Death's Sweet Song

Death’s Sweet Song

by Clifton Adams

Chapter One

The blue Buick pulled off the highway about fifty yards past the station. I could see the driver looking back at the cabins, and there was a woman beside him in the front seat. They sat there for two or three minutes while the man made up his mind, and finally the Buick began backing up and stopped in front of the gas pumps.

“Fill her up?” I said.

“All right.” He opened the door and got out. “What we're looking for,” he said, “is a place to stay for the night. Do you have a vacancy?”

“Sure thing.”

There were five cabins behind the station and they were all vacant, Most of them would remain vacant, even during the tourist season. That's the kind of place it was. I wondered about that while I put gas into his car. Here was a tourist with a new car, wearing expensive clothes, so why should he want to put up in a rat trap like mine when there were first-class AAA motels all along the highway?

He must have read my mind.

“Engine trouble,” he said. “Nothing serious, but I thought I'd better get a mechanic to look at it.”

“Oh. Your best bet is to go back to town and talk to the people at the Buick agency.”

He smiled pleasantly. “That's what I was thinking.”

He was a pretty good-sized guy, and you could see that he kept in condition. His face was burned to the color of old leather, and I guessed he was the type that spent a lot of time on a golf course, or maybe a tennis court. We talked a little about the weather and how hot it was, and then I hung up the hose and went to work on the windshield. That was when I got my first good look at the woman. And she just about took my breath away.

At first I thought she was asleep. She sat there with her eyes closed, her face completely expressionless. Her hair was blonde and short, and her skin was pale, almost white. She wore tan shorts and a white T shirt. The tan shorts looked almost black against that skin of hers. As I was finishing with the windshield, she opened her eyes. For just an instant we stared at each other through the glass, and then she smiled the smallest smile in the world and curled up slowly like a well-fed cat.

“Will you check the oil?” the man said.

I added a quart of oil. Then we went inside the station and he signed the register: “Mr. & Mrs. Karl Sheldon, St. Louis, Mo.”

“You want me to call the Buick agency for you?” I asked.

He smiled again. “Don't bother. I can drive it back to town all right. Anyway, I'd like to freshen up a bit.”

I put them in Number 2 cabin, right next to the one I kept for myself. I went around every morning and put the cabins in shape, but it would take more than clean sheets and a few licks with a mop to make them look like anything. They were all just alike, bedroom, bath, kitchenette—lumpy beds, peeling dressers, cracked linoleum on the floors. But I hadn't realized how shabby they really were before I saw the look on that blonde's face.

“Really, Karl! It seems to me—”

“It's just for a little while.” And he looked at me, almost apologetically. “Don't bother with the luggage. I'll bring it in after a while.”

That was a dismissal, so I went back to the station.

The thermometer on the east side of the wash rack had reached an even hundred. I opened a bottle of Coke and stood in the doorway, watching the endless stream of traffic rushing by on the highway. License tags from everywhere—Nebraska, California, Illinois.... Where do tourists go, anyway, in such a hell of a hurry? What difference does it make? I thought, with a taste of bitterness. They're not going to stop here!

And who could blame them? No air-conditioning, no fancy lunchroom, no AAA sign hanging out. Why should anybody want to stop at a place like this?

That started me thinking about Karl Sheldon and that blonde"” wife of his. Now, if I could afford a wife like that, you wouldn't catch me putting up in a fire trap like this, not by a long shot. Sheldon seemed like a nice guy, but apparently he wasn't very smart. A woman like that was meant to have nothing but the best. Several times that afternoon I caught my imagination beginning to get the best of me. That white skin; I'd never seen anything just like it before. I was almost glad when a customer came by and left a flat for me to fix; it gave me something else to think about.

Around five o'clock Ike Abrams, my part-time helper, came on duty, and a few minutes later Sheldon backed his Buick out of the carport and headed toward town.

“I see you've rented one of the cabins,” Ike said. “Maybe the tourist business is beginning to hit its stride.”

“I hope so. Say, did you notice anything wrong with the way that Buick was running?” “It sounded fine to me.”

Ike may not be the smartest man in the world, but he's as good a shade-tree mechanic as you'll find. When he doesn't hear something wrong with an engine, then there's nothing wrong with it. That started me thinking again. Now, why would Sheldon bother to hand me that cock-and-bull story about car trouble? And even if it was true, why would he wait until five o'clock to get started for a garage that would already be closed for the day?

Well, a man had his own set of reasons for everything, and it was none of my business, anyway. I was just glad that a cabin was rented.

After a while I checked the cash register with Ike, turned the station over to him, and headed toward my own cabin to get cleaned up for my usual date with Beth Langford. I could hear the shower running in Number 2 cabin, and I stopped for a moment and listened, thinking about that blonde. You'd better hold on to that imagination of yours, I thought.

My own cabin was like a farmer's oven at harvest time. The sleazy marquisette curtains hung limp and still at the open windows. No hint of a breeze. Through the sagging screen door I could see the glistening ribbon of Highway 66, and beyond it the shimmering, sun-blasted monotony of Oklahoma prairie. It hurt your eyes, just looking at it.

I tried to tell myself that the tourist business was just getting started, as Ike had said, and pretty soon I'd be renting the cabins every night and the money would begin rolling in.

It was a pipe dream. And I knew it.

I kicked my shoes off and lay across the scorching bed, and in no time at all I was cursing myself for ever getting into the business in the first place. The heat was getting me down. I was going to be late for my date with Beth, but that didn't seem to matter.

For about fifteen minutes I lay there with the sweat rolling over my ribs. Pretty soon that old feeling of frustration began gnawing at me, that nameless anger that I knew so well began sinking its claws in my guts.

I wondered if Karl Sheldon appreciated the woman he had. I wondered if he appreciated that car of his, the money in his wallet, the way he could afford to live. By God, I thought, I would appreciate them if I had them!

There had been a time when I was going to have such things. There had been a time when I was going to take the world apart and put it together again just the way I wanted it.

But it didn't work out like that. Nothing worked out the way I planned it. Even now I could feel this tourist-court business falling down around my shoulders. Another failure, Hooper; but you ought to be used to it by now.

I never got used to it. Every time I went under, something inside me got harder, that anger got hotter. One of these days, I thought, I'm going to do it!

But not today.

I lay there, groggy and listless in the heat, “not caring a damn whether or not I ever got up, whether I ever kept my date with Beth Langford. Finally I did get up and stripped and got under the shower. The cold water jarred me, made me feel a little better. I pulled on some clean slacks and a fresh shirt and got out of that cabin before the heat could get another hold on me. Mrs. Sheldon was sitting on the steps of Number 2.

“Is it always this hot in Oklahoma?” she said.

“In July it is. It usually cools off, though, when the sun goes down.”

She shrugged faintly, as though she didn't believe me. A white pique skirt-and-halter outfit had taken over for the shorts and T shirt, but the effect was about the same. Sitting in front of that cabin, she looked crisp and fresh, as out of place as caviar in an Army mess kit.

“This is quite a place you have here,” she said dryly. “Do you own it?”

“Me and the bank.”

She smiled. It was an expression that came slowly, and you didn't realize that it was there at all until it hit you. Then she stretched those white legs out in front of her and lay back with her elbows on the top step. I must have been staring pretty hard, but she didn't seem to notice.

“Were you ever a fighter?” she asked.

It seemed like a funny question. “I was never a boxer, if that's what you mean.”

“You've got the build for it.”

I didn't know what to say to that. It made me uncomfortable, the way she looked at me, and I wondered if she was laughing at me. About that time I saw Sheldon's Buick turn off the highway and decided it was time I got away from there.

When I got back to the station I saw that Ike had washed down the driveway and swept the office—things I never remembered to do. “If I'm not back by ten o'clock,” I said, “go ahead and lock up.” I left my keys with him, then got into my '47 Chevy and headed for town.

When you take 66 into Creston, your first impression is that it's a pretty good-sized place. The first things you see are the oil-well supply houses, big sprawling buildings and sheds, long rows of powerful cementing trucks, pumpers, testing and drilling equipment. Acres of buildings and acres of trucks, millions of dollars' worth of equipment. It's pretty impressive the first time you see it.

Right next to the railroad are the grain elevators, great towering cement columns standing solid and proud like lonesome skyscrapers in the middle of the prairie. And then there's the big overpass at the railroad. You cross the overpass and drop down on the other side and you're in Creston.

You take one look at the town and feel cheated.

You'd been led to expect great things and here you are right in the middle of another one-horse prairie town. I'd lived here all my life, knocking out four years in the Army, and I never failed to be disappointed when I looked at it. It was a fairly clean town, as prairie towns go, once you moved away from the cluster of produce and feed companies that huddled around the grain elevators. Coming down the town side of the overpass, you could see it all. The straight, treeless streets. The frame houses and parched lawns. The new, raw-looking high school, the cement tennis courts, the white afterthought of a steeple on the Baptist church.

It was my home. A place where eight thousand people, more or less, lived, loved, hated, worshiped, spawned. I knew everybody and everybody knew me, and that's the kind of arrangement you can get pretty sick of after a while.

For a minute I thought I'd drive around to the family house and say hello to my dad, but I stopped at a drive-in instead and had a beer. At that moment, with the bank breathing on my neck, I didn't feel up to lying about how good business was and how much money I was making. And I didn't want Dad asking if Beth Langford and I had set the date yet. He didn't know it, and Beth didn't know it, but there wasn't going to be any date. That's one thing I was sure of.

The carhop, the sister of a guy I had known in high school, brought me the beer.

“How's the tourist business, Joe?”—“Fine. Just fine.”

What a joke! I thought. They always asked the same question and I always gave the same answer, lying in my teeth. But, at times like this, there was always one comforting thought in the back of my mind—this tourist business was purely a temporary arrangement. A breather, a stopover on the way to something big.

If they thought I was going to stay bogged down in Creston the rest of my life, they were crazy. There was a limit to the number of craps a man could throw, no matter how unlucky he was. Sooner or later his luck had to change, and I could feel it in my bones that my turn was about to come up.

I had a theory about this business of getting ahead in the world. Once, at least once, in every man's life there comes a chance to make a killing, a chance to lift himself out of the dung heap. I'd seen it happen too many times. I'd seen oil-field roughnecks become millionaires, betting their hard-earned cash on good structures that the big companies had missed on. I'd seen two-bit land men become big shots overnight.

There is no mystery about how one man gets to be a big shot while the man right beside him remains a bum all his life. One man saw the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it appeared, recognized it for what it was, grabbed it.

There's no mystery about it at all. The only two requirements are plenty of patience and a world of guts. And this is the way it works:

Herb Carter was a small-time land man for a big-time oil company. His job was to go out and lease up land that the company wanted, land that had been proved either by existing producing wells, or by geophysical exploration—proved at a cost of maybe a million dollars to the company. It happened that Herb had a friend who was the chief engineer for an exploration company, and this was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Herb didn't miss. From his friend Herb got the exact location of the prize structure and leased the land for himself.

It sounds pretty simple, but it took plenty of guts. Herb Carter had blackballed himself for life, he had practically robbed his company of a million dollars that they had sunk into the exploration of that land. But he took the chance. He let the company scream. He fought off lawyers and began to drill.

Now, there is just one way in God's world to tell you if a structure will produce oil, and that is to sink a hole. They can shoot the land a thousand times and locate faults, salt domes, anticlines, any of which might produce oil, but the only way to tell is to sink a hole. And every time you sink a hole the odds are nine to one that it will be dry. Herb knew this before he started, but he also knew that this was his one chance, his only chance, to hit the top, so he let them scream and he drilled.

It happens that Herb hit it to the tune of five million, and I had heard the story all my life. But the lesson in the story is not that he hit; the lesson is that he had the guts to recognize an opportunity and grab it.

Herb Carter's story was one I never forgot, and its lesson stuck with me. Have patience, have faith, and have the guts when the time comes to act. So when they asked me about the tourist business I could look them in the eye and say: “Fine. Just fine.” Because I knew that one day my turn would come.

I tramped the horn and had the carhop bring me another beer, knowing that I was going to be late, knowing that Beth didn't like the smell of beer on my breath anyway, and not caring somehow. I was thinking about that blonde out at the tourist court.

Now, there is a woman, I thought, that a man could get excited about. If I was on my way to pick up a woman like that, you wouldn't find me killing time in a drive-in. You could bet your life on that!

But habit had its way, finally. I settled the tab with the girl and headed the Chevy toward town.

The Langford place was on Third Street, a one-story white frame house right across from the Methodist church, where Beth and I used to go to Sunday school, and where Beth still did. The house had been standing there ever since I could remember, just like my own family place a block away, and it never seemed to change. It got a fresh coat of white paint every other spring, the hedge was always neatly trimmed, the lawn always mowed.

It was a lot like our own place, except that Mr. Langford was not a doctor, like my dad, and had more time to keep the place in shape. It was seven-thirty when I pulled the Chevy into the driveway, almost dark, and Old Man Langford had just finished watering the front lawn.

“You're late tonight, aren't you, Joe?”

Be thirty minutes late for a date and the whole town knew it; that's the way Creston was. “I got held up at the station,” I said. “I thought maybe we'd have a sandwich and see a movie. There's plenty of time for that.”

“Sure,” Langford said doubtfully, then shrugged. “How's the tourist business?”

“Fine. Just fine.”

But I wasn't fooling him one little bit. If business was so fine, I'd be driving a better car. Langford was a retired real-estate man and he knew the signs. Then the front door opened and Beth came out.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” I said, hardly seeing her.

I'd seen her so many times, had had so many dates with her exactly like this one, that there was nothing fresh or new about it. Long ago I had slipped into the habit of taking Beth for granted. I knew just about everything there was to be known about her; I could guess beforehand just what she would wear, what she would say, how she would react to any given situation. I could look at her as I was doing now, and never actually see her, because I knew her as well as I knew my right hand, and a man doesn't have to keep looking at his hand to make sure it hasn't changed.

“A sandwich and a movie?” I asked.

She smiled and I knew the exact words she would answer with. “Sure, Joe. A sandwich and movie sounds nice.”

There was a drive-in movie on the highway south of town, and that's where we went. But I couldn't tell you what the picture was about. I don't remember her name, but the girl in the picture was blonde and plenty good-looking, and the husky way she had of talking kept reminding me of that girl back at the tourist court, that Mrs. Sheldon.

I kept remembering the funny way she had looked at me, and that remark she had made about my build.

“What is it, Joe?”

“What?”

“I thought you had gone to sleep,” Beth said.

I became aware of the giant screen in front of us. “I wasn't asleep,” I said. “I was thinking.”

“I thought you liked John Wayne. If you want to go, Joe, it's all right with me.”

“I like John Wayne fine. Let's watch the picture.”

She looked puzzled. Then, almost immediately, she slipped back into that Hollywood dream. I looked at her and had the uneasy feeling that I was sitting beside a total stranger. I looked at her objectively, the way you would look at a photograph of a person you had never seen. By no stretch of the imagination could she be called beautiful, or even pretty, although she was pleasant enough to look at, and certainly she wasn't ugly.

Her face was small, and her hair was rather thick and long, which was the wrong way to wear it. Even I knew that. Her figure was all right, if a little thin. But her arms always freckled in the summer, and they were freckled now. Her eyes, I think, were the best part of her. They were large and startlingly clear.

It's difficult to dislike people with eyes like Beth's, and maybe that's the reason I had fallen into the habit of dating her. But what the hell, I thought. A guy had to do something. If she had let herself believe that it meant something, it wasn't my fault.

She turned her head briefly and looked at me. She smiled and took my hand and squeezed it. The night was hot and her palm was sweaty, and I had to go through an elaborate act of lighting a cigarette to get my hand free. My nerves were beginning to get on edge and I didn't know exactly why.

I settled back in the seat, tried to get comfortable, and stared determinedly at the screen.

It wasn't a minute before I was thinking of that blonde again.

Chapter Two

I went straight back to the station after taking Beth home. The place was dark; Ike Abrams had already called it a day and locked up. I put the Chevy in the carport and then went around and checked all the locks to see that Ike hadn't missed anything. Four of the cabins were still empty, I noticed. Right at the height of the tourist season and only one cabin rented!

The dead, hot air hit me in the face as I went inside my own shack. The lights were still on in the Sheldon cabin, and I could hear the muffled sounds of their talking, without being able to understand what they were saying. Probably, I thought, that blonde is still raising hell about having to stay in such a place.

Well, I couldn't blame her for that.

Think about something else, I thought. Or think about nothing—that's better. Just get your clothes off and hope a breeze comes up and you'll be able to get some sleep before the sun comes up again.

It wasn't any good. The bed was hot, and pretty soon it was clammy with sweat, and I lay there in the darkness smoking cigarettes and wondering when the hell my luck was going to change. When would I be able to pull out of this hole for good?

Times like this were the toughest. It isn't easy to have faith when you're alone. The harder you pray for a break, the more they seem to avoid you, and pretty soon you begin thinking that maybe you've got it figured all wrong, that maybe you're destined to be stuck here the rest of your life, just, the way you are now.

That's when it gets tough, when you have no money, when you have no special influence, and you know there's no way in the world to go out and make something happen. All you can do is wait and be ready to take advantage of any break that happens to come your way—but they never seem to come. And soon, if you let yourself, you'll get to believe they'll never come.

When I'd got out of the Army I'd gone to work in the Provo Box Factory in Creston—just marking time, I told myself. I'll keep my eyes open and wait for something to come up. Then there had been rumors of a big superhighway project along Route 66 and I had grabbed this tourist court on a GI loan. The superhighway project had flopped, and with it my plans for big right-of-way profits. So I was right back where I'd started, except that I was now saddled with a slipping business.

It was almost midnight and not getting any cooler. Disgusted, I got out of bed and walked around in my shorts. Then I thought: Hell, I might as well go outside if I want to walk. So I put on my pants and a pair of moccasins and went outside.

The lights were still on in Number 2, and they were still talking. That Sheldon! Why didn't he just get in that Buick of his and start driving? That's what I would do if I was in his shoes.

