enovel Inches To Spare James Holly [Future Story Codes]

---

.....7723 home .....7725

Inches To Spare ....(78k)    by James Holly

1

When I remember her mouth there is no other mouth.

When I remember her breasts there are no other breasts.

When I remember her body, her legs, her hands on my body, I know there was never another woman like her.

I wanted her more than anything in the world.

I think I would have done anything to own her.

And I did what she wanted me to do.

I did everything she asked.

But she gave me something no other woman ever gave me.

I'll never forget the first time we fucked. When we kissed her tongue shot into my mouth and she moved against my body, rubbing her crotch against mine and then her hands came down over my crotch. She opened my fly and she drew out my cock and stroked it into a hard pole. She fondled the head, then flipped it back and forth with her hand as if it were a little flag. I didn't know what was coming next until she said "Put your head in the pillow and get on your hands and knees."

I rolled over on the bed and felt her hands on my thighs, pushing them far apart until the skin on my ass was stretched tight. My flesh jumped as she slid her hand between my legs and her fingers grasped my cock. Slowly, oh, so slowly, .she stroked the tender skin of my prick. Then I felt her cool tongue slowly lapping my buttocks. Suddenly her tongue darted out like a snake's tongue and jabbed at my anus. I felt my anus convulse.

"Easy, easy," she whispered. I pushed my ass back and felt the tip of her tongue go into me. She pushed 'harder and I moved and suddenly my asshole was wide open and she speared her tongue inside with ease. I felt her delicious tongue going in and out and waves of pleasure shooting up through my guts.

The waves of pleasure shot right into my cock. I felt it jerk and throb as she slid her tongue in and out with each stroke of hand around my cock. It was heaven! Jesus, I never had felt this hot before!

I felt my hips jerk and thrust back against her tongue, and my asshole convulsing grasping for her tongue like a hot cunt for a fast prick. I felt my balls swelling with come and my legs and thighs quivering and shaking.

Suddenly she withdrew her tongue and her hand dropped my cock and all the excitement dropped out of me, but her hands were already shoving at my body, turning me on my side, rolling me over on my back, and then she was straddling me, her hands on my waist. Looking up I saw her wonderful, lovely curly -haired crotch coming down toward my waiting mouth.

Shed no tears for Frank Jackson. I was a big boy. I knew what I was getting into.

I had what I had always wanted-a little bath and tennis club, six courts, a concrete swimming pool, and a clubhouse.

It had been a rundown riding academy. I picked it up with a GI business loan after the war.

I built the courts and swimming pool myself. The clubhouse was there, an old wood frame house.

Norm helped me. He was a rummy, a good old tennis pro gone to booze. I got him out of an advertisement in World Tennis.

He was a hell of a good teacher, better than me.

He'd found a home.

We had a going thing, not big, but right.

It was the middle of July. Afternoon sun hammered down the heat. Too hot for lessons, so it was okay to have a drink.

I went up to the clubhouse. A cool old wooden house.

I fixed myself a Rum Collins. Two old members were playing cards in the lounge. The lounge door was open. It was nice sitting there sipping the drink.

I looked out the window at the white Jaguar convertible pulled up alongside the tennis courts.

A beautiful leg floated out of the car.

I'm not strictly a leg man. I'm a skin man. Give me a woman with ugly features and beautiful fresh skin and my motor starts to turn over.

But right there I became a leg man. You can have Marlene Dietrich. Brother, she'd look like a case of rehabilitation next to those gams. You should have seen that leg.

I was hooked. On number one court two of my best players stopped playing. One pretended to kick the ball toward the fence. He kept trying to pick up the ball while he was sneaking a look through the fence at this woman. Nothing short of the Second Coming or the H-bomb would have stopped him before; my favorite tennis nut.

A minute later I realized I wasn't drinking. I was looking, like all the other players. At her.

She was blonde. She was wearing white Bermuda shorts. They were too tight for Bermuda shorts. She wore one of those Fred Perry tennis sport shirts, sleeveless. The shirt was too tight for tennis. But Good Lord, what a pair of knockers!

She walked up to the tennis court fence. She took off her colored glasses. She smiled at the man stumbling, trying to pick up the ball, and her lips moved.

I sat there without moving. She looked up at the clubhouse. Sunlight caught her hair, touched her eyes.

I put my drink down and went outside.

Her fingers were laced in the wire fence as I came up. It was her left hand. No rings. She turned and looked at me briefly and then past me. Her eyes were violet and she had one of those patrician noses, long and slim, beautiful as her legs.

"Do they give lessons here?" she asked softly.

"Yes. Can I help you? I'm Frank Jackson, the pro."

I could feel the rest of the players watching us. Tennis had stopped on all the courts. Players were pretending to pick up balls or look at their racquets.

"I'd like to take a lesson."

It was a club policy to give lessons only to members. Otherwise you had a lot of people taking lessons but no members.

I decided the club needed a change of policy.

Immediately. "Pretty warm," I said. "Most of the ladies shy away during this kind of heat."

"Do you have a racquet I could use?"

"Sure."

I went inside, feeling that body walking behind me, feeling it every step of the way, hearing my own breathing.

I couldn't think of anything to say as we walked out to the courts. Usually I make a little casual conversation, but I was tied in knots.

I could smell her perfume, her flesh. And from the corner of my eyes I could see her breasts. I tried to look straight ahead.

I gave her a Wilson fiveandahalf light racquet and hit her a couple of balls.

Her strokes weren't bad, a little too relaxed in the wrist, but that wasn't what I was looking at.

I had to know. I wondered what had brought her to my club. There were two other clubs in town, all of them fancier than mine.

But that wasn't what I had to know. It was knockers. I watched her run, wondering if they were for real.

There's a way to find out whether a female pupil is wearing falsies, so I gave her the business. I hit her a short ball and brought her up to the net.

Brother, there was nothing false about those tits! You should have seen them swing as she ducked down for that short ball.

I went up to the net and put her on the base line.

"You're hitting the ball a little late," I told her.

All I could see were those legs and those tight shorts and that lovely curve where her buttocks came smoothly up into her back.

I knew I was staring, but I'd been playing long enough to be able to watch the ball and whatever else I was looking at.

She moved well on those long, nice legs.

I didn't dare go near her to put an arm around her as I usually do with customers taking a first lesson, showing them where to groove their swing, you know, holding the racquet with them.

She was too much.

I knew if I got near her she'd hear me panting.

"Start your swing sooner," I called, tossing a ball across the net. "Back now! That's it."

I felt as if I had a stomach ache.

But I had to make it look as if I were giving a regular-type lesson.

So I called to her and crawled over the net.

"Let me see your grip," I said.

All I could see were those long suntanned arms.

"Hook your forefinger a little more," I said. I could feel my arms and hands moving, wanting to touch her.

I took the racquet out of her hand. It was warm where her hand had touched it. I put it in my hand, squeezed it hard, showing her how to hold the racquet with only the thumb and forefinger.

"Just swing it, holding it like that," I said.

She swung and I watched the long, smooth arms move in the sunlight. I could almost taste the scent of her perfume, the soft fragrance of her hair and the sweet smell of her skin.

"Here," I said. "Turn sideways to the net."

I stood directly behind her. I reached around and put my arm alongside hers and gripped the racquet with her. There was only an inch between her back and my stomach. I could see the little golden hair on the nape of her neck.

I felt the sexual energy in her body come out of her arm as my forearm touched hers, and a shock of crazy electric excitement ran all through me.

I felt I couldn't be near her another second without grabbing her in both arms. I backed off.

"Okay," I said. "Bend your knees just before you hit."

I went back to my side of the court and struck balls to her forehand for half an hour.

She thanked me for the lesson, handed me the racquet, and cash for the lesson, and walked down to her car.

Her perfume was still there on the courts after she drove away. I stood there.

One of my advertising executive members said, "Jackson's really in the right business." His partner grinned.

"Frank, let me handle some of those lessons when you're tired."

Norm stood there tapping his tennis shoe heel with the rim of his racquet.

"Where'd that come from?"

I shrugged and went into the clubhouse. The sun felt hotter. I could feel the sweat on the back of my hands.

Like I said, I don't own the fanciest tennis club in Cereal City, but it's mine, and in a couple years I'll make it better. I'm only twenty-five. But right then I knew what those trusted diplomats must feel who give away state secrets for a woman.

Right then I'd have given away my whole club to own her.

I felt a cold, prickly sensation run up and down my spine, through my back, right into the pit of my stomach.

I could hear the sound of tennis balls: pock-pock, the steady rhythm, coming as if from very far away.

I went upstairs to my room. There was a big elm tree outside the window. In the fading light it looked like some gigantic green round fruit, so thick were the leaves, with each black limb running like a long tendril into the heart of the big, ripe ball of lush greenness. The soft sigh of the summer wind in the leaves was like the husky sound of her voice.

Sparrows filled the tree. They stood shaded under the green coolness, each with his leaf, head motionless, eyes half-lidded against the drying heat.

Veins of each green leaf seemed filled with sunlight, swollen with the heat of the hour. From down below came the steady sound of tennis balls being struck against a backboard.

I made a good backboard.

I didn't know it then, but she'd just given me my first real lesson in court strategy-in a game that was for keeps.

2

Was I eighteen years old? Hadn't I ever seen a good-looking pair of cans before?

(Come on,) I told myself, (spring is past; don't get in heat.)

(Play a couple sets. Cool off. Take a cold shower.) Sure.

I'd known women before who took lessons just to get their kicks getting the pro all worked up-or get themselves all worked up for the kicks out of playing teaser.

But there was something different about this babe. She was money. But who was paying the bills? Papa or some sugar daddy?

(Pay attention to business. Don't get your meat whereyou get your potatoes. If I'd taken up all the suggested offers from female pupils in my career I'd have been a stud instead of a tennis pro.)

(Stick to your racquet. It isn't love.)

(Put her away. File her for another day.

You've seen better cans and fanny in your time and in your time you'll see even better.)

(What's so special about her? Pack it up!)

I felt something in my hand. Hell, I was still holding the racquet I'd loaned her. I'd been squeezing it. My hand was sweating.

I tossed the racquet on the bed.

(Maybe I ought to burn it. That would help.)

(Nothing of her to think about.)

Downstairs the lounge was empty when I went in.

The two advertising executives who were good players were singing and yelling in the showers. Norm was out on the courts giving a lesson to a boy.

I told myself it was time I started catching up on members' racquets which had been left for stringing.

I was a little short of Imperial gut, which most of the members liked. Plenty of nylon, though. But there was enough of both to do five or six racquets.

I started stringing. We did all our stringing by hand, not because a machine costs so much, but because we could string faster by hand than by machine.

I strung two Imperial gut jobs in forty-five minutes. It was warm in the tennis shop. Maybe next year if things went right we could air-condition the clubhouse or at least a couple rooms.

I was just starting to string with nylon when Linda came into the shop. Linda was twenty-one that summer. Her father was chairman of the board of National Milling. They did about five million dollars' worth of business in wheat during the Russian deal.

They belonged to every club in town that was worth joining. Jeff Beaverson was a tennis buff, so he'd bought a membership at my club and actually even played there occasionally, but he spent most of his time at Millwood, which was the "important money" golf and tennis club in Cereal City.

She looked smiling and happy, which was the way she always looked. She had a lovely figure and the white tennis dress didn't hide all of it.

"How about a lesson?"

I smiled and told her I'd better catch up on my stringing work. I knew she liked having me handle her when I showed her how to hit the ball, but I wasn't going to get involved with the daughter of the man who owned half of Cereal City.

I also knew she was fishing for me to take her out for a cold beer after the lesson. I'd done it a couple of times but that was as far as it went.

And I didn't feel like giving anybody a tennis lesson right then.

But she looked hurt, and she was a customer. And hell, whether you feel like it or not, the customer is always right and you gotta put out or go out of business.

So I said, "Just a minute; we'll hit some as soon as I finish this racquet."

She smiled and laughed and sat down and started chattering about a tennis match she'd seen in Minneapolis at the Northwest Lawn Tennis championship between Wally Boison and Wendell Ottum in which Wally, a senior veteran, had defeated Wendell, state champion. She was quite excited telling me about it.

"You should have seen those lobs. Wally kept pushing the ball up into the sun and Wendell started missing. Pretty soon he couldn't hit a thing. Wally soft-balled him right off the court."

I finished stringing and got a basket of balls and we went out on the court. She was really sweet-looking in a tennis dress. I stood on the base line and I had her practice forehand volleys.

Half an hour later when we finished she smiled and sighed and half-looked at me and said, "Gosh, I'm thirsty."

I knew a hint.

"I could use a drink myself," I said. We went in and showered and changed clothes and got in my car. I could have bought her a beer at the club, but I knew that was not where she wanted to have it.

Besides, maybe I could get my mind off that woman by concentrating a little on Linda.

Then it hit me. The woman had never told me her name.

(Forget it,) I thought. (Forget all about her.)

She lay back on the seat. The top was down and she put her head back. You could see her breasts come up full and the suntanned V below her throat and her long, smooth, suntanned arms and legs. I was sure she'd been kissed, but I was also sure she was a virgin. I felt like an old man with her. Maybe I'd been around too much. Her body was full and beautifully rounded. No, I wasn't going to touch her.

She pulled out the ashtray. It was a gag she always pulled, pretending to be looking for cigarettes with lipstick on the end.

"Cleaned it out again, didn't you?"

"Only girl I know who smokes is you."

It was getting dark and we went out along the river road. We usually stopped at the Sea Gull Inn, a little beer joint on Indian Bluff, but tonight I knew she was in a romantic mood when she said suddenly, "Let's just get a six-pack and sit in the car. It's such a lovely night."

It was pretty up there. You could see all the cars going along beneath, the lights shining through the trees on the highway that had once been an old Sioux Indian trail.

The stars were out and we sat in the car sipping the cool Grain Belt beer. She stretched and as she moved, part of her breasts came out of the top of her low-cut gown.

I looked away as quickly as possible, but I saw her hand cover her breasts; then I felt her hand touch my shoulder.

"Don't pretend," she said. "You saw me?"

"What?" I said, playing it dumb, but looking at her. Her hand still covered the tops of her breasts and she lay stretched out with her hand on the back of the seat.

"Frank," she said, "do you like me?" Her voice was low, almost child-like. It scared me.

"Of course. Look out! The beer. You're spilling it."

Her hand touched my arm. Her fingers were soft and cool. She set down the can of beer on the floor, without moving.

"Frank, do you know ... five times ... you've taken me out five times and you've never tried to kiss me?"

"I don't fool around with the customers."

"Is that all I am?"

"You know I like you."

"Is that all?"

"Linda, I have to work for a living."

"Frank."

"What?"

"Give me your hand."

I didn't give her my hand. Her fingers were already touching my hand and she drew it down and put it on her breast. I didn't know what the hell to do. She was beautiful. She was a customer. If I didn't do something she would be sore and stop coming to the club and then her old man would wonder what had been going on, and if I did do something now I'd have her on my hands, and she was too sweet a girl-yes, that was it, a girl, not a woman-to handle this way.

But I was wrong.

She was a woman.

She kissed like a woman, warm then warmer, with her lips softening and opening and her whole body coming against me. She put both her breasts in my hands. I kissed the warm hair on the nape of her neck. Her arms were closed around me and the perfume on her neck came over me. Her open mouth was tender and soft and her breasts were firm and hard. One of her hands came away and I felt her reaching around behind her back and heard the sound of a zipper.

"No," I heard myself say. I didn't want this to happen. (It mustn't happen.) The warble of a bird crossed the night air.

"You're shaking, darling," she whispered.

Her knee knelt between my legs. Her breasts were shining and she put them in my hands again and drew her dress down and pulled one hand down against her stomach and pressed it into her stomach.

"You're so close I could cry," she said. "Oh, Frank, I've got to cry. I've never felt so happy."

Her head began to roll back and forth on the seat. Her long, soft hands slid down my back, clutching-. My hands felt helpless and sad.

"Oh, please, Frank, please."

Her head rolled from side to side.

"You're a virgin."

"I know. I know. Please, please, Frank," her voice anguished.

(If I touch her with it, I'll crash,) I thought. (I'll crash my whole life. Mustn't touch her with it. Mustn't let her touch it. Must get her out of here.) Her arms and body held me so hard I thought I was breaking in two.

"Don't. Don't!" she cried. "Don't let go! Don't let go!"

"Linda, I'm not going to get you in trouble."

"Please, please don't stop."

I could hardly bear to hear her. There were tears in her eyes. "Please, Frank. I feel so safe and good with you. Please."

"Come on, Linda."

"Hold my breasts. Oh, Frank, darling, darting ... please."

She knew what she was doing to me, and unless I shoved her away she would kill me. I would die, and I could feel myself slipping down to her, my whole mind slipping away. (Come on, come on, don't, don't ... don't get her in a jam.)

"Wait," I said. "Wait until we can do it right. Some night at the club after we close. Not here," I said. "Not here."

I lifted her away from me as gently as possible and kissed her lips and she went on crying.

I stroked her hair and felt the flesh on my back go cold and hot and my stomach trembled, aching for her flesh. (Cut,) I thought, (don't start it.) But her head came down on my shoulder and I felt her nipple soften, then grow firm against my shoulder, and I turned her head and reached down inside her dress and fondled the nipple. She began to pant, pressing her mouth open against the side of my face.

I opened her dress and she drew back her head and moaned and I felt her nipple in my mouth, turning it slowly with my tongue.

She cried out: "Oh, Frank! Oh, Frank!"

I felt my teeth go softly into her nipple and her body twisted and writhed against me; then my face was between her breasts and my tongue roved over their creamy fullness.

The mounds swelled with passion; then I was on my knees with her breasts over me, covering my face as she twisted her nipples back and forth across my eyes.

"Bite me," she said. "Don't hurt. Just bite softly."

I eased my teeth into her nipple, and her whole body jerked and she cried out in pain and ecstasy, squeezing my head between her hands as if she were undergoing some kind of exquisite torture.

I opened her dress all the way down to her navel and ran my tongue over her throat and down between her breasts and kissed her navel, furrowing into her flesh, hearing only cries of delight.

"I've never done it, Frank. Please, please. I never did it before."

"Let's not sit here."

I opened the door and lifted her out and she lay down on the grass. I lay on top of her and ground my hips into her loins and opened her mouth. Her lips were warm and round and wet and her tongue went slowly 'round and 'round inside my mouth.

"I love it. I love it, Frank," she moaned. "You won't hurt me, please."

I felt her legs parting beneath my hips and I pressed both hands against her stomach and turned on my side, holding her tight against me.

Her fingers sought the rosy upthrust stalk and I felt all the breath going out of my body and such exquisite pain as she pressed her hand into me, squeezing harder and harder.

"Love me, Frank."

I zipped her dress down all the way and drew it back off her shoulders and slipped my hand beneath her silk panties and felt the warm, soft hair of her body.

I stroked her slowly while our tongues thrashed softly, feeling her arms going around me tighter and tighter as she arched her body higher and higher.

"Ahhhh," she moaned softly, her thighs moistening beneath my searching hand until my fingers penetrated and she let out a scream of delight and flung herself on top of me, clawing at my face and body.

"Get your clothes off," she hissed. "Frank, Frank. Hurry. I can't stand it!"

She ripped the buttons loose from my shirt and began to drag it over my head, and in a moment we lay naked, our legs and arms intertwined.

"Oh, Frank, give it to me ... you won't hurt ... you won't hurt, promise."

Slowly I entered and with each easy motion she panted and sighed and cried out, digging her fingers into my back. Her eyes were big as stars and her breasts seemed to stare up at me; then I was completely inside her and I felt my body passing out of me. Slowly, slowly, so that she would cry, I eased myself in and out, in and out, stroking her breasts, kissing her throat, kissing each nipple in turn, feeling her soft, round buttocks turning and thrashing in my hands.

She laughed softly; then she lifted her head and rolled over on top of me. She sat on my stomach. She lowered her head and I closed my eyes and felt her tongue running over my chest and my flesh going all hot and cold again until it was almost unbearable.

I touched her breasts, and nipples came up big, big and hard and round under my fingers, and her tongue began to explore every crevice and I could feel it like a small, warm, moist little animal, furrowing into my armpits, down my chest, into my navel-down, down, down, until I caught her head and held it in my hands.

"Please, let me."

"I thought you were virgin."

"I am. But I never knew anything like this could happen. I never dreamed I'd feel like this, Frank. I must be crazy."

"What do you want to do?"

"Let me kiss you. Please. Please."

"Wait," I said. "Wait."

I kissed her breasts and felt her hair fall down over my face; then I lifted her and kissed her stomach and suddenly she had me inside her again and she was moving up and down, up and down, moaning and groaning, sighing and writhing. Then in one big explosive instant I felt such exquisite pleasure that I seemed to pass out, almost die, almost black out, and I felt inside of her, come warm and flooding all over and through me.

I drew her down, flattening her hard nipples and breasts against my chest and she lay there with me inside her, squirming and crying with soft little pants of delight and ecstasy.

We lay there a long time. The stars wheeled and circled and the night darkened; then she touched me again.

"Once more, darling," she said. I turned on my side and stroked her body, feeling the lovely curve of her spine as I began to mount higher and higher, deeper and deeper until her body arched and her mouth smashed against mine, our tongues seeking deeper ecstasy, almost as if-we wished to pass out of the realm of human flesh into some god-like state of pleasure.

I. could feel the longing and passion rising in her breasts and legs, asking me to descend faster and faster into the secret creamy warmth of her flesh-down, down, down, into the wild excitement of her thrashing thighs, against the smooth pumping of her soft, warm stomach. Her passion stunned me like a blow of sunlight. Her skin was fiery, while her hips went on now in a languid motion, her long, slim thighs locked around me. I felt myself curving deeper and deeper inside her. Now I wanted her more than 'anything in the world-now, now, in this crazy moment. Wild physical desire swept over us, rushing through our brains, emptying our skulls of all thought except what our flesh could feel. Suddenly she ceased and leaned her head on my chest; then after a long moment her head lifted and her mouth came down again upon my mouth, her lips open, her tongue probing and searching.

Our bodies arched against each other again, her buttocks writhing slowly in my hands.

Her mouth strained against my mouth.

She whispered in a dying voice, "Hurry! Please! Hurry!"

She held me with both arms around my shoulders. I lay on top of her. Her body arched slowly backward.

