THE FOREVER GIRL
Part 1 Forever

By Chris O'Grady

One

Off to the west, half a mile or more, a thousand neon lights along the Strip thrust a glaring vari-colored canopy high up into the night sky. In the other direction, a climbing moon, almost at the full, spread a softer silver light on the desert floor.

Cutting across the sage and cactus-covered plain, I was on my way to the first night of that week's tour of the graveyard shift where I worked.

About halfway there, I saw them dump him out of a slowly moving car onto a dirt road that cut across my regular route, just ahead.

The car came bobbing its headlights along the seldom-used track from the southeast, on my right rear. I glanced at its approach over my shoulder, but paid no special attention to it.

The path I had beaten for myself over the past few months angled into the dirt road maybe a hundred paces from me when the car went past. A short distance before it reached my path, one of the left-side car doors opened while they tumbled him out. The car had slowed almost to a crawl, so he rolled loosely and then lay still. The door slammed shut and the car speeded up, its two red taillights getting closer together the farther off they went.

By the time I came up onto the county maintained dirt road, I could hardly make out the taillights in the distance. There had never been a hope of getting a look at the license plate.

There was no hurry. He was either dead or alive. As I reached the road, I hesitated for that small second.

I should tend to my own business, cross the dirt road and continue on the second mile of my hike to the aluminum windows and screens assembly shop where I worked.

The small second passed. I didn't tend to my own business. I turned and walked along the road, back to where he lay.

It was as thorough a going-over as any I had ever seen.

He lay on his back. For the first moment or two, I thought he was dead. Then I heard his breathing, harsh, rasping, bubbling in his throat.

Maybe he was dead, at that. Or as good as.

It wasn't a professional job. They had done too much to him.

Both his eyes were black, the left one swollen shut, the other just about.

I squatted beside him, not touching him, waiting to see if he died. He didn't. The struggle to breathe went on. He had to work at it, but somehow he kept it going.

The gentle night-wind stirred some of the light-brown hair at the top of his head. The rest of his hair was matted to his skull by blood.

Still squatting there, I raised my head and gazed across the level land to the big-money Strip, wondering what he had done. Welshed on a bet? Stolen somebody's girl? Tried moving in on someone else's territory?

There could be a thousand reasons. Or none. He had been pulverized by experts.

Whoever had done it had enjoyed doing it, no doubt of that. I shrugged. It wasn't my affair. He might live a couple dozen more years, or he might go out like a candle-flame a minute from now, but that was nothing to me, either.

All I had to decide right then was which of three possible paths I was going to walk. I could forget I ever saw this man and go on to work and attach aluminum storms and screens till eight in the morning. Or I could get to a phone, make a fast anonymous call to 911 and then go on about my business. Or I could pack him on my back across the sage flats to the nearest lights and get him treated as quickly as possible.

I settled for the second of the three. In the shape this guy was in, to move him might be to kill him.

“Look,” I said, bending over him, “can you hear me?”

I thought I caught a gleam from the right eye, the one that wasn't completely puffed shut. It may have been moonlight reflected from his eyeball. His labored breathing was the only sound he made.

“I'll get to a phone,” I told him. “Don't move from here. I'll get some help as soon as I can.”

He just lay there, his face a smashed-in blob washed by the cold silver moonlight. The gleam was still there in that one eye, or it was there part of the time, but I couldn't be sure if he was conscious or not. So I had to leave him like that.

“I'll be as quick as I can,” I told him.

I was surprised at the thickness in my throat. I was even more surprised to find myself running across the desert, headed due west for the nearest lights, weaving in and out among the clumps of sage and an occasional cactus.

It had gotten to me, the way whoever had given him the business had given him so much of it.

In the old days, I had started out in the muscle bracket. I quit it before I graduated into the leave-them-dead class. But we did what we did like pros. We broke a guy's arm, maybe a leg. We put a scare into him, according to what the contract called for. But we didn't go crazy and pound all of him into the ground and still leave him alive. Even the hit boys did it clean, most of the time. They left you a man. True, they left you a dead man, but up to that final second, you were still a man; you were still yourself; you could see to your pride and try to go out right.

That must have been what got to me: whoever had worked on him had loved every second of it. One of those sick bastards, as sick as you could get.

I was shaking, sweating, my lungs screaming for air from the unaccustomed jogging, when I loped out of the sage flats into the first dark quiet street at the edge of town. There was a block or two of that before the lights of the Strip blotted out most of the night.

I kept going until I reached the brightness, where I had trouble stopping. Grabbing a power pole at the edge of the curb, I stood there panting, gulping air, peering around for the nearest roadside phone.

Maybe I looked out of place in my work dungarees and blue denim shirt, because a patrol car slid to a stop in front of me. The nearest cop got out and came over to where I leaned on the pole.

He might have thought I was drunk, and they still had some empty cells in the drunk-tank downtown.

“A guy…” I gasped. “Back there…in the desert…beat up pretty bad…”

His hard little cop's eyes turned even harder.

“You beat up a guy?”

“Not me,” I snarled. “Just…found him. He's…bad shape. Need an…ambulance. Better hurry.”

He took hold of my upper arm, the way they do.

“Okay, get in the back seat. Where is this guy?”

My breathing was returning to normal.

“On a dirt road, that way,” I said, pointing the way I'd come.

He slid in beside the one at the wheel and picked up the mike. “A dirt road?” he asked over his shoulder. “Which one?”

“I don't know. It crosses from southeast of town to up ahead, where we're pointed now. It must come into this road…”

The cop at the wheel spoke.

“I know the road he means, Mike.”

He pulled out onto the Strip and went barreling along it, lifting the siren to just above a growl.

The other cop, Mike, talked low into the radio, directing the ambulance where to meet us.

We swung abruptly to the right, leaving the lights of the Strip behind us, then slowed and made a half-right, bumped down a slight grade, and leveled off at the bottom. Then the houses were behind us, and we were running along in the moonlight. The sage flowed past on both sides of the county road.

I tried to watch for my path. Away off to the left, I could see the row of light-industry buildings where I worked in the one on the end of the string nearest to the Strip. Far ahead and off to the right was the house where I lived in a furnished room with a hot plate. That house was easy to see on any night: it was the last building down that way.

But I had never gone along this dirt road, so I couldn't be sure where the path was that I had worn for myself across the desert getting to work and back, whenever I didn't have a ride home.

“Which side of the road?”

“Right side. Close to the road. Practically on it.”

Now we drove slowly. The patrol car's headlights gave plenty of light, once the one at the wheel stomped the brights on.

There was no oncoming traffic at that hour on a forgotten dirt track like that.

No one was lying beside the road.

After we had gone along like that for awhile, I suddenly knew there wasn't going to be anyone.

“They must have come back for him,” I muttered, half aloud.

I felt like kicking myself for getting mixed up in it.

Mike turned and looked back at me a couple of times. Then he would face forward and watch the right side of the road again.

I kept thinking what kind of damned fool I had been to open up to him, back there on the Strip. I should have found a phone, called it in, and let them find him or not find him. I'd be at work right now, not starting to sweat again.

Finally I had to say the obvious.

“We've come too far. We must have passed him.”

The cop at the wheel swung the front of the vehicle off the road in a clear space, backed, turned, and started along the dirt road the way we'd come.

“Maybe he crawled into the brush,” he ventured. He didn't sound loaded with confidence.

“No,” I said. “In the shape that guy was in, he couldn't have moved a foot.”

They grunted and kept quiet, but I had to stick to my story.

“Look, let me out here,” I called.

Mike laughed.

“He wants us to let him out here. Playtime's over.”

“I can't tell where I'm at, inside a car,” I explained. “I've always come across here on foot. I can't get my bearings. You get out with me, if you think I'm trying to cut out.”

“All right, I'll do that,” Mike said. “Drop us here, Sam. Stay behind him. Keep him in your brights. I'll walk along on my side, out of the lights.”

Sam stopped the car. Mike slid out and watched me as I got out of the patrol car's caged back section.

“Stay in front of me,” Mike ordered.

Moonlight gleamed on metal in his hand. He was a tough, experienced cop in a fast-money gambling town, and he wasn't taking chances.

“And don't go off the road, buster.”

“Okay, buster, I won't.”

I walked forward into the beams of the squad car's headlights. I could hear the crunch of Mike's footsteps keeping pace with mine, back there, just off the road.

The car eased along, a dozen feet behind me. I looked off toward the shop where I worked. It wasn't in line yet.

A bit farther along, it was closer to the way it looked when I walked toward it at night. I began to watch the left edge of the dirt road, trying to spot where I usually came angling into it from where I lived.

Twice I stopped at spots that looked familiar, but after sighting both ways, decided each time they weren't right, so I went on.

Then I found the path. It lined up all right, both with the shop up ahead and the other way, with the house where I was staying.

Crossing the dirt road, I checked the other side. Over the weeks, my shoes had worn a groove in the relatively soft shoulder, and there it was.

Standing there, I peered back to where the injured man had lain. From where I was now standing, even with only moonlight to help at the time, I had been able to see him lying there after he was thrown from the car. Now, with the squad car's brights full on, I saw we hadn't just missed him coming along the road just now. He wasn't there anymore.

“This is the path I follow on my way to the job,” I told Mike, pointing at the rut through the sage bushes.

Mike stood beside the squad car, his face reflecting the headlights dimly.

“Where's the guy?”

“He was back there.”

I went back along the dirt road, past the squad car. Sam backed up, the car purring quietly along beside me. Behind me, Mike's footsteps crunched in the roadside grit and desert sand.

When I thought I had almost reached the place where the beat-up man had lain, I stepped to the side of the road and bent, watching carefully as I prowled along.

“Don't go off the road,” Mike called.

“Don't worry.”

A few steps more, and I stopped and bent closer to the ground. It might have been the place where the guy had landed.

“Have you got guts enough to come up here and take a look?” I called over my shoulder. “This might have been where he fell.”

Mike came out into the light of the red taillights and stood beside me, watching where I pointed.

The ground was scraped. A sage bush was smashed in on one side. I was relieved to see that. When the guy was thrown into the bush, it had probably hurt him plenty, but so far it was the only tangible thing I had found to back up my story.

“He hit about here,” I said. “Then he rolled over into the bush, I guess. He stopped about there.”

“Stay here,” Mike repeated. “Don't go off the road. I don't want too many tracks screwing things up, if this turns out to warrant investigation.”

“All right.”

I watched Mike walk wide around the bent bush to about where the guy had stopped rolling. He squatted, flash in one hand, revolver in the other.

Inside the car, I could hear Sam talking softly into the radio.

A pair of headlights came rapidly toward us from under the golden pink bowl of light reflected from the sky by all the lights along the Strip. A siren sounded.

Mike looked up as the ambulance approached, then returned his attention to the ground. He put his gun away, reached out, touched something, held his fingertips in the light of his flash. Then he straightened and stood there watching the EMS vehicle slow and stop, with its headlights facing the squad car's.

I went on standing where I was, in the middle of the dirt road, lit by the squad car's red taillights. I waited. There was nothing else I could do.

Mike spoke to the EMS worker who alighted from the vehicle.

“Guy was thrown from a moving car, hit there, rolled, and ended up here. Now he's gone. May have crawled away, may have been picked up by a passing car. If we don't find him nearby, you wasted a trip.”

The EMS man grinned.

“No, you wasted a trip for me.”

Mike shrugged.

“I'm going to make a circle or two. If I don't find the victim, we'll have to let it go for now.”

Turning, Mike disappeared into the sage.

EMS stared after him a moment, dug out a cigarette and set fire to the end of it with a wooden kitchen match.

“You the one that found the body?” he asked me.

“Yeah. The body was still alive when I left it.”

“Could it move by itself?”

“I don't see how. It was well worked on.”

Losing interest, he went over to talk to Sam in the squad car. After a moment, I followed him.

“Okay if I go on my way? I'm probably late for work now. Supposed to be there at midnight.”

“Better stick around,” Sam said.

“Officer, I've told you all I can. He was dropped from a car, landed over there, I took off for help, and now the help is here.”

“Only he isn't here,” Sam pointed out.

“That's not my fault,” I complained. “I didn't put him there. All I did was find him and report what I found to you. From here on, it's your baby.”

“Better stick around,” Sam said again. “We'll clear it with your boss.”

I gave up. When they start saying the same things to you over and over, you might as well argue with a block of concrete.

“Okay if I crawl in the back of your car again? I'll be on my feet till eight in the morning, if I ever get to work. Might as well stay off them while I can.”

He grinned.

“Climb in.”

Crawling in back, I shut my eyes, opening them once in awhile to look around. I couldn't sleep, but I relaxed as well as I could.

Presently, another car came out. Plainclothes cops got out of it, talked to Mike and Sam. They all wandered around for awhile. Then it began to wind down.

Sam climbed behind the wheel again and Mike got in beside him. One of the plainclothes cops had me go over it for him. He listened quietly, nodded once or twice, and said, “All right, thanks for reporting it.” Turning to Sam, he said, “Get his name and address and where he works.”

“He's late for work,” Sam said. “Okay if we drop him off?”

“All right with me,” plainclothes said, and went away.

“Name's James Brandon,” I told Sam's notebook.

“Address?”

“ Seventy, East Tonopah Street .”

“Where do you work?”

“U-Kay Aluminum Products. I don't know the street number.” I pointed north across the sage flat. “The long white building on the end there, nearest the Strip.”

“Good enough,” Sam said. “I'll get the address when we drop you.”

It was almost one in the morning before I picked up the airgun and started bolting the heights, headers and sills together.

Mike went and told the foreman why I was late, but before he left the shop, I noticed him step into the little glass office, where he talked for a few minutes with the boss. Probably asking about me. I didn't let it worry me. Nobody there knew any more about me than anyone else in the world. The fact that I had been working there for two or three months would be enough. Nobody in that shop had been there long anyway, except a few old-timers who had cushy deals. It wasn't the kind of shop that paid enough to make anyone want to stay longer than they had to. Minimum wage the first month, then you got an obligatory raise when you were let into the Union : ten cents an hour.

Thinking about that, I laughed. I could hardly figure out what to do with that extra four bucks a week I was getting, less taxes and what-not.

By quitting time next morning, I'd had to tell my story to the guys at work half a dozen times, but they finally stopped talking about it and went back to tell one another who they'd laid lately and how drunk they'd gotten.

Punching out at eight-thirty, I washed up and walked across to the diner and had breakfast. When the guy I usually caught a ride home with was through eating, I almost went with him, but on impulse I told him: “No, I forgot. I have to report at the Hall of Justice.”

“Okay,” he nodded. “See you tonight, Jim.”

I didn't have to report anywhere that I knew about. Wondering why I hadn't gone along with him, I sat there over a second cup of coffee.

I was tired enough , certainly. I wondered about it awhile.

Over on the Strip, trucks drove back and forth with supplies for the little city, so its hungry-eyed people could spend short intervals between working gambling games doing a little eating.

Presently I quit wondering why I had turned down the ride home, because by then, of course, I knew why.

I sat there and looked at it, the way a circus aerialist must gaze out over the void before him before he takes the first dive out, reaching for the swinging bar.

I had kept away from the grift, gotten this bacon-and-bean job, just to clear the stink of it all out of my nostrils for awhile, but I was beginning to realize that some of us are apparently born to what I had been kidding myself I was trying to get away from: snooping, digging into the mess of life other people made for themselves.

Now I could feel myself inching toward the near end of that high wire again. I watched myself doing it, and wondered why. Because I knew damn well I would be sick of it again, if I went back into the investigation line.

I lit a cigarette, shaking my head at myself.

Maybe there would be nothing out there. Maybe he had just crawled off somewhere and died. Or maybe he had been picked up and hauled away to a hospital, or to oblivion.

I shrugged. Whichever it was, I knew I was going to walk back across the two miles of sage flats.

The pathetic part was, I felt the old lift, the beginning of excitement.

That was why I shook my head. At myself. It looked as if I was hooked. Again.

Buying two quarts of milk and a couple of hero sandwiches at a delicatessen, I slipped between the deli and the coin-operated laundry next door, and started across the sage.

The wind soughed gently, whipping the bushes, tossing them.

Walking through it, I swung my gaze back and forth, but I saw no one. When I reached the dirt road, I stopped and looked around. No police stakeout. Maybe they had gone over the ground again, when daylight arrived. Or perhaps my victim had turned up at a hospital and that was the end of the little mystery, and of his disappearing act.

But I stood there anyway, in the middle of the dirt road, waiting.

I had a feeling.

If you had asked me then, “Do you think he's still somewhere out there?” I honestly wouldn't have known what to reply. Probably I would have said: “No. I don't think so. How could he be?”

But I had the feeling, and I went on standing there. Then I turned along the road until I came to where they had dumped him. I looked all around.

I knew I wouldn't be able to see him. If he was good enough to stay hidden in the desert this long, I wasn't going to spot him. He might be lying fifteen or twenty feet from where I stood, but if he knew how to sprinkle desert sand the right way, he would remain invisible. To my eyes, anyway.

“Look, I'm not police,” I called out.

The wind blew the words away from my mouth. The sage bushes tossed, the desert stank with memories of night-smells, but nothing else happened.

I guess I hadn't really expected anything to happen.

Far off, beyond the house where I roomed, a car streaked along a road, headed toward the southwest end of the Strip.

I began to feel foolish, but I still stood there. He might not be anywhere around, and any words I called were being said to nothing but the wind and the desert.

“Okay, man, good luck,” I finally muttered.

Turning, I started to cut across to my well-worn path, but glancing down at the paper bag I carried, I stopped and went back to the dirt road.

Holding the bag way up, I called: “Here's some milk and sandwiches. If you need them, get to them soon, before the milk turns sour in the sun.”

Stepping off the dirt road in among the knee-high sage, I put the bag down in the shade of a big bush, went back up onto the road and along to my path.

All the way across that second mile of wind-tossed flat, I didn't look back once.

The room I rented was on the second floor of an old adobe building at the end of a quiet neighborhood street, whose pavement ended halfway along the house. A concrete sidewalk ran along the side of the windowless adobe wall that fronted that section of the street and ended at my front door. Beyond that there was nothing but a few feet of dirt path to the corner of the building and then the sage-spotted desert.

Going around the corner of the building out of the wind, I unlocked the street door, then stepped back to the nearby corner of the house, where I stared back across the sage flat.

At that distance, I couldn't expect to see a thing, and I didn't.

The mid-morning sun was hot, once you were out of that wind.

Gazing across the two miles of flat desert, I thought of all that had happened out there. Then I went inside and up the stairs and unlocked the door of my room.

That night, before starting across again, I crawled out the east window onto the narrow terrace, whose railing was the top of the outside adobe wall of the building. There was just enough room out there for two or three people to sit, between my window and the northeast corner of the building. For one person, there was more than enough space.

With my back against the outside wall of my room, I sat on the edge of the hip-high wall at the corner. Leaning forward a little, I could look past the corner of the building and see the string of lights bordering the Strip. I didn't even have to lean forward to see the area where I would be working an hour from now. Everything was dark between where I sat and that strip of light-industry buildings.

Sitting there, I smoked a long while before rousing myself to leave for work.

The wind had dropped.

I took a flashlight with me.

When I reached the dirt road, I turned back along it. The bag of food and the two quarts of milk weren't where I had left them that morning.

I prowled around for awhile, but I couldn't find a trace of anything, so I just went on along to work.

In the morning, I didn't even stop for breakfast at the diner, but started back across to the dirt road.

Near where I had left the food, there wasn't a trace of anything. I circled around, taking plenty of time and going slowly, but I still almost missed it.

One of the milk containers was partly hidden in the shadow of a sage-bush. Picking it up, I examined it. There was a streak of red at the top. It might have been blood, left there when someone had been drinking, and maybe the mouth doing the drinking had been bleeding.

Then again, maybe it wasn't blood.

Holding onto the milk container, I kept searching, but that was all I found. When the radius of my last swing had gotten to something like an eighth of a mile, I knew there wasn't going to be anything more than that milk container. I was surprised there had been that much.

Finishing the final circle, when I cut my own footpath partway between the dirt road and my current rooming house, I went along home, without looking back.

While I ate breakfast, I noticed another wider streak of pink in the middle of one side of the milk container, and there was a very clear fingerprint.

I couldn't tell which finger had made the print, but it wasn't the thumb or the pinkie: it was too big. One of the other three fingers.

Probably the police forensics team could tell, and they might also be able to find out if the owner had a record somewhere. If they had a reason for finding out.

But they didn't have a reason yet. The owner of the print hadn't done anything. Someone else had done it to him.

Still, I ought to turn the milk container and its print in for identification purposes. Maybe the blood would provide DNA information. If the pink smear was blood.

That night, the police sent for me while I was at work.

“Where should I go?” I asked whoever phoned. “I forget where your morgue is located.”

“Not the morgue,” he corrected me. “ County Hospital .”

So much for saving the milk container with the fingerprint. If he was in the hospital, they could get all the DNA and prints they needed from the guy in person.