I sat on the steps arid started to light another cigarette. But something stopped me. I didn't know what it was at first, but I knew something wasn't right. I listened hard, the unlighted cigarette in my mouth, but the only thing I could hear was the talking over in Number 2. Sheldon and his wife. I listened some more, knowing that something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Then it hit me. It wasn't Sheldon and his wife talking; it was Sheldon and another man!

I couldn't hear what they were saying, but the talk kept going on and on between the men, and only occasionally did Mrs. Sheldon put in a word. The thing seemed funny to me. If Sheldon knew anybody in Creston, he hadn't mentioned It. Then I remembered that car trouble that didn't seem to exist. And the fact that he had chosen one of my shacks instead of a first-class motel. And now he was receiving company at midnight, in a place where he was supposed to be a stranger.

Little things, but put them together and it came to a pretty queer situation.

I had no qualms about eavesdropping; I was trying to hear what they were saying now, but the words were mushy and senseless by the time they had drifted over to where I was. Finally I got up and swung wide around the carport and came up in the shadows by the east window. You're going to have a hell of a time explaining this, I told myself, if Sheldon happens to look out that window and sees you standing here.

I needn't have worried. The shades were drawn, the windows and door were closed. With no ventilation, the thermometer inside that cabin must have been reaching for 105, and that only made me more curious. What could be so important that a man would take precautions like that?

I stood there behind the carport for maybe three or four minutes before anything began to make sense, and then I heard Sheldon saying:

“It sounds too good. That's the trouble. I don't like jobs that look like pushovers, because there isn't any such thing.”

“Just the same,” the other man said, “this one is a pushover. I tell you I would have done it myself, all alone, if it hadn't been for that safe.”

“Prisons are full of men who thought a job was a pushover. Well, let me see that sketch again.”

Then, after a few seconds of silence, “Look. From this first-floor window to the front office, how far is it?”

“I don't know. Forty, fifty feet, I guess.”

“I want to know exactly how far it is, right down to the last inch,” Sheldon said. “It's going to be dark and we're not going to have a guide to lead us by the hand. I want every piece of furniture listed, in the storeroom as well as in the office, and I want all the electrical wiring checked. That's very important. How about burglar alarms?”

The other man laughed. “Not a chance.”

“I know a hundred men who said the same thing,” Sheldon said dryly. “They're in cells now.”

“Cripes, I can't go in there with a yardstick and measure the place off for you. I'm takin' a big chance as it is.”

“All right,” Sheldon said flatly, “we'll forget the whole thing. The deal's off. I told you how I work, and that's the way it's got to be.”

For several minutes they just haggled, Sheldon saying the deal was off and the other man trying to change his mind. I stood there thinking: Well, I'll be damned! It didn't take a mindreader to figure out what they were planning. They were planning to rob somebody! That realization stunned me for a moment, and I guess a kind of panic took hold of me. This was a hell of a thing. The only thing I could think of was getting to a telephone and calling the Creston County sheriff.

But that would be foolish. What could I tell him? I didn't know who they were planning to rob, or how, or when, or anything else. The only thing to do was wait and see if I could learn something else.

So I waited. They were still haggling about how it ought to be done. After a while I stopped listening to what they were saying and began concentrating on the man Sheldon was arguing with. The voice sounded vaguely familiar. I couldn't pin it down exactly, but there was one thing I would bet on: He was a native of Creston. The thing that puzzled me was how a native of Creston ever got to know a man like Sheldon.

“Now, wait a minute. Maybe a hundred and fifty people work at this factory. They draw between fifty and a hundred and fifty a week, so what does that make a two-week payroll? Close to thirty thousand dollars, the way I figure it. Think of it! Are you sayin' we should forget thirty grand?”

“I'm saying the job will be done my way or not at all.”

“All right, all right! I'll get the information you want. I don't know how I'll do it, but I'll do it. Now is everything all right?”

“Everything is just fine,” Sheldon said pleasantly. “Now let's have another look at that sketch. Did you notice what kind of safe it is?” .

“All I know is that it's big and looks plenty rugged.”

“Get me the make and model and it won't be so rugged. Now tell me about this factory again; I want to hear everything there is to know about it.”

I already knew what factory it was, because there was only one factory in Creston, and that was the one that made boxes. It was owned by a tough old Bohunk named Max Provo, and I had worked there one summer after getting out of the Army. I had sweated off fourteen pounds in the place for a lousy fifty bucks a week. I'd never thought of it before now, but it was a wonder the place hadn't been robbed long ago, considering how it was run.

Old Provo was the kind of penny-pinching gaffer who never put out a dollar if he didn't absolutely have to. Long ago he had figured out that writing checks cost money. A hundred pay checks, costing about ten cents each, meant that he would have to pay out ten dollars every two weeks for nothing. Twenty dollars every month, two hundred and forty every year. Not for a man like Provo. He paid in cash.

And did he have the cash brought out in an armored car? Not Provo; that kind of foolishness cost money. He picked up the cash himself and made the bank furnish armed guards, free of charge. And he picked the cash up the day before payday and made the office force come in an hour early the next morning in order to get the payroll ready by noon. That was Provo's idea of good business, squeezing that extra hour's work out of the office force.

Well, by God! I thought. At that moment I was remembering the long hours and low wages and bad working conditions, and I was almost ready to go back to my cabin and forget that I had heard anything. Let them take the cheap bastard. Let them take him good; it was none of my business, anyway.

I don't know—if I had walked off right then, maybe that's just the way it would have happened.

But I didn't walk off. I heard Sheldon saying: “Now about the watchman; what kind of routine does he follow?”

The other man laughed shortly. “His routine is to sit in the garage arid read Western magazines. He's about sixty years old, he's got a gimpy leg, and on top of that he's half deaf. You could probably blow the safe with him right there in the garage, and he'd never even know about it.”

I got the unpleasant feeling that Sheldon was not amused. “He'll have to be taken care of,” he said flatly, “but that shouldn't be any trouble. Now look. Here's a list of things I want you to do. Today's the seventh, isn't it? Yes, the seventh. Paula and I will leave this place first thing in the morning, and we'll come back on the fourteenth. I'll pick up the things I need and we'll take care of that safe the night of the fourteenth. That's right, isn't it?”

The other man must have nodded. “All right,” Sheldon said, “that's all there is to it. We'll come back to this same place. It's a lousy place, but there's one thing about it—it isn't crowded with tourists who might recognize me. The farmer that runs the place is too stupid to guess anything. He'll think we're just returning from our vacation.”

The other man sounded amused. “It's funny, in a way. Joe Hooper used to work at this factory.”

“Who's Joe Hooper?”

“The guy that owns this fly trap you're stayin' in.”

The meeting was about to break up. Paula Sheldon began complaining about the heat and somebody opened the window, but not until I was well back in the shadows.

Stupid farmer! I thought. Well, by God, we'll see about that! You're going to look pretty silly, Sheldon, when you tackle that safe with a roomful of deputy sheriffs looking on!

I got back to my cabin just in time. I saw the lights go out in Number 2, then the door opened and a man came down the steps. He came right in front of my cabin, whistling softly through his teeth, and suddenly I had him pegged. His name was Bunt Manley. He was a thickset bull of a man, wearing a flapping sport shirt and a wide-brimmed straw sombrero. He walked around the far side of the station, and after a while I heard a car pull off toward Creston.

Well, I thought, the picture is beginning to fall in place. I didn't know Bunt Manley very well, but I knew that he had recently served a year and a day in Leavenworth for some dealings in moonshine whisky, and that was probably where he had met Sheldon.

I lay across the bed again and pieced the thing together as well as I could. It was possible that the robbery had been Sheldon's idea in the first place, but it didn't seem likely to me. Probably Manley had spotted the box factory as a soft touch and had got in touch with Sheldon, who seemed to consider himself an expert on safes.

Looking at it objectively, I had to admit that they were . working it very nicely. Almost every man in Creston had worked in the box factory at one time or other, and probably Bunt Manley had too. So he would know the place, and there would be no special reason to suspect that he had a hand in the robbery. Sheldon, of course, was just a man on a vacation. You couldn't arrest a man and his wife for spending the night in a tourist court.

It was a nice setup, with one exception. I knew about it.

Tomorrow, I thought, the Sheriff will know about it. Comes the night of the fourteenth and we'll see who's the stupid farmer, Mr. Sheldon!

I couldn't sleep. This new excitement had me alive to my fingertips and I was up pacing the floor all over again. What a hell of a thing this is! I thought. Planning a robbery right here in one of my own cabins—a thirty-thousand-dollar robbery! The thought of so much money stunned me. Thirty thousand dollars, just for one night's work!

Of course, there was going to be a monkey wrench in Sheldon's machinery, and I was going to throw it. But the idea that the thing could be done, if it weren't for me, just about knocked the breath out of me. All that money!

Hooper, I thought, what could you do with that much money? Think of it!

I didn't dare think of it. Sure, I was looking for a break, an angle to grab hold of, but this business of pulling a robbery was too much of a gamble. No, sir, a thing like this just wasn't in my line.

But it was a pile of money, more money than I had ever had at one time, and it was hard getting my mind on anything else. Across the way the lights were still on in Number 2. The door was open now and I could see Sheldon working over some papers at the table. I didn't see the blonde.

Then I did see her. She was outside, sitting on the bottom step of the cabin, and the slant of light from the doorway just fell across the top of that platinum hair. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, just watching her, and it was then that I realized that she had hardly been out of my mind from the first moment I'd seen her. All afternoon she had moved back and forth through my consciousness. Even tonight, when I'd been with Beth, she had been in my brain.

Well, I thought, you might as well forget her, Hooper, because in just one more week she's going to be in jail, along with Sheldon and Manley. I wondered what Sheldon was doing there at the table—probably going over those sketches that Manley had made of the factory.

As I watched, the blonde stood up and stretched, and then she called, “How much longer are you going to be, Karl?”

“Not long,” Sheldon said. “Why don't you go to bed?”

“I can't sleep with the lights on. Besides, it's too hot.”

Sheldon said something else and his wife stood there for a moment, smoothing down her hair. Then she turned and started walking out toward the highway—not going anywhere, just walking to kill time while her husband got caught up on his homework. If I had a wife like that, I thought, I wouldn't be fooling with paperwork this time of night; you could bet on that!

But when you're a professional safecracker, I guess you have to work odd hours. I turned around and watched the blonde go past my door, and then I went to the door and watched her walk as far as the station. She didn't do anything. She just stood there and looked at the empty highway, and you could almost tell how bored she was by the way she stood. I lit a cigarette and told myself it was time to get some sleep.

I didn't budge.

As long as she was where I could see her, I couldn't take my eyes off her. After a while she moved around to the other side of the station, making a wide, lazy circle on her way back to the cabin. I went to the icebox to get myself a beer, and when I got back to the door she was standing right there at the bottom step.

She laughed softly, and just the sound of her voice was enough to shake me.

“I saw your cigarette,” she said. “The heat keeping you awake too, Mr. Hooper?”

For a moment it was pretty awkward. I couldn't think of anything to say. She had known all along that I had been watching her and it didn't seem to bother her a bit.

Then a cloud slid from under the moon and there was sudden light in front of my cabin. I saw that she was smiling. “Is that beer you're drinking?” she asked.

“There's more in the icebox, if you'd like one.”

“I think that would be fine,” she said softly, still smiling.

I had a fast pulse as I went for the beer. I kept reminding myself that it was all probably very innocent, that she was just bored and wanted to talk. Still, that was the way things got started.

I didn't have any definite plans; I'd just take her the beer and see where we went from there, if anywhere. When I stepped out of the kitchen I saw that she was no longer outside by the steps.

She was there in my room.

Well, I thought, that's laying it on the line where you can't miss it! She was standing there with an unlighted cigarette in her fingers, and I must have set the beer down somewhere because I didn't have it when I stepped over and held a match for her. For a moment neither of us did anything. We just stood there looking at each other getting the situation down pat. Then I grabbed for her.

She slipped out of my arms like a greased cat. “Are you always so impulsive, Mr. Hooper?”

“That's the way I am, I guess. And the name's Joe.”

“And I'm Paula.” She smiled. “Now do I get that beer?”

That was when I began to burn. I felt like the guy who had the wallet pulled away from him just as he was about to pick it up. But I got the beer. I found the can on the kitchen table and gave it to her.

“Now you're mad,” she said, still smiling.

I said nothing.

She drank some of the beer and put the can down. “Does it always have to mean the same thing,” she asked, “when a girl steps into a man's room?”

“Am I making a beef?”

“No. But you're mad; it shows all over.”

I was mad, all right, but not nearly so much as I had been at first. Nothing had really changed. She hadn't turned indignant or tried to slap me, so I knew that nothing had changed but the timing. And I could change my timing. For a Paula Sheldon I could change a lot of things.

“All right,” I said, “maybe I'm mad, but I'll get over it. Do you want another beer?”

“No, I'd rather talk.”

“All right. What do we talk about?”

Still smiling, she hit me with it. “Let's talk about what you heard at our window tonight.”

I couldn't have been more stunned if she had fired a pistol in my face. I stood like a post as she stepped around the bed, looked once through the window to make sure that her husband was still busy with his paperwork, then pulled the shade. She wasn't smiling now. She meant business.

“How much did you hear, Joe?” she said.

I shrugged as if to say I didn't know what she was talking about.

“You heard enough,” she said. “I was on the bed when Karl and Manley were talking. You couldn't see me, but I could see you through the gap between the window shade and the facing.”

There was nothing I could say to that. She had seen me. What got me was why she hadn't yelled at the time, giving Manley and Sheldon a warning.

She knew what I was thinking.

“You're wondering why I kept quiet about it,” she said. “I did it because this job has to go through. There can't be any backing out, because Karl has to have the money. Do you have any idea how many strings have to be pulled to get a man out of prison? It took almost ten thousand dollars to get Karl a parole, and now the string pullers want to be paid, or they'll send him back faster than they got him out. If he's lucky.”

I hardly heard what she was saying. She had moved closer, pressing against me, and then those white arms crawled around my neck and she turned her face up to me.

“Do you understand, Joe?”

The only thing I understood was the excitement that took hold of me when she touched me, as the softness of her seemed to melt against me, as I tried to capture that red mouth that kept slipping from one side to the other.

“Joe, do you understand what you must do?”

“I understand.”

She was a fire inside me, spreading through me, racing like flame. She was still talking as I forced her back. I tightened my arm around her, bowing her back, bending her knees, and suddenly both of us came crashing down on the bed. She was still talking.

“Joe, nothing must happen to stop this factory job! No one must know about it! No one!”

“I said I understood.”

“Promise, Joe, that you'll tell no one!”

“Great God, what do I have to say to convince you? All right, I promise!”

Only then did she stop squirming and fighting, only then did I capture that red mouth of hers. Her arms tightened around my neck in the kind of nervous excitement that is impossible to fake. Her dagger-sharp nails gouged into my shoulders as she pulled me down with her, then she took my hand in hers and guided it, and for a long while there was no sound in the room except that of our breathing.

“Joe...”

I wasn't sure how much time had passed. The bright, “clean fire was dead, and the stifling heat of the Oklahoma summer moved into the room.

“Joe...”

I said nothing. The thing to watch about climbing so high is the terrible fall to the ground. I laughed.

“Joe, what is it?”

“Nothing.”

I had no wish to touch her or look at her or anything else. After a while she got up and went to the window, again, and I guess Karl Sheldon was still busy with his burglary plans, because Paula seemed in no hurry to leave. She came back and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Joe, you meant it, didn't you? You won't do anything that might affect our plans?”

I looked at her then, amazed that she looked exactly the same as she had before—completely unruffled, as pale as the moon. Even then, at a time like that, with the heat in the room so heavy that it was almost impossible to breathe, all I had to do was look at her and that sure excitement began to take hold again. Instinctively I reached out for her, but she laughed softly and moved away.

She was waiting for an answer, for some assurance that I was going to keep my promise. I wasn't even sure what it was I had promised. I made another grab and she slithered away again, and this time she stood up and moved into the deep shadows on the other side of the room. It was almost as though a powerful field of magnetic attraction had been removed. Now that I could hardly see her, I could think again.

“Well...” she said. Not impatiently, not uncertainly. It was just an invitation to get on with the particular business at hand.

“I gave you my word,” I said. “I won't break up your husband's plans.”

Like hell I wouldn't break up his plans! What if something got fouled up and something went wrong with the robbery? Where would that put me? I knew where it would put me, if it ever came out that I had known about the robbery beforehand. It would put me in a cell right alongside Sheldon and Manley. Accessory before the fact— I wasn't so stupid that I didn't know what that meant.

I sat up and lit a cigarette to give my hands something to do while I thought it out. She was a hell of a woman, there was no doubt about it....

“I know what you're thinking,” she said, almost gently, and I imagined that I could hear that faint half-smile in her voice.

“Do you?”

“You were wondering if the payment was right for the job.”

“I was wondering what your husband would do if he knew I had listened in tonight.”

“That's easy,” she said. “He simply wouldn't go through with the job. That's how he is. If a thing isn't set up perfectly, he doesn't touch it.”

“And if he doesn't go through with this one, he goes back to prison?”

She nodded. “Or worse.”

I found an ash tray and mashed out the cigarette.

“You know,” I said, “this thing could be as dangerous for you as it is for your husband. You must love him very much, coming here like this....”

Nothing at all flustered her. She laughed. “As a matter of fact, I don't love him at all.” And she had already anticipated the next question. “Then why am I married to him? Maybe I'll tell you someday.”

She moved out of the shadows then and came across the room again. This time she didn't slip away when I reached for her. For just a moment the hard fire raged and she gouged her fingers into my shoulders as I kissed her.

“I like you, Joe!” The words came through her teeth, hissing.

Then she was gone. Holding her when she didn't want to be held was like trying to squeeze moonlight in your hands. She was out of my arms and out of the cabin before I could stop her. There was nothing I could do about it.

There was little sleep for me that night. My nerves were strung as tight as cat gut on a violin.

After a while the light went out in the Sheldon cabin and the night was completely quiet. There was not a breath of breeze to move the limp curtains, to relieve the heat. When I looked hard into the shadows I could almost see her standing there. I could reach out and almost touch her. And all I could do was lie there and sweat, giving myself plenty of good advice that I knew I wasn't going to take.

