old Cape Cod.”

They drank and toasted until their table was called. The steaks were huge and bloody and the baked potatoes smothered in butter and crumbled bacon and sour cream. Garlic toast on the side. The windows were steamed over, snow was piled on the sills outside like in Minnesota, like a Christmas card, the voices and laughter in the room were hearty and exuberant like coming home from duck hunting with your limit of mallards.

For a moment he wished his folks, his uncles and cousins, everybody he had hunted and fished with over the years, were all here to celebrate with them.

They went back into the piano bar for a nightcap, the crowd had thinned, they got their same table back. A waiter appeared.

“Order anything you want, champ,” urged Drinker.

The piano was still playing. On an impulse Dunc said, “Ask the piano player for ‘Desert Moon.’ ”

Penny looked at him with slight misgivings, as though she might have forgotten their favorite song, then looked puzzled when she didn’t recognize the song at all. A few minutes later Pepe pulled up a chair from an adjacent table with effervescent energy and sat down.

“Pepe!” said Penny. “How did you even know we were here?”

“ ‘Desert Moon,’ ” he said with a grin. “Nobody but Dunc asks for my own stuff. What brings you two to Reno?”

“They got married this afternoon!” said Sherry.

After hugs and congratulations and introductions, Pepe looked at Dunc with a grin. “Apart from snagging the prettiest girl in Reno, what are you up to these days?” He read Dunc’s business card and chuckled. “A genuine private eye? How did you get into that?”

“Remember that Labor Day picnic we were going to at Griffith Park in L.A.? I met Drinker there, he’s my boss now — and my best man.”

Pepe told Drinker, “You got a pretty damn good man right here.” Then, looking embarrassed, said to Dunc, “Sorry about that picnic. An hour after you left that joint on the Strip I got a good gig in Monterey, be there immediately. After that, a couple of cruise ships. Chile, Argentina, and back.”

“Did you make your record?” asked Penny.

“Not yet, but thanks for remembering.”

She shook a finger at him in mock severity. “If you stayed in one place — maybe L.A. — you’d get a contract for sure.”

He laughed. “You got me, Penny — I can’t stay in one place.” He turned to Dunc and Drinker with twinkling eyes. “Private eyes! Maybe you guys can find me a record contract.”

They chatted, drank more bubbly. Finally Pepe looked at his watch and sighed and stood up from the table.

“I’d better get back. After the grand opening in May, the piano lounge becomes a show lounge; they’re bringing in Vegas headliners, and then where will I be?” He bent and kissed Penny on the cheek. “Long life and every happiness, beautiful bride.”

They were staying at a downtown hotel with a garage next door because Drinker had insisted on indoor parking. The two couples rode up to their respective rooms together.

“Where’d you meet the piano player?” asked Drinker.

“Las Vegas,” said Dunc.

“Then again on the Sunset Strip,” said Penny.

“Now here.” Drinker was thoughtful. “Lad gets around.”

Sherry’s head was on Drinker’s shoulder, she was almost asleep, but Penny looked more alive and sparkling than she had all day. Dunc realized all over again how much he loved her, how her vitality energized him. They parted outside the elevator.

Lad gets around, Dunc thought. The guy was a musician, musicians had to go where they got the best offer. Or maybe, the way his mind worked, Drinker thought Pepe was connected with the big boys. But anyone who lived around gambling at least brushed up against mob guys, that didn’t mean they were connected.

Despite the champagne, both he and Penny were ready. He entered her tentatively at first, awed at the expanded context of then lovemaking since they’d last been together.

“It’s okay, darling,” she said. “We can’t hurt anything.”

He was a piston driving their love, then Penny was bucking under him, her incoherent cries of climax bringing on his own. He gasped, “Move... over little... man. Make room for... Daddy.”

Daddy. He was going to be a father. Of a boy, of course.

Pepe closed down his piano at 2:00 A.M., went to the bar to sip cold white wine and stare sightlessly at the backbar mirror.

Dammit, the man had to know. Or suspect. He was a natural-born observer, made even sharper by months as a private investigator. Running into Dunc twice could be accidental, but at some point the kid would figure it out. Unless...

Could Dunc be that sly? Hiding what he knew behind that open midwestern face, biding his time for the moment to act?

Maybe, maybe not, but Pepe couldn’t take the chance anymore. For his own peace of mind he had to act first.

Sometime into Dunc’s head would pop the sequence of events during that last night in Vegas. Some night he would sit bolt upright in bed, beside that new bride of his — she had known there was significance in Pepe’s sudden disappearance from the Strip, he had seen it in her eyes tonight — and Dunc would remember. And, remembering, he would go back to read the Las Vegas newspapers for last July 5, and then he would know...

The hell of it was, Pepe really liked the kid. He wasn’t small-minded or mean-hearted, and he was a genuine fan of Pepe’s music. Pepe could count his fans on the fingers of one hand.

But survival came first. He didn’t want to have to move on as he had in L.A. Keep ducking out before the job was done, and word would go out he’d lost his nerve. Guys like Mr. David had people like Pepe, who had not only fronted for the mob but carried out hits on face-to-face orders from the bosses, retired with flowers the minute it looked like they were losing their nerve. That was the only way someone in his line of work was ever retired. With flowers.

Look what had happened to Jack Falkoner just because a couple of kids maybe had seen a body being carried away.

Uh-uh. Not for Pepe that little stutter-step to the coffin. Time to make another phone call about Dunc; not, as it had been in L.A., just to have someone check him out. A careful voice answered the phone in San Francisco.

“Give me Mr. David,” Pepe told it. “Right now.”

Chapter Forty-eight

On Sunday they didn’t even pry their eyes open until noon; it never occurred to Dunc to go to Mass. What with one thing and another, they were lucky to join Drinker and Sherry in the hotel casino at three in the afternoon.

Drinker looked them over critically. “Married life agrees with you,” he said to Penny, then to Dunc, “You look like hell.”

Penny did look ravishing, her hair full and soft around her face, her eyes sparkling as she laughed at Drinker.

“I love my husband.”

Sherry took Penny’s hand. “And he loves you, sweetie, make no mistake about that. Come on, let’s win a lot of money.”

“I’m a killer at blackjack,” said Penny.

She had a system, right pocket/left pocket. You bought chips with the stake in your right-hand jacket pocket, played at a dollar table. Winnings went back into that pocket until the original stake was replaced. After that, winnings went into the left-hand pocket. If you lost your original stake, you quit for the night. Penny didn’t have to quit, except, finally, to eat.

They’d just started their salad when a bellhop came to their table and said Drinker had a phone call.