Two

The hospital sprawled on a machine-made knoll surrounded by bright green grass, which needed lots of water to stay that green. An occasional royal palm stood tall, here and there on the lawn. High up, the wind clashed the palm fronds.

None of the wind reached me as I went up the path that bisected the front lawn. When I went inside the hospital out of the sun through the main entrance, I felt the cool shady difference, even that early in the morning.

An aide at the receiving desk told me to wait. I sat on a bench. People passed.

I'd gone home from work, taken a shower, put on slacks and a sport shirt before coming back uptown. I had gotten my usual ride home from the shop, but had to walk to the hospital. I wondered if I had enough money yet for another car. After I left here, I might do some looking in used-car lots.

A youngish-looking man crossed to me from the desk.

“You Brandon?”

“Yes.”

“This way.”

I followed him along a corridor until he stopped outside one of the wards at the rear of the hospital. A uniformed police officer sat on a chair beside the door.

With one hand on the doorknob, the plainclothes cop said to me, “If you could have gotten here last night, before they treated him…”

I stood beside him, waiting.

“I'm Detective Sergeant Brode,” he went on. “This may be the man you reported, the one left in the desert a couple of nights back. I say may be, because while this one is pretty banged up and the doctor claims he got it several days ago, he was found in an alley in the northwest section of town, a short distance this side of that new casino out there. Florian's. You know it?”

I shook my head.

He shrugged.

“Half casino, half country club. They even handle yachts farther north on the lakeshore.” He grinned at the quizzical look I gave him. “Yeah, haul the high-rollers' yachts up to the lake and back, if they've got enough of that old stuff.”

“As soon as I get enough of that old stuff,” I said, “maybe I'll have them haul my yacht, too.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Anyway, he was found in this alley, not as far out as Florian's. As I say, he might not be your guy, but…how did that line go?…he's the only one we've got. See if you can make some kind of identification.”

His hand started to turn the knob.

“What about his papers?” I asked. “Do you know his name yet?”

His hand stopped turning the doorknob. His eyes watched me thoughtfully. He sighed.

“I'm glad you asked that question…I think.” He seemed to hesitate before going on. “He was clean. No identification of any kind. Nothing in his pockets but three blood-soaked handkerchiefs and a couple of…well, no papers, anyway. Sound usual?”

“No.”

“That's what we thought, too.”

“He might have been robbed,” I suggested.

I tried to recall if I had felt the bulge of a wallet in his trouser pocket against my knee when I squatted beside him on the dirt road that night. Maybe I had just imagined it.

“He might well have been robbed,” Brode agreed, watching me closely. “Well, come on.”

At that early hour, there were no visitors but Brode and myself. A couple of patients near the far end of the ward were talking among themselves. They glanced up as we went by, and their eyes followed us, as we went behind screens arranged around the bed that held the unknown man.

“Do you recognize him?” Brode asked.

There wasn't much to recognize…that I could see, I mean. His head was heavily bandaged. Almost his entire face was covered with thick swathes of gauze. I could smell the medicine odors coming from him in waves.

He lay stiff and still, covered by the sheets up to his neck, and above that by bandages. Only a tuft of his dark blond hair showed near the top of his head. The rest had probably been shaved for surgery, and was now covered with bandages.

Standing beside the bed, I looked down at him. Only his right eye and nose showed out of the bandaging. The eye stared fixedly at the ceiling. It didn't turn to look at Brode or myself, after one quick glance when we came through the opening in the screens.

I studied that single eye surrounded by bandage-lumps. The white gauze made the eye stand out, gray as slate, and just about as warm-looking.

I tried to think of something to say. Finally, I just said, “I hope you're all right soon.”

We stood there a moment or two longer. When he still didn't look at us, I turned and went outside the screen and out of the ward. In the corridor, I stood near the policeman sitting there.

Brode came out.

“What do you think? Is it him?”

I shrugged.

“It might be the same man. With all those bandages, it's hard to tell.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”

“It could be the guy,” I assured him “Moonlight is funny. The hair could be the same…and it was the right eye that wasn't completely closed.”

Brode stood there chewing his lip, staring at me, but not seeing me. Then he nodded.

“All right, good enough. There aren't that many assault cases. This is the same man. Thanks for coming over, Mr. Brandon. If we need you later on, when some of those bandages come off, we'll get in touch with you.”

“Will it be all right if I bring him some cigarettes?”

He had been turning to the policeman as I asked the question. Turning back, he eyed me sharply.

“Do you know that guy? I mean, did you know him before this…?”

“No. I just thought I would…I mean, none of his family are likely to show up, unless he's from right here in town. Maybe he could use a touch of something…something that hasn't got a fist wrapped around it.”

For another moment, he kept staring at me. Then he grinned and shrugged.

“Sure, Mr. Brandon, I guess it's all right. Check with the duty nurse about the cigarettes, though. His ribs are taped up, I understand.”

“Okay.”

I went back down the long corridor past the swift-walking, whispering-soled nurses and orderlies.

When I got back outside, the lawn was still there, still uncannily green in that desert sun. I wondered why they bothered.

Walking down the main walk leading through the grass out to the street, I was wondering where I could find the nearest bus, or the nearest beer.

Just short of the street, a big statue of someone stood off to one side. Stopping, I studied it. Its name was on a metal plaque attached to the base. It might have been a doctor who had saved lots of lives, or a money-man who contributed mucho dinero to build the place, or it could have been a Mexican bandit.

Continuing on, I reached the sidewalk.

Someone called my name.

Back on the shady side of the statue, a crew-cut head with a bronze face beneath it was aiming another holler my way.

Staying where I was, I watched Jack Harvey come striding along, his hand outstretched.

“Hey, how you been, Jim?” he smiled. “You've been out of circulation awhile.”

I reached my hand out and it helped his shake it.

“Been earning an honest dollar,” I said. “Just to see what it feels like.”

“You should keep in touch,” he scolded genially. “I've had plenty of work coming in. I could easily throw some of it your way, and I'd never even feel it.”

“Doing what? Catching department store help clipping quarters from the change?”

Smiling, he spread his hands.

“Hey, Jim, it's bread and butter. What the hell, in our racket, we can't pick and choose. The big hunt-that-man-down sort of cases you specialize in don't show up every week. You have to eat in between, right?”

“I'm eating.”

“Jim, I'd like a little pow-wow with you,” he said seriously. “One of these days, why not give me a call? I can always use a good man like you, maybe for relief work. That way it don't tie you down.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Fair enough. Jim, I wish I had a minute right now. We could grab a fast bite somewhere. Maybe next time we'll get to kick it around. You've been out of the loop so long now, I'm gonna have some of my people look into it. Maybe you're grabbing too much business away from me for my own good.”

He laughed.

Jack had a big good-looking outdoor-face, and one of the friendliest smiles in the state. Unfortunately, his eyes held as much warmth as the underside of a glacier.

Just to be saying something while we stood there making conversation, I ventured: “I heard you were going to branch out, set up an office out on the coast.”

“Wish I could, Jim,” he admitted confidentially. “That's where the real green is. Maybe someday, but not just yet. I want to be in real solid, all through this territory, before I try spreading out.”

For a moment, he eyed me speculatively.

“I wish I could get you to work into the big-outfit way of operating, Jim. You might be the right man to handle things for me here, while I head up our first branch on the coast, when we open it.”

The ‘we' slid into the conversation as smooth as a switchblade, but I knew it was a word even the wind would have a tough time carrying any distance.

I shook my head.

“No, I like it fine this way,” I told him. “My elbows feel crowded by all that paperwork you have to do.”

He laughed again.

“All right, Jim. We'll leave it at that. I suppose you'll never change. Maybe it's a good thing for me you don't want to break into the big-agency dodge. You'd be rough competition.”

We both knew he was lying, but his smile seemed a lot more sincere than mine.

When we separated, I wandered down to automobile row, checking out the buys in smashed-up old cars, where the damage is all on the surface: fenders, sides, doors…but I kept my eye open for one with its guts still in good shape.

One or two I looked at seemed pretty good, and they were both less than a hundred. Possibles. But for the time being, I let it go, making a note of the lots where each was for sale. Experience had shown me it paid to look a long time for the sort of car I wanted, and could afford.

Two days later, on the afternoon before my midnight-to-eight trick in the shop ended for that week, I went over to the hospital during regular visitors hours, to see how the unknown Punching Bag was doing.

No cop sat outside the ward door.

Some of the bandages had been removed, but most of the injured man's face was still covered.

His eyes picked me up when I went through the opening in the screens that still walled him off from the rest of the ward, but he still didn't say anything. Pretty soon his right eye turned up to the ceiling and stayed that way.

I just sat beside his bed awhile, listening to the gabble of voices of the other visitors in the ward, gazing out the window at the far-stretching sky.

I left a pack of cigarettes, uncertain whether he could smoke yet. I had forgotten to clear it with the ward aide.

All the time I was there, I didn't say a dozen words to him, and he hadn't said one.

After that, I forgot about him. I worked the four-to-twelve for half a week before the boss called me into his office.

“Phone call for you.”

Right away I thought it was about the man in the hospital.

“Brandon speaking.”

It wasn't the police or the hospital. It was Jack Harvey's office.

I was so surprised that he had called as he said he would that I just listened to his offer and, without thinking, said yes.

“Good man,” Jack said heartily. “Start next Monday.”

While I was hanging up, I wanted to call him back and tell him I'd thought it over and changed my mind.

Then I looked at the boss, sitting there behind his little desk in his crowded office, bent over papers, wearing a dark-straw fedora. Peering out at the shop, I listened to the whine of the saws cutting through the aluminum, to the air-guns hissing, to the rubber mallets gingerly pounding glass or screening into frames.

I decided it was time I gave up being poor but honest for awhile and got back into my line of work before I forgot how to do it.

“I have to quit,” I told the boss.

He looked up at me, his eyes disgusted.

“When?”

“I can stay through Sunday.”

His glance dropped to the mess of papers in front of him. He was too offended by me to look at me anymore.

“I thought you weren't a fly-by-night.”

I shrugged.

For a second, I wanted to tell him off. What did he expect? Loyalty? For minimum wage?

I held it in, though. He didn't own the business. He just had to run it. And he was a fairly good guy.

“I'll help break in the new guy,” I said gently. “Including tonight, that gives you four days.”

“Okay.”

He nodded, but he still wouldn't look at me. I was an outcast. I had defiled the altar of the great god Work.

Back at my air-gun, I tried to appease the wrath of the god, but I doubt if he could stand to look at me, either.

The phone call and the sudden feeling of shock I had felt when I thought it might be about the man in the hospital started me thinking about him again.

Early Friday afternoon, I paid him another visit. Brode was standing beside the ward bed. His face was angry when he turned at my approach.

“Your friend here seems to think he's going to get all this attention, and then just say thank you and walk on out of here, and go about his business, and not even tell us his name.”

He glowered down at the man in the bed, sneering at him.

“He claims he don't remember his name, and nothing else, either. Especially he don't remember who gave him the workout.”

Brode made his own eyes round with wonder, adding in a low, mock-portentous voice: “Why, Brandon , do you know what I think? I think he thinks he's going to get us to think he's got amnesia, just like on television.” Brode laughed harshly.

I stood across the bed from him and watched Punching Bag.

All the plaster and bandages were off his face and head, now, except for one section that was still taped, high on the right side of his skull. The hair around it had been shaved for treatment, and to allow sticking space for the tapes that held the patch of gauze in place.

His face was wide, his forehead high, and his nose, miraculously, had not been broken through it all and was straight and strong-boned.

Generally, he appeared strong and well-built, wide across the cheekbones, with strong jaw muscles, bunched now, so that the lower part of his face appeared almost as wide and solid as it did up by the Indian-looking cheekbones.

His chin still showed wide red areas and might carry scars. The chin showed thrust, but that might simply have been foreshortening, because I was looking down at him, and saw his face from the lower part upward.

“You seem to have healed pretty well,” I said to him. “That night, it looked as if your face would never be much more than hamburger.”

His eyes continued staring straight upward, fixed on the ceiling, eyes like slate, bleak as a tundra.

Brode and I stood there, watching him. Neither of us said anything for awhile, until I said, “Oh, you're welcome.”

That got to him. His lips looked for a moment as if they might have wanted to grin, if they could remember how. His eyelids narrowed perceptibly. You might almost say it amounted to a hearty laugh, I suppose, considering what he'd been put through.

Rolling his head on the pillow, he looked up at me. When the movement brought the taped part of his skull into contact with the pillow, his eyes wavered for a moment. Turning his head back the other way a bit, he still kept his eyes on me as he said, “Thanks.”

His voice was deep, gravelly, husky with disuse. He hadn't been using it much lately, certainly not nearly enough to please Sergeant Brode.

Feeling somewhat ashamed for dragging the thanks out of him, I grinned and said quietly: “ Por nada .”

Outside the ward, I said goodbye to Brode, turned, and walked off. Brode's voice followed me quite a way along the corridor.

“Okay, son, this is the way it's gonna be with you,” Brode said angrily. “First, you're going into a detention ward. And when you're all healed, you're going into a cell. I'm going to see to it that you stay in it until we find out about you. And if you think I think your fingerprints aren't on file, somewhere, you sure must take me for a simple-minded son of a bitch…”

Distance kept me from hearing the rest of it.

I wondered what kind of record his fingerprints would turn up on Punching Bag.

The following Monday, I began working for Jack Harvey's detective agency. The jobs consisted of the usual crud: catching small-change thieves in big department stores, working usually in groups of three, one day operating against the help to catch the ones who were knocking down and short-changing both the customers and the store itself, and then when the three of us were spotted by the rest of the help, we filled in on the shoplifter detail.

A couple or three days of that were plenty, but I hung on.

When the deskman handing out assignments in Harvey 's bullpen gave me one of the shifts on a twenty-four-hour-a-day stakeout, I almost welcomed it. At least it let me catch up on my newspaper reading. On the third day of that, I noticed the item way in back of the local newspaper: Punching Bag had apparently left the hospital the night before, on his own. The story was by-lined by Chuck Macy, a local reporter I had met once or twice. It said the police expected to apprehend him shortly. (They usually did. And they usually did the apprehending, too.)

With Punching Bag, I didn't think they could miss. Nothing in his pockets, nowhere to go, wearing hospital pajamas, or half-pajamas. I gave him the rest of the day, if the cops hadn't already turned him up.

That's what I gave him until I recalled those eyes of his, and the wide set of his clamp of a mouth. Then I wasn't so sure.

Maybe he did have someplace to go.

After the morning my two quarts of milk and the two hero sandwiches had vanished from where I had left them in the sage bushes beside the dirt road, he had had the rest of that day and at least part of that night. He had used the time, and probably needed most of it, for traveling, because at the end of it, when they finally found him in that alley this side of Florian's, he was stripped of anything that might have identified him. And since it had been police trying to do the identifying, the stripping must have included labels in his clothes, laundry marks, everything.

I sat in the agency's car and watched the place I was being paid to watch, but I was thinking about that identification business. Nothing was right about it.

Okay, granted, he had somehow gotten across town. Brute energy and a will of iron might accomplish that: he could just keep himself crawling, or stumbling, or staggering along.

But for fine work? For scissoring labels off clothes, checking his own shirts and pants and shorts and T-shirt for laundry marks? That I couldn't see him doing, not in the shape he was in.

After my siege of the day was over and I had been relieved and signed out at the agency, I walked out along the northwest highway to look over this Florian's casino Brode had told me about.

Naturally, there were no sidewalks. I walked facing oncoming traffic with the falling sun on my left. Trucks and cars went whooshing by, shaking the world. I walked on gravel, on sand, on asphalt parking aprons fronting steel-and-glass hamburger stands and drive-in bank branches and dry cleaners and auto repair shops. I walked along gigantic parking areas longer than a jet-landing strip, damn near, which fronted shopping centers that seemed even bigger than their paved parking fields.

All the way out beside that highway, I was one of the only remaining breed of vanishing Americans: the walking American.

Striding along beside a busy highway has a curious effect. Cars flash past you. Gigantic trucks shake the ground, belching exhaust fumes, while you plod along beside the well-paved highway using anything there is to set foot on, stumbling into ditches when you can't avoid them, feeling the unyielding gravel through the soles of your shoes, the grit getting inside your shoes, having to stop and take them off to empty them, periodically.

The effect is inevitable: you realize how small a man on foot has become. You feel left out, unimportant. There's no place for you anymore in a country where distances to and from a store are too great to be walked, and therefore no sidewalk is required, since no one is likely to use it.

Yet, at the same time that you feel small and resentful, you also want to join them: you want to get a car of your own. Then you won't feel small and insignificant anymore. You'll have become one of them. Good old General Motors and Mrs. Motors and all his Little Brother Motors. Their rights of way were built for them with tax-payer dollars, free and clear. They had it better than the railroads, back in the days of their thievery.

Far ahead, I saw a sign: Florian's.

It took me a long time to reach the casino, after I first saw the distant sign.

I passed a series of motels, half a dozen used car lots, all interspersed among the usual automobile-row sprinkling of small stores and shops that sold or fixed tires, balanced and aligned wheels, replaced mufflers, put in seat-covers, repaired and installed radios, did body and fender work, automatic transmissions resealed, valve and ring jobs, ‘ from only this little on some makes of car' ( to God knows how much on the make of car you've got).

It didn't hit me until the big sign at Florian's was only about an eighth of a mile ahead. Punching Bag had come all this distance on foot, in the shape he was in!

It stopped me in my tracks. Turning, I looked back the distance I had come so far, and I shook my head. He couldn't have moved from where they had dumped him, either, but he damn well must have.

I shrugged. From here on, I would predicate this on the possible. Forget about how much he couldn't have done something. Just try to figure out how had he actually made the journey.

There at the roadside was a row of stores, a block-long string of small shops located in one long brick one-story building. A dirt driveway ran back from the highway beside the end shop, between it and the side loading-yard of a lumber company I had just walked past. Beyond the rear corner of the store I could see a wooden shack of some kind, and nothing beyond that but the sage flats of the desert stretching away for miles.

That had probably been Punching Bag's route, through the sage brush.

Off to the west, the sun hung just above the jagged line of a far-off range of hills. As I watched it drop out of sight, suddenly Florian's nearby sign was lighted. It startled me, the sudden appearance of that crazy chiaroscuro of reds and yellows and greens and blues. But in the middle of it all, no matter what the weird effect of the mixture of all those different colors, out of the moving moil of brilliance you could always read FLORIAN'S.

Okay, Punching Bag had been found by the cops near Florian's. From out in the desert, he could have used that sign of theirs as a mark to head for: it stood higher than all other lights along this stretch of highway.

Which left two questions. How did he cross the Strip, back in town? And where was he finally found?

The Strip part I could forget. He might have staggered right across it at any time, and happened not to get hit by any cars while he crossed. However he had managed it, somehow he had worked his way west of the old town back there, and crossed the desert almost as far as the big casino just ahead.

But what was he trying to reach? Florian's itself?

I walked on along the row of stores contained by the brown brick building. At its northern end, another dirt driveway emerged from behind the store at that end, and again there was a wooden shack barely visible at the back. That could be an alley behind the row of stores. Maybe that was where Punching Bag finally showed up again, in that alley.

Going on, I passed El Rancho Motel until its property ended and a kind of wasteland began. A stretch of desert had been preserved, perhaps to separate the casino from the last cheap motel that was its nearest neighbor. Rather than throwing money away putting in some kind of lawn to do the separating, Florian's owners had used the plants of the desert to create a primitive garden of sorts, if you liked cactus plants and rocks and sage bushes instead of beds of begonias and roses in your gardens.

Close to the roadside, this wasteland had big slabs of limestone, roughly hewn, standing hip-high, buried in the desert deeply enough to keep anyone but the very drunk and unusually determined from accidentally stumbling past them and being pierced in a dozen places by cactus spines.

Beyond the wasteland, the casino itself was large and long, built horizontally. It looked as if the landing decks of two modern aircraft carriers had been laid one atop the other.

Walking on, I could see ahead a wide break in the median, out in the middle of the road. That was to allow customers from the city to be able to turn across the southbound lanes and enter the casino grounds. A traffic light network facilitated matters. Without those traffic lights, Florian's would have been dead.

Idly, I wondered how many people at the Hall of Justice back in town had profited from getting those traffic lights installed, giving easy access to the new casino.

When I reached the break in the median, I stood there gawking along the three-lane-wide entrance to the place.

It looked like a front entrance comparable to some of the better spots on the Cote d'Azur , but newer, shinier, and a lot more expensive.

A good deal of money had gone into Florian's. A lot of money was still going in, from the look of some of the cars driving past me.

Still, that's what it was there for: it was a casino. It was there to make money, anybody's money. Which meant snobbery was out. Maybe you needed your Dun & Bradstreet rating checked out to use the rest of Florian's: the hotel, the lounge. But anyone could drop half a week's salary in the casino, or half an hour's salary, too. That's what it was there for.

For a moment, I wondered whether I should go in and drop some of my salary.

No, plenty of time for that. I'd been too close to being broke for too long to begin tossing it around. The memory of three months of grind in the aluminum storms and screen shop where I had worked was too recent to be easily forgotten.

Turning, I started back the way I'd come.

I had almost reached the end of the wasteland where El Rancho Motel's property began when I caught a glimpse of Jack Harvey at the wheel of an electric blue convertible coming out from the city.

The sleek blue job went whistling by on the far side of the grassy median. The traffic light a block to the north was in his favor, so Jack had no wait. He made his left across the two lanes on this side of the highway, and disappeared into the entranceway to Florian's palace of delights, and disillusions.

I turned and went on in the last of the sunset light away in the west, but I stopped in front of the entrance to El Rancho Motel.

Its sign said Vacancy. Once, it had been a working neon sign, but most of its tubes were gone, now, and the few remaining ones were broken.

A chill wind blew in from the desert. It was going to be dark soon.

The traffic hissed past behind me, and the wind sighed from the other direction.

Peering into the motel court, I saw only an old gray Chevy sedan parked in front of the rear unit in the far northwest corner. Nothing else was visible in there, nothing moved. Only two of the units had lights on, this early in the evening. The setting sun threw roof shadows most of the way across to the half-row of units with their backs facing the side of the highway to the left of the entrance leading into the U-shaped courtyard. There was a light in the office, on the near-right corner of the place, but I could see no one inside.

Beyond the office and the intervening units, the solitary Chevy parked in the far right corner had its left rear fender smashed in smoothly, leaving a deep depression just forward of the taillights, but not far enough forward to affect the left rear wheel in any way. The depression had no jagged edges. It was the sort of car I was looking for: harmlessly beat up where it didn't matter. It probably ran like the workhorses some of those old Chevrolets had been.

I would have to make up my mind and get myself a car, soon. All the walking I was doing lately was wearing me out.

Walking partway through the entrance driveway, I peered into the office. I could just see a man's head above the near end of the counter in there. He appeared to be fast asleep sitting in a desk chair of some kind.

Rather than returning along the highway, I turned and rounded the outside corner of the office and strolled along the motel's north wall, away from the road.

Out near the roadside, the barren stretch was thickly choked with cactus and stunted mesquite trees slightly larger than a garden's hedge, but farther in, the tangle suddenly thinned and low sagebrush began again.

Across the stretch of wasteland, Florian's southern façade bulked its two levels against the darkening night sky. From my vantage point, I could appreciate even more the sheer size of the place. The side I could see was maybe half as long as the front part facing the highway, which made it roughly as big as many a municipal airport's terminal building.

Near the western corner of the top deck, I saw what looked like a man leaning on the parapet. Stopping where I stood, I watched him. Sure enough, outlined against the pale sunset sky, a man leaned there, smoking and enjoying the evening air.

“Good for him,” I thought, after watching him a moment, before starting on.

At the far corner of El Rancho Motel, I angled a hundred paces farther out into the desert, where I got a good look at what was farther along, behind the motel. A row of shacks ran southward facing the rear of the row of stores in the single brick building.

That might be the alley where they'd found Punching Bag.

Keeping a hundred feet away from the backs of the row of shacks, I crunched along, trying to see if there were any spaces between any of the shacks big enough to warrant being called alleys, but nothing seemed to qualify. Fences of various kinds rimmed the property each shack stood on. Any alley would have to be the space between the fronts of the block-long row of shacks and the back of the equally long brick building containing all those little shops facing onto the highway.

At the southern end of the row of shanties, I turned in between the lumber yard's loading area and the end shack.

My shoes had picked up some desert sand. When I reached the alley, I couldn't take the discomfort any longer, so I vaulted up and sat on the edge of the loading platform to empty my shoes. When I finished retying the laces, I sat there a moment, staring across the dirt driveway up along the alley. It was wide enough to take a car, if the driver went slow enough and drove carefully. Otherwise, the car might take down some of the rickety picket fences that were the front yard bastions of many of the shacks.

In a town like this, Mexicans and Indians would live in shacks like those.

Instead of following the driveway back out to the highway, I hopped down from the edge of the loading yard and headed across it toward the alley.

Might as well give it a close look while I was all the way out here.

Crossing to the driveway, I was about to enter the alley when a car turned off the highway and entered the driveway. Its headlights caught me in their beams for a moment. It approached swiftly.

Hurrying across, I got into the alley out of the headlights, but I was less than five paces along when the car turned into the alley behind me, and I was again caught in its headlights.

Stepping over to my right by the brick rear wall of the store-building, I waited to give the car passing room.

Across the alley, beyond a lopsided picket fence, a little old man with a seamed Indian face sat on a porch, smoking a big pipe.

The car swept up beside me and stopped.

A wide-faced man in the passenger seat peered up at me.

“What are you doing back here?” he asked.

I stared down at his big face and at his right arm draped over the top of the door. His face was in shadow. His right hand and wrist hung down out of sight, inside the car door.

I didn't have to be told what he was. The kindest label is Security. I had seen too many of them. Known too many of them. Hell, been too many of them.

“You!” he said sharply. “I'm talking to you. What's your business back here?”

“Just walking.”

“Walk someplace else. Turn around and go back out of here the way you came. You'll find all the walking you want out by the highway.”

“You think that's a good place to walk?”

“The best, brother, the best. Get going.”

“If it's that good, why don't you try taking a walk out there yourself?”

His eyes glinted in his wide calm face. He sighed, and his thick lips smiled. Shaking his head from side to side, never taking his eyes off my face, he gently murmured: “Okay, brother, you want it that way, you got it that way.”

“Hold it, Fats,” the man at the wheel said quietly.

Fats kept staring up at me, but when he spoke next, he was talking over his shoulder to the man sitting beside him.

“Hold it, hell, Jeff. This bastard's got no business back here. This is all private property.”

“That's what I mean,” Jeff said. “He wants to mosey around back here, all we do is notify the local law. They can mop him out.”

“No,” Fats said. “I don't like his face. I'll do the mopping myself…”

“Fats!” Jeff interrupted, “you been told before. You throw your weight around when you don't got to. They don't like that…”

“Hell with what they don't like,” Fats snarled. “Put a button on it, Jeff. I mean that. You!” he said to me. “On your way, fast. And now. I tell you this only once. Then I get out of this car and you'll…”

Leaning down, I squinted past Fats at the man behind the wheel. He had a thin face with a mouth like a badly healed knife-scar.

“You say this is all private property?” I asked him, talking past Fats.

Jeff nodded.

The semi-automatic in Fats' right hand came into sight. His voice was thick as he whipped the gun around to bring it to bear on me.

“Brother, you do your talking to me, not him…”

My left hand closed over the top of his forearm. A moment later, my right completed the clamp. Both hands pulled Fats's arm up and out the open car window.

Stepping back along the side of the car, I hauled his arm right along, gun and all. His left hand was doing some fumbling inside the door, trying to get it open, but the way I had hold of him by then, he'd have to tear his right arm out of its shoulder socket to get that door open.

The top of his shoulder crunched up into the upper rear angle of the window-opening. That left his head inside, and his arm and most of his shoulder pinned outside, with his gun hand held against the edge of the car's roof.

Through the closed window of the rear door on my side, I could see Fats's face twist suddenly, lose its expression of anger, and take on a look of pain.

I socked the finishing touch to him then, hard and quickly. Both my hands slid along his forearm to his wrist, which I twisted until I had his big handgun pointed up at the sky. I didn't want any stray shots going off and sending bullets through the thin walls of three or four of those shanties across the alley, and maybe through some of their occupants, too. They might be as good as dead already, but maybe they didn't know it. I didn't want some slob like Fats breaking the news to them the hard way.

Once I had the muzzle of the gun pointed the way I wanted, all I had to do was twist his wrist a bit more, the way you'd wring out a wet rag.

It took only a second, then he gave.

“Aaaah!” grated out of his mouth.

Slumping, he quit struggling to free his arm.

When his hand let loose of the gun, I caught it before it hit the roof of the sedan and turned him loose.

Going around behind the car, I pulled from the sling under my left arm the revolver the agency had signed out to me, earlier that day. When I came up on the driver's side, I had it cocked, but I held it down by my side, out of sight, against my leg.

“Here,” I told Jeff, handing him the big semi-automatic I had just taken away from Fats. “Better give your friend some more lessons in how to be tough. He could use them.”

Jeff didn't say anything, but in the night gloom I thought I caught a glimpse of a wry grimace twisting his face.

“Is there a way out of this alley?” I asked Jeff. “I mean, up ahead, the way this car's pointed?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why don't you drive on up to it?” I suggested. “Right now I don't want to be in those headlights of yours.”

Jeff chuckled.

Stepping back, I watched the big car move carefully along the narrow passageway between the flimsy front-yard fences and the rear brick wall of the building holding the string of stores.

Turning, I walked back to my end of the alley, where I turned and watched until the car reached the other end, where it turned right, out of sight toward the highway.

Walking quickly up the dirt drive to the front of the store at that end, I peered carefully around the corner just in time to see their sedan edge out into the stream of traffic and head southward past me, toward the Strip, whose distant glow was already filling the sky off to the southeast.

I lost sight of their car a moment after it entered the swift-flowing stream of traffic, but I went on standing there, remaining in shadows, there at the corner.

When they hadn't returned in ten minutes, I went back to the alley and walked the length of it.

The old man was still sitting on his low-roofed porch. I could see the faint glow of his pipe.

No one else was visible along the alley. At the other end, I turned right and went back out to the highway, where I walked along beside it toward the distant Strip until a cab slowed questioningly.

Signaling him, I got in.

“Just to where I can catch a bus,” I told him.

His shoulders told me what he thought of me. I couldn't think of any way I could do the same to him, so I didn't bother trying.

Three

Next day, the assignment desk sent me out on the stakeout job again, but I was only on it an hour or so when another operative relieved me.

“They've got another assignment for you.”

He took my place in the car. Fifteen minutes later, I was getting into another car with another, younger gumshoe.

“Where we headed?” I asked him. “They tell you?”

“Out to that new place, Florian's. The big boss will tell us what to do. He's out there himself.”

Okay, Florian's was just another job. I had seen Jack Harvey…the big boss…out at Florian's the night before. Drumming up business, presumably.

For a moment, I found myself wondering if I could get my job back, at the aluminum storm and screen shop. Then I grinned at myself. If I needed to, it was there, waiting. Or another job just like it. I still didn't have enough scratch stashed even to rent myself a desk and start out on my own again.

My co-worker had obviously been out at Florian's before. He didn't stop at the front entrance, but gave a high sign to the uniformed parking guard and drove past him, around to a good-sized parking area, where he got a ticket from another uniformed man and headed over to a side entrance.

Inside, we went up a short flight of carpeted stairs. A gray corridor took us a short distance toward the front of the building, where another door let us into the rear end of the entrance lobby.

Five or six showgirls in brief costumes swept past us. All those long legs were dazzling. A couple of them giggled at the two of us standing there gawking at them, as they went by. The last one, a tiny thing, gave me a big smile just before they all disappeared through a doorway behind the lounge.

My guide grinned at me.

“Looks like you've got a little friend, there,” he observed.

“I couldn't afford to buy breakfast for her.”

“There's Mr. Harvey,” he said, pointing.

We strolled toward Jack Harvey, who excused himself to the man he was talking to and came to meet us.

“Good. Fast work, boys. Tom, you've been here before. Go around to chuck-a-luck. Tell Angelo you're here to relieve for awhile. He knows about it.”

Tom nodded and went off, moving silently on the deep carpet.

Jack grinned at me.

“How do you like the layout here, Jim? Wish I had points in this place.”

“You'd likely need a paid-up plot in a cemetery, to go along with it.”

He glanced at me oddly, then looked quickly away, with a shrug.

“Oh, these boys aren't so bad,” he said. “Anyway, the reason you're out here is to relieve some of their regular men. There's a big shipment of cash, coming or going, I'm not sure which. They need their regular guys to handle it, so that leaves a personnel gap or two to fill. Come on.”

I followed him up four steps, into and through a glass-walled cocktail lounge, which overlooked the big front room of the casino.

Harvey nodded toward a small elevator, just beyond the bar and to the left.

“Take that to the third floor. Tell them you want Mr. Wyatt's office.”

I got into the elevator with the young uniformed guy who ran it. Harvey stayed out of the elevator and told the operator: “He's one of my men.”

The elevator operator flashed teeth in a smile, and ran me up to the third floor.

“To your left, sir.”

The carpet up here was even thicker than the one in the casino downstairs. I bounced along on it until a man in a dazzling sport jacket seemed to step right out of the corridor wall in front of me.

“Mr. Wyatt's office,” I told him. “I'm from the Harvey agency.”

“That's right,” he smiled.

He was as big as I was and probably in better shape. His smile was certainly a lot nicer than mine ever was.

He held his hands out, palms up, flipping his fingers upward.

“Just lift your arms a little,” he said genially.

For a moment, I hovered there. Then I thought, Hell, it was Harvey 's gig. His other men went through this sort of routine as a matter of course, every time they were sent out here to help.

I held my arms well out from my sides. A moment later, the Agency gun was locked in a drawer in a built-in desk at the back of a shallow niche in the corridor wall. The desk could have been genuine fake Chippendale.

Smiles went over the rest of me as if he still expected to find other weaponry. When he didn't, he handed me a little ticket.

“For your hardware,” he explained. “When you're leaving.”

“I even get a hatcheck,” I laughed. “And without leaving a hat.”

“That's right,” he said, still smiling. “Down this corridor straight ahead to the end, then turn right. Mr. Wyatt's office is the second door on your left.”

I knocked on the appropriate door. A moment later, I found myself standing in an outer office, facing a plate-glass barrier beyond which sat a blonde receptionist whose face cost more to cover each day than my whole body cost in a year.

“Oh, yes, the relief man,” she said. “You stay out there. Sit or stand, whichever suits you, except when someone comes in or out. Then you stand.”

“That's all?”

“That's all. I'll handle any questions. If I'm gone and someone comes in, just ask them to wait.”

I started my day's work seated in an easy chair, over near the wall, where I could just glimpse the blonde's forehead, whenever she leaned forward a bit.

Time passed. Not much time. My glance strayed over toward the plate-glass wall. A round-faced man was standing beyond it, watching me. His mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear a thing he said. I realized that the plate-glass was sound proof. The blonde could talk through it when she wanted to by flipping a switch. I remembered her voice had sounded slightly odd, earlier.

The round-faced man noticed me watching him watching me. He said something to the girl. Her voice came out to me: “This is Mr. Wyatt…”

His voice broke in on hers.

“You're from Jack Harvey's Agency?”

I rose and went over.

“Yes.”

He stared at me through the glass. He may have noticed there was no Sir after the yes I had given him.

After a moment of using those dark muddy eyes of his on me, he spoke again.

“What's your name?”

I told him.

“You know what you're here to do?”

“Your secretary told me.”

“Fine.”

The sound went off. He turned half away and his lips began speaking soundlessly again to the girl.

Turning, I went back and sat down. Lighting a cigarette, I glanced over toward the plate-glass again. Wyatt's eyes slid away from me. A moment later, all of him slid soundlessly out of sight into the inner office.

I wondered if the soundproof glass was bulletproof, too. It probably was. Why be half safe?

Sometime afterward, two men came in.

I stood up.

The slimmer of the two, a young man with a carefully tended pencil mustache, gave me a quick glance and ignored me from then on. The older man didn't look in my direction, simply went on with what he had been saying.

“How long has she been like that, down there?”

His voice was crisp and clear, but he sounded weary. He looked tired around the eyes, tired all through.

Mustache shrugged.

“Maybe half yesterday and all last night.”

“Has she lost much, Ted?”

Ted made a face.

“Brock, you know the way Jan can be. She has so much credit on tap, she could probably buy this place, if she wanted to.”

Over the sound system, the blonde's voice materialized.

“Good morning, Mr. Townsend. Hello, Mr. Fenton.”

The older man smiled, a nice smile. You almost didn't notice how much effort it took for him to bring it up.

“Hello, there. If I may see Mr. Wyatt…”

“Of course, sir. Please have a seat. I'll tell Mr. Wyatt you're here.”

Ted went on speaking in his confidential tone.

“Brock, I don't want to go near her when she's like that. You know what she thinks of me…”

For the first time, Brock Townsend glanced in my direction. His mouth tightened. Turning away slightly, he muttered something to Fenton.

“He just works here,” Ted said, his voice lower now.

“All the same, I don't like her name being…”

The blonde's voice broke in.

“Will you come in, gentlemen? Mr. Wyatt will see you now.”

The door in the plate-glass wall clicked and swung inward. After the two men went through it, the door swung shut, soundlessly. I watched them pass the receptionist's desk and disappear.

For a time, it was quiet again, and I could sit down. But not for as long as I would have liked.

The outside corridor door opened again. A young woman in an evening gown, with a length of mink thrown casually over one shoulder, came through the doorway and leaned against the wall beside it. Beyond her for a moment, I glimpsed the smiling face of the sport-jacket type who had frisked me on my way in. He winked at the receptionist, glanced blankly at me, shut the door behind the woman, and was gone.

I stood up.

The newcomer leaned against the wall with her eyes closed. One end of her mink dragged on the floor.

Her hair was light brown, and, although she wasn't a raving beauty, she had a strong pretty-looking face, even drawn and tired-looking, as it appeared right then.

“I don't understand,” she murmured to no one, without opening her eyes. “A credit check? On me?”

Her head was tilted back against the wall. Her eyes remained shut while she thought about it.

Presently the voice of the receptionist brought her eyes open.

“Won't you come in, Miss Thornton?”

After blinking at the receptionist behind the thick glass for a moment, she pushed herself away from the wall.

“Oh, yes, of course.”

The mink slipped from her shoulder and settled soundlessly on the floor around her feet.

Stopping, she stared down at it for a moment, then her gaze wandered around the outer office. She seemed startled to see me standing there, off to one side.

Going over, I picked up the fur. She was either too drunk or too tired after her night at the tables to be able to pick it up herself, without possibly landing on her face on the floor beside the mink.

I held it out to her.

“I didn't see you standing there,” she said. “You surprised me.”

I handed her the mink. She draped it over her arm, doubled.

The door in the Plexiglas wall opened with its click. She made no move toward it, but stood looking at me with a curiously hard look about her eyes. After a moment, she shook her head.

“You're not very beautiful, are you?” she asked.

I laughed.

“Not very.”

“Miss Thornton?” the receptionist's voice said tentatively.

The automatic door stood wide open, waiting for her.

Laughing softly, breathily, she turned and went through it.

I went back to my sofa-sitting.

Time passed. No one else came or went. Once I saw the one with the mustache, Ted Fenton, talking to Wyatt beyond the glass barrier wall. He glanced in my direction once or twice, but I didn't stare at him. I stared straight ahead at the blank wall opposite where I sat.

Eventually, the receptionist's voice came through the speaker.

“Mr. Brandon? You can go now. Report to Mr. Harvey downstairs.”

In the corridor, I retrieved my Agency gun from the smiler.

“Do you want the ticket back?” I asked him.

“Not important,” he said. Even when he wasn't smiling, he looked as if he were.

“I thought if I could keep it, maybe I could have it stuffed.”

Handing the ticket over, I went down in the elevator, found Jack Harvey bucking a blackjack game. He must have been doing all right, because he told me: “Knock off for the day, Jim. I'll clock you out, back at the Agency.”

“I can go back on the stakeout job,” I suggested. “It isn't even noon yet.”

“Forget it,” he said cheerfully. “Take the afternoon off. Here, want some chips? Try your luck.”

I grinned and shook my head.

“I have no luck. Thanks for the time off, though.”

I left Florian's by the front entrance and strolled down to the highway.

So I had the afternoon off and no way of getting back to town. I started slogging it.

A gila monster slipped sluggishly off a rock beside the road. He disappeared with a swift slither into the patch of tangled shrub and cactus and sage between Florian's and El Rancho Motel.

The motel courtyard was as deserted as ever. Dust swirled with the wind in the restricted space. Not even the old gray Chevy sedan with the crumpled-in left rear fender stood parked in the far corner of the U-shaped courtyard.

That reminded me of my hunt for a car of some kind. Automobile Row was not far ahead. When I reached it, I began a little shopping.

In the third yard I canvassed, I found something that would do: ninety-five dollars for a twelve-year-old Ford sedan. It was light and trim, and rotten with rust here and there, where you could see it. Ignoring the unsightly rust, I went over the heap carefully, especially under the hood and back beneath the transmission.

The motor sounded like a tough little bugger, good for perhaps twenty or thirty thousand more miles. The rust only looked bad, but it didn't slow down the machinery any.

I put something down on it. They said they'd handle the registration and plates. I could pick it up later that afternoon.

I walked on into town.

Four

After I ate lunch, I caught the bus along the Strip. A quarter mile short of the end of the line, I got off and started up my street. The houses in there cut the impact of the wind some. Up high, cottonwoods thrashed in the wind.

After the pavement ended, I walked on along the dirt path in the lea of the adobe wall fronting the street to where Sergeant Brode sat waiting in an unmarked car beside another plainclothes detective.

