Takeover Attempt in Las Vegas Results in Theft and Murder

When you're an operator working alone, you get your inside dope the best way you can. I had a friend or two on the cops, and sometimes I made eat money doing day work for a big detective agency on the Strip, but neither of them were going to keep me posted on current events in the big money areas around town.

One of the casinos had been hit the day before, out in the desert. The word was that it was a one-man heist, but nobody seemed to know for sure. The casino's heavy guns looked mean when I ran across some of them around the gambling joints along the Strip. Then in today's paper was an item about a shooting. The body found in the brush early in the morning had been identified as a small-time hoodlum named Mindy Kemp.

A skimmed-cash car of one of the biggest, newest dives in town, Florian's, gets robbed. Then a day later, a guy is found shot dead outside town.

I was interested. Half the readers in town were interested, too, but they weren't going to end up involved in any of it.

I rent desk space in a long room half a block from the Strip. I was reading the newspaper when an insurance man up near the front door which opened onto the side street turned off his desk light and called out: "Good night!"

I glanced at him over the top of the paper.

"'Night!"

That left the light at my desk the only one lit in the long room. The front part of the office was dark. I thought about going up there and turning on a ceiling light, but I got wrapped up in the newspaper again. When I was finished with it, I dropped it in the wastebasket beside my desk.

A guy was standing across the desk, watching me.

I started. I hadn't heard him come in.

After learning how to breathe again, I said, "Good evening. What can I do for you?"

My little desk light didn't illumine his face, just distorted it. He wore a yellow-checked jacket over a light blue nylon shirt, which he hadn't buttoned. I could see his torso, completely hairless, but tanned from much sun.

"You Brandon?" he asked. His voice was low, his words slurred.

"That's right."

"Mr. Mercator wants to see you."

"That's fine," I said. "Now that you know where I am, you can tell Mr. Mercator where he can find me."

For a moment he was silent.

"Mr. Mercator wants you to come with me. Now."

"Tell Mr. Mercator I can't come with you. Now. Tell Mr. Mercator I'm waiting for a vital phone call from my associates in New York."

His right hand went somewhere and a blade flicked into sight.

"No," he said, "Mr. Mercator wants you to come now. He wants to see you."

I lifted my eyes from the switchblade and examined the sections of his face revealed partially by light reflected up from my desk lamp, and down from its reflection on the ceiling. Slowly I raised my right hand and scratched my chest through my shirt.

"Tell Mr. Mercator that I'll be delighted to see him here, in my office, now, tonight."

"Mr. Mercator wants..."

"Oh, hell," I said.

Sliding my hand beneath my jacket, I brought out the .38 and pointed it at the ceiling.

His dull brown eyes looked at the gun.

"Tell Mr. Mercator," I said, "to come here, himself. When you tell him I am unable to leave my office, he will understand. He will then decide to come here, either later this evening, or tomorrow morning. Tomorrow would be best."

He just stared at me.

His hair was combed in that careful way some of the young wear it. To me it always looks sloppy and dirty, but when you see the pains they take combing it to get it to look that way, you wonder if maybe your own values of neatness may not be a little out of whack.

"Mr. Mercator..." he started again.

"Look," I said gently. "It's all right. Mr. Mercator is nearby. This is a relatively small city. He will understand. Go tell him to come here. I will be glad to see him. It is all right. I will wait another half hour."

I stopped talking. My jaws hurt. I was mouthing each word so carefully that the muscles grew tired, after awhile of it. Anyway, I wasn't sure any of it was getting through.

Yellow-jacket stared out of the caves of his eyes beneath his thick eyebrows and the heavy prow of his hair. Finally he seemed to make up his mind...what there was of it...and turned away, walking silently toward the front of the office.

He wore dark sneakers and no socks. The coarse skin above his heel-tendons wore parallel dirt lines. Once he was out of the circle of light thrown by my desk lamp, I couldn't see him at all. I couldn't hear him, either.

I waited a minute before going to the front of the office and flipping a wall switch. A ceiling light went on.

I wanted no more switchblade morons genii-ing before me out of the darkness. And I wasn't going wandering off with someone like him to see anyone, not even Mr. Mercator, whoever he was.

Sitting down, I thought about. I laughed at what I'd said about expecting a call from my New York associates. I wished I had some associates in New York. I wished I had associates anywhere.

After awhile, I went back to thinking about the other stuff, the stick-up of Florian's cash shipment, and the dead man they had found in the brush. I itched to get busy on either case, or both. It's like being an actor unable to get a part in a play, I guess. You stand outside, thinking how well you could handle the role, if you could only get a chance to take a crack at it.

That's how I felt about things like the heist and the shooting. They were rumblings beyond the horizon. People larger than life handled things like that, not guys like me. Who would come down this side street and look up Jim Brandon to hand over an important case to him?

I answered the question myself: "Nobody."

I killed the half hour. When it was up, I was glad no Mercator had shown. Turning off all the lights in the office on my way out, I made sure the street door locked behind me. I started walking up toward the lights on the Strip before I remembered my car was parked the other way.

Turning, I went back past my building. After the lights, it was a moment before I could see through the darkness between me and the street light on the next corner.

Someone was leaning against a tall palm tree. It could have been Switchblade.

Whispering footsteps behind me came rapidly from the alley next to my building. Spinning on my left foot, I braced the right foot just in time. His arms were out, reaching high for my head and neck, the drunk-grab muggers like to use.

Except I wasn't drunk.

I didn't put too much muscle behind the left, just laced it out, fast. It jolted him. I felt teeth under the center knuckle and pulled the punch to keep from getting any unnecessary cuts.

He was hurt, but he had to keep coming. The left hadn't done much but shoot in fast and hurt him.

He lunged clumsily, grabbing, already swinging toward me, one hand scraping against my chest. I brought the right across and put weight and muscle into it.

It crunched into the side of his head. He went down onto the sidewalk, moaning.

For a moment, I felt a touch of fright. You can kill a man, hitting him in the side of the head, if it lands too high and you hit too hard.

Then I remembered the other one, the palm-tree leaner. Just in time, I stepped away from the one on the sidewalk and turned, pulling the gun.

Sure enough, there he came. The lights of the Strip behind me were strong enough to reveal him as he came charging silently. They glinted on the blade in his right hand.

I held my gun out a little, so he could see it.

"Don't do it," I warned him. "Mr. Mercator wouldn't like it."

I don't know whether he stopped because he saw the gun or because now he was alone. He stood there, panting, looking at me, and down at the one on the sidewalk.