My whole being pressed hard into her out of an exquisite torture. I felt the blood draining out of my skull. I heard her moaning. When I touched her breasts she sprang toward me, floundering, weeping against me like a dying animal. She began to grind her whole body into mine, dragging her mouth over my face. "Now! Please. Please. Now!" She didn't seem aware I was there. "Don't stop. Please! Please! Don't stop." Her voice ceased for an instant. "Oh! Oh!" Then her mouth came open in a soundless scream.

I held her tighter with both hands. She seemed to take one last despairing look at the sky as if she were about to faint; then her eyeballs drew back into her skull and she screamed, "Oh, yes, yes, yes! YES!"

She relaxed in a long, shuddering swoon.

I held her gently, whispering softly. Then she slept and I held myself inside her as she slept.

I sat her up and zipped up her dress and kissed her again and held her in my arms. We got up and got back in the car.

There was quiet peace in the car for a long moment; then she began to cry. So I put my arm around her and that's the way I drove her home.

They lived in a big summer house at Lake Wowinapa, about ten miles out of Cereal City.

"Don't be mad at me, Frank, not tonight anyway. Please."

"I promise."

"You know I've wanted you to love me all summer."

"Have you ever done that before?"

"I never fell in love before," she said.

"Linda, you've got a lot of years ahead."

"I'm twenty-one."

"That's what I mean."

"Frank, I am in love with you."

"Look, Linda, I like you. A lot. It wouldn't work. I'm not cut out to work behind a desk in a flour mill and pretend all day my father-in-law doesn't own it while I don't know anything about the business for which I'd be getting paid to keep you in the kind of house you're used to."

"I'd live at the club with you."

"Nonsense."

Then we were at her. house, up the driveway, the long circle under the trees, to the big Tudor-timbered mansion with the Rolls parked in the drive.

Her father was coming down the porch steps.

"Hello, Frank. Had dinner?"

"Caught a hamburger on the way home," I lied.

He smiled and waved and got into the Rolls.

Sure, he was democratic. He knew I understood the score, the village boy who could play in the fields with the girl from the castle, play little games, but that was all. He knew I knew where I belonged in the final analysis, so that's why he was so damn nice. He really wasn't such a bad'guy. He just wasn't completely aware how the other half lived.

And he didn't want to know.

Nor Linda to know, either.

-That's the way I had him figured, but after that night I figured I was wrong.

We went into the house and she called a maid and ordered some dinner-roast beef and cold beer and artichoke salad.

While we were eating I said, "You're awfully sweet, dear."

It sounded phony as hell.

We were just finishing when her dad came in.

"Hi! Still hungry?"

He sat down and we talked about tennis. He asked if I had ever thought of adding more courts, and I told him I hoped to someday, but first I'd have to purchase the land. He said if I was interested in buying property around my club he'd be glad to help out at the bank with a loan. Hell, he was the bank-it was money out of his pocket.

He was a solid, genuine guy. He made me feel as if I belonged in the house.

But I kept thinking of that other woman.

That smooth, soft bitch.

We played backgammon after dinner, but I couldn't concentrate. My mind kept thinking of that woman. I couldn't stop it.

I was restless as hell sitting behind Linda and I was pretty lousy at backgammon.

They realized I spent about five to six hours a day on the courts, so about nine-thirty, which I jokingly referred to as past my bedtime, I excused myself.

As I rose her dad said, "It's always nice to see you, Frank."

He sounded as if he truly meant it. I was sure he did.

Linda walked out to the car with me. She caught my arm in the darkness and clutched my wrist, murmuring she was happy, happy, until I looked back up at the house to see if anybody was watching and kissed her quickly before they saw us, and got in the car.

She leaned over the side of the car and I gave her another kiss.

"See you tomorrow," I said.

"Thanks, Frank."

"Tomorrow. Night, Linda."

She walked lightly up to the house. She moved as if she were happy.

I drove slowly away beneath the heavy dark trees.

On the way back to the club I tried to add up everything, but nothing added up. If I had any brains I'd marry Linda. Her old man was genuine. He'd probably back me in a better club. He knew I'd make it work. But what kind of a life would it be for her, her husband catering to all her old school friends? Or we could move away.

(Quit kidding yourself,) I thought. (Cut it out.)

Because I knew I was only thinking this way to forget that other woman. I drove fast to the club.

I undressed, got into bed, lay in the dark. I couldn't sleep. I thought about her. She'd never be back. Just some high-paid secretary who put all her money on her back and on the car. She couldn't afford to belong to a club.

She'd never be back.

I was safe.

So I tried to sleep.

I slept two hours.

3

I couldn't sleep after five o'clock that morning. So I got up. It was a beautiful morning, war and quiet, warning of a hot summer day to come.

I went out and wet down the courts. They' been sprinkled the previous night, so now the needed only a light sprinkle before rolling.

About six o'clock Norm came out and stood on the club porch.

"Hey, what's the rush?"

We usually didn't work on the courts until six-thirty.

"Too hot to sleep."

"Oh," he said and went inside. At breakfast h was quiet and I didn't talk, either. We exchange sections of the morning paper without talking.

I opened up the tennis shop and got out the box of old balls we use for giving lessons and se them on the back porch. Norm was finishing sprinkling the courts.

While I patched the base line of one court, Norm got the gasoline roller out of the shed and began to roll the far courts.

When he finished one court I began to line the court with the lime marker.

It was a still morning, radiant now with morning light and no sound save the silky noise of car tires on the pavement beyond the trees. The sunlight began to hammer down the heat and I felt the mugginess of a Minnesota summer day rising from the cool, damp clay and the hot, bright sky. I took off my shirt.

Usually a bunch of women played in the morning, but this morning only two of the customary eight or ten showed and they played singles on the end court.

I patched another court. It was getting near the dryest, hottest period of Minnesota summers, those deadly two weeks of muggy heat, the last week of July and first week of August, and if we didn't keep the courts watered and -lined and patched twice a day, they would start to crumble and fall apart about the second week in August.

The sun burned down on my back. I had my shirt off now. I wanted to sweat hard. I wanted to burn the thought of her out of my mind.

When I finished patching the court I got Norm out on the court for a workout. We played three fast sets. I tried to go to the net on every shot, which is madness on clay, but it was the kind of workout I told myself I needed.

It wasn't any use. I started missing shots I never miss.

I was thinking of her, that beautiful skin. Her name. Liquid eyes all soft violet. The suntanned skin bursting, the skin so smooth. Those long legs as if they started at her shoulder blades.

What was the use of kidding myself?

I didn't want to forget her.

"Let's knock it off," Norm said. "You're playing like a debutante with her head in her hands."

"I'm tired. Beer?"

"No. I've got a lesson," he said.

I went inside, glad to be alone. Glad to sit alone and think about her.

I poured myself a cold golden bottle of Grain Belt. I was tired, but it didn't mean anything. It was almost noon.

For a moment my mind stopped thinking of her. I looked around at the clubhouse. In a couple years, with more money, I'd have one of the best clubs in town, put in hard-surface courts, then maybe one or two indoor courts for winter play.

I actually thought I was rid of her.

Hell, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to marry Linda, let her friends come to the club and play, so what? Most of them were bums anyway, living off their fathers' money or business.

This club I'd made myself.

Norm came in, but not all the way. He just stood in the door.

"You've got a pupil," he said, his voice flat, quite low.

He looked at me briefly, no expression on his face; then his eyes flicked away and he went out. I got the signal. She was back. I went outside.

There it was, the convertible; then I saw her. She was seated under the striped canvas canopy set on four poles alongside the number one court. Her back was turned to me.

I knew the shape of her head, her shoulders.

She was wearing a white tennis dress. I walked over to her.

"Pretty hot, isn't it?"

"Oh, it's lovely," she said.

She hadn't turned, even looked over her shoulder as she spoke. Then, still without turning her head or shoulders, she reached backward with her right hand.

"Cigarette?" she asked.

"No, thanks."

She turned.

"Bad for business?"

"Something like that. I just never got started."

"You're lucky," she said and lit a cigarette with a gold Dunhill lighter.

She went on watching the women down on the end court.

I waited, wanted her to go on talking, but she just sat there; then after several long moments when I was about to ask her if she wanted a lesson, she turned and looked up at me.

"Is that your racquet?"

"Yes."

"May I see it?"

"Sure," I said and handed it to her. She put her fingers around the grip and swung it.

"Awfully big and heavy, isn't it?"

I agreed and told her the weight and why I like a heavy racquet for volleying.

Her brother, she said, who lived in California, had told her to use a four-and-a-half lightweight racquet, was that correct? I told her I thought a four-and-a-half medium might be more to her liking after she played awhile.

"How long have you been a pro?" she asked.

"Five years."

"Did you play at college?"

"Michigan State."

Her whole manner was cool and impersonal and her eyes didn't seem to be thinking about what she was asking, though she was smiling.

I took the racquet back.

"What do you think of this?" she asked, handing me her racquet. It was a Davis, very powerful, but apt to be hard on a woman's arm, since the racquet was apt to impart all the shock into the elbow.

"Good racquet," I said. "But I think you'll find Wilson a little easier on the arm.

She got up.

"Do you mind if I use the backboard and just practice there?"

"There is a charge."

"Of course," she smiled. "There ought to be."

"I suppose I'd better tell you. This is a membership club: We don't rent courts by the hours. However, we do want anybody to try the courts once before deciding on joining."

"You should have told me. Can I take lessons?"

"Do you live here?"

"Oh, yes."

"It's against policy."

"How much is a membership?"

"One hundred dollars, but the season is almost half-over now so...."

"Don't worry," she said. "If I join I'll pay the entire fee."

I kept feeling I was pushing her further and further away and I didn't want to and I had the feeling she was going to leave for good in one more minute. But maybe I was doing it because I was also afraid of the way she made me feel and part of me wanted to get rid of that fear, so I was trying to get rid of her.

"You'll let me know?" I asked.

"Soon," she said. She smiled. "Is it all right if I use the backboard today?"

Before I could speak she was holding five dollars, which she put in my hand while I was trying to talk.

"That's too much," I said.

"Give me a can of balls, too."

She smiled and turned away.

"Just put the balls in the car," she said.

I went in and got the can of balls and put them in her car. She was back on the far court, hitting against the backboard, but even at that distance I couldn't keep my eyes off her, watching her skirt flare, the movements of her legs and arms.

The phone rang in the clubhouse and I went in and it was a good customer asking if his racquet was strung and it wasn't and he was on his way over and wanted a playing lesson of a couple sets, which meant money in the till.

By the time I got the racquet strung she was gone.

Norm came in and handed me another racquet to string.

"Hey," he said, grabbing my hand. "Watch it!"

I had put the string in my hand in the wrong hole:

I made my eyes and mind focus hard on what I was doing. Norm picked up a can of new balls and went outside.

The two women who had been playing on the end court came in and ordered a drink from their bottle in the locker.

They were married women, about thirty-five. One's husband was an eye doctor; the other was married to a patent attorney. They weren't good tennis players, but they loved playing the game.

As they were finishing their drinks, one said, "Frank, who was the woman on the practice court?"

The other woman smiled faintly over the rim of her glass.

They were both watching me.

"I really don't know her name," I said. "She's thinking of joining."

"What a lovely forehand," the first said.

"Yes," said the other, smiling, "she has nice form, Frank."

I knew what they were thinking.

Very funny. But I didn't care.

I only cared about one thing.

Getting her back. Getting her to come here often as a member.

That was all I wanted.

Hell, she could have a lifetime membership free.

Always. Any time.

4

I usually take Monday off because we close the club after being open all weekend.

I didn't go fishing that Monday. I didn't leave the building, thinking she might come past. Then it was Wednesday and she still hadn't come back.

Business was slack, very few lessons because many of the members had gone away on vacation or were up on the north shore of Lake Superior sitting out the onslaught of the hot spell and the beginning of hay fever season.

I gave lessons to a couple of kids and kept the junior development class going, and Norm and I played every evening to keep in shape and to keep our strokes and timing right, which can get lousy if you teach kids and hackers all day.

That morning I hit some balls with Jean Arth and Betty Swanson who drove up from Minneapolis. Jean was Wimbledon and national doubles champion and Betty was Number Two in the Northwest, so they'd drive up and play Norm and me a couple times a month. We never charged them, because it was fun to play them. They were damn good.

But I was jumpy even after four sets with them. A member was sitting in the lounge, sleeping. I told Norm I was going downtown to get some gut at the suppliers and would probably stop for lunch.

I came out of George's Club Twenty about one o'clock. The sun was a ball of fire in a white, empty sky. As I cut across the street to the parking lot somebody called my name and I turned. It was Linda.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello, Frank." She walked up to me. She looked hurt, badly hurt. "Frank, would you have lunch with me?"

I should have been back at the club then.

"I'm sorry, honey, but, honest-believe me, I'm late now at the club."

"When am I going to see you?"

"Right now," I said. "Come on, I'll buy you a drink."

I took her back to Club Twenty and we sat down in a booth.

(What if she comes to the club now,) I kept thinking, (while I'm gone? What if I miss her?)

"Frank, please forget the other night."

I put my hand over hers. Hell, she was a sweet kid. Why hurt her?

"I won't forget it," I said, "but I won't bring it up."

"Frank, I was terrible."

"No, it's all right."

"I was horrible."

"You were lovely. I'm sorry, Linda." I interrupted her and told her I hadn't called because the courts had been breaking up in the heat and we'd had to put in a lot of time at night repairing the surface.

"Frank, it's none of my business. But are you in love with somebody?"

"I like you a lot, Linda. You know that. No. I am not in love with anybody else."

"The way...." she began and saw me glance at my wrist watch. She got up immediately. "Don't let me keep you ... I didn't know you had a date." Her eyes were cold and hurt. "Don't ever let me keep you."

She turned and ran out.

I sat there feeling dead. Then I was thinking about those eyes again, those liquid fresh violet eyes, and I got up and drove back to the club as fast as I could.

The lounge was empty. Sunlight beat down upon the hot clay courts. Four boys were playing doubles on one court. The other courts were empty. I moped around, strung some racquets. By then it was almost dinner time. The boys were gone. The club was vacant. We usually stayed open until nine o'clock since with daylight saving time the sun didn't set until almost fifteen minutes after nine.

I mixed myself a Rum Collins and heard a car stop in front. A light tapping of heels came up the steps. The door opened.

There she was. She stood there smiling.

"Before I buy a membership perhaps I should try all the club services. What is that you're drinking?"

I held up the glass.

"Rum Collins, but you have to have a liquor locker and...."

"And I can't have that until I'm a member?"

"State law."

"Don't you ever break any laws?"

"Just a minute."

I stumbled over myself mixing her a drink. I felt suddenly awkward, heavy footed. (Come on,) I thought, (you're a big boy, you've mixed a few drinks before for good-looking girls.)

When I gave her the drink she sat down and started asking questions about the club-how many members, how long was the season, what did I do in the winter?

I seemed not to hear her, though I could hear my voice answering automatically. My whole being was focused on looking at her, at the curve of her lips, the high, smooth sweep of her breasts, her long, smooth throat, my eyes feeling stony, staring, my insides collapsing like a pack of cards. I could see the narrow niceness of her waist, the soft golden skin between her legs, almost as if her lips and mouth were on the back of my neck.

(Give me your mouth and your hair and arms and legs,) I wanted to say, (your breasts like pink pears in my lips.)

But somebody like this belonged to some guy.

Something like this didn't run around free.

It was already owned.

That was for sure.

"Do you think I could ever learn to play the game well?" she asked.

"You play it well now."

She laughed softly and I saw what she meant but I had missed it completely.

"Come now ... Mr. Jackson, is it?"

"Frank ... Jackson."

"How long have you played?"

"Since I was eight."

"Then there isn't much hope for me."

"Lessons and practice."

"I see," she smiled. Everything she said seemed to pass out of my mind as if my mind were crushed by her presence.

"Like I said, Miss ... uh?"

"Cynthia Simons."

She held out her glass.

"Another?" she smiled.

I got up, feeling clumsy and awkward again, cursing myself.

I handed her a fresh drink.

"I think you could be really good in a year or two," I said.

I didn't want her to go away.

"Do you tell that to all the members?" She laughed at me.

"No," I said. "Just the potential members."

She had a point, but I'd never lied to a member yet. But this Cynthia did have good strokes. She could, with a lot of practice, become a topnotch club player.

"I'll join," she said. She picked up her drink and added, "Oh, yes, do you have food here?"

"Steaks and sandwiches."

"Is the kitchen open?"

"As long as I'm here."

"You're the chef?"

"What's your order, ma'am?" She laughed.

"I'd love a steak sandwich."

"Another Collins?"

"How much is the membership?"

"Season one hundred. Half-season fifty." Check all right?"

"Sure. Say, I'd better move your car. It's right in the entrance."

"You start dinner. I'll move it." So that's the way it went. Never the way I thought it was going to go. I went back to the bar,, mixed a couple drinks, then went into the kitchen and put a couple New York cut steaks on the charcoal broiler.

I was lighting the charcoal when the telephone rang.

It was Linda.

"Frank, can I come over and talk to you?"

"Tomorrow."

"Frank, I'm a fool."

"Forget it, Linda. See you tomorrow."

"I want to see you tonight."

"I can't. Norm and I are doing the books for the month. It's impossible. Really."

"I'm sorry about today, Frank."

"See you tomorrow, honey."

"Thanks, Frank. 'Night, darling." I wiped the sweat off my forehead, wondering what I'd have done if she had driven over.

We had a small dining room for the members and a kind of kitchen alcove for Norm and myself.

I went back to the bar, loaded her drink. Rum does something to girls in the summertime.

She was wearing a white knit sports dress and you couldn't miss any of the curves. It was dark out now, and I turned on the lights, just a few dim lights in the lounge.

She smiled and picked up her glass and took a drink.

She shook her head, put the glass down. "Do you always give your new members their money's worth in drinks the first time?"

"We aim to please."

"That drink is loaded."

"Oh, sorry," I said, picking up her glass, tasting it. "This one is yours." I handed her mine.

She accepted with a little nod.

"Did you put the steaks on?"

"They'll be ready in fifteen minutes. What kind of salad dressing do you like?"

"Thousand Island," she said coolly.

She was friendly but still faintly distant, the rich girl amusing herself with the help, with a faint air of teasing. I felt certain that not even a fifth of rum would have changed things.

I decided it was strictly tennis business from now on.

She was smiling but she seemed to be watching everything in the room at the same time, a kind of beyond-look in her too-steady gaze.

(No dice, Jackson. Just play it for the membership fee, because that's all you're going to get.)

We ate dinner in the alcove. "Beautiful steaks," she said.

"Thank you," I said and that's the way it went, compliments from her about my cooking and the club and my tennis and appropriate hackneyed remarks from me.

Strictly business.

But I couldn't keep my mind or eyes or business. I couldn't keep my eyes off her throat, her lips, the curving roundness of her pear-like breasts showing just above the neckline of her dress. It was a battle of control and I knew I was losing it.

Music came in from the stereo in the lounge and outside the moon was shining on the courts. The music was low, soft.

"That was a lovely dinner," she said, touching the napkin to her lips.

I figured that was it; then I thought again-and it hit me. She wouldn't have stayed here for dinner without a purpose. There were a score of better places to eat in Cereal City. No, she was somebody's wife and she was on the loose and going to get what she could get on the side from the hired help.

(All right,) I thought, hating her, wanting to love her, but hating her, (you'll get your membership's worth, and whenever you want more I'll always be here, and sooner or later you 're going to find the hired help better than anything you ever got in your life.)

I got up and walked around the table, past her.

"Let's have an after-dinner drink in the lounge," I said.

I heard her get up. By then I was behind the bar pouring a couple of white crime dementhes on rocks.

"Have you ever tried this?" I asked, holding out the glass to her.

She took the glass, set it down. She walked around the bar.

"No," she said. "But I try everything that looks interesting."

She stood in front of me with her lips apart, looking tall and strange, looking into my eyes, crinkling her eyes, looking at my mouth, her eyes flecked with colors.

Her voice broke the stillness.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Her mouth was like a refreshing fountain, wild and rushing, her body tall against me, the perfume of her flesh in my nostrils, my lips then in her hair and down upon her neck and the soft tenderness of her open mouth on my ear and neck, both of us shaking and trembling, her arms around my neck now. I couldn't believe my luck or my ears.

I felt her fingers unbuttoning my shirt. I remember turning out the lights, the sound of her clothing dropping to the floor. I knell between her legs as if praying, and kissed the slim, smooth, round belly.

"Oh, Jackson."

"What?"

"It's beautiful. You surprise me."

I closed my arms around her tall body and felt the hair on my hands touching her breasts and my days of dreaming went rolling out of my brain as her hands slid down my back, with my lungs dragging in air until I felt I was crashing into a long white river. "Don't let me go," she cried. "Don't let me go. Hold me-I'm breaking in half, darling." And down we went into the beautiful waves.

I thought Linda was something, but Cynthia was more. She hit me like a match hits a pool of gasoline. The way she moved around once I got inside was something I'd never felt before, swabbing my stalk slowly from side to side, brushing first one way then the other, then slowly up and down, then side to side, not hurrying, with her fingers digging into my back until I could feel my shoulder blades almost touching.

I felt her breath coming into me with her breasts pumping her heart against my chest. Her heartbeat came straight into my mouth from her tongue. Her lips were hot and scalding, searching every corner of my mouth, while beneath, the slow, circular motion of her hips held me in a knife point of ecstasy somewhere between pain and pleasure. Her breasts grew bigger, scalding my chest, and she pressed my head down to take the nipples in my mouth as she drew her hips slowly back, arching her back slowly, taking me out inch by inch.

I grabbed her, feeling as if she were going away, and held her tight,, harder and harder, trying to stop my flesh and body from shaking, mashing my mouth upon her breasts. Then I felt her hands between my legs stroking me slowly, coming up the inside of my thighs, softly, delicately, squeezing my hips, pressing me deeper into her.

"I wanted you the first time I saw you," she said.

"And me."

"Do you give this service to all your pupils?"

"Shut up."

"I'll make you shut up. Come here."

I felt her hands running up the inside of my legs again, and her thighs spreading and spreading and her hands pushing from underneath and behind my hips and her voice moaning and sighing now and her mouth wet and open.

I felt her soft fingers scalding and her legs spreading.

"All of you," she murmured. "Everything. I want everything inside me. Everything you've got."

I heard myself yell as an agonizing pain shot through my hips and stomach; then her hand was stroking my back softly.

"Easy," she said. "Easy." Then, "There. It doesn't hurt now."

I couldn't believe it. She had everything inside her.

"Lift me up," she said, and she took my hands and as her body rose the pain in my stomach drew away.

