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“Scram,” the guard said, growling. “Take this lump of iron the hell out of here or I’ll give you something to complain about.”
We drove away the way we had come. I watched the guard in the rearview mirror. He stood in the middle of the road, his hands on his hips, staring after us: a real twelve-minute egg.
“Nice fella,” I said and grinned.
“There’s another like him. They’re both on duty at night.”
“See the dog?”
“Dog?” He glanced at me. “No. What dog?”
“Just a dog. Nice teeth. If anything he looked a little tougher than the guard and sort of hungry. And the barbed wire. Good stuff. Sharp. I guess I’ll have to ask for a little more dough. I’ve got to get me insured.”
“You’re not going to get any more money from us, if that’s what you mean,” Parker snapped.
“That’s what I do mean. Pity you missed the dog. It should be a lot of fun having that cutie roaming around in the dark. Yeah, I guess you’ll have to dip into your sock again, brother.”
“A thousand or nothing,” Parker said, his face hardening. “Please yourself.”
“You’ll have to revise your ideas. I’m in a buyer’s market. You know, Brett might pay me for information. Don’t tell me to please myself unless you want me to.” I glanced at him, saw his eyes narrow. That hit him where it hurt.
“Don’t try that stuff with me, Jackson.”
“Talk it over with Fatso. I want another five hundred or I don’t go ahead. Fatso didn’t tell me about the guards or the dog or the alarms or the wire. He made out it was a soft job—a job you could do in your sleep.”
“I’m warning you, Jackson,” Parker said between his teeth. “You can’t monkey with us. You made a deal and you’ve accepted part payment. You’re going through with it.”
“That’s right. But the fee’s jacked up to fifteen centuries. My union don’t let me fool around with dogs.”
“You’ll take your thousand or you’ll be sorry,” he said, and his hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “I’m not going to be blackmailed by you, you cheap crook.”
“Don’t blame me. Blame Fatso. I’m not a sucker.”
He began to drive fast and we got back to the house in half the time it took us to leave it.
“We’ll see Gorman,” he said.
We saw Gorman.
Fatso sat in a chair and stroked his hard pink face and listened.
“I told him he couldn’t make a monkey out of us,” Parker said. He was white and his eyes had a feverish look.
Gorman stared at me.
“You’d better not try any tricks, Mr. Jackson.”
“No tricks,” I said, smiling at him. “Just another five hundred to take care of the insurance. You want to see the guard and you want to take a gander at the dog. When you’ve seen them, you’ve seen plenty.”
He brooded for a long minute.
“All right,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t know about the guards or the dog myself. I’ll make it another five hundred, but it’s the last you’ll get.”
Parker let out a little explosion of sound.
“Don’t get excited, Dominic,” Gorman said, frowning at him. “If you knew about the guards you should have told me.”
“He’s blackmailing us!” Parker stormed. “You’re crazy to pay him. Where’s it going to stop?”
“Leave this to me,” Gorman said, cool as a cucumber.
Parker stood glaring at me, then he went out.
“I’ll have the dough now,” I said. “It wouldn’t be much use to me if I run into that dog.”
We argued back and forth. After a while we agreed to split it and Gorman handed over two hundred and fifty.
I borrowed an envelope and a sheet of notepaper and prepared another surprise for my bank manager. There was a mailbox just outside the house. I went down the drive and mailed the letter while Gorman watched me from the window.
Well, I was coming along. I had collected four hundred and fifty iron men for nothing so far, and they were where neither of these guys could reach them.
All the same I didn’t like the easy way Gorman had parted with the money. I knew I wouldn’t have screwed it out of Parker. But Gorman was a lot trickier than Parker. When he had parted with the money, his face had been expressionless. But that didn’t fool me. I began to think it was going to be a lot harder to collect the balance of the money when I had handed over the compact. I was all right now, but the moment I had handed it over I had a feeling Gorman would go into action. I felt it the way you feel a hunch, and it kept growing. I remembered what Max had said about Parker’s gun. Right now they wanted me to do a job Gorman was too fat to do and Parker hadn’t the guts to do. But when I’d done it, I’d be of no further use to them. I’d be a danger to them. That’s when I should have to watch out. And I told myself I’d watch out all right.
Later, Max came to tell me lunch was ready. I was sitting on the terrace overlooking the lawn, and when I was going to speak to him he frowned a warning.
I glanced over my shoulder and there was my pal Parker standing in the French windows watching us. He came over, a little stiff, but controlled.
“I have everything you need for tonight,” he said when Max had gone away. “I’ll come with you as far as the wall and I’ll wait there in the car.”
“Come in with me. You can take care of the dog.”
He ignored this, and we went into the dining room. The lunch was nothing to rave about. While we toyed with the food, Parker told me what he had got together for me.