“Must be Sherry, calling me from the office.”

“Very funny,” said Sherry.

They were on dessert and coffee when he finally came back with a troubled face. “That was Wee Jimmy Haggerty,” he said.

“He’s a cop, Drinker’s ex-partner,” Dunc told Penny.

“There’s been a break-in at the office, I have to go back.”

“We’ll go with you,” said Dunc, half rising.

Drinker shoved him back down again. “It’s your goddamn honeymoon,” he growled. “Sherry and I can handle it.”

Dunc had his hands resting lightly on Penny’s shoulders from behind as she played blackjack, aware of her body heat the way you were aware of the heat from the fire on a cold night out in the woods. The same kind of comfort, the same kind of warmth. But his thoughts followed Drinker back to San Francisco. Had the files been rifled? Was it something to do with one of Drinker’s private clients whose names were never spoken? Had he left some loose end in one of his own files?

Penny looked back to turn that brilliant smile on him.

“I’m going to pay for our honeymoon, sweetheart.”

She was his lucky Penny. When her luck turned at midnight, she cashed in and gaily stuffed the neat fold of her winnings into Dunc’s inner jacket pocket. Up in their room, neither of them seemed able to stop making love. Finally they fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, tumbled together on the bed like puppies.

The front desk woke them at 9:00 A.M.: Dunc was needed in San Francisco. He didn’t really mind. They were now man and wife, they could do their loving wherever fate might take them.

When he went down to settle their account, he was told their bill had been paid. “Compliments of Mr. Cope,” said the clerk. His face was wreathed in smiles. “A wedding gift.”

That Drinker, he could always surprise you. What did they call it? A real beau geste.

It took him twenty minutes to find the Grey Ghost — he hadn’t been drinking when he parked it originally, so why... Then he saw it about ten spaces up on the other side of the garage. Well, he’d had other things on his mind. A wedding, for instance.

It was a sparkling day, bright blue sky and temperatures up into the forties. He got the car warmed up and the heater working, he didn’t want his pregnant Penny facing the cold.

They gassed up, then went south out of Reno on Nevada 395 to Carson City, then took Highway 50 southwest toward California. They would go up and over Echo Summit, over seven thousand feet high, then eventually down to Sacramento, where the palm trees started.

When they went back to the car after stopping for lunch at sleepy little South Lake Tahoe, Penny wanted to drive.

“I have to learn how to handle the Grey Ghost now that he’s part mine, too.” Dunc started to object because the road up over the summit might be icy, but she laughed him to silence. “Hey, big boy! I’m from the snow country, too, remember?”

He surrendered, closed her door, slid into the passenger’s side, and quickly relaxed against the seat. They sang songs together and miles flew. First camp songs like “Comin Round the Mountain” and “Little Brown Jug,” then on into “Down Among the Sheltering Palms” and “Sentimental Journey.” Dunc did a sonorous “Old Man River” with lyrics changes he’d learned in the Glee Club:

Penny, both hands on the wheel, shot a quick look over at him and said, “Seems to me that on our wedding night, big boy, you got a lot drunk and you got a lot of tail.”

“And I’m gonna get even more tonight.”

“You promise?”

At Echo Summit they pulled off into the vista point. Below them were sparkling, snowcapped peaks with dark armies of pine forests marching up their flanks. Penny plunged them down into the sunlight and shadow on the winding, narrow, two-lane blacktop. Snow was piled two feet deep on the verge of the road, but lay only in patches under the shelter of the trees.

Penny said, “Dunc honey, this is hard to say after Drinker and Sherry have been so nice, but don’t you think maybe you should start looking for a new job?”

“A new... but I love detective work! It’s fun and exciting and I’m getting a lot of material for my writing.”

“But you’re not writing, and it’s changing you, Dunc. When we’re together you’re sweet and loving, but when you’re talking about work you... you’re harder, colder, it’s like you’re losing all your finer perceptions. You just see the bold strokes—”

“Jesus!” he burst out. “First I lose my chance to be a writer, now you want me to quit detective work. Why?”

“So you can get back to your writing.”

“You’re saying it’s detective work that keeps me from writing? Here I thought having a wife and baby to support might have a little something to do with it.”

She looked over at him angrily. “You haven’t had a wife and you don’t have a baby yet, but I don’t think you’ve written a single story since you came to San Francisco. Why are you trying to blame me for that, Dunc? Are you sorry we got married?”

“Quit trying to twist around what I’m saying. Of course I’m not sorry, but the baby’s timing could have been better.”

She wailed in utter misery.

He said, “Oh Christ, honey, I didn’t mean — Penny!”

Ahead the road had narrowed and steepened, made a sharp left-hand turn. Penny rammed the brake pedal right to the floor and kept twisting and twisting the wheel, the car wasn’t turning, wasn’t slowing, she screamed, Dunc saw the trunk of the tree coming at him with appalling speed...

He was standing on the edge of a curving blacktop road with the reek of raw gasoline all around him. Three or four cars were parked at goofy angles off the road. A half dozen people he’d never seen before were milling around aimlessly. Almost all the way off the road was a gray Ford with the open hood crumpled against the scarred trunk of a pine tree and its ass end up in the air with both back wheels three feet off the ground.

Some asshole was holding his arm. Dunc said, “There’s been an accident here, I don’t want anything to do with it”

Lying on the ground was a log or anyway something long and cylindrical with a couple of blankets laid over it. Just looking at it somehow made him queasy and reminded him of how much his head ached. He reached up with his left hand; his forehead over his eye felt slippery to the touch, as if he’d been rained on.

That irritating guy was still gently tugging at his sleeve.

“Why don’t you come over here and sit down for a minute?”

“Hell with you,” said Dunc, feebly pushing him. “There’s been an accident and there’s plenty of people to help out. I gotta find Penny, we’re on our way to Reno to get married.”

“But if you’d just sit down and rest for a few minutes...”

Dunc shook off the persistent Samaritan, started to stride away up the hill. He heard the far-approaching keen of sirens. He’d known it! An accident for sure. They’d wanta ask a lot of questions without answers, he had to go find Penny...

On the other hand it was a long way up that hill. Maybe...

He sat down suddenly in the road, then tipped over sideways and lay still.

“You made it up?” demanded Sherry, an enraged hornet immobilizing an astounded Drinker with her appalled anger. “How could you be so goddamn stupid?”