"Don't move," she said. "Just stay like that. Ahhhh." She began slowly to rotate her hips, and all of myself that was inside her began to turn slowly in the soft, warm, creamy flesh of that lovely envelope of pink flesh at the apex of her thighs.

I was turning up inside her. Even in the darkness I could see her eyes widening, rushing white, all iris, and her nipples getting as big as her eyes; then her pupils seemed to contract to black pinpoints.

Her mouth was wide-open and I looked down on her slowly rotating belly and stroked each nipple softly. Her panting rose higher and higher and her hips were scalding me to death, then dissolving my flesh into her flesh.

She was tearing me apart. I had never believed a woman this age could open herself this much before, her hips devouring, churning, chewing at the rosy upthrust stalk inside her.

I leaned far down and nibbled at each nipple. Then she cried out, and I knew I had her going. Her hands clutching my hips, thrusting me harder and harder into her and then just as we were about to explode her body sprang away from me. I grabbed her arms.

"What the hell is this?" I held her, digging my fingers into her arms.

"Wait," she said. "Wait. It'll be even better now."

"What kind of tease are you pulling?" She laughed softly. "You'll see," she whispered. "Are you being funny?"

"Darling. Wait. Take it easy. Get me some Vaseline."

I couldn't move; then I heard her rise in the darkness, heard her felling around on the dresser, and when she came back she had it, the round hard, cold jar in her hand.

"Lie down," she said.

As I lay on my back she covered my hips with Vaseline; then she handed me the jar and said, "Put it on my breasts."

I stroked each nipple with the cream-like substance, feeling her breasts swell bigger and bigger. After that it was easier than before, everything going in, her legs folding around me, my hands sliding smoothly over her body and breasts, all of me inside her so easy, and then her finger smooth and soft entering me between my hips while her hips held me in the envelope of her flesh and ground me slowly around and around as her finger speared a hot ecstasy through me. I felt my brain coming out of my body and my body felt as if it were being drawn off the earth up into the sky. I wanted to scream but the pain was so mixed with ecstasy I could feel my mouth opening, gaping like a dying fish, yet no sound coming out.

Only the unbearable electric ecstasy mounting higher and higher through our bodies as our flesh sought realms of ecstasy beyond the flesh, our hips grinding 'round and 'round as my hands, as if they were bodiless and controlled only by the rotation of her breasts, slipped smoothly over and over again, flattening her huge nipples.

"I'm dying," she cried out. "I'm dying."

I could not speak.

My insides rushed hot and cold, warm and smooth, on and on, and on. (It must never stop,) I thought. (I don't want this ever to stop.)

But I couldn't hold it, and I knew I couldn't.

Then, just as I felt that my insides were going to come apart, she spread her legs and sat up suddenly, thrusting her thighs over my legs, and caught me around the waist with both hands, locking her hands behind my back.

I couldn't believe it. She pulled me deeper and deeper inside her bottomless creamy warmth, torturing her hips against me, until I felt the skin burning on my thighs.

Then suddenly I felt both of us rush out of each other and her arms were squeezing the breath out of me, and she was holding me tighter and tighter and tighter and we were sitting up facing each other, rocking back and forth, feeling our bodies drift away, as if we were swimming, now floating outward, bodiless, upon a distant warm dark sea.

I looked up at the remote stars, and they seemed to be breaking into a thousand fiery flowers, bursting and falling warmly through the darkness, and we clutched each other, feeling the warm stars falling all over our bodies.

5

God only knows when I woke. It was dark. I could feel her hair upon my chest and hear her breathing in the dark.

She lay against me child-like, her head on my chest, her breathing steady and soft and peaceful. I felt her flesh glowing. Even in her sleep I felt the tenderness and the wildness of her body. I touched her smooth, soft thighs.

"Cynthia," I whispered. She did not stir.

I touched her warm belly. It was incredibly soft. I kissed her creamy shoulder and breasts and then her mouth and held her close and drew her against me.

It was a moment I shall never forget, the blood clamoring in our ears, our bodies and minds drowning, floating in each other, the clamor softening.

The darkness seemed to dissolve into light as our flesh touched softly, softly, flowing through, upward into the warmth, into the soft, gentle light as if our bodies were flowers bursting into sunlight-only to lie coolly, lighting now upon cool water as shadows lifted our limbs, further and further out upon an immensity of water growing even more tranquil as the shore receded.

Then she murmured, the murmur low, fading.

"Darling, darling," she suddenly cried, her subtle muscles arching, as if crying out themselves as my mind disintegrating in the dark called back to her, voiceless. Then our mouths suddenly warm as rain, softer, softer, and then the water ebbing back and our bodies floating upon the tide, the water slowly azure again, beneath the warm stars, the naked muscles reclining laxly, golden, humming, at ease.

We sighed in soft and astonished ecstasy.

We slept again, touching. The warmth and glow of her body was like a drug.

We woke again.

Her passion came suddenly in a rushing curve, her breasts swollen with love, pressing, pressing, and again that passionate tender fullness, rising and rising until it seemed to pass out of the realm of what our bodies could endure of passion and anguished ecstasy.

There was no sound, no motion; the world had stopped, ceased, only our nerve ends trembling, shaking in grateful bliss, enraptured in death of desire.

I kissed her lips, held her close. We slept. I woke early enough, and I got her up. I said, "When will you be back?" She kissed me. "Don't worry. I shall."

"When?"

"I'll call you."

"When?"

"Tomorrow night. About seven."

She dressed while I sat there stunned. I looked up, and she was gone.

I knew it then. She was married. She had to pick her time to get out. But she was mine. She couldn't really belong to anybody else after what she had felt with me.

I lay there thinking about what to do and then I knew what to do.

Get out of town.

Sell the club.

I felt like a new man. Everything was clear. Sell the club, get away, build another club, take her with me.

I got out a map and tried to figure out where was the best place to start a bath and tennis club.

Far enough away so we wouldn't run into people from Cereal City and still not so far that we would run into heavy competition in the field.

I could feel her near me all day.

I picked up the morning paper and read the real estate advertising carefully, and checked the yellow section of the phone book to see who was handling business properties.

Finally I called the Cereal City Real Estate Association and asked for the newest company to enter the field of commercial real estate.

I got the name and drove over to the office. The girl at the desk sent me back to a young guy in a Brooks Brothers suit with a tab collar. I told him what I had in mind about selling.

I didn't expect him to come up with a client, but I thought he might have a few ideas, like paying for an advertisement in World Tennis magazine and pushing it there to all the pros around the country.

"Mr. Jackson, there's no market for your product right now."

"How's that?"

He gave me the solicitous smile of the old uncle to the misguided nephew.

"Actually, Mr. Jackson, we simply don't have many tennis pros in Cereal City."

He stopped, seemed to be waiting.

I mentioned something about it being a choice location for a high-rise apartment if the housing code were changed.

"I'm afraid that's somewhat in the future," he said, oh, so patiently, so nicely, so politely.

"However," he said, "I might be able to get somebody to take an option on the land in-"

"-case the city council changes the building code."

I smiled at him.

"Well, there is some rumor, you know," he said hesitantly with that beautiful manufactured smile.

"I didn't know."

He smiled again.

"We'd like to be of service."

"I'm sure."

He smiled again.

"Would you like us to offer it on that basis?"

"I'll call you," I said. "Don't call me."

"Thank you, sir."

(Where do they buy those bodies for those suits?)

Back at the club I thought about Norm; but I knew he didn't even have a window to throw it out of.

But maybe he could get a mortgage at the bank and buy it on time. Anyway, it was an idea.

So I talked to him about it. I knew he didn't have a dime of his own. He listened.

"Frank," he said. "Is she worth it?"

"What the hell do you mean?"

I was sore. He smiled slowly.

"Take it easy. Remember that old story about the monkey that had its tail resting on the railroad track and the train came along and cut it off and he turned around to see what happened and lost his head?"

"Up yours, Jack," I said and got up.

I went out and checked the lesson schedule book. I was glad I had a couple lessons to take up the time. I didn't want to be around Norm or I knew I'd belt him.

It was hot that afternoon and after the lessons I was tired, so I went upstairs to my room in the clubhouse to take a nap.

I couldn't sleep at first and then I thought I was having a dream, hearing Linda calling my name over and over again.

Then a hand roused me.

Linda was sitting on the edge of the bed.

She was a beautiful young girl, no doubt about it, with her black hair and blue eyes and fresh white skin. Her arms were folded across her breasts and she sat at the foot of the bed. I sat up, rubbing my eyes. She wore a white tennis dress with blue piping around the neck and down one side. Her tennis racquet rested against the side of the bed.

"How goes it?" I asked. "Been practicing?"

"Don't you remember? We had a date for a tennis lesson?"

"I'm sorry, honey, but it wasn't in the schedule book."

"So you just forgot?"

"Sorry."

""That's about all you can say, isn't it?"

"Look, Linda, I said I was sorry. I'm tired, too."

"I know. Slaving over a hot court all day. Why don't you say it? You don't-want to see me because I made a fool of myself."

"That's finished, forgotten."

"Okay, Frank, but who is she?"

What the hell business was it of hers? So I had another girl. Who the hell did Linda think she was? I was probably feeling guilty because she could tell I was trying to cover up.

"What business is it of yours?" I blurted out.

She looked frightened, badly hurt, and she drew back. I reached and touched her arm.

"Take it easy, honey, I haven't got another girl."

"Are you sure? Oh, Frank, I'd do anything for you. You know I'm in love with you. I hate the thought of your kissing anybody else. I think I'd die if you made love to somebody else. I don't know much about making love, but I know how I feel, Frank. Please help me, show me."

What the hell was there to do? If I gave her the brush-off, she'd know there was somebody else, and if I made love to her again I'd maybe never get rid of her.

She lay down on the bed beside me and put her arms around my shoulders and pressed her mouth against my face. She was all body-shaking like a leaf. I felt like a rat, but I returned her kisses. It's funny-that old saying, that a guy's balls have no conscience because that's all I was, just balls; but I didn't want her the way I wanted Cynthia, not in my mind, but it wasn't my mind that was working when she put her mouth on mine. It was just that my body and my mind were a long way off, and I suppose in a way I was holding Cynthia in my arms, even thinking of her as I made love to Linda.

"Oh, Frank, Frank," she said, crying out in happiness and I let myself go with her, everything, kissing her lips and eyes and throat. My mind was a vacuum in the blooming tensions of our flesh, tightening against each other, pressing further and further, with that terrible inner deliciousness of throbbing newness, her body straining in its desire to be searched again and again, nerves ravishing nerves, until at last each nerve in her body softened into a warm balm.

She pulled her head away. I heard her breathing heavily. I felt my heart pounding and heard the pounding of her heart.

She murmured softly, "Oh, thank you, thank you, oh, you darling."

I kissed her to give her a feeling of safety, thinking, what in hell have I got myself into now?

My brain was coming back into my head. What would happen to her if this went on when her youthful experiment became refinement, and all her modesty was lost, and I was gone?

Whoever wanted her then, could have her. I hoped she would find somebody nice to be good to her who would learn her every breath and fever of desire that lay awakened inside her.

"Touch me again. Just once," she whispered. "Once."

I ran my hand down the soft inner flesh of her thigh. I put my finger into the smooth, creamy hollow inside her arching hips, and stroked her breasts. I stroked slowly, softly, gently, slowly, and I began to feel her creaminess deepen and thicken under my hand. I ought to stop. She couldn't stand a diet like this. It would tear her apart eventually. I ought to stop, I told myself; but my hands seemed to move as if of their own volition, locked into the secret of flesh.

Then her lips opened hot and new and fresh against my mouth, and her tongue moved slowly under my lips, slowly, slowly, licking my lips, darting inside.

"Oh, Frank. Get on top. Please. I'm burning up."

It was strange. She was burning up, but her breathing was low and soft. I touched her closed eyes. I thought she had fainted. She whispered, "Darling, darling, darling, darling," rolling now and pressing against me, fondling the rosy stalk until I couldn't control my flesh, my whole body coming alive again for her, the stalk rising in her hand, rushing hot and cold beneath her fingers.

We began to shake and tremble and then I knew everything was started up again and I couldn't stop and that this would ruin her, but I couldn't stop.

Our bodies were on fire, and we were swimming upward into a long dark cave, her parted lips throbbing against me, her belly and shoulders quivering. I went on and on, upward into the darkness, in a stream of liquid fire pouring out of her, exploring every inch of her, seeking, seeking the last opening, that great flood of warm liquid darkness that would engulf us.

Her lips coiled and swelled and struck back against me, lunging and shuddering, coiling and uncoiling in moaning .gasps, burning and sucking my body farther upward, sucking me into sweet fire. I felt my brain and body drowning in a long, beautiful, shuddering darkness, and then, now at last I entered the final dark, liquid room of the cave, and we lay peaceful in the darkness, the stalk soft against her soft belly.

I looked at my watch.

"Tonight," she said.

"I can't," I lied. "I've got a tennis club board meeting."

"Frank, please try to love me. Oh, Frank, I love you so much."

I looked at my watch again.

"It's time somebody tended bar downstairs." I raised up on one elbow, looked out at Norm, who was teaching on the court, and the sunlight. Members would be expecting drinks.

"I've got to go downstairs."

"Frank, just...."

"There isn't time. Listen, go down the back way, through the kitchen, please."

I got up, dressed, and went downstairs.

Sure enough, the after-office tennis players-lawyers, doctors, though many ol them could play at noon, radio announcers-they were all there, hot red-faced, wiping their faces, toweling their arms, rapping on the bar when they saw me.

"Let's go, Jackson!"

I mixed all their favorite drinks. They were talking tennis. One quiet martini drinker who rarely said anything, a middle-aged lawyer, suddenly raised his head.

"Mixed doubles-if that isn't the worst poison ever invented."

"You need a new partner," a doctor said. "Have you seen the Swedish girl who joined last week?"

They went on kidding the lawyer. He laughed it off, shook his head, and the kidding stopped.

I mixed him another martini. He came down to the end of the bar, shaking his head.

"I never played tennis," he said, "until I met my wife. Then she beat me. So I got her pregnant a couple times. While she was pregnant I got pretty good at the game. Now all the time she wants to play mixed doubles with me."

"Hey, man," said the lawyer, "if you had her forehand, you'd be lucky."

"Yeah, yeah," said the lawyer, sipping the martini. "So she plays tennis all day now when I'm at the office, and at night she's too tired to get pregnant again."

"Frank," a radio announcer yelled, "let me show you something."

It was a Slaezenger racquet made in Australia, the kind used by the Aussie Davis Cup team.

"How about that frame?" he said. "Isn't it a beauty? I'm sure it'll do something for my lousy strokes, eh?" He chuckled, then swung the racquet at an invisible ball.

The lawyer at the end of the bar was getting a load on and wanted another martini.

Which was okay with me. It was his booze, and I made twenty-five cents off every drink. So I gave him another four-to-one martini.

"Three kids," he said, "and now she wants to play tennis all day so she can beat me again. It's too late and she doesn't know it. At night she's so pooped out from tennis all she can do is sleep."

He looked down into the martini glass and I looked at my watch. Why doesn't she phone? She promised.

Finally the tennis players drifted to the shower room and at last the lounge and clubhouse were empty.

Maybe the bank would back Norm and pick up the whole mortgage on the place. He could run the place if somebody watched him and Kept him off the booze.

Missouri would be the place to take her and find a good spot for a new club. Not too far south, and yet far enough to have two or three more months of an outdoor season as compared to this arctic region known as Minnesota.

That's what we'd do. I'd see the bank in the morning.

It was after ten o'clock. I finished the martini in the pitcher. Where in hell was she? She'd promised.

Hell, I'd been played for a sucker. Just some guy's beautiful rich wife or mistress looking for a little strange stuff at no cost.

I'd never see her again.

Sucker meat, Frank Jackson.

I turned out the lights in the lounge. I heard Norm close the door to his room.

I was standing there in the dark in the lounge when I heard a car come up the drive.

It stopped and Cynthia got out.

6

Her breath had stopped and only the sound of her heartbeat could be heard. Her tongue and lips were hot and scalding, searching mine. And her breasts, swollen with passion, pressed against me with all of her lovely, tall body arching and yearning as if to press all its surface into me. Moaning softly, she tried to turn away. We couldn't get enough of each other.

We lay there for a long time without speaking.

Finally, I said, "You had me worried when you didn't call."

She didn't speak. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. She sighed, not moving.

"Are you worried now?"

I couldn't have felt happier.

She put her breasts in my hands again and her full, soft mouth came down on mine, her fingers digging into my shoulder blades, her body pliant as a cat, and if Dr. Kinsey had been taking a reading he would have needed a seismograph. Her passion stunned me. Ah, the lovely curve of her spine, the smoothness of her buttocks, her voice expiring in long gasps, her soft loins writhing upon me, holding me tighter until in one long shuddering swoon we went down the long white river that never seemed to end until I heard her calling softly, "Ahhhh," and slowly our bodies came back to shore.

Then we slept. But even in my sleep I heard her voice, the faraway pock-pock of tennis balls against the backboard. I woke with a cool breeze blowing across us.

It was dark outside and we lay in the dark and talked and I asked her about herself.

She'd been to college three years, then her father had died, her home was in Minneapolis, and after having to drop out of college she'd worked in a stockbroker's office and she'd made some money on the market and that was how she had the Jaguar.

She kissed me. She said she'd never been so happy with anybody. I told her we'd play tennis together a couple of times a week. I'd teach her the game free.

A great future.

Then she told me where she worked. I'd never heard of the place. Advance Real Estate. Several men owned it. She'd been with them five years. They owned office buildings all over Cereal City. She was not only secretary of the corporation, but also accountant. She handled all the bookkeeping and supervised a staff of stenographers.

I felt pretty small. Hell, she was a bloody executive! She probably made twice the money I made.

Her fingers touched my body. Her lips came down upon my lips. She drew back her head.

"Have you lived in Cereal City all your life?"

"Nope. Houghton, Michigan."

"Same difference. Were you in the war?"

"E.T.O."

"Did you like Europe?" 'What I saw."

"Paris?"

"Just over it. I never got out of England in three years."

"Paris! We'll go there. It's wonderful."

Sure, then Istanbul, Cairo. So she'd been to Europe. I wondered how many guys she'd shacked up with.

"How's Parisian love life?"

"That's my business," she said.

"How the hell do I get to Paris?"

"Don't worry about it."

"How did you? Men?"

Her expression didn't change. She smiled as if out of some secret reserve of humor. She supported her head on one hand and leaned on her elbow. A finger of her free hand traced my lips. Then she put the tip of her finger on the tip of my nose.

"Let's say I've been around and leave it there."

"I want to know."

"So you know."

I didn't say anything. I was sore for a long moment at every guy that had ever touched her. I hated them all. Had there ever been one special guy? I wondered. I couldn't get it out of my mind.

"Who was he?"

"What?"

"Who was he?" I asked. "The first guy you ever slept with?"

"He was a flier," she said. "Like you. I was about eighteen. I grew up with him. I suppose I thought I was in love with him. Five months later he was dead."

"Were you in love with him?"

"I don't know." She stopped and looked away. She seemed to go a long way off. Then she smiled.

"Forget him," she said. "Please. Just forget him."

The trouble is none of those first loves are ever dead for women. Somebody mentions them or something reminds the woman of the guy, the first guy she slept with, and it all comes back to them. So she was right: don't bring him up again, leave the dead buried.

The moonlight was shining through the window. The night air was cooling.

"Is this all you want out of life?" she asked suddenly.

"The club?"

"Sure."

"Just the way it is?"

"Well, no. But there's no point in dreaming. I've got a lot of ideas."

"Like?"

"A real bath and tennis setup. A big kidney-shaped tile pool and a new clubhouse, with a top-flight dining room and apartments in the clubhouse and an indoor tennis club and skating rink to make it a year-round club. But, hell, that's talking about three hundred thousand dollars or more."

She picked up her drink. I could feel her brain thinking behind her eyes that were steady-eyes I could see in the light of the moon. They didn't look violet now. They looked smoke-blue. That's what they were, smoke-blue, not violet, and they were motionless, steady as her hand holding the glass to her lips.

"Keep talking about it," she said. "You might even get it someday."

She put her glass down.

I didn't know what she meant then.

I didn't care.

All I cared about was having her beside me.

I caught her and held her with both arms around her creamy-smooth shoulders, her body slowly arching as out of an exquisite dance. I heard her moaning softly and felt the blood draining out of my skull.

Her body was smooth as a vase. We held each other, seeking to find all the body surfaces of each other. When I touched the warm, creamy thighs and drew my hand upward, she sprang, clawing at me with both hands, hurling her body into me. We floundered against each other like grappling animals.

"Oh, darling, darling," she cried. "I could do this with you all night."

I felt time passing without any sense of motion and my eyes seemed blind. She writhed against me and I felt as if I were dreaming in some infinite rock of space before creation, and I could feel her filling my body with a new life, a sense of life I had never known before, a new vigor. But little did I know I was being borne toward a dark horizon.

I felt the muscles in her back and legs jerking and trembling in spasms of joy, and then my thighs tightening and jerking against her thighs, and her legs spreading slowly, then more quickly, and her hand feeling for the rosy stalk as she slipped it down into the warm creamy pinkness, and the sweet smell of her breasts and nipples came over me like the sweet odor of a field of flowers.

Our bodies began to move in a long swoon of ecstasy, and I breathed the sweetness of her flesh with the blood charging through our thighs and bellies, pulsating above the quivering upthrust stalk upon which she seemed impaled in the depthless liquid rhythm of our bodies melting into each other.

The melting sensation mounted steadily, warmly, plumbing all the cells of our minds and bodies. And now only Now matters. Now. Now the Big Now, and Now of blazing, liquid instant warmth as her body seems to rise and swell into me. Her body is a flower, luminous, and I feel the sharpness of my teeth in her softness.

Yet in that single instant fear lighted up my mind. A bottomless darkness seemed to open before me.

I felt myself falling into it, being swallowed. All reason seemed lost. I felt her mouth quivering over my lips and tongue. My body felt soft and willless. There was no tomorrow. No past. Nothing of myself any more. Only sounds and sensations. I had been replaced by her, a mouth and breasts and flesh moving upon the sound of her moaning, enveloping a dark nothingness.

Then there was a long, dark silence. I couldn't seem to open my eyes. Her hands smelled of sunburn. I could hear my heart beating as if I were alive, the only part of me still alive.