"Put the knife down," I told him.

"Mr. Mercator wants you to..."

"First put the knife down," I said patiently.

I felt as if I were involved in some kind of pointless rehearsal for a thirty-year-old vaudeville routine involving a character named Mercator, who never appeared but was always being talked about until it got to be funny. I wasn't at the laughing stage yet, but maybe I'd get there, if I could keep from getting myself wrapped around the blade of that switch-knife.

"Put it down," I repeated. "On the sidewalk."

After a moment, he stooped and laid the knife on the pavement at his feet.

"Now go help your friend," I said.

Dutifully, he went to the one now silent on the sidewalk and bent over him.

"Hey, Chavez, you okay?"

Keeping an eye on them, I went over to the knife, put a heel on the blade and yanked up on the handle. The blade snapped off, close to the handle.

Its owner saw what I'd done.

"Hey, you broke my knife."

"It was an accident. I'll get you another one."

"That was a good knife," he muttered. "I put in a lot of work on that shiv."

I kept looking up toward the Strip. People strolled past, cars whipped by. Now would be a good time for a patrol car to show up.

I watched Switchblade help Chavez sit up. Chavez held one hand against where I'd hit the side of his head. He didn't moan or make any sound after that first one, when he went down. He stood and shook Switchblade's hand off.

They both looked at me.

I wondered whether I should bother turning them in.

Instead I asked: "Have you got a car?"

Chavez just stood there, watching me.

The other one said, "Yuh."

"Let's go see Mr. Mercator," I said.

It took a second to get through to them. Then the knife-fighter nudged Chavez with his elbow and they walked past me.

I kept the gun in my hand and followed them down the street to an old Plymouth parked at the next corner.

"Both of you get in front," I told them.

Chavez climbed behind the wheel and started the motor. It sounded wheezy. Switchblade sat beside him.

I got in back.

"Is it far?" I asked. "To Mr. Mercator?"

Switchblade looked over his shoulder at me, shook his head. "No."

They moved along side streets, keeping away from the Strip, working up through the edge of town to the lake highway that went out past Florian's. At the highway, there was a wait for a break in the traffic stream. Then they ran the Plymouth out almost as far as Florian's, where they cut left, off the highway, went down a block, turned right into a little alley for a half block.

It was as black as a drug-pusher's heart when Chavez cut the headlights.

"Leave the lights on," I told him.

"It'll drain the battery," he said. It was the first time he'd spoken. His voice was guttural.

"Turn them back on anyway."

He pulled out the light switch and savagely threw open the door beside him.

"Don't get out," I told him.

He swung his head and looked at me, his teeth showing in his broad Indian face, his lips drawn back from them in a silent snarl.

"I get out first," I said, "then you."

I stood clear as they both climbed out the driver's side. The other side of the car was too close against a hedge-fence for Switchblade to get out there.

"Now," I said, "where's Mr. Mercator?"

"In there," Switchblade said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at one of the wooden shacks that lined the alley. Two lighted windows in the back wall we faced looked as if they had opaque paper in them instead of glass panes.

"Go in," I ordered. "You first, then Chavez, then me."

I didn't want Chavez too far from me. The other one didn't look especially dangerous, but Chavez was cut from different cactus.

We picked our way across a tiny backyard littered with what felt like old tin cans. The bonehead leading the way stopped at the back door.

"Go on inside," I told him. "Go on."

He opened the door. Light poured out onto him and Chavez.

I stayed off to one side a little, partly out of the light.

A quick look through the open doorway showed me only a man sitting at a big wooden table. I didn't see the girl until I followed the other two inside.

Closing the door behind me, I leaned on it, still holding the revolver down at my side. It seemed a sensible precaution.

The man at the table looked at the gun and then at Chavez and Switchblade. He didn't smile, just said, "Thank you for coming, Mr. Brandon."

"After awhile it seemed the easiest thing to do," I said. "You Mercator?"

He nodded.

"I've heard a lot about you," I said. "Well, maybe not a lot. Just the same thing, but a lot of times. It seems you want to see me."

"Yes, I do," he agreed.

He glanced at Switchblade.

"Bernard, you and Chavez can wait in front." To the girl, he added: "You go with them, Roberta."

She was perched on the edge of an enamel-top kitchen table, across the room from Mercator. She paid no attention to him. She was looking at me and smiling.

"Hey, Daddy-O. You know, you're kind of cute. I mean, underneath all those bumps and welts and scars and things."

Her face was young, and her smile was pert and gay. Her eyes twinkled blue through the squinched-up flesh around them when she smiled. She wore a blue-gray sweater, tight as a drumskin over a marvelous pair of breasts. Her skirt was short and tight and showed her legs an inch or two above round knees. Black patent-leather high-heeled shoes were on her feet. She wore no stockings, and no hat on her ear-length silver-yellow hair. The skin on the inside of her thighs was very white.

"Bobbie," said Mercator quietly, "go with your boy friend. Mr. Brandon and I have business to discuss."

"Say, Brandon," Bobbie asked, "have you got a cap you can spare?"

"Stop that, Roberta," Mercator said, sharply.

She ignored him, keeping her eyes on me. When I didn't answer right away, she made a jabbing motion at the upper part of her left arm with her right hand.

"You know," she said, "for a little kickee-o. I'm on the pin, or I was, before we came to this town."

She flashed an irritated look Mercator's way.

"Anything will do, Brandon-Daddy." Her eyes crinkled, and her left eye winked. "I'll screw for you," she wheedled, smiling impishly. She said it so artlessly that I couldn't keep from smiling.

"Sorry, doll," I said. "I haven't got a thing on me."

Lightly, she jumped down from the table.

"Oh, Daddy-O, that's the end. Feenee! Not nothing?"

I shook my head. She was a little thing, but a knockout.

"Not even nothing."

She shrugged.

"Okay, poppa-mia. I still think you're cute, even if you are a drag."

She flashed her brilliant joyous youngster's smile at me, winked again, and went through the other door into the front of the shack. She left the door open after her. I heard her husky happy voice talking to Chavez and Bernard in there. It seemed a waste.

"You must excuse Roberta, Mr. Brandon," Mercator said. "She's like a lot of these young people, essentially good, but much too wild. I believe it's something called kicks. A condition overly devoted to glands and organs."

He stood and crossed the room to shut the door to the front room. Returning, he seated himself behind his table again and told me, "Please sit, Mr. Brandon."

"I'll stand. What did you want to talk to me about?"

His face was swarthy, wide, the nose and jaw strong-looking, prominent. He wore a conservative brown pin-striped business suit that he hadn't gotten from K-Mart.