“For Chrissake, Sherry, I wanted them to have some time alone, okay?” He made placating movements of hands and face. “You know Dunc. I just thought that when they get back he’ll get all caught up in his cases again, and—”

“You’re lying,” she said abruptly. “You didn’t make up that phone call you got in Reno.” Fury, fear, sorrow, fought in her face. “It was from her, wasn’t it? That woman. April-fucking-Wham. You told her where you’d be, and she called, so you made up your lies and came running down here to—”

He snatched up the ringing phone, snapped “Drinker Cope” into it, glad for the interruption. Listening, he sank down into Sherry’s chair like an old man not sure of his balance.

“Yeah,” he said tiredly. “Where is... I see. Yeah. Okay. I’ll be there tomorrow midday for sure.”

He hung up the phone. Stared up at her.

“Christ, Sherry, they were in the mountains, they went off the road a few miles this side of Echo Summit”

All color had left her face. “How... how bad is—”

“Penny’s dead. They called her family, the mother’s prostrated, the sister wants her body shipped back to Dubuque, pronto. They’re talking as if they blamed Dunc for—”

“Dunc!” she cried. Her voice was fearful. “Is he...”

“He’s still alive but he’s in a coma. They... don’t know i£ he’ll make it.”

“Oh, Drinker!” she wailed, crushing his big graying head to her bosom and crying like her heart would break.

Chapter Forty-nine

Dunc jerked and opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling’s white foot-square tiles with rows of little holes in them. He licked his lips. Bad dream. Whew. “Penny?” he said cautiously.

“He’s awake,” a voice said. Penny leaned over the bed to look anxiously down into his face. He tried to smile. “Could you tell me your name, sir?”

Not Penny. Some of it rushed back, all in an instant.

She wailed in utter misery...

“Jesus Christ,” he said softly. It was not a curse.

“Try again,” said the woman in white bending over the bed.

“Pierce Duncan,” he said impatiently.

“And do you know where you are, Mr. Duncan?”

He sat up in the bed. Or at least that’s what his brain said he did, but he still just lay there looking at the ceiling.

“Hospital.” He thought he pointed at her. “Nurse.”

There was a log or anyway something long and cylindrical with a couple of blankets laid over it. Oh dear God.

“Where is Penny? How is she? Please, let me see her...”

The eyes looking down at him suddenly filled with tears. He curled into a tight ball of anguish and howled like a wolf. Except he just lay there, unmoving. He shut his eyes again.

Pepe hung up and threw the chair across the room. Still alive. Still alive. How could that be? He regretted missing his chance in Vegas and in L.A.

Who was the guy, fucking Lazarus?

In a coma, maybe he’d just die like the nice guy Pepe had figured him for. Or wake up with mush for brains. Put a collar on him and lead him around like a pet chimp. Send the hitter in with a pillow? No. Not yet. The accident scenario could still work.

Drinker’s voice said, “I know how you feel, Dunc, but...”

Dunc didn’t move. Didn’t open his eyes. Thought, no, you don’t know how I feel, Drinker. I murdered my wife and baby.

“You said he was awake,” complained Drinker.

“He was. His vital signs are normal. We’ve told him his wife is dead and maybe he just can’t handle it.” Her voice was fading; they were leaving. “He’ll come out of it eventually...”

You don’t understand, Dunc thought. Maybe, by blaming her, he’d robbed Penny of hope, left her only despair. Maybe she had deliberately driven off the road.

Not to be borne. Not to be thought about. He felt his bandage. Surprisingly small, neat, tidy. That navy watch cap in his roommate’s closet would cover it nicely. His own clothes were in his open closet. Wait in feigned coma until dark...

And then start running away. Forever.

Out in the hallway bulky, red-faced Drinker Cope abruptly thrust the flowers m one hand and the candy in the other at the petite black-haired nurse. “You take ’em, he don’t need ’em. Tell him I was here. And if there’s any change—”

“We will surely let you know, Mr. Cope.”

Drinker went away down the corridor. Goddamn, what a mess! Dunc in there, him here, Sherry trying to run the office. Harry Wham to deal with, April too. Craven to check on...

Standing under the wind-danced streetlight, Peter Collinson watched the Buick’s disappearing taillights. Son of Nobody. He blew into his bare hands; the chill had already crept through the garage attendant’s shoes a man named Dunc had always worn. After midnight. Six hours to get 250 miles east of Reno. This time of year, only local traffic would be moving until about 6:00 A.M.

A bulky man in a brown sheep-lined coat came by, overshoes squeaking on the hard-packed snow, his fur cap’s earmuffs giving him the head of a bear. Dunc asked, “Where’s the bus depot?”

“Two blocks back, see the red sign says Casino?” He was pointing. “Go through the gaming room, the depot’s out back.”

Inside the plate-glass door, a blast of welcome heat greeted him. A few tired tourists and even more tired shift workers sipped coffee and dunked doughnuts at the all-night café. Through the open door at the far end he could see a man in tan work clothes vacuuming the maroon wall-to-wall carpet.

In the casino a bartender polished glasses and yawned. Roulette, craps, wheel of fortune, everything covered with white canvas dust-cloths except one blackjack table. The cardman was dealing to a black-haired woman in a slit black sheath dress that emphasized her hips and haunches. She was dwarfed by a balding man in a loud size 50 suit who seemed to be backing her play.

Dunc crossed to an archway that led to a spacious hotel lobby with potted palms and deep red leather chairs. Behind the check-in desk a stringy-haired man dozed with his chin braced on one hand. His knuckles had pushed his mouth open so a gold tooth caught the light. He could have used more chin and a shave.

“When’s the next bus?” Dunc asked him.

He came awake with a start. “Bus to Reno arrives at three-fifty-two A.M. Twenty-minute rest stop, then—”

“East.”

“Five-oh-four A.M.”

Dunc started, “I’ll take...” but his hand had brought out only a five and two crumpled ones from his pocket. “Forget it.”

He flopped down in a red leather chair. What was he doing, where did he think he was going? Mexico? The South Seas?

“No sleeping in the lobby unless you’re waiting for a bus.”

“So I’m waiting for a bus.”

“Company don’t pay the hotel good money so any bum stumbles in here off the street can use it as a flophouse.”

The man had a point. With the knit wool cap pulled down over his ears he looked the part. He stuck it in his pocket.

He almost dreaded watching the woman play blackjack. He stood behind Penny as she played, aware of her body heat the way you were aware of the heat from the fire on a cold night. But he had at least five hours before there was enough through traffic to give him a decent chance of thumbing a ride before he froze to death.

The dealer had a thin sad face and a pearl stickpin in his lavender necktie. Hands quick as Henri’s scooped up her chips.

“Dealer takes all pushes.”

She had a smooth aloof face, great cheekbones, and an insolent mouth, but said to the big man in a cloying little-girl voice, “Petie Sweetie, I’m out of gas.”