Then my eyes opened and I looked at the soft sheen of her breasts, as if they were endowed with magnetic powers, and each nipple appeared ready again, ripe with invitation.

I could feel my eyes staring down at her. Suddenly she entwined her arms around my neck and her moist, fiery mouth came savage and thrusting against my lips, her tongue searching my face and throat. A cry of exultation broke from her lips and I felt her tongue searching my chest as my hands caressed her thighs and buttocks.

I felt my body dissolving beneath her tongue, her tongue flowing downward, my body helpless, utterly drugged, as the stalk came up in a wild rush and she pressed it between her breasts with her last ounce of passion and strength, until I could feel all my nerve ends trembling in the rubbing of her breasts. Then suddenly all my naked muscles reclined laxly, and my body came back to me, filling with a soft humming as of the sound of hot summer afternoon fields.

I felt as if I had been drowning, and I now was floating effortlessly on a vast sea, the savage full stalk lax, yet still entranced.

7

Love is a good racquet, but was it enough to keep her coming around?

No, I figured, I was just small potatoes. If she'd been to Europe, there were other guys, big dough, and sooner or later she'd get tired of me and go back to the big money.

But one thing stuck in my mind. Her remark about "keep thinking about the three hundred thousand and maybe you'll get it."

Maybe I was dreaming, but there was something in her voice, under the sound of her voice that set me to thinking. She knew people with that kind of money.

But who the hell was going to throw that kind of money away into a tennis club?

But for two days I'd tried banks and loan companies, every angle to town to see if I could mortgage the place to Norm, but there wasn't a chance. He'd been a rummy ten years before and the banks and credit bureau still had him down as a rummy.

I'd told her about the idea, but she hadn't answered, and that was three days before and I hadn't heard from her since. I hadn't mentioned marriage but the talk about mortgaging the club and moving south maybe had scared her away because she probably wasn't interested in marriage. What the hell did she want with a two-bit tennis pro?

Well, this was it. I'd goofed, scared her off by getting serious.

I mixed another drink behind the bar. There were four members lounging around after doubles. It was hot and bright out on the courts. I felt bored and restless.

It was a relief when Doug Carney came in. He played in Minneapolis at the tennis club there and traveled for Gopher State Mining and Manufacturing Company. Doug was an old guy who had played big-time tennis thirty years before and it wasn't long before he was mixed up in the talk at the bar with a young player.

"Are you kidding?" Carney asked. "These punks today beat a guy like Tilden with their lousy ground strokes? Look what happened to Alex Olmedo when they put in the one-bounce rule. No ground strokes. Rosewall killed him off the ground. Tilden would murder the current crop of U.S. Davis-cuppers."

Carney could get loaded on two drinks. He was well into his second. So was the young player. The sun had taken a lot out of him and he was trying to put it back via gin.

"McKinley would kill him," said the young player. "After all, how did Tilden finally get taken? At the net. By that Frenchman."

Norm laughed. Carney chuckled.

"Listen," Carney said. "I saw Tilden when he was fifty-four play Perry who was thirty and beat Perry in straight sets."

"In tennis," said the young player, "you're over the hill at thirty."

"So where was Tilden?"

They went on and on and tried to draw me in and get Norm sucked into the argument and I left them debating whether Ellsworth Vines could beat McKinley.

I went out and checked the number one court because it was breaking up again, and turned on the hose and sprinkled the base lines and re-lined them. It seemed as if everybody from hackers to good players wanted action on that court. Damn tennis players, were all prima donnas, waiting for a gallery, so they could wear out my best court.

I checked the schedule book for lesson appointments.

There it was. A lesson with Linda.

I called Norm into the kitchen and asked him to call Linda and tell her I couldn't keep the appointment because of a tennis clinic I was supposed to attend in Minneapolis for state high school players.

The trouble was he phoned and Linda had already left, so I got out of the club as fast as I could and drove downtown and found a quiet bar and holed up there most of the afternoon; in fact, too much of the afternoon, because when I came but of the air-conditioned coolness the heat off the street and sidewalks struck me like the hot blast of an open furnace door.

The liquor didn't do me any good, either. I was groggy. I wasn't used to that many drinks during the day without a workout first.

I started up the street when a car honked behind me, then honked again.

When I turned around, Cynthia was parked by the curb. She was staring at me in the strangest way; I thought it must be because I looked tight or the sun was shining so bright, but later I knew that wasn't it. She was thinking about something. I wish I'd known then what I know now.

She smiled and I went over to the car.

She leaned out of the window. I must have looked a little groggy. She put her hand over my hand on the door.

"Come on," she said. "Hop in."

She drove across town, out near the airport and stopped in front of a new apartment building. I felt very sleepy.

"I know what you need," she said.

She had a three-room apartment, nothing fancy, but all the furniture modern and new.

I never saw anything like it. The shower cabinet was all glass. You could either shower in it or take a steam bath. We got in and sat down and she closed the glass doors. The steam was terrific and I felt all the booze and grogginess coming out of me in a few minutes.

We took ice-cold showers and dried off.

I held her there in my arms. She hadn't left me, but I had found her. No, she had stopped me on the street.

We went into her bedroom and lay down on the cool sheets. Once the telephone rang and she didn't move.

"Let it ring," she said. "Let it ring."

It was as it had been before only better, the long white river of softness carrying us on and on, instilling within us life and joy, carrying us to an almost unbearable ecstasy.

I drew the covers up to our throats. I had to find out what she figured I meant about all the talk of mortgaging the place, moving, selling out to Norm.

"Cynthia, the bank won't give me a dime for the place. I'm stuck right here."

She didn't move. She was staring at the ceiling. "So what?"

"Cynthia, I want to marry you, get a better place, go to another state, start a new club, something bigger and better."

"Bigger and better?" she asked. "Bigger and better."

She touched my chest. As long as I had her I felt there was nothing in the world I couldn't do. I could stay here, build up this cloud.

"Bigger," she said softly, "doesn't always mean better."

"It does in this business."

"You need money."

"Sure, maybe I could borrow some at the bank and fix the place up, increase the membership that way."

"No, you need a lot of money for what you have in mind."

"Not all at once."

"Why not?"

"Because the bank won't give it all at once. You know that."

"I know where there is big money," she said. Her face was suddenly different, changed, low and flat.

"It can be had," she said. She turned on her side, looked at me.

"Who's going to give that kind of money for tennis?"

"Frank, do you love me?"

"Yes."

"There's a way you can get the money you need."

"What kind of a woman are you?"

"Do you love me so much that nothing else matters?"

"I don't want this setup the same ten years from now that it is today."

"All right," she said.

I felt my insides going hot and cold.

She put my hands on her breasts. It was like being in heaven.

"Have you ever stolen anything?" she asked.

"Candy bars."

She laughed.

"Darling, this is money already stolen. It's illegal to begin with. They stole it from somebody else. We're going to steal it from them."

I was scared, I wanted to get away. I'd shot and killed people in the war. I'd been shot at and damn scared, but this was different.

I wanted to get away, but she held my hands and where she held my hands I never wanted to leave. I would have gone to the end of the earth to stay there.

"What about police?" I asked.

"They don't dare call the police. They wouldn't want the police or the Internal Revenue Service to know about the money. They can't talk if it's stolen."

She leaned away from me, then put both arms around my shoulders, and I kissed her. Her breasts smoothed into me.

It was like being in heaven.

"What do .we do?" I asked.

"Shhhh," she said. "Afterwards. Later."

She stood up and I watched her study herself in the mirror. She looked down at her arms, her breasts, the nipples pink and ripe. Her lips were full and red and she ran her tongue along her lips, studying herself. I could feel her flesh smooth and flexed, swelling with a sense of voluptuousness. She looked down at her breasts again and laughed softly. The nipples were pointing now, straight at me where I lay, pointing at me like little pink tongues seeking nourishment.

"Frank," she hissed, her voice a harsh whisper.

She lay down beside me, motionless, smiling; then slowly writhing under my glance, she closed her eyes and lunged her hips upward in an anguished movement, thrusting herself upward at an imaginary body.

I touched her and she put her hand on her breasts.

"Not yet," she cried, thrusting her body upward at some imaginary figure. She began to twitch and jerk from side to side, moaning with her eyes closed, but her mouth curved in a smile.

I gripped her thigh, and saliva came from the corner of her lips.

She began to whimper, twitching and jerking, telling me not to touch her yet, not yet, making a sound like crying. But rising through the sound came a queer kind of whimpering as if somebody were beating her.

Then suddenly she caught my wrists and drew me over and down upon her body.

Her body felt strange, cat-like, feline, sending out waves of excitement, penetrating every pore of my flesh, drawing me deeper and deeper inside her. I could feel the hysteria of her flesh entering mine. Her eyes were closed and her lips were smiling up at me.

She pressed her thighs tightly together, stretching her arms up for me, drawing me down. Then with her thighs pressed together she twisted her body upward, and again inside my skull stars began to bloom like gigantic soft flowers, exploding in sea shells shaped of light.

I felt the wild imprint of her teeth in my shoulder. I heard myself moaning and grasping at her body.

Her cat's eyes staring at me.

But I wanted to drown in her body. Her flesh ate into my soul. My brain was dizzy. Her mouth breathing, kiss me kiss me kiss me kiss me, a hot well sucking my tongue.

I bit her breasts until she screamed and her nipples were two big red strawberries staring up at me.

The room swirled in the fierceness of our blood and thrashing bodies.

Then our flesh began to merge, down through a long corridor of light, lifting our bodies upon a ray of light. I felt as if I were floating in air; then her breasts and hips came on rushing again, furious and wild.

"Oh, darling, darling," she cried, and I felt her muscles arch and my brain disintegrated as our bodies rose furious and supple, flexing and receding.

Her mouth was warm as rain; then our muscles ceased and I felt her heart rush through my body in a long, dying curve, her big breasts, swollen with love, pressing, pressing down, down through my chest, into my naked flesh.

I kissed her, held her close. There was no end.

I was doomed. I would do anything for her.

8

I lay in her arms and she did not speak. I felt the softness of her cheek against mine and again I asked the question.

She was silent, breathing. Then she said again, "Later, not now." We made love again and slept and when I woke she was dressed. She was sitting at her dressing table combing her hair. She mumbled something about the hour and I rose.

Why wouldn't she tell me what she had started?

She could see I was worried. "Get dressed," she said. "We'll get out of here."

Why not stay here? What was there to worry about here?

"Come out to my place," I said.

"No," she said. "We'll go for a drive. It's always better to talk in a car."

I didn't get it. All this spooky stuff.

So we went in her car. Out into the country, down a road behind a golf course. On the way out she kept glancing at the rear-view mirror.

"What the hell?" I asked. "What're you so spooky about?"

She smiled, just shook her head, held up a finger as if to say, be patient, wait, and I will tell you.

We turned off the golf road and into a roadside picnic area. It was empty. I was getting a little fed up with all this dodging about.

She parked.

I said, "Okay, let's have it."

She looked at me carefully.

"You wonder why I wanted to get out of the apartment, why I keep looking into the rear-view mirror? Have you ever heard of Stutz Gandler?"

"Who hasn't?"

Anybody who can read the Cereal City Tribune knows Gandler, oldest brother of three Gandlers, alky king of the Twenties and Thirties, alleged head of the syndicate which controlled most of the liquor licenses in Cereal City despite city law that allotted one license to one owner. Three times he was charged with gang killings, and three times he'd beat the rap. He's getting old now, but he's still overlord of the gang world of our town.

"You might as well know," she said, "I work for him. The feds are after him. Income tax. They're going to indict him."

"Where do you come in?"

"I'll have to take the stand."

"So what?"

If I take it and tell the truth-I know the books-he'll do time. He'll die in prison. He's sixty now."

"Why doesn't he get out of town?"

"He's waiting. If I talk, I'm dead. I haven't got the money to leave town, not to get that far from him."

"He figures you won't talk." She nodded.

"He can't possibly beat a net worth case, no matter how many sets of books he keeps. And once they start on net worth they'll question me."

I could hardly believe her.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was afraid."

"Of what?"

"You wouldn't see me again."

"Nonsense. I wouldn't know Gandler if I saw him."

"He'd have both of us killed if he knew about this."

"Have you ever-?"

"No." She shook her head. "He has his girl friends."

Then she stopped suddenly. She looked away. I could feel the heat of the day mounting inside the car, and I rolled down the window on my side.

"You mean in all the time you worked for him, he never-"

"Oh, he's tried. He'd like to, but he doesn't dare-I'm his niece." Her voice was trembling. "If I don't get out of here he will try and if I stop him he'll beat me or kill me. I know him. I know what he's done. You're the only person I've ever told. He thinks I'm taking lessons, but that's all."

Suddenly her head was on my shoulder and she was crying.

The bastard really had her scared.

I knew his reputation, but in that instant when I heard her crying I wasn't scared of him. I wanted to kill him. I put my arms around her.

"Cynthia, darling."

She was a million miles away in her fear. I couldn't do a thing for her. She went on crying, shaking.

I lifted her face from my shoulder and as her crying began to stop, the more the hate inside me rose for Gandler. I knew the kind of power he had. I knew the men he had killed. I knew who they were-one a newspaper reporter, and three business competitors. I felt whipped.

I could remember his picture in the newspapers: the toad face, the football shoulders, the smooth black hair with the part so neat it appeared to have been shaved.

"He'll kill us both if he finds out.'

"You mean that you're seeing me?"

"No, what I know we can do."

"Hell, tell me!"

"Can I trust you?';

"Who else can you trust?"

"Darling, I'm so scared. So scared."

She huddled against my shoulder.

"Please," she said. "Please believe me. I know we can do it."

The sun slanted two shafts of light through the window from the trees surrounding the picnic grounds, and the sound of a car speeding down the road came to us. I started the engine. Her fingers pressed my leg, squeezed into my thigh.

"You must be careful," she said.

9

That night Cynthia came to the club. She waited until closing time and we went up to my room. We were sitting there having a drink when suddenly she said, "Who is she?"

"What do you mean?"

"The girl. Don't tell me you haven't got a girl."

It shocked me. I wondered if she'd had somebody watching me or if she were just guessing.

"Scores," I said, trying to make a joke of it. But she only shook her head and said, "Come on, Frank." So I started telling her about Linda, how her old man was rich and how she hung around the courts, but how she was too young for me and besides her old man could make or break mo if he wanted to.

"Is she better than I?"

"I've never slept with her."

"Sure, Frank."

"Honest!"

"Sure."

"So help me." Somehow I couldn't tell her.

"You'd better help yourself, Frank. Let me give you some advice. This affair-the trouble is if you haven't slept with her, you'd better. I don't want anybody tying us together. You can't imagine how many stool pigeons Stutz has around town. Don't ignore this girl."

"I don't want her on my hands."

"Take her out. You've got to have a girl publicly."

I knew what would happen if I started dating her. I'm healthy, but in no time at all I wouldn't have anything left for Cynthia. Linda was a very passionate girl, but I couldn't tell Cynthia that.

"I'll get in a jam with her."

"You're a big boy."

"Hell, people have seen your car around here. They'll tie us together."

"You won't find it parked near here now," she said. "I checked on you. You don't have a reputation for playing around with the customers."

"She's a passionate girl."

"It's the only way," she said. "We want out of this town. You want me and a place of your own. I want you and freedom from here. If we're going to get it, we're both going to have to do things we don't like."

Far away, overhead, I heard the Chicago night plane climbing, droning east.

"Stop worrying about how you're going to feel now," she said. "What counts is we're going to be together later."

"Okay," I said. "You're the boss."

I reached for her shoulder and she drew back and set her glass down.

"Okay," I said. "But where are we getting this money? What do I have to do?"

"If you remember during the Second World War sugar was rationed. And so was whiskey. You couldn't make whiskey without sugar. Stutz saw that it was made. He stole or had printed-I never found out-millions of dollars' worth of sugar ration stamps. He got the sugar and he sold it. He used some of it himself. He made and sold bootleg whiskey. It was the biggest business in America during the war. But where could you hide the profits? You couldn't show it or spend it, at least not a lot at one time."

I found myself staring at her, the glass in her hand.

"That money is hot. Red hot. But they've got to use it. They're in real trouble."

That wasn't what I wanted to hear. I didn't care what kind of trouble they were in. I only wanted to know where I fitted into her plan to get money.

"They can't buy off the Internal Revenue Service, but Stutz is short of cash. It cost him a hundred thousand dollars in attorneys to beat that case the state had against him for buying the streetcar company, then watering the stock. He's got to get some of that cash out now for this income tax case against him."

She stopped talking. She looked at me quietly.

In the faint light I could see her face, those rousing breasts, the slim, round softness of her body, the slender fingers, the long, beautiful long legs.

"Have you been listening?"

"Every word."

"I know what you're thinking about, but right now listen to what I tell you."

"Okay," I said.

"This is what I think is going to happen. There're two sets of books in our office, one real and one false. That money, about three hundred thousand dollars in cash, is hidden in his brother-in-law's house in Minneapolis. Sam Jebo's his name. Sam lost both of his legs in an auto accident. I don't know, but I think I'm going to be asked to pick up the money. I've picked up money before for Stutz. I'm the last person they figure the feds will watch. I don't know when or where, but you'll meet me and take the suitcase. It's sure to be in that."

She touched my hand, her face close now.

"But you're going to need a gun in case they have somebody trailing me."

"Don't worry about that," my voice said.

"All right," she said, smiling. She kissed me. "I won't."

She lay back on the bed. "Darling, I don't mind you thinking what I've been thinking too, but not when we're discussing business."

"What are you thinking now?"

She smiled and stretched. "You guess."

She twisted and turned as I took her clothes off. Her eyes closed, her hair spread out on the pillow, and then her breasts were there, drawn up, pointing at me, soft and pink, and I kissed her breasts and knelt between the softness of her legs and kissed her mouth and sank down into the voluptuous hysteria of her flesh and mine.

We lay there a long time, breathless, feeling time ebbing and flowing yet seeming to stand still, the world outside motionless, the globe itself as if it had ceased spinning on its axis.

"Frank," she said, "do I make you big?"

"Bigger than ever before."

"Lovely big?"

"Big-big-lovely."

"Am I good inside?"

"Too much. Too much."

"How am I good inside?"

"Juice and tightening and yet giving everything."

"You make me that way."

"Come here," I said.

I got busy with her again, hands on her breasts and touching the hollow wet sweetness between her legs, smelling the sweetness of her flesh making me big again.

Wanting her again as never before, sitting on her stomach now, pressing her breasts around my bigness until I felt her thumbs going into my sides.

"Oh, come up, Frank," she cried softly. "Come up. Higher."

I felt her hands lifting me up and the sweet pinkness of her lips opening and closing, opening and closing and her thumbs digging into my sides and my guts rushing hot and cold, in and out, and the stalk narrowing in a frenzy, growing wild but small, so I pushed down upon her shoulders and lifted myself up and lay upon her and kissed her breasts and felt the swooning opening of her thighs.

Then her mouth was my mouth and her breasts were my flesh and her body became my body and there was nothing else in the world.

She left before it was night and by ten o'clock the next morning I'd given two one-hour lessons and was back in the clubhouse drinking ice-cold lemonade. Sitting in the lounge were an attorney and a local judge named Earl Swanson.

"How goes it, Frank?" asked the judge.

"Fine, Judge. Picking up this summer."

"Don't worry about Frank," said the lawyer. "He knows how to promote."

"Thank you, sir," I grinned.

"He promotes a lot of good things," said the lawyer. "How did you ever promote her?" He sat there, smiling. I'd known him for ten years. He was a good friend. What the .hell was he up to now? Had he seen Cynthia? Did he know her? My guts felt cold and hard.

"Well, Frank's a good teacher, aren't you, Frank?" asked the judge.

That just about did it. They had me over a rack.

I didn't know what to say or where to go.

I pretended to be busy slicing an orange, trying to smile, but I could feel the smile was badly forced.

"She's a nice girl," said the judge, "and you won't find a better man for a father-in-law."

All the fear ran out of me suddenly. They meant Linda!

"He's a swell guy," I said. "None better."

10

So the next day I went around to Linda's house. There was the big front lawn with sprinklers throwing spray into the sunlight.

I rang the doorbell. No answer. I waited a couple minutes and rang it again. Still no answer. I started down the steps and across the drive when she called my name and I looked back and she was looking out of the second-story window.

"Be right down!" She waved.

Sunlight and summer air swept across the porch and lawn like music, and somewhere a bird sang three notes and stopped. In the peaceful silence the house seemed isolated. On the invisible highway screened by the high hedge a car passed, died away.

"Hi," she said, opening a door and springing out to plant a kiss on my cheek. "Hey, take it easy!" I looked around.

"Nobody home," she said gleefully and caught my hand and led me into the house.

It was cool and peaceful inside. It was an old house, huge, with split maple woodwork, erected at the turn of the century by her grandfather. I forced a happy smile.

"Everybody's gone for today. Mother went up to the north shore and Dad's in Chicago on business." She chattered on about the weather and how glad she was to see me. She was a beautiful girl and I wished to hell I had never met her.

"Let's have a drink," she said. "I feel like celebrating." She laughed. "Isn't it your birthday or something?"

"Not even close, but the drink sounds good."

I needed more than one drink to drive away the blues that were coming over me.

I watched her move as we walked to the liquor cabinet. She had a beautiful figure. Every movement was feminine and assured, filled with the friendly, natural buoyancy of a happy person.

Her parents were going to Europe in the fall, she said, and they wanted her to go along, but she wasn't sure she wanted to go. She'd been to Europe while in college two years before. She thought she might stay home and do hospital work for the Junior League.

"I'm glad you're not going," I said. "I don't want you to go away."

(After I was gone somebody from the country club would take care of her and marry her and they'd raise kids and send them to the same schools they had attended and they would raise more kids and in the end she would Hue happily ever after as she was intended to live, with her own kind of people.)

She was beautiful and sweet. I envied the guy.

I finished my drink and said I had to get back to the club.

She looked sore and hurt.

"Why did you stop then?" she asked.

"I just wanted to tell you," I said, "I'm going away."

"Frank!"

"I'll be back, but I'm going away for a while."

"Who's going to run the club?"

"Norm will do the job."

"Are you in trouble?"

"Nothing like that."

"Is it money? Look, Frank, you can ask Dad ... he can arrange it at the bank."

"Nope. I'm just mixed up, Linda. I want to think over a lot of things."

"What about me?" She got up and suddenly came into my arms. "Frank," she said, her mouth faintly open, her eyes close to mine and pink spots darkening slowly on her cheeks. "Frank, I'm your girl." She caught my shoulders. She shook me. "I'm your girl, Frank, do you understand?"

