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an eyebrow. "Including the preliminaries?"
        "Given similar provocation," I agreed. "But first I could stand a shot of bourbon and some food."
        I put on a robe and we went downstairs. Hazel fed me a steak, and then I watched the last half of a ball game on television. Hazel had a tower stretching up into the cobalt blue of the Nevada sky that was higher than some cable-company antennas I'd seen. It pulled in a signal from everything this side of the Continental Divide.
        We went back upstairs and sacked in again. I'd been a little doubtful about performance, but when I turned my palomino loose at the watering hole it was hip, hip, and hooray. We reached the quarter pole in.24, breezing, and worked out the mile in 35 and change.
        "How'd you like to take a ride down to Tucson tomorrow?" I asked Hazel when she came out of the shower.
        "Oh, man, have you ever got a one-track mind. Why don't you just forget the whole thing?"
        I thought of a bronzed, high-cheekboned, eagle-beaked face peering at me along the barrel of a machine gun while I crouched on the wing of the 727. "I'd like to meet up with the one who got away, that's all. One more time."
        "Why hasn't there been anything about it in the papers?"
        "Because a man named Neal Harris decided there wasn't going to be anything about it in the papers."
        "I still don't see why you feel-"
        "Quit stalling. You want to go to Tucson?"
        "Oh, all right, all right!"
        
***
        
        So the next morning I was gassing Hazel's Corvette at the pump in front of the barn when she hailed me from the kitchen doorway. "Someone's driving in from the highway, Earl!" she called.
        I stared in the direction of the dust devils swirling above the dirt road that led from the highway to the ranch property. I started for my own car instinctively before I remembered that my.38 wasn't in the glove compartment but buried in the sand near the abandoned airstrip where the hijacked plane had been forced down. There was no real reason I should need it, anyway. There was an umbrella now over my presence at Hazel's place, a by-product of the Cuban expedition.
        The incoming car was only a hundred yards away when I recognized the driver. Hazel recognized him, too. "Earl, it's Karl Erikson!" she said. She sounded pleased.
        I wasn't nearly so pleased myself.
        Erikson was a government man who had suckered me into the Cuban caper I mentioned. I had no idea he was a government man at the time I was recruited, although in hindsight I should probably have realized it from his authoritative manner and take-charge personality.
        So instead of a big bundle of cash I thought I was shooting for in Havana, it turned out I was working on a piddling per diem basis for the government. Wholly involuntarily, I might add. And once I found out, I had to go through with it in order to get out of Cuba with my neck intact. