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finding new questions to ask. I should pack up, get out, forget her. But I knew that if I left, I would never find her or anyone like her again. Before, I had managed to live without her. But now I had had her. How had she put it?
    Don’t you see what I mean? Now I’m used to money. I know what it’s like to have it. I know what it’s like to be able to do anything I want and to buy anything I want. I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.
    I had had her—once—and I was used to her. I knew what it was like to have her, to love her and be loved by her. Love? A weird and shifty word. It made me feel like the hero of a popular song.
    But I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.
    She was right and I was right; only the world was wrong. We needed each other and we needed that money, and if there was a way to get both I didn’t know where to find it. I tried looking for it at the bottom of the glass but it wasn’t there. I filled the glass again, skipping the ice this time around. The liquor was smooth enough without it.
    I had the heroin. I could take it to New York and sniff around in the wrong streets until I made a connection, then unload for all I could get. It might work. The money might be enough, enough to take us away from L. Keith Brassard. Enough to get out of the country—South America, or Spain, or the Italian Riviera. We could live a long time on the money. We could buy a boat and live on it. Once, I learned how to sail. There is nothing like it. And you can take a boat and lose yourself in a million little islands all over the world, islands where it’s always warm and the air is clear and clean. We could go anywhere.
    And we could never look behind us.
    Because we would never get away. He was not an ordinary husband, not a straight Westchester burgher with a lawful mind and lawful friends. Anybody carrying that much horse was very well connected indeed. The word would go far and wide, and there would be an unofficial but firm price on a certain man and a certain woman. Some day somebody somewhere would look twice at us. We could run but we could not hide.
    We wouldn’t last long that way. We’d start off loving each other very hard, and then every day we would do a little more private thinking about the men who were going to catch us. It wouldn’t happen all at once—we’d forget those men, and then something would happen that would force the memory of them upon us, and we would run again.
    And then it would begin to happen. She would remember being Mrs. L. Keith Brassard and living in Cheshire Point with her ermine coat and her sable coat and her chinchilla wrap, with a big solid house and heavy furniture and charge accounts. She would remember how it felt not to be afraid, and she would realize that she had never been afraid before she met me; that she was always afraid now, a little bit more afraid with every passing day. Then she would begin to hate me.
    And I would remember an uncomplicated life, where you left one town when things became overly difficult, where the biggest threat was a watchful hotel manager, and the biggest problem the next meal. I would look at the soft sweetness of her and I would think about death—a slow and unpleasant death, because the men he would send would be experts at that sort of thing. And, inevitably, I would begin to hate her.
    I couldn’t have her and I couldn’t have the money, not that way. I drank more bourbon and thought about it and drew blanks. There had to be a way, but there wasn’t.
    The bottle was half-gone when I thought of the way, the only way. Another person might have thought of it at once, but my mind has certain established channels in which it runs and this was out of known waters. So it took a bottle of Jack Daniels before I got around to it.
    Brassard could die.
    That scared the hell out of me, and I had two more quick drinks, got out of my clothes and into bed. I fell asleep almost at once. Maybe the liquor was responsible