But all things end, if you wait long enough, and finally that night ended. I opened the station as usual around seven o'clock, and about thirty minutes later Karl Sheldon and Paula came around in the Buick.

I lifted my hand when Sheldon waved. “We're going down to Texas to see my wife's people,” he called. “On our way back we may be stopping with you again.”

“I'll be looking for you.”

Paula didn't even look at me. Which was just as well.

As the Buick pulled onto the highway and slipped into the stream of early-morning traffic, panic took hold of me. Christ! I thought. How are you going to explain this to the Sheriff, Hooper? What are you going to say when he asks why you stood here and let them drive away?

Then I thought: Now, wait a minute. There's nothing to get panicky about, because, as far as you know, they haven't done a damn thing that they could be arrested for. All they've done is talk. And there was no way in the world I could prove that.

Sure, I thought. That makes sense. The robbery doesn't take place for another seven days, so just phone the Sheriff and tell him what you know.

I didn't do it.

The first thing I knew, it was noon, and I still hadn't done anything about calling the Sheriff. Something seemed to happen every time I started to call. First it was a farmer wanting coal oil, then a flat to fix, then a lube job, and then the morning was gone. Once I had been putting gas in a car, and the driver got out and said, “What the hell do you think you're doing?” The tank had overflowed and gas had gone over his rear fender and was splashing onto the driveway. “What are you thinking about, anyway?”

I could have told him, but I didn't. I had been thinking about that blonde wife of Sheldon's.

That threw a scare into me. Well, by God! I thought. Are you still remembering that little blonde tramp, Hooper. Is it because of that promise to her that you can't find time to call the Sheriff's office?

Oh, she's quite a woman, all right, that Paula Sheldon, but you'd better be sensible about this thing, Hooper, or you're going to have more trouble than you can handle!

Paula, I thought, you're going to look like hell in one of those prison dresses, but there's not a thing I can do about it. I quit the lube job I'd been working on, went into the station, and picked up the phone. After a minute a voice said, “Sheriff's office, King speaking.”

“Ray, this is Joe Hooper. Let me speak to the Sheriff, will you?”

“The Sheriff just left for lunch. Anything I can help you with, Joe?”

“No. Thanks, anyway. It's nothing important.” Suddenly I was glad the Sheriff wasn't in, because the thing was too involved to tell over the phone. When Ike came on duty, I'd go down to the office and talk to him. That was what I told myself.

“By the way,” the deputy said, “how's the tourist business, Joe? They keepin' you pretty busy out there?”

“Yes, pretty busy. Well, see you around, Ray.”

I hung up and looked at my hands. They were shaking. I felt like the man who walked away from a head-on collision.

What's the matter with you, Hooper, have you lost your mind completely?

I knew what was the matter with me. I was beginning to get an idea. It came with a rush, and suddenly it stood there full grown, grinning at me. This is the way, it said.

This is how it's going to be!

Chapter Three

About two o'clock that afternoon the Sheriff called.

“Joe, this is Otis Miller. Ray King said you called while I was out to lunch. Anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I talked to Ray, and maybe I should have told him about it, but I decided to wait until I could see you. I'm afraid I got suckered, Sheriff. I was going through my cash drawer this morning and found a five-dollar bill that looks like it was printed on newsprint.”

“Counterfeit?”

“Queer as a thirty-cent piece. I don't know why I didn't notice it before. Too busy to pay attention, I guess.”

“Well, that's too bad, Joe, and I don't know of a thing we can do about it. Bring the bill down to the office, though, and it may help catch the man who's passing them. By the way, how's the tourist business out there?”

“Fine, Sheriff. Just fine!”

“Glad to hear it, Joe. Well, you bring that bill around and we'll see what we can do.”

I hung up, amazed at how easy a lie could roll once you got it started. I did have a counterfeit five-dollar bill, of course. I'd been carrying it in my billfold almost a year, wondering what I was going to do with it.

Well, now I knew. That bogus bill, the way I figured it, was going to be worth about ten thousand dollars! It had got me off the hook with the sheriff. Because of that bill, and some pretty fast thinking, I'd soon be able to kick this town in the face. I'd soon be on my way to the top!

I felt like a million dollars, just thinking about it.

It seemed fantastic that the idea hadn't come to me right away, as soon as I'd heard Sheldon and Manley scheming the robbery. But it hadn't it had come at the very last minute, and it had been a damn near thing, too. This was the break I'd been waiting for, that beautiful once-in-a-lifetime break, and I had almost muffed it!

The trouble was I hadn't expected a break to come in the form of a payroll robbery. What I had been expecting was the Herb Carter story all over again, but I knew now that breaks don't come spelled out for you—sometimes you've got to fill out the instructions yourself. Another thing; I hadn't expected my big break to land me on the wrong side of the law. But what the hell! Hadn't Herb Carter broken just about every law in the book? And had anything happened to him? Like hell it had. They're not so anxious to wave that law in your face if they know you've got a bankroll to fight with.

Anyway, I'd finally got it straight in my mind, and I felt fine about it. I walked around grinning. Oh, Sheldon and Manley were going to squeal like pigs under a fence when I broke the news to them that I was cutting myself in for one third of that box-factory payroll. But there was very little they could do about it. They'd either have to accept my terms or give up the jot)—and I just couldn't see a professional giving up a soft touch like that box factory.

I walked around in a rosy daze the rest of the afternoon. Good-by, filling station, good-by, tourist shacks, good-by, Creston! In another week I'd shake the whole business out of my hair.

But, in the meantime, I had to sit tight. I had to wait for the Sheldons to come back, and I had to act completely normal. That's the important thing, just act as though nothing at all had happened.

So I spent the rest of the day trying to act normal, trying to keep my feet on the ground. I stood in the station doorway, drank Cokes, watched the traffic go by. I thought about that robbery, and the ten thousand dollars, and getting away from Creston. And I also did a good deal of thinking about Paula Sheldon.

But I concentrated on acting normal. Every few minutes somebody from Creston would go by on the highway, and I'd wave, and then I'd think: Christ, what would they do if they knew what I'm thinking right now! They wouldn't believe it. What if I walked up to them and said, “Look here, on the fourteenth of this month I'm going to take part in a robbery. I'm going to help rob old Provo's payroll. What do you think of that?”

I wanted to laugh. They wouldn't believe it! Doc Hooper's boy robbing a payroll? Never!

If they only knew! I thought.

I made a kind of game out of it and amused myself for a while, but after a few hours it began to grow a little thin. Anyway, my thoughts always turned back to Paula Sheldon.

I kept remembering what she had said about her husband. “I don't love him at all,” she had said. And she had meant it. And she had meant it when she had pressed that red mouth of hers to mine—there was no faking an excitement like that!

I knew what she was, and it made no difference at all. She was hard, as ruthless as she was beautiful, as brittle as fine china. Well, I could be hard too, and ruthless, and brittle. I had taken it on the chin plenty trying to play according to the rules. Now, for the first time in my life, I felt strong; I felt that I could do something really big, and to hell with the rulebooks.

But it all came back to Paula, eventually. Oh, I had been drunk on heady wine, all right, and only a man with a hangover can know the terrible thirst for more that comes the day after. Paula had known. Knowing that I never intended to keep my promise to her, she had smiled.

She had known better.

It's possible to hate and love at the same time, they say, but I did not hate Paula. Where there had been stale existence, Paula had brought excitement. She had given me something to fight for—herself. Let's face it, Hooper, it's not only the ten thousand dollars that fascinates you— it's that blonde as well, and you know it.

Her husband? I hardly thought of him. What was necessary I would do. But after the robbery Paula would belong to me.

Ike Abrams rattled off the highway in his '46 Ford, drove around to the back of the station, and parked beside the grease rack. I went around to meet him. “Can you take over now, Ike? I've got some things to do. We can check the cash register after a while.”

“Sure,” he said. “You sick or somethin', Joe? You look a little green around the rills.”

“I feel fine.”

I went to my cabin and didn't even notice the heat. I lay across the bed for several minutes without moving, without batting an eye, just staring at the ceiling and thinking of all the things I could do with one third of thirty thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars, right in my pocket! It was more money than I'd ever had, more money than I'd ever seen, even, all at one time.

I must have dozed for a while. It was almost sundown when a knock at the door brought me out of it. I sat up, groggy with sleep and half dazed by the heat, and then I saw my father standing on the steps on the other side of the screen door.

“Son, you in there?”

“Sure, Dad. Come on in, if you can stand the heat.”

I was still sitting there scratching my head as he opened the screen and stepped inside. “By God,” I said, “I must have been crazy to go to sleep in this heat. I feel like I'd been knocked down with a wooden mallet. Sit down, Dad. I think there's some beer in the icebox.”

He looked older than the last time I had seen him, which had been only a day or two before, and very tired. He smiled faintly, dropped into a cane-bottomed chair, and carefully placed his black satchel on the floor.

“Yes. I think* a beer might taste good.”

I went to the kitchen and washed my face at the sink, then got the beers out of the icebox and brought them in. I dropped on the bed again and for one quiet moment we drank from the sweating cans. I was used to having my father drop in on me like this, every time he had a call out this way. He was the finest man I ever knew— and the only man in the world that I cared a damn about. We never said much. Usually it was just like this, sitting, drinking a beer together, and then he'd leave. I had a feeling, though, that today was going to be different.

“You been out to the Jarvis farm again?” I asked firmly.

He shrugged and smiled that small smile. “The McClellans, this time. The youngest boy stepped on a nail. Luckily, he had been vaccinated for tetanus.”

“Why,” I asked, “do you keep fooling with these hard-scrabble farmers, Dad? You'll never get your pay, and you know it. You could have a fine practice in town, be making plenty of money, if you'd stay in your office where people could find you.”

He glanced at me, then away. “People in the country need doctors too. Besides, it's a little late for me to start making money, isn't it?”

“You could think about your health. It's not too late for that, but it will be pretty soon, if you keep making these farm calls at all hours.”

We'd been over it a thousand times and had never found a meeting place. Maybe I would have been a doctor, the way he had wanted, if I could have seen any future in it when I was younger. But getting up at all hours of the night, when you're dead tired, and going out to the very end of God's nowhere to help some farmer's wife have her tenth kid was not my idea of a way to live.

“Joe ...” I looked up, almost forgetting that he was still sitting there. He cleared his throat and looked down at his lean, white hands. “Joe, I had a talk with Beth's father yesterday.”

“Steve Langford?” I knew what he was thinking. I didn't want to talk about it. It was the last thing I wanted to discuss right now, with Paula Sheldon whirling in my mind, but I couldn't think of any way to stop it. “What did Langford have to talk about—that front yard of his?” I laughed. “You'd think it was his life's work, the time he puts on it.”

“No.” He still looked at his hands. “He talked about you, Joe, and about Beth.”

“I know,” I said, trying hard to keep a hold on my anger. “Langford wants to know if Beth and I have set the date yet. Well, I've got news for Langford. There's not going to be any date. What a hell of a town this is! Go out with a girl a few times and they've got you as good as married!”

I had plenty more to say. I was getting damn tired of people like Steve Langford butting in on my business. But I leftthem unsaid, the things that were in my mind. I had no wish to hurt my father, the one man in the world that I liked. I guess he figured, like Langford, that someday I would marry a home-town girl and settle down to rot the rest of my life away in Creston. Well, he was mistaken about that; they all were mistaken.

But the look of disappointment in my father's eyes shook me. I suddenly realized how old he was, and tired, and finally I said: “I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk it over with Beth.”

He smiled, very faintly. “All right, Joe. Whatever you say.” Then he reached for his satchel and stood up. We said the usual small things, and after a while he was gone.

I was late, as usual, when I got around to the Langford place that night, and as usual Steve Langford was watering his front lawn as I drove up.

“You're late tonight, Joe.”

“Got held up at the station again,” I said.

He seemed distant, cool. He had been doing a lot of thinking and had just about decided that he didn't like me.

“Beth's in the house, I think.” He went on with his watering.

I sat in the car waiting for Beth to come out. Something made me look at Langford again. He was standing half crouched, rigid as a statue, with the squirting nozzle in his hands, almost as though it were a gun. I got it then. He was waiting for me to get out of the car, walk up to the front porch, and meet his daughter at the door.

Well, I thought, the hell with him! I tramped the horn button and the blaring sound hit the silent dusk like a hammer. Bright crimson rushed to Langford's face as he stood there. I tramped the horn again, just for the hell of it. By God, I thought, if she doesn't want to come out of the house, that's fine with me!

But she came out. I knew she was defying her father in doing it, but she came out.

“Are you ready?” I said.

“Sure, Joe.” Not looking at her father, she walked head down to the Chevy and got into the front seat beside me.

That was all we said until we were away from the house. She sat stiff and silent as I worked the Chevy toward the highway. She looked clean and crisp in a white dress, and her tanned arms and small face made her look almost like a young girl. But she certainly was no Paula Sheldon.

Well, I thought, I'm glad the end is in sight. And Beth knew it—it was written in the strained lines of her face. She was thirty years old, which is pretty old for a single girl in a town like Creston, and I could see it written in those lines of desperation at the corners of her mouth, in the steady glassiness of her eyes. There was just one thing I wished for: I wanted it to be calm and civilized. I had no wish to hurt her—all I wanted was to end it as cleanly as possible.

About three miles out of town we turned off the highway, onto a graveled road, and before long we could see the dark stand of oak and blackjack that more or less surrounded Lake Creston. It was getting dark now and we began meeting cars heading back toward town, some of them towing small boats on two-wheeled trailers. Local fishermen.

Pretty soon we could see the lake itself, a pretty good-sized body of water for that part of the country, sprawling over maybe three hundred acres and held in check by a big dirt dam. I glanced at Beth, and she looked surprised. It had been a long time since I had brought her out here.

Maybe it was a mistake to come to this particular place, but it was the only place I could think of where we could talk and not be disturbed—where we could get mad and yell at each other, if it came to that, and not be afraid that somebody would hear us. I made a great business of watching the road as the lake rose up before us.

It was always something of a shock to see that much water in a dry country. The lake had been built back in the thirties by the WPA. It furnished Creston with water, and was well stocked for fishing, and a few years back picnic grounds had been constructed below the dam. There was a dock where several fishing boats, and even a few snipe-class sailboats, were tied up. Up toward the head of the dam there was a small blockhouse where you could buy fish bait, fishing licenses, and beer. I stopped and picked up a can of beer before crossing the dam. Now that the sun had set, the night was almost cool near the water.

“You want to take a turn around the lake?” I said.

She said something, I didn't hear what, as I circled the car to get under the wheel. “It's really quite a place,” I said. “I wouldn't mind having a cabin out here somewhere, a place where a guy could knock off for a day or so and just take it easy.”

I was just killing time, and Beth knew it. I could feel her staring at me, wondering what I was going to say.

There was a narrow, single-lane graveled road that meandered all the way around the lake, and now and then a deep-rutted spur that wandered off to a dead end at some abandoned farm. I put the car in gear and started across the dam, dunking vaguely that the cabin idea wasn't a bad one, at that. Maybe Paula and I would get ourselves one sometime. It would take some money, of course, but Old Man Provo and his box factory were going to furnish that.

After we hit the lake road we had to take it easy. It was dark, and the road crawled crazily in and out of wild-looking blackjack thickets, and you had to watch for cars parked here and there along the road. High-school kids.

About halfway around the lake I pulled my Chevy onto one of those abandoned farm roads and snapped out the lights. I looked at Beth, then lit a cigarette and sat back in the seat. There was tightness around her mouth, a determined look in her eyes.

“Joe.”

I looked at her.

“Joe, what's wrong? Something is wrong, isn't there? You've hardly said a word since we left the house.”

I didn't know how to say it. Goddamnit, I thought, I should have just called her on the telephone and told her it was all over. She moved over next to me, and I was the stiff one now, and cold.

“Joe...”

“Yes?”

“What is it, Joe? Can't you tell me?”

The situation was ridiculous, and being ridiculous made me mad. “Christ,” I said, “do I have to spell it out for you? We're not getting anywhere, that's all, and your old man thinks we ought to knock it off.” I looked straight ahead, through the windshield. “I think so, too.”

She did nothing for several seconds, sitting very erect, clenching her hands in her lap. Then, finally: “Joe, is it someone else? I know what my father thinks, and it isn't important, but is it someone else?”

“Now, who else would it be?” I said wearily. “If I'd found someone else, it would be all over Creston by now and you know it.”

“But... there must be a reason!”

“I told you,” I said. “We're not getting anywhere. And I'm tired of not getting anywhere, tired of Creston, tired of those lousy tourist shacks. I'm leaving this country, Beth, and everything in it. It's as simple as that.”

“Is it, Joe?”

“Now, what's that supposed to mean? Of course it's as simple as that. I'm sick of it and I'm leaving it.”

“And me, Joe?” A very tight voice. “What about me?”

Good Lord, I thought, what do you have to say to a woman like this?

I said, “It's over. If there was ever anything to begin with. That's what I'm trying to tell you. It's over.”

She didn't believe me. Womanlike, she couldn't believe that after all this time she was being dumped. Behind it all, she probably believed that my motivations were noble and gallant, because she couldn't make herself believe that I was simply sick of her and that was the whole story.

Then she did a hell of a thing. You had to know Beth to understand what a hell of a thing it was. Suddenly she had her arms around my neck and was pressing herself against me, and there was absolutely no mistake about what she had in her mind. This was her one big weapon—the one weapon that all nice girls like Beth hold onto to the bitter end, hoping that they'll never have to use it but firmly convinced that it will gain them their ends, a ring and marriage certificate, if the time should ever come.

It left me completely cold. Instantly, Paula was in my brain again, and nothing in the world that Beth could do could stir me. I reached for the switch and snapped it on.

“You might as well go on saving it,” I said. “But for somebody else.”

Chapter Four

The fourteenth was a long time coming that July. The days dragged as I stood in the station doorway watching the traffic go past, thinking: Maybe the next car will be that Buick, maybe the Sheldons will come early to make sure there are no slip-ups.

