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library. He doesn’t know what very small thing might turn out to be very important, so he doesn’t think of it or mention it. Then when it’sabout to go off in my face, he can tell me where the fuse is, which is something he can’t do from a hundred miles away.”
    She looked at me speculatively. “He wants to give up the whole idea.”
    “Okay. Sure.”
    “
Damn
you!”
    “Sweetie, you can take a good and gentle horse, and you can start using a chain on it. Maybe you turn it into a killer. And maybe you break it right down to nothing, to a trembling hunk of meat. Then can you ever turn it back into a horse? Depends on the blood line. Sometimes you don’t want the victim along. Sometimes, like this time, you have the hunch you’ll need him. I won’t go into this without him. So he has to forget the chain. You’re along to turn him back into a horse, Chook. You’ve got to prop him up. I don’t want you in on any of the rest of it.”
    “Why not?”
    “It sounds just a little too dirty so far.”
    “And I have just walked out the convent gates in my little white pinafore. Come
on
, Trav!”
    “Miss McCall, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the professional killer. It’s the amateur. When they sense that somebody is taking back what they went to so much effort to acquire, that’s when they get violent. The essentially dishonest man is capable of truly murderous indignation. In this instance, the bitch will be looking on, heightening the performance, looking for blood. I don’t think she’ll relish losing.”
    I sensed mischief as she studied me. “I guess any man would find her pretty exciting.”
    “Hell, it’s exciting to be pushed out a window. Or run over.”
    “And you didn’t have the least little urge, darling? She did sort of have an eye on you.”
    “The scorpion is a very cute little brown bug, the way she plods along with that tail curled over her back. She’s a living fossil, you know, unchanged in millions of years. It’s imaginable that some bug-lover might want to pick one up and stroke her scaly little back.”
    Big brown girl in scanty pink, in Zen-pose on my splendid vinyl imitation of teak. It is real teak on the aft deck below, partially justifying such trickery. Staring dubiously at me. “Men aren’t that bright about those.”
    “Arthur wasn’t.”
    “And what have
you
got? Radar?”
    “Alarm systems. Bachelor devices to detect poisonous types. One good way is to watch how the other women react. You and the others, when Wilma Ferner was around, all your mouths got a little tight, and you were very very polite to her. And you made no girl talk at all with her. No clothes talk. No date talk. No guided trips to the biff. No girl secrets. Just the way, honey, a woman should be damned wary of a man other men have no use for.”
    That was a little careless, and too close to home. Frankie gives most men the warm sweet urge to hit him heavily in the mouth. Chook’s dark eyes became remote. “If the breeze dies it could get buggy here.”
    “The long-range forecast says we’ll get more wind instead of less.” I rose smartly to my feet. If I’d been alone, perhaps I would have crawled moaning to the sundeck rail and hauled myself up. Vanity is a miracle drug. I could count on three orfour more days of torment before, I hoped, the limberness would come back, along with the hardened belly and lost pounds and unjangled nerves.
    As I stretched and yawned, Chookie said, “Hey!” and came to me and in a very gingerly way touched, with one fingertip, the pink weal below my left armpit. “I didn’t notice that. It’s new, huh?”
    “Aw, it’s just a scratch.”
    “Knife?”
    “Yup.”
    She swallowed and looked ill. “The idea of knives, it makes my stomach turn over. And it makes me think of Mary Lo Ching.”
    While I’d been away on this last one, the one that gave me the funds for a slob summer, an animal had gotten to Mary Lo with a knife. The twins had been