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made a phone call, still wearing the dungarees I put on in the auto shop, and been picked up and was forty miles out of town before they even knew I was gone. They still don’t know how I got out. Big mystery. Big headlines. They won’t know until somebody spots those handles and that bar, and maybe they never will.”
    “Very sleek,” Ace said.
    “But it can’t ever happen again. I couldn’t ever get out again. They’d watch me too close. And here’s news for you. I’m never going back in again. They’re never going to shut any gates on me again. I’m out for good. This deal is going to work. I’m going to make it work. And I’m going to live fat until I’m ninety, live in a place where I can keep my thumb on my nose. I’ve lost too many times. And I’ve lost too many years.”
    Ace leaned back. “When you talk like that I don’t like this so much.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You used to kid around. You used to make it the easy way. Now you’re all strung up. You’ve got the shakes.”
    “Maybe I’ve changed.”
    “I don’t like the shakes.”
    “When we place the bet, I won’t be shaking.”
    Ace stood up. “Don’t be.”
    “Sit down!” Ace shrugged and sat down. “I’m running this.Anything that sounds like an order, I give it. Maybe you better get out right now.”
    “Don’t get your ass in an uproar.”
    “In or out. Come on. If you’re in, you take orders.”
    “The older you get, the meaner you get. All right. I take orders. Now I get my bag. Then I unpack. Then I make a drink. Okay, chief?”
    Harry relaxed visibly. “Okay, Ace.”
    The two men sat up after the woman had gone to bed. They talked of old names and old places. They were like two mercenaries speaking of lost battles in a war in which they didn’t believe. The list of the fallen was long.
    After Ace had gone to bed, Harry Mullin sat alone, a Havana station whispering over the radio. He finished a last drink and went to bed. The woman lay asleep in the restless moonlight, dark leaf shadows moving against the contours of her soft sleeping body. Mullin thought of the money. He thought of it with heat and ferocity. He thought of the money with a special intensity. With his thoughts at that peak, he awakened the drowsy and acquiescent girl.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Dr. Paul Tomlin stood at the window in his dressing room which adjoined his second floor bedroom. He wore an ancient and comfortable dressing gown. It was ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, the twelfth day of April—a warm windy day. He stood looking down at the girl who, with trowel in hand, grubbed patiently at the flower bed in the corner of the wall.
    Dr. Tomlin was a tall, straight, lean, knotted old man with large, veined, blotched hands, wattled throat, hard shelf of brow, thin white hair with a faint yellowish tinge to it. He felt a warmth within him as he watched the girl. She was on her knees, faded blue jeans taut across round young buttocks, her hair dark gold in the sun as she worked away. The flowers were growing for her, as they had never done for Arnold. Since she had come here the food had become more varied, more pleasant. Furniture appeared in more pleasing arrangements. The entire house seemed lighter and more alive.
    He remembered the day the couple had arrived, a cold day of rain two days after Christmas. The fat-pine fire Arnold had built crackled in the study fireplace. Arnold had come in, dark face both thoughtful and dubious to say, “They’s a couple of young folks here says they’s kin to you, Doctor. Name of Preston.”
    He remembered a letter that had come nearly two months before, a letter written in pencil, mailed in California, and signed Joseph Preston. It had traced the remote relationship. Joseph Preston was the grandson of the doctor’s wife’s half-brother. The letter had said that Joseph and his wife might drive east some time to visit. The doctor had not answered the letter. Now they had come. He knew he could not turn them