Then I'd get to thinking: Maybe they won't come back at all. Maybe something happened and they decided to call the whole thing off.

What would I do then? They had to come! I couldn't stand this lousy place much longer. I couldn't stand this flea-bitten service station. I wanted to feel that money in my pocket. I wanted Paula close to me, where I could reach out and touch her.

Meanwhile, I was alone. That business with Beth at the lake—Lord, I hope I never get into a mess like that again. She cried. She didn't say a single word, just lay there with great tears streaming down that pale, pinched face of hers. I had hated her at the time, but now I felt nothing. I hadn't heard a word from Bern since that night. I knew I never would.

Now there was the robbery to be thought about. I wasn't worried about Manley and Sheldon; I was holding all the cards. If they pulled the robbery, there was no way they could keep me out of it. And they would pull it, all right, because Paula would have it no other way.

Still, I was taking no chances.

On the thirteenth I decided to do something that I should have done at the very beginning. I was going over that box factory with a fine-tooth comb. I wasn't going to rely on Bunt Manley.

I thought: This is going to look damn funny, Hooper. You haven't been near that factory since you stopped working there. Is this going to be smart, sticking your nose into things the day before the robbery?

Smart or not, I couldn't take chances on something going wrong. And about that time I remembered Pat Sully—good old Pat Sully, who had loaned me five dollars six months ago and had probably kissed it good-by long since.

Well, Pat was going to get a surprise, because I was going to pay him back, and I was going to pay him back because he happened to be a bookkeeper for Max Provo and did his work in the factory's front office, which was exactly the place I wanted to visit.

About three that afternoon I turned the station over to Ike Abrams and took the Chevy into town. The factory was north and west of town, sprawled out on the red slope of a clay bill. There were two main buildings, two-story red-brick affairs, connected by a plank runway at the second-story level.

One building was the factory itself, where the boxes were made, and that one didn't interest me at all. The other was a conglomeration of warehouse-garage-storeroom-office, and this one interested me plenty.

I parked the Chevy in the company parking space at the west side of the factory, got out, and started walking around to where the front office was. There was a good deal of activity at the loading ramp, where two big semis were backed up to be loaded. Sweating roustabouts formed an endless chain with their loaded dollies, warehouse to trailer and back again, working like so many ants around an anthill. I had been one of those ants once. Never again. The office itself was a busy place and not much to look at. It was just one big room, the working space partitioned off by wooden railings. Truck drivers and warehousemen were coming and going, and some of them were trying to make themselves heard over the noise of typewriters-and adding machines. There were maybe a dozen girls on one side of the room, filing things, typing letters, or whatever they do in an office like that; and on the other side of the room the bookkeepers and department managers were going about their business and ignoring everything else.

The temperature must have been a hundred in that room. No air-conditioning, not even an electric fan. Those things cost money, and anything that cost money wasn't for Max Provo.

I had been in that office a hundred times or more, but this time I really looked at it. There was a big double door at the back of the office; one of the doors was open— for better ventilation—and I could look into the warehouse, on the other side of the plyboard partition. Nothing had changed since I had worked here. Everything was the same, but this time I was taking a picture of it in my mind.

“Then my gaze landed on the thing I was really looking for, the safe.

It looked like a hell of a safe to me. It looked like the great-great-grandfather of all the safes in the world. I had seen it before, I must have seen it before, but I didn't remember it as being that big. It was the biggest, heaviest, ruggedest-looking damn safe I'd ever seen. It was six feet tall; at least six feet tall, and almost as wide, and there was no telling how thick or heavy the thing was. It looked as big as a Sherman tank.

That Sheldon better be good, I thought, because it's going to take more than a can opener to get into that thing.

“Hello, Joe. Not lookin' for a job, are you?”

I looked, around and there was a man grinning at me from me other side of the railing, a little sharp-faced, stoop-shouldered man whose name was Paul Killman and who, so the story went, rode in on the first load of brick when they started building the box factory thirty years ago and had been there ever since.

I said, “Hello, Mr. Killman. I.just happened to be passing this way and remembered that I wanted to see Pat Sully about something. Do you know where he is?”

“Why, I think he's at his desk. Yes, there he is.”

I'd been so busy looking at that safe that I hadn't seen Pat at all. But I saw him now, a big, red-faced guy about my own age, sleepily putting figures inter an open ledger.

“All right if I talk to him a minute?” I asked.

“Sure, sure, Joe. You know your way around here.”

I pushed open the gate and went around on the business side of the railing. I put a five-dollar bill on Pat's ledger and said, “The age of miracles hasn't passed, after all, and here's something to prove it. Remember that five you loaned me?”

His head snapped up. “Hell, Joe, you didn't have to come all the way out here to give it to me. To tell the truth, I'd forgotten all about it.”

Like hell he had. He was quick enough to put it in his pocket.

We talked for maybe five minutes about things that neither of us cared a damn about. Pat kept looking anxiously at Old Man Provo's desk, in the far corner of the room, as though he expected the sky to fall. I was sizing up that room. I was getting a picture of it in my mind that couldn't be erased. That safe was the only thing that bothered me.

I said, “Is the water cooler still in the warehouse? Let's go back and have a cigarette. Old Provo can get along without you for a few minutes.”

Pat didn't like it much; old Provo was hell on getting his pound of flesh from the office force. Then he shrugged. Maybe he was getting tired of the job anyway. “All right, but just for a minute.”

I wanted to get a good look at that warehouse, because that was the way we had to come in. We couldn't come in the front way; that was well lighted and facing the highway. It had to be the back way, through the warehouse. I deliberately counted the steps from Pat's desk, which was about in the center of the room, to the warehouse partition.

I swung close enough to the safe to get the brand name; it was a Kimble. A Kimble Monarch, the lettering said, Model K-467. It was an elephant of a safe. Why hadn't I noticed it before? No wonder the place had never been robbed, with a safe like that. If you're smart, I thought, you'll drop this thing right where it is. Let Manley and Sheldon beat their brains out trying to get inside that iron blockhouse. It's crazy to think that a man could ever open a monster like that.

Then I was crazy, because I was not dropping it now. Sheldon was the expert on safes; let him worry about it.

The water cooler was a big galvanized can with two spigots at the bottom, sitting on a couple of sawhorses just on the other side of the office partition, in the warehouse itself. Entering that warehouse was like stepping into the bleak, empty spaces of a desert. It looked as big as those hangars they used to house dirigibles in. The ceiling was two stories high, and up there somewhere, in the gloom, cranes rolled back and forth, the noise echoing and bouncing from one wall to the other. All over the floor there were skeleton crates filled with flattened cardboard cartons of every size and shape imaginable, and the roustabouts were continually bringing them in or taking them out.

At the back of the building there was a giant steel sliding door, and I immediately counted that out. A door like that might turn out to be tougher to open than the safe. That left the windows, and they didn't look much better. To start with, they were small, and they had iron bars on them.

I stood there at the water cooler talking to Pat, but I don't know what about. I was studying those windows at the back of the warehouse. Then one of the workers, a big swarthy guy in overalls, saw me and yelled.

He had a grin a yard wide. His name was Matt Souel and he had been just another roustabout when I had worked at the factory, but now he was the warehouse foreman.

“What the hell you doin' out here with us workin' folks, Joe?”

Pat Sully was nervous and happy enough to make a quick excuse and get back on the job before Provo discovered that he was missing. I went back and talked to Matt Souel for a while, glad that he had called to me. It gave me a chance to have a closer look at those rear windows.

We'd wake the whole town trying to get past those iron bars. But the thing that really decided me had nothing to do with the bars. The thing that decided me was about twenty feet of makeshift electrical wiring and an oblong box fixed to the rear wall, above the windows.

There were limits, it seemed, to how far even a man like Max Provo would go to save money. He was tight, all right, but he hadn't been too tight to invest in a burglar alarm.

The windows were out.

Everything was out unless I could find a way of disconnecting, that burglar alarm, and I didn't know a damn thing about burglar alarms. I didn't know where the switch was, or how it was set, or anything else. And even if I did know, I couldn't very well start fooling with that wiring when there were fifteen or twenty roustabouts looking on.

Matt Souel was still talking, and I stood there grinning like an idiot while my spirits sank like a truck falling down an elevator shaft.

Hell, I thought, we're beat even before we start. If the back of this building is wired, then so is the front. Touch one of those doors or windows after closing time and the whole town is going to know about it. You'll have Otis Miller and the rest of the police force on your back before you know what hit you.

Then I remembered something. I remembered the garage, on the other side of the warehouse, and I remembered the two master switch boxes that controlled the electrical output to both buildings. They were in the garage. And the garage wasn't locked at night, because that was where the night watchman stayed most of the time.

I was beginning to feel better. I felt fine. Burglar alarms were electrically operated; all we had to do was open the circuit to this warehouse building, and you could knock the walls down and the burglar alarms wouldn't do a thing.

I felt great. I felt like a man whose parachute had finally opened a hundred feet above the ground. Not even those barred windows worried me now. Not even that steel monster of a safe could worry me.

The next day, about four in the afternoon, the blue Buick pulled under the station shed and Karl Sheldon said pleasantly, “Here we are again. I hope you've got a vacancy for us.”

I felt as big as a house. I grinned right in his face and said, “Yes, sir, I've been saving one for you.”

Paula was back in shorts again, white duck shorts and white T shirt and thong sandles. Just looking at her was all I needed to get me excited again. She didn't say a word. She just sat there smiling that slow smile, knowing that she was being stared at and liking it.

She knew what I was thinking, all right. She knew what was in my mind.

Sheldon said, “We're in luck, honey. He's saved a place for us.”

You sonofabitch, I thought. Do you think I'm so stupid that I don't know sarcasm when I hear it? I was tempted to hit him with it right there. I wanted to grab him by the throat and say, “Listen to me, you pompous bastard, I'm cutting myself in for one third of your take tonight. What do you think of that?”

But I played it straight. I signed them in, then took them to the cabin.

Sheldon came around to the back of the car and began unlocking the trunk. I didn't offer to help. Somewhere in that car there was enough nitroglycerin to blow us to hell, and I wanted no part of it. I unlocked the cabin and opened some windows. When I turned around, Paula was standing right behind me. I grabbed her.

I hadn't meant to. I had it all planned not to do a thing until I got everything settled with Sheldon. But I simply couldn't keep my hands off her. That bright hot arc jumped between us and suddenly she was straining against me.

“You haven't changed,” she said huskily.

“It's been a long time.”

“Only a week.”

“Do you know how long a week can be?”

“Yes, I know.””

That ripe mouth didn't slip away this time as I kissed her. I felt her nails digging into my shoulders again, into my arms. “You're strong, aren't you, Joe? Hard and strong.”

“Yes.”

“I believe it. I've thought about you, Joe. Your arms like leather rope. I like men with arms like that.”

“You've got some points too that I've thought about.”

Her arms went around my neck and pulled tight. The words came through her teeth. “There's no future in this, Joe. You know that, don't you?”

“We'll talk about that later.”

“There won't be any later. Tomorrow I'll be gone. Besides, there's Karl.”

“You said you didn't love him.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

I had the feeling that she didn't like what was happening, but she was unable to stop it, just as I was unable to stop it. A handful of iron gets caught in an electrical field and jumps to the magnet. The iron has nothing to say about it.

Outside, an impatient horn blared out, and I knew it was somebody at the station wanting gas or oil. Then Sheldon called, “Hooper, you've got a customer.”

I had forgotten about Sheldon, the station, and everything else. Sheldon hit the steps, but before he got the door open Paula was out of my arms. She threw herself on the bed and lay there like a marble statue, as white and unmoving as marble statue, that red mouth of hers partly open.

She lay there on her back, her arms and legs forming a white letter X on the bed, her eyes closed. For just a moment I remembered some paintings that I had seen once. They were nudes, painted by some Italian with a name I couldn't pronounce. The nude women all looked alike and they were all painted orange; their bodies, their faces, every thing was orange but the hair, and they were the nakedest women I ever saw.

Sheldon was in the room now, standing there by the door. I looked at him but couldn't tell what he was thinking.

“I think you've got a customer,” he said again.

“Yes. I heard.”

I'd have to wait until Ike relieved me at the station before I could hit him with the robbery business. Anyway, I needed to calm down a little. I got out of there.

I went back to the station, took care of the customer, and tried to keep my feet on the ground until Ike came. I didn't hear any noise from the Number 2 cabin, so I figured Sheldon hadn't noticed anything out of the way. I didn't give a damn whether he had or not.

Maybe fifteen minutes had passed when Sheldon backed the Buick out of the carport and headed toward town. That meant he was going to make his contact with Manley and get their plans jelled.

Sheldon had been gone almost an hour when the telephone rang.

“Hooper?”

“Yes.” I didn't recognize the voice at first.

“This is Karl Sheldon. Would you give my wife a message for me?”

“Sure, Mr. Sheldon.”

“Just tell her that some important business has come up and our plans have been changed. Please ask her to get everything packed and I'll be back as soon as possible.”

“You're checking out, Mr. Sheldon?”

“That's right. Sorry if we've inconvenienced you, Hooper, but of course we'll pay the usual rental fee.”

“I see.”

I didn't see worth a damn. But something had gone wrong. Something had exploded right in my face and I didn't know what it was. All I could think of was that I had to talk to Paula and talk fast before her husband of back. Maybe, between the two of us, we could straighten the thing out.

Then Ike Abrams drove up in that jalopy of his, and I was never so glad to see anybody in my life. I turned the station over to Ike, then went to my own cabin, as I always did. When I saw that Ike was busy in front of the station I went over to the Sheldon's cabin.

Paula was still on the bed, but she came off it the minute I stepped through the door.

“Something's wrong,” I said. “Your husband just called and said for you to get packed.”

“What?”

“That's all he said. He's checking out as soon as he gets back and he wants you to get packed. Do you know what it means?”

Something happened to that beautiful face of hers; it wasn't so beautiful now. “Yes,” she said, almost hissed. “I know what it means. It means he's backed out on the factory job.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?”

“Because everything has to be perfect. If everything isn't absolutely perfect, he won't touch it.”

“I still don't get it,” I said.

I had never seen anger just like hers. It was almost as though she could turn it off and on by throwing a switch. Now she switched it off, sat on the edge of the bed, and put her hand to her forehead. “I really can't blame him so much. He spent five years in a cell for making a mistake once, and he doesn't want to make any more. Probably Bunt Manley couldn't get the information he wanted, so he called it off.”

“Just like that he'd turn thumbs down on thirty thousand dollars?”

“It's more than thirty thousand dollars—it's his life.”

I remembered what Paula had said about how much it had cost to get her husband a parole. “It's the string-pullers you're worried about, isn't it? What happens to your husband if they don't get paid?”

“They always get paid, one way or another.”

“How much time does he have?”

She looked up. “It ran out a week ago. Karl thinks he can outrun them, but I know better.”

It would suit me fine to let the string-pullers take cafe of Sheldon in their own way, but I needed him myself. That safe had to have an expert's attention, and Sheldon was the only expert I knew.

“This is important to you, isn't it?” I said.

I am convinced that she could read my mind. “No, Joe.

Not you!”

“What's the matter with me? Am I made of old china? Do I go to pieces when I'm dropped? You say you're not in love with your husband—that's good enough for me. Maybe you'll tell me someday why you're so concerned about him, but that isn't important now. If I get your husband off the hook by convincing him that this job can be brought off, with my help, would you drop him?” “For you, Joe?” “For me.”

For one long moment she said nothing. Then, without looking at me, she said, “You wouldn't like it, Joe. I would want things that you couldn't give me.”

“Don't believe it. All I need is a little time.” “You wouldn't like my world,” she said. “You wouldn't like me, either, after you got to know me.”

“The way I feel about you has nothing to do with liking you. I just have to have you. As for this world of yours, all I ask is that it be different from the one I've known all my life.”

I moved in front of her, lifted her chin, and made her look at me. “You've been in my brain ever since I first saw you. After that night in my cabin I started cutting myself away from Creston and everything connected with it.”

She smiled faintly. “You're a convincing man, Joe.” “It's a deal?”

She nodded. “It's a deal, as you say. Now tell me how you're going to convince Karl.”

That was when we heard the Buick outside. It pulled into the carport beside the cabin and I said, “I won't have to tell you. You can see for yourself.”

Sheldon was surprised to find me there with his wife, but not too much surprised. He said, “Well, Hooper...” then stepped over to the table and put down a brief case and some papers. Maybe he was used to walking into situations like this. He eased into a chair at the table and Paula lay across the bed, her eyes alive, her body, tense.

Sheldon said, “Did you want to see me about something, Hooper?”

“Yes.”

“Well, out with it.”

The way he said it did something to me. A spring snapped. The words came out like pistol shots. “All right Sheldon, here it is. It has to do with you and me and an ex-convict named Bunt Manley. It has to do with a box factory and a thirty-thousand-dollar payroll. Does any of that ring a bell?”

He was surprised this time and showed it.

“I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about.”

I was impatient now and wanted to get it over with. “Look,” I said, coming toward him. “I know what you and Manley are planning to do. It would scare hell out of you to know how close I came to telling the police. But I didn't. I got to thinking.”

I let it hang, watching Sheldon's face. One second it was red with rage, and then it was gray. Paula sat up on the bed, her mouth half open, looking as though she were going to laugh.

She didn't laugh. After a moment she lay back on her elbows and stared at me, not making a move, not even blinking.

Sheldon's anger was pretty thin when he said, “I think you're crazy, Hooper. I still don't know what you're talking about.”

“Goddamnit! I haven't thought this thing out just for the sake of argument. Get that through your head, will you? I came here to talk business.”

He'd had a pretty bad shock, but he was quick to regain his poise. He began putting things together, slowly at first, and then it came with a rush, like a summer storm, and he had the whole picture.

He looked at me and a suggestion of a sneer began to form at the corners of his mouth.

“You punks,” he said hoarsely. “You all think you can ride luck, nothing but luck, to the very top, but you never think of the long fall down. Eavesdropping must be very interesting, Hooper. You must hear some interesting things in these cabins, even some profitable things, maybe, although I doubt that you have the brains or imagination to bring them off.”