“You cost more to run than my Caddy.”

“I want to beat this bastard at his own crooked game.”

A paw made to crush beer bottles tossed a heavy leather wallet on the table. A granite jaw and thick neck suggested a ruthless power slightly belied by surprisingly mild blue eyes. She methodically lost a quarter inch of bills, cursing the dealer obscenely for every hand he took. They departed to the bar.

Dunc said to the dealer, “Sweet lady.”

“She was explaining my parentage to me.” Two red spots burned on his cheeks. “She’s a guest at the hotel.”

“And the customer’s always right. Right?”

The spots faded from his cheeks. He grinned wryly. Dunc said, “A blackjack dealer I knew in Vegas had hands like yours.”

He put the cards through an intricate Scarne shuffle, a false cut, dealt himself seconds. “There’s one rotten town, Vegas.” He finished with that most difficult of card maneuvers, the waterfall, said almost ruefully, “That’s my real name. Hands. What could I be except a dealer, hands like these, name like that? Like the kid in Treasure Island, he’s up the mast with a pistol, he says, ‘One more step and I’ll fire, Mr. Hands.’ ”

“Jim Hawkins,” said Dunc.

“That’s him. Most everybody just calls me Hands.”

Dunc hesitated a moment. “Peter Collinson,” he said.

His already expressionless face emptied entirely. “Big guy over there calls himself Peter Collins.”

“Good old dad,” said Dunc. “Mr. Nobody himself.”

“Comes in ’cause of Imogene. You just passing through?”

Dunc nodded. “Drifting with the wind.”

“A sad wind, maybe? Good luck.”

Dunc sat in a red leather chair out of the clerk’s sight, under a potted palm near the mezzanine’s broad marble stairway. Three A.M. Two hours before he could stick out his thumb. Physically, except for his headache, okay. Penny and their child were dead, but he was okay. He crossed his arms, felt a bulge in his jacket pocket. A folded sheaf of bills, $400. Where...

The blackest of despairs shot through him. Penny cashed in and gaily stuffed the neat fold of her winnings into Dunc’s inside sport jacket’s pocket. Penny, loving him, trusting him, and he’d made her want to be dead...

A man came in from the side street without seeing Dunc. Cold radiated from his midnight-blue overcoat; a black rakish hat with a narrow brim was pulled low over his eyes. He had thin features and an olive complexion. Dunc thought, Pepe, realized, of course not: Pepe was 250 miles away. But the same type.

Where’d you meet the piano player? Lad gets around. Something quizzical moved in Dunc, was gone.

Imogene came slinking out of the casino. The man in the blue topcoat purred at her. “He in there?”

“I said he would be, didn’t I?” Her voice was polished steel, nothing at all like her simpering tones for Petie Sweetie.

“We only pay on delivery.”

“I only deliver on payment.”

A faint rustling, Dunc imagined an envelope changing hands.

“Our play isn’t in here. Get him out to his car and—”

“You gotta be crazy. Up in my bed, asleep.”

“Just tell him to wait for you. At his car.”

Mollified, she went away. The man in the blue topcoat disappeared into the men’s room like a prowling black cat.

Dunc slumped lower in his chair. So what if Collins was hit? He was already Mr. Nobody. Penny was dead, and Dunc...

He sat up, frowning. Just as Penny had said, he was different. Eight months ago he’d charged into Raffetto’s gleaming blade to try and save Artis’s life. But Penny was...

Collins and Imogene came out of the casino. His mohair overcoat made him look too wide to fit through doors.

“Go warm up the car so I won’t get a chill, Petie Sweetie,” she crooned in her pubescent voice. She stood on tiptoe to give him a quick Judas kiss. “I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

She went upstairs, long legs flashing. Collins crossed the lobby toward the main door as a herd of noisy bus customers crowded in, eager to feed the bandits during their twenty-minute rest stop. The killer prowled out of the men’s room after Collins.

“Aw, shit!” muttered Dunc, and pulled his silly goddamn watch cap back down over his ears.

Out in the street, icy wind snatched the air from his lungs. Collins was already too far away to call to without alerting the man in the midnight-blue overcoat sauntering along behind. Dunc went padding after them on silent rubber soles.

A wind-danced streetlight cast confusing shadows as Pete Collins entered the parking lot where he’d left his long gleaming Cadillac. Whistling, he bent to unlock the door. A piece of the night leaped at him to drive a long-bladed glittering knife at the unprotected back of his prey. Knife. Glittering.

Glittering as Raffetto charged down the stairwell.

Dunc slammed his clasped hands, clublike, against the killer’s head, dropping him where he stood like the sheep in the Hunter’s Point slaughterhouse. His knife clattered away without having touched even the cloth of Mr. Nobody’s coat.

Collins spun around, shock on his face. He recovered quickly. “I know who he is — who the fuck are you?”

“The guy who just saved your life.” But Penny was still just as dead, Dunc was still just as responsible.

“How’d they... Imogene!”

He stormed past Dunc, face dark with rage. Dunc said, “She’s just spit on the sidewalk. Is she worth dying for?”

Collins whirled, staring at him almost stupidly. He looked down at the fallen warrior, he looked at his car keys, he looked at his Cadillac.

“That’s two I owe you. How do I square up? Money?”

And Dunc was thinking again like the private eye Drinker’s months of tutelage had made him. Raffetto’s blade had been a black Commando knife designed to never reflect light. But there had been another man in Vegas, slight, quick, muscular, who might have wielded a knife.

“A ride to South Lake Tahoe,” he said. He gestured down toward the killer slumbering at their feet. “What about him?”

“He wakes up or he freezes, he lives or he dies — who gives a shit?”

Dunc got into the Cadillac.

Chapter Fifty

It was three the next afternoon before Drinker got back to the office. Sherry was at her desk. She started to her feet when his head appeared above the floor level. “Anything?”

“Not a trace.” He opened a clenched fist as i£ freeing a trapped starling. “Like that. Dressed himself and walked out.”

Sherry slowly sat down again. “Then why hasn’t he called? He could be lying in a ditch somewhere—”

“When did you become his mother, for Chrissake?”

She was suddenly embarrassed. “Yeah, God, listen to me.”

“Go on home and get some rest.” He had gone around her desk to massage her shoulders. “I’ll handle things here.”

“Thanks, Drinker. I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.”

She put on her coat, went up on tiptoe to kiss him on the mouth like a sleepy child, then went down the stairs with a wave of her hand. Jesus, more trouble. How did you tell a woman you needed to help run your office that you didn’t want her sexually anymore? But after having just spent two hours with April, he knew in his heart that he wouldn’t want Sherry, not ever again.

