The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,46

Rogers has friends in Miami, and some of them may know where he is. When he doesn’t come back they may call up here looking for him. Put her on the sofa.”

Bonner jerked a thumb. “Park it, kid.”

She stared at him with contempt.

He shrugged, hauled her up by one arm, and shoved. She shot backward past the end of the coffee table and fell on the sofa across from me. Bonner went out.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my fault. But I thought I’d lost them.”

“You did, temporarily,” the man put in. “But we didn’t follow you here. We were waiting for you.”

I stared at him blankly.

He pulled the other chair around to the end of the coffee table and sat down where he could watch us both. If Bonner was a journeyman in the field of professional deadliness, this one was a top-drawer executive. It was too evident in the crisp, incisive manner, the stamp of intelligence on the face, and the pitiless, unwavering stare. He could have been anywhere between forty and fifty, and had short, wiry red hair, steel-gray eyes, and a lean face that was coppery with fresh sunburn.

“She doesn’t know anything about this,” I said.

“We’re aware of that, but we weren’t sure you were.

When we lost you in Tampa we watched for you here among other places.”

Blood continued to drip off my face onto my shirt. I mopped at it with the towel. My eyes were beginning to close and my whole face felt swollen. Talking was difficult through the cut and puffy lips. I wondered how long Bonner would be gone. At the moment I was badly beaten, too weak and sick to get out of the chair, but with a few minutes’ rest I might be able to take this one, or at least hold him long enough for her to get away. Then, as if he’d read my thoughts, he lifted the gun from his pocket and shook his head.

“Don’t move, Rogers,” he said. “You’re too valuable to kill, but you wouldn’t get far without a knee.”

The room fell silent except for the humming of the air-conditioner. Patricia’s face was pale, but she forced herself to reach out on the coffee table for a cigarette and light it, and look at him without wavering.

“You can’t get away with this,” she said.

“Don’t be stupid, Miss Reagan,” he replied. “We know all about your working habits; nobody comes out here to bother you. You won’t even have any telephone calls unless it’s somebody looking for Rogers. In which case you’ll say he’s been here and gone.”

She glared defiantly. “And if I don’t?”

“You will. Believe me.”

“You’re Slidell?” I said.

He nodded. “You can call me that.”

“Why were you after Reagan?”

“We’re still after him,” he corrected. “Reagan stole a half million dollars in bonds from me and some other men. We want it back, or what’s left of it.”

“And I suppose you stole them in the first place?”

He shrugged. “You might say they were a little hot. They were negotiable, of course, but an amount that size is unwieldy; fencing them through the usual channels would entail either a lot of time or a large discount. I met Reagan in Las Vegas, and when I found out what he did I sounded him out; he was just the connection we needed. He didn’t want to do it at first, but I found out he owed money to some gamblers in Phoenix and arranged for a little pressure. He came through then. He disposed of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth for the commission we agreed on, and we turned the rest of them over to him. I suppose she’s told you what happened?”

I nodded.

He went on. “We were keeping a close watch on him, of course, and even when he started out on the hunting trip that Saturday morning we followed him long enough to be sure he wasn’t trying to skip out. But he was smarter than we thought. He either had another car hidden out there somewhere, or somebody picked him up. It took us two years to run him down, even with private detectives watching for him in all the likely spots. He was in Miami, but staying out of the night clubs and the big flashy places on the Beach. It was just luck we located him at all. Somebody spotted a picture in a hunting and fishing magazine that seemed to resemble him, and when we ran down the photographer and had a blowup