"I'll be back. I won't be gone long."

"Where are you going?"

"I'll be back. Don't worry."

"I'm your girl, Frank. You made me your girl."

Her voice was cold and still and her lips were scarlet.

"Do you understand, Frank?" I kissed her, and her face seemed to drain of color, became small and sincere and child-like, and I could feel her agonized body, filled with longing and a kind of sorrow, pressing against me as long, shuddering waves of desire went over her, her lips opening in a shuddering swoon. By infinitesimal inches the smell of her flesh seemed to slip into every pore of my body. Her eyes became darker and she began to moan in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward, overcome in a wave of physical desire. When I touched her breasts she sprang, hurling herself upon me, dragging me down upon the davenport, grinding against me, her mouth gasping as she moaned, "Hurry. Here. Now. I've got to. It's not my fault. It's you. It's not my fault. Didn't you start it? You're not afraid, are you?" She dragged at my head with her hands, straining at me as though she were trying to touch me with all of her body surface at once.

When we finished I wanted to leave. I felt lousy, but she clung to me, not crying, just clinging as if she owned a piece of me, or rather as if I owned a piece of her, and as if she had never complained before about my hedging on marrying her.

She thought I felt what she felt, but, hell, that's what made me feel lousy, because I knew what she felt, what I had felt with a woman a century ago-tenderness after sex-but I didn't feel it now. I felt good, sure, but I didn't feel as if I ought to take care of her the rest of her life, and this probably was what she was feeling, thinking: he loves me because I love him now. But they never learn, so I felt rotten, as if I had betrayed her, knowing I knew better, but just taking her for kicks.

Ah, what the hell? It was what she was asking for, I told myself, but I didn't buy it. I wanted to buy it, but somewhere inside me I couldn't buy it, and that was funny, because with Cynthia I was feeling the same thing Linda was feeling with me, and I figured that for Linda it was kid stuff.

That was it. The ticket. Cynthia had me feeling like a boy again. Paradise. That's what she did to me. The Seven Cities of Cibola. That's what lay between her legs, but why Cynthia and not Linda?

Whoever could answer that one for every guy and gal in the world could bottle it; just a piece of paper with the answer on it, and put it in a bottle, and sell it for patent medicine and make a fortune.

"I'm your girl, Frank. Always your girl."

But her voice was warm now, and I thought perhaps the way to get rid of her was to take her now with coldness as some women will lie there and take it without giving any juice, just twitching phonily, and you can always tell, and to give her that would turn her away and I would be rid of her.

But when she touched me she got me in a strange way that Cynthia had. She turned it on like Cynthia. She didn't know it, but she did it, all the way.

I did what she wanted and then got out of there.

I felt rotten, as if I had betrayed two women-the one I loved and the one who wanted me to love her.

I had never felt so rotten.

Besides, I was scared, too.

In a war you've got to plan the attack, and in this war I knew so little about the enemy position I wasn't sure of a thing.

And Cynthia was too vague. When? Where? These were factors I knew nothing about because she had not explained them.

I'd seen guys afraid in the war, fear eating into them each day until their confidence was gone, and it ruined them, and I could feel this happening to me now, and knew that for a job that required nerve we'd better do it fast before the fear ruined me.

I couldn't concentrate on anything at the club. I tried stringing and made a botch of two racquets, so when a couple of lessons came in I asked Norm to take over and he wasn't so blind as not to put everything together and come up with the answer, but he took the lessons for me without saying anything.

It was almost evening before she phoned.

"Can you talk?" she asked.

"Go ahead."

"I'm up at Carter's."

That was a drugstore about five blocks from the club.

"Meet me in five minutes," she said. "I'll drive along the street, about half a block from Carter's."

I waited a couple minutes and started down the street and spotted her car about two blocks from Carter's. I raised a hand and turned a corner, hoping she had spotted me.

She had. She picked me up on the next comer.

When we were about two miles out of Cereal City she turned up a side road and parked. We kissed.

"Things an-moving," she said. "Kmc." I said, waiting for her to open up. "We're going to need your car tomorrow."

"I (tan get away. What's the deal?"

"We're going to Minneapolis. I want you to see Jebo's house, the whole layout."

"Fine."

"Did you take my advice?"

I didn't look at her.

"I saw her, if that's what you mean."

"What're you sore about?" she asked.

Her smile angered me, taunted the rottenness I felt inside myself in that instant, but looking at her I knew it was only Cynthia I wanted-she was the only one. Maybe she was a whore and witch or a combination of both, but whatever it was I couldn't ever get her out of my skin. I wanted her and that was all, no matter how the other things made me feel.

"Nothing," I said. "She's a nice girl."

Cynthia said nothing. She was looking straight ahead, her mouth bold and bright.

Sunlight dappled the road through the overhanging tree branches, and the long shadows of elm trunks striped the dust from woods to cattail swamp out of which the blackbirds were calling, swirling through the sunny air.

"Well," she said. "How was she?"

"Shut up."

She turned the key in the ignition, started the engine. I caught her hand as she shifted gears, reached across, switched off the motor. I caught her wrists and kissed her lips. She dragged her mouth free.

"She's better, isn't she?"

"Shut up," I said, wanting to strike her to get some sense into her head.

"It was your idea," I said.

"I thought you could handle yourself," she said scornfully.

"She's a beautiful nice girl! What the hell, I'm only human!"

She began to cry. She told me she had only meant I was to keep Linda on the string, but this wasn't true and she knew it, and now she was jealous because I'd told her the truth or she'd guessed it. I should have lied. Always lie to them. They don't want truth, I thought.

"I'm in love with you! Not her!" I said. "If you don't know that now you'll never know it!"

I felt her body soften and the boldness and hardness go out of her lips and she leaned her head on my shoulder and kissed my cheek and asked me to kiss her. We sat there holding each other, touching each other, kissing in the warm, sweet-scented summer afternoon.

"Nobody can have you except me," she cried, her lips soft and fierce.

If only I'd known what she was getting me into.

11

We drove down to Minneapolis the next day. The highway seemed endless, though it was only seventy miles.

"It's an old house in a poor part of town. Nobody would ever expect him to have the money, even though everybody knows he's related to Stutz."

Her voice was steady.

But I could tell by her eyes she was scared, maybe even more afraid than I was. It was as though she were listening to the silence between us, because I could feel silence and it was fear and in the silence she was thinking. You could see it behind her eyes as if she were groping gingerly for a thought she could not find.

"It's an old brown frame house."

"Have you ever been there?" I asked.

"Once."

"What for?"

"I drove Stutz. Two years ago."

Her voice ceased. We came into north Minneapolis and turned down Lyndale Avenue, then onto Hennepin and drove around Loring Park, and across upper Nicollet Avenue.

She told me to pull up against a curb and park. Across the street was an old brick tenement house and on the other side were huge piles of sand in a vacant lot.

"It's a block east and half a block south," she said. We started up, past' weather-stained old houses that had been fashionable forty years before. Gables and porches. Windows filled with ROOM FOR RENT signs.

She lifted her hand. I saw the house, small, gaunt and stark, shaded by shaggy elms. It was only two stories with a board fence on each side. It might have been the garage or carriage house of one of the big houses long since gone to insurance company headquarters or secretarial schools that -lined the other side of the street.

The shades were drawn. There was little grass in the front yard. Two dogs nosed each other in the dust, wrestling and snapping.

I wondered why the brother-in-law of the head of the syndicate in Cereal City lived in such a miserable place. Maybe it was a good way to keep the government from ever sticking you with a net. worth suit. Maybe Jebo had money and he was smarter than Stutz, not showing much of it at all.

The front door of the house opened and a woman came out.

"Look out," Cynthia said and slid down in the seat so that her face was invisible below the dashboard. "Let's get out of here."

I stepped on the gas and we shot around the corner. We drove about two blocks and suddenly Cynthia ducked as a Buick came toward us with two men in the front seat. One had a small round dark face and the other was tall and blonde and young. They went past, looking straight ahead.

Cynthia said, "That was Jebo and his son. His son is in medical school at the university."

"They didn't even look at us."

But that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was how she expected me to get the money from her. Sure, it was good to know where the pickup was, but she could not be expecting me to stick her up at the house. It would have to be after she left, so now I knew only where to start trailing her.

Her hand was shaking as she lit a cigarette. I pretended not to see it. I drove out Highway 100 and parked at the beach where Highway 52 joins Highway 100 and got her out of the car and sat her down at one of the picnic tables under the trees.

"Are you sure you're going to pick it up?"

"I heard Stutz tell his brother he was sending me down soon to pick up some merchandise. They use that term in front of the other girls in the office."

"They'll have a tail on you. First to protect you and second to see if the government is following."

"How will we work it?"

She was worried and scared; I could see it.

"The only thing that will look reasonable is a fender-bender."

"What?"

"Fake an auto collision."

"In daylight?"

"Nope. You're right. You're going to have to go into a garage and tell them something is wrong with the car. We'll loosen a plug before you leave. Then, while the mechanic is away ... tell him you want a new plug ... while he's away take pliers and give the gas line a squeeze. The car will run about half a mile on what's in the carburetor and then stop. That's where I come in. And while you're in the garage it'll give me a chance to see if Stutz has a tail on you."

"I don't dare come around the club any more. The day I go I'll phone and simply say I'd like a lesson and the time I give you will be the time I leave the office for Minneapolis."

"What'll we do after we get the money?"

"I leave the car, my car, and go back to Cereal City with you."

When we got into Cereal City she kissed me and I dropped her about five blocks from her apartment.

The courts were full when I got back to the club. Men and women and kids. Mixed doubles, doubles and singles. Norm was stringing racquets and I pitched in with him. I felt relieved. Now I knew the score. It had been like waiting for the next big attack without knowing the target. Now I knew the target.

After awhile I said, "Linda been around?"

He looked surprised.

"I thought that was finished."

"Finished?" I laughed. "It never got started. Or rather maybe it's just starting."

"She's a fine girl."

But I could feel him looking at me strangely.

Then somebody called for a drink and I went out front. We had a busy evening. I thought everything was fine. I felt relaxed, no longer scared, but about nine o'clock, just before closing I began to feel uneasy, and there was nothing I could hang it on. It was the same uncomfortable feeling I have sometimes after leaving a motel and a couple miles down the road I start wondering if I didn't forget to pack something.

This was it, and it got worse and I couldn't put my finger on it.

Then it hit me.

No gun.

And then I remembered and went downstairs in the basement and pulled out the old GI footlocker and rummaged around inside. It was still there, under the brown coat and pink trousers.

I had bought it off a Ranger on the lie de France coming home, the first load into New York after VE Day. He also had the Nazi flag from the Bremen headquarters. He was selling Lugers for twenty-five bucks and Walthers for fifteen.

I bought a .32 Walther.

It was still there with cartridges. I checked it over and loaded it.

It was clean and ready. I put it back in the locker.

12

I put the telephone on the table behind the work bench on which I was stringing racquets. My fingers felt big and awkward, pulling the strings of gut through the holes in the racquet frame. The strings slipped and I wiped the sweat off my hands, smelling the open shellac bottle right down to the bottom of my jumpy stomach.

I went on working. Minutes dragged like hours and hours were a century long.

The phone squatted there silent. Another hour passed. Another.

Suddenly the telephone rang! Now, I thought, let it be now. Her, and the word to go.

I lifted the receiver. My hand was sweating again, "Hullo."

"Pastime Tennis Club?"

"Yes."

It was Cynthia but she had changed her voice.

"What's the trouble?"

"Who's on the line?" Her voice sounded shaky.

"Nobody." I could see into the lounge where the other phone rested on a coffee table.

Something was wrong. There was a slip someplace. I could smell it. The wire hummed. There was no other sound; then I heard her breathing above the sound of the wire hum.

"It'll never work," she said. "Skip it."

"What's the matter?"

"It's too risky."

"Aren't you going?"

"He's putting two men on me. They'll tail me all the way in and all the way back."

"When do you leave?"

"About four o'clock."

"You ought to be at Jebo's by five-fifteen."

"Frank, it won't work."

"I'll be there."

"Frank, listen-"

"See you, darling."

I hung up. She loved me or she wouldn't have cared enough to stop me. For that kind of money she could have suckered me into it. Tonight was the night. They were going to move the dough in the evening traffic. It was going to work.

I was ready. Would she do her end?

I often wonder now if she had any other plans for the money, if anybody else would have got it if things hadn't worked a certain way. I'll never know.

I told Norm to take over, that I had a date. He gave me a queer look and nodded, but didn't say anything, not even a smile this time.

I took only three things-pliers, a flashlight, and the gun.

It was nice driving down to Minneapolis. You come down along the river with the last light of day beginning to shine on the water and the river moving big and blue, widening and narrowing, running bluish-white between the green trees on each side. I stopped in Anoka for gasoline and a cup of coffee. I left the gun in the car under the front seat, but when I was back on the highway I stuck it in the inside pocket of my sport jacket.

Between Anoka and Osseo I began to feel hurried, but as I came through the city limits I knew things were just right.

It was ten minutes to five.

I'd hit Jebo's right on the nose.

I came around behind Jebo's on the side street about five minutes after five, and as I went through the intersection I saw her Jag parked in front. Across the street a black Ford with two men sitting in the front seat.

I drove slowly around the block and waited a couple minutes, then went through the intersection again behind the black Ford.

She came out about twenty minutes after five o'clock. She was carrying a big suitcase. I knew if she were going to pull the stunt she wouldn't go ftf a garage until she hit Anoka, the gas station being right on the corner of the highway junction, so I hung back through the traffic, about three blocks behind her and a block behind the tail.

You couldn't tell if anybody else was following her because the traffic was thick.

The traffic was heavy on the highway, but she wasn't wasting time, and I hoped she didn't try to set any speed records to Anoka.

All she needed was to have the suburban police or highway patrol pick her up. It would mean I'd have to drive past her and then the tail might spot me in Anoka later.

She slowed on the river road. It was a narrow road, the old road of new split-level houses set against the river edge in grassy suburban plots, with now and then an older house, marking the time of river cottages.

The wheel began to feel greasy in my hands. I was sweating, but I didn't feel nervous. It was like flying in the war again. The worst part was sitting there, waiting, waiting, not knowing what was going to happen, but feeling better once you got the wheel in your hands and the roar of the engines in your head, even though your gloves were full of sweat before you hit the coast.

Well, the coast was coming up for me now. Anoka was only five miles away, so I just hung back in the long snake of cars of suburban fathers going home to suburban mothers and kiddies, everybody driving like mad to get home while the sun was up.

Then we crossed the river bridge and drove into Anoka. I pulled over to the curb and parked.

I checked my watch. I'd give her three minutes to the gas station and five minutes in the station and figure her tail would pull through the intersection and park across the street to pick her up when she came out of the station.

It would also give them a chance to see if she was tailed.

Seven minutes later I passed the gas station. The Jag was there. She was bending over the engine with the hood raised. I drove past through the intersection, and sure enough, about two blocks up the old tar highway, two guys were parked in the black Ford.

They looked at every car passing, and there was a steady stream even on the old road. I drove about a mile and pulled off on a side road so I could see anything that passed.

I waited ten minutes and the Jag passed.

Four cars behind were her buddies. They looked like a couple of insurance salesmen en route to a customer appointment, dark blue suits, straw hats.

The sun was getting low, red and yellow across the cornfields.

I pulled onto the highway and drove behind an old Chevy. There was a Filipino driving it and he was talking to two men in the back seat who were drinking beer. The Filipino kept turning around and waving his hands at them, laughing and grinning, taking a sip of their beer.

I figured any minute he was going to crack up, so I nosed around him and pulled into line about five cars back from her.

Then I saw the Jag start to turn out of line.

It swerved again and turned suddenly across the highway to the left and onto a country road that ran between brush and swamps and woods.

The black Ford followed, and I followed the black Ford. Shadows of trees had reached the road. The shadows were almost across the road, yet full sunlight still showed through the tops of the trees.

We were running about forty-five miles an hour for perhaps two miles through a desolation of swamp and brush. The car swung in the eroded ruts, rising and falling toward what looked like a long valley ahead.

Suddenly the Jag stopped dead.

Right in the middle of the narrow road.

The black Ford stopped and I stopped.

I got out and walked up to the black Ford. The two men were already out, standing on the edge of the road.

They looked over their shoulders at me, one tall in a suit that looked black and silky and tight-neither was smoking-the other in a suit that looked blue and silky and tight. They wore sport shirts buttoned at the throat, their eyes narrowing as I walked toward them.

"Can we give the lady a hand?" I asked, smiling.

Cynthia was leaning over the motor, the hood raised, her head invisible.

"Go on," the blue suit smiled affably, "we'll help her." '

"Okay," I said, and went back to my car and climbed in. I drove up on the shoulder of the narrow road and passed the car and the two men. She was twenty yards up the road and when I came alongside I stopped and stuck my head out the window.

"Need any help, miss?"

"I don't know what to do," she wailed in a lost, despairing voice, lifting her head.

I sprang out and moved quickly behind the raised hood and pulled out the gun before they were even close to the car.

The man in the blue suit stopped first. He smelled a rat. I heard him yell something, but I couldn't hear the exact words. I ducked down beside the car and duck-walked; crouched along the side of the car.

They nearly nailed me that way. They had split up while I was behind the hood and as I came around the rear of the car one stepped out.

He was waiting for me, but he was looking the wrong way. He was looking straight ahead instead of down. I was kneeling. He fired once over my head. His hand came down quickly, but it was too late.

I shot him in the stomach while his hand with the gun was on the way down.

For a long moment he hung there, frozen in mid-air, his hands clutching to his guts, his gun flung against the sky; then he doubled up and fell on his face. He lay spread out, with his head twisted to one side. His eyes rolled white and then stared and blood ran out of the corner of his mouth.

I ducked under the car. I could see the legs of the black suit coming toward the car, to my right. He didn't know where I was except on the opposite side of the car from him.

When he was quite close I shot him through both legs. He screamed and cursed and I rolled out from under the car. Because he was down on the road level now.

He got off two shots. I heard the bullets smash the underside of the car. I heard the gun go off bop, bop.

I sprang upon the hood of the car and crawled up on top and flattened on my belly and crawled and looked over the edge. The man lay on his back with one leg folded under him, the other sticking straight cut.

He propped himself up on one arm and shot without straightening the other arm and the bullet ricocheted off the top of the car. Holding the gun in both hands to keep it steady, I sat up and leaned over the edge and shot twice, once over his head, and once in front of him. He almost hit me, because I could see the flash of his gun without hearing the explosion. I fired at the same time and I could hear the shots whirring past.

With the last shot I drew down on him carefully, holding the gun steady with two hands and down he came, flopping on his side. He tried to come up, still holding his gun, but he couldn't make it and he flopped back on his side. Pretty tough.

I wanted to lie there. I was beat. I felt terrible, but I got up fast.

The road was still empty.

"Give me the suitcase," I said.

She already had it out of the car. I took it from her. It was loaded, plenty heavy. I put the case in my car and took my pliers and pinched her gas line back in shape. She started the car.

"Follow me," I said. "This road runs west and comes out on the new highway and we can take it north. Give Stutz some kind of phony description of me. If we make a break for it now, sure enough, we'll both get picked up. Get back to Stutz fast."

We went down that country road fifty miles an hour. There were no farms. It was all state land, swamp and woods. It was ten minutes to the highway. I had the suitcase on the floor in the back seat. I had the gun on the seat beside me.

I turned the radio on as we hit the highway and let her go on past and saw her shoot north.

I drove slowly. It wasn't long before I began to sweat. It was the sweat of fear and it had a smell to it I've never smelled in a locker room, only in a flier's locker room after a mission. I stank. It was some kind of animal smell, dry and rotten, like a dog smells when he comes in from hunting.

I wondered how long it would take them to find the car. There were gun clubs around where the shooting happened. Between that and the roar of the homebound traffic, maybe nobody took notice.

But somebody was bound to use that road, and then the cops would be on the trail, but already it was too late for them.

I hung in the traffic. It moved slowly,-a long snake of cars, and so I had to sit there and think, and now that the shock and astonishment were over I began to get scared again.

I had killed two men. No loss to the community, but nonetheless I had done it. I was, cooked.

I turned off the highway at Clearwater and parked on a gravel road and opened the suitcase.

It was all there. Cash, bundles of bank notes jammed the suitcase. I hefted a couple in one hand and put it back and shut the case.

Then I put it in the trunk and locked the trunk.

I lay back on the seat, panting.

13

The gun and the money. I had to hide one and get rid of the other. Get rid of the gun. Hide the money.

First things first. Get rid of the gun. But who was going to know I had anything to do with it? Nobody had seen the cars. But what if Stutz squeezed it out of her? What would she tell him-how she was heisted on a lonely road by one guy?

He'd never buy that. No, the story to tell-and why hadn't I thought of it in time to tell her, because Stutz was sure to figure it was an inside job?

She could tell him that the lone heister was somebody who knew the two bodyguards, that from what they said it was clear they were going to double-cross Stutz, except the lone guy double-crossed the two bodyguards.

If she didn't tell that, it was a cinch Stutz would torture the truth out of her.

Where was she now? I better keep the gun. I might need it.

My God, how had I gotten into this? Killed two guys. It seemed impossible.

For her. She'd changed me. She'd gotten me to do it. Maybe I was really the louse I'd been the past couple of weeks. Maybe that was the real me, and I'd been kidding myself all along, killer, seducer. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That was the real Frank Jackson.

Whatever it was, the real me was the one that loved her, that would do anything for her. That was Frank Jackson.

I'd protect her no matter what happened.

Nobody would figure it was me, because neither Cynthia nor Stutz was going to mention the murders to the cops. They couldn't afford to, least of all Stutz. If he did the cops would want to know why they were murdered.

He was going to have to say he didn't know them, but they were his boys and the cops knew it and they would run up a blind alley.

Maybe even figure Stutz had them killed to keep them quiet before hjs income tax trial.

But what if Stutz made her talk and tied a can on me? He had friends in the police department who would buy whatever he said and he could scare her, anybody, into being a witness against me.

I didn't know whether to keep the gun or get rid of it. It was evidence. Get rid of it, I told myself.

I drove off the highway and down the back roads. There were swamps and woods all through the area. It was grouse and rabbit and deer country, no farms, and some' lakes, and I went looking for an old duck slough I'd known years ago before the duck feed wore out.

