had no reason to lie about it now. And she hadn’t known that his car had been abandoned right in front of the James girl’s apartment, either. An odd thought struck me then. Had she really killed him? But that was stupid. She’d as much as admitted it. She was paying me $120,000 to get her out of there and hide her from the police. For what—a parking ticket?

“You don’t make much sense to me,” I said.

“Really?” She lit a cigarette, and for an instant the flame of the match lit up the still, intensely beautiful face. “I wasn’t aware I was supposed to.”

“Did you kill Butler?” I asked.

“Perhaps you should read the terms of our contract again. I recall nothing in it about submitting to an inquisition.”

“Have it your way,” I said. “I just work here.”

“An excellent appraisal of your status. Incidentally, I might say that you have done very well so far, with only one or two exceptions.”

“What exceptions?”

“In the first place, you should have killed them instead of turning them loose. They can describe you; And in the second place, you have thrown away the only key I have to the house. It was attached to the car keys.”

“We don’t need a house key,” I said. “We go in through one of the basement windows. And as far as their describing me, you know as well as I do they’re not going to the police. They can’t.”

“Yes. But has it occurred to you they might be captured by the police?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s just a chance we have to take.”

“Needlessly.”

“All right. Needlessly. But I’m doing the job, and I’ll do it my own way.”

She said nothing. We came up the grade out of the river bottom.

I’d had plenty of warning about her. But I didn’t realize it in time.

Ten

We were nearly there. I could see the glow of lights against the sky.

“Slowly,” she said. “We pass a cemetery on the right. And just beyond it there’s a road on the left. Turn there.”

In a moment I could see the evergreen hedge of the cemetery. Two cars were coming up behind us. I slowed and let them go by.

“Now,” she said. “On the left.”

I made the turn. It was a gravel road with a field off to the left beyond a fence. We passed a lighted house. A dog ran out and chased us, barking furiously. I cursed, feeling the tension build up inside me.

Coming back here like this with the police after her was insane, and I knew it. Suppose we ran into them? We might get away from them in the dark, but that wasn’t the thing. They’d know where we were, and all the roads in this end of the state would be bottled up before we could get out.

But there was nothing else to do. We had to have the keys to get into those boxes. Maybe, under ordinary circumstances, you could have them opened without the keys if you had plenty of time and absolutely foolproof identification. In her case it was utterly impossible. She’d rented them under a phony name, she was a fugitive, and the slightest irregularity or one suspicious move would bring the whole thing down on top of us.

While I was on the subject, I thought of something else.

“Have you got any cash with you?” I asked. “Or at the house, where you can get it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have nearly a thousand dollars in my handbag.”

“Good,” I said. I didn’t ask why she was carrying around that much. It was obvious. She’d known she might have to make a run for it someday, and she was ready.

We turned right and went up a slight grade with trees on both sides of the road. I was driving slowly, drawing a map of it in my mind. We might be in trouble when we came out. There were no houses, no lights. A cat ran across the road, its eyes shining.

“In the next block, where that power line crosses the road,” she said.

“Right.” I swung the car sharply around, facing back the way we had come, and backed off the road under the overhanging trees. I cut the motor and lights, and we sat still for a moment, letting our eyes become accustomed to the darkness.

We got out, and I gently closed the door. I was conscious of my shallow breathing and the fluttering in my stomach, the way it always was just before the opening kickoff of a