As I came strolling up, Brode got out, grinning, but his eyes didn't grin along with his mouth.

“That's some wind you got out here,” he observed.

For a moment, I studied him and his partner curiously, until I figured out why they were there.

“Oh, I see.”

“You see something?”

“Why don't you both come in and visit awhile? I think there's a little Irish sloshing around in the bottom of a bottle, somewhere upstairs.”

“This is my partner, Callahan,” Brode said, tilting his head toward the one in the car. “He might like some of that Irish, except we're on duty. Regulations say…”

Nodding to Callahan as he climbed out from behind the wheel, I led the way to my corner door, beyond where they were parked, and on inside and upstairs.

Entering my rooms at the top of the landing, Brode took off his hat, again saying: “That is quite a wind.”

He wasn't just talking to make conversation. He was really impressed.

“You don't know how rough a wind like that is,” he elaborated, “until you get indoors, and you're out of it. Then you kind of miss it.”

“Like a hammer on the head,” Callahan put in.

“Yeah, kinda,” Brode agreed, absently. Idly, he poked around the room and peered into the john, opened the door of the closet the rest of the way it wasn't already slightly open, and studied the clothes that were hanging and dumped in there. “This all the closet space you've got?”

“That's it,” I said. “You forgot to look under the bed.”

Now his grin was real. He shrugged.

“Habit.”

“I gather you can't find Punching Bag.” I said it instead of asking it.

“Punching Bag? Oh, yeah. We call him Assault, on account of he was assaulted.”

“Assault was a racehorse.”

“Hell, I'll just call the bastard Pain-in-the-ass until we get our mitts on him again. Then we can start calling him mud.”

“He's sure making us work like a horse,” Callahan interjected solemnly.

Brode and I both looked at him, and when there was nothing more from him, I turned back to Brode again.

“Nothing from Washington ? No record from his prints?”

Brode shook his head.

“Not yet. They'll have something on him, I'm sure of it. He was too quiet. There's too much metal in that lad, even if he was as weak as a kitten. I don't like that much iron in a guy like him. And I don't like finding out you work for Jack Harvey as one of his private dicks. You didn't tell me you had a license.”

“You didn't ask. Anyway, what's the beef with Harvey ? He's still this side of the line, isn't he?”

“Just barely, like most private dicks. What I don't like is you kidding me along into thinking you're just a hard-working citizen helping a stranger who got mugged. Now I find you're a gumshoe. And you're mixed up with that crowd out at Florian's.”

“You work fast, finding out all that about me. What's the matter with Florian's?

“Florian's is just another one of those places where the dough is made too easy and slick to suit me.”

“You're living in the wrong state,” I pointed out. “So I had an assignment out there this morning, working for Harvey's Agency. I put in a few hours of work. That's all Florian's is to me.”

Brode's eyes were level, cold, and unfriendly on me, all of a sudden.

“That's where Assault seemed to be headed when he was picked up.”

“Sergeant,” I said slowly, “if Assault wanted to get to Florian's, he would have gotten all the way there. He crawled or stumbled what? three, four miles from this southeast end of town, all the way out there to the northwest, and you want me to believe he finally passed out?”

When he made no reply, I shook my head.

“No. Like you said, there's too much iron in him. He had something to do. He did it. Then he passed out.”

Silence filled the room like an invisible gas. They both just stared at me.

Finally, Brode spoke.

“I hope to God you're straight, Brandon . If I find out you aren't, I'll…”

I waved that aside impatiently.

“What about the clothes you found him wearing? That bothers me. There should've been some laundry marks, something your forensics people could pick up to localize him, pin him down, find out about his neighborhood. We've all got a neighborhood, you know…”

Brode glanced archly over at Callahan.

“He's sure enough a detective, all right.”

Callahan grinned.

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked, irritated.

“All the clothes he wore were brand new,” Brode said. “Khaki shirt, sun-tan slacks, cheap two-buck genuine Indian moccasins manufactured in Hoboken , New Jersey .”

“He wasn't wearing any of that when he was dumped out there in the brush,” I objected.

“That's right,” Brode admitted. “Apparently he bought them so that's what he'd be wearing when he was found. No underwear, no jacket, just a shirt, pants, and moccasins. Nothing at all in the pockets.”

“Did you find where he bought them?”

Brode nodded. “Of course. No lead from there, though. A little Army-Navy surplus shop so close to wino row you couldn't tell the difference, even by the smell. The proprietor of the store is used to dealing with all kinds of slobs, in all gradients of busted-up condition. Our boy was just a bit more banged-up than usual. The storekeeper had himself a quick cash sale and thought no more about it…until we found him, and he identified the clothes.”

Impatiently, Brode stopped talking and went over to look out the window at my waist-high, adobe walled terrace-for-one. Turning back, he went on.

“I tell you true, Brandon ,” he growled. “I don't like what I smell about that guy. I think he's got it in his head there's people he's going to see. I've had that feeling about him all along, since I first laid eyes on him in the hospital. Now he blows out of there, and I still have that same feeling, worse than ever.”

“Well, I'm not in on it,” I assured him “I don't know as much about that guy as you do.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll settle for that. For now. But don't hold out on me. You're one of the few people who could recognize him. If you catch a glimpse of him, get in touch with me, and quick.”

I nodded.

After glowering at me a moment, Brode turned and went out onto the landing and down the stairs to the street door. Callahan didn't look at me, simply followed Brode out, leaving the door of my room wide open behind him.

Standing on the landing, I made sure they shut the outside door, and then I went back inside again.

The closet door had swung open a bit. I pushed it shut absently, but a moment later it swung back out again a few inches. The catch didn't catch right.

For awhile, I stood by the window, staring over the edge of the adobe wall of my narrow terrace at the sea of sage bushes stretching away eastward to the edge of the world.

In the closet, I dug out my .38 Police Special and gave it a cleaning. It hefted better than the gun the Agency signed out to me, whenever the job of the day required one. Or maybe I was just used to this one.

After laying a thin film of oil back on the weapon, I wrapped it in cloth and gave the shoulder-holster a going-over with linseed oil until the leather was pliable again.

Stuffing the handgun, cloth and all, into the holster, I sat holding it in my lap, staring down at it.

It took me awhile to figure out where I could keep it so it was out of sight but easy and quick to get at.

A nail stuck out a little from the back of the bureau, over against the wall. I had to keep hammering it in, but it kept working its way back out, although probably I didn't do it often enough. It was kind of like the closet door would never stay shut. I'm not much of a householder, when the furniture isn't mine…and it was never mine.

Shifting the bureau away from the wall a bit, I felt for the protruding nail. Still there. Hanging the gun-heavy shoulder sling on the nail, I waited to see if it would take the weight. When it did, I worked the bureau back in, closer to the wall again, until there was just enough space left between the back of the bureau and the wall for my hand to reach in there.

When all that was taken care of, I got a cigarette going, wondering why I was going to all the trouble with the gun.

Maybe I knew why, or sensed why, even then.

* * *

There were no more stands at Florian's, but the grubby business of nosing into other people's shabby lives continued. I even picked up an occasional job on my own. The Agency didn't like that sort of thing, but the hell with them. I was with Jack Harvey's outfit only until I raised enough of a stake to go back into business for myself. I owed them nothing but time, like any other job. Employers can never see it that way. They think they buy everything you had and were, with their weekly paycheck, but all anyone ever bought from me was time.

Looking back, I suppose I was just waiting, doing my stints in stores or alleys or behind the wheels of parked cars or inside stuffy little apartments late at night, waiting for two people to begin making out, so the husband or the wife of one of them could break in on them and heave both into court so the divorce wouldn't involve any kind of split of property, or not so much of a split.

Maybe I wasn't exactly waiting, but I had that expectant feeling. I'd had it ever since the night I found Assault tumbled beside the dirt road, out there in the sage flats, the cuts on his face already caked with dried blood, the ones on his body seeping patches of blood through his T-shirt to his outside shirt.

The feeling was half of dread, half of expectation, of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Almost a week passed after Brode's visit. Sometimes I would call Jack Harvey's Agency to check myself out after a day's work. Sometimes I'd stop at the office downtown. If I didn't need their weapon for the following day's assignment, I'd turn it in. The day I made the final payment on the car, I left the Agency gun with the dispatcher, snagged someone's newspaper and headed home.

It was still daylight, and still plenty hot. The showplaces along the Strip flipped by on either side as I drove the Ford down the length of it. Half a mile short of my turnoff, I heard sirens, decided I couldn't make my street before they came up behind me, and pulled over to the side of the roadway.

It turned out to be the fire chief's car shooting past.

Far ahead, out in the desert to the south, there was a gray column of smoke spiraling into the sky.

It was starting early. Brushfire season usually waited until late July or early August.

Traffic on the Strip started up again.

I made the turn into my street near the southwestern end of the Strip, before it starts its swing to due west. I stopped halfway along the block to get a look through a clear space between two of the houses on the south side of the street.

The smoke down there was still pretty much the same.

Driving on to the near end of the adobe-walled building where I roomed, I parked and went in the front way to pay the landlord my week's rent. When I came back out, the Ford was still idling. At first, she had done some stalling, but a little fiddling, and a fractional turn on the screw that fed idling gas, and the problem was solved.

I had already done some work on the rust patches that showed, painting them over with red lead, then over that with regular paint. I did that so I could use my own car on the job, and make extra money for the car, too. But you can't tail anyone in a car that has too many distinguishing features, like scabs of rust as big as your fist or as long as a chorus cutie's legs. Or even as short as the legs of that tiny little knockout who'd given me the angel-smile that time.

When I got back into the Ford and drove the length of the adobe wall to my end of the old place, the sun was half out of sight.

I didn't bother turning the car around, just parked in front of my corner entrance and got out. After hooking the car keys under the dashboard for secrecy and convenience, I slammed the door shut, and only then noticed a dark green sedan backed into the sage, beyond the end of the dirt part of the street. Even with some lingering sunlight, I almost missed spotting it, standing in the shadow of a little willow that grew in the yard of the last house across the street.

Making sure I didn't do any staring, I turned and went inside, closing and locking the street door behind me, thinking: As if this door and its ten-penny lock are going to stop anyone from coming in here if they want to.

I took the steps two at a time.

This had to be one of the nights the Agency wanted their goddamn cap pistol turned in!

When I opened the door of my room, I thought I had it made. I even relaxed for a moment. Perhaps that wasn't too bad a move, although I made it without knowing it was a move.

After making certain the door was locked behind me, I started across the room to get the .38 from where it hung from the nail behind the bureau. Then I felt it, and stopped moving.

I stiffened. I wanted to keep moving and try to reach the gun, but I made myself move easily, no special rush, trying to figure out what was wrong. And what I had sensed, I now saw: halfway out of the closet, Jeff stood there with a little semi-automatic in his hand. The thing seemed to have an enormous muzzle at its business end.

Jeff had been savvy enough to let the closet door do whatever it usually did. It had swung open a couple of inches. Since it was usually like that, I hadn't noticed.

“Relax, Brandon ,” Jeff said quietly.

I nodded and stood there.

“I'm relaxed.”

“Somebody wants to see you.”

“Of course somebody wants to see me.”

“Smiles is coming up. Move away from that door. Leave enough room for him to get in here.”

Footsteps climbed the stairs. Easing off to one side of the door, I told Jeff: “I'm not packing. The Agency had me turn in their gun at the end of the day.”

“We'll check anyway.”

“Jeff, would I lie to you?” I asked, pained. “After all we've been through together?”

Jeff's scar-stitch of a mouth wrinkled a bit. It might have been a very small smile.

“We'll check anyway,” he said again.

The steps reached the landing, and the doorknob rattled.

“Jeff?” a voice called.

“One sec,” Jeff replied. To me: “Unlock it, then move away from it again.”

Opening the door, I got out of the way.

The big hard-as-nails-looking young man who had relieved me of the Agency's pistol out at Florian's stepped into the room on light feet, closing the door soundlessly behind him. Smiles. And sure enough, he was grinning.

“Frisk him,” Jeff said.

“Here we go again,” I said, lifting my arms a little out from both sides.

Smiles laughed. He went over me with practiced thoroughness.

“Clean.”

“Let's shove,” Jeff said. “You first, Smiles. Then you, Brandon. Then me.”

And that's the way we went: Smiles, then myself, then Jeff, down the stairs, out into the early evening dusk, the air still hot and soft, hardly any wind, then across the dirt road, and into their big car. In the front seat, Smiles and myself. Behind us, Jeff.

You could barely hear the motor, but I could feel the smooth surge of power under all that velvet. Even on the dirt stretch, before we reached the paved part of my street, we rode smoothly.

Peering past Smiles' profile behind the wheel, I could see the far-off blossom of flame out in the desert to the south.

“Like that fire, do you?” Smiles grinned.

I shrugged.

“It's a little early in the season for brushfires.”

Smiles gave a short laugh.

“Brushfires.”

In back, Jeff growled: “Smiles, cut the talk.”

Smiles still looked as if he was almost grinning, but I could see his jaw muscles tighten.

He stopped at the Strip for traffic. We waited while cars and SUVs and trucks tore past in a steady stream. Then, in a gap in traffic, Smiles jumped the car out into it, whipped it across to the far side, snapped into that lane just in front of a zooming sport car, and headed south out of town, accelerating rapidly.

A moment later, the sport car racketed past us, the guy at the wheel yelling something. Smiles just grinned affably and waved at him. The sport job took off and quickly grew smaller ahead of us.

I checked our speedometer. We were doing close to eighty. And the other guy was leaving us as if we were standing still.

Behind us, the last of the lights along the Strip fled and were gone, and we were out under the first dim stars.

Far off to the half left, the fire in the desert still glowed dull orange. When the highway completed its swing half to the right, we stayed with it, following the long curve all the way in its third of a turn until we were pointed due west.

Now the distant fire was at our side once more, nearer, but not much nearer. I still couldn't gauge how far away it was, or what was burning.

We stopped for the light at the intersection where, if we made a right turn, we'd end up at Florian's, if a left, we'd reach Mexico , eventually. We did neither, just crossed and went straight ahead.

Gradually the fire fell behind to our left rear, and I faced forward again.

Presently Smiles slowed, turned right abruptly onto a paved side road, and picked up speed again.

The sage flats flowed by, clear in the headlights, a blur on either side. Bugs whizzed and whirled in the lights. Occasionally one of them splattered against the windshield.

Off in the brush, every now and then you could glimpse lights from an isolated home. Then they would fall behind, and everything would be dark again, except for the headlights and the high huge stars.

Our car slowed again as we approached another lit-up building, back from the road about a quarter mile. Smiles turned left into its entrance drive, scattering gravel until he slowed on nearing the place.

It was a ranch built on a rise, its rambling outlines bulky against the star-studded western sky and the pale afterglow of the fallen sun.

Swinging the car around a circular drive in front of the place, Smiles left the car facing back the way we'd come.

Opening his door, he got out.

“Slide over to this side, Brandon,” he told me. Now he was holding a pistol, too.

He stood well clear, as I shifted under the steering wheel and got out on the driver's side.

“Jeff will shut the car doors,” Smiles said. “Move. I'm right behind you.”

Crossing gravel, I went along a flagstone path up toward the house.

Smiles pushed a button beside a big wooden door. Four-tone chimes sounded distantly inside.

Turning, I gazed across the desert at the wide glow of the lights the Strip threw up into the eastern sky.

Along the paved road, the headlights of a passing car went by, (then I couldn't see them anymore, just the beams they threw ahead of them. )

Jeff climbed toward us up the sloping flagstone walk.

When the door behind me opened, I turned. Smiles twitched his handgun and followed me inside.

The squat wide-bodied man who admitted us wore a suit that looked too tight for him but really wasn't. Anything he wore would look as if he was stuffed into it.

I followed the short man up more flagstone steps to a landing. He pointed to the right, up still more steps. I climbed, with Smiles beside me and to my right, and Jeff coming along behind both of us.

The man who'd admitted us exchanged a few quiet words with Jeff. I couldn't hear any of them.

At the top of those stairs, I found myself entering a big fieldstone-walled room with very modern furniture and a big desk over on the right near a set of wall-wide sliding glass doors, which opened onto a terrace. A cigarette glowed out there against the darkness.

Behind the desk stood Les Wyatt, his eyes watching me out of his round face. He was putting a cup and saucer down onto the desk beside a gleaming silver coffee service.

Wyatt went around the far end of the desk as I crossed the room toward it.

All around the room, animal heads stuck out of the stone walls. Big Mexican serapes hung here and there along the walls, too.

Wyatt went outside onto the terrace, where he spoke to a tall figure gazing off into the night. Coming inside again, he went back behind the desk and sat down.

“Come on over here, Brandon ,” he ordered, waving a hand. “Let's have a look at you.”

“Yes, that's right,” I said, crossing the rest of what was undoubtedly a real Persian rug to my side of the desk. “I heard somebody wanted to see me. I dropped everything and came right over. I'm a man who likes to be seen by people who want to see me.”

He nodded, but the words might not have been said, for all the response they got from him. He watched me with that curious remote look their eyes sometimes have, a look that tells you they've long ago gotten used to making that final move which settles forever whether anyone gives them trouble. They would be patient with you. They might even try to make a deal with you. But they always had the ultimate solution, and they would use it, if they had to. Only if they had to, true, but they would use it.

Underneath a moosehead in a distant corner of the room, a door opened. Jack Harvey came through it with a drink in his hand. He nodded to me.

I glanced back at Wyatt. He looked as if he hadn't taken his eyes off me for a second.

“How's that friend of yours?” he asked. “The one that was laid up in the hospital?”

“Friend of mine?”

“Sure. Mugged by some young hoodlums, wasn't he?”

“Maybe they weren't so young.”

“I hear he jumped the hospital before they could bill him for the repair work they did on him.” He laughed heartily. “Good for him. I like a guy like that. Screw those doctors, and the damn hospitals, too. Them and their health plans! I wouldn't let them operate on a bug, most of them. All they're after is the buck.”

“Not like you and me,” I said. “We just work for the love of the work itself.”

“Hell, you know what I mean, Brandon . I get some change across the tables. You do your private peeping. But those butchers! They take it right out of people, like literally right out of their hides. You don't have any dough, you don't get operated on, even if you die without it. If they do operate, some crumb does it that you wouldn't let near a bug, unless you really hated the bug. Why, right now, just for an example, one of my employees is banged up pretty bad. Concussion. A lousy hi-jack job. You think I'd send him to one of those hospitals? The hell I would! Any X-rays, we got our own connection, the best equipment, the best MD's, the best of everything, all around. Costs more, you say? Sure, but in the long run, it pays. Keeps the help happy.”

“And healthy,” I added. “And no police reports.”

‘That's right,” he chuckled. “Healthy, too. Where'd that friend of yours go off to, the one that jumped the hospital bill?”

“I have no idea. That friend of mine, I don't even know his name.”

“I think you do.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. To my left, out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of movements Jack Harvey made, but Wyatt was playing deadlock-eyes with me, and I hated to break up the game.

Jack started to say something, but Wyatt's right hand lifted an inch from the desktop and sliced the air. Harvey stopped whatever it was he'd begun to say.

“I think you do know his name,” Wyatt said slowly. “And I think you know where he is, right now.”

“You're thinking wrong. I don't.”

“Uh-uh!” He shook his head positively. “Either you know, or you can find out. You can feed the cops any kind of crappy story you want, but me, don't try it with me, Brandon. I'll bend you out of sight like nothing.”

Turning, I glanced at Harvey . He was watching me. He raised his drink and took a pull at it.

“Where's the guy at?” Wyatt asked.

“I don't know.”

He stared at me for a moment, then pulled open a desk drawer, reached down into it, and tossed a packet of money across the desk. It plopped on the side nearest me, and slid almost to the edge of the desktop before it stopped.

“You find that guy,” Wyatt ordered. “That's half your retainer. When you turn him up, you get the same again. Any expenses it takes, I'll pay, no problem.”

His round face, with those muddy Mediterranean eyes, was glistening with sweat, all in a moment.

“And, Brandon , you find that guy quick or you're through around here.”

Taking a deep breath, I looked past him through the wide wall of glass doors behind him. The man out there wasn't smoking anymore. He stood leaning on the terrace railing, his back to me, outlined against the distant glow of light from the Strip.

I told Wyatt: “No.”

His face became congested with blood. His mouth twisted. He looked as if he was going to come lunging across the desk at me. In case he did, I shifted my feet, to be ready.

He didn't move. He got hold of himself, holding on hard, he was that angry. Swiveling his head, he barked at Jack Harvey.

“I thought you said this bastard had some smarts.”

“Jim, do what he wants,” Harvey said quietly. “Take the job. It's just an assignment. The retainer's all yours. I'll detach you from my outfit for this special job. You can find that guy, easy.”

“Maybe I can find him,” I replied, but I kept my eyes on Wyatt. “I just don't cotton to the way this job was handed to me. How much money is this?”

“Count it,” Wyatt snapped.

Picking up the package, I riffled through the bills. All hundreds. Twenty five of them. I tossed the package back onto the desk.