I almost hit him. He was big and in good condition, but I could have taken him. But I didn't. I snapped a steel trap on my temper and held it.

I said, “I think we should talk business.”

“With a punk like you, Hooper?” He looked as though he might laugh, but didn't. Instead, he dropped back into his chair and sat there looking at me, shaking his head.

I said, “There's thirty thousand dollars in that factory, Sheldon. That's ten thousand a man, not bad for about an hour's work.”

I could see that he wasn't going for it. He wasn't the kind to let himself be pushed into a thing he didn't like. My ground was falling out from under me.

Then I noticed the papers that Sheldon had put on the table, and I could see, what they were. There was a detailed diagram of the factory layout, streets and highway, and there were other sketches that I took to be diagrams of the office interior and warehouse. I took a step forward and scooped up a fistful of the papers. When I straightened up I was looking into the muzzle of a .38.

It was a Police Special. Most of the bluing had been worn off around the muzzle and the front sight had been filed off even with the barrel. In Sheldon's brown hand it looked businesslike and deadly.

“Those papers,” he said, holding out his free hand.

“You've already talked to Manley, haven't you?” I said. “You didn't like the way he laid it out, so you called off the job.”

I studied that pistol for one long second, then handed him the papers.

“You punks,” he said again. “I don't know anyone named Manley. I don't know anything about a box factory. I'm just a tourist who made the mistake of spending the night in this rat trap of yours—and after these papers are burned, you can't prove I'm anything else. Besides, I don't think you'll holler cop, Hooper. You'd have a bit of explaining to do yourself.”

He smiled.

The robbery couldn't be called off! My whole future was built on this one thing, this one night. Without its support, all my tomorrows would come crashing down.

“Look.” I hardly recognized the voice as my own. Sheldon still had that pistol in his hand, but I ignored it now. “Look,” I said again, and stepped right in front of him, right in front of the muzzle of that gun, “look at these sketches.” I grabbed them from his hand, scattered them out on the table. Then, with one sweep, I brushed them all on the floor. “I told you I was here to talk business,” I said. Get me some paper and a pencil, and I'll prove it.”

For one long moment he did nothing. I could see a thousand things going on behind his eyes, like lemons and plums and bells whirling past the windows of a slot machine. Paula still lay back on her elbows, staring with a kind of dumb fascination.

Then, at last, things stopped happening behind Sheldon's eyes. I heard the soft sound of breath whistling between his teeth. There was a little click as he switched the safety on that .38, then he slipped the pistol into his waistband and said, “Get it for him, Paula. Pencil and paper.”

Paula got up lazily, almost bored now that the moment of tenseness was over. She got several sheets of note paper and a fountain pen out of one of the suitcases and brought them over to the table. Sheldon didn't say a thing. He just waited. I picked up the pen and went to work.

I had the inside of that office and warehouse and garage down perfectly. I had stepped them off, I even had the approximate dimensions. I put it all on paper and shoved it over for Sheldon to look at.

Two full minutes must have passed before he said, “Are you sure about all this?”

“I was in the place yesterday. I made it my business to find out.”

“And also to make a suspect of yourself.” The sneer was beginning to show again.

“There's a guy in the place I know,” I said. “I owed him five dollars and just dropped in to pay him.”

The sneer disappeared. “What about the safe?”

“The biggest goddamn safe I ever saw. A Kimble Monarch, Model K-four-six-seven.”

He began to relax. He even smiled, very faintly. “Given time, I could open it with a nail file. However, that won't be necessary. What about burglar alarms?”

“The place is wired, all right, front and back. But the master switch box is in the garage, where the watchman stays. It shouldn't be much of a job to find the right switch and cut off the power to the building.”

I could see that he was interested, and I began to breathe normally again. “When we cut off the power,” J said, “it will darken the building, of course, but I don't think it will be noticed because the front of the factory is lighted with floodlights.”

“How do we get in—if I should lose my mind and decide to try it your way?”

“Through the front door. It's the only way.” “With all those floodlights?” An eyebrow lifted, that was all.

“I told you it's the only way. The back door is a big power-operated steel affair and out of the question. It would take all night to saw through the bars on the rear windows. What we'll have to do is take the keys from the watchman, watch our chance, and go right in the front door.”

He wasn't even listening. He was back to studying that sketch I had drawn. Paula was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.

“It looks all right,” she said. “Everything you want is there.”

Sheldon said nothing. He was thinking. “It's a lot better than your pal Manley could do,” Paula went on.

Sheldon ignored the gentle prod about Manley. “It could be a soft touch,” he said thoughtfully, “if something hasn't been overlooked. That could be a big if. I should have scouted the place myself. It was a mistake to leave it up to Manley.”

“Manley!” Paula spat the name. “You were a fool to listen to an ox like Manley in the first place. He's smalltime. He'll never be anything else.”

“But he spotted the factory,” Sheldon said, as though he felt somehow obligated to defend Manley.

Paula said one word, a word that is not often heard, even among men. There was nothing sleepy or passive about her now. There was an almost electrical energy about her. She walked across the room, snapped a cigarette out of a pack, and lit it.

“Leave Manley out of it,” she said. “Forget him. He's contributed nothing so he gets nothing.”

Until now I had been satisfied to remain quiet and let Paula get my argument across. But this business about leaving Manley out of it was no good.

She took one nervous drag on the cigarette and then ground it out on the floor, ignoring an ash tray less than twelve inches away.

“I know what you're going to say, Hooper,” she said to me, as though she had never seen me before. “That is your name, isn't it? You're going to say that we can't leave him out. But we will. Manley's a fool, all right, but he's not fool enough to yell cop in a situation like this. When he reads about the burglary in the morning paper, he may not like it, but there'll be nothing he can do about it.”

I shook my head, and Sheldon started to speak, but she stopped both of us. “Think of that five thousand dollars, that extra five thousand that will be yours, Hooper, if we leave Manley out of this. Anyway, what are you afraid of? Manley doesn't know that you've cut yourself in. There's no way he could hurt you.”

Sheldon managed to break in this time. “I'm afraid there's one small detail you've overlooked,” he said. “I haven't decided to take this job.”

“I have decided,” Paula said. “We have to have that money, Karl. It's not too late to set yourself right with those people, but we've got to have the money!”

She could be beautiful and decorative when she wanted, but she could also be other things. We stood there looking at each other over Sheldon's head. She's a hell of a woman, I thought, realizing vaguely that my argument about Manley was slipping away from me. One hell of a woman!

Chapter Five

I went back to my cabin feeling nine feet tall. Fifteen thousand dollars! What a man could do with that much money! I looked at my watch and saw that it was already six o'clock. I'd been in the Sheldon cabin almost two hours and the thing was settled.

Everything was all right, it was fine. Paula had everything, brains as well as looks. What a hell of a team we would make!

And then I saw Ike Abrams peering through the screen door. “Where the hell have you been, Joe? Your dad was around a while ago and we couldn't find you anywhere.”

“Where have I been? Nowhere.”

Wait a minute, I thought. That won't do. “Oh,” I said, “I was over in Number Two. The shower was leaking again and they wanted me to fix it.”

Just in case he had seen me go over there.

He kept standing there, one foot on the step and his face almost against the screen. “What is it?” I said. “Is something wrong?” '

“No, I guess not. It's just your father. He looked worried.”

“He's always worried about something. Probably he's pulling another of his hard-scrabble farmers through another siege of malaria.”

“I think he's worried about you, Joe.” He had something on his chest and he wasn't going to rest till he got it out. He said, “I know this is none of my business, Joe, but if you and Beth have had a fallin' out about something, well, it's never too late to make up, they say.”

“Great God!” I exploded. “Ike, will you get back to the station and stop sticking your long nose into my business?”

He looked as though I had pulled a knife on him. Backing away from the steps, he mumbled, “All right, Joe.... I'm sorry.”

I hadn't realized I was so on edge. I almost called Ike back to apologize to him, but I didn't. What difference did it make? I was cutting away from Creston anyway.

I prowled the cabin for maybe thirty minutes, but the place wasn't big enough to hold me. I wanted to see Paula. I wanted to make plans for the future—a future with just me and her and no Karl Sheldon. But I couldn't talk to her now, and I couldn't very well just sit in the cabin until time for the robbery.

I looked through the window and Paula was sitting on the steps of Number 2 again, but this time her husband was standing in the doorway behind her. What the hell, I thought. I pulled on a clean shirt and went out.

“Hooper?” Sheldon said.

“Yes?”

“What do you usually do this time of day?”

“Do? Nothing in particular, I guess.”

He opened the screen door and stepped outside. “It's important,” he said soberly, “to keep to your regular routine, if you have one. Are you sure there isn't some kind of pattern? Don't you have a girl friend in town that you see pretty often?”

I looked straight at Paula and she smiled faintly. “No, I don't have a girl friend.”

“Then why don't you drive into town and see a movie, if you're not going to stay at the station? The less we see of each other, the less chance there is for suspicion. Just be sure you're back by midnight.”

Maybe he was right. I had to do something to kill time, and sitting alone in my cabin was no way to do it. Of course, there was always the chance that I might get a few minutes alone with Paula if I stuck around, but odds were long. Everything would go to hell if he caught us together.

“All right,” I said. “Midnight.” I headed toward the station to get the Chevy.

It was the longest movie I ever sat through. It was the first time I had missed Beth, or even thought much about her, since I had made up my mind to break away. I was so used to having her sitting there beside me that it was almost like being lost. It was strange at first—but I had a cure for that.

All I had to do was think of Paula.

I didn't see a thing that happened on the screen; I just sat there and thought of what Paula and I would do after the robbery. Then I began thinking about the robbery itself, and that was when the first stirrings of uncertainty made themselves felt in my bowels. What if I had overlooked something at the factory! What if that switch had nothing to do with the burglar alarm at all? After all, I didn't know a damn thing about burglar alarms. Maybe the wiring on it was independent of the original circuits. What a hell of a thing that would be!

I never hated a thing in my life as much as I hated that movie. Every instinct told me to get out of there. Get out in the cool clean air and get this thing straightened out before it strangled.

That's just what I did, and it worked. The minute I got outside, the uncertainty was gone and I felt fine. I killed some time at a beer drive-in, then took a ride out north of town, and the first thing I knew there was the box factory looming up in the darkness. I don't know what had pulled me in that direction, but there I was.

Looking at it made my guts draw in a little. At night the place looked much more formidable than it did in the daytime, those two solid brick buildings squatting on a clay hillside. They looked almost prisonlike, with those floodlights pouring down the front of the main building, and I thought: I hope to hell that's not an omen.

I kept driving until I came to a section line and turned around. On the way back to town I tried not to look at it, but the thing was too big, too formidable to ignore. How were we ever going to get inside the place with all those floodlights pointed right at the front door? I had seen the factory a hundred times at night, but I had never noticed that there were so many of those floodlights or that they were so bright.

Then I thought of all that money. Thirty thousand dollars, maybe more. I thought of what Paula and I could do with money like that, and it would be just a beginning. The factory didn't look so tough after that. I drove straight through town and headed for the station. It was getting close to midnight.

Chapter Six

Karl Sheldon said: “Have you got a gun?”

“We don't need guns to take care of the watchman.”

“I hope you're right. But in case you're not, take this.”

It was a nicely blued Colt's .38, and it looked as though it had never been fired. “I'll take it,” I said. “But I'm telling you now, I'm not going to use it.”

He looked at me. “Let's hope not.” It was almost a prayer, the way he said it.

The time was twelve minutes past midnight and the three of us were back in Number 2 cabin. Paula still had on those white shorts and halter and was lounging on the bed.

“Well,” Sheldon said, “I guess there's no use waiting.”

“I guess not.”

He took up a satchel, similar to the one my father carried his medical supplies in, and the two of us went out the door. Paula said nothing. She lay there on one elbow, her eyes quick and alive, but she didn't make a sound.

“We'll take the Buick,” Sheldon said. “You drive.”

I got under the wheel and Sheldon sat on the other side, holding the satchel very carefully in his lap. “There's one thing,” I said, before pressing the starter. “This old night watchman, he's kind of a friend of mine. He might recognize me, so you'll have to take care of him. Tie him up or something, but don't hurt him.”

“My friend,” Sheldon said dryly, “I understand that they have not yet installed a lethal gas chamber in your state penitentiary, and the electric chair is a very nasty way to die. You may be assured that I want no part of murder.”

“I'm glad we understand each other.” I started the car.

The traffic on Highway 66 was very thin, and there was almost none at all in Creston, but I played it safe anyway. I didn't want to be seen driving that Buick, so I took the side streets through town until we hit the north highway. Sheldon seemed lost in thought and neither of us said anything until we saw those floodlights in front of the box factory.

Then he said, “Keep in the shadows as much as possible and drive around to the back, where we can't be seen from the highway.”

“Do you think I'm crazy enough to park under those floodlights?”

He looked at me coldly. I was just about ready to turn onto the factory road when a car topped the hill ahead of us, headed toward Creston. I had to drive on to the next section line, turn around, and try again. This time there were no cars. I tried not to look at those floodlights as I shoved the Buick into second and skidded onto the graveled factory road.

“Take it easy, you fool!” Sheldon snapped. “There's enough nitro in this satchel to blow us both to hell!”

I didn't look at him. I kept out of the light as much as possible, but I couldn't get off the road and leave tire tracks everywhere. When we neared the factory office building I cut sharply to the right and pulled around to the back. The car lights had been snapped off.

“Who's out there?” a voice called as I cut the motor.

“I thought this old man was deaf,” Sheldon said.

“He's not so deaf that he can't hear eight cylinders charging down on him.”

“What's his name?”

“Otto,” I said. “Otto Finney.”

And about that time the voice called again, “Who's that out there?”

“All right,” Sheldon said, “you just sit here and watch the satchel. I'll be back in a minute.”

I sat there feeling sweat popping out on my forehead. Sheldon seemed very cool as he got out of the car. He walked forward and called, “It's me, Otto.”

“Who?”

“It's me,” Sheldon called again.

I could see Otto now. When he opened the garage door a thin slice of light fell across the parking area in back of the building. The old man was standing in the light, holding a big hog-leg revolver in front of him. Sheldon kept walking toward him. “Can't you see a damn thing, Otto?” he said jokingly. “Don't you know who I am?”

“Oh,” the old watchman said uncertainly. “Well...” Then he let his revolver sag at his side. He still couldn't see a thing, standing in the light the way he was. Sheldon walked right up to him, and hit him.

That's all there was to it. I heard Sheldon's fist crack against the watchman's jaw, and then the old man's revolver clattered to the cement driveway, and he fell as though he had been shot. It was all very neat and clean and I felt weak with relief.

Sheldon dragged the old man inside the garage. I drove the Buick up against the building, in the shadows, then I got the satchel and Sheldon stuck his head through the doorway. “All right, Hooper. We can't take all night.”

The garage was a big affair, almost as big as the warehouse itself, and the air was heavy with the smell of gasoline and oil. Four big trucks were parked in there and they seemed almost lost in the vastness of the place. A whisper could ricochet from one wall to another, building itself up until it sounded like a scream. “Over here, Hooper!” Sheldon called, and the loudness of his voice startled me.

The old watchman was as limp as a rag and pale as death, but there was only a trace of blood where Sheldon had hit him.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

“Sure he's all right. Now where is that master switch to the office building?”

I couldn't take my eyes off the old man. Sheldon already had him bound and gagged, but it looked like an unnecessary precaution to me. Otto Finney was dead! I would swear it! He lay there as still as any corpse I had ever seen, and his face had that yellowish cast that the dead or dying always have. As I stared at him I could feel the cold feet of panic walking right up my spine.

“He's dead!” I heard the words, but I didn't recognize the voice as mine.

“I told you he's all right,” Sheldon said impatiently. “Now where is that switch?”

I wheeled on Sheldon with a kind of rage that I had never felt before. “You sonofabitch! He's dead! Do you think I don't know a dead man when I see one?” I went down on my knees and put my hand over the old man's heart.

I felt like a fool. The beat was there, as strong and steady as the tides.

“Are you satisfied?” Sheldon said dryly.

“All right, I'm sorry. The switch boxes are over on the west wall, over there by the workbenches. You want me to take care of it?”

Sheldon was all business. “You go back to the garage door and keep your eyes open. I probably know more about electrical wiring than you do. Besides, you don't want the old man waking up and recognizing you, do you?”

I hadn't even thought of that. I got out of there.

The minutes crawled by. Every minute seemed like an hour as I stood there in the darkness behind the garage with a thousand insane fears tearing through my brain. What if Sheldon fouled it up? What if he pulled the wrong switch, cut the wrong wire? What if the sky fell? What difference did it make? I was in it to my neck and there was no pulling out.

Then the lights went out. The garage was black. The whole building was black. But the lights were still on in the factory building across the way, and the floodlights were still on. I heard my breath whistling through my teeth in relief.

Sheldon had done the job right. Sheldon was a good man. At that moment I almost loved him. I heard him walking carefully across the cement floor of the garage, and then he was at the door.

“All right,” he said, “I got the keys off the watchman. Let's go.”

We went around to the far corner of the building, then under the catwalk, and walking into those floodlights was like walking into machine-gun fire. We cast shadows twenty feet long. We stood out like tarantulas in the snow.

“Jesus!” Sheldon said. We stood there blinking, our backs against the office building. I felt that if we walked under those lights they would be able to see us all the way to Tulsa. But there was absolutely no other way to do it. We had to go right up to that front door and open it.

“Well,” Sheldon said finally, “at least we can be thankful that traffic is light on the highway.”

“Give me the keys,” I said.

Sheldon was still staring at that highway. “I'll take care of the door,” he said at last. “You move back in the shadows and let me know the instant you spot a car. The first damn instant, understand?”

I was getting tired of being treated like an irresponsible idiot, but I kept telling myself that it wouldn't last much longer. I moved back against the wall, then went back to the catwalk and crossed over to the factory building, where I could stand in the shadows and still see the highway. Sheldon glanced at me and I nodded. He slipped around the corner and headed for the door.