What was left of Grey Ghost Two was up on the hydraulic lift. The mechanic, a kid barely nineteen, gave a low whistle as he shone his flashlight at the sprung undercarriage of the car.

“Not just the brake line, the steering mechanism, too.”

They had known Penny would be with him, Dunc thought. Wouldn’t have known about the baby, but that wouldn’t have stopped them. Their baby. Dead. The child he hadn’t wanted had become almost as devastating a loss as Penny herself.

“Why wasn’t the tampering found?” he asked at last.

“Nobody looked,” said the kid. “What made you want to?”

“When I went to pick up the car on Monday morning, it had been moved. But I didn’t do anything. I just let it go.”

“They must have cut the line almost through, then taped it to hold until it got a real good pump. A lot of brake fluid must of spilled out on the floor. Funny you didn’t see it.”

“I wasn’t looking,” said Dunc, sorrowful to his very soul.

The kid was shining his light again, talking about the steering linkage. Dunc couldn’t stand to hear any more.

The car wasn’t turning, wasn’t slowing, Penny screamed...

“Sell it for salvage,” he said. “Keep the money.”

At the bus depot he bought a ticket for L.A. Dark as his thoughts were, a great weight had been lifted from him. Someone else had killed Penny, not him.

The bus came, Dunc found a window seat, leaned back and shut his eyes. He was pretty sure it had been Pepe, but Pepe wasn’t the only one who might have wanted to kill him. Rephaim, Seventh Priest of Mechizedek, thundering biblical curses at him. Hector, acolyte to Rephaim, trying to run him down. Probably in jail, both of them, but he had to eliminate them as suspects.

The bus from L.A. dropped him at Sepulveda and Mission Road. He walked from there. It felt strange to be back in San Fernando. Like returning to a nest he’d helped build and finding it full of fledglings. The seminary was completed; young men in black gowns moved between the buildings, plantings were in, the raw earth was covered with grass.

Dunc waited until the slightly stooped, silver-maned man in the mission’s gift shop had sold a tourist couple some holy medals and a rosary. Then he said, “Hello, Rephaim.”

The man whirled. Recognition dawned. Some erstwhile fire flashed in those eyes. “You!” Rephaim said in half-whisper.

“I didn’t turn you in.” Dunc stepped closer, suddenly needing this man’s absolution. “I didn’t turn anyone in. I was just trying... trying to...”

“To do good,” said Rephaim, so low Dunc could hardly hear him. “I too. I got probation, some kind soul gave me a job here because I am a man of God and because they felt guilty about...” A pause. “So I sell rosaries, here, where it all started...”

“And Hector?”

“No probation for Hector. My church is gone, my people are scattered, my acolyte is imprisoned...”

“But you are still the Seventh Priest of Melchizedek,” said Dunc in sudden fierceness. “No man can take that from you.”

“Yes,” said the old man, wonder in his voice, more light coming into his eyes. “Yes! And God works in mysterious ways.”

That evening a different L.A. bus dropped Dunc on Figueroa in Highland Park, pulled away in a swirl of diesel fumes. He walked through the gathering dusk. Together he and Penny had prowled every inch of these nighttime streets arm-in-arm, laughing, whispering, stopping for long giddy kisses...

And now he didn’t even know where she was buried. Dubuque, Iowa. What was that? Were there flowers on her grave? A headstone? He’d been her husband, but when he’d called her sister Betsy about the funeral, she had cursed him and hung up.

He paused in front of the little white two-story house. The lights were on, he could hear faint television. What would his reception be? More curses? He rang the bell. Aunt Goodie opened the door, stared for a moment, then cried, “Dunc!” and threw her arms wide to receive him.

“It was a beautiful service,” said Goodie. “And the cemetery is on a wooded knoll near Loras College, overlooking the Mississippi.” The three of them were at the kitchen table, iced tea untouched beside them. “We so wished you were there, Dunc.”

“Not her sister,” he said quietly.

“She even went after Goodie for letting Penny go out with you,” added Carl. “As if we could have stopped her.”

Goodie said defensively, “It was just too much for them, losing her that way. Penny was everybody’s favorite, a ray of sunshine. Her father was killed before she was born.”

“By convicts,” said Carl.

“Wait a minute,” said Dunc. “Her dad was killed in an accident and her mom raised the two girls on the union life-insurance money.”

Goodie waved him silent with a small dismissive hand.

“That’s just what we told the girls at the time. Penny’s daddy was a guard at Iowa State Prison, in charge of a flood-control work gang on the river.” Her voice was low. “The prisoners broke loose and killed him.”

“And mutilated his body,” said Carl.

Dunc felt all the blood drain from his face. He gripped the edges of the table fiercely. Of course that was years before Hent, but...

“The girls never knew any of that,” said Goodie almost briskly. “Betsy was bitter, she remembered her dad. She must have felt bad when we all made such a fuss over the new baby. Penny was born early, just a week after her daddy died. She was just a lovely, loving child who grew up into a loving woman. A woman who loved you, Dunc, with her whole soul.”

His emotions were churning, it was like he was helping murder Hent all over again, and here was retribution, so neat, so clean. Black anger welled up in him at the comic vindictiveness of it. The sport of the gods.

“Dunc?” Goodie was staring at him.

“I’m okay,” he said reassuringly. “It’s just so soon...”

Tomorrow, Las Vegas. Confirm what had happened that July fourth night that m some twisted way had led to Penny’s death. And then... Then, by God, do something about it. Henri had said the man was expected at the Flamingo midweek...

A week had gone by. Ten days. No word from Dunc. No body in a ditch. The routine of the office had resumed, with Drinker fighting to keep all the balls in the air at once. Just now it was April, striding up and down his living room, cigarette in hand, pouring out words half in rage, half in fear.

“Harry came to my room last night. He hasn’t done that in months. Months! And he wanted to sleep with me.”

“What else could you do but oblige him?” sneered Drinker.

“He is my husband, for Chrissake.” She glared at him. “Anyway, this morning we did it again...” Drinker was suddenly, perversely, almost dizzily excited by the fact that Harry had been inside her just scant hours earlier. “And then he said that after this trip on Saturday he is going to sell the boat, stay home, and get me to fall in love with him all over again.”

She had dropped into his easy chair, blowing smoke through her nostrils, legs planted apart so he could see up her skirt. His groin was almost instantly heavy with arousal. Following his gaze, she savagely slammed her knees tight together.

“No more for you, damn you, until you do it.”

“Do what?” he asked mildly.

“Kill him, goddamn you! Blow the son of a bitch to hell!” Her eyes were blazing. “For money — or for me.”