“It's too much.”

Wyatt stared, then threw his head back and laughed, a harsh guttural laugh.

“Too much!” he yelped. “Now I've heard everything!”

“That's right,” I replied. “Too much. And I don't like the conditions of the job, either.”

“Keep it up, peeper,” Wyatt growled. “Tell me what you don't like about the conditions.”

His lips compressed. Tiny red veins showed around his eyeballs.

“If someone wants me to find somebody, I'll hire on and try to find him. I guarantee nothing. You pay regular day rates, like anyone else. And I'll do as good a job of hunting as I can.”

“Damn your day rates,” Wyatt snarled. “I'm willing to pay twenty, fifty times your lousy day rate…”

“That's what I mean,” I snarled back. “You're not hiring me to do a job. You're telling me: find this guy. Not try to find him, but find him, or else. I don't work like that.”

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” Wyatt whispered in a voice that seemed to fill the room, “you're gonna be lucky if you work at all, from now on. You ain't gonna be around to work, if you don't do like I…”

“That's what I mean,” I interrupted. “What did he do to you?”

Wyatt blinked and straightened. The anger flowed out of him. Everyone else in the room seemed to be holding their breaths.

“Where did he hit you?” I asked. “How hard?”

Wyatt's fury just seemed to back into him, leaving those muddy eyes of his staring out of the round face at me.

“What did you just say?”

“You heard what I just said. He must've hit you where you live, to get you this steamed.”

One of them moved behind me.

Smiles's voice said: “I told you this creep was in on it.”

Turning, I looked at Smiles. He was almost on top of me. His eyes were slits, but he still looked as if he was smiling. He swung the pistol he held. The barrel slashed across my left cheekbone. The room turned a tumblesault, crashed away, and wasn't there anymore, for a long moment.

Five

I could hear their feet doing soft muffled dances on the thick rug all around where I fell, but I couldn't see anything except a white-hot ball of pain.

Filmy ragged crimson curtains began to close in on me from both sides. I thought those curtains were going to shut completely and smother the searing light that brought the pain.

They almost did shut. Both curtains hung there, letting the last of the blinding light get through to the me inside me. Then, after a long wait, the curtains began to part. The pain came back, more and more, until I couldn't see the crimson curtains at all, anymore. They were drawn off too far to the left and to the right.

Now, nothing in the world remained but the burning light and the waves of pain I could feel turning my stomach over, inside me.

Suddenly, I could see again. The burning light really was a light: it shone down on me from the ceiling.

I tried turning my head, to get the light out of my eyes. I was on my back, on the rug. Rolling over onto my face, I tried to get up.

Hands beneath my arms and shoulders lifted me.

“Get away,” I muttered thickly.

They didn't. They held on, Jeff on my left, and Jack Harvey on my right, both of them supporting me.

Trying to shove them away, I ended up pushing myself backward, out of their gripping hands. I still couldn't stand by myself, though. My legs gave. If I hadn't tilted back against the edge of the desk, I would have landed on the rug again.

I kept trying to breathe, to end this dizziness that kept me floundering.

Jeff stepped forward again, and with his left hand, he kept me propped, half standing, half sitting on the edge of the desk.

My head hung down. My chin rested almost on my chest. From beneath my eyebrows, I watched the semi-automatic in Jeff's right hand. If I could get squared away to him so my left hand was near enough to make a grab for that gun-hand of his…

Lurching to my left, I tried sliding along the edge of the desktop, but Jeff had been around too long for that to work. He sidestepped right along with me, keeping his free hand shoved against my chest to hold me upright, but not taking any chances with the hand holding his gun. He'd been around a long time, and not because he took foolish chances.

I had to let it go.

Gradually, my sight cleared. Tears no longer filled my eyes, making the room in front of me swim, and making me desperate by filling my eyes up again each time I wiped them free of tears.

My left cheekbone throbbed with an angry pounding throb that made my head ache.

Finally someone said something that made sense.

“Get a chair over here.”

A moment later, Jack Harvey and Jeff lowered me into a chair they had dragged around in front of the desk. After a minute, I looked around.

Wyatt was out on the terrace, talking with the man out there.

Closing my eyes, I endured the pound, pound, pounding of my own blood beating through where Smiles had belted me with his gun barrel. I wondered if the skin over the cheekbone was laid open. Gingerly, I probed with my fingertips, but I couldn't tell, so I took the exploring fingertips away.

Wyatt came back inside and sat behind his desk again.

“Send Little Flores up here,” he told someone. “And keep that grinning fool downstairs.”

He looked at me.

“Smiles is an all right guy,” he explained, “but right now he's kind of worried.”

He stared at me across the desk, his muddy eyes showing nothing.

“ Brandon , I don't like this rough stuff,” he complained, “but maybe it had to happen. The boys aren't happy about that guy you found beat up in the desert. My advice is, you better take the job I offered you. Find that bastard. I mean it. I won't have to say a word to some of these boys of mine, if you find him. All I'll have to do is turn you over to Smiles and another guy. They have damn good reasons for wanting that guy from the hospital found.”

“I'll bet they have,” I managed to croak.

“Does that mean you won't?” he asked, after waiting a beat.

“That's what it means.”

Shrugging, he turned away.

“Okay, that's that.”

Rising, he went around the window end of his desk and stood at the near corner of it.

“Jeff, you keep an eye on Smiles,” he instructed. “We want this jerk alive. We need information from him. I still think he was in on that little job, yesterday. If he wasn't such a dope, I'd be sure of it. Make sure they leave him alive.”

Jeff nodded and came over to me.

“Take him to that place up by the lake,” Wyatt added. “You know the one. Maybe some of that treatment will soften him up…”

“Les!”

The man on the terrace was calling, and his voice sounded urgent.

Wyatt hurried out there.

I could hear snatches of conversation.

“You don't think he'd try coming here? Brock, the son of a bitch must be nuts…”

Finally, I knew who was out there, Brock Townsend. When he had called out, I hadn't been sure, although the sound of the voice had rung a faint momentary bell.

Standing beside my chair, Jeff waited, watching me and the two silhouettes out on the terrace. Beyond Jeff, I saw the short man who had admitted us to the house earlier, Little Flores. Somewhere in the room behind me, Jack Harvey moved around restlessly.

Out of the night beyond the terrace, the sound of an approaching car could be heard, coming fast.

“Jeff, you better get downstairs,” Wyatt called in. “Make sure Smiles doesn't…”

Jeff nodded and turned toward the door.

“Keep your eye on this one,” he told Little Flores.

The squat man nodded.

Outside, the car was quite close now. The wheels made harsh scraping noises when it turned in a circle at the foot of the flagstone-stepped path, which led up to the front door. There was a sudden rattling of sprayed gravel thrown violently against the front of the house as the vehicle turned, then a loud thump, and finally the screech of gears as the motor was gunned savagely.

Someone down there shouted. Smiles. There was a sharp crack, another.

On the terrace, Wyatt was leaning over the railing, shouting down to Smiles. He came running back inside, pulled open one of the desk drawers and hurried back out carrying a snub-nosed revolver.

Jack Harvey went out with him.

I checked Flores . He was watching me, paying no attention to the uproar going on outside, nor to the shots still being fired below.

The three men were silhouetted against the far-off glow of light from the distant Strip. There was a flash: Wyatt was firing his revolver.

The sound of the car was getting farther away, and then I couldn't hear it anymore.

Townsend said something I couldn't make out.

Wyatt yelled down, “What's going on? What happened?”

“He's stopped,” Jack Harvey's voice reported.

“How do you know he's stopped?” Wyatt snapped. “He's got no lights on…”

I saw one of the terrace doors star before I heard the distant report of the shot and heard the whoosh of the bullet, the smack of it against the wall behind me, high up, near the ceiling. Plaster rattled softly on the carpeted floor.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Flores flick his head toward the hole in the glass door, then back to me. He was a tough man to distract, when he was told to watch someone.

Downstairs, in front of the house, a fusillade of shots was fired, quickly, one after another. Then a heavier handgun joined in, but slower, the shots spaced, fired deliberately. That would be Jeff, trying impossible shooting at that range with any kind of handgun.

Out on the terrace, Wyatt crouched down slightly. So did Jack Harvey.

“He's using a rifle on us,” Wyatt murmured. His voice was soft, astonished.

Beside him, Townsend called over his shoulder.

“Turn off those lights in there.”

Just then, the glass door in front of me starred again, lower than before. Flakes of glass rattled onto the desktop.

Sliding down in my chair, I watched Flores glide swiftly along the wall past the door to the landing, to where the light switches were.

A moment later, the room was dark. I eased out of my chair onto the floor. I couldn't see a thing, but neither could Flores , I hoped.

Keeping the big easy chair between him and myself, I wormed on my hands and knees around the inner end of the desk just in time for the third rifle bullet to hit the glass terrace wall, lower than ever, almost at floor level. There was a rush of air as the slug punched through the Plexiglas.

I twisted flat while particles of glass showered down all around me. I could smell the dust in the rug.

Whoever was using that rifle was getting his shots off faster. I listened, trying to time the intervals between shots. It could either be a bolt action or a lever action weapon.

But no more shots struck the glass. Now the rifleman seemed to be aiming at Smiles and Jeff down below, replying to their fire, perhaps sighting on their gunshot flashes.

I didn't hear any more shots from Jeff's heavy caliber gun, but Smiles was still blasting away down there. I wondered if Smiles was going to live through this night. I hoped he did. I still owed him for that crack across the face he'd given me.

Suddenly, Wyatt was shouting.

“Get after him, you guys. He's moving. Take the car. Get that son of a bitch.”

A moment later, I heard the car I'd been brought in start up and move out.

I was just getting up off my face, wondering if I could make it to that far door in the corner of the room Jack Harvey had entered by.

“Light that room, Flores,” Wyatt called in from the terrace, “before Harvey 's shamus tries to powder on us.”

That killed it. I managed to stand up and get around the corner of the desk to the chair I'd been sitting in before the lights came on.

Seeing me approximately where I ought to be, Flores slid the gun he held back under his jacket. He stayed close to the wall, though. I wished I were nearer the wall, too, in case any more of those rifle bullets came smashing in here.

Instead, I had to sit back down in the easy chair, well down in it, just as Wyatt and Jack Harvey came back inside.

Wyatt stared down at me for a long moment.

“All right,” he finally said, “drive Brandon back to town, Jack. I still don't like it. I still think he's in this, somewhere along the line, but maybe you're right. That crazy out there could have blown Brandon 's brains out as well as any of ours, so maybe the two of them aren't in this together. Get him out of here. I might want to see him again, so keep tabs on him, understand? Keep your eye on him, or we'll find you, instead.”

Jack nodded.

All through it, Jack had nodded his head, not saying a word, himself tall and rangy, looking down a good half a foot at the little round-faced man telling him what to do.

When Jack was sure Wyatt wasn't going to tell him anything more, he glanced at me and said, “Come on, let's go.”

I followed him out of the room and down the flagstone steps and out the front door. Behind us, the lights on the ground floor were still lit. They had never turned them off.

When I was about to pull the front door shut behind me, I spotted something sprawled on the lowest of the wide flagstone steps. Instead of closing the door, I opened it wider and stepped to one side, so more light from inside would shine through.

Even with the extra illumination, I still couldn't make out what it was down there, although I suspected.

Halfway down the front steps, Harvey hesitated and looked back up at me, before going down the rest of the way, where he leaned over it.

“Which one of them?” I called.

“Of who?” he asked. He didn't look up. He got out a pencil flash and began using it.

“Smiles or Jeff?”

“Neither. It's some other guy. I've seen him around, but I don't know his name.”

Shutting the door behind me, I went down and joined him at the foot of the steps. One look at what lay there and I knew who it was.

“Jeff called him Fats.”

“What are you two looking at?” Wyatt shouted from above.

He was standing at the terrace railing beside Brock Townsend.

“One of your people,” Jack replied.

After a moment, Wyatt called, “All right. “We'll handle it. Get going.”

I followed Jack Harvey along the perimeter of the traffic circle in front of the house to a branch gravel drive that ran along the north side of the house, back toward what were probably garages. We didn't go that far. Harvey 's car was parked halfway along the side of the house, facing toward the front of the place.

He got behind the wheel of his electric-blue convertible. When I slid in beside him and closed the door on my side, he was sticking the ignition key in, muttering, “The bastard didn't even ask if Fats was dead.”

“Was he?”

He turned the starter.

“Of course.”

The motor kicked over. For a second or two, he raced it savagely, then he kicked the brake off and we moved forward, went around the front corner of the house, into and across the circular driveway and, faster now, down the private road to the paved secondary road.

Instead of turning right and going south to the big highway…the way Jeff and Smiles had driven me out there…Jack turned left and headed northward.

Far off to the right, I could just make out the lit-up Florian's sign. Even farther in the same direction, the general glow of the entire Strip filled the sky softly, a long stretch of it along the eastern sky, but still looking small, swallowed up in the immensity of the desert night.

“They won't be bothered too much when you turn up dead, either,” I told him.

Taking his eyes off the road ahead, he glared at me.

“That's a hell of a thing to say.”

“What do you expect me to say? Thank you? You're in with those bastards up to your tonsils, and you just dragged me in, too.”

“I'm just doing a job for them,” he muttered. “I've been just doing a job all along.”

“On me.”

“All right, on you. They hired me. I'm for hire. So are you. Don't give me any of this…”

“Better not tell me don't give you anything,” I growled. “Not right now, not after that pistol-whipping I had to take back there. I'm not exactly in a mood for…”

“What could I do, Jim? You know what they're like…”

“Yeah, you're right,” I agreed. “I know what they're like. Apparently I know that better than you. That's why I steer clear of them. I hope you live long enough to learn to do the same…but I'm beginning to doubt it.”

“Jim,” he said patiently, “you talked to Wyatt back there as if he was dirt….”

“He is dirt. They're all dirt.”

He rolled his eyes up to the sky.

“Jim, I thought you were on. I thought you had gotten some sense by now…”

“Oh, turn it off, Jack. We've got different ways of looking at things, you and me. You're gonna keep an eye on me for Wyatt, are you? He may want to see me again, and when he wants you to, you're going to turn me up, are you? Well, Jack boy, from here on, I'm packing a gun, all the time. My gun. Not yours. And if your Mr. Wyatt or any of his friends wants to see me, he's going to have to come to me, not the other way around. And if he tries to deal with me in any cute way, he's going to have to be damn fast and very lucky.”

“Don't worry, he will be. Any guys he sends will be experts.”

“Fats was an expert, too.”

He didn't say anything.

“Okay,” I began, when the silence between us had gone on long enough. “Now you'd better start telling me what this is all about. Wyatt hired you to keep me under your thumb by giving me a job. Why?”

“You're getting kind of raunchy, aren't you, Jim?”

I turned to face him. There was a small smile on his lips. His eyes were squinted a bit against the glow from the dashboard lights.

“Telling me I'd better start telling you…”

I hit him with the edge of my left hand, high on his near cheekbone. His head snapped away from the blow. He yelled something.

“Give that to Smiles,” I told him, “next time you see him.”

The car swerved on the two-lane blacktop. Jack almost lost control of it. I braced my right foot against the tilted part of the floorboards, beneath the dashboard. My left elbow I hooked over the seatback behind him, and got my left hand on Jack's near shoulder, sliding it toward his neck.

He pulled his foot off the accelerator and jammed it down onto the brake pedal, fighting the steering wheel, trying to keep his car from rocketing off the road out into the brush.

I slid my left hand down across his chest and beneath his jacket, under his left arm.

By then, Jack had the car under control again, slowing it enough so he could release the steering wheel with his right hand. He swung his upper arm down on top of my left forearm, hard, then grabbed for the gun under his left armpit, twisting his body away from me just as my fingertips brushed against the handgrip.

So I had to settle for a fistful of the soft part of his right shoulder, grabbing it with my left hand and squeezing.

He groaned.

I squeezed harder.

He thrashed around some, but he still needed his left hand on the steering wheel, and the way I had him, he couldn't do anything with his right. He squirmed, trying to bring the car to a complete stop.

Now my left hand could reach under his gun arm. My hand gripped the weapon and pulled it clear of the clip holster.

Relaxed now, I sat back while he finally brought the car to a stop, cursing steadily, massaging his right shoulder muscle gently with his left hand.

I gave him a few minutes to recover from the sore muscle. Then I told him to get started talking.

“I want to hear all of it. By now, I know some of it, but I want you to tell me, just to make sure I'm looking at the same picture you are.”

Taking his hand down from gently kneading his shoulder muscle, Jack Harvey stared at the gun I had taken from him. When he raised his eyes, his lips twisted, and his cold eyes were thoughtful.

“Jim,” he said slowly, “after this little stunt, you aren't gonna be around this town long. There isn't that much business here. In our line of work, you need every friend you can get. Well, you just lost your last hope of ever getting any crumbs I'll toss your way again. Mister, you're going to starve, and I won't even have to lift a finger to see that it happens. It'll happen all by itself.”

“Let me worry about that,” I replied. “Get on with your story. Or are you in so thick with them you don't dare tell me anything?”

Facing forward, he put a cigarette in his mouth, and used the dash lighter to get it started.

“Don't wear out that bit about me being ‘in' with anyone. I'm in with me. Those people are just clients, like anyone else. Touchier, maybe, but still just clients.”

He glanced across at me.

“Okay if I drive while I fill you in?”

“Drive away.”

He started the car moving again, but kept his speed in the forties and fifties. I noticed he used only his left hand on the steering wheel. The grinding I had given his ropy right shoulder muscle made him favor it. His right hand and forearm lay carefully in his lap.

“Someone held up their skimmed-off-the-top shipment, early yesterday. That was the result of it, back there. Fats was missing.”

“He isn't missing now,” I pointed out.

Jack chuckled.

“There were three of them in the car,” he continued. “I don't know who Wyatt was more sore at: whoever did the hijacking, or his own strongarm men who let it get done to them.

“As near as I can make out, from the little they told me…which wasn't much…the cash run was about their usual amount, nothing out of the ordinary, twelve to fifteen thousand. You filled in at Florian's a week or so ago, remember? Well, you were there to replace one of the men for the same kind of cash run as yesterday's, except these three dudes stopped at a gas station south of town. They go that way once in every two or three trips to make sure no one gets used to a pattern. So much for alternate routes, huh? They still got skunked.

“Anyway, one of them had to use the can. The others got gas while they were waiting. Used a credit card. The gas station attendant later found the one in the john out cold, after the heist was all over. He didn't see anything else.

“So he gave them their gas, processed the credit card, they stayed parked at the pump a few more minutes until the one using the latrine came back, and then they drove off. That's all the attendant saw. Except pretty soon, he hears noises in the back, goes around there, and finds the jerk in the men's room, still half out of it, but coming back up for air.

“The gas station guy calls the cops, before the casualty was fully awake. Wyatt doesn't like that, now. It brought the cops in on part of it. Wyatt's boy got on the phone real quick and filled Wyatt in on all he knew about what went down. That guy is okay. Just a headache. But he doesn't really know a thing. Says he just heard someone come into the men's room behind him, and then, curtains. Scratch one of the three. Two to go.

“Fats, the one we saw back there on the front steps, he was the wheel man. Scratch two. For information, anyway. No way of knowing what or who he saw, not anymore.”

“What about the third guy?” I asked.

“He's the one they got some kind of story out of, Wyatt did. They don't think that one gave the police very much. His skull may have been fractured. At the gas station, he was in the back seat with the money, leaning forward, talking to Fats. Says he heard footsteps approaching behind him, thought it was the one who used the john, until he saw Fats look past him at whoever it was and go for his gun. And then Fats stopped. He froze. Note that. Fats froze.”

“It's duly noted,” I assured him. “Go on.”

“Before the one in the back seat could turn his head, it gets bashed. Their doctor says it could have been done by a gun butt. The one in the men's room could've had his iron lifted.”

Putting out his cigarette in the dash ashtray, Jack Harvey drove on through the desert night for awhile without speaking.

Then he went on.

“The guy in the car was unconscious for some time. Doesn't know how long. When he came partly out of it, he was on the floor of the back seat area, his wrists were tied behind him, his gun was gone, and the car motor was stopped. The only thing he knew was that he was no longer at the gas station where he'd been slugged.

“Outside, near the car somewhere, he could hear Fats being worked on. Over and over, whoever did the working was asking Fats the same questions. ‘Who were the others? Who gave the orders?' Something like that.

“Understand, this guy's skull was probably fractured. Says he kept blacking out and coming to, and like that. After quite a lot of it, Fats cracked. ‘Me and Smiles and a creep named Ted Fenton.' He thought that was the name. He also admitted Wyatt was the one who told them to pull the rough-house. Just a favor for a friend.

Then the fractured skull guy told Wyatt there was one last question: ‘Why?' And he said Fats answered: ‘For fooling around with this friend's girl.'”

Jack Harvey glanced across at me.

“That's about all Wyatt got out of him before he passed out again,” Jack added.

I thought about it.

“The dough's gone?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Twelve to thirteen grand, cold cash, in handy-size bills. Nice, huh?”

“Nice isn't a word I would have used,” I murmured absently. “Where did they find the guy with the skull fracture?”

“Near the burning car, out in the desert.”

“Was that what was burning, down there?”

“Yeah. The hijacker set fire to it, with the slugged one still on the floor in back.”

I whistled.

“How'd he get out of the car?”

Harvey shrugged.

“He got out, somehow. Opened the door himself, crawled out and off a ways, into the brush. This was after he heard another car drive away.”

I stared out at the night while the passing wind roared by.

“No wonder Wyatt was sore.”

“Yeah,” Jack laughed. “Be glad you're still in one piece. For awhile, anyway.”

I let that one pass.

“What happened next?”

“That was pretty much it. The cops didn't get there till early afternoon. An ambulance brought the one with the skull trouble back into town, but the first casualty…the one in the gas station…he'd already clued Wyatt in, so they managed to get their own doctor and maybe a lawyer into the hospital, to help keep their second lad from telling the police any more than he absolutely had to, until they had time to decide what was going on, and who ought to handle it, the law or themselves.”

“Running skim money would pretty much guarantee the law would be kept out, I'd think.”

Jack chuckled and nodded.

“Wyatt wasn't sure it wasn't some mob stuff, maybe a probe, someone checking for soft spots out here, in case things might be getting ripe for someone to move in. They have so little of that kind of crap out here, they can't remember how they used to handle it.”

I couldn't help chuckling at that.

“Then again,” Harvey went on, “if it turned out to be just a one-shot hijacking, fine, then they'd let the cops help. They never expected it to turn out to be something like this. Now they don't want cops in on it at all.”

“How can they keep them out? Twelve thousand is a lot of nickels, even to an outfit as big as Florian's”

“What twelve thousand?” Harvey grinned. “There's no twelve grand. A guy slipped and fell in a gas station men's room and knocked himself cold. His friend got careless or clumsy with the car's dashboard lighter while he was driving along a dirt road out in the desert, and the car caught fire. And damned if he didn't knock himself cold, too, getting out of the burning car.”

Jack threw his head back and laughed with delight.

“Hell, Jim, you know how it goes with those guys. Nobody knows nothing. They were all born the day before yesterday. That white stuff around their mouths is their mothers' milk. They just haven't had a chance to wipe it off yet.”

“And Fats? Or what's left of him, back there on the front steps of that ranch?”

Jack shrugged.

“Who's Fats? There wasn't any Fats. They'll work out whatever story they need. If they want all this kept quiet…and I think they do…they'll go find this guy, or guys, themselves.”

“Or try to make me find him.”

He didn't say anything to that.

I thought about Jack's version of the story. It figured. Or it was close enough, anyway.

He slowed and turned right for a few miles, and slowed again on reaching the highway Florian's was on, except this time to the south. I thought he was going to turn down that way, but he didn't, just crossed the intersection and went straight ahead toward the reservoir area.

“Who was the friend Wyatt did the favor for?”

“No idea. They're always doing favors for people.”

“What's the story on the one out on the terrace tonight?”

“Name's Townsend. Brock Townsend. Big operator. Many dollars, well spread out. He's into pictures, TV, real estate. Plenty of other areas, from what I've heard around. All legitimate. A piece of Florian's, I'd suspect. A big piece. Owns a million acre spread, off to the north, beyond the mountains north of the reservoir.”

“Legitimate, huh?”

Harvey shrugged.

“Once upon a time, maybe not so legit, but a very smart citizen.”

“Well, he can tell Wyatt to stand up straight,” I observed. “And Wyatt doesn't even get restive when he does.”

“Perhaps they're old school chums,” Jack chuckled. “Choate? Or Andover , maybe?”

“More like Dannemora Prep,” I grunted. “Maybe he was the friend Wyatt had his boys pound hell out of that guy for, the one I found in the brush, awhile back.”

“Could be,” Harvey said carelessly. “On that, your guess is as good as mine, Jim.”

“And you came into all this where?”

“Wyatt quietly wanted to know anything I might hear about some guy who was dropped in the desert.”

“No name on the guy?”

“None that they told me.”

“And you heard I was the one who found him there, is that it? Then when he finally let himself get found again and taken to the hospital…”

“That's when I made the contact with you.” He flicked a quick glance at me. “Hell, Jim, I just rolled with it. I signed you on at my Agency because that's the easiest way to keep tabs on you.”

“And you can even charge my salary to Wyatt as an expense.”

“Hey, I never thought of that. Maybe I'll do it, too. Even pennies and nickels add up in this business we're in.”

He shot a malicious glance across at me, slowed as we approached the reservoir highway, across from a little roadside state park, which picnickers could use in the daytime.

After making a full stop, he turned right and headed toward the distant glow of lights from the city, off to the south.

Far ahead, away to the right, the Florian's sign was in constant movement, with its various colors switching around in every direction.

I wondered if Wyatt's friend was there at Florian's tonight. Or was he still back where I had been, just awhile ago? I wondered if the friend's girl friend would turn out to be the cool tired number I had encountered along with her mink stole, in Wyatt's outer office, (for a strangely intriguing moment.)

I hoped she wasn't.

Six

“So you bring it to me,” Detective Sergeant Brode muttered. “At my home. At this hour.”

I sat on the top step of his three-steps-up front patio. A squat wide-fronded palm tree fought a losing struggle for survival in the middle of his front yard, and the struggle had turned the palm tree ugly.

“Why don't you shoot that tree?” I asked him. “Put it out of its misery. Why make the damn thing suffer? It doesn't belong in this climate.”

“It was there when I bought this house,” he said, out of the shadows where he sat in an aluminum folding chair. “My wife likes it, too. Why couldn't you wait till morning?”

I hesitated.

“Who says I'm still going to be around in the morning?”

“You thinking of leaving town?”

“No.”

“Then why… Oh! I read you. It's that bad?”

“I don't know. It might be. All I can say for sure is this: if you find me some night with six through the pump, try not to get the case dropped in the suicide file.”

He chuckled in the darkness.

“I'll try.” Then he sighed. “ Brandon , I sleep here at home any and every chance I get, because I never know when I'm going to get home to sleep in my own bed again. Sometimes it's days, and it feels like weeks. I'm a cop, on call twenty-six hours a day, thirty on Sundays.”

“That's why I came to you,” I reminded him, “because you're a cop. You want me to go tell a fireman?”

“Good! That's the way. Give me a chuckle with your wisecracks. I don't need TV sitcoms. I've got you.”

“I told you what Jack Harvey told me,” I pointed out, “in addition to what I've seen tonight, to wit, one slightly dead man, who's a bit low on the local hotshot totem pole. So far as I'm concerned, our boy Assault is starting to live up to the name you pinned on him, and with a vengeance.”

“Yeah, it could be him.”

“Any word on him yet from the Feds? Prints? DNA?”

“Nothing yet. Takes time.”

“Can't you get anything from Army or Navy records? Everyone's been in one or the other. Or the Marines?”

Impatiently, Brode replied: “I've checked his prints wherever regulations permit me to. There's nothing come back on him yet.”

“Did you get any photographs of him, while he was in the hospital?”

“Unofficially. A day or two before he checked himself out.”

“That's something, anyway.”

“Except his face didn't photograph too well. Even you and me…and we've both seen him several times…even we couldn't make a positive I. D. from those snapshots. The lens picked up every lump they put on his face, but it couldn't seem to capture what he looked like. I was going to give it a second try, but he took off before the camera team was available again.”

“Great!”

“Well, hell, Brandon , I run my tail off every day. That case was only one of plenty of other things I still had to get around to. I knew I ought to do it, but I just couldn't get to it in time. How'd I know he was gonna pull a powder?”

“Okay, sorry. You're right. Now what?”

“I've already called in what you told me, just now. They'll send a car out there. Wyatt'll tell them that you and Jack Harvey were mistaken. It was just one of Wyatt's friends who fell down drunk. They'll probably produce the friend, too. And he'll be drunk, too.”

“Probably.”

I squinted up the street.

“That looks like a nice car parked up the street, there.”

Brode turned his head, outlined by dim light from inside his house.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll be your straight man. Which car, and where up the street?”

“The one up at the corner. The car that's been there ever since I got here, the one that's going to leave when I leave. And I'll bet cash money on that.”

Brode just grunted.

“I'll bet you something else, too.” I added. “Jack Harvey will be calling in, or he has already called in, to report on Fats. And you'll find Fats out there at Wyatt's ranch, right where he was dropped.”

“Excuse me,” Brode said, rising. “I think I'll go inside now and lie down on the floor in the cellar. You stay as long as you feel like.”

Laughing, I stood and went down to the sidewalk to my new used Ford.

There wasn't much light, back at the corner, where the car I had spotted was parked.

I didn't try any fancy stuff, just drove to the nearest corner, turned left and headed for the Strip. When I turned south along it, they were right behind me. They didn't get too close, but they followed me home, stopping half a block short of my rooming house.

Before going to see Brode, I had stopped off at the room and picked up my Police Special. Now, as I climbed out of the car, I held it in my hand, cocked and ready.

No pineapples exploded. No sub-machineguns spat fire and metal at me. I simply unlocked the ground-floor door, went inside, swung the door shut behind me, made certain the lock caught, and went on up the stairs to my room.

When I opened the door, I banged it back against the wall, in case anyone was behind it. No one was. No one was inside the closet. Even the can was unoccupied.

I let the hammer down on the .38, but I didn't turn on any lights. Keeping low, I crawled out onto the adobe-walled balcony. From there, I could see their car, the lights off now, parked on the other side of the dead-end street, pointed back toward the Strip a block and a half to the west.

Someone inside the car was smoking; there was an occasional glow with each inhalation.

There on the terrace, I squatted until my legs ached.

Finally, groaning, I crept back inside. My legs were stiff from the prolonged crouch.

Hell with it! I went to bed. But I took the .38 to bed with me, and kept it there beside me on the mattress, all through the night.

* * *

It was still there in the morning.

I shaved, dressed, ate, and went downstairs and outside. Their car was no longer there. Mine was. I started to get in, but I stopped and stepped away from it.

Sweat burst out on my forehead. I cursed myself. I didn't curse them. I cursed myself. They had me on the run already. They had me scared shitless, and they hadn't done a thing.

Grabbing the door handle, I almost yanked the car door open to prove I wasn't going to let them buffalo me, but I stopped myself from opening the car door.

Don't be scared, I told myself. Just be careful.

If they wanted me dead, and I helped them by being foolish, I would only be playing their game.

Play your own game, I advised myself irritably. Stay alive. Survive.

Carefully, I checked the exhaust pipe, peered underneath the car, up and down, both sides. Gingerly, I raised the hood. When it didn't go up in a sheet of flame, I looked the motor over, checking for wires that didn't belong there, especially ones that might be attached to the ignition system. Nothing.

Opening the door on the passenger side, I crawled across the front seat and examined the inside of the door on the driver's side. Nothing that might go off when I opened the door from outside.

Next, I checked the gear stick, all the way down the steering post.

And finally, I felt carefully beneath all the pedals.

No bombs or grenades were waiting to go off.

And for all my care and caution, when I inserted the ignition key, I still held my breath.

That's how I felt for the rest of the morning.

I had a doctor look at my left cheek.

“No break in the skin,” he assured. “It should be okay.”

He swabbed it with something, taped a patch of gauze over it, and I left, giving some money to his receptionist.

With no more job to go to, I hired desk space down a side street from the Strip, near where I lived. A phone answering service went with it. Two hundred a month, cash in advance.

The desk was one of ten others in the big room, small businessmen, doing everything conceivable, from selling insurance to selling girls, that last being done by a man I recognized, who had twice been arrested but not yet convicted for pimping. He had obviously gotten effective help in the legal area, because he had himself a desk and he was back in business.

I put an ad in the paper: James Brandon, Investigations, and the phone number. It would be in time for the next morning's edition.

Today, I sat there awhile, looking over the rest of the desk renters, then ignoring them.

My desk was off in a corner, the furthest one from the entrance door. To my right was a window, which faced onto an alley.

Around noon, I went out and around to the back of the building to check out the alley.

A tall man could stand on tiptoe in the alley and see in through the window near my desk, which was over a little to the left, in the corner of the room. I decided that when I got back from lunch, I would swing the desk around a bit so I would always be able to see out that window.

As I was walking back from lunch along a narrow side street, a car swept in toward the curb, just ahead. I had my hand half inside my suit coat, when I recognized Brode's grinning face looking back at me.

“Easy there, Wild Bill,” he called.

I went over and leaned down beside him on the passenger side. Callahan was at the wheel.

“You win that bet,” he said. “They both reported it, first Jack Harvey, then Wyatt.”

I was looking at his face, but I was thinking, trying to line it up, to figure my way through whatever they might be up to.

“So what comes next?”

With a chuckle, Brode said, “Wyatt claimed Fats didn't work for him anymore. Wyatt said that when he discovered Fats had a record, he had to fire him. Didn't want convicted criminals on his payroll. See you.” He started to laugh. When the car swept away, he was still laughing.

I went on back to my new office.

Late in the afternoon, when I ran into Brode again, he wasn't so tickled. He was coming out of a store. At sight of me, he blinked.

“Who's following who?” he asked.

Then he tilted his head, and I went with him along the street to where the store ended and a few residences began.

He broke down a stick of chewing gum in his mouth before he said anything.

“Something for you, maybe. New faces have begun drifting into town. We made a few of them and hauled them in, fast, told them to shove along out of here, today. They shoved. But there are others coming. Looks like maybe something is building here.”

“It could be,” I agreed. “They're like vultures. When they think they smell a rotting corpse, they start to hover.”

“They're crazy,” Brode said, shaking his head in disgust. “In this state, people like Wyatt run legitimate businesses. No takeovers are possible. Ownership is recorded, each owner is licensed. Any newcomer buying in has to pass the licensing commission.”

I shrugged.

“Maybe they're just tourists passing through and slowing down in case there's some quick action.”

“It's possible,” he conceded. “But it looks too coincidental. I mean, so soon after yesterday's little job out in the desert. I'm beginning to think there might be a bunch of ignoramuses who think they've got territory here they have a chance of taking over. That means, the desert thing might not be our boy Assault, after all. Oh, by the way, they traced his prints. His name's Benjamin Crane.”

“That's a step forward, anyway,” I said. “Any record?”

“Not yet. The Army turned over his military history. Served in Nam . Nothing outstanding, no medals or anything. But he was one of the volunteers who went into the tunnels to root out the Viet Cong.”

I whistled, impressed. “But nothing outstanding.”

Brode chuckled.

“I take it you're not working for Jack Harvey anymore.” He said it rather than asked it.

“That's right. I hung out my own shingle. I want to see how it swings in the wind while what little dough I've got lasts.”

“Good luck with it,” he said, starting back toward the stores.

“I'll need it,” I called after him.

I took a couple of steps toward where I'd parked my own car, but I thought of something and turned and called after Brode again.

“Hey, wait a minute.”

He stopped and waited until I caught up to him.

“Couple of things I meant to ask you. Are you assigned to that business out in the desert yesterday?”

Chewing his gum ruminatively, he shook his head.

“No, that case is for the big boys: Sheriffs, Deppitties, the Chief, even one of the Inspectors. I get to read some of the reports, though.”

“How about Fats? Did you take a look at his remains?”

He nodded.

“Did you notice his wrists? Was he tied?”

“Oh, sure, wrists and ankles both.” He watched me with his strangely mild blue eyes. “What are you getting at?”

“Sloshing something around in my head.”

“I think I know what's bugging you. That's one of the reasons this may be the start of some gang stuff. No man could have pulled off that heist alone. The gas station is miles away from anything else. We know at least one guy got into the car after clobbering the second man in the back seat. My guess is, he had help dealing with Fats after they both took care of the first one in the men's room of that filling station. Out in the desert, we know what happened, from the guy whose brains are still scrambled, but who was partly conscious part of the time out there…we know from him at least one hijacker was working Fats over, putting questions to him the hard way. And I really mean the hard way: you should see the shape Fats ended up in. I think he would have died from the working-over he was given, even if they didn't put a bullet through his face, out at Wyatt's ranch last night.

“Anyway, they burn Wyatt's car, the one they got at the gas station. They drive away, taking Fats with them. Where'd this second car come from? Could one man have left it there in the desert? Me, I don't think so. It supposes too much. There was no way anyone could know that the gravy car Fats and his two buddies were driving was going to stop at that particular filling station. They had to be followed to it, in a car. The only other way is ridiculous: it has a guy leaving his own heap out in the middle of the desert, walking a roundabout series of old dirt tracks to get out to the highway, to reach a gas station Florian's cash car never stopped at before.”

Brode shook his head.

“No, I can't buy that. There had to be two of them. There was no other way for their getaway car to get out there in the desert to take them away, after they put the torch to Florian's car out there.”

He stopped talking and stared at me, waiting.

“It makes sense,” I had to admit.

“Couldn't have happened any other way,” he insisted. “Now, this doesn't rule out this Crane fella. He might have a friend in this area, someone who would help him. But that would change my thinking about him being hot for their heads, the people who gave him that punching out.”

Shrugging, he stared into the distance.

“It isn't usual anymore,” he added, almost as an after-thought, “but in the old days, out in this country, they handled things their own way. But if you saw what Fats looked like in the morgue, you'd change any sentimental notions you might have about your friend Ben Crane. It makes him no better than Wyatt and Fats and any others who gave him the working over he got. And if Crane is wearing their stripes, you and I better forget the picture we had of him: of a guy who tried to put in some sack time with somebody's girl, and suddenly found himself getting the bejesus pounded out of him by people who knew what they were doing from long practice.”

“And then some,” I said. “Okay, I see what you mean. If it was Ben Crane and a pal, he might be a hood himself, and they just haven't turned up any arrests on him yet. If it wasn't him who did the job on Fats, I suppose the only other possibility is some of those outside people you mentioned.”

“Right. In which case, the more of themselves they knock off, the better. Just so they don't dirty the sidewalks with a lot of mobster blood. It aint neat.”

“Not to mention innocent-bystander blood,” I pointed out. “Okay Sarge, thanks.”

I started off.

He went the other way.

For awhile, I sat inside my car, thinking over what he had told me.

I should go home, I thought. I'd had a brutally hard day sitting around my new place of business.

But instead of doing the sensible thing and going home, I drove past my street and on out of town, to the gas station where yesterday's hijacking took place, or where it started.

It was on the left side of the highway that led down to Mexico . Pretty isolated. I swung across the road and parked in front of the gas station, so I could look it over.

Two sets of pumps stood in front of a good-sized white building, with the small corner office on the right-hand end, and the shop on the left taking up three-fifths of the available inside space. Back in the gloom, a car was up on the hydraulic lift, but no one was working on it. The attendant was busy feeding gasoline into the rear end of a big Hollywood job.

Ahead of me, the highway stretched off southward, narrowing in perspective in the sea of sage bushes spread out on each side of it. The wind was coming from the west, as usual, riffling the tops of the bushes. As far as I could see along the road ahead, there was no house, no other gas station, nothing.

Chalk up some points for Sergeant Brode's theory.

The customer getting gas finally took off. I drove over to the pumps and had the attendant fill my tank and check the oil and water. While he was at it, I asked where the men's room was.

“Around on the side,” he told me. “Second door. But you need a key. It's hanging on the inside of the office door.”

Finding the key, I used it. No one was in the men's room, conscious or otherwise. This was one of the station's dull days.

Outside once again, I stood on the narrow concrete sidewalk that ran along the side of the building. Two cars were pulled up, facing the side of the building. A bald patch of the desert had been worn free of sage brush by long use, but fifteen or twenty feet away, the desert began again.

The car farthest from the highway was ready for the junkyard. The other probably belonged to the attendant.

Going around front again, I paid for the gas and oil he'd put into the Ford, but when I tried to talk to him about yesterday's excitement, it turned out he wasn't there when it all took place.

“I take the evening shift,” he said. “Youngster has the daytime. You a cop?”

“Private,” I told him. “A friend on the force was telling me about it.”

He nodded. He was a big, slow-moving man, and he would always be sunburned or wind-burned, or both. I wished he had been the one on duty, the day before, at the crucial time. He struck me as the kind of man who would notice a good deal more than you would think.

We eyed each other for a moment. On impulse, I dug out my credentials and showed him my P. I. license.

He hardly gave it a glance.

“Come on inside,” he said. “I get enough of this wind when I have to, without standing out in it when I don't have to.”

We went into the office. He left the door open, but the corner was so situated that none of the wind reached us, once we were past the office doorway.

“The key,” he said.

I still held it in my hand.

“Sorry. I forgot.” I hung it on its nail.

He grinned.

“I didn't mean that the way it sounded, but it's just as well you leave it here. I've got a spare somewhere, but I'd never be able to find it, with all the stuff lying around. The key just started up again. After yesterday, I mean. Before that, anyone could get into the john without a key.” Almost as an after-thought, he added: “I was the one who had to clean up in there.”

“There wasn't any blood, was there?”

He shook his head.

“No, but the injured man threw up a little, while he was regaining consciousness. He wasn't feeling any too good, for awhile, after taking that crack on the skull. Can't blame him none.”

“I understand that whoever did it burned the car, out in the desert, later in the afternoon.”

“That's right. You could see the smoke going up in a column, a mile or so back of here. We did a lot of business. People just kept stopping to watch the excitement. Some of them bought gas just because they were handy to it. I could have used extra help, for awhile there.”

“I saw the smoke from this end of town,” I said. “I thought it was an early-season brushfire.”

“Nah,” he scoffed. “Too soon for brushfires. Don't wish any brushfires on me, not this early in the season. We have enough trouble with those later on, every summer. No way to help it. One of these days, this whole place will burn real bad, if the owner don't keep the brush cleared, out back. If those tanks ever go, huh!” He chuckled. “Forget about it.”

“Something you said,” I put in. “About the burning car. You said it was only a mile back in the desert from here. I gathered from the police story it was seven or eight miles away.”

“Well, maybe a bit more than a mile,” he said carefully. “Nowheres near seven miles. Call it a mile-and-a-half, at the most two. Distances can be tricky in this country.”

“Are the police aware it was that close to here?”

“They must be,” he said, with a shrug. “They were all over the area. Even the fire chief was down here.”

“Show me, will you?”

“I don't know if we can pick it out from here,” he said. “The fire was put out before I came on, around four o'clock. I think they even took what was left of the burned car away, too. Quite a lot of dust roiled up out there, for awhile. Now it's all settled and quiet.”

“But there might be a blackened patch we could see,” I suggested.

“Might be able to see something,” he admitted.

We went outside, and I followed him around to the south side of the building, back along the narrow sidewalk to where the junk pile was parked at the rear end of the walkway.

Standing at the rear edge of the sidewalk, he squinted across the sage-covered desert. The late afternoon wind was picking up. Clumps of sagebrush tossed under the steady pouring force of the wind.

“No,” he decided, after trying to pick out the location of the fire. “Can't make out anything. The brush itself helps hide it. There would have to be a pretty big patch of burn-off out there, before you could pick it out of all that.”

He swept his arm around at the immense plain stretching away to a horizon so distant that it seemed to blend imperceptibly with a low dim violet jagged line of a mountain range far beyond the horizon.

“Okay if I climb up onto this relic?” I asked, pointing at the old car.

“Good idea.”

We both climbed up onto the wreck's hood, but after staring for quite awhile, I realized it was still no use. We could see nothing out there, no trace of the fire of the afternoon before.

“Anyway,” he said, climbing down from the old car, “she was burning about there.”

He pointed. I sighted along his arm. There was nothing out there to use as a landmark, so I was no better off than if he hadn't shown me the approximate location of the burn site.

“Okay, thanks.”

Back in the office, I asked: “Can you show me on a map how I can get in there?”

“Why not? I know those old traces as well as anyone, I reckon. I even had to help the police yesterday afternoon, when I first got here.”

Taking a road map down from a rack of them, he opened it up.

“Here, I'll draw it on a regular road map. The tracks don't show on road maps. They're mostly only old dirt roads. Hardly anyone uses them, anymore.”

With his drawn map as a guide, I drove almost three miles farther along the southbound highway before turning into a little dirt road winding off through the brush. The track it connected with was right where he said it would be, but I probably would have missed it on the first pass if he hadn't given exact mileage to guide on: l.9 speedometer miles from the highway turnoff.

The track went meandering through the sage flats for half a mile before it brought me to a crossroad of sorts. Following his drawn-in directions on the road map, I turned left and went a couple of miles north along that until I came to the area I was seeking.

The late-afternoon sun was taking on a red-gold tinge, but it wasn't enough to soften the black ugliness of the place where the car had been set afire.

The entire area was black with soot. Quite far out in all directions, some of the bushes were scorched on the stems and branches of their sides nearest where the car had burned. Closer in, clumps of sage were gone completely: only black, smoke-smudged roots showed, sticking up out of the ground.

As the station attendant had said, they had hauled the burned-out car away, which left not much else to look at. A year from now, perhaps less, the desert would have even the scorched patch wiped clean and completely grown over again.

Clambering up onto the hood of my own car, I couldn't help grinning at what I saw.

“All the smart cop-work,” I murmured aloud in the silence. “All the high-powered brass.”

Because there, no more than a mile away, off to the west, was the back of the gas station building.

And, of course, everything fell into place.

I knew the hi-jacking could have been pulled off by one man. And if Ben Crane could crawl for miles through the desert after the beating he had taken, those weeks ago, he could certainly get through this stretch of sagebrush and pick up his own car from where he had left it at the paved highway, when he began his spur-of-the-moment hijack play, at that gas station.

I was satisfied it could have been done, but I decided to check it out.

Taking an old red waste-cloth from the trunk of my car, I tied it as tightly as I could to the top of the Ford's radio antenna, then I pushed the antenna as high as it would go. Noting the time, I started walking through the brush toward the distant gas station.

Every so often, I stopped and looked back, to make certain that I could still see my improvised red beacon. I didn't want to lose track of the Ford and have to spend the oncoming night wandering back and forth, out there, trying to locate the car it was tied to.

It was all right, though. When I was halfway to the gas station, I could still see the little red flag, so I walked the rest of the way without worrying about it anymore.

Fifty feet or so from the back of the gas station, I checked my time. I had walked it in twenty minutes. From there, I could still just make out the barest glimpse of dull red. The car beneath it was completely out of sight in the sea of sage, but the red cloth was still visible.

Good enough.

Before starting the return journey, I checked my time again, because I intended to make the return trip at a trot.

It was a long way to jog, and getting buffeted by the rising evening wind from the left rear quarter didn't help any. But finally the red cloth was just ahead, whipping straight out in the wind.

Taking out my watch, I burst through the breast-high sage into the burned-clear patch and stopped, panting from the run.

Twelve minutes.

And something told me Ben Crane could certainly have run it in less. If he was the one who had pulled the hi-jacking in the first place.

I didn't understand what the voice said. The sound of anyone's voice out there was shock enough. Even as I jolted into motion, I was thinking gratefully: “For once I'm ready, up on my feet and primed for anything and anyone.”

Even the watch was in my left hand: the right hand was free.

I drove it under my coat, turning in a balanced spin at the same time. The gun was out and cocked. The muscles of my jaw and face were as tight and taut as the tendons in my right hand and wrist.

I was not about to be a pushover again for another Jeff/Smiles combination.

The woman's eyes stared at me, round with astonishment and horror. She reached out one hand toward me in a pushing motion, while she gasped, “What is it?”

For one long eternal second, she was lined up in the sights.

Somehow, I held the shot. The sudden tension slackened inside me. My muscles loosened. I straightened from the shooting crouch I had fallen into naturally, from habit and training going back a long ways.

Easing the hammer down, I slid the .38 Special back into its socket under my left arm. The palm of my right hand was slick with sweat. Taking out a handkerchief, I first wiped my quivering mouth with it, pressing it, still folded, against my lips until they stopped jumping. Then I wiped the palms of both hands, before putting the handkerchief carefully away.

Then I walked over to her across the patch of blackened desert.

It was the young woman I had seen in Florian's, the one with the mink stole, in Wyatt's outer office.

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “You surprised me. I wasn't expecting anyone to be out here.”

Her laughter was nervous. Her voice had a breathless catch in it.

“I surprised you!” she cried. “You came running out of those bushes so suddenly, I didn't know what to think.”

She glanced toward where I had emerged into the clearing.

“Is anyone chasing you? I can leave, if there's going to be any…”

“No one is chasing me,” I assured her. “I'm practicing for my debut on TV tonight, for the next Olympics tryout.”

Her brown eyes snapped suspiciously.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked, almost in a threatening tone.

I nodded.

“Yes. Are you one of those women who don't like to be kidded?”

“By someone I know and like, I don't mind. But I don't know you, and I think I don't like you, either.”

“That's been known to happen before, too.”

Turning, she walked around my car, headed for her own, a short distance beyond mine. Glancing back at me over her shoulder, she stopped walking, turned, and watched me for a moment, frowning.

“Where have I seen you?”

She still looked irritated, but her eyes were curious now, too.

“In Florian's,” I told her. “I picked up your mink.”

After a moment, she smiled.

“Oh, yes, now I remember. I was a bit squiffed.”

Strolling around the back end of my car until I was reasonably close to her, but not too near to start her on her way again, I ventured to disagree.

“You looked more exhausted than anything.”

“No,” she said positively. “I was squiffed, no doubt of it.”

“No one gets squiffed anymore. It's gone out. It isn't done nowadays, it simply isn't.”

“I do,” she insisted. “I get squiffed. And quite often, too.” Gazing off at the evening sky in the west, she added: “Too often, I suppose.”

After thinking about that a moment more, she shrugged and was with me once again.

“What was that fast-draw gun business there? If for any reason you can't tell me, please don't, of course. But…I'm curious.”

The wind tossed her long brown hair, held it in a rippling stream behind her head. She turned her head slightly to face directly into the wind, but her eyes remained on mine.

“And what happened to your face?” she asked, examining me closely. “You know, with a face like yours, you really ought to be more careful.”

I couldn't help grinning. Maybe that was what she'd been trying for. I touched the bandage taped across my left cheekbone. It felt a bit swollen.

“Why don't we sit in my car?” she suggested. “While you decide just how much you dare tell me.”

Her eyes were closed almost to slits, perhaps squinted against the wind, but maybe she was simply trying to keep me from seeing the glint of amusement in them.

She strode across the rough ground so strongly that I was surprised to notice that she wasn't wearing flats on her feet. Her high-heeled shoes interfered in no way with her long, free-swinging walk.

I slid into the passenger seat beside her.

“Leave your window open,” she advised. “I'll close this one. That should keep the wind out of here, and we'll still get enough air. God, how I hate that wind! No, I don't, either. Oh, hell, I do and I don't.”

“That dashboard of yours,” I observed, “looks good enough to eat.”

She laughed. “Have a bite.”

“Later. It'll spoil my supper, eating betwixt meals.”

“Betwixt,” she murmured, holding out cigarettes toward me.

I shook my head and took out one of mine.

“What's your name, gunslinger?” she asked, after lighting up.

“Jim Brandon. What's yours?”

“Make it Jan. Now, why the gunplay, back there? I think I have a right to know. I have a shivery feeling I'm lucky I'm still breathing.”

“You're too right,” I agreed. “Gave me a turn, too.”

“A turn, yet!” She laughed, throwing her head back and giving the laugh full throttle.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked. “A spot this isolated…”

She shrugged.

“Nothing better to do, I suppose. I wanted to see where all that smoke came from, yesterday. Besides, someone sort of told me not to. Not exactly told me, but…”

“And you're a girl who doesn't like being told what not to do,” I finished for her.

In response, her smile was quick and her eyes seemed to dance.

“Right. There's only been one man who might have told me what to do and what not to do. But he didn't stay around long enough to try it.”

She gazed straight ahead through the windshield, but I didn't think she was engrossed by the spectacle of the wind tossing clouds of desert dust up into the air. Gradually, her features softened. When she finally turned back to me, it was as if she had forgotten that I was there.

Her eyes were touched with pain. She seemed almost bewildered. Whoever she had been remembering had gotten through to her, and apparently she was unable to get him out.

“Sorry,” she said, laughing lightly, embarrassed. “Day dreaming…”

“This guy who told you, or asked you, not to come out here: did he say why?”

She shook her head.

“No special reason. Just that the police might still be going over the crime scene out here, and they wouldn't want sightseers hanging around.”

“No other reason?”

She shook her head, then turned and looked at me closely.

“No other reason.” She continued to watch me a moment before saying, “You sound as if you know who told me…”

“Brock Townsend?”

“Hey, wait a damn minute!” she cried, sitting up straight behind the steering wheel. “I want a little more of this, Mister Jim Brandon. Just how could you know that? Neither Brock nor I have tried to keep our little games a big cute secret, but we haven't had any sky-writing done about them, either. Not that I'm aware.”

“Relax, Miss… Relax, Miss Jan…”

“You can leave off the Miss part, Brandon . We're not back on the old plantation. And you haven't answered my question, either. I want that question answered, because if I don't get an answer that I like, I have an idea you just might get the same question put to you by some of Brock's friends.”

“I already have.”

“What?”

“A couple of good old Brock's friends already asked me a few questions. Where do you think I collected this welt on my face?”

“Good for them,” she said through clenched teeth. “And if I'm not happy with the answer I get, that's just a sample of what you'll get. Give, cowboy. How does a sleazy little man like you know anything about Brock Townsend and me…unless you've been doing some snooping. And, so help me, if you have been snooping, I'll see that you…”

She stopped talking. Her hands gripped the steering wheel so hard, the knuckles were white.

I spoke slowly and carefully.

“The day I handed you that mink at Florian's, the one you forgot to pick off the floor, I had been sitting and standing right where you saw me, for most of that morning. A few minutes before Smiles poured you through the doorway, two men came along and talked to each other. The older one called the younger one Ted, and the receptionist called the older one Mr. Townsend. Shortly afterward, Ted called him Brock. Now, Brock seemed worried about a young woman named Jan, who had stayed up overnight, gambling. Ted didn't seem worried at all, but he tried to ease the other man's mind. The receptionist let them go on inside. A few minutes later, you showed, dropped your mink, got it back, and also went on inside”

Before going on, I watched the darkness deepen outside the car.

“It doesn't take a towering genius to figure out the cast members in those scenes. I am a man of reasonable perspicacity. I took one, and added it to another one, and came up with the sum of two. Would you really call that a case of snooping, Missy Jan, Ma'am?”

Slowly, she settled back against the seatback's upholstery. She didn't seem to like my explanation to be so simple.

“That's how you know?”

“I don't know anything,” I insisted. “But I can do a bit of guessing.”

Her upper teeth gnawed gently on her lower lip. Her eyes had that bottomlessly venomous look any woman can give you, for any reason at all. Or for no reason at all.

Gradually, the look left her eyes, but not as if she wanted it to.

“Sorry,” she said abruptly. “I guess I'm a little on edge.”

Without a beat, she whirled on me again.

“The way you pulled that gun on me, awhile ago, it's no wonder I'm…”

“That's right,” I interrupted. “It's my fault again.”

“Well, isn't it?” she snapped.

“All right, goddamn it, it is,” I shouted.

“All right, then,” she said, her voice mild and gentle and sweet.

Her face wore a look of satisfaction. She wouldn't quite permit her lips to wear the smile they wanted to, but she couldn't keep them from hinting at it.

She had gotten my goat. All was well. She had won all the chips she wanted to win.

I watched the almost smug expression on her face.

“You really didn't have to put me through all that,” I chided her. “You already knew you could handle me without half trying.”

“Through all what?” she asked, without looking up from the meaningless fussing her hands were busy performing. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Of course you don't.”

I let it go.

“All right, Jan, so your loving man was behaving the way loving men always act, telling you what to keep away from, where not to go. And, naturally, you had to go precisely there.”

Indifferently, she gazed out the window on her side of the car.

“Naturally,” she murmured.

I watched as her face lost the pleased look and became empty of expression.

“And you're right,” she said presently. “About what the lover man always gets around to doing. I suppose I should have left him long ago, before it got to him this badly. But he has been…very good to me. I hate to…”

She let the sentence die without even attempting to finish it.

I tried not to yawn, but apparently part of it got out.

She glanced across at me, stiffening.

“If I'm boring you with my problems, please let me know,” she drawled icily.

I shrugged.

“All women bore all men with their problems. It's one of the penalties women exact of men, in exchange for their less boring qualities and capabilities.”

“Is that so? Well, if you'll be kind enough to get the hell out of my car, I'll see to it that you are bored no more.”

Opening the passenger door, I got out.

She started the motor and raced it. I could hardly hear her parting words over the racket the motor made.

“Nice to have seen you, Mr. Brandon…although not to have seen you would have been nicer still.”

She started off fast. Her tires slashed at the ground.

I had to jump back quickly to escape the choking swirl of dust they raised.

In a few minutes, the wind cleared the dust away in a fleeing cloud, but by then I could no longer see her car, only the trail of dust its wheels had churned up, going rapidly farther away across the early evening desert.

Seven

When I got back to town, I tried to reach Sergeant Brode. He was out. I left my new office phone number, and asked to have him call me, when he had a chance.

Supper came off the hot plate, after which I bought a newspaper, before going back to the office.

Only one of the other desk-renters was there that late, which explained why the place was still open. He was bent over insurance policies spread out on the desk in front of him. When I went in, he glanced up, nodded politely, and went on with what he was doing.

In my rear corner, I remembered I hadn't turned my desk so I could easily see out the alley window. Swinging it around, I sat behind it and it was the way I wanted it.

The place was silent except for the occasional rustle of one of the insurance policies. I switched on my desk lamp. That made two lights in the office, mine and the insurance guy's.

During the day, with all the other renters there, the office was a quiet bedlam. Now it was silent. I could hear the far-off blast of an auto horn from the Strip, half a block away, but it was muted by walls and distance, and it seemed to come from another, more strenuous world.

I wished I had a drink. Maybe I ought to get a bottle and keep it in one of the desk drawers, like the private dicks in movies. Who knows, it might even be good for business. Atmosphere. Give the clients' confidence. Maybe they don't trust a P. I. who stays sober, most of the time: they felt they weren't getting as arduous service as they were paying for.

Checking the desk's drawers, I found it hadn't been designed with the special bottle needs of private detectives as a main consideration. There was no deep-drawer to keep a bottle in. Perhaps if I got going again, and began making money, I could get a desk with a drawer deep enough to hold my bottle of booze. It always takes money to make money.

For awhile, I browsed in the local newspaper. There were still a dozen lines on the hi-jacking, but nothing new on it. The only other item that caught and held my attention had Chuck Macy's byline, and told about a shooting victim who had been found in the desert, early the previous afternoon.

For a moment as I read that, I could feel my pulse quicken from sluggish to slightly activated. Sitting straighter, I read it through carefully. The victim turned out to be a small-time hoodlum they had identified as Mindy Kemp. And he hadn't been shot with a rifle, which may have left Ben Crane out of this one, at least.

When I thought that, about the rifle, I had to grin at myself. By now, this Crane fellow not only had twelve or thirteen grand for financing his revenge spree, but at least three handguns he had gotten from Fats and the other two hoods he had buffaloed, out at the filling station south of town. More than enough firepower to shoot Mindy Kemp.

Up front, the insurance man was preparing to leave. Before turning off his desk lamp, he turned and called, “Good night.”

I wished him good night and watched him leave. I used the phone, but they told me Brode hadn't yet returned to headquarters. I left my number again. After going through the rest of the newspaper, I dropped it in the waste basket beside my desk.

A man was standing on the other side of the desk, watching me.

I caught my breath.

When I could get words out, I said, “Good evening. I didn't hear you come in.”

He may have nodded. The desk light didn't illuminate his face, just distorted it a bit. He wore a yellow-checked jacket over a soiled electric-blue shirt, which he hadn't buttoned. I could see his torso, completely hairless but brown from much sun.

“Your name Brandon ?”

“That's right.”

“Mr. Mercator wants to see you.”

“That's fine. Now that you know where I am, you can tell Mr. Mercator where he can find me. He can use any map of the area.”

“Mr. Mercator wants you to come with me. Now.”

“Tell Mr. Mercator I can't come with you. Now. Tell Mr. Mercator I'm waiting for a vital phone call from my associates in Istanbul .”

His brown right hand disappeared somewhere inside his shirt and a blade clicked into sight.

“No,” he said seriously. “Mr. Mercator wants you to come now. He wants to see you.”

Raising my eyes from the switchblade, I studied the sections of his face that were partially revealed by light shining upward from my desk-top, and reflected downward from the ceiling. I used my right hand to slowly scratch my chest through my shirt.

“Tell Mr. Mercator I'll be delighted to see him, here, now, tonight.”

“Mr. Mercator wants…”

“Oh, hell,” I growled. “Listen, go tell Mr. Mercator to come here himself. When you tell him I am unable to leave my office, he will understand and he will then decide to come here himself.”

He stared down at me. His hair seemed to be combed in that careful way young men wore it lately. It looked sloppy and quite dirty, but whenever you saw one of them taking infinite pains combing it and arranging it, and it still turned out looking a mess, you wondered if perhaps your own values of neatness weren't somewhat out of whack.

“Mr. Mercator…”

“It's all right,” I told him gently. “Mr. Mercator is nearby. This is a small city. He will understand. Go tell him to come here, and I will be delighted to see him. It is all right. I will wait here for another half hour, at least. I wouldn't want to miss meeting Mr. Mercator.”

Out of the caves of his eyes, he stared from beneath thick eyebrows below the prow of his forelock.

It took awhile, but finally he seemed to make up his mind…what there was of it…and turned to walk silently toward the front of the office. He wore dark sneakers and no socks. The skin of his heel tendons wore parallel dirt lines.

Once he was out of the light of my desk lamp, I couldn't see him, and I could never hear him at all.