He puzzled me. The two punks didn't seem to be in his league. Except for a barely noticeable wilted look to the collar of his shirt, he had every appearance of a prosperous man, in complete control of some money-earning enterprise.

"I'd like to have you secure information for me," he said. "I'll pay your customary fee, of course."

"Fifty a day and expenses," I said, to see what he'd do with it.

Pursing his lips, he nodded, took a thin leather wallet from an inside pocket, and opened it in front of him on the table. The wallet stayed open limply. Drawing out some bills, he put them on the corner of the table nearest me.

"Is a hundred all right as a retainer?"

"Yes, but first I'll have to know what kind of information you want me to get for you."

"Naturally." He put his wallet away, leaned back in his chair, and said, "If you're wondering about..." He nodded toward the door to the front of the shack. "...my associates, or about this place, I want to assure you I'm ordinarily not this...spare. Mr. Chavez lives here. He has very kindly permitted Bernard and his girl and myself to stay here temporarily, until a certain condition of tension, I might even say of danger, which we have encountered in this city, has been allowed sufficient time to disperse itself. Or until I know the source of the danger. In which case..." He smiled slightly. "...I may be able to disperse it myself."

He chose his words with such care that I couldn't bring myself to tell him he hadn't yet told me a thing I could understand. I just asked: "Danger?"

"Yes. An article in the local paper told of a man found shot to death in the desert outside town." He watched me. "Do you have any idea who might have done that shooting?"

I shook my head.

"None at all. I saw the story. I can't recall the guy's name."

"Mindy Kemp was his name," Mercator said. "I sent him down here, a sort of patrol, a reconnaissance. I had heard, recently, that there were possibilities in this town. I thought I would look into those possibilities."

"What kind?"

Mercator look at me with his muddy brown eyes surrounded by a field of finely lined skin that had seen a lot of desert over a period of years.

"That," he said softly, "is part of the information I would like you to get me."

"Mercator, I'd like to oblige," I told him. "Believe me, if I thought there was any way I could earn that bill, I'd do it. But I wouldn't be honest with you if I didn't tell you that you're whistling into the wind if you're thinking of moving in on anything down here. It just can't be done. Not the way you're thinking. Or the way I think you're thinking."

"My thanks to you, Mr. Brandon," he said, "for being frank with me, but I'll concern myself about whether or not I can do what I set out to do. What I need, what I require of you, is a pair of eyes. And an intelligence. Someone familiar with this city who has a contact here and there, someone who can find out for me why Kemp was killed and by whom, and, if possible, whether the same thing is intended for me."

He tilted his head toward the front of the shack without taking his glance off me.

"As you can see, the pairs of eyes presently available are not also equipped with suitable intelligence for this kind of problem."

Or any kind, I thought.

"About the Kemp killing," I said, after mulling over it for awhile. "I can ask around. About me solving it, finding out who did the job, all I can do is tap a cop or two that I know to see what's being done about it, and maybe what they've got worked up on the case, so far. Whatever I get from them, I'll pass on to you. More than that, I can't guarantee."

"I can ask no more than that," Mercator said. "And also, if you will...keep a nose to that wind you think I'm whistling into, a finger on the pulse of this city, as it were, at least the part of the city that counts. I'd appreciate it. For the next day or two, I need intelligence, in the military sense. I've got to know how the...ah...the enemy is deploying his forces, what shifts of alliances are being made, if any. A man from this city, like yourself, may be much better situated for that purpose than Kemp would have been, had he lived."

"Again, no guarantee," I told him. "But I'll pass along the scuttle-butt, whatever of it is kicking around. Can you get to a phone?"

"Yes. I'll call you at your office. If necessary, perhaps I can send one of my..." He chuckled. "...my force to you."

"Better send the girl," I advised him. "Chavez hates my guts. The other one is too dumb to get a message right, a talking message, anyway."

He thought about it for a moment, then seemed to agree.

"Yes, Roberta is the one for liaison. She's a bit giddy, but, as you say, at least she will remember whatever you tell her and be able to relay the sense of it to me."

I gave him my office phone number and told him I had no home phone. He jotted the number in a little book, rose from his chair and came around the table, picking up the money and bringing it over to me. I took it and wrote him a receipt, and then we shook hands.

"I'll have you driven home," he said.

"No, thanks. I can get a cab up at Florian's. It's only a block from here."

He nodded agreeably.

"You can go out the front way, then," he said. "The alley will give you access to the highway at either end. This is a good quiet haven, for the time being. Until I know where I stand."

"Okay," I said. "Keep in touch."

I crossed the room and went into the front room, shutting the connecting door behind me.

On a mattress over by the left wall, Chavez was banging Roberta. The mattress lay on the floor. Chavez hadn't taken off his shirt or his jacket. Roberta had simply lifted her skirt. Her legs looked whiter than milk against his Indian-brown flanks. The expression his face wore was dogged, stubborn. Maybe it would look happier when he got to the good part.

Opening her eyes, Robert saw me and smiled her sudden bright smile. Her eyes were misted, waiting.

"Hi, Daddy-O Brandon," she murmured. Her voice was thick as cream, now, without its earlier impish crackling lilt. "Look what you're...missing."

"Yeah," I leered. "Looks good."

"It's marvelous," she sighed.

She winced, closed her eyes, shifted her hips a little on the mattress. Chavez's next stroke was apparently on course again. She relaxed.

I crossed the room to the front door. Her boy friend Bernard was sitting sprawled on a cardboard box across the room from the busy mattress. He watched them with disinterested eyes, leaning back with his shoulder-blades against the plank wall. His right leg was crossed over his left thigh, the ankle resting on the straight-out unbent knee. His wrist dangled a hand over the bent right knee. The dangling hand held a lit cigarette that sent a tiny wisp of gray smoke straight up in the airless room.

Maybe he'd already had his share.

Picking my way carefully across the shack's short front yard in utter darkness, I found some kind of gate in a hip-high fence made of wooden slats, and got through to the alley. I thought of Roberta and her white white skin, as I walked toward the town-end of the alley. Turning up a concrete driveway that ran along the brick end-wall of the line of connected stores separating the alley from the highway, I waited under a street light until an empty cab passed on its way back to the Strip after dropping passengers at Florian's. I had him take me to within a block of the Hall of Justice. I walked the block and went in. The only cop I could find that I knew even slightly was a detective named Brode.

When we were through with the "Getting Much?" part, I said, "Is it my imagination, or is this town having some kind of rumble?"