“You’ll want a knotted rope for the wall. I have that with a hook at one end. I have a good pair of cutters for the wire. You’ll need a flashlight. Anything else?”
“How about the dog?”
“A leaded cane will take care of the dog,” Gorman put in. “I’ll tell Max to get one.”
“And the combination of the safe?”
“I’ve written that down for you,” Parker said. “You’ll find a wire running along the side of the safe. Before you touch the safe, cut the wire. That’ll put the alarm out of action. Don’t touch any of the windows.”
“Sounds simple, doesn’t it?” I said.
“For a man of your experience it is simple,” Gorman said smoothly. “But don’t take any chances, Mr. Jackson. I don’t want any trouble.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
After lunch I told them I’d take a nap in the garden, and that’s when I met Veda Rux. I went down to the lily pond hoping I’d run into her and that’s where I found her. She was sitting on the low wall surrounding the pond the way she had been sitting the previous night. Her feet in sandals hung a few inches above the water. She wore a pair of canary-colored corduroy slacks and a thin silk shirt of the same color. Her almost black hair hung loose to her shoulders in a kind of Dutch bob, only she had waves in it. She was small and compact and curved, and there was strength in her. It wasn’t that she was muscular; it was something you guessed at rather than saw. You had the impression her wrists had steel in them and the curve of her thighs would be as hard as granite if you touched them.
Her face was pale and small and serious. Her lapis-lazuli eyes were alert and watchful. Plenty of girls have pretty faces and curves you can’t improve upon. You look them over, get ideas about them, and forget them as soon as they’re out of sight. But this girl you wouldn’t forget. Don’t ask me why. She had something. She was as different as gin is to water. And the difference, as you know, is there’s a kick in one of them. Veda Rux carried a kick like a mule.
As soon as I saw her I knew there was going to be trouble. If I’d had any sense I’d have quit there and then. I should have told Gorman I’d changed my mind, given him back his money and got out of this house like a bat out of hell. That would have been the sensible thing to have done. I should have known from the way this girl made me feel that from now on I was going to have only half my mind on my job. And when a guy gets that way he’s leaving himself wide open for a sucker punch. I knew it, and I didn’t even care.
“Hello,” I said. “I’ve heard about you. You walk in your sleep.”
She studied me thoughtfully. No welcome. No smile.
“I’ve heard about you, too,” she said.
That seemed to take care of that. There was a long blank pause while we looked at each other. She didn’t move. It was uncanny how still she could sit: not a blink to show she was alive. You couldn’t even see she was breathing.
“You know why I’m here?” I asked. “You know what I’m going to do?”
“Yes, I know that, too,” she said.
Well, that also took care of that. There didn’t seem much else to say. I looked down into the lily pond. I could see her reflection in the water. She looked good that way, too.
I had the idea I was having the same effect on her as she was having on me. I wasn’t sure, but I had a hunch I had touched off a spark in her, and it wouldn’t need a lot of work to fan it into a flame.
I’ve been around and I’ve known a lot of women in my time. They’ve given me a lot of fun and a lot of grief. Now women are funny animals. You never know where you are with them—they don’t often know where they are with themselves. It’s no good trying to find out what makes them tick. It just can’t be done. They have more moods than an army of cats have lives, and all you can hope for is to spot the mood you’re after when it turns up and step in quick. Hesitate, and you’re a dead duck, unless you’re one of those guys who likes a slow approach that might get you somewhere in a week or a month or even a year. But that’s not the way I like it. I like it quick and sudden: like a shot in the back.
I had come around the pool and was close to her now. She sat like a statue, her hands folded in her lap, and I could smell her perfume; nothing you could put a name to, but nice—heady and elusive.
And all of a sudden my heart was slamming against my ribs and my mouth was dry. I stood close behind her and waited. It was as if I’d got hold of a live wire in my hands and it was pulling me to pieces and I couldn’t let go. Then she turned her head slowly and raised her face. I caught her in my arms and my mouth covered hers. She was in the mood all right. Her mouth was half-open and hard against mine. I felt her breath at the back of my throat. Five seconds—long enough to find out how good she was, with her firm young other hand gripping my arm; then she pushed me away. She had steel in her wrists all right.
We looked at each other. The lapis-lazuli eyes were as unruffled and as impersonal as the lily pond.
“Do you usually work as fast as that?” she asked and touched her mouth gently with slim fingers.
There was a weight on my chest that made me breathless. When I spoke I had a croak in my voice a frog would have envied.
“It seemed the thing to do,” I said. “We might do it again sometime.”
She swung her legs over the wall and stood up. The top of her sleek dark head was a little above my shoulder. She stood very still and straight.