I finally found it, down eroded tracks through trees, the tracks curving and climbing until they came out of the woods and went on past a swamp to the right and a hill of buck brush to the left. I knew the big slough was beyond the buck brush.

I remembered the muck-loon crap, we call it-off the point where we'd had a duck blind. Nobody would ever find a gun in there. I parked off the road.

The mound of buck brush became woods and I walked along the top of the ridge seeing water through the trees. I had the gun in my pocket.

The ridge ceased, sloped toward the lake, and I came down into the cattails. I found a branch and poked the mud in the cattails. Mucky as ever. Further out it was ten feet deep.

No danger of a fisherman hooking the gun in here.

"All right," a voice said. "Don't move!"

A flashlight beam hit me in the eyes.

The voice was behind me. Then the sound of boots coming through the brush.

"Turn around," said the voice. Then, "Frank, what the hell you doing 'round here?"

The light clicked off. A big figure came toward me.

"Judd Ringer," I said with relief. I hadn't seen him since I'd stopped renting the slough. He was an old bachelor and owned the land around the slough. It was worthless land and how he scratched out a living I could not figure.

"Where you been, boy?"

"Just going through and thought I'd see if you had any ducks back this year."

"Not since you and that doctor friend shot 'em off."

"We didn't kill them."

"Something did."

"Any around?"

"Nothing but snipe and some pheasant."

"How you doing?" I asked.

"Got me a job at the missile base."

"Good enough."

"Drink?"

"Sure," I said and he produced a jug and I drank a cold substance that tasted like gasoline.

"Hell," I said. "What is it?"

"How about that?" he laughed. "Make it myself. Sure something, ain't it?"

"What is it?"

"Lots of stuff. My own recipe. Another?"

"No, thanks."

"There's some kids comin' in here making i lover's nest out of my woods. Lightin' fires and monkeying around. I figure to catch them tonight with that moon out."

I took another drink when he insisted and listened to him talk about the state of the world for a couple of minutes; then I eased out and got away.

It was dark on the highway now. I turned on the radio and began to hear sirens. At first I thought it was a radio show because I wasn't really listening to the radio. Then the state highway patrol car shot past with the red light on top revolving and the siren shrieking like mad and a couple of minutes later another state highway patrol car came past going south.

So somebody had found the bodies.

All I could say is I hoped both of those guys were dead.

They looked dead to me, and I'd seen enough dead in the war to make some diagnosis.

But you can always be wrong.

Then suddenly I felt hungry, an overpowering need to eat. Maybe it wasn't a bad idea. I listened to the radio first, turning from station to station, but there was no report on the shooting.

I knew I mustn't stop at a little town. Somebody would remember me, a stranger in a hamburger joint, and there's always some local cop writing down strange license plates for lack of anything else to do.

No stop, just keep going straight to Cereal City.

I felt as if I were starving; then I remembered I hadn't eaten since breakfast.

When I pulled into Cereal City I drove downtown and went into the LaSalle House coffee shop and sat down at the counter.

"What'll you have, Frank?"

"Steak sandwich, Millie."

"Isn't it awful?"

"What?" I asked. She was laying out a napkin, knife and fork and spoon.

"Two salesmen shot in cold blood. It just came over the radio."

"Where's that?" I asked, feeling my guts contract and my skin jerking hot and cold along my arms and a pulse beating suddenly in my back.

"Between here and Minneapolis."

"When?"

"That Minneapolis must be full of murderers."

"Who were the men?"

"They worked for a machine company."

"Pretty terrible," I said in appropriately shocked tones.

I could feel the gun butt pressing against my armpit.

She brought a cup of coffee.

I sat there, unable to think, my mind numb and tired, sipping the hot coffee, hoping it might make my brain turn over. I didn't know what to think nor where to start and then I realized the coffee was bitter and I looked down and saw the salt shaker on the counter.

I didn't even remember having picked it up.

I'd poured salt in the coffee. I drank it that way, brackish, feeling nauseated.

When the food came my appetite seemed to have faded. I felt exhausted. I forced myself to cut the meat and eat it.

The ride across town to the club seemed to take hours.

The lights were out. I took the gun upstairs, but left the suitcase locked in the trunk. Where else could I hide it?

14

Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets-that's the feds. You name the angle and if the feds want to nail you, they'll go any route, dirty, clean, honest, or dishonest, but they'll do everything within and outside the law to nail you so the man in Washington can have a good crime statistic record every year.

And Stutz was down in the books to be had. They wanted him and they wanted him bad, one way or another, ever since the days he'd run alky during prohibition. Kefauver had tried to nail him for the feds during the congressional hearings, tying him to all the Florida and Las Vegas gamblers through Florida holdings, but the only thing of value the feds could dig up at the time was a picture of a former vice president of the United States with his arm around Stutz's shoulder at a Miami hotel.

But the feds kept digging, and now they had him.

Under the Mann Act.

I heard it all on the radio the next morning.

And the chief witness against him was Cynthia.

It was the big piece on the morning news. I sat there paralyzed, wondering what had hit me. I felt as if I'd been shot. I couldn't move. I felt sick, my legs turned to water and my guts hollowed out with fear. I couldn't move.

She was in federal custody, the radio said, and had been since early that morning.

The noon newspapers carried the story. The federal grand jury had indicted Stutz on a charge of transporting her across the state line.

They didn't say where she was held. Protective custody.

When you take any woman other than your wife or mother or sister across the state line and stay at a motel overnight, you'd better have an affidavit that nothing happened or the babe is the world's greatest witness against you.

I didn't dare try to locate her. I just kept running in and out of the clubhouse, trying to act normal, giving lessons, and in between trying to catch the radio news.

The evening papers carried the whole story.

It was a classic example, according to the press, that a woman spumed is the most dangerous animal in North America. Stutz was out on bail. The federal district attorney said he would show Cynthia had lived out of wedlock with Stutz for several years while she was working in his office. She had traveled with him to Chicago and stayed with him at Chicago hotels.

The bitch! What a sap I was. Getting set up by a high-class whore for a stickup. It was clear as hell-at least I thought so then. He'd dumped her, Sat off her apartment allowance, spending money, and apparently really made her work, according to one news story, and found himself a new girl friend.

So Cynthia had turned state's evidence.

That's what the papers said.

They had made five trips to Chicago, staying at the Palmer House the previous year, in different rooms, of course, oh, of course, and they had made five trips to California. The feds had all the motels listed where she'd stayed with him.

The bitch! I was burning, but the trouble was I still loved her. I still wanted her.

I wanted to think it was something else. I told myself he'd made her do it, forced her to take trips, forced his attentions on her, and out of fear she had gone along, fearful of her life. I told myself this over and over again, and I went dizzy thinking about it, seeing him, that big ape, putting his hands on her.

But I had the money. No matter what happened I had the money. But wouldn't the feds keep an eye on her after the trial? They'd have to give her some kind of protection if they nailed Stutz at the trial.

So?

So if we started flashing big money around together they'd start asking questions.

What I couldn't figure out was nothing on the radio or in the newspapers about the two boys getting knocked off.

For some reason they held it off the front page until evening and then it hit. Headlines big as your hand.

EMPLOYEES OF STUTZ FOUND SLAIN Why?

The paper nor the cops could figure it out, so they tied it to Stutz as a gangland slaying to silence witnesses against him concerning an alleged forthcoming new federal indictment.

One radio station hinted at the income tax rap.

But that must have fallen through or the feds wouldn't have tried to nail him on the Mann Act. The Mann Act was the last resort when the net worth bit wouldn't hold water.

The man in the blue suit had a police record that included a couple armed robberies. He also owned a pin ball company, or rather fronted it for Stutz. He was dead on arrival.

The man in the black suit had been a labor organizer in Florida where an indictment for murder had been squashed three years before. He'd once been a bodyguard for a Miami gambler.

The local police had questioned Cynthia, but she had revealed nothing. Meanwhile, two burglars from Chicago had been detained for questioning.

But there were tire marks. One set was clear, and the other set was blurred. That was the only clue.

It was good, but not a hot clue. There were a helluva lot of tires in the state. Which Was fine as long as they didn't find that the tires to the Jag were the clear prints. The papers said nothing about what size tire prints were the clear ones.

The empty cartridges showed a foreign automatic had been used. Nobody knew I had it except myself. Norm had never seen it. But it was a hot clue, according to the police.

I had to get rid of it fast. , I'd have to do it at night.

A boy hunting squirrels in the woods had heard the shots, but he'd been too deep in the woods to see anything. He had thought it was somebody else hunting squirrels.

The cops didn't know who to look for.

They didn't have a line on anybody. It was a gangland killing by Stutz to cover up some kind of evidence. The papers decided that was the motive.

I went back to teaching tennis in the morning and kept myself under control, concentrating hard to get by. I couldn't tell whether Norm could see any difference in my reaction and timing. I knew they were slow. My mind simply wouldn't stay on it.

The trial wouldn't take too long. They'd wrap up Stutz in a hurry on her testimony. I could give her part of the money and she could slip away or maybe even the feds would take care of that, in order to protect her, and later, maybe two or three months later, we could meet.

I poured myself a drink. The afternoon paper came. On the front page were pictures of Stutz and Cynthia. I read it sitting in the lounge. The picture of Cynthia didn't look like her at all. I hardly recognized her because her hair was different, swept back off her face and her face was turned in half-profile.

I wondered if anybody in the club noticed the picture. Norm would be the only one. He came in as I was reading it.

"Too bad," he said, shrugging, "she seemed like a nice kid."

"Man, I'm glad I didn't mix up with her. Stutz's girl friend! I could be lying out there in the ditch with his two boys."

Norm laughed.

"You know, Frank, for a while I figured you were moving in on that."

"Who knows?" I smiled. "Maybe I did."

"Pretty nice stuff. You're lucky. Did you have any idea?"

I shook my head, looked astonished.

"Well, you're lucky," Norm said.

But it bugged me. I couldn't tell what he was thinking, but when I finished the story in the paper I knew what I was thinking and it sure as hell wasn't what I had been thinking.

The paper said she had been his secretary, but before that she had been married three years before to Bixie Racatto, Stutz's bodyguard.

At first I didn't believe it; then I read the story again, and the quotes about Racatto and her marriage were right from the horse's mouth, the chief of police.

Racatto had been found shot in the back of the head three years before in a downtown parking lot.

I sat there staring at her picture.

15

The radio and newspapers started to bug me. I could hear them and see them even when I wasn't listening or reading. The same headlines and the same voices shouting about the murder over and over again, shouting Cynthia's name, shouting Stutz's name.

I wanted to get out of Cereal City, as far away as possible.

I had the money, but I couldn't go anyplace. I had to stay there and think about the bodyguard she had married.

Married to Stutz's bodyguard. I couldn't sleep at night. I'd lie there hour after hour hearing headlines, hearing her voice, hearing more headlines, more radio news broadcasts.

I always figured I had guts, guts enough to face guns day after day, after being shot-down twice in the war, going out again, maybe because then I was afraid to admit to myself I was scared to death, and if I didn't keep going on, keeping the truth from myself, I'd crack up, so I'd held on in those years and they gave me medals for it, but now I was afraid to admit one thing to myself-I'd been fooled, lied to. She'd never mentioned being married. I told myself she hadn't wanted to hurt me, but that was kid crap. No, she hadn't lied to me'. Because I'd never asked her if she'd been married.

No, she was doing this for us, helping with the rap against Stutz. How stupid could I be not to see it! She'd never told me anything because she'd planned it this way. This way she put Stutz away and at the same time she got government protection for having copped Stutz's black market money.

She'd planned it so it would work this way for us.

She was smart. A hell of a lot smarter than me.

But I kept hearing those damn radio voices blaring headlines.

And seeing her in bed with Stutz, that's what hurt, and the bodyguard. Well, maybe she'd thought she was in love with the bodyguard. A man's a man no matter what he does for a living. I knew guys that fell in love with a woman just because she had a certain way of cocking one eyebrow. He felt it was erotic as hell. Who was I to judge how Cynthia had felt three years earlier? None of us is the same person year after year.

I couldn't stand lying in my bed thinking about it. It was Norm's turn to work the lounge bar, so I went down there to get away from thinking.

The gang in the lounge were gathered around the radio, drinks in hand, listening to the newscast, and I was right back where I'd started upstairs in my room, thinking about the whole mess again. Wondering only if she'd used me or if she loved me. I wasn't sure which. But maybe there was a way to find out.

I had to find out. I didn't want to believe she had used me.

Had she used others? This I had tq know.

Women were always using men, one way or another. But weren't men doing the same? But it hadn't been the way with us. I loved her and she loved me. Maybe she had loved Stutz's bodyguard, really loved him, and this was one way she had of getting even if Stutz had had him killed.

But had Stutz used her for his pleasure? I didn't want to think about it and as I stood there the radio news came on and again the news was all about the gang shooting. I couldn't listen any more.

I went upstairs to Norm's room. He was watching a television show and I asked him if he'd take over the bar tonight and I would take an extra night for him.

He looked surprised and suddenly embarrassed as I opened his door and came in without knocking.

Then I noticed the color in his cheeks, almost crimson beneath the suntan. He'd been drinking, and though I didn't look there, I suspected there was a bottle under the bed. I hadn't seen him touch a drop in two years.

At first he didn't appear to be listening. So I repeated my request. He sat up. I didn't go near him. I didn't want him to think I was sniffing his breath or that I was suspicious in any way even though I'd hired him on the basis that he stop drinking.

"Yeah, sure," he said abstractedly and got up and put on his shoes. "Just a minute." He stretched out an arm and switched stations on the television set.

"Wanna hear the news first," he said, his head down, while his hand focused the newscaster who was talking sports now. "How about that?" Norm asked, still not looking at me, his gaze fastened on the television screen.

"Like the Thirties," he said. "This neck of the woods can stand a little excitement."

"What do you mean?"

"Didn't you hear the news? Couple of Candler's boys got the chop."

He chuckled to himself, shook his head. I waited.

"Those guys can't change," he said. "They get bored trying to run legit businesses and keeping expensive broads, so for a change in kicks they finally revert to what they were."

"Come on," I said. "There's nobody on the bar."

"Okay," he said in a tone of inward amusement.

As we walked downstairs he said, "Haven't seen your girlfriend around lately."

I didn't say anything. I didn't like the sound of his voice. It was as if he were waiting for me to comment on his comment. I just kept going down the stairs.

"How do you figure it?" he asked.

"What?"

"The killing."

"Business," I said. "That's the way they do business. Competition probably."

My guts froze, but I kept walking, trying to keep my voice natural.

"How do you figure?" I asked casually.

"Look, Stutz must be sixty-five. He's probably got a young chick and these two young guys are supposed to work for him, according to the newspapers, and one of them, hell, maybe both, start playing around with this chick."

"You ought to write for television," I said.

"How do you figure it?"

"Norm, I couldn't care less. Let them kill each other. The more the better."

Outside I looked at the trunk of my car. I tried to think of where to hide the money, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed it was in the right place. I could watch it as long as I watched my car.

I drove downtown and went into a little bar, and sat on the end stool with a couple guys down toward the middle looking up at the show on television blaring away from the set behind the bar.

I ordered a double bourbon and ginger ale.

Again I thought about the money. I decided I'd better keep it in my room, bring it in late at night, keep the suitcase locked and right in my closet. There was nothing on the radio about a suspect, and all the cops had to go on were tire tread marks, and I figured this might be a bluff because my tire tread had run over theirs following them and on the way out my tire tread had tracked over Cynthia's. So maybe they could pick out something. Out not much-.

Then it came again, what was really bothering me. I wasn't worrying about hiding the gun or ;he money.

It was Cynthia. Did she love me or had she used me? I had to find out and there was only one way.

I was going to find out.

16

It was a dangerous business, sticking one's nose into past history in Cereal City, especially past gangster history, since it had once been a hangout for every hot bank robber and heister in the Middle West ranging right through Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd to Homer Van Meter and Baby Face Nelson.

They had all used Cereal City as a hideout between bank robberies, but none had ever robbed a bank in Cereal City. They were allowed to lay over, as the saying goes, until the heat cooled on them, and for the privilege they paid Stutz Gandler so much, who in turn took care of the cops who notified Stutz if the-heat was too excessive.

In that case Stutz told them to move on until things cooled. Those days were gone and Stutz didn't want anybody to remember them, nor all the bodies found in farm fields during the alky war and battles over liquor licenses. Stutz must have had at least fifteen people killed and many more beaten in his formative years before he could afford to invite vice-presidents of the United States to lunch and dinner at the three-million-dollar hotel Stutz owned in Florida.

I knew the gang history of the town. Everybody did who read the newspapers. I hadn't exactly lived a sheltered life, either. In my extreme youth I'd spent more time training than hanging around bars owned by gangsters, but I knew where the spots were now, the after-hours joints owned by Stutz, and his cigar store bookie joints whose windows were filled with dust-covered displays of Juicy Fruit chewing gum.

As I drove across the river bridge to the north side of Cereal City I though about us, Cynthia and me. Sure, I was jealous of anybody who had been her husband if the news reports were right, and I told myself I could understand her being in love with a guy no matter what he was a couple years ago, but I was going to get out fast if I found out she had anything to do with her husband being killed.

I drove around town. I drove slowly. I don't remember how long, first around the north side, then back through downtown, and out to Island Lake, all the time telling myself that she hadn't meant to use me, that she expected me to wait, that she was twice as smart as I was, the way she'd turned state's evidence to get herself held by feds in protection from Stutz until they stashed him away in Leavenworth with a Mann Act trap.

And it would all be lies, how she had gone to Chicago with him, slept in adjoining rooms, or had she slept in his room?

I couldn't think straight when I thought of that.

I had to tell myself she was forced to do that, that Stutz had killed her husband and forced her to live with him, that Stutz had murdered to get her.

But had she had anything to do with her husband's death? I knew I had to go back to the north side if I was going to find out anything, and I knew where to go, and I went and stopped under the neon sign above the cigar store front: JAKE'S BILLIARDS AND CIGARS.

It was in the old part of town, the section Stutz was born in, that spawn of Gandler's who had started out by stealing coal off the tracks to keep the house warm when they were kids.

It was a dingy part of town, seventy years old, dingy houses, unpainted, with old-style globe street lights on the comers so the middle of the blocks were dark.

But the cars parked around JAKE'S were not dingy. They were new-Caddies and Buicks, mostly Caddies.

JAKE'S had one of those new fronts; it was the cleanest building in the block, with a fake brick imprinted siding covering the old frame building.

There were no lights in the windows. The place looked closed, but even from my car I could see back through the darkness inside the front of the store. Cracks and veins of light under the interior wall showed there was action in the back room of JAKE'S.

But where had she started from to meet a gangster's bodyguard? Had she been born in Cereal City?

I turned off the engine and looked at the joint, because it was the kind of place where a guy like Bixie Racatto would have spent his spare time.

I didn't want to go in. I was exposing myself by getting nosy, but maybe I could feel my way around. But the guy on the door wouldn't know me and they weren't going to let too many strangers in a game if they didn't know you or if you didn't know somebody who knew them, and once a stranger gets nosy, he'd better watch out.

At the same time I didn't want any cruising police car to see my car around her and note the license, which was apt to happen to a strange car parked near a gambling joint.

I drove north a couple of blocks into a gas station and asked the attendant for an oil change and grease job. I didn't want to leave the car on a dark street with a suitcase full of money in the trunk.

Then I walked back to JAKE'S. The front door was locked, so I walked around the building. Sure enough, there was a parking lot in the backyard, big enough for about twenty cars, and a back door on the building. I pressed the doorbell. I could hear voices inside. A little baldheaded guy with a broken nose and a scar on the side of his face opened the door.

"What ya want?"

I smiled.

"Looking for a little action."

"Beat it, buddy."

"Wait a minute."

He shut the door and stepped down onto the back porch. It was dark, save for the single pole light in the parking lot.

"Beat it," he said. His voice was cold, still. "Joe sent me. Joe Sommers."

"Yeah?"

In Cereal City everybody knew Joe. I'd gone to school with him. He'd been police reporter for the Tribune for fifteen years.

"I'm from out of town," I said.

"Where?"

"Minneapolis," I said.

"You know Joe.?"

"Hell, yes. I used to live here."

"What's your name?"

"Mack Norton."

"What're ya looking for?"

"Like I said. Action. Craps. Blackjack. What've you got?"

"Anything you want, buddy."

He opened the door and we went in, into the light, the sound of the two house men on the dice table, the calls of the players, the smoke and the voices of the blackjack dealers, the click and whine of slot machines.

I figured to try the crap table first. I had about fifty bucks, and you could buy chips from a dollar to twenty dollars. I bought twenty-five dollars' worth of one-dollar chips.

I fooled around with the twenty-five dollars for almost an hour, running it up to two hundred, playing the field, betting house bets when I could get down on a third-time-out-no-come bet, and I figured to run it up higher, but a big loud guy with a headful of booze that didn't do anything to his brains except make his voice louder because he kept betting right and making the dice work for him took me for a hundred bucks. So I started scratching around again, playing the field, and when I was ahead about fifty bucks I wandered over to the bar.

It wasn't a bad layout: everything was new furniture, bar, wallpaper-and the joint was jammed.

I ordered a Seven-Seven and leaned on the bar after pushing a quarter tip down into the groove for glasses on the bar.

L heard the bartender say thank you but I had my back to him and was watching the game at the blackjack table. After awhile I ordered another drink and leaned there drinking until the bartender came down to my end; then I casually asked if Bixie had been in yet.

The bartender stopped as if he had been shot, his hands frozen in mid-air where he was reaching down for a glass below the bar.

For a fraction of a second he didn't move; then he picked up the glass, but he didn't raise up, only his head, and he only half-turned his head and took a good look at me, squinting a little against the ceiling light.

"What?" he asked, not moving, his lips faintly parted, slanting his head as if he might be slightly deaf or didn't quite believe what he had heard or what he thought he had heard.

"Bixie," I said. "Has he been around tonight?"

"Bixie hasn't been around in a couple of years."

"Oh, where'd he move to?"

"Lakeside Cemetery," he said, and stood up straight and said, "You ain't funny, mister." I gave him a blank, innocent stare. "What do you mean?"

"Bixie's dead," he said in a low voice. "What the hell do you want? Who are you?"

"Jees, I didn't-" I began, stopped, looked appropriately astonished, and said, "I mean, hell ... I knew Bixie for years. I've been out of town. I owed him some money and all I was-" I spread my hands palm-up and shrugged. "I was only-"

"Give it to his widow. She can use it," he said, his voice low.