I gave him a minute before I went to the front of the office and turned on a couple of desk-lights near the entrance door. I wanted no more switchblade morons geniing before me out of the darkness.

Shortly afterward, Brode called.

“Our boy Ben Crane could have done that hi-jacking by himself after all,” I said, and I told him why.

He thought about it a minute.

“Okay,” he said, “I'll keep that in mind. Chances are, though, I won't be able to use your theory. The higher-ups are convinced it's mob work. Different types have been oozing into town all day. Some of them are nesting out at Florian's, so I guess Wyatt sent for those. But a few just disappeared. We're alerted to keep picking them up, whenever we spot them.”

“The name Mercator mean anything to you?”

He was quiet awhile.

“I seem to hear a small tinkle in my brain-pan, but I can't fix wherever it's coming from.”

“All right, maybe a tinkle is good enough for a start,” I said. “Check into the name, if you get a chance. He might be one of the ones who disappeared.”

“Will do. And about our boy, Ben Crane, I'll try to slip what you told me through to someone…but you know the way they are, upstairs.”

“Yes, I know.”

I was just hanging up when I had my second visitor.

This one I saw coming through the door, the brown-and-white shoes, beige slacks, maroon silk shirt, sky-blue silk scarf, and a beautifully tailored jacket that may have been anything between blue- and purple-colored in a daylight sun, but which only confused my optic nerves in the lights of that office.

I was looking at Ted Fenton's tiny pencil-thin mustache, at the almost offensively healthy appearance of his skin, and at his only slightly disdainful china-blue eyes.

“I don't believe this,” he marveled.

He stood across the desk with his hands on his hips and examined me.

“What can I do for you?” I asked politely.

“You really are a private detective, then?”

“That's what the license says.”

He shook his head in mock wonderment.

“And you do your highly confidential work out of this sort of place?”

His hand fluttered around. Every stick of furniture in the joint seemed to shrink and age slightly, as if they were suddenly ashamed of being the mass-produced junk they had been intended to be from the beginning.

“I sure enough do,” I said. “And I think you've got the wrong address. You go outside and turn left, up to the corner. There, you turn either way, and the first place you come to with lights too high for you to spit over, that's where you go in. Go right up on stage…they all have stages…and start right in with your cute little act. You'll kill them. I sense you've got it, that certain something that only comes along every so often.”

“Oh, it has a ready wit,” he chortled. “Leaden, but ready.”

Weary of it, I sighed.

“Look, Teddy Boy, it's been one of those days, like. State your business and go, or vice versa.”

“I'd certainly prefer to go,” he said primly.

Shrugging, he checked the steel chair standing at one end of my desk, took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and flipped it at the dust he apparently discovered there. I caught a whiff of something when he pulled out the handkerchief. It might have been Brut.

“Is that Chanel I smell?”

He stopped in the act of seating himself and glared at me. His eyes were mean as only blue eyes can get. His mouth pinched in a tad at the corners, but those opaque eyes still stared right at me.

When he spoke, he said tightly: “Don't let whatever you think you see here fool you, Brandon. In my time, and in a place or two, I have watched some people squirm for a good deal less than…”

I held up a hand.

“Please, it's late. What do you want?”

His eyes were still frosted, but he seemed to be working on himself. In a moment, his teeth flashed in a smile, white in the tanned field of his face.

“Not a thing. I want nothing for myself.”

I stood up.

“Fine. Then we can both go. Thanks for dropping by.”

“But Brock Townsend wants some protection,” he hurriedly added. “And for some incredible reason, he thinks you can provide it for him.”

“Protection?” That surprised me. “From what?”

He chuckled.

“That's what I was wondering. But…” He shrugged elaborately. “He wants you. So I came to get you for him.”

“Just like that.”

He looked puzzled.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You waltz in here, snap your fingers, and I'm supposed to go hurrying out, trundling along in your wake, like a poodle you just bought and paid for.” I stood staring down at him. “Not this time, Teddy Boy.”

“Cut out the Teddy Boy bit,” he snapped.

“Shove off.”

“Are you for hire or not?”

“I take clients, but not this way.”

Waving a hand impatiently, he persisted.

“Are you in business or not? Just tell me, yes or no. If it's no, I can go back and tell him that. It wasn't my idea at all. To me, getting you is getting less than nothing.”

He busied himself, ranging his glance around the office, shaking his head in disdain.

“A private snoop with an office that might as well be on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.”

Ignoring that, I said: “I'm in business, all right. The client comes and tells me what he wants. He doesn't send his secretary, or his man Friday, or whatever you are to Brock Townsend. If he wants to see me, he'll have to come around himself. He…especially he…will have to do his own job of selling, this time.”

Slowly, Fenton rose. Although he was quick and lithe, he seemed to unfold. He was tall. His eyes were almost level with mine. He peered at me quizzically.

After a moment, he murmured, “That's interesting, that ‘especially he' part. Why?”

I didn't bother answering.

After waiting a moment, he smiled and turned away.

“Stay out of dark alleys, Brandon . You never know.”

“I do my best work in dark alleys.”

He laughed.

“I don't doubt it.”

Fenton glided the dark length of the office into the lighted area near the entrance doorway. Then he was gone.

I wondered what protection Brock Townsend thought he could get by hiring me.

Turning off all the lights on my way out, I made sure the door was securely locked behind me before I descended the three corridor steps to the street door.

Outside, I glanced toward the glare of lights along the Strip, half a block away, but I couldn't see anyone who might have been friend Fenton.

My car was parked the other way.

I shouldn't have looked toward the lights. Before my eyes got used to the darkness, I had walked almost to the end of my building, where a vague figure leaned against a tall slim palm bole.

For a second, I thought it might be Fenton, but dismissed that possibility. Then I heard the whisper of footsteps coming rapidly behind me from the alley next to my building.

Spinning around on my left foot, I braced the right foot behind me. His arms were spread wide, reaching for a body-grab.

I didn't put too much into the left, just laced it out, fast. It jolted him. I felt teeth under the center knuckle, so I pulled the punch to keep from getting any unnecessary knuckle cuts.

He was hurt, but his forward momentum forced him to keep coming.

The left hadn't done much more than cut in fast and slow him. He lunged clumsily, trying to straighten up, already turning toward me again, one hand pawing against my chest.

I brought the right around, and I put weight and muscle into it. It crunched into the side of his skull.

He hit the sidewalk, moaning. For a moment, I felt a touch of panic. You can kill a man, hitting him in the side of the skull, if you hit too high, and too hard.

Then I remembered the other one, who had been leaning against the palm tree farther along. I stepped quickly away from the one on the sidewalk and pulled the gun.

Sure enough, there he came. The lights on the Strip were behind me, now. They glinted on the blade in his right hand.

I held the gun out, so he could see it.

“Don't do it,” I warned him. “Mr. Mercator wouldn't like that.”

Whether it was seeing the gun or because he was alone now, I don't know. But he slowed and stopped moving, and just stood there, panting, looking from me to the one down on the sidewalk, and back to me again.

“Put the knife down,” I ordered.

“Mr. Mercator wants…”

“First, put the knife down,” I told him impatiently.I felt as if I was caught in some kind of pointless rehearsal for a thirty-year-old vaudeville skit involving a character named Mr. Mercator, who never appeared, but everyone talked about him until after awhile it got to be funny. I hadn't reached the laugh-out-loud stage yet, but I suppose I could get there, if it kept up much longer.

“Put it down on the sidewalk.”

After a moment, he stooped and laid the knife carefully on the sidewalk at his feet. “Now go help your friend.”

Going over, he bent above the one on the sidewalk.

“Hey, Chavez, you okay, man?”

Keeping an eye on the two of them, I eased over and put the heel of one foot on the blade of the switch-knife and yanked up on the handle. The blade snapped off, close to the hilt.

Its owner saw what I'd done.

“Hey, you broke my knife.”

“It was an accident. I'll get you another one.”

“That was a good knife,” he said mournfully. He seemed genuinely bothered.

I kept an eye out, up toward the Strip. Now would be a terrific time for a squad car to show. Naturally, none did.

I watched as he helped Chavez sit up. Chavez held one hand against the side of his head above the ear, and the other in front of his face. He didn't moan or make any sound after that first groan, when he went down. Now, he staggered to his feet, shaking his pal's helping hand off. They both stood there staring at me.

I wondered whether I should bother turning them in.

“Have you two got a car?”

Chavez just stood there, staring at me.

The other one said, “Yuh.”

“Let's go see Mr. Mercator.”

It took a moment for it to get through to them. Then the knife-swinger nudged Chavez with an elbow, and they walked past me.

I kept the gun in my hand as I followed them down the street past my car to an old Plymouth , parked near the corner.

“Get in front,” I told them “Both of you.”

Chavez slid behind the wheel and started the motor. It sounded wheezy. Switch-Blade sat beside him. I got in back.

They stayed away from the Strip, once they got across it, working their way through the darker side streets until they reached the highway that went northwest past Florian's. They turned onto that and drove out almost as far as El Rancho Motel, then cut left on the dirt driveway beside the lumberyard and ducked into the alley behind the row of stores.

I didn't have time to see if the old man was still smoking, back in the darkness of his porch.

They drove almost to the far end of the alley before stopping in front of a shack, two short of the end of the row.

It was as black as a faro dealer's heart when Chavez cut the lights.

“Leave the lights on,” I told him.

“It'll drain the battery,” he growled, in a guttural voice.

“Turn them on.”

Petulantly, he pulled out the light switch and threw open the door beside him.

“Don't get out.”

Swinging his head around, he glared at me, his teeth showing in his broad Indian face, his lips drawn back in a silent snarl.

“I get out first, then you.”

We did it that way. I watched carefully as both of them climbed out.

“Now, where's Mr. Mercator?”

“In there,” Switchblade said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at a broken-down shanty that had what looked like opaque paper instead of glass in two lighted windows fronting the alley.

“Go on in,” I instructed. “You first, then Chavez, then me.”

I didn't want Chavez too far from me. The other one didn't seem especially dangerous, for all his knife act, but Chavez seemed cut from different cactus.

We picked our way across a tiny front yard, which was littered with empty tin cans. The bonehead leading the way was almost to the front door when we heard sirens coming out along the highway from the city. The wailing rose as it came nearer, reached a high sustained pitch as it passed the brick stores separating our alley from the highway, and went howling north toward Florian's. By the time the siren sound dropped lower, more of them were screaming out from the city after it.

All three of us stood where we were, listening.

Switchblade turned his head and looked at me over Chavez's shoulder. I didn't say or do anything, just listened to the siren racket. It sounded like a regular flock of them, but I suppose it could have been only two or three making that much noise.

They went howling past, sounding as if they were right there in the alley with us, although the highway was easily almost an average city block away.

Finally I told Switchblade: “Go on inside.”

Stepping onto the wooden front porch, he opened the door. Light poured out on him and Chavez. We stepped forward into the glare of light. The room we entered was brightly lit. A door in the opposite wall stood wide open.

Following the two of them across the first room, I kept a little to one side, trying to stay out of the dimmer light from the second room. I didn't want to find myself entering a roomful of rough specimens.

A quick glance through the open doorway showed me only a man seated at a big wooden table, over to the right. I didn't notice the girl until I went through the doorway and stepped quickly over to the left to lean my back against the wall.

I still held the .38 down at my side. It seemed a sensible precaution.

The man sitting at the table noted the gun I held, then glanced at Chavez and Switchblade.

He didn't smile. Very seriously, he said, “Thank you for coming, Mr. Brandon.”

“After awhile it seemed the easiest thing to do,” I said. “You're Mercator?”

He nodded slightly.

To Switchblade, he said, “Bernard, you and Chavez wait in the other room.”

To the girl, he added: “You go with them, Roberta.”

She was sitting on a porcelain-top kitchen table across the room from Mercator. She paid no attention to him, instead taking me in with her lively eyes. She smiled.

“Hey, Daddy-O, you're kinda cute. I mean, underneath all those bumps and cuts and welts and things.”

It took me a moment to recognize her. She was the tiny one at the end of the line of Florian's chorus girls I had seen the day I worked out there, or the half-day. She was the one who had smiled at me.

“You're not so bad yourself,” I told her.

Her face was young. Her smile was pert and mischievous. Her eyes twinkled pale blue through the squinched-up flesh around them, whenever she smiled.

She wore a blue-gray sweater, tight as a drum skin over a marvelous pair of breasts. Her skirt was short and too tight, and showed off her legs five or six inches above round knees. Her feet wore black-patent-leather high-heeled pumps. She wore no stockings, and no hat on her ear-length silver-yellow hair.

The skin on the insides of her thighs was very white and smooth-looking.

While I was taking in the unexpected vision of loveliness in that squalid room, I found myself wondering once again how a little thing like her could get work at Florian's, along with the usual long-legged types they always hired.

“Bobbie,” said Mercator quietly, “go along with your boy friend. Mr. Brandon and I have business to discuss.”

“Say, Brandon ,” she asked, “have you got an extra dose or two?”

Sharply, Mercator ordered, “Stop that, Roberta.”

She ignored him, keeping her eyes on mine. When I didn't answer right away, she made a jabbing motion at the upper part of her left arm with her right hand.

“You know,” she explained, “for a little kickee-o. I'm on horse, or I was, before I got to this town. Now…”

She flashed an irritated glance in Mercator's direction.

“Now anything will have to do, Brandon-Daddy.”

Her eyes crinkled. The left eye winked at me.

“I'll screw for you,” she wheedled, smiling impishly.

She said it so artlessly, that somehow I wasn't repelled by the notion. I couldn't keep from smiling.

“Sorry, Roberta,” I told her. “I haven't got a thing with me.”

Lightly, she sprang down from the table.

“Oh, Daddy-dear, that's the very end. Not nothing? Honest Injun?”

I shook my head. She was such a tiny little thing, but a knockout. I couldn't take my eyes off her.

“Not even nothing, I'm afraid.”

She shrugged.

“Okay, poppa-mia. I still think you're cute, even if you do the square thing.”

Coming over to me, she reached up and caressed my cheek with the palm of her hand, and flashed her brilliant joyous youngster's smile at me. Turning, she went through the doorway into the front room of the shack, leaving the connecting door open behind her.

I could hear her husky happy voice talking excitedly to Chavez and Bernard out there.

It seemed a waste.

“Mr. Brandon, you must pardon Roberta,” said Mercator. “She is like a lot of these young people, essentially good, but much too wild. I believe it's something called kicks.”

Rising, he crossed the room to close the door she had left open, then returned to seat himself again behind his table.

“Please have a seat, Mr. Brandon. I'd like to talk to you.”

“I'll stand,” I said. “Thanks, though. What did you want to talk about?”

His face was swarthy and wide, the nose and jaw strong looking and prominent. He wore a conservative brown pinstriped business suit which he hadn't bought at a discount store. He also hadn't bought it recently.

Mercator puzzled me. The two punks he had sent for me didn't seem to be in his league at all. Except for a barely noticeable wilting of the collar of his shirt, he had every appearance of a prosperous man in complete control of a money-earning enterprise.

“I should like you to secure certain information for me,” he said slowly. “I will, of course, pay your customary fee.”

“One fifty a day and expenses,” I told him, to see what he'd do with it.

His lips pursed. Nodding, he took a thin leather wallet from an inside pocket, and opened it in front of him, there at the table. It looked like a limp book that stayed open without spine enough to snap it shut.

Drawing out some bills, he put them on the corner of the table nearest where I stood.

“Will a hundred dollars be all right as a retainer?”

“First, I'll have to know what kind of information you wish me to secure for you.”

“Naturally.”

Returning the wallet to where he had gotten it, he leaned back in his chair.

“If you're wondering about…”

His head tilted toward the door to the front room.

“…my associates, and my use of this place, I want to assure you that I'm not ordinarily this Spartan. Mr. Chavez lives here, and he has very kindly allowed Bernard and his girl and myself to lodge here, off and on, and to use it as a meeting-place, such as this between you and myself. Strictly temporary, until a certain condition of tension… I might even say of danger, which we have encountered in this city…has been given sufficient time to disperse itself. Or until I can discover the source of the danger, in which case, I may be able to disperse it myself.”

He chose his words with such care, that I couldn't bring myself to tell him he hadn't told me a thing so far.

So I just asked, “Danger?”

“Did you notice a certain article in today's newspaper?” he asked, watching me closely. “About a man who was found shot to death, out in the desert?”

“Yes, I read it. I can't recall his name.”

“Mindy Kemp was his name,” Mercator said. “I sent him down here, a sort of reconnaissance. Recently I heard that there might be possibilities in this town. I thought I would come by and look into them.”

“What sort of possibilities?”

Mercator studied me, with his dark eyes surrounded by a field of finely-lined skin that had seen a lot of desert, over a period of years.

“That,” he replied softly, “is part of the information I would like you to secure for me.”

I shook my head.

“Mr. Mercator, I'd like to oblige. Believe me, if there was any reasonable way I could earn that bill, I would do it. But I would be less than honest with you if I didn't tell you, up front, that you're whistling into the wind about moving in on anything down here. It just can't be done. Not the way I think you're thinking of trying it.”

His eyes continued to examine me. His face was without expression, the lines of it strong, effortlessly aggressive, a credit of a man to whatever grandsire had slithered off a Middle-Eastern wharf into the hold of an America-bound fig-freighter.

“My thanks to you, Mr. Brandon,” he said, “for being so frank and open with me. But I will be the one to judge whether I can do what I mean to do. What I need here is a pair of eyes and an intelligent mind, someone familiar with this city, a man who has contacts, here and there. Above all, someone who can find out for me why Mindy Kemp was murdered, and by whom, and if the same fate is intended for me. As you can readily see…”

Again, he tilted his head toward the front room of the shack without taking his eyes off me.

“…the pairs of eyes presently available to me are not also balanced with suitable intelligence, not for this sort of problem.”

Or any other sort, I couldn't help thinking.

I shrugged.

“About the Kemp killing, I'll ask around. About solving it, finding out who did it, all I can say is, I'll tap a cop or two that I know, and try to see what they've got on it. Whatever I get from them, I'll pass along to you. More than that, I can't guarantee.”

“I cannot ask for more than that, Mr. Brandon, and also, if you could keep a nose to that wind you think I'm whistling into, a finger on the pulse of this community, as it were, the part of it that counts, I would appreciate that. For the next day or two, I need intelligence, in the military sense. I have got to know the…ah…how the enemy is deploying his forces, what shift of alliances are being made, if any. A man from around here, like yourself, may be much better for that purpose than Kemp would have been, had he lived.”

“On that part, again, no guarantee,” I told him. “But I will keep an ear to the ground, and pass along whatever I come up with. Is there a phone number I can reach you at?”

“Yes, there will be. I will call you at your office when I have it. If necessary, perhaps I can send one of my…”

He chuckled.

“…my available force to see you.”

“Better send the girl,” I said. “Chavez hates my guts. Bernard is too dumb to get a message right, a talking message, I mean. I take it we won't be sending anything in writing?”

“No, of course not.”

He watched me thoughtfully for a moment before nodding.

“Perhaps you're right. Although her work as a dancer at Florian's doesn't always leave Roberta available, she is, as you say, at least able to remember anything you tell her, and is able to relay the sense of it to me.”

I told him the office phone number and that I had no phone at home. He jotted the number in a neat little book, rose from his chair, and came around the table, picking up the money and bringing it over to me. I took it, wrote him a receipt on a page of my spiral-wire notebook, tore the page out and gave it to him. We shook hands.

“I'll have you driven home,” he offered.

“Thanks, no,” I said. “I can get a cab up at Florian's.”

Nodding agreeably, he said, “You can go out the way you came in, then. The alley gives access to the highway at either end, but turning to the left will take you closer to Florian's than going the other way would.”

“Thank you. I'm familiar with this area,” I assured him.

Going into the front room, I closed the connecting door behind me.

On a mattress over by the left wall, Chavez was banging Roberta.

The mattress lay on the floor. Chavez had left his shirt on. Roberta had simply lifted her skirt.

Her legs looked white as milk against his Indian-brown flanks. He wore an expression more purposeful than pleasurable.

Roberta opened her dreaming eyes, saw me and smiled her sudden bright smile, but her eyes remained misted, waiting.

“Hi, Daddy-O Brandon,” she whispered. Her voice sounded as thick as cream, without its earlier crackling impish lilt. “See what you're…missing?”

“I do, indeed,” I leered. “Looks good.”

“It's lovely,” she sighed.

Her eyes closed. She winced, and shifted her hips a bit on the mattress. Chavez's next stroke was apparently on course once more, and she relaxed.

I crossed to the front door.

Her boyfriend Bernard sat on a cardboard box across from the busy mattress. He was watching them with disinterested eyes, his shoulder blades tilted back against the plank wall. His right ankle rested atop his left knee, and at the end of his limp hand, dangling down from where its wrist lay on the bent right knee, a burning cigarette sent a tiny wisp of gray smoke straight upward in the airless room.

Maybe he'd had his share already.The Conclusion of The Forever Girl will appear in the next issue.