He cast a shadow as big as an elephant against that brick wall. He went up the two cement steps to the door and I could hear the keys jingle as he went to work. I was so busy watching Sheldon that I didn't see the headlights on the highway until it was almost too late. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference, maybe the people in the car wouldn't have noticed. But at that moment it seemed absolutely impossible that they could fail to notice Sheldon's enormous black shadow under the glare of those lights, and if they ever noticed, it was sure going to look fishy. People just don't fool around factories at that time of morning.

“Sheldon!” I called hoarsely.

He didn't hear me. He was so busy with that lock, concentrating so hard on which key to try, that he didn't hear a thing.

“Sheldon!” I practically yelled it this time, and this time he heard and reacted instantly. He hit the ground as though a bomb had gone off. He dropped off those steps, maybe three feet down, and hit face down in a flower bed. The car roared past the factory and hummed off into the night.

After a minute I gave him the go-ahead and he picked himself up and went back to work. It didn't take long. Not more than a lifetime. But he got the door open and motioned me to come on.

I crossed back over to the office building and sidled along the edge of that brick wall as though I were walking a tightrope. By the time I got inside, Sheldon was ready to go to work. It wasn't dark in there, with those floodlights pouring through the front windows, and Sheldon had already spotted the safe.

“Well,” he said, sounding pleased, “this shouldn't be difficult.” ”

It still looked like a hell of a safe to me, but Sheldon was supposed to know. He was the expert.

“How long will it take?” I asked.

He shrugged, walking back and forth in front of the safe, looking it over from all angles. “That all depends. I'd say about fifteen minutes if I could use an electric drill, but I can't. As it is, it shouldn't take longer than thirty minutes.”

That was going to be long enough for me. Already the echoing silence in the place was making me edgy. Sheldon was down on one knee, his black satchel open. He pulled on a pair of tight black suede gloves and tossed a pair of white cotton work gloves to me. “Put these on and wipe both doorknobs. Wipe the doorframe, too, while you're at it, and any other place that you think you might have touched.”

By the time I had done that, Sheldon had his tools laid out—a hand-operated brace, diamond-tipped drilling bits, a teaspoon, a small bottle of yellowish liquid resting on a cushion of foam rubber.

“All right,” I said, “what do I do now?”

“When I blow the door,” he said, “we need to have something over the safe. Something like a very heavy quilt or blanket would do, but we'll have to make out with what we can find.”

“How about a canvas tarp?” I said. “They usually keep them in the warehouse.”

“Fine!” He locked in a drilling bit. “I couldn't have ordered anything better.”

The warehouse was dark and ringing with silence. I could hear my own breathing, I could hear the wind sliding softly over the high tin roof. The echoes of my footsteps sounded like an army of marching men in the darkness.

I had no light, but I knew my way around back there, and I finally found the pile of heavy tarps that I was looking for. They were big pieces of canvas, maybe twenty feet square and very heavy. They used the tarps to protect new shipments of material from the weather when there wasn't enough storage room in the warehouse. The thing was too cumbersome to carry, so I dragged it across the cement floor and through the partition to Sheldon.

“How's it coming?” I said.

He just grunted. He had shed his coat and loosened his tie, and in the floodlight glow I could see the drops of sweat beaded on his forehead as he struggled with the brace and bit.

“Anything else you want me to do?” I asked.

“Just keep out of my way,” he said shortly. “Go over to one of those windows and keep an eye on the highway. Don't bother me until I'm finished.”

It looked like Sheldon's show from here on in. I went over to one of the far windows and stood staring out at the night. This was the part I didn't like. As long as I was too busy to think, it wasn't bad, but just standing and waiting began to get on my nerves. I began thinking about that Buick sitting outside. It was in the shadows, of course, hard against the building, but it would be a lot better if we could just open that big back door and drive it into the warehouse.

Then I began worrying about Otto Finney. What if the old man was really hurt? Hurt bad? What a hell of a mess that would be!

I looked at my watch and it was almost one-thirty. We had been there in the office almost forty minutes. What was taking Sheldon so long? Then I heard him throwing the tarp over the safe.

“You going to blow it?” I asked.

“That's what we came here for, isn't it?”

“You need any help?”

“All I need is for you to keep out of my way. Get over there by the partition and stay on your belly until this door's off.”

I thought: One of these days I'm going to shove that nasty voice down your throat, Sheldon. But not now. I was going to be a good boy and do exactly as he said, because this was Sheldon's party.

“You ready?” he called.

“Yes.”

“All right.” He set the fuse, then took about five quick steps and lay down behind the safe. The building seemed to bulge with the explosion.

It wasn't such a loud noise—most of it was muffled by the tarp—but it was loud enough for me. It was enough to make the windows rattle. It was enough to make my teeth rattle, too.

But it did the job. The safe door flew open as though a bomb had gone off inside, and a little whitish smoke drifted up in the darkness. Sheldon and I began picking ourselves up.

I couldn't be as casual about it as Sheldon was. I rushed to one window and then another, not knowing exactly what I expected to see, but something. It seemed impossible that nobody had heard that explosion. But evidently nobody had. Everything outside was nice and quiet, the highway empty. I began to breathe again.

When I got to the safe, Sheldon was grinning. “Well, here it is.”

“It sure as hell is!” I had never seen so much money. The explosion must have broken the inside compartment, because money was scattered all over everywhere, nice new, clean, crisp, green bills, tens and twenties and fives and ones. It was beautiful.

I said, “What are we going to carry it in?”

“Carry it in the box it was in,” Sheldon said. So we began crawling around on the floor, grabbing bills and stuffing them in the tin box. All that money! More money than I had ever dreamed of—and half of it was mine!

“Well,” Sheldon said when we'd got it all together, “how does it feel to be rich?”

“It feels fine! But it will feel even better when we get away from this factory.”

That was one time Sheldon gave me no argument. He got his satchel and I picked up the box of money, all that beautiful money, and we headed for the door.

We waited until the highway was clear and then made a run for it. Going under those floodlights was nothing now. I had thirty thousand dollars under one arm and was on top of the world. By the time we reached the garage I was four stories tall and growing by the minute.

“By God,” Sheldon said, “I'll have to hand it to Manley. He said this would be a pushover, and it was. I'd never have believed there could be such a pushover if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.”

“Good old Manley!” I felt like laughing. “He's going to have a fit when he reads the morning paper.”

“The hell with Manley,” Sheldon said. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

We had already started for the car when I heard it. I didn't know what it was, but it hit me like a hammer. Sheldon looked around at me. “What's the matter?”

“I don't know. I thought I heard something.”

“Heard something? Where?”

“I don't know. I think it was in the garage.” Both of us stood there as rigid as a pair of department-store dummies. I listened until my ears ached, every nerve drawn to the snapping point. Then it carne again, a scuffing, shoving sound that started an unscratchable itch on my scalp.

I glanced at Sheldon. “Did you hear it then?” He shook his head.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just an overactive imagination, or maybe it was just the strain. After all, a man doesn't commit a thirty-thousand-dollar robbery every day. But I had to be sure. It was much too late to begin taking chances.

I said, “Wait a minute. I want to have a look in there.”

I opened the door and stepped into the pitch-darkness of the garage. There was no sound, absolutely no sound at all. Hooper, I thought, you'd better get hold of yourself before you go off the deep end. Then, just as I turned to go, the light hit me right in the face.

It was brighter than any light I had ever looked into. Brighter than those floodlights. Brighter than the sun. It hit me right in the eyes, that ball of brightness, and I couldn't see a thing. I lunged to one side just as the revolver crashed and resounded with unbelievable violence around the walls of that high garage. I felt the hot breath of the bullet. I heard the instantaneousspat! as the slug smashed itself against the brick wall.

I turned to run. I fell over something—God knows what —there in the darkness and went sprawling just as that revolver exploded again. Then I knew, somehow, instinctively, that running was not the answer.

That light had been on my face. The owner of that pistol was not only trying to shoot me, he knew who I was!

There was no time for rationalization. That deadly .38 of Sheldon's was in my hand. I fired once, twice, three times at the sweeping ball of light that was trying to pick me out of the darkness. I heard the incredible reverberations shatter the silence of the night, and I knew, somehow, that there was no use shooting any more.

It had happened with unbelievable speed. One second? Two seconds? No more than that. By the time Sheldon came crashing into the garage, it was all over.. Realization of what had happened was just beginning to hit me, and it left me cold and weak.

“Hooper!”

“It's all right,” I heard myself saying. “It's all over.” That flashlight still stabbed the darkness. I could hear it rocking back and forth on the cement floor. Its beam swept shorter and shorter arcs across the floor, and finally it stopped, pointing directly at me.

Sheldon said, “For God's sake, Hooper, what happened?”

“I just killed the watchman,” I said.

Chapter Seven

Sheldon took about four quick steps in front of me and picked up the flashlight. He turned the beam on the watchman's face.

He was dead, all right. There was no use feeling for a pulse this time. Those pale old eyes stared directly into the beam of light, unblinking. A broken little man, completely dead. He had fallen on a small heap of waste rags, the kind you find in every garage, and for a moment he looked as though he were another pile of rags and not a man at all.

Sheldon moved the flashlight beam up and down, slowly and carefully, and it was easy enough to see what had happened. The watchman's feet were still tied, but he had somehow managed to loosen his hands. He had pushed himself over to the garage wall, to a workbench where the pistol must have been, and the flashlight. Probably he was just beginning to untie his feet when I heard him.

Sheldon suddenly shot that beam of light at me. “Well, Hooper,” he said tightly, “you've fixed things this time. You've fixed them good.”

“I fixed them!” I stepped forward and knocked that beam out of my face. “You were supposed to have him tied and gagged! A fine fix we'd have been in if I hadn't stopped him before he threw that switch.”

“Did you have to kill him?”

“What was I supposed to do? He had that flashlight right in my face!”

“But you didn't have to kill him. It could have been some other way.”

Sheldon's voice was almost a whine now. I could look . right through that tough front of his and see his guts deserting him. This was something I hadn't figured on. If anybody went to pieces in this operation, I had expected it to be me. But I should have known. I'd seen the signs— I'd seen how Paula could shut him up. From personal experience I knew that he would not touch a job unless he figured it to be an absolute pushover. The signs were there, all right, but I hadn't seen them until it was too late.

Now Sheldon wiped his face on his coat sleeve. “This isn't just robbery now, it's murder! I didn't agree to anything like this.”

“You didn't agree! Listen!” I grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted hard. “Listen to me! Do you think I wanted it? I liked this old man. I liked him a lot, and about the last thing in the world I'd want to do is kill him. But I had to do it. Do you hear me? He had the flashlight in my face!”

“Christ!” I could feel him shaking. “I didn't plan on anything like this!”

“You didn't plan! You gave me the gun, didn't you?”

It was amazing, really. I had never killed in my life and I had never imagined that it could be so easy. I was sorry that it had been Otto; it would worry me for a long time, but still it wasn't as bad as I had heard. It had been Otto or me. Otto had shot at me and I had shot back, and there was no way in the world to change it now. I had to accept it. Besides, there were other things to think about. It was staggering how many things there were.

“Hooper, we've got to get out of here!”

“Wait a minute. I think I've got something.”

The one word that kept hitting me was “murder.” To me it didn't have the usual meaning. It was like thinking of cancer or TB. You get yourself branded with it and it kills you, only with murder you the in the electric chair instead of in a bed.

I said, “Sheldon, you wait right here.” Then I went down on one knee and lifted the dead watchman to my shoulder. Sheldon looked as though he had been clubbed. He stared dazedly as I hurried out of the garage with the dead man across my back. What I had in mind wasn't going to fool anybody for long, but it would cross the Sheriff up for a while, at least, and maybe that would be long enough.

It seemed, by now, that I had run that gantlet of floodlights a hundred times, but that didn't make it any easier this time. It was pure gambling; I just had to hope that no one saw me. Old Otto Finney had been a frail little man, and I was glad of that as I raced along the front of the building with him across my shoulders. I didn't even look at the highway. I went right up to the door, pressed Otto's palm to the latch and in two or three places along the door frame. Then I dragged him inside and did the same thing there. Finally I went over to the blown safe and made sure that Otto's fingerprints would be found on the door as well as other places.

That was that. I was breathing as though I had been swimming underwater, but I hoisted the dead man to my shoulders again and headed for the door. Just as I stepped outside I heard the sound of a motor, and then the headlights of a car cut a thin gash in the darkness of the highway. I hit the ground. The dead watchman hit and rolled a few feet ahead of me. As the car hummed past and out; of sight, I lay there for several seconds, breathing hard. And Otto was looking at me. Those pale, sightless eyes were wide open and staring right at me.

I said, “I'm sorry, Otto!” And I knew I had to get hold of myself or I was cooked. What was done was done. I wasn't going to crack up about it. That was the one thing in the world I couldn't afford to do. I shouldered the corpse and made another run for darkness.

Sheldon was right where I had left him, there by the garage door. I hadn't been afraid of his running out on me because I still had the key to the Buick. “Get the car door open,” I panted. “The back seat.”

By this time Sheldon had guessed what I was up to.

It won't work, Hooper,” he said tightly.

“I know it won't work for long. But maybe it will buy us time, let the trail cool a little. Now get the door open.”

He did it, and I dumped the dead watchman on the floor. Then the two of us went back to the garage and cleaned the place up. We picked up all the bloodstained rags, the gun, the flashlight. “Now,” I said, “let's go!”

It was a long, long ride back to the tourist court; I hope I never take another ride as long as that one. Every car I met I expected to be the Sheriffs car. I expected something violent to happen every second, but nothing did. Nothing happened at all. What we were going to do with the dead watchman, I didn't know. I was beyond thinking. It took all my concentration just to keep the car in a straight line.

Then at last we reached the cabins, and I pulled the Buick behind the station and into the carport next to Number 2. There were no lights in the cabin, but Paula had the door open the minute we pulled off the highway, and she was right there the second we hit the carport.

She jerked the door open on my side.

“What took you so long? Did anything go wrong?”

I could smell the perfume she wore. Or maybe it wasn't perfume, maybe it was just her.

“Something happened, didn't it?” she said. “Tell me!”

Sheldon hadn't said a thing. But now he turned toward his wife, and his face looked a hundred years old. “The trouble,” he said, “is back there.”

Paula opened the back door and made one small sound when she saw the dead man. Then she looked at me.

“Who did it?”

“I did.”

She frowned. “I might have known it couldn't have been Karl.”

“I guess we need to talk this thing over,” I said, and got out of the car.

Sheldon sat where he was. “Paula,” he said, “we've got to get out of here. Get your things together right now.”

“The three of us?” she asked coldly, glancing at the back seat.

“Oh.” He looked pretty foolish and he knew it, and that did more than anything else to snap him out of it. “Well, maybe Hooper's right, maybe we should talk it over, coolly, calmly.”

There was a moon out that night. I didn't notice it until I got inside the darkened cabin and saw the whitish moonlight pouring through the open door. “Turn the light on,” Paula said.

“It will be safer if we don't,” I said.

“We can't count the money in the dark.”

First things first. I felt a crazy impulse to laugh. The hell with the dead man outside, we had money to count. She turned the light on.

It really didn't make much difference. The cabins, as usual, were empty, and I was too tired to care, anyway. I was having trouble keeping my thoughts organized.

Then I thought: Christ, I've forgotten all about the money! I kicked the door open, went out to the car, and got it. I didn't look behind the front seat; I didn't want to see those pale, wide eyes again. Just don't think about it, I thought. He asked for it, didn't he?

Paula's eyes were alive with excitement as she dug her hands into the green bills. “Thirty thousand dollars!”

Sheldon said, “We don't know how much there is. We haven't, counted it.”

“I can tell! Just by feeling of it!”

“For God's sake,” I said, “stop playing with the stuff and let's count it!”

Then Paula turned on me with a tight little smile. “First,” she said, “tell me about the watchman.” The look in her eyes shook me. “Forget it,” I said. All this talk was rubbing right through to my nerves. “The old man shot at me and I had to kill him. That's all there was to it.”

“I knew it!” She almost sneered, looking now at Sheldon. “I knew it couldn't have been you, Karl!”

I didn't know what she was talking about, but Sheldon must have. He stood rigid for just a moment, his eyes stormy, and then, without a sound of warning, he back-handed her. The back of his fist slammed into her mouth, knocking her across the room and onto the bed. “Now keep quiet, goddamn you!” he said hoarsely.

I felt the muscles become tense in my shoulders. Stay out of it, I warned myself. This is between just the two of them. You can't afford to butt in now—not until we make the split, anyway.

His knuckles had broken Paula's lower lip and a thin little stream of blood dripped down her chin. She didn't come fighting back, as I had thought she would. She felt of her lip. Then she opened a suitcase, took out some paper tissue, and held it to her mouth. She didn't say a word, but there was plenty in her eyes. Sheldon dumped the money on the table and began counting it out. I helped him. It came to $31,042. We cut it right down the middle without a word: $15,521 each. “Not bad,” Sheldon said. “If we live long enough to spend it!” “Oh, yes,” Sheldon said softly, as though he had been trying to forget it too. “The body.”

I glanced at Paula and she was still sitting exactly the way she had been for fifteen minutes, there on the edge of the bed, holding the bloody tissue to her mouth. Now she stood up and I could see that all the fight hadn't been knocked out of her.

“Why did you bring the body with you, anyway?” “Because,” I said, “I went to a good deal of trouble putting the watchman's fingerprints all over the safe before we left the factory.”

“Oh.” She was getting it now, but I stopped her before she had a chance to carry it too far.

“Don't get the idea,” I said, “that the Sheriffs going to be fooled. He's not going to think for one damn minute that Otto Finney robbed that factory. Still, the evidence is going to be there and he's going to have to look into it. And if we can get rid of the body, the Sheriff is going to have to look for it, and that's going to take time.”

“Time for us to get far away from Oklahoma,” Sheldon said softly. “Well, the rest is up to you, Hooper. What do we do with the body?”

That question had been drumming at me ever since I pulled the trigger. So far, I had been pretty successful in keeping it impersonal. I tried to think of it as a problem to be solved, and nothing else. “The lake,” I said. “It's the only thing I can think of. Drop the body in the lake.”

Sheldon frowned. “Tell me about this lake.”