"His-?" I started to say, stopped cold inside. What the hell did this guy mean? Bixie's widow? What was he talking about?

"She and the kid can use it," he said. "She's living in a dump over on Fourteenth Street. Sixteen-fourteen or-She hangs out in the Skold Taproom."

"It's been about five years. I don't remember her name."

"Ann."

"I'll be damned," I said. "Bixie dead?" I shook my head. "How'd he-?"

"Don't ask me, buddy," he said and walked away, toweling the glass in both hands.

I finished my drink and went back to the crap table. I dropped twenty-five bucks and won fifty and cashed in my chips.

The little guy with the bald head and the broken nose was sitting on a chair propped against the wall beside the door.

"Thanks," I said, and put my hand on the doorknob. He looked at my hand, then at me.

"I'll open it," he said.

I waited while he opened it.

He looked at me, his eyes steady as camera lenses focusing on my face. Then his eyes were wooden suddenly.

"Had a little luck tonight," I said genially. I stepped out into the darkness.

"Don't push it, buddy," said the voice behind me, and the door shut fast and hard.

I walked up the street to the gas station. The car was parked beside the station building. The attendant was pumping gas and nodded everything was set, so I went over and paid him and then came back and looked at the trunk.

Earlier I had put a piece of cellophane tape on the trunk opening. It was still intact.

I drove across town to the east side. It had an old section just like the north side. The Skold Taproom was on a corner.

Two middle-aged women were drinking beer at one end of the bar. An old guy with a red face was arguing with the bartender and two guys were playing the pinballs at the far end of the room next to about five men sitting on stools at the end of the bar.

I ordered a large glass of Grain Belt and then the bartender announced the bingo game would begin. There were booths in a room behind me and I could see couples under the dim light with the waitress passing out bingo cards.

I got a bingo card, drank beer and watched two men win a couple of plastic fishing rods.

While I was sipping my second beer and waiting for the next bingo game to start, I asked the woman next to me if Annie ever came in much.

"Annie who?" she asked,' her eyes red-veined and watery.

"Annie Racatto."

"Naw. Annie been gone since she moved."

"I been in the hospital," I said. "Isn't she still over on-" I stopped and jerked a thumb over my shoulder, and then snapped my fingers as if trying to remember her address and shook my head. "On ... uh ... oh, you know ... over on ... hell, what was that address?"

"She ain't been at Fifteen-thirteen for couple of months."

"I been in the hospital," I said, putting a faint Swedish accent on the words to match the woman's accent.

I didn't ask any more questions. I drank another beer and played two more games of bingo and sat there trying to figure out the score: if Racatto had a wife and kid, where did Cynthia fit in as his wife, according to the newspapers?

It was getting late when I left. I checked the trunk of my car where I'd left it parked under a street lamp, and nobody had disturbed it.

The address was about five blocks away. I found the building, a dingy flat-iron hunk of dirty sandstone. In the lobby there was no Racatto on the mailboxes. There was a janitor's box. Basement apartment.

I went downstairs and knocked. The janitor was a young guy about my age.

"Sure," he said. "Sure. She used to live here. I know her. In fact, I know a lot about her."

"Where is she?"

"Why?"

"I was a friend of hers. I've been away."

"I never seen you around before."

"I've been gone a couple years. Service."

He looked like a nice, easy-going guy until you watched his eyes. They kept looking me over. He was a fishy-eyed, cold fish.

He blinked his eyes, as if clearing them.

"Look," I said. "I'd like-"

"I don't care what you'd like, mister," he hissed. "I never seen you in my life. I don't know what you are up to, but I'm not putting my fanny in a wringer doing anybody a favor."

"Maybe this'll help," I said. I held out a ten-dollar bill.

"You better get the hell out of here, mister. I don't want your money. If you want Annie Racatto, find her yourself."

He stepped back, slammed the door in my face.

I got out of there and sat in my car. It looked as if Annie was hot and anyone who knew something about her wanted to forget it.

There was a gas station about a block away. I stopped and bought some cigarettes and used the toilet and came out and stood around with the attendant, who looked about seventeen. I asked him for a light and gave him a cigarette and stood there smoking for a couple minutes, chatting about baseball before I asked him about Annie, telling him she was an old girl friend.

He knew Annie. In fact, he'd gone to school with her kid brother. He didn't know for sure where she lived now but he thought he remembered hearing she had moved back in the neighborhood where she was born, about a mile away.

"Do you know where?"

He gave me an address.

"One of those apartment buildings. There someplace," he said.

The bell rang and he went outside to service a customer. I moved out fast.

I drove slowly. I turned on the radio. The news was coming on.

Cynthia was still in federal protective custody.

Nothing new, except the district attorney asked for a speedy trial. But when? How long?

17

"Man," said the old colored man, "how about a nice fresh pint? You won't find no liquor stores open now. Nice fresh pint. Five dollahs." I looked up and down the dark street. "I don't want any."

"Five dollahs."

"Hit the road," I said.

A policeman in a uniform came around the corner and came up to us. There was an edge in his voice.

"This man bothering you, Willie?"

"He ain't buying," the colored man giggled.

"You live around here, mister?" asked the policeman.

"Just looking for a place to eat."

"Barbecue right around the corner. Get in gear, mister."

It was clear that the colored man had the go sign to sell booze after hours from the cop on the beat, and if I wasn't a customer I better "get in gear." I got in gear. I'd been moving all night. At the address given to me in the gas station nobody had ever heard of Annie Racatto, but I could see they didn't trust me; they knew where she lived, but they thought I was a cop. They were Italians. Now I'd crossed over into the Negro section after the taste of beer lingered stale and copperish on my tongue. I went into the barbecue joint and ordered coffee and ribs. I was sitting there when the Negro bootlegger came up behind me and sat down in the booth. I could feel the flat half-pints of whiskey strapped to the side of his thighs. He laughed.

"You ain't hungry," he giggled. "You ain't even thirsty." I wondered what his angle was. His clothes smelled musty and his flesh smelled old and dry.

"Man," he said. "What you looking for?"

I ordered him a cup of coffee.

"Okay," I said. "Gimme a bottle."

He reached down in his trouser leg and came up with a half-pint of Sunny brook and I handed him a five-dollar bill under the table.

From his grizzled head and shrunken face he might have been fifty years old or a hundred. His beady little eyes rolled whitely, red-veined. "Man, how about a touch in my coffee?"

"Sure." I poured him a shot that would pop his eyeballs. He lapped up the coffee as if it were candy.

"Man, you want a girl?" he asked. "A girl, yes."

"What kind, white or dark?"

"I'm looking for a girl I used to know. Suppose to live five blocks away. You wouldn't know her."

"Man," he grinned, "I know all the hustling girls. What's her name?"

"Annie Racatto."

He giggled, shook his head. "Wheeee! Ain't her night, man! Girl's gotta rest."

"Where does she live?"

"Hey! Hold your hosses."

"Is she a hustler?"

"How much?"

"I don't want her for that. I just want to talk to her."

"Okay, man. Okay. Don't get your water hot. Maybe we do business. How much?"

"Five dollars."

"Wait here, mister."

He got up and I watched him go along past the booths and tables. The joint was packed with colored hustlers, cab drivers and salesmen out on the town. He opened the kitchen door and it swung behind him.

I waited, wondering if he'd come back. He already had five bucks. But this way he made another five without exchanging merchandise. The next five was all profit. He'd be back.

He was gone about ten minutes. He sat down and asked for another coffee royale.

"Where's the five, mister?"

"Where's Annie?"

"Where's your car?"

"Around the comer."

"Which one?"

"Blue Tempest coupe."

"Come out in about five minutes," he said. "Annie will be in your car."

He stayed for another coffee royale and left. I waited, then paid the check and went outside and up the street. He stepped out from the alley.

"I'll take the five, mister," he smiled, holding out his hand. When I wouldn't give it to him until we went to my car he gave that whinnying high giggle and walked along.

Through the window I could see the face of a woman. I opened the door, stooped my head. "Annie Racatto?"

The head nodded. It had once been a pretty face but it had seen too much gin, cigarette smoke and sleepless nights. The face was small, taut and white. The lips were too red and the eyebrows and eyelashes were too black.

I handed the colored man his five and went around the car and got in behind the wheel. I turned on the radio.

I didn't want to scare her away and I didn't want to get mixed up with her but I didn't have to start the conversation. She started right out. I was all business with her.

"This is my night off," she said. "It'll cost you fifty dollars."

"Fair enough."

"Let's get going."

"You'll get fifty bucks," I said. "But you don't have to-"

"Not in a car! What the hell do you think-"

"Take it easy. Annie, have you got a daughter?"

"What the hell are you? Some damn welfare creep?"

"All I want is some information and the fifty is yours."

"What do you want?"

"Are you Bixie's widow?"

"That creep," she said and she began to cry, holding her forehead, and her hand propped up with her elbow on her knee. Then she ceased abruptly, shaking her head. "Annie," she said as if speaking to herself of herself. "Annie, the stupid, stupid! Crying over that fink. Fink! That fink sonovabitch!"

She looked at me and sneered. "How long do you think you'll last, mister?"

She looked straight ahead, staring out the windshield down the dark, dingy street.

"He was a big shot," she said, staring. "A real big shot. I thought he was Mister Big. Sap. Annie, the sap. He was nothing. She told him he was something. She made him believe he could be Mister Big. What the hell was he? A two-bit collector for the Syndicate. That's all. When they found him in the parking lot with part of his head missing, I knew what he'd done."

She sat there staring dry-washing her hands, her voice hissing, her eyes widening, her eyebrows lifted.

"Why'd they kill him?" I asked. "Didn't anybody tell you yet?" Her voice was harsh and bitter.

"Thief-he held out on the collections. I gave him everything I could. I gave him a pretty baby. I loved him like nobody loved him and I paid for his funeral. Listen." She turned her head, looked at me. "Is she yours now?"

"Yes."

She laughed, the laughter ceasing almost as it began, and she put her head back, eyes closed, and laughed again contemptuously and softly to herself.

"He left me and went to live with her." She opened her eyes, turned her head, resting it now on the back of the seat. "How do you figure she's going to sucker you, brother? After him she lived with Richards. They mayor's collector. The biggest slob on the police force. The richest."

She sat quietly now, her arms folded and her head bent a little, but I could see that her nostrils were waxy-white with rage against her dark face.

I leaned toward her and touched her arm. I wanted to know more.

"She took his money. It was in her apartment. She wouldn't even pay for his funeral."

She looked suddenly worn out and her head sagged.

"Where's Richards?" I asked.

"The slob retired with a fortune. He owns about five apartment buildings. Look him up in the phone book."

"Thanks."

"Thanks, hell," she said. "Where's my fifty bucks?"

I got out my wallet and counted out five banknotes. She put the bills down the front of her dress.

She pushed the door handle and got out. Just as she was about to close the door she stopped and stuck her head back inside.

"That whore," she laughed. "With me you'd of got your money's worth. Don't forget I warned you-sucker."

18

When I got out of there and across town I had only one thought in mind. Get out of town. Get out of the country. Get out now.

But how? How to move that much dough out of the country?

It was almost dawn. That first faint paling of the eastern sky with the moon and stars dying showed through the trees and above the rooftops.

I drove around the lake. I don't remember how many times I circled Island Lake. Get out of town.

But if I left suddenly it would look fishy. Somebody would smell something. How would I dispose of the club? The bank wouldn't help. Norm would never be able to buy it. How does a guy just disappear but for a good reason, so that people won't think he's been killed or gone out of his mind?

But what was the point of going unless there was someplace to go? Someplace I wanted to live in on the money.

Mexico? Europe? I'd like to go back to Europe. But how in hell could I ever get that much money out of the country?

Drive around the country and deposit it in various banks in different cities and keep enough to go overseas and then have a Swiss bank draw it out, one bank at a time, until the whole caboodle was shipped overseas.

That was the ticket.

Get a passport and go to England or France and move slowly by stages to Switzerland. Hell, even buy a business over there, and then have the dollars transferred. Make sure the money was all in checking accounts.

But there was one catch. Alone. That was the worst part.

What good was all the money if I didn't have her with me?

I tried to think it out. Hell, she'd probably had a tough life, if she'd only tell me. There's a reason for everybody going wrong, and maybe to her it hadn't seemed wrong, just what everybody did in the world she had lived in-take it, take what you can or go down the drain.

Sure, I told myself, she was always trying to keep from going down the drain.

Now if I could only find out how it had all started, stealing somebody's husband.

That was hard to take.

Stealing a small-time mobster. For what? Then when he'd been killed, who could she turn to?

Maybe Richards knew the answer. Maybe she had turned to Richards to save herself from Stutz who had killed Bixie to get her.

Maybe Annie had been lying.

Then it was light out and I drove downtown and got some breakfast and after eating I looked him up in the telephone book.

There it was-Clive Richards. He was a retired inspector of police.

When I saw the apartment building it looked like a hundred-thousand-dollar investment. Richards must have saved a lot of his pay if he owned five of these. A very frugal police officer.

I pressed the button under Richards' mailbox and a woman's voice came through the tube in the wall. I gave her a phony name and she said he wasn't home.

"When will he be home?"

"I don't know."

"Okay, I'll wait in front."

"Can he call you?"

"No, I'll wait."

"Can I give him a message?"

"I'll wait."

I went outside and sat in my car across the street and listened to the morning disc jockey telling canned jokes out of old joke books.

He was in. It was a stall. I watched the curtains in his apartment. The shades were drawn, and they didn't come up.

The sun was out, bright and hot, and I sat an hour with the windows open.

Then a man came out of the building. He was tall, about fifty, with one of those Calvert Whiskey advertisement faces, gray hair, and a long, straight nose. You could see him leaning against the mantel piece-in his hunting lodge after a hard day in the cement duck blind.

He came directly across the street to the car. His voice was quite low, quite .pleasant.

"Are you the gentleman who asked for me?"

"Are you Mr. Richards?"

He smiled and nodded with a great air of old-world manners.

I opened the door and he got in and opened a silver cigarette case and offered me a cigarette. I took one. We said nothing. He reached for a lighter, but I already had the dash lighter under the tip of his cigarette.

"I was out fishing and I just came in," he said. "My housekeeper said you wanted to see me."

"Have you any idea why I want to see you?"

"Not the faintest," he answered, in that polite voice.

He waited, smoking, with an expression at once bland and alert, with one forefinger in his vest. The cigarette wreathed a faint plume across his mask-like face.

His face had a strange, bloodless color.

"I want to ask you about Cynthia," I said.

"I'm an old man," he said, taking the cigarette out of his lips. He pinched a tobacco flake out of the end, looking at the cigarette between his fingers. "I have lived a great deal, and have asked a great deal of life." He lifted his hand and glanced at his gold wrist watch. "I have achieved everything I sought. I have never been defeated except once. I don't know how many times you have been defeated, but I'm sure if you have not tasted defeat you are about to. Good luck."

I felt my guts fall apart, everything I wanted to believe going down the drain. He opened his case and lit another cigarette. He sat there, waiting. I wanted to kill him. He'd just cut my heart out.

"Where you and I are different," he said, "is that I knew what I was getting into. I knew the woman's history. Apparently you did not."

I didn't say anything.

"Do you think you will get away with it?" he asked.

He held out his cigarette case. I took one. Suddenly I felt a kinship for this guy. I couldn't explain it, but it was there suddenly.

"With what?" I said..

"I wasn't a police officer for twenty years for nothing."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I really don't care what happens to you. You see, I knew what she was." He smiled faintly. "I got out while I was still alive."

"Where did she come from?"

He lifted his brows, his eyes bland and contemplative.

"I never cared and I never asked.

"Did she go to Stutz after she left you?"

"My dear fellow, I gave her away when I saw it was my life she wanted. Besides, it was an amusing gift. Stutz thought I was being nice when what I truly achieved was getting even with Stutz for some unfinished business. He failed to keep a bargain with me when I was with the force."

"Did she try to kill you?"

"My dear fellow," he laughed softly. "Not obviously, but I'm sure that was her design. I'm sure you realize your good fortune in being young and in good health."

"Thanks," I said.

"However, I would not make plans for the future. It has come to my attention that she already has plans."

"What?" I heard my voice ask.

He smiled, benign as a Buddha.

"I only know her plans have something to do with a mart in Europe." He paused. "Paris, I believe."

I said nothing. I could not speak.

19

Late that day two detectives from the state crime bureau who were assisting the district attorney's office came to the club. I was in the tennis shop stringing racquets and I heard them ask Norm for me.

They were tall with a faintly farmerish look, and-they seemed to be watching me closely as Norm called and I came across the room.

"We'd like to talk to you alone," said the first one. He was blond, with a bull neck.

I walked back into the office and asked them to sit down. They sat opposite me, one on my left and one on my right. Both stared at me intently.

Then the first one who had spoken leaned forward.

"Do you know this woman?" he asked, extending his hand holding a photograph of Cynthia.

"Yes," I said, somehow feeling a strange relief "She took some tennis lessons from me."

"When did you last see her?"

"Couple weeks ago. I could look in my lesson schedule book and give you the date."

"You know she's in trouble?"

"I thought that was her picture in the paper."

"Don't bother about your lesson book. About when is she here?"

"Like I said. Couple weeks ago."

"Was she alone?"

"I'm not sure."

"Ever see him?"

I looked at another photograph. The face was sinister, sullen, high, thin cheekbones, almost lipless, with a small chin and wide black eyes.

I almost shook my head. Then it hit me. I remembered the face. It was one of the hoods in the car. The last guy I'd plugged.

For a minute I didn't know what to say, and then I decided to take a chance. The police were looking for an explanation of the killing. They weren't after me. I sensed that.

But if Cynthia was trying to frame Stutz, what better way than to tell the police that this guy, who worked for Stutz, was her lover?

It tossed the whole killing into Stutz's lap.

"Let me see that," I said, turning the photograph over, peering hard at it. "Hmmm," I squinted hard, held the picture closer. I looked up at the detective on my right, feeling his eyes on my face.

"You know," I said thoughtfully, "a couple of times she came for lessons there was somebody in the car with her. It does look like him. Yes, that could be him."

"Thanks, Mister Jackson," he said and stood up.

"That sure surprised me when I read it," I said. "Man! Stutz's girl friend. Wow, I wouldn't want to be caught making a pass at her."

"A couple parties were caught," the second detective said-"Well, thanks again, Mister Jackson."

I walked out to the lounge with them and opened the door for them as they went out. They drove away in an unmarked police car.

It was dusk out, almost dark, the loneliest hour of the day, when you start wondering what you're going to do with yourself now that the. day's work is finished.

Nothing, I was alone.

I longed to see her and at the same time the thought of her frightened me. She couldn't put the finger on me for the murder or she'd never get the money.

But I was scared. Scared of her. Somehow, some way she might frame me and get the money, but I couldn't figure out how.

I went downtown and kept going from bar to bar. I didn't want to hang around the club at night. I made believe I never knew her. But there wasn't any escaping thoughts of her.

I felt shipped, tired all over, an immense weariness. I remembered setting the glass down on the bar carefully; then I suddenly felt I was outdoors, in the open air. The air was cool, a different color. Somebody was holding me up and I could hear a car engine running and I heard my voice saying somebody put something in my drink.

I heard my voice saying this over and over again.

Then I was in another place, dark, and I was vomiting, trying to tell somebody to call me a cab, when I felt my body sink down upon something hard. The terrible jerking in my stomach passed. I felt an immense desire to lie down and somebody pulled me up. I saw somebody light a match and I staggered erect and leaned up against a wall, trying to focus my eyes in the darkness. I shut one eye, and felt myself swaying. , I wanted to sleep ... I fought from wanting to sleep. I did this right away, but time seemed to pass anyway. My eyes felt as if they were open but I couldn't see anything.

Then I could see. I lay still. I was lying in a cramped position under a room of some kind; then I was looking at the dashboard of my car. Then my stomach jerked again and I heaved myself up and almost struck my head on the dashboard.

I fell back against the seat, looking out at the dark and empty street. I fumbled for the ignition key. I passed out. I turned on the dash lights.

The crystal face of my watch was broken, but I could just see the hands.

It was four in the morning. I sat there feeling angry and helpless.

A half-bottle of bourbon lay on the seat beside me. I knocked it off the seat and started the engine.

My stomach needed something, but I had to get out of there.

I looked at the bottle on the floor and my guts coldly spasmed.

I reached down and picked up the bottle and drank.

I choked the stuff down, clapping a cigarette into my mouth to stop the spasm. I began to feel better.

I drove home and got into bed and lay there in the darkness remembering those nights with Cynthia beside me, longing for her now.

I woke, empty of any sense. Then my stomach muscles retched and I got myself up and into the bathroom before it was too late.

An hour later I came downstairs.

"Norm," I said. "You'll have to take my lessons today."

"Had a big night?"

"Too much."

He smiled. Whether he knew what the score was I don't know, but he said nothing. Perhaps he understood. He'd had his troubles in life, and maybe he didn't want to get involved in anybody's troubles any more.

He was a friend in the true sense of the word. I think he knew what had happened but I knew he would never talk. He might regret my getting mixed up, but he'd never talk. I'd taken him off the streets when he was washed up and given him a job and now all he wanted was to be left alone to do the job well every day the rest of his life.

"Any phone calls?" I asked.

I looked at the morning paper but there was nothing new about Stutz or Cynthia.

I thought I'd go crazy around the club. I was too hung over to work, too nervous, but waiting, waiting-waiting for what?

To escape? To get Cynthia back? It might be a couple of months before Stutz came to trial, and in the meantime I'd go to pieces waiting, waiting to hear her story when she got out.

"Norm," I said. "Let's hit a couple."

He grinned.

"Want to work out some of the poison?"

"Let's try."

We played three fast sets, and during the first two I thought I'd pass out. I couldn't move, couldn't run, and my head was full of throbbing pulses every time I looked up into the sunlight, and then I began to sweat and all the booze and poison began to run out of me, and by the end of the third set I felt tired but somehow freshened.

I showered. I wondered how long I could stand this waiting.

I drank a cold beer and phoned Linda.

She was cool at first because I hadn't called and then I explained I'd had to go out of town on business and she came around to sounding happy on the phone.

"Let's go down the river tonight and drink some beer and have a picnic."

"Why not?" she asked, her voice gay and happy.

I picked her up just after dark. The house was empty and we stood in the hall kissing. I held her tight and her mouth was round and warm and ardent, her tongue seeking and vibrant.

I had no idea this was the last time we would be together, but I was being everything she wanted.

