closed, and leaned on it. She shot back into the room and sat down. I almost fell over her.

He was on the floor, with Madelon Butler under him, groping wildly to get both hands on her throat. She was kicking and beating at his arms, but uttering no sound, while that insane racket kept coming from his open mouth.

I shoved the gun in my belt and hauled him up. He wouldn’t turn her loose, and tried to bring her with him. I hit him. He turned his face a little, and finally let her go and looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. I hit him again and felt the pain go up my arm. He was standing there rubber-legged as if he couldn’t fall until somebody told him where, so I put my hand in his face and pushed. He stretched out alongside the blonde on the floor. I felt of my hand. It hurt and it had blood on it, but I couldn’t feel any broken bones.

Madelon Butler stood up. The dark hair was wild and her eyes were like winter smoke as she came toward me. I didn’t know what she was trying to do until I felt the gun sliding out of my belt. I grabbed her wrist, broke her grip on it, and shook her hand off.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “Sit down.”

She didn’t seem to hear me, so I shoved her down in the chair at one end of the table. The other two were getting off the floor, and now they both looked crazy. He was crying, and her face was white and her eyes blazed.

I pointed to the chairs at the other end of the table. “You’d better sit down,” I said. “I’m tired of wrecking my hands. From now on I use the gun.”

His mouth was working. Tears ran down his face. “I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll kill you.”

“Quiet,” I said. I pointed at the chairs again.

They sat down.

I pulled a chair up to the table, halfway between them and Madelon Butler, and sat down myself. I tilted back in the chair a little, put the gun in my lap, and took a cigarette out and lit it.

After all the violence it was suddenly quiet in the room, so still I could hear the sound of my own heavy breathing. Then the blonde’s voice came up through it.

Her hands grasped the edge of the table so tightly her fingers were white around the nails. I could see the cords standing out in her throat. Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper that sounded as if it were being pressed out of her by a heavy weight on her chest, but some of the things she said I’d never heard before myself.

It went on and on. Madelon Butler watched her curiously, the way she might study something brought up by a deep-sea trawl. When the blonde finally stopped for breath, she said, “You are a vulgar little gutter rat, aren’t you?”

But the blonde was finished. She could only stare silently. She drew her hands across her face and shuddered, and at last she turned to me.

“What are you going to do with her?” she asked.

“Never mind,” I said.

“Let me have the gun,” she begged. “Just let me have it for five seconds. Let me kill her. I’ll give it back to you. You can kill me, or turn me over to the police, but just let me have it.”

“Relax,” I said. “You’ll get ulcers.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

Madelon Butler lit a cigarette and watched us through the smoke. The man sat hunched over the other end of the table, holding the edges of it with his hands and saying nothing.

“We’re going to take your car and go for a little ride as soon as it’s dark. If you don’t mind.”

“How much is she paying you?”

“Who said she was?” I asked.

“Of course she is. Why else would you do it?”

“I’m her mother.”

“How much?”

“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t think you could meet the price.”

She turned her face then and looked at the man. “Didn’t you hear him, Jack? You see? The dear, sweet thing couldn’t find it. She didn’t even know what we were talking about.”

“Stop it!” he said.

“She not only double-crossed you then, to get it, but she’s using it now to double-cross you again and get away and leave you holding the bag.”

“Shut up!”

There was no stopping her. “Why didn’t you have sense