“Creston's water supply, a man-made affair about four miles out of town. There's a deep hole at the north end that would give them plenty of trouble if they tried to drag. Anyway, there are a lot of garfish in that water, and I doubt if a body would be recognized after a day or two, even if they got it up.”

Keep it impersonal, I reminded myself. But the thought of those scavenger fish wasn't pleasant.

Sheldon turned it over in his mind. “All right, that's the way it will have to be. We haven't got time to think of something better.”

I shook my head. “There's something else about this lake that you'd better know about. It's kind of like a local lovers' lane. When couples don't have anywhere else to go, they head for the lake.”

“At this time of night?”

“At any time of night. That's what I'm trying to tell you. There's just a chance we might be seen.”

“Then the lake's out,” Sheldon said shortly.

“The lake's all we have,” I reminded him. “Paula could go with me; the two of us could handle it. If we happen to be seen, nobody's likely to give it a second thought.” Time was running out and I had to talk to Paula. This was the only way I could think of doing it.

Sheldon didn't like it, but this was no time to smooth out the rough places. What Paula thought about it she didn't say. The three of us stood there, looking at each other, and then I said, “I'll be back in a minute.” I gathered up my half of the money and went out.

I put the money under the mattress in my cabin, and then I went to the station and rummaged around in the darkness until I found what I wanted—a cast-off flywheel and a set of rusty mud chains. I was working smoothly now.

Just keep cool, I thought, and everything is going to work out all right. Then I went back to the Buick to put the wheel and chains in the back seat.

About a minute later Sheldon came out. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing. We've got to move the body to my car, though. I can't afford to be seen in this Buick.”

“Hooper, are you sure this lake business is all right?”

“Can you think of anything better?”

He wasn't worried about the lake, he was worried about Paula. But he merely shrugged. Between the two of us we got the old watchman's body into the back seat of my Chevy and covered it with a piece of canvas from the station. Then we loaded the flywheel and chains and everything was set—as set as it would ever be. I looked at my watch and it was almost three o'clock.

The thing went like clockwork. There was just enough moon to make driving without lights possible on that twisting lake road. The place was deserted, not a car, not a soul anywhere, and the lake itself was motionless. Not a ripple was on the water. When I reached the spot I was looking for, I drove on for maybe a mile to make sure that the way was completely clear, and then I turned around and came back.

It was just as I had remembered it, shelves of brownish rock jutting out of a red clay bank, and below it the lake. I knew how deep it was there, for as a kid I had seen the bulldozers gouging it out. There was no need of a boat, no need of taking the body out to the middle of the lake before dumping it. Just drop it over that shelf of rock and let the lake settle over it and keep it forever and ever, amen. He was an old man, I thought. He wouldn't have lived much longer anyway. “Is this the place?” Paula said. “Yes.”

I got out of the car and lugged the chains and flywheel over to the edge of the rock. Then I went back to the car and carried the body—the amazingly light, frail old body —over to the rock and put it down. I then slipped the chains through the flywheel and fastened the other end of chain to the body with several pieces of strong wire.

“Can I help?” Paula said.

“No.” I eased the dead watchman over the ledge, then gave the flywheel a shove, and there was a silvery splash as the body and weight plunged down and down, and I stood there watching as they sank out of sight.

“Good!” Paula said huskily. She looked as soft and pale as the moonlight. I knew we should get away from there as fast as possible, but there were still some things to get settled. I wasn't fool enough to think the killing hadn't changed things. I couldn't possibly just pack up and leave with Paula; that would look too fishy now, right after the robbery. But she was in my blood and something had to be worked out.

I walked over to her and she stood there looking at me with that tight little smile at the corners of her swollen mouth. Then she reached out and touched my shoulder, and she said, “You've got guts, Joe Hooper.”

Staying there was idiocy, but I couldn't seem to move.

“I like a man with guts,” she said huskily. “I like a man to be strong.”

“What about your husband?”

She made a small sound. “Karl spent a long stretch in Leavenworth, and—do you know why? Because he was afraid to pull the trigger. He let the cops take him because he was afraid to shoot.”

“That isn't what I meant. What do we do now, you and me?”

Like a lusty young animal, she wrapped those white arms around me. She was fire in my arms. The taste of blood was in my mouth when I kissed her.

“What do you want to do, Joe? About us.”

“I want to hold you just like this and never let you go. But that's impossible now. Within a few hours cops are going to be swarming all over this part of the country, and they're going to be asking a hell of a lot of questions.”

“Then you want me to go tonight with Karl?”

“It looks like the only thing for the present. How can I get in touch with you as soon as things cool off here?”

She thought for a moment. “I have a sister in Missouri. Mrs. Stella Bundy, Box Three-forty, Route Three, St. John, Missouri. She'll know how to find me. Can you remember the address?”

Chapter Eight

It was almost five o'clock when we got back to the cabins and Sheldon was fit to be tied. He grabbed his wife and jerked her out of the car as though she were a bag of groceries. “Goddamn you!” he snarled. “Where have you been?”

He looked as though he were going to tear her head off and she just smiled. “Don't get excited, Karl. You know where we've been.”

He knew where she had been, all right. Or he was guessing pretty close to it. A family ruckus was the last thing in the world I wanted right now, and I didn't like the ugliness in his voice. I stepped out of the car and said, “Did you ever try to get rid of a body, Sheldon? You don't just dump it in a gully. You have to do it exactly right or it's too damn bad. I didn't know it was going to take this long, but it did, and there's nothing we can do about it.”

Glaring at me, he took one deep breath, then he flung his wife against the side of the car and went into the cabin. “Well!” Paula said softly. “You'd almost think he was a man, wouldn't you, when he's mad?”

I said nothing. The sky along the eastern edge of the prairie was beginning to pale, and I could feel all the strength going out of me. I felt a hundred years old. I didn't let myself think about the things that would start happening within the next few hours. That robbery was going to turn Creston upside down and shake it, and I just hoped that I would be able to ride it out.

Then Sheldon came out with the luggage. He threw it into the car without a word and Paula glanced at me and shrugged. “Maybe we'll meet again, Mr. Hooper,” she said dryly.

She smiled again and slipped onto the front seat beside her husband. Karl Sheldon looked at me once. He didn't say a word, he just sat there and looked at me with all the hate that was in him. Then, with one savage movement, he jammed the Buick into gear and they were on their way.

I stood there for maybe five minutes. I watched as the Buick slammed violently onto the highway, spewing gravel and dust into the still morning air, and I listened with relief as the car dropped behind a small rise and the roar became a drone, and the drone became a hum, and the hum became nothing. Silence.

Strangely, I felt nothing. I stood there and the pale sky became suddenly bloody as the violent sun lifted into a widening sky. Finally I turned and walked to my own cabin.

There was no use going to sleep. I had to open the station within an hour, because I always opened the station at six-thirty in the morning, and this morning had to be exactly like all the others. I made a pot of coffee, black as evil, strong as temptation, and I sat at the tiny kitchen table and watched that savage sun begin its violent work. Even my bones ached with weariness. I looked at my watch and it was nearly six, so I turned on the light and went to the bathroom to shave.

My face looked back at me from the bathroom mirror, and nothing could have shocked me more. It seemed incredible that I could have survived such a night without changing, but there was no change at all. The face was mine. The eyes seemed faintly tired, but no more so than they often did in the morning. I don't know just what I expected to see in that mirror, but the sight of my own unchanged face almost made me sick.

This is fine! I thought bitterly as I lathered to shave. Just a little more of this and you're cooked, Hooper. Get a hold on yourself, and you'd better be damn sure you keep it.

I felt a little better after the shave. Then I stripped and showered and got into my work clothes—and only then did I remember the money. I grabbed the mattress and threw it to the floor.

The money was still there. I took it in my hands. The bills were crisp to my touch. The smell of ink and silk-fibered paper was like the smell of roast beef to a starving man.

For a while I had trouble thinking of a place to put the money. The woman who cleaned the cabins might run across it if I left it here, so I took it to the station with me when I opened up. The first thing I did was wrap the money in clean waste; then I moved several cases of oil and loosened a plank in the flooring. That's where the money went, under the floor, and the cases of oil went back on top of it. That would have to do until I thought of something better.

I felt all right now. It was almost seven o'clock by the time I'd finished unlocking the gas pumps and connected the hose for water and air. The tourists were already beginning to hit the highway, getting an early start on the heat. I went back into the station and turned on the radio.

“... between midnight and four in the morning, according to the authorities,” the announcer was saying. “No details are available as yet, but it is believed that the entire Provo Box Company payroll was taken in the robbery. Otis Miller, Creston County sheriff, has issued no statement concerning the disappearance of Otto Finney, the factory's watchman. The robbery was discovered less than an hour ago, when Paul Killman, shop foreman, delivered a company truck to the garage....”

They knew nothing. They weren't even sure how much money had been taken.

By noon they knew a little more, but not much. “It is not known whether more than one person took part in the robbery, but it has been determined that entry to the company's office was made possible by use of a key —probably the key that Watchman Otto Finney kept on his person. Also, it was learned that the factory's burglar-alarm system was rendered ineffectual by a circuit break at the master switch box in the garage. This has led to speculation that the burglar or burglars must have been familiar with the factory layout, and it has been suggested, off the record, that an employee of the Provo Box Company may soon be named as a suspect. However, Sheriff Otis Miller claims he suspects no one at the present time, although the watchman was still missing as we went on the air. Ray King, Miller's deputy, said this morning that several fingerprints were found on and near the blown safe and that these will be checked....” I could smile. The Sheriff knew as well as I did that Otto Finney had nothing to do with the robbery, but pressure for investigation was being brought down on him and he would have to look into it. While the real trail grew colder, And colder. By the time they permitted Otis to stop chasing his tail, there would be no trail at all.

It was exactly the way I had figured it. But there was small satisfaction in it for me. I was too sick with fatigue to feel satisfaction or anything else. All I wanted right now was for Ike Abrams to relieve me and give me a chance to get some sleep. And that was the day Ike had to be late. It was almost one o'clock when that Ford of his rattled off the highway.

“Where the hell have you been?” I said. “It's almost one and I haven't even had lunch yet.”

He was a lanky, easygoing guy, but that day there was excitement in his sleepy eyes. “By God, hell's bustin' loose in town, Joe! I guess I forgot what time it was. You heard about the robbery, didn't you?”

“The box factory? It was on the radio.”

“Well, it's the damnedest thing you ever saw, the way it's got the town boilin'.”

I was too tired to care, but I couldn't walk off without showing a normal amount of interest. “I figured most people hated Max Provo's guts,” I said. “Why should they get worked up because he lost some money?”

“It ain't Provo that bothers them, it's old Otto Finney. Half of them say he ought to be caught and lynched. They claim old Otto's the only one could have done it, him having the keys and knowing about the burglar alarm and all. And the other half claim the old man's probably dead somewhere, wherever the burglars buried him after they killed him.”

“And what do you think, Ike?”

Ike shrugged. “Old Otto never cared about money. He never showed it, anyway. But it's goin' to look bad if those fingerprints on the safe turn out to be his.”

“Has the Sheriff got any clues besides the fingerprints?”

Ike grinned faintly. “Otis ain't talking. Half the City Council is pullin' him one way, half the other.”

Just the way I had planned it. I was pleased. “I wouldn't want to be in the Sheriff's shoes,” I said.

And Ike said, “I wouldn't want to be in the burglar's shoes. The harder they make it on Otis, the more determined he'll be to catch them. And he'll do it, too. In spite of the City Council or anybody else.”

I rubbed my face, only half hearing what Ike said. “Well,” I said, “it's the Sheriff's baby, not mine.”

I went to my cabin, too tired even to wash my face and hands. I dropped on the bed and began to sweat in that blistering heat. Almost immediately unconsciousness began closing in like a steaming blanket.

And it was night again.

And there we were, Sheldon and I, racing under the blinding brilliance of floodlights. It was an endless, vacant avenue lighted by a thousand suns, and we were racing up that dazzling stretch where there was no sound, no shadow. That was the thing I noticed, there was no shadow. Just Sheldon and I racing through that shocking brilliance. There was a heavy load on my shoulders. I felt myself falling and I called out to Sheldon but he did not hear. He continued to run, and the load on my shoulders bore me down. Now it seemed that all the lights, every dazzling little sun, turned upon me as I fell. The load was suddenly lifted from my shoulders as I struck the ground, and I lay there for a long while, breathless, as the gathering suns watched and waited. And that was when I saw the eyes, two old eyes, very old and very dead, and they were staring right at me. I awoke staring into the brilliance of the sun, the real sun. Its furnace-like heat reached through the cabin window and struck my face.

I rolled over and lay drunkenly on the soggy bed. The dream was still with me and the terror of it was in the room. Automatically, I shoved myself up from the bed. I stumbled to the bathroom and washed my face. I sloshed cold water on the back of my neck until I was fully awake.

I stood there for a long while, rigidly, waiting for the lingering terror of the dream to slip away. I soaked a towel and wrapped it around my neck, and then I went to the bedroom and then into the kitchen, touching things as I passed in an effort to prove to myself that I was awake and that the dream was gone.

I opened a can of beer and went to the bedroom. A strange thing happened then—or perhaps it wouldn't seem so strange to people who knew about such things. I began to hate Otto Finney.

It came slowly at first, and then with a rush, and within a matter of minutes I hated the old watchman more man I had ever hated a man in my life. I was glad he was dead. I was glad I had killed him. In my mind I had a completely new picture of what had happened, and now Otto was the villain, not I.

I don't know.... Maybe it's what a psychiatrist would call “defense mechanism.” Maybe they would say that turning my hate on Otto was an attempt to “justify my crime.” I don't know....

I only know that hate came when I needed it most. It saved my sanity.

Killing a man was not so difficult—I had learned that. But to go on liking him is not compatible with sanity—I had learned that, too. Killing and hatred are brothers. They go together, they are inseparable. If one is missing, it must be created from what is at hand.

And so it was.

But it came slowly at first. I thought: It should never have happened. If he hadn't shone that flashlight in Any face, it never would have happened. If he hadn't shot at me, it never would have happened.

And the inevitable tangent to this circle of thought was: He had no right to shoot at me! I wasn't trying to take hismoney! But he had shot at me. He had tried to kill me. Goddamn him, the whole thing could have been so easy and simple. A pushover, Sheldon had called it. But that watchman had to be a hero, he had to try to ruin everything just at the last minute.

And so hate was created. At the time, of course, I did not look at it objectively and I did not question it. The terror of the dream was too close for objectivity. I welcomed my new hate and held it close. I thought, I'm glad I killed him!

If it is true that hate is a defense mechanism, it is an effective one. It stands head and shoulders above fear. And it has strength, that's the important thing. I could feel myself growing stronger, and it was good to know that I would be able to sleep again and not dream.

The hell with Otto Finney!

Chapter Nine

The Sheriff's office was in the courthouse basement. I walked down the corridor of dirty marble and was almost sick at the steaming smell of unemptied spittoons and filthy toilets and stale cigar smoke, and I wondered why it was that the sheriffs office was always in the basement, and why it was that small-town courthouses were always so filthy. Near the end of the corridor there was a sign that said: “Otis Miller, Sheriff.”

Ray King was sitting at a desk just inside the front office. “Well, Joe, what brings you down to the courthouse?”

“Hello, Ray. I'd like to see Otis, if he's around.”

“Sheriffs tied up right now, in the back office. He ought to be free in a minute. Take a chair.”

I sat down in a straight-backed hard-oak chair, hoping that coming to the Sheriff wasn't a mistake. Mistake or not, I felt that it would be a good idea if I could find out what Otis thought about the robbery. It had been three days now and the papers had printed the same thing over and over again, and the Sheriff had said nothing, nothing at all, and there was no way of telling what he was thinking or doing. And I had to know. Before I could think of contacting Paula, I had to know.

Ray sat there grinning for a few seconds, then he pulled some papers in front of him and picked up a pen. “Excuse me a minute, Joe. Otis will be on my back if I don't get this report finished.”

“Sure. Sure.”

There was nothing else to do, so I sat back and tried to ignore the heat and watched Ray working on the white form. He didn't look much like a deputy sheriff, but the business was in his blood and it was more or less taken for granted that he would get Otis Miller's job when Otis decided it was time to step down. Ray's dad had been a U.S. marshal when Creston was just a stage stop in Oklahoma Territory, and there was a stone monument out west of town marking the place where he had been killed in a gun fight with two Territory badmen.

So it was natural enough that Ray should take up the law-enforcing business, although he looked pretty light for that kind of work. He was a lanky, easygoing sort of guy, not much older than myself. He looked more like a lawyer or a businessman than a deputy sheriff. Most of the time, when it wasn't too hot, he wore a dark, double-breasted suit. No cowboy boots and white hat for Ray King, and he never wore his gun where it would show, but he knew the business of a sheriff as well as Otis Miller did.

Maybe ten minutes passed, and finally an inner door opened and out came Pat Sully, the guy I'd paid that five dollars to that day at the box factory. That jarred me for a moment. Surely Pat hadn't suspected me! The big red-faced bastard was too dumb to put two and two together.

Still, it was something to think about. It turned me cold for just a moment, until. I heard Sully say, “I hope I've been some help, Sheriff.”

Otis Miller followed him out. “Well, we can't tell about that, Pat, until we put all the pieces together. 'I've called in everybody on old Provo's office force on the long chance that they might know something.” Then they shook hands and Pat turned to leave.

He saw me then. “Why, hello, Joe. What are you doing in this part of town?”

“Got a little business with the Sheriff, nothing important. How are things out at the box factory?”

Sully shook his head. “It's a mess. You never saw such a mess in your life. Old Provo's fit to be tied about this robbery.” He grinned faintly. “Well, I guess I'd better get back to it.”

I breathed easier. Nothing to worry about, I told myself. The Sheriff's talking to the entire office force. A matter of routine.

The Sheriff looked at me and I could see the tight little lines around the corners of his mouth. They were putting the pressure on him, all right.

“You waitin' to see me, Joe?”

“If you're not too busy, Sheriff. It's about that bogus bill I took in.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his face and I could see that he was annoyed. “Well, all right,” he said after a second. “Come on in the office.”