He studied me shrewdly.

"What do you mean, rumble?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. That hijacking yesterday, and now this morning they're finding dead bodies littering the desert in every direction."

He laughed. "One stiff."

"Same difference," I grinned. "Hell, if I want that kind of action, I can go back to Chicago or Youngstown. Out here it's supposed to be nice and peaceful. How can a man gamble in peace if he's worrying about flying shrapnel?"

"Relax, Jim," he said. "Every town gets a stickup, now and then. It's a miracle this burg stays as quiet as it does as much as it does, considering the loose cash all around. We can't cover everything."

"The word is going around there's a little gang stuff involved."

"Forget it," he said.

"I just want to know whether to put on my bullet-proof underwear."

He grinned.

"Nothing to it, huh? No strangers in town lately?"

"Oh, a couple. We've spotted a few and bounced them on their way."

"Did you miss any?"

"The ones we missed today we'll wave goodbye to inside twenty-four hours. Oh, I know what you're getting at. There's a stickup. Knuckleheads five hundred miles in every direction tell themselves, Whoopee! The big boys on the Strip are slipping, let's go down and take over whatever they drop."

He chuckled, shaking his head.

"So one of them gets found out in the brush. Maybe it's a warning to the rest. The big boys in this town aren't slipping, anywhere along the line. There's millions tied up in every one of those casinos, and they're licensed in this state, just like any other business. It'll quiet down. Give it a day or two, and you'll never know anything got out of line."

"You getting anywhere on the killed guy?"

Frowning, he looked at me.

"The homicide boys are digging," he said, carefully. His tone told me he didn't like my questions anymore.

I flipped a couple of gags out before I left. I didn't want to get him sore by pushing too hard on the killing.

Up at the nearest corner, I looked over toward the Strip, and I was thinking, Sure, homicide would dig, up and down, forward and backward, but they wouldn't find a thing. Whoever had done the job on Mindy Kemp had flown in, someone had pointed a finger at Kemp, and before morning, the touch man was high on a plane about a thousand miles away, headed for wherever he came from. Homicide wouldn't find a thing.

I started my detecting the only way you can. I asked questions.

I dropped by some of the little joints, tried to get some sort of picture, from dealers and house-men and the tight-pants girls working some of the tables, all the time working my way southward until I was past the city line and onto the Strip, where the big clip-joints grow.

When it was halfway to midnight, I was tired, but I had the feeling I ought to keep trying to dig up some information for Mercator before he and his two clowns and their little babe got into trouble too big for them to handle. But I was sort of headed for home: I lived in a furnished room near the end of the Strip in the eastern outskirts of town.

My questions had brought a couple of careful looks when I started in with them at the big places. The croupiers smiled and looked away, and that was that. I drifted on, tried another, and another. Then I'd go to the next place further along the Strip, walking beside the highway.

In one of the old places, El Rancho, a dealer I had spoken to waited until he thought I was too busy pumping someone else, and went out of the gambling room. I slipped through the bar and got him in sight. He was on a phone. I waited until he went back to work before I went out into the night.

The wind this far outside town had some heft to it. The stars were clear, if you got far enough away from all the neons near the highway.

Something inside me shivered a little. The wind wasn't cold enough to make me shiver. It was caused by another kind of chill.

At the next intersection of the new cross-highway, I waited for the traffic light to change. Sage bushes just off the sidewalk whipped and tossed in the wind with a steady thrashing sound.

Off to the northwest I could see Florian's in purple neons. Out that way was the alley where Mercator and his motley crew waited. Mercator and his foolish machinations. How long had he been around in this world, and yet he was still filled with dreams of grandeur?

I wondered about Mercator. I couldn't really believe he thought he was going to bulldoze his way in on any good deal down here. He looked intelligent, and vaguely I recalled hearing about a Mercator from up Dune City way.

The light changed and I walked across and on down the Strip. I felt as if I was in a dream. Everybody was kidding. Brode was kidding. Mercator was kidding. Even all the people I was trying to probe in the casinos were kidding when they grew careful and silent and told me they'd see me next week, maybe they'd know something then. Even the dead man they found, out in the desert that morning, even he was kidding. It was all a big act. I was the only one not in on it.

But the hundred bucks Mercator had paid me to nose around wasn't kidding. Nobody in the spot he was in, with that thin a wallet, was shoving a bill at a fifth-rate gumshoe like me just for laughs.

All right, I decided, I'd just have to make believe they weren't kidding and watch myself so I wouldn't laugh in any wrong places.

Inside the Desert Spa, I went on with my fishing. Once again, a blackjack man who didn't know from nothing left his table shortly after I drifted on and awhile later I saw him talking to a big smiling blocky guy I'd seen around. He was always smiling. Now he was smiling across at me. Both of them were watching me. I tried to stare them down, couldn't, and turned away. When I saw them again shortly afterward, they were separating. The blackjack man went back to work and Smiles was using a phone. All the time he was talking, he was smiling. I recalled that's what they always called him, Smiles.

I got out of there and spent another hour doing the same thing, asking questions and getting no answers.

I couldn't blame them. Something was up, but it was nothing to most of them. They just worked for a living, and they worked hard, eight hours a day, feeding the impedimenta to gamblers of all kinds, nickel and dime bettors and thousand dollar plungers, the hardest, most boring work in the world.

Soon, this rumble would die down, there wouldn't be any more stickups of casino cash-transfer cars, no more bodies would be found out in the brush, and they'd still have their jobs to do, and life would go on. They made sure life went on simply by keeping their mouths shut. I couldn't blame them for that, either. What was I to any of them, even the ones I knew slightly?

Finally I ran out of questions and decided I had done the best I could for Mercator. Maybe tomorrow, when I wasn't so tired, I'd have something for him besides descriptions of a lot of careful faces.

I took a cab to my rooming house, and went upstairs. I had trouble with the room lock, but finally the key opened it. On the outside terrace, I leaned on the adobe wall it had for a railing, where I looked across the sage-flats and the distant streaks of light along the highway coming into town from the east.

Back inside, in the little bathroom, I dashed some cold water on my face and washed pretty thoroughly.

I didn't feel so tired after I washed. I could have used a shave, but that could wait till morning. Leaning close to the mirror, I studied my eyes. Tiny pink veins stroked across the whites toward the eyeballs. They looked like pale pink lightning bolts. Pulling back from the mirror, I blinked. I was seeing double.

Closing my eyes, I squeezed them shut, and opened them.

I was still seeing double. But one of the faces in the mirror was smiling.