“For you, lady.” Drinker’s voice was thick, heavy. He was unbuckling his belt. “Take off your panties. Show it to me.”

She slid lower in the chair, smiling wickedly. “I’m not wearing am panties.” She opened her legs wide. “See?”

Dunc spread the Las Vegas Pioneer for July 5, 1953, open on the library reading table. The headline was three inches high:

Ned was there, and Carny Largo. And Artis. And... And yes, Gimpy Ernest, throat slit in the parking lot at the ballpark where the fights had been held. Ten feet from him, car keys in hand, Rafe Raffetto, dead from repeated stab wounds to the heart. A Commando knife still in its sheath between his shoulder blades, but with traces of blood on the blade.

It couldn’t have been Rafe on the darkened stairwell of Artis’s house. He’d been dead for half an hour by that time.

It had been Pepe. Pepe, front man for the mob, the Mafia, put into places like the Gladiator to play his piano and learn everything his bosses had to know for a takeover. Put on the Sunset Strip to oversee grabbing off the jailed Mickey Cohen’s vice empire. Put into the Roundup for the same purpose — Drinker had speculated that the mob would soon grab it off.

But wherever he went, here was Dunc showing up. What would he have thought? That Dunc was there to spook him, or to confirm a suspicion aroused there on Artis’s stairs? Because Pepe could never be sure Dunc hadn’t recognized him, or someday might.

Dunc returned the newspaper to the research desk, went up a floor to the rental typewriters, and wrote what he thought of as his first professional piece of writing. Call it a story, call it fiction because of some guesswork, but he would be paid for it. Not in money, not in revenge, but in justice. Or in blood. Roll the dice.

He even figured he knew who his dream killer had been.

He finished the last page, separated the originals from their two carbons, and started his cover letter:

That finished, he went out into the soft Las Vegas night.

An hour later Henri, pit boss at the Flamingo, jerked his head across the restaurant and said, low-voiced, “There he is, Mr. David in the lean and hungry flesh.”

Dunc looked, casually. A long-boned, rather elegant man in a blue blazer. Wavy hair above a high forehead, assessing eyes, a sensuous mouth.

Henri said, “The only time you can get near him is at seven in the morning when he’s doing his laps in the hotel’s outdoor pool. There’s nobody else around at that hour.”

“How do I get by hotel security?”

“I’ll find you a bellhop’s jacket. After that, kiddo, you’re on your own.” He turned on his wide grin. “Dunc who?”

In the office behind a carefully locked and bolted street door, Drinker put on thin rubber gloves. From the satchel he took a shoe box holding Craven’s four sticks of dynamite. They were bright red and looked exactly like dynamite in the movies.

Drinker used his plierslike crimper to carefully angle a small hole into the side of one dynamite stick. Into this he inserted an electrical blasting cap, a small metal cylinder with a pair of insulated wires sticking out of one end. They were the ends of an uninsulated loop, called a noninsulated bridge wire, that was embedded in the cap’s flash charge. From this loop all good explosions flowed.

Drinker wound electrical tape around the four sticks of dynamite to form a compact bundle, then put it aside for a cheap twelve-hour alarm clock from Woolworth’s. He set the clock but did not wind it, then removed the back to expose the alarm bell and clapper. Around the alarm bell he wound the stripped end of one blasting cap wire; around the alarm clapper he wound the stripped end of a free length of insulated wire.

To arm his bomb, Drinker needed only to fasten the free end of the wire from the clapper to one of the two terminals of an ordinary dry-cell battery, and attach to the other terminal the remaining wilt from the blasting cap. Wind the alarm clock and leave. When the alarm went off, the clapper would hit the bell and close the electrical power circuit.

Mr. David finished his twentieth lap in the Flamingo’s outdoor pool at 7:30 A.M. and whooshed up out of the water sleek as a seal. In a profession where many died young, often violently, he intended to live forever. Dripping water, he lay back on his lounge chair and shut his eyes. He came down from San Francisco often to enjoy this perfect time of the year in Vegas, winter’s chill gone and summer’s intense heat not yet arrived.

“Mr. David?”

He opened his eyes. A Flamingo Hotel bellhop stood there holding a tray with a letter on it. Mr. David sat up, furious.

“Get out of here! I’m not to be disturbed for any reason.”

The bellhop just looked at him. A husky kid with close-cropped black hair, a wide neck, shoulders and arms too thick for his jacket. A new angry red scar above his left eyebrow ran up into his hairline. Jesus Christ, this was no bellhop!

And he without his bodyguards! But this was the Flamingo, for Chrissake, neutral ground. Who would have the balls to...

The kid sat down on the adjacent chair, still holding his tray. The fear drained out of Mr. David but left him too shaky for renewed rage. Dunc was shaky, too, but he had ice inside.

“I’m Pierce Duncan. I found two people for you. Kata Koltai and Jack Falkoner. Jack murdered Kata, you had Jack murdered in turn.”

Mr. David struggled for sangfroid. “You’re Cope’s man.”

“Two Saturdays ago, my girlfriend, Penny, and I got married.”

He found himself getting intrigued. This was the damnedest pitch he’d ever heard. He said, “Congratulations.”

“On that Monday, Penny was murdered. One of your men wanted me dead, and she happened to be in the way.”

Mr. David was actually shocked. “You think that I—”

“No.” He extended the tray with its envelope. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, so I wrote a story. You’re in it, and Kata, and Jack Falkoner, and Pepe the piano player...”

Mr. David read the pages. When he had finished, he sat with them in his hand for almost a minute, looking at the blue water and green grass and waving palm trees blooming here in the desert — and not really seeing any of it.

“Instead of Pepe, what’s to keep me from—”

“That’s a carbon,” Dunc pointed out.

“And the original—”

“Is in the hands of a man even you can’t touch.”

“I see.” Mr. David met his gaze. “I think I know what you want. No problem of course, but if you could spell it out...”

The cold inside Dunc was now glacial. “You said it yourself. You know who and you know why. Eye for eye.”

Mr. David nearly smiled. “You’re a careful, clever man.”

Chapter Fifty-one

They leaned back against the headboard of Drinker’s bed, naked, sated, sharing a cigarette. April giggled.

“On Friday evening we dine à la chinoise with Lee Fong, then go to the Alcazar Theater. Eight P.M. curtain. They plan to sleep on board the Doubloon, but it will be unguarded from six P.M. Friday until midnight at least.”

“Does murder always make you so happy?” Drinker growled.

“Only Harry’s. When will you go in? When will it go off?”

“Go in, nine-thirty. Go off, ten sharp Saturday morning.”