“We might,” she said and walked away. I watched her go. Her slim body was upright and graceful and she didn’t look back. I watched her until she had disappeared into the house, then I sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. My hands were as steady as an aspen leaf.
For the rest of the afternoon I stayed right there by the lily pond. Nothing happened. No one came near me. No one peeped at me from the windows. I had all the time in the world to think out what I was going to do that night, how I was going to evade the guards and the dog, how I was going to climb that wall without being seen, and how I was going to open the safe. But I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I thought about Veda Rux. I was still thinking about her when the sun dropped behind the tall pine trees and the shadows lengthened on the lawn. I was still thinking about her when Parker came out of the house and down to the pond.
I looked at him blankly because he had gone right out of my mind. It was as if he had never existed. That was the effect she had on me.
“You’d better come in now,” he said abruptly. “We’ll run through the final arrangements before we have supper. We want to get off about nine o’clock when the moon’s right.”
We went back into the house. There was no sign of her in the hall or the lounge where Gorman was waiting. I kept listening for sounds of her, but the house was as still and as quiet as a morgue.
“Dominic will carry the dagger,” Gorman said. “When you’re up on the wall he’ll hand it to you. Be careful with it. I don’t want the case scratched.”
Parker gave me a key which he said unlocked the back door. We went over the architect’s plan once more.
“I have another two hundred bucks coming to me before I go in there,” I reminded Gorman. “You can give it to me now if that’s okay with you.”
“Dominic will give it to you at the same time as he gives you the dagger,” Gorman said. “You’ve had too much of my money without working for it, Mr. Jackson. I want some action from you before I part with any more.”
I grinned. “Right, only I don’t go over the wall without it.”
I expected to see her at supper, but she wasn’t there. Halfway through the meal I found I just had to know where she was. I said casually I’d seen a girl in the garden and was that Miss Rux and wasn’t she coming in for a bite of food?
Parker turned a greenish white. His fists clenched until the knuckles seemed to be bursting out of his skin. He started to say something in a voice that was drowned in rage, but Gorman put in quickly, “Don’t excite yourself, Dominic.”
I didn’t like the look of Parker, and I pushed back my chair. He looked mad enough to take a sock at me. I don’t like a guy to sock me when I’m sitting down—even a clown like Parker.
“You’re hired to do a job, Jackson,” Parker said, leaning across the table and glaring at me. “Keep your damned nose out of what doesn’t concern you! Miss Rux doesn’t want anything to do with a cheap crook like you, and I’ll see her wishes are carried out. Don’t bring her name into this conversation!”
Because of what had happened out there by the pond, I didn’t play it the way I should.
“Don’t tell me that number I saw in the fancy pants could fall for a stooge like you,” I said and laughed at him. I had my heel against the rung of the chair and I was about to kick it away and land him a poke in his snout when I found myself looking down the barrel of a .38 police special that had jumped into his hand. Max had said he carried a gun as if he could use it. That draw was the quickest thing outside the movies I’d ever seen.
“Dominic!” Gorman said quietly.
I didn’t move. There was a blank, sightless look in Parker’s washed-out blue eyes that told me he was going to shoot. It was a nasty moment. The gun barrel looked as big as the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and twice as steady. I could see the thin finger taking in the slack on the trigger.
“Dominic!” Gorman shouted and brought his great fist crashing down on the table.
The gun barrel dropped and Parker blinked at me as if he couldn’t understand what had happened. His vacant, bewildered look sent a chill up my spine. This guy was slaphappy. I’d seen that dazed, vacant expression duplicated on a row of faces in the psychopathic ward in the county jail. You couldn’t mistake it once you’d seen it: the face of a paranoiac killer.
“Don’t get excited, Dominic,” Gorman said in his thin, scratchy voice. He hadn’t turned a hair, and I began to understand why he kept telling Parker to take it easy. It was his way of controlling him when he was getting out of hand.
Parker got slowly to his feet, stared at the gun as if he couldn’t understand what it was doing in his hand and walked quietly out of the room.
I took out my handkerchief and touched my forehead with it. I was sweating: not much, but I was sweating.
“You want to watch that guy,” I said evenly. “One of these days they’ll take him away, strapped to a stretcher.”
“You have only yourself to blame, Mr. Jackson,” Gorman said, his eyes cold. “He’s all right if you handle him right. You happen to be the quarrelsome type. Have some more coffee?”
I grinned. “I’m going to have a drink. He was going to shoot. Don’t kid me. You want to take that gun away from him before there’s an accident.”
Gorman watched me pour the drink. There was an empty expression on his fat face.
“You mustn’t take him too seriously, Mr. Jackson. He’s become attached to Miss Rux. I shouldn’t mention her again in your conversation.”
“That guy? And what does she think of him?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with you.”
I took a drink and came back to the table.