I swung away from the little sink. My elbow knocked the mouth-rinse glass to the floor. It shattered on the tile. Smiles jammed a short-barrelled revolver into my gut, hard.

"Ooooph!" I said.

"Where you been, Brandon?" Smiles asked genially. "Don't you never come home?"

"Watching the parade of poker-faced people," I said.

He shoved me ahead of him out into the big room.

"You been asking questions," he laughed. "Go ahead, ask us some questions."

There was another face in front of me, a hard, pale, almond-eyed face that hadn't had much desert sun. This one held a gun he looked as if he could handle.

"Elephant hunting doesn't start till the Fall," I told him.

I tried to keep my mouth shut, but sleep crowded in on the sides of my brain like smoke from a smudge pot. It had me blurting nonsense.

"Huh?" the one in front of me grunted. Ridges and knobs beneath his skin stretched it taut all over his face. It seemed to have no flesh underneath, just bone and knotted muscle and ligament.

He looked at me, then at Smiles.

"He means your cannon," Smiles said. "He's a comic, I guess."

"Oh, that's it?"

His fist snaked out, clipped the side of my jaw. I was hardly aware of the punch.

For a second, I didn't even know it was supposed to be a punch.

"Easy, Val," Smiles chuckled. "They want him in one piece. It looks better that way."

"If that's the hardest he can hit, " I said, "they haven't a thing to worry about."

"You want some more, then?"

Val stepped close and looked up at me, tense as a pulley cable, his angry eyes flashing.

He swung the gun, clipped my left cheekbone with the barrel. That hurt. Bulbs of light did a fan dance.

Smiles put a hand against my back for a second, until I got over the moment of dizziness.

"Come on," Smiles said. "Let's blow this hole. Check him for metal, Val. Under the arm."

Val took away my .38 and threw it onto the bed. Turning away, he sneered, and spat on the carpet.

"A character!" he piped.

He went out onto the adobe-walled terrace and down the stairs.

Smiles gave me another shove.

"Follow along," he said cheerfully. "Don't do any yelling."

A long dark sedan was standing by the curb at the foot of the outside stairs. A thin gray-haired man was at the wheel. His name was Jeff. He'd been a kind of trouble-shooter for the casinos for years.

Jeff got out of the car, glanced quickly up the dark quiet street toward the lights on the Strip, opened the back door and motioned me in.

"Move it," he said quietly.

I sank back on the deep-cushioned seat directly behind the driver. Jeff was back behind the wheel with Val beside him on the passenger side. Smiles went around behind the car and crawled in beside me, shoving me over toward my side.

"You take up too much room, Brandon," he said good-naturedly. "A big tough bruiser like you can't spread out too much. Leave a little room for little guys like us."

He laughed.

I didn't say anything. When Jeff moved the car, I half-opened my eyes and stared absently at the back of his thin head with the dark gray straw fedora tilted just slightly to the right.

My eyes closed by themselves. From way off, I heard Smiles say mockingly: "That's the idea, Brandon. You just relax and enjoy the ride. It's gonna be a long one. Maybe your last."

I think he said those last three words. Maybe I just thought he did.

I fell like a stone, not into sleep, but into something more, or less. I would wake, shiver a little, feeling scared, cold, and pull open my eyes now and then, to see where we were, as if I were taking a bus ride and didn't want to miss my stop.

We passed the Strip first, a long crazy kaleidoscope of lights in front of the joints. I was used to the Strip. I saw it every day. I was used to it, wasn't I?

In my quarter-coma, I grinned. Could anyone ever get used to it? All that glitter over the grime of humanity. All those famous Hollywood stars getting paid those famous Hollywood prices. And the army of little people underneath the shine and the glamour, making change for the customers, taking money for chips, repairing the slot machines, keeping the liquor supply up to snuff, the best liquor, given away to the customers, just so they'd gamble. And only occasionally, out of those hundreds of thousands of people who went through town every year, every month, every week, only now and then did one man fall, riddled with bullets, left in the desert under the stars, scoured by wind. It wasn't much of a price to pay. Life went on. Business went on. The gambling went on.

Smiles sat on my right, his snub nose revolver resting on his knee under his hand.

Ahead was Florian's purple sign. We flashed past it. I stared through the wicket of my eyelashes at the highway slicing straight through the open desert now. The headlights gashed the night far ahead of us.

Like a rising and falling flow of sound inside the car, Val's flat mid-western drawl kept going, and sometimes the lower softer tones of Jeff.

Most of what they said I heard clearly, but I paid no attention, not consciously, until Val commented on the stickup of the cash car out in the desert the day before.

"They'll never believe it," he chortled. "Back East, they'll wonder how you guys run things out here, letting some yokels knock over your skim shipment."

"Okay, okay, Val, lay off," Jeff told him. "We know how hotshot you big city boys are."

"Well, hell, Jeff," Val said. "I'm not razzing you. But don't it smell kind of funny to you? Like, maybe an inside finger?"

Jeff shrugged. "Inside, outside, whoever did it, they'll find him. He'll wish he was never even born."

I listened some more, but their voices went lower.

Anyway, it was time for another of my instantaneous nose-dives into darkness.

Way back in my skull, I knew all I needed was sleep.

The crack Val had taken on my cheekbone was a goad, though, even when I was dozing. It throbbed, pulsed with the beat of my heart.

I wondered where they were taking me. I hoped I didn't know.

Settling back in the comfortable seat, my lungs climbed, trying to fill themselves with enough air. Every so often, I would come out of it, sometimes for only a second, sometimes for as long as a minute. The ghostly sage would be fleeing by. Up ahead, the line of mountains against the sky climbed higher into the stars. We were getting closer to them.

The two men in front droned on.

"How're the others making out?" Val asked.

"Most were nothing," Jeff said. "Some got scared when you guys got here. They vanished without a sound."

Val laughed.

"What about that Mercator? I hear he's a shrewdie."

"Small time," Jeff said. "He shoulda stood in Dune City. They've probably dusted him already. I heard it was tonight. Probably over by now."

My eyes opened, and stayed open. The warm swarm of sleep washed back away from my brain.

"Your boss Demerra don't like Mercator," Val said. "Got a reaming from him once, up in Dune City."

"Yeah, I heard something like that," Jeff said. "That was before Demerra made his connection with us down here.

Val didn't say anything for a moment.

I was staring now, and all through my body, something wet and colder than ice flowed and swirled.

I remembered Roberta's face when she smiled, crimping her eyes closed until only a gleam of blue sparkled through the slit of her lids.

Val laughed.