“Then I’ll have him call me on the ship-to-shore phone at nine-fifty-five for a big surprise. Harry loves surprises.” She sobered. “But you won’t love this very much, darling. This is the last time we can see each other until we open those lockboxes and get all that lovely money a week from Monday.”

“No, goddammit!” said Drinker in an angry voice.

“You of all people should understand. Your military record shows you’re a demolitions man, I may have been seen going in and out of this apartment. If someone sees Harry’s boat blow up...”

“Good answer,” he agreed reluctantly. “It makes sense.”

“For that,” she said, sliding down in the bed while Drinker remained where he was, “you deserve a special treat.”

It was after 3:00 A.M. Saturday when Pepe finished his gig at the Roundup and drove back to his luxury hotel in downtown Reno. The snow was gone, spring was on its way.

He let himself into his room, clicked the light switch. Nothing happened. Light filtering through the curtains showed him two shadowy waiting figures.

“You’re late, sweets,” said a soft voice Falkoner would have known. Pepe just had time to make the sign of the cross.

Ferris Besner had spent the night with April in Harry Wham’s outsize bed, but was still worried about Drinker.

“April, don’t forget — mean and tricky and smart...”

“Sweetheart, when the banks open Monday morning you will do your exquisite forgeries of Harry’s signature, we will empty the boxes, and we will be gone. Free, free, free!”

“But Drinker Cope is a detective, darling.”

“He’s been well paid. Also, he’s a murderer, or soon will be. We just make an anonymous call to the police once we’re out of their reach.”

At 9:55 they were waiting at the special wireless phone Harry had installed for direct connections with the Doubloon. The Piper-Heidsieck was in the silver bucket with two paper-thin crystal champagne flutes waiting beside it.

The phone rang at 9:58.

“Hi, darling! What’s this big surprise I’m going to love?”

Sixty seconds. Fifty-five. His life was passing before her eyes. “I know all about your Spanish gold, Harry. Only it’s Mexican and it doesn’t come from any galleons.”

Harry’s voice carried respect. “So you found out.”

Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen...

“On Monday Ferris and I are clearing out all your safe-deposit boxes and going away together. I hate you. I hope—” The receiver erupted with a brutal, massive noise that made her hold it away from her ear. “I hope you’re in hell, darling.”

Ferris was twisting the wire off the champagne’s cork.

“Exit Harry Wham,” she said to him, hanging up the phone.

“Exit Harry Wham,” said the big tousle-haired man. “Not a bad last line. Harry Wham will certainly have to be dead.”

Lee Fong was at the wheel; the Doubloon was in blue water. Harry scaled the phonograph record labeled Side I EXPLOSIONS AND DETONATIONS (Exterior Reverberations) over the side into the blue-gray chop. It sank instantly.

“Where’d you get it?” he asked.

Drinker Cope said, “That little theatrical supply house near the Curran Theater. What happens now?”

He nudged Drinker’s large canvas bag with his toe. “A fishing boat will carry you and your twenty-five percent of the loot to Monterey. A car will bring you back up here.”

“And you?”

He swung an arm to indicate the breadth of the world.

“No bullshit now, Drinker. Why cl you tell me about it?”

When Cope moved the canvas bag with the toe of his shoe in turn, Wham shook his head.

“No, it had to have been more than just money. You couldn’t have been getting tired of April, and don’t tell me any crap about lives getting saved on Iwo Jima. Just for the record, I never was a marine captain on Iwo. Not anywhere, not ever.”

For once in his life, Drinker was almost speechless.

“But... but... the photos, the medals...”

“Fakes. During the war I flew supplies into China over the hump from Burma. A lot of us got moderately rich on that run. Jewels, jade, carved ivory — once all the struts and aileron wires of my plane were made of almost pure gold.”

“Some detective,” said Drinker sheepishly. The two big men were silent for a time, each with his own thoughts. Then Drinker said, “I put a mike in your bedroom and a listening post in the basement. April and Besner talked a lot, made a lot of plans.”

Harry nodded in acknowledgment. Drinker gestured.

“We’d better throw the bomb overboard. It isn’t connected to the dry-cell, but dynamite is dynamite, after all.”

“It’s not on board, it’s under my bed, or it was.” Harry looked at his watch. “It was set to go off twenty seconds ago.”

Drinker jerked upright, his eyes shocked, even frightened. “Jesus Christ! April and Besner would have been just...”

“Exit April Wham,” said Harry, stone-faced. “Besner is just a bonus. I didn’t mind her trying to blow me away, Drinker — there was money involved. But” — he motioned toward the slight, silent man at the wheel — “she hardly knew Lee Fong.”

Drinker retrieved his car from the St. Francis Yacht Club lot where he’d left it at nine that morning, after listening to April’s final bedroom session with Besner. Compared to April, Sherry would be Cream of Wheat to the rarest, bloodiest steak imaginable, but she had one huge advantage: she was still alive.

Then he laughed aloud. He had real money. He’d never have to kiss a client’s ass again, never have to sleep with Sherry again. He’d thought what he’d gotten from Kiely’s safe-deposit box in Kansas City had been a lot of money, and he’d killed two men to get it — Earl with his .45, Emmy with his Plymouth when he’d found the man comatose in the parking lot near the Barbary Coast Hotel. But this was a hell of a lot more money, and he hadn’t had to kill anyone at all to get it.

He found parking around the corner on Green, walked down Gough to his apartment with a satchel in each hand. He didn’t want to leave the bomb-making stuff in the trunk overnight.

Dunc was sitting on the front steps in a tan-colored overcoat, a dark blue navy watch cap pulled down over his ears.

Drinker unlocked the door. “You look like a fucking bum.”

“I’ve been on the road, I sort of ran out of money.”

Drinker started up the stairs, Dunc tagging along behind. Opening his apartment door, he’d half expected April’s perfume to waft out at him, but the place was cold and dreary. He tossed the satchels in a corner, turned on lights, lit the wall heater. Dunc stood looking around; it was his first time there.

“I’m making coffee, you want some? I ain’t got any tea.”

A head shake. Drinker busied himself in the kitchen; there was a strange look in the kid’s eyes, half-mad, half-sad. The scar from the crash was very vivid above his left eye.

“You okay after the concussion and all?”

“Yeah, sure, fine.”

Drinker leaned back against the counter, his arms folded.

“Are you coming back to work for me again? You’re a damned good investigator and—”

“That’s what you told me in L.A. at the Labor Day picnic, wasn’t it? If we hadn’t gotten into the shooting contest you’d have hooked me some other way.” Drinker felt a stab of unease. “Pepe the piano player hired you to keep an eye on me.”

