of myself, I watched her. She was arrogant and conceited as hell, but when you looked away from her for a moment and then looked back you went through it all over again. You didn’t believe anybody could be that beautiful.

“I’m ready to go back to town,” she said, “if you are.”

“Don’t you want to hear me waste my breath any more?”

“Frankly, no. I should think we’d about run through your repertoire.”

“You don’t believe any of it at all?” She put the finishing touches on the lips, pressed them together, looked in the mirror once more, and then across at me. She smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous. By your own admission, you’re a housebreaker, liar, and impostor. And attempted extortionist. Quite an array of talent, I’ll admit; but to ask me to believe you is a little insulting, wouldn’t you say?”

I leaned across the table and caught her wrist. “And don’t forget abduction, while you’re adding it up. So why don’t you have me arrested, if you don’t believe any of it?”

“And add to the burden of the taxpayers?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll tell you why. You can’t.”

“Don’t paw me,” she said.

I reached over and took the other wrist. I slid my hands up inside the wide sleeves of the robe and held her arms above the elbows. “I want that money. And I’m going to get it. Why don’t you use your head? Alone, you haven’t got a chance, and the money’s no good to you if you’re dead. Maybe I can save you.”

“Save me from what?” she asked coldly.

I shook my head and took my hands off her arms to light a cigarette. “Has your car got a radio in it?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I’ll tell you the easy way to find out if I’m telling the truth. Trying to go back to town is the hard way, and there’s only one to a customer. In about an hour there should be some more news. We’ll listen to it.”

“Maybe there’s some on now,” she said. She picked up her purse and started toward the door. She had a good start before I realized what she was up to.

I jumped after her. By the time I reached the door she had run down off the porch and was standing in the open, fumbling in the purse for her keys and looking around for the car.

“Wait!” I yelled. She paid no attention.

She swung her face around and saw the shed at the side of the house. The car had to be in there. She whirled, ran one step toward it, and then it happened.

The purse sailed out of her hands as if a hurricane had grabbed it. She stopped abruptly and stared as it flopped crazily and landed six feet away from her on the edge of the porch, and we both heard the deadly whuppp! as something slammed into the front wall of the house.

She was frozen there. I was down off the porch and running toward her before I heard the sound of the gun. Without even thinking about it, I knew it was a rifle and that he was shooting from somewhere beyond the meadow, over two hundred yards away She started to run now. I grabbed her. It was four long strides back to the front step. I dug in, feeling my whole back draw up into one icy knot. I was a hundred yards wide, and all target.

I leaped onto the porch. I stumbled, and slammed in through the open doorway, trying to keep from falling on her. And just as we hit the floor I saw a coffee cup on the table ahead of us explode into nothing, like a soap bubble. The pieces rained onto the floor.

I rolled her over me to get us out of the doorway, and reached back with one foot to kick the door shut. He put another one through it just as it closed. A golden splinter tore off the wood on the inside, and on the back wall a frying pan hanging on a nail bounced and clanged to the floor.

It was silent now except for the quick sob of her breath. We lay on the floor with our faces only inches apart. The fright was leaving her eyes now, and I could see comprehension in them, and a growing coldness.

“Maybe you’d like an affidavit with that,” I said.

I pushed myself up from the floor. She was trying to sit up. One side of her face was covered with dust, and a