"I wonder," he mused, "if old Lanson uses the chopper on them in that alley shack of theirs? He's been dying to break it in on someone."

A sheet of flame went through me.

"No," I whispered.

I swung the left around in a tight hard loop, crushed it hard-knuckled into Smiles on his breast bone, where the nerve is. He tried to scream from the pain, but he couldn't get it out. He jammed himself backward, like he was trying to push himself through the back of the seat.

"Hey," Val yelled, turning his head. "What gives back there?"

When I first moved, Smiles had raised the gun from his knee, but the punch had frozen his right arm. His face was twisted.

I grabbed his wrist and half of his gun hand. Sliding down in my seat, I raised my left leg and lashed it out over the top of the seat in front. The heel caught Val's forehead, and snapped his head back. He dropped from sight.

My left hand got hold of the revolver Smiles held. I crunched my right thumb savagely into the muscle between his thumb and forefinger, where it was hump-stretched over the back of the gun butt. His hand sprang open.

I fumbled with the gun. One of Val's hands groped over the top of his seatback and gripped it.

The car was slowing.

Val's head reared up.

Jeff braked gradually, trying to keep from throwing Val off balance.

The snout of Val's automatic poked into sight.

His face was a mess. Blood streamed down from his forehead. He was making noises in his throat, gritty with pain, thick with fury.

Turning the revolver I had taken from Smiles, I shot Val twice through the back of the seat.

Both reports seemed muffled inside the car, but the interior filled instantly with acrid cordite fumes.

Beside me, Smiles grabbed for the gun. I slashed it at his face and felt bone crush under the impact.

Moaning, he fell forward, off the seat.

Lunging forward, I put the smoking muzzle of the snub nose against Jeff's right ear.

"Jeff, you want to bet I can't put a bullet in this ear and bring it out the other one?"

Jeff's right hand froze, half out from under his coat. The dashlights glistered on metal in his hand.

"No bet," he said quietly.

Reaching my free hand over his left shoulder, I plucked a long-barrelled .32 from his hand.

"Turn this load around and head back to town," I told him.

Down on the floorboards below the dash, what was left of Val stuck out every which way. On the floor beside me, an occasional whimper came from Smiles.

Jeff turned the car around, straightened it out and started back the way we'd come.

Before he got it up to speed again, I told him: "Open that door across from you and boot that bastard into the road."

Jeff turned his head and looked at me with what might have been reproachful eyes, but he did as I told him.

"And make sure you don't come up from there with Val's automatic," I cautioned him.

"I'll make sure, Brandon," Jeff murmured.

He had to wrestle some to get Cal up from the narrow space below the dashboard, but he finally tilted the last of Val out onto the asphalt pavement and pulled the passenger side's door closed again.

I stuck Jeff's .32 into my belt, and when Jeff had picked up speed, I opened the door on Smiles's side of the car.

Jeff started to slow. I swung the snub-nose at him, snarling, "Faster. Speed it up."

He turned his head and stared at me in the soft dash lights, then faced forward once more and started to pour highway under us.

Getting Smiles up from the floor, I sweated. He was big and blocky. He breathed hard, irregularly.

"You'll never flash that shitty smile of yours again, buster," I gritted, as I tugged and hauled him upright.

Stuffing him partway through the open doorway, I pushed him against the door to open it wider against the wind pouring against it by our speed.

I was panting. A hot hating fire burned behind my eyes like a blowtorch.

The outside wind against the car door held Smiles jammed there in the opening. Hard as I shoved, I couldn't budge him.

Laying down along the back seat, I braced the hand that wasn't holding a gun, and straight-kicked out with both feet.

Smiles was still alive. He grunted when my feet punched into him. He swung out with the door over nothing, just far enough. Then he was gone. A single long sickening slap when he hit the pavement was the last of Smiles.

"Faster," I growled. "Faster, Jeff boy. We've got a little girl to find still alive in an alley shack. You'd better pray we find her alive."

I was still panting, reaching for air, but sleep and drowsiness were long gone. Now I was keyed up to the highest pitch. And I stayed like that all the way back across the desert, watching the glow of lights along the Strip get bigger, clearer. We flashed past Florian's.

"Start slowing here," I told Jeff.

"I better," he said, "or the cops'll stop us."

"Don't worry about cops, Jeff. You've got me to worry about. That's plenty."

He nodded.

"Turn right up ahead," I told him.

He had to screech the tires a little slowing enough to make the turn, but he was a good man with a car.

"One block down," I whispered, "then another right into the alley for half a block."

He turned in, slowly now, and drifted along until I saw the place I wanted.

"Cut the lights. Quick, douse them, you bastard. Now go through that gap in the hedge."

He slid the big car in with no fuss.

There was the shack, across the littered backyard. Its windows still showed light from inside.

"Keep your hands where I can see them, Jeff."

He nodded.

"Off with the motor now," I told him.

When he cut the engine, I raised the snub-nose, holding it by the barrel, and slugged the back of his head. I felt the crack against his skull through his straw fedora.

The breath went out of his lungs with a soft "Ugh!"

His right hand leaped away from the steering wheel, down toward the seat beside him. I had to give him another one with the gun butt.

His head sagged, then all of him tilted slowly forward against the steering wheel.

I grabbed the back of his coat between the shoulder blades. I didn't want him falling against the horn.

Leaning over the seat-back, I groped around until I found Val's big .45, where it had settled in the crack between the two cushions, or where Jeff had managed to ease it, somehow. I took that gun along, too, and got out of the car.

I couldn't keep from making some noise getting through the tin cans and other junk spread all over the yard. Outside the back door, I listened for a moment, heard no sound inside. The wind blew on my left cheek, gentle as a zephyr, but I shivered: my own sweat made the breeze feel like an icy blast.

An insect buzzed near my ear. I almost ducked.

I felt as if eyes were on me, from all along the row of flimsy shacks and huts that lined the alley, but I saw no one, and heard no one. The lights shining inside Mercator's shack were the only lights along the alley.

Well, I had plenty of firepower, more than I could handle. I left Jeff's .32 inside my belt and put Val's howitzer in a hip pocket. With the left hand free again, I eased the back door open an inch, and punted it softly inward with my toe.

The door swung all the way around and bumped gently against the inside wall, rebounded from it a little and stopped moving.

Short of the threshold, I stood listening, the snub-nose cocked and ready. There seemed nothing for it to be ready for. I stepped through the doorway.

Except for the body of Mr. Mercator sprawled on its back over by the right hand wall, the room was empty.

I must have been holding my breath. It went out of me in a long sigh.