The Sheriff was a short, squat barrel of a man. He wore cowboy boots and the pants and vest of a blue serge suit. He had a big pearl-handled .45 that he wore cowboy style on his right hip, even in the office. Looking at Otis Miller for the first time, you'd think that here was just another small-town politician who had seen too many Buck Jones movies, full of wind and nothing else. You couldn't be more wrong. Otis Miller was as tough as steer hide, and his reputation as a lawman was spotless.

He planted himself behind his desk, as solid as an oak stump. “Well,” he said, “let's see it.”

I gave him the bill and he held it up to the light.

“You've got stuck, all right.”

“It looks like it,” I said. “I guess there's not much to be done about it now,” wondering how I was going to get around to the robbery.

Otis was still squinting at the bill. “When did you say you got this?”

“Four or five days ago. I found it in my cash drawer.”

He grunted. Then he got up and went to a small office safe in the corner of the room. He took another bill from the safe and held them up to the window. “I'm no expert,” he said finally, “but I'd swear these two bills came off the same press.” He handed them to me. “Look at the scrollwork in the upper left-hand corners.”

I held the two bills up to the light, and sure enough, they were exactly the same. The same engraving flaws were in both bills. “Where did this one come from?” I said, holding out the bill he had given me.

He shrugged. “Don't remember exactly. Several of them were passed here in Creston about a year ago. Directly after that the counterfeiters were caught in Tulsa.”

Otis was looking at me. It was just a look, I told myself, and didn't mean a thing, but I felt that chill again.

“They were caught?” It was all I could think to say.

“A year ago. They're in Leavenworth now.”

“How about me plates?”

“They were taken, too. They were so bad that the counterfeiters had stopped using them.” The Sheriff dropped the bill and let it flutter to his desk. “Very few of these bills were passed,” he said thoughtfully, “according to the federal men who were on the case. Look at them. That kind of work wouldn't fool an idiot—no offense, Joe.”

Goddamnit! I thought. Why did I ever think of this bogus bill, anyway? “Well...” I didn't like the way he was looking at me. “Where do you figure this bill came from?”

He shrugged.

“Somebody must have held onto it for a year and then passed it off on me.”

“It's possible,” Otis said.

But not probable. Bogus money as bad as this stuff just didn't stay in circulation. I couldn't tell what he was thinking, if he was thinking anything. He just looked at me and fingered that bogus bill.

“Then,” I said, “I guess there's nothing much we can do about it, if the counterfeiters are already in prison.”

He smiled faintly. “Maybe the experience will be worth five dollars to you, Joe. From now on you'll look at your bills before ringing them up.”

I had an almost irresistible impulse to wipe the sweat from my forehead. It was nothing. I was just imagining things. The Sheriff said, “Was there anything else on your mind, Joe?”

“No. No, that's all,” and got up. “I guess this robbery thing has got you pretty busy,” I added.

“Yes. In fact, there are some people I want to talk to right now. So if you don't mind ...”

That was a dismissal. He stood up and hitched his holster. “Well, take it easy, Joe,” and he walked out of the office.

I hadn't learned a thing. That didn't occur to me until I had reached the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. I had been on the defensive every minute; I hadn't had a chance to ask questions.

I was tempted to go back and talk to Ray King and see if I could get anything out of him, but that would be too risky. If Otis did get to wondering about that bogus bill, everything I did would begin to mean something to him. He was a bulldog when he got hold of a thing. Let well enough alone, I told myself. Give Otis no reason to believe that I tried to fool him with that piece of counterfeit and everything will be all right.

I looked at my watch and it was three o'clock. Three days, almost four, since the robbery, since I had seen Paula. It seemed like a lifetime.

Across the street from the courthouse there was a bar, and that's where I headed. I stood there with my foot on the rail for maybe fifteen minutes, nursing a schooner of beer and wondering what I was going to do next. I was free; Ike was taking care of the station for the afternoon. Free to visit with my dad, free to do anything I wanted, and I wanted to do nothing. I didn't even want the beer. Then a paper boy came in with the afternoon paper, the only paper Creston had, and I took one. It was in the headlines.

FINGERPRINTS ON PROVO SAFE

IDENTIFIED AS MISSING WATCHMAN'S

Otis Miller, Creston County sheriff, said this morning that the fingerprints found on the blown door of the Provo Box Company safe had definitely been identified as those of Otto Finney, missing company watchman. Finney has been missing since the night of the robbery....

I read it and felt myself smile. The paper, without coming right out and saying it, made it sound like an open-and-shut case against Otto. Now I knew why the Sheriff had been annoyed at my bothering him with that bogus bill. He knew perfectly well that the old watchman was innocent, but that wouldn't keep the political wolves off his back. There was only one thing for him to do, and that was to find Otto. By the time he did that, if he ever did, the details of the case would be so fogged that the trail would never be picked up again.

Suddenly I felt good. I felt fine. I had another schooner of beer and this time I enjoyed it. It was strange, the way that story in the paper affected me. It was difficult to believe that it had anything to do with me, anything at all. A factory had been robbed. An old watchman was missing. That was all. I could even think back to the night when Paula Sheldon and I had dumped the body over the rock ledge into the lake and feel nothing but a kind of cold savagery. The old bastard had tried to kill me! He got what was coming to him!

I had another beer, and this time the bartender leaned over the bar to look at the paper. “Well, I'll be damned,” he said. “That makes it look bad for old Finney, don't it? But you want to know what I think? I think the old man's dead.”

I looked at him. “Why?”

“Just a hunch, maybe.” He shrugged. “That's the way I've got it figured, though. I've been thinking about this thing, and I just don't believe the old man could have done it. I don't give a damn about the fingerprints. I think the robbers killed him and dumped his body in the lake.”

I must have jumped.

“What's the matter?” he said. “You look kind of funny.”

“Nothing's the matter. But what made you think of the lake?”

“Well, it just seems like the logical place to me. I ask myself how would be the best way to get rid of a body in a hurry, and I think right away of the lake. I don't know why; it's just the obvious place, I guess.”

It was obvious, if this stupid bartender had thought of it. Dangerously obvious.

“It's my guess,” he went on, “that the Sheriff would be dragging the lake right now if he could get the officials together on it. There are too many damn fools in town, though, that think the old man actually took part in the burglary and is hidin' out somewhere. But they'll come around in time. Then you'll see I'm right.”

I wanted to get out of there. I was beginning to realize that the lake hadn't been such a fine idea after all, and if it weren't for the wrangle in the City Council I'd be in a hell of a mess. I said, “Well, I guess the Sheriff knows what he's doing.”

“Sure, if they'd just let him do it. You know, I've got another theory about this thing. I'll bet somebody right here in Creston took that money and killed Finney. Otis Miller will get them, though. I'll bet on it.”

I downed the beer and got out of there. I'd heard enough.

I got back to the station around sundown and Ike Abrams said, “Anything new in town?”

“Not much. I talked to the Sheriff about the counterfeit bill. We'll have to chalk it up to experience.”

“I heard on the radio that the fingerprints on the safe belonged to Otto Finney. That's hard to believe, isn't it?”

“You can't ever tell about people, I guess. Anything new out here?”

“Everything's about the same.” Then he grinned. “By , golly, there is something. You remember the guy with the blonde wife, the ones in the blue Buick?”

An anvil dropped in my stomach.

“Well,” Ike said, “they're back.”

Chapter Ten

I couldn't believe it. It was impossible! They couldn't be stupid enough to come back here at a time like this!

But they had. That blue Buick was parked in the carport beside Number 2, like the returning of a nightmare. “I don't know what we've got,” Ike said, “but they must like it. This is the third time they've stopped here, isn't it?”

“I don't remember.”

“Sure, two times before. I remember the last time was the night the box factory was robbed.”

I was about to blow up. Why had they come back? “Maybe you're right,” I said, and my voice was surprisingly calm. I felt like yelling.

“You goin' to town tonight?” Ike asked.

“No. There's no need of your staying on; I'll close the station myself.”

“I don't mind staying.”

“Ike, take the night off. I want to go over the books, anyway.” He stood there grinning, and I could have slugged him. “What's the matter with you? What are you grinning at?”

“Why, nothing, I guess. Is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing's wrong. Go on, Ike, take the night off.”

“Whatever you say, Joe.”

I was tingling all over. I wanted to get that Sheldon by the throat and beat some sense into his stupid skull. And Ike wouldn't leave. He kept puttering around for maybe five minutes while I tried to keep from yelling.

“Well, if you're sure you won't need me tonight...” he said finally.

“I won't need you, Ike. That's the truth.”

I was as tight as a drum. Just about another minute of Ike and I would have exploded. But he left. I was never so glad to get rid of anybody in my life.

Now that he was gone, I didn't know what to do. I had to see Sheldon. I had to find out if he had completely lost his mind. He must have lost his mind, coming back here at a time like this! At least Paula should have known better.

I was afraid to leave the station untended, but it looked like the only way. As soon as Ike was out of sight, I headed for Number 2. There was a coldness inside me; I was ready to take somebody's throat in my hands and start squeezing.

Paula was at the door when I got there, and the sight of her jarred me. She looked as though she hadn't slept for a week. That blonde hair wasn't as blonde as it had been before, and it looked as though it hadn't been combed since the night of the robbery. I jerked the door open and said, “What the hell do you mean, coming back here?”

She took two steps back, like a sleepwalker, and glanced at the bed. Sheldon was stretched out on the covers, his face flushed, his lips tight. One shirt sleeve had been ripped off at the shoulder and his left arm was bound with what looked to be dirty rags.

“Hooper?” he almost whispered.

“Goddamn you, why did you—”

“I've got to have a doctor,” he said, talking through clenched teeth.

I wheeled on Paula, who still hadn't made a sound. “What's wrong with him?”

She smiled then, without humor. “He's been shot.”

The full implications still didn't hit me. “How did it happen?”

“We'll go into that later.”

“We'll go into it now!”

She shrugged. “All right We were in Texas. We saw this drugstore, a little hick drugstore in a little one-horse town in Texas. I was buying some aspirin and I saw the druggist go to the safe, and I saw the money there. It looked easy.” She sighed wearily. “There must have been a week's take there in a safe that I could have opened myself.”

“And then what happened?”

“For God's sake,” Sheldon said hoarsely, “don't stand there talking. I've got to have a doctor!”

“And then what happened?” I said again.

Again Paula smiled that smile that wasn't a smile at all. “We took the drugstore that night. Or we almost did. The town marshal, a hick town marshal, just happened to see us as we were leaving. The whole town was asleep, but not that hick marshal. He was a hero. He had been wearing that six-shooter for God knows how long, just waiting for a chance to use it. And he used it oil Karl.”

“But why come here, all the way from Texas?”

“Karl's got blood poisoning, I think.”

“But why did you come here?” I insisted. She sank to a chair beside the kitchen table.

“Because,” she said, “Karl has to have a doctor. And because doctors don't treat gunshot wounds without reporting them. And,” she added, “because I remembered that your father was a doctor and I thought maybe he would overlook the report if it was for a friend of yours.”

That stunned me. It had been obvious all the time, but she had to spell it out for me before I got it.

“You're crazy!”

She shrugged, very lightly.

“You must be insane,” I almost yelled. “Or maybe you just don't know what an honest man is like. Well, that's what my father is. Nothing in the world could make him take a case like this and not report it!”

“Not even to save his son from the electric chair?”

She had me.

She knew she had me, and she could start turning the screw any time she felt like it. And she felt like it right now. She stood up suddenly, and she didn't look so tired now. She pushed her hair back and looked straight at me with those cool blue eyes. “I'm not going to argue about this. Karl has to have a doctor.”

“Then get one of your own!”

“You know that's impossible. Your father is the doctor we want, the one we're going to have.”

And then a car honked outside and the sound made me jump.

“What's that?” Her eyes brightened just a little.

“Somebody at the station. A customer. I've got to get back.”

“Have you got a telephone at the station?”

“No.”

The corners of her mouth turned up again. “Sure you have. Well, call your father and tell him to get out here, understand?”

The car honked again and we stood there staring at each other, and even then, at a time like that, I kept thinking what a hell of a woman she was. She had looks, she had brains, and she could set a man on fire. I hated her guts at that moment, and it was all I could do to keep my hands off her.

“For God's sake!” Sheldon groaned.

“You'd better go, Joe,” she said, and fatigue crept back into her face. I turned on my heel. “And don't forget to call your father,” she added as I went out the door.

I was shaking with rage when I got back to the station. The guy was just beginning to honk the horn again as I rounded the corner. “All right!” I yelled. “All right!”

They were tourists, a fat old geezer of about sixty and a little pinch-faced woman. I looked in the car window and said, “Fill her up?”

“No, we just want a cabin,” the man said.

Of all the times to get business! “I'm sorry,” I said, “we're full up.”

“You've got a 'Vacancy' sign out,” the little old woman said peevishly.

“I just forgot to take it in, ma'am. Sorry.”

“Don't look like you're full,” the man complained. “There ain't but one car back there. I looked as we drove up.”

I could feel my nerves unraveling. “Mister,” I said tightly, “I've got no vacancy. Why don't you try one of the other motels? There are plenty of them down the road.”

“The good places are all filled,” the old woman whined.

The man said, “Look here, son, I'm not as young as I used to be. Driving tires me, and I've been driving all day. You sure you haven't got some kind of place?”

“For Christ's sake!” I exploded. “How many times do I have to tell you? We've got no vacancy!”

“Well!” The little old woman pulled herself up, outraged. The fat man got red in the face. I turned my back on them and went back to the station as they drove off.

I was still shaking. I took the “Vacancy” sign down and put the “No Vacancy” up, the first time it had been up since I started running the place.

At that moment Paula stepped through the station doorway. She had washed her face and combed her hair and put on fresh lipstick and she looked like ten million dollars.

“Have you called your father?” she said.

“I'm not dragging my father into this, Paula. That's something you'd better get straight.”

Surprisingly, she smiled. “All right. If that's the way you want it.” She stood up, lazily, like a young savage. Then she stepped to the wall phone and picked up the thin directory.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm going to call a doctor, any doctor.”

“You can't! Any doctor you call will have to report that gunshot wound!”

“It can't be helped,” she said, as though it didn't make any difference to her one way or the other. “Karl will die if that arm doesn't get attention.”

“Then let him die!” I took Paula's arms and held her tight. “What do you care what happens to him? You don't love him. You despise him. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at him.”

I must have been hurting her, but she only shrugged. “Maybe, Joe,” she said softly, “but he's been good to me.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

This time her smile was edged with bitterness. “Joe,” she said huskily, “could you guess what I was before Karl married me? Could you guess what I did for a living?”

I turned her loose. I could guess.

“That's the reason I won't let him die,” she said. “Love has nothing to do with it. Karl has everything to gain and nothing to lose by calling a doctor. If the wound is reported, if the story gets to the police—well, it was you that killed the watchman, Joe.” She found a number, then lifted the receiver, and I could hear the operator answer.

I slammed the hook down with my hand.

“Well, Joe?” she asked softly.

She had me and she knew it. I picked up the phone and gave the number.

“Hello, Dad?”

Chapter Eleven

It was closing time but I was still at the station, waiting, wondering what I was going to say when my father came out of that cabin, wondering how I was going to explain it to him. Then I heard his footsteps—those slow, weary footsteps—as he came around to the front of the station. He looked a hundred years old as he came in and set down his bag.

“How's the patient, Dad?” It sounded insane, but he didn't seem to notice.

“Blood poisoning,” he said heavily. “Another day without attention would have killed him. He still stands a chance of losing that arm.” He reached for the phone and I jumped.

“Who're you calling, Dad?”

“The Sheriffs office. That man has a gunshot wound and I have to report it.”

“But it was an accident, Dad. Didn't they tell you?” I was hoping that he wouldn't notice how I was sweating. “You don't have to report it, do you, if it was an accident?”

“All gunshot wounds have to be reported and investigated, Joe. You know that.” He reached for the phone again and I stopped his hand with mine.

“Dad, as a favor to me, don't report this one. These people are friends of mine and I know it will be all right. Just don't bother them.”

Those old eyes looked puzzled, and I couldn't tell whether he suspected anything or not. “Joe,” he said slowly, “you know I have to make a report. I'd be breaking the law if I didn't.”

“Then you'll have to break the law, Dad.” And that was when he began to notice things. He noticed the sweat, the veins standing out on my forehead, and I guess he saw some things in my eyes that scared him. He felt for a chair and sat down very slowly.

“What is it you're trying to tell me, Joe?”

I couldn't tell him. I couldn't bring myself to hurt him any more than was absolutely necessary, but he knew something was wrong, and he knew it was bad. And he was waiting.

“Joe,” he said finally, “you're in trouble, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Is it bad?”

I couldn't look at him. I nodded.

He just sat there, looking at his hands. Those white, thin hands. After a moment he said quietly, “Why did you do it, Joe? Was it because of that woman?”

I didn't understand at first. Then it began to come, and an unexpected hope began growing inside me. He thought I had shot Sheldon! I took hold of that hope and held it tight, I held it with all the strength that was in me.

And then I was talking. “Dad, I don't know how it happened. I'd tell you if I could, but I don't know.” I saw the opening and the words came pouring out. “You saw what kind of woman she is. When she came playing around, I lost my head, I guess. I know that's not much of an excuse, but that's the way it was. And lien her husband found out what was going on, and there was a scuffle. I don't know.... There was a gun in it somewhere, and it went off, and when it was over there was a bullet in his arm.”

He just sat there.

“Dad,” I said, “don't you see why you can't turn in that report? The whole story would come out and the whole town would know about it.”

He folded and unfolded those white hands, saying nothing.

“Dad, the rest of my life depends on what you do about this report Should one mistake be that expensive? Just one mistake!”

“I was thinking about Beth,” he said heavily. “I didn't want to meddle any more in your affairs, Joe, but that woman, that man's wife, is she the one? Is she the reason you and Beth stopped seeing each other?”

I said nothing and let him think what he wanted to think. His hands trembled as he fumbled for his handkerchief and wiped aimlessly at his forehead.