I could tell by her kisses how happy she was. We bought some cold beer and chicken and lay on the grass by the river and watched the moon sail down the sky and drank the cold beer and saw the stars shining in the dark river.

I felt lousy, thinking suddenly of Cynthia, and I turned away.

She caught me and turned me back against her and I kissed the little childish soft hairs on the back of her neck and she pressed her lips against mine, opening her mouth, warm and soft and big, covering my mouth, licking my lips tenderly.

"Oh, Frank," she cried.

I felt sorry for her. So I kissed her lips and eyes and throat. I furrowed my tongue into her ear and along her cheek and down under the hollow of her throat. I opened the top of her dress and kissed the tops of her breasts and rolled slowly over on top of her body. Flesh heated against flesh. There was nothing in the world but our flesh pressing against each other. I felt her breasts and heart and belly beating and throbbing and quivering against my body.

Her hands sought my stalk and my hands sought the sweet-honeyed warmth of her thighs as they opened and clasped the stalk and twitched, and my mind became a vacuum and all I could feel was my body going out through my stalk into her liquid, soft, warm honey.

The honey grew warmer and softer, a soft, hollowed-out pool of slowly moving liquid inside her drawing me in farther and farther, with my insides waiting for the bottom of the pool to touch me, to quicken the stalk as it thrust downward into the honey pool, growing warmer and tighter, holding and giving, holding and giving. Then my fullness became fuller and the stalk reached into the bottom of the honey pool and throbbed with an inner deliciousness like a sweet, everlasting drunkenness that only she could give.

My head reeled and the throbbing stalk searched again and again for the newness in her honey, in a feverish frenzy as if it could not seek out the answer for the quivering nerve ends of my spine crying out for release.

And then her honey ran all over me and our nerve ends meshed, nerves ravishing nerves, animal ecstasy so ravishing the stalk could hardly hear it.

I turned and kissed her softly. I lay back.

"Frank, what's the matter?"

"Too much tennis."

"Did you play all day?"

"Customers. All day," I lied.

"Girls?"

"Couple."

"Have you ever fooled around with any of them?"

"No."

Looking up at the stars I felt her lips on my face and her hands searching and then her hand touching me and I rolled over against her close, holding her tight.

"Don't you want to again?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I'd like to sleep with you all night. Have you ever slept with a woman, Frank?"

"Don't talk like that."

"Don't be so serious, Frank. I was only kidding. Put your hand there. Right there. I like that."

"You're crazy, Linda."

"So are you. Will you do it again?"

"All right."

"Oh, Frank. That's it. Ah, you darling."

"Just a minute."

"No. No. Please. That's it. Right there. Did you ever do it like this with anybody?"

"No."

"Is that what you want?"

"Yes. Yes."

"You're good, Frank. I wish we could stay here all night. I wish we could go to my house all night. Am I better than any of the others?"

"You're the best."

"You're saying that. That's all. Just saying it. Yes. There. There."

Her mouth opened and the tip of her tongue, like a morsel of sweet fruit, rested slowly between my lips and just as slowly caressed the tip of my tongue.

"Do you want me to do it to you?" she asked. "If you want to."

"Do you remember the other night?"

"Have you ever done it with anybody else?"

"Don't be silly. Only you. For you. I want to."

"Do you want me to do it to you?"

"Oh, yes. Yes. Go ahead. It's wonderful. It's almost better than-did you ever with anyone else?"

"No."

"Don't stop."

I raised my arms high and touched her pink nipples. Her honeyed loins tightened with an anguish of desire and her back arched higher and higher.

"Go on! Go on! Oh, Frank! Oh, now! Now! Pinch me!"

I pressed her breasts down hard and saw her stomach rising high above the arch of her back and then she screamed with a long sigh and collapsed, but only for an instant and then almost at once her face and hair came over me and she was panting like a wild beast, pressing my hands into her breasts and I could feel the stalk against her cheek and her face rubbing the stalk and then her lips parted and the stalk was warm and cool and her hands were running over my body like small wild animals and then I couldn't bear it any longer and I flung her back and had my mouth on her mouth and her tongue was like a long spear going down, down into my body, burning and hot, twisting and turning, twisting and probing, on and on into a wild, crazy ecstasy. I lay upon her exhausted.

"Really. You're the best," I said when my breathing had slowed.

"I don't know much yet."

"I wish I were better for you."

"You're perfect."

"You're perfect."

"Go on. Go on. Right there. Yes. Right there."

"S-shhh," I said. "Hold me! Hold me! Hold me!" Then there was no sound and after a long time she said, "Oh, I could go to sleep right here."

"Why not? Go on to sleep. I'll wake you. Don't worry."

She went to sleep with her head resting on my arm, and I lay there looking at her. I could see her face in the moonlight shining through the trees. Poor kid, I could hear my head saying, poor kid. She doesn't really know what she has. How unlucky can she be? Where will I be a month from now? Where will she be? How will she feel? What in hell is going to happen? She wanted this to happen. One way or another she'd have gotten hurt fooling around with me. Why did I have to give her what she wanted? Why couldn't I have stopped her? But she didn't want me to stop her. She wanted everything. She wanted to find out about everything.

Now she knows and she'll be sorry and the drop will be twice as high as the climb. And if I married her and let Cynthia have the money everything would be better, but then Cynthia would be afraid of me and no telling what she would do then. Who can tell?

But I couldn't marry Linda. Not as long as Cynthia was alive.

I let her sleep for about an hour. She wanted to stay there all night and I was even more sorry then that I had ever started anything because now there was no stopping her, but finally there was an end and I drove her home. All the way home she lay with her head on my lap.

I kissed the top of her head as I lifted her up.

I kissed her good night in the doorway.

I drove home and mixed a drink and turned on the midnight news.

"A break in the trial of Stutz Gandler is expected tomorrow ... a reliable source reports a surprise will take place tomorrow in the Chippewa County Court House ... Gandler's lawyer has requested a hearing before Judge Stuart Rider...." What the hell was Gandler up to?

20

Sure, she'd used all of them, but they'd all used people themselves, and she hadn't wanted to tell me because she knew how much I loved her.

She probably feared I'd leave her if I knew the whole truth, so she'd kept quiet, and the only way she could ever get a new life was with me and the money, and the most important point of all that showed she loved me was simple to see.

She'd chosen me to help her get the money. With her looks she could have had any number of guys.

But she'd chosen me. I slept.

At noon the news came on the air.

Stutz had pleaded guilty. There wasn't going to be a trial. But I couldn't figure out his guilty plea unless he'd made some kind of deal with the feds.

What could the deal be? And how soon would they let her out? And when would I see her again?

All day I felt her beside me. I could almost see her and touch her. Her presence seemed to walk with me. If I closed my eyes I was lying beside her again.

One thing bothered me. How could she contact me?

Would the feds or any of Stutz's men follow her?

The feds would probably try to protect her, but there was nothing I could do until she called me.

I waited all day. Nothing on the news about her release. And then it hit me. There wouldn't be any news about her release.

The feds would keep telling the newspaper men she was in jail and meanwhile they would let her out the back way at night when nobody was around.

All I had to do was wait.

She would come to me.

I waited all that night and the next day, never leaving the club for a minute except to teach lessons on the court.

No word. The hours crawled. Nothing on the radio or television about her. Stutz was to reappear in court in two days for sentencing.

Then I began to get nervous. It was the second night.

Then it was the third night. The sun was going down and the lounge was deserted. I sat on the steps looking out across the empty courts, watching the sun die through the trees and the emerald twilight rising out of the ground, slowly, like green water, taking a little of the trees as each moment passed until the greenish light thickened and the leaves and branches were submerged in greenish light; then suddenly it was dark. I sat there listening to the faraway sound of traffic passing on the highway. The bats were slanting in the warm darkness. I wondered what was going to happen. I didn't dare call the jail.

I heard a noise in the bushes behind the club house. I thought it was a cat or dog and then another sound, a soft sound, as if something were dragging against the bushes.

I stood up.

"Shhh. Frank. Go inside."

"Cynthia?"

"Yes. Are you alone?"

"Yes."

It was Norm's night out. I was supposed to keep open another hour, but I could lock up early.

I went inside, turned off all the light downstairs, closed the door, then opened it a crack.

I went upstairs to my room. I didn't hear anything until the sound of her footsteps ascending the staircase.

Then suddenly in the dark hall we were in each other's arms and my kiss was in her hair and her lips were on my throat and face and her hands were pressing into my back.

"Oh, darling, darling, love."

Then my mouth was upon her mouth and my hands were feeling her body.

"I know what you're thinking," she said, drawing her head back.

"Forget it."

"No, I can't forget it. I only know I'm here with you now."

I didn't answer. I hated her and loved her, hated her for the men she'd slept with and hated the men who had slept with her, but what could I do? What did I want to do but to do it with her, even though part of me still hated her, even though-? Oh, she was nice, wonderful, yes, you are, you're perfect, oh, perfect, yes, perfect, and I want more. I don't care, no matter what you did, I don't care. Cynthia, don't care. You're perfect for me, perfect. Yes. Yes. You're perfect, delicious, delicious, delicious. Oh, yes, delicious. And we're both delicious. You're me. I'm you. So now, now, now; then now was over.

And in the silence she said, "We've got to plan things."

"I don't want to do anything now."

"Listen to me, Frank."

"What about Stutz? How'd he-?"

"They gave him a choice and he took the lesser charge."

"What do you mean?"

"Like I told you before. They were after him on an income tax rap. Net worth. Only it would be a costly trial. They had me as a witness on the other charge. All they wanted was an airtight case, and if I had to take the stand they would have put him away anyway. He didn't want a lot of things to get out if I took the stand, so he pleaded guilty and the state got him without too much cost."

"How'd you get out?"

Just as I thought, they had taken her out of jail the back way.

"I've got a passport," she said. "They don't know anything about you."

"You could have been followed."

"I parked the car three blocks from here. Nobody followed. I went around the block four times. The feds simply told me to leave town."

"The money," I said. "Do they know about it?"

"The feds don't know' anything about the money. I even told them one of the men who was shot was my lover."

I laughed and she wanted to know why, so I told her.

"Okay," she said. "Now listen. I'm going to Minneapolis. I'll take a room at the Minikahda Courts. You come down tomorrow night and I'll be in the coffee shop at six o'clock."

"Are you sure nobody's followed you?"

"Positive."

"Come here."

"I can't stay. What about Norman?"

"I think he knows but he's never going to say anything."

"The money?"

"No. No. Just about us."

"How can you be sure he'll keep quiet."

"From wherever we are I'll write him, tell him the club is his. Once we're out of the country we can keep moving."

"How much is there?" she asked.

"About two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

She didn't say anything. She didn't even ask where Ihad the money.

But how were we going to get it out of the country? This still bothered me. I couldn't keep it stashed in a suitcase forever.

"Stay tight for a month," she said. "Don't make a move. I'll go ahead. England."

"How the hell are we going to get the money out of the country?"

She looked thoughtful for a long moment; then she said, "It's so simple it's funny. You'll ship it."

She was out of her mind. You can't ship money out of the country and I told her so.

"Oh, yes you can. Bring me twenty-five thousand tomorrow night. Keep the rest wherever you have it. In about a month ship the rest to American Express Office, care of Betty Smollet. Crate it with books and label it books."

"Won't they open it?"

"Not a single crate."

"How can you pick it up?"

"There are people in Europe who can fix up any kind of identification papers."

I didn't catch on at all. It looked as if she had it all figured out for us.

"Don't go," I said, not wanting to lose her for an instant. Her throat arched and her knees came up around and smooth against my stomach and her lips opened on mine and then there wasn't anything but our bodies floating, and her arms holding me.

Her mouth came harder against my lips, her pointed tongue hotter and hotter into me. I drew my hand down along her back. I slowly upzipped her dress. It was like being with her for the first time again. My hand went down along the long, smooth skin of her back. I felt her buttocks coil and clench beneath my hand.

She drew my face down and together we slowly became one, slowly, softly, smoothly, on and on, softly, slowly, smoothly.

She lay back and smoothed her hair. "I've got to go."

"Once more."

"Frank, you'll kill me."

Her pure, huge round breasts shimmered. I kissed each breast carefully. She lay there, staring up at the ceiling, the nipples still soft, her breath slow and even.

I went on kissing her breasts and soon she began to shiver and moan and murmur to herself. This time I did not take her. She took me. She was on top of me, savage and thrusting down, grinding her hips into me, swaying from side to side, crying out for her breasts to be pinched and caressed.

She coursed and sluiced the stalk back and forth, up and down, then 'round and 'round, through darkness and waves of glimmering lights inside my head as I smelled the sweet honey odor of her flesh.

She leaned down her face without stopping the rotating motion of her hips. I tasted the sweetness of her hot tongue. Our bodies became one central point, and her honeyed innards were a whirlpool of liquid, a whirlpool slowing and then speeding up, slowing and speeding up, until the unbearable painful ecstasy in the stalk seemed almost to tear it from my body.

I pulled her down, wanted her hair over my face, kissing her breasts and mouth furiously, tasting the sweet nipples, feeling my body about, to go out of itself, out through the stalk to vanish into space.

My body seemed to be floating in unlimited spaciousness, and I clutched at her breasts and buttocks as if to bring myself back into the world.

I opened my eyes. Her whole body was writhing above my belly as if she were doing a dance. Her face moved as her body writhed.

I stroked her breasts, and her legs circled under me, her ankles entwined, and she thrust her belly down upon me, roofing my face in the soft darkness of her hair. Her breasts crushed against me and I felt the stroke of her belly and then we were solid against each other and I was holding her with both arms. I pulled myself up and for an instant we sat poised-mouth, breasts, belly and loins locked-then we rolled backwards and forwards slowly until at last she rolled onto her side. Then, lying at right angles to her hips, the stalk thrust into her to the absolute limit of the honeyed envelope of flesh, and I heard her panting coming slower and softer and her insides soften as her liquid poured over me and the stalk sank softly downward into the warm, sweet honey. I kissed her lips gently and held her close. She lay motionless against me, her hips faintly twitching, then subsiding, her tongue lifeless in my mouth.

"In a little while," I said.

"I must go."

"Once more Later."

She put her breasts in my hands and for a long moment we held each other tight, tighter and tighter.

"Tomorrow night," she whispered.

We lay silent for a while.

Then she said, "It's all going to work out. It's going to be lovely. You won't forget everything I told you?"

"No. The money-ship it to London, you meant, didn't you?"

"No," she said, kissing my cheek. "Paris, darling. It's such a lovely city. You'll adore it."

21

How stupid could I be? I saw it clearly. Used? Hell, I hadn't been used. I'd been suckered-hook, line and sinker!

I saw the whole bit. Sure, I'd wind up with twenty-five thousand dollars, but that was all.

No Cynthia, no more money.

I wanted to kill her right there, but that could wait. I could do that later.

Before she ever got to Paris. Because if she ever got to Paris it was bye-bye.

Richards was right. She used everybody and got rid of them and I was next on the line, only I wasn't going to be rubbed out.

Just discarded, standing in an empty street in Paris, staring at an empty lot with a post card in my hand saying meet me at this address.

Great. She had another think coming. Maybe I'd learned a little from her.

I thought about it all the next day. I knew exactly where I was going to take her that night.

I had the gun, but not the money. I put the suitcase in my closet and locked the suitcase and the closet door.

Linda called that afternoon. I told her to come over for a lesson the next afternoon.

"Let's go out to the river again, Frank."

"Tomorrow night."

"Bye, darling."

At lunch I was eating a sandwich alone in the kitchen when Norm came in. He shut the kitchen door.

"Frank," he said, "I want to ask you something."

"Shoot."

"It's none of my business and I haven't wanted to ask you ... but ... "

"Go on."

"That woman. The one that was in the paper."

"What about her?"

"Like I say, it's none of my business, but you've got a good-thing here, and-"

"And you wouldn't want me to ruin it?"

"Something like that."

"Don't worry about it."

"Is she coming back around here?"

"I doubt it. I never had anything to do with her."

"Oh?" he said and paused, half-turned toward the door, thinking. "Well?"

"Nothing. Only I thought-"

"What?"

"Frank, don't blow your future on a dame like that."

I laughed.

"Brother, when the candles are low they're all the same."

He shook his head, laughed awkwardly.

"Boy, you had me worried, Frank."

Then we both laughed and had a bottle of beer and didn't talk about her any more. But he still looked as if he wanted to ask me more or wanted to tell me something but he didn't come out with it and I sure wasn't going to bring up the subject of Cynthia again.

It was about quarter to six when I checked into Minikahda Courts. I looked for her car in the lot and then decided she was probably driving something different now. I sat in the room until six and then walked down to the coffee shop. I could feel the gun in my coat.

Shoot the bitch, I thought.

She was sitting alone with a newspaper in front of her at a corner table and it looked as if she spotted me with an almost imperceptible half-turn of her head.

I took a table by the door and ordered coffee and waited.

It wasn't long. She folded her newspaper and tucked it under her arm and dusted her chin with a napkin and got up. She paid her bill at the counter.

As she passed my table the newspaper fell away from under her arm. It lay on the floor, just under my table, and I reached down to pick it up. She didn't move.

Scrawled across the top of the newspaper above the headline with pencil was the message: Room 106.

I handed her the newspaper. She smiled, thanking me, and departed.

I ordered a sandwich and killed fifteen minutes in the coffee shop.

I went to her room. The door was ajar. She was sitting on the bed doing her nails.

"Hello, darling," she said. "How's everything?"

"Not good, not bad."

She put down the fingernail file and stood up and came toward me and put her face up for a kiss and her arms around my shoulders. I kissed her lips and she stepped away. She looked at my chest.

"Hey, what's the gun? Didn't you get rid of it?"

"With that kind of money to take care of?" She frowned, shook her head. Then she said, "Where is it?"

"Well get it. Don't-"

"Didn't you bring it?"

"Hell," I said. "You don't think I keep it around the house do you? I've got it stashed."

"Where?" .

"Outside of town. About ten miles. I buried it."

"You had me worried. Oh, darling," she said. "Come here." She put her arms around me again. I kissed her. I wanted to stay. I knew if I kissed her again I'd start thinking differently, and I knew she wasn't ever going to be any different, but I knew I couldn't stand it, being with her again, loving her. I couldn't take that now. So I kissed her once.

"I want to get up there before it's too dark," I told her. "It's in a woods. I don't want to show a light until we're right in the woods so nobody will see us going in."

She looked at me and smiled. It was almost an amused smile.

"If you can wait, I can," she said. She gave me a funny look.

We took my car. I knew where I was going to take her. About ten miles north of Minneapolis, along the river, where there were woods and brush.

As I drove she kept her left arm around my shoulders, her arm lying along the top of the front seat.

"Darling," she said. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter."

"I'll be glad when we're both away from here. I hate it here. We'll go to the south of France first and stay there until winter and then go skiing in Switzerland."

"Yes," I said, keeping the bitterness out of my voice. "Yes, and afterwards England. I want to see England again. Think of all the places we can make love in. I know some strange hotels in London."

"Oh, darling, it will be wonderful! With all that money ours."

I turned off the highway onto a dirt road.

"Is this the way?"

I nodded. It was almost dark and I turned on the headlights. I knew the road. It was an old rutted lane leading down to the river, to the duck-hunting marshes. The headlight beams bounced back and forth off the tree trunks, picked up the ruined walls of a barn that had burned years before, went on among the tree trunks, the road curving and winding, to slant down at last through a heavy growth of willows. It was dark now and the night was without moonlight.

I took the flashlight out of the glove compartment.

"It's down in the willows," I said. "About fifty feet. Almost in the river."

She didn't say anything. I went around to the rear, opened the trunk and took out the spade.

All right, you bitch.

I cast the beam of light ahead and she walked by my side.

I was going to hit her with the shovel first.

Suddenly I couldn't do it. I couldn't kill her. I'd killed people in anger and fright in the war, but I'd never killed anybody I loved.

And I still loved her.

I stopped.

"Come on, Cynthia." I took her arm and turned toward the car. And then I told her.

"I couldn't do it," I said. "I don't care what you've done or who you've got waiting for you in Paris, I can't kill you."

"You stupid fool! You poor stupid fool! I love you. Don't believe those lies. I don't have anybody in Paris. It's only you I want. Us! Me! You! Give me that gun before you kill us both."

I drew out the gun and handed it to her. We walked back to the car. I opened the trunk.

"Frank," she said. "Where is the money?"

I told her.

"Let's get it, Frank," she said, and her voice was different, quite cold, quite deliberate. I raised my head.

The gun was pointing at my chest.

"All right, Frank, get in the car. We're going back. We're going to get that money. You're going to give me all of it except fifty thousand dollars, and you're going to stay right here and keep your mouth shut because the minute you open your mouth, I'm the government witness against you for murder. Understand?"

Her voice was hard and cold.

"Cynthia-" I heard my mouth cry out in horror and astonishment and I started walking toward her and heard the gun explode and in the muzzle flame felt the hot, shocking blow in my shoulder.

At the same time a violent huge beam of light shone over us and a voice shouted:

"All right, you two, come out with your hands up!"

The voice roared out of the darkness. I lay there, still hearing the explosion of the gun and in the explosion the sound of the voice and then the sound of the voice came again:

"Put that gun down!"

I saw the muzzle flash from the gun in her hand. Then I heard a roaring of guns, a whistling rush, and another burst of gunfire behind me.

I heard her scream, first high, then in short, sharp, thin cries. I heard people running in the woods.

I got up on one knee and stumbled over to her. She lay on her side. There were many voices around us and a light shone on her face. She looked dead but her eyes and lips were still alive, her eyes staring at me.

"I'm sorry," I heard my voice say.

"Get away," she said. "I can't stand sorry people."

Her eyes stared at me a long time after she was dead.

I still see her eyes. The FBI had a tail on her all the time, and the next day the county nailed me when they searched my room. She died that morning in the county hospital. The county attorney was a tough boy. He got a deathbed statement from her, and she spilled everything. But he couldn't put her on the stand because she was dead. But they nailed me pretty good with her statement. She shot the works, where Stutz got the money, how we got it. I took the stand, but what could I say? Everything I denied nailed me that much more behind bars. The jury was out ten minutes. The judge gave me twenty years.

THE END
Inches To Spare ....(78k)    by James Holly





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~







.....7723 home .....7725








---

	"Double for Nothing!! Tricks for Free!!!"™ A MrDouble Production: mrdouble

Page Design Copyright � 1998-2011, Mr Double, ALL Rights Reserved    
Stories Copyright respective authors.