The gun I held hung down from my hand at my side. I knew I wouldn't need it now.

I went over and studied Mercator. His serious eyes, opened wide and staring, stared up at the ceiling. His prominent nose and strong jaw both jutted upward. If his mouth had been closed, and his eyes hadn't been fixed in that empty stare, he might have seemed still alive.

No, there was one little thing that looked out of whack: a thin line of blood had trickled from the side of his mouth and dried on one cheek.

The door to the front half of the shack was slightly ajar. I swung my own door closed behind me, crossed the room and entered the front room

Chavez lay on the floor, halfway between the mattress and the front door. One of his legs was stretched out behind him. The other was bent high up, the knee almost touching his armpit on that side. Both his arms were stretched along the floor in front of him. The point of his jaw was the only part of his head that touched the floor: the big muscles of his upper arms against the sides of his face had propped his head up that way.

He looked like a man carefully climbing up the steep slant of a pointed roof.

A wide pool of blood extended from beneath his chest on the floor, on both sides of where he lay.

Bernard was nowhere in sight.

Roberta lay on her right side on the mattress over by the left wall. She was curled in a foetal position.

I crossed the room and stood over her, looking down. I felt empty for a moment, until I remembered that Jeff was still out in the car. My hand tightened on the gun.

It wouldn't do any good, but that didn't make any difference to me, not anymore.

I was half turned away when the girl's eyes opened.

I sat on the floor beside the mattress. She stared at me as if she couldn't remember who I was. A look of terror filled her eyes. They widened until the whites showed all around the washed-blue of the irises.

"It's all right, Bobbie," I said gently. "It's me, Brandon."

It got through to her. The fear went out of her eyes.

"Oh, Daddy-O," she murmured. "You came too late. Way too late."

"Where are you hit, kid?"

My voice sounded like the voice of a stranger, hoarse, harsh, a voice I had never owned before.

"Tummy," she gasped. "It doesn't hurt. It did hurt...just after...but now it doesn't."

She looked up at me, slight frown-wrinkles in her forehead. Her eyes smiled, or started to smile.

"Don't cry, Daddy-O," she said quietly. "I don't care. I don't mind...dying."

Suddenly, her eyes flooded with deep dark blue, for just an instant. I thought she was going to cry, but she kept it back.

She had cried earlier: tear-streaks had dried on her face, all around her eyes, and had left their glazed remains on her pale white skin.

Looking up at me, she grinned slightly, defiantly: "This living isn't so much."

Both her hands were pressed against her stomach, one hand pressed against the back of the other, both held there tightly.

"Roberta, listen," I said. "I'm going for a doctor. Don't move from here. Stay just the way you are. I'll get a doctor and be back before you can..."

I stopped speaking.

"Before I can die?" She grinned, mocking my hesitation. Then her eyes widened again, but not as much as they had before.

"Oh, Brandon Daddy," she cried, "don't leave me alone. I don't want to die alone."

Instantly, tears spurted from her eyes, pouring down her face sideways, dropping into the dark patch on the mattress where her earlier tears had fallen.

I tried to think of something to say that would reassure her, tried to make myself get up and go for a doctor. Then it all went out of me. I slumped back down where I was and didn't say anything.

Her skin was white, but now it was whiter than any skin could be. Her eyes had turned back to the pale blue-green of a chlorinated pool. There was no longer enough blood left in her to give them their deep blue color, the blue they had been when she was alive.

Her hand, her left hand, reached slowly out toward me. Her eyes kept trying to see through the tears that filled them.

"Daddy-mia, don't leave me alone."

I put my hand on hers.

"I won't leave you, Bobbie."

She clutched my fingers, hung on. Her eyes closed. She sighed.

I sat up straight and used my free hand to get a handkerchief out. I wiped her eyes with it. She kissed the inside of my wrist.

"I'm a nice girl, Brandon," she whispered. "I'm really a good girl."

"I know you are," I said. "You're a doll, Roberta."

"No, I mean it," she cried. Her eyes opened, struggled to open farther. "That...before...I was just teasing you."

She smiled at me. Her eyes smiled, and the skin at the outside corners of her eyes crimped up. She watched me. Her eyes on me were softer than any eyes had ever been.

I grinned. "I know you were."

"You like me, don't you?" Her eyes were still crinkled, the eyes of a mischievous little girl.

I nodded.

"Love me, too, don't you?"

There was a sly little gleam peeping out of the smile-crinkled eyes.

"I think so."

"I thought you did." Then she stiffened. Her eyes closed. She waited, listening to her own pain. Slowly, her face relaxed again, but her eyes remained shut.

Her limp hand in mine no longer gripped my fingers.

I sat there and watched her face.

Her eyes suddenly flew open, wide, frightened, found me.

"Oh, Daddy-O!" she whispered, so softly that I had to lean my head close to her mouth to hear her.

"Yes, honey, I'm still here," I told her. "What is it? Don't be afraid. I'll stay with you."

"Poppa-mia, kiss me goodbye," she wailed softly. "I don't want to die."

Her lips were warm. They spread under mine.

I don't know when she died. Her eyes were closed, so I couldn't tell, until I realized that the hand I held was a tiny dead girl's hand.

For the first time, I could look away from her face, down at the mattress.

Her other hand no longer pressed into her stomach, but had fallen loosely, the knuckles and backs of the fingers resting in the blood on the mattress. The palm of the hand was red with blood, too.

Her fingers looked so tiny compared to mine!

I didn't look at the gunshot wounds stitched across her middle. It didn't matter now.

Then I was out in the night again with the gun in my hand. I crossed the littered backyard as if I had all the time in the world.

My feet made a racket among the junk, but that didn't matter, either.

When I saw that Jeff and the car were gone, I just stood there, staring at where I had left them.

It didn't bother me, particularly. There was plenty of time. I don't even know how long I stood there, the gun hanging from my hand. I couldn't seem to think what to do next.

Raising my glance, I walked in among the sage, walking quickly, smelling the fragrant night-odor of the sage bushes high up inside my nostrils, feeling the wind coming against me, strong, now that I was clear of the buildings.

I went weaving in and out among the clumps of brush, some of it higher than my head, much of it only a bit above the knee.

A shooting star flashed across the sky. Lifting my head, I watched it streak through the night and finally disappear, lost in an endless sea of stars.

"Gone so quick, Roberta?" I asked, stumbling on across the desert.

Long afterward, when the morning sun was making the eastern sky glow, I was sitting at a table in an expensive Strip restaurant, eating an excellent meal.