“Pepe... Jesus Christ, kid, I met him for the first time at that Reno steakhouse. I think you ought to—”

“I’d told him I was coming up here. I’d also told him about busting up a wetback smuggling ring. You praised me for that at the picnic, but my name hadn’t turned up anywhere, not once.”

Drinker poured himself coffee. “Sure you don’t want—”

“No, I’m fine.”

He carried his steaming mug into the living room and sat in the leather easy chair, had a momentary vivid image of April in this same chair, opening her legs... He made a decision.

“All right, yeah, I was down in L.A. on other business and I got hired by the piano player to get a line on you. But...”

Dunc was sitting on the straight-back chair across the room. He took off the navy watch cap.

“You played me like a fisherman plays a trout, played me up here, gave me a job so you could keep an eye on me for Pepe.” His face tightened. “Pepe got Penny killed, Drinker.”

“What are you talking about? She ran off the road—”

“I saw the cut line and sawed steering linkage myself.”

“Aw, Jesus Christ, Dunc! Tin so fucking sorry...” He took a gulp of coffee. “Listen, we can go after him! We—”

“I’ve already gone after him — through Mr. David.” Dunc was on his feet, striding up and down the room, ignoring Drinker’s reaction to what he had said. “When I told you we were getting married in Reno, you called Pepe to alert him. He told you to steer me his way, he’d decided I was dangerous because of Las Vegas, so—”

Drinker had to ask it. “You never suspected him at all?”

“Not until Penny was dead — and then it was too late.” He shook his head. “Just a fucking dumb naive punk kid, Drinker.”

Drinker sighed and slumped lower in his chair, knees apart, hands hanging down between them. Dunc kept on pacing.

“But Pepe didn’t fuck up the Grey Ghost’s brakes and steering. He hired the man on the scene to do that for him.”

“Hey, just a minute! You’re not saying that I—”

“Of course I am, Drinker. Who else could have done it? That was the call you got — there was no office break-in.”

Drinker slumped lower so his right hand was now touching the inside of his left calf. Dunc had stopped pacing.

“You’re dead wrong,” Drinker said in a weary voice.

Now he was touching the butt of the little .25-caliber backup piece he always carried strapped inside his left ankle.

Dunc went right on. “And then on Monday morning you called to send us flying down the mountain as fast as we could...”

Drinker said abruptly, “Did you come here to kill me, kid?”

“I don’t know, Drinker. I just—”

Drinker jerked the six-inch .25-caliber revolver from its ankle holster and shot Dunc from six feet away.

The little slug tugged the sleeve of Dunc’s overcoat, but by then he was spinning to his left, moving fast, his gloved left hand jerking out Drinker’s office gun, a Colt .38 revolver, firing it while on the move.

The slug entered Drinker’s right temple from nine inches away, bulging his eyes and slapping his head to one side as its force drove him over against the left arm of the leather chair.

Dunc stared wide-eyed, shocked, at the corpse he had made. If he hadn’t meant to kill Drinker, why had he brought Drinker’s office gun with him?

Larkie straightened up, holding his bloody prize above his head; then he threw it far out into the swamp.

Suddenly Dunc knew, with a blinding clarity, that this was what the Las Vegas priest had been talking about. Not what he thought he had been talking about, but what he had been. Because the weight of guilt over Penny’s death had shifted, just a little, inside Dunc. Not the feeling of loss, but the guilt. What had Penny said in the dream? Now you can go on.

What said the Old Testament? Eye for eye. Simple justice.

He said to the corpse, “I’m still a better fucking shot than you are, Drinker.”

No one was ringing the bell, no one was pounding on the door. The killing could have happened in a vacuum. So go on. Think it through. Blow-back particles on Drinker’s right hand. Powder-scorching around the bullet hole in his temple — a bullet from his own gun... Suicide.

Dunc picked up the ankle gun, pocketed it. Wrapped Drinker’s right hand around the Colt .38, then let hand and revolver fall naturally. What else? Bullet hole!

He found Drinker’s slug lodged in the wall six inches from a framed picture. Dig it out, or leave it there? But on the far wall was a larger picture, a Maxfield Parrish print, blue ladies in diaphanous gowns with blue mountains behind them. He switched the prints. Maxfield Parrish covered the bullet hole.

He was halfway out the door when he remembered the ankle holster. Empty ankle holster. He went back and got it.

At 7:58 Monday morning Dunc trudged up the inner stairs at EDWARD COPE — INVESTIGATIONS. The newspapers had carried the explosion at the Whams’ flat, two dead. April — identified from the teeth in the half of her lower jaw they’d found — and an unidentified male too lightly built to be her husband.

In an allied story a private investigator who had been a marine demolitions expert in the war had been found dead in his apartment, an apparent suicide, with a large amount of unexplained cash and the remnants of a bomb-making kit...

Sherry was at her desk, her eyes red with weeping.

“I don’t believe it,” she said to Dunc.

“That Drinker would set a—”

“He’d kill anybody for money. But kill himself? Never!”

“He kept bad company,” Dunc said in a soft voice.

Her gaze faltered. “Dunc, I’m so sorry about Penny...”

“Yeah. Me too.”

There were volumes in the exchange. She ducked her head, ran for the stairs, ran down them, went out. He stood as if listening for something, then walked over to Drinker’s private office. He stood in the open doorway, looking in, overwhelmed with rage, anguish, love, regret, nostalgia, hatred.

All gone. Everything. His beloved Penny. His child. Drinker. Even Sherry. His dreams of being a writer. His joy at being a private eye. He’d clean out his desk, get his stuff from Ma Booger’s, say goodbye to Mickey, and hit the road again.

To go where? To do what?

There were tentative female steps on the stairs. He felt an upsurging in his chest. Sherry, coming back. They would sit down, talk it through, hash it out, get everything out in the open.

But it was a middle-aged woman, well dressed, her face crumpled with loss and indecision. She paused at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Cope?”

“Mr. Cope... died suddenly over the weekend. The office is no longer—”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.” She made a vague gesture of regret, but she might not have heard him. “I had hoped to hire him... My daughter... she’s only sixteen, and I’m afraid she’s run away with a man... much older than herself...” She wrung her hands with the over theatricality of true emotion. “What am I to do?”

Dunc felt an inner stirring. He was surprised to realize he was standing aside as if to usher her into Drinker’s private office, and she obediently went past him. But Drinker was dead.

“Please sit down,” he heard himself saying. He sat down himself in the swivel chair, drew over a memo pad, and picked up a ballpoint pen from the blotter. He began, “Maybe you’d better give me the particulars...”