in the garage. I put it and her purse in under the blankets. Everything was set, except that I’d better leave a note. After she’d called me, it would look a little odd if I didn’t. I went back inside once more, scribbled out a few lines to the effect that a man who owed me eighty dollars on an old deal had called from Exeter that I could collect if I’d come after it, and left it on the coffee table. Of course, there would be a fight, anyway. That was news? But she wouldn’t have cause to suspect anything. Except that I was still the same miserable bastard she’d been married to for two years.

I locked the front and back doors, and swung up the door of the garage. Taking one last look into the back of the station wagon, I was satisfied with it. It was always full of some kind of camping gear and those old rumpled blankets and life-belts. I glanced at my watch. It was four twenty-five.

I got in and backed out of the garage. Somewhere off that road going into the northern end of Javier Lake, I thought. It would do as well as any. I tried not to think about her. Twenty-four was a lousy time to die. Oh, drop it. It never did any good. This world was a rough place to live in, unless you lived in it one day at a time and never thought of what was gone or what could have happened. You used up Today, threw it back over your shoulder, put your hand around a blind corner, and a little man put another one in it. Some fine morning you’d shove your hand around the corner and there’d be no little man. Just a seagull with a sense of humor. You couldn’t buck a system like that; you joined it.

I might make this stick, and I might not. The best thing would be to continue denying she was ever with me. Nobody could prove it, and Nunn’s word didn’t carry much weight. If I carried it off successfully I’d hang around another six months or a year before I tried to get away. She’d never tell anybody about Cliffords now.

I swung into Minden. It was only three blocks to the traffic light at Main. I saw I was going to hit it on the green, and speeded up a little, and then the career of Barney Godwin began to come apart like a cheap toy left out in the rain. I smelled the motor just a second before all the bearings began to go, but by that time I was already into the intersection and starting to turn. The clatter of connecting rods and burned-out mains rose to a crescendo, and then the end of a rod came out through the crankcase wall and I was through. The motor locked. tires skidded and made a short screeching sound as I came to a standstill in the middle of the intersection of Main and Minden with traffic piling up around me and horns beginning to blow.

There was a sort of horrible fascination about it, like watching a levee crumble and go out, or seeing an explosion in slow motion in a newsreel. You knew what the end result was going to be, and yet you sat and appraised the individual stages in the sequence of destruction. Pedestrians turned and stared, most of them people I knew. The light changed. More horns took up the outcry. I saw Grady Collins step off the curb and come toward me. He was grinning wryly and shaking his head.

“Barney, he said, “did you ever try putting oil in this heap?”

Then, before I could reply, he called to someone on the sidewalk before the café. “Hey, Gus. Run inside Joey’s there and call Manners. Tell him to bring his wrecker and get this clunk of Barney’s off the street.”

I got out. If there was anything unusual about my manner or expression he apparently didn’t notice it, so perhaps nothing showed. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, so I merely stood there. He grinned at me again, shook his head ruefully at the car, and began directing traffic around it.

The wrecker came and maneuvered into position. While his helper was hooking on and hoisting the front of the station wagon, Manners glanced briefly under the hood, whistled, and shook his head. Then he got down on hands and knees