Except for me, the place was empty.

There was the revolver I had gotten from Smiles, on the white tablecloth beside a glass of water.

People stood in the doorway, peering in at me.

I went on eating.

After awhile, two policemen came in. I shook my head at them.

"Get Brode."

One of them shook his head.

They had guns in their hands. I picked up the revolver, pulled Jeff's .32 out, pointed one at each of them.

"Get Brode," I told them again.

I had no idea why it had to be Brode, but it had to be.

One of them said quietly to the other: "Hold it a minute." To me, he said: "You mean the detective uptown, Bill Brode?"

"That's the one."

He studied me. I went on watching them.

It didn't make any difference to me, what they decided.

The one who had spoken said to the other: "Phone for Brode."

The other one looked at him as if he thought he was crazy, but after a moment, he went back out through the crowd at the door.

Putting both guns down, one on each side of my plate, I went on eating. The cop stood there, still holding his revolver, watching me eat.

In a little while the other squad-car man came back in, nodding to the one who had stayed.

"He'll be down here in two shakes," I heard him mutter. "Although why you let this..."

The other one shook his head.

"Look at his eyes. He's on cloud thirty-seven. We're lucky he doesn't want the governor."

The other one didn't look any happier.

The first one told him, "Relax. Brode'll be here any minute."

The next time I looked up, Brode was standing across the table, looking down at me curiously.

"Citizen's arrest," I said.

I nodded at the two guns on the table and pulled Val's .45 out and put that next to Jeff's .32.

"This is evidence."

Brode turned and looked at the watching cops, then back at me. He grinned.

"All right, citizen," he said. "Who should we arrest?"

"Me." I said, finishing the last of my coffee. "I meted out justice unlawfully. Summary justice." I thought of something and chuckled. "And it's not even summer yet."

"All right," Brode said. "Come with me. It's not official until you're at the Hall of Justice. That's where the jail is."

He picked up all the handguns and put them away.

Getting up, I followed him out past the two cops. The crowd behind them in the doorway melted before us.

They gave me a nice cell, all to myself. It was very quiet. I slept for more than fifteen hours.

Three days later, after telling it four or five different times, I had my only visitor, Brode. He stood outside the steel-bar door, looking in at me. He'd brought a carton of cigarettes.

"You all right yet?"

"I guess so." I eyed the cigarettes. "That's the wrong brand. I don't smoke those."

He laughed.

"Yeah, you're all right again. For awhile, there, you were acting pretty odd."

"Probably."

"What are you knocking those creeps off for? Let them kill each other, like we do. That's all they're good for, anyway."

"They weren't doing it fast enough to suit me," I replied. "I wanted to jack up the count."

He grunted. "Anyway," he said, "you're not up the creek too far. Upstairs, I mean. But that kicking Smiles out of the car when it was going seventy miles an hour...they don't like that."

I shrugged.

"It's up to them now. That's why I turned myself in. I'll plead self-defense. If they want to use temporary insanity, they can. But the way Jeff and that guy Val were talking in front of me, about things they didn't seem to care whether I heard or not, looked to me as if they knew I wasn't going to be around after that car ride was over. So...I ended the car ride before they could."

"You sure did," he said. He was looking at me as if he'd never seen me before.

I got a lot more of that kind of look, through the preliminary hearing and afterwards, with the reporters.

They didn't lift my license. And after that, for some reason, I suddenly seemed to be one of the town's curiosities. Business poured in, until I couldn't handle it all. Some of it wasn't really business at all, and both the clients and I knew it wasn't. They were just being "in" with a celebrity. Next week or next month, it would be someone else.

But it all came too late. There was a time, when I was scrounging around for any kind of work, getting lots of it poured suddenly into my lap would have seemed great, but things like that always come to you when it's too late, when you don't really care anymore.

Before I knew it, guys were working for me, doing the tail jobs, the department store stuff, all the rest of the legwork.

I didn't let any of it fool me, though, the politeness of the gambling crowd, or the sudden respect I got from cops around town. I knew, better than any of them, that it was only a matter of time before I'd be blown down. Jeff wouldn't have to do a thing. It would be two or three guys from different parts of the country. One day, maybe today, maybe next month, or two years from now, someone would call my name on a quiet street, under a hot noon sun or in the dark of night. If I managed to pull the Special and squeeze off a couple of shots, well and good, but they'd drop their tools on the sidewalk beside my body and in two minutes would be lost in the city. In half a day, they would be gone forever, as far as my case was concerned.

But until that day came, I did what I could, and I did it with a will. Once in awhile, I saw Jeff at a distance. He only came close to me once, though. I spat in his face and waited.

He turned white. His hand twitched, right there on the sidewalk, but he didn't pull it. And he never would, because he knew I'd get him. He was as quick as a striking snake, and any man who carries a .32 is good enough for anything. But I knew, and he knew, that he played it that way because no matter how fast he was, I'd bring him down.

All the same, we both knew he didn't have to. All he had to do was wait and I'd be missing.

It got around, though. People heard about the two of us, Jeff and me. It didn't do Jeff much good, because he was a long-time smoothie, one of the told-timers around town. He'd had it good, because he was the best they ever had at what he did, for any kind of trouble there was, smooth or heavy. He still had it good, of course, and he played it the way they told him to play it, knowing I wouldn't be around that long. But I knew that he played it that way for another reason, too: I was the one guy in the world he could never be rough with, or smooth, either. To me, Jeff was already dead, walking on the edge of his own grave, every time he was in my sight. He was the only one I could connect in any way with the death of Roberta.

I knew he hadn't killed her personally, but that didn't change things any. He was one of them, and so far as I was concerned, they were all fully responsible, along with anyone else who tries to twist law from the impersonal machine it's supposed to be into something you can fix, something you can see a

guy about.

Every so often, at night, I sit on the adobe wall on the terrace outside my room. The night and the desert wind, the line of distant lights along the highway to the north, even the nearer, harsher glare of lights thrown up at the high night sky along the Strip, the smell of sage, aromatic and tangy, pungent in the nostrils, all these things were part of my few memories of Bobbie-O, little Roberta.

She was buried somewhere out there. I didn't know where. I didn't want to know where. Probably in some cruddy little municipal parking-lot for unclaimed dead bodies.

I didn't have much of her, just the memory of her impudent, delightful face, her happy eyes, squinched almost shut when she smiled.

I would sit there, smoking, drinking cans of beer, with the desert wind in my face, watching the night sky, looking for another shooting star. I never saw another one that soared across the sky like the one I saw the night she left me here.

END