I quit asking questions. There’d be time enough for that when I gave her definite word I’d take it.
But why was I holding back? It puzzled me. I’d have given my left arm for that auxiliary sloop Ballerina, and here it was being tossed in my lap. The job was easy, the pay was fantastic. I believed she was on the level. What did I want, anyway?
Of course, I didn’t have any desire to look down the end of Barclay’s gun again, but that was calculated risk, and besides he probably wouldn’t have any reason to connect me with it until it was too late and we were already gone.
Something kept bothering me, but that wasn’t it. I gave up.
It was a little after five when we began to get back into the outskirts of the city. We hit the peak of the traffic rush right on the nose and crawled through the downtown district a slow light at a time. After a while she pulled into a parking lot and we walked up to the corner to a cocktail lounge for a drink. That was where the odd thing happened.
It was one of those too-utterly-utter places I usually avoided, dimly lighted, with blue-leather-upholstered booths and a soulful type who needed a haircut playing Victor Herbert on an electric organ. We sat down in the last booth and ordered Scotch and water.
After the drinks came she wrote down her telephone number for me. “You’re sure it’ll be all right?” I asked. “They haven’t tapped your phone?”
“It’s not likely,” she said. “But you never know for sure. Just be careful what you say; tell me you want to see me again, or something like that. I think it’ll be all right if we meet just once more, to give you the money, but beyond that it’s too risky.”
“Yes, it would be,” I agreed, knowing she was right but still feeling let down about it.
We both fell silent, listening to the music. A moment or two went by. I was looking at her face when she suddenly raised her eyes and saw me.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”
“You,” I said. “You’re probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
It was completely unexpected. I hadn’t intended to say a thing like that. It startled me, and I cursed myself for an awkward idiot.
She was startled, too, for an instant. Then she smiled, and said, “Why, thank you, Bill.”
She was probably wondering when they’d flushed me out of the hills and put shoes on me.
We finished our drinks in silence while I tried irritably to figure out why she affected me that way. God knows I wasn’t a particularly smooth type, but I’d never had this many thumbs and left feet around a woman before. She was married, I had known her exactly one day, and yet in less than four hours I’d managed to insult her and then startle her out of her wits with a piece of off-the-cuff brilliance like that. Maybe it just wasn’t my day.
We walked back to the car. She offered to drive me out to the pier, but I vetoed it. “You’d better stay away from places like that,” I said. “They’re not safe with those people following you.”
She nodded. “All right.” We shook hands, and she said quietly, “I’ll be waiting to hear from you. You’ve got to help me, Bill. I can’t let him down.”
I watched her drive away. Restlessness seized me, and I didn’t want to go back to the pier. I went into another bar and ordered a drink, nursing it moodily. Twice I started to the phone to call one of the girls I knew for a date; both times I gave it up. I tried to think calmly back over the day, to pull it into perspective, and I kept bumping into Shannon Macaulay at every turn. She ran through it like a brilliant silver thread through a piece of burlap.
Look, I asked myself, what was with Shannon Macaulay? I didn’t know anything about her. Except that she was married. And her husband was on the lam from a bunch of mobsters. So she was tall. So she was nice looking. So something said sexy when you looked at her body and her face, and sweet when you looked at her eyes. I had seen women before, hadn’t I? I must have. They couldn’t be something entirely new to a man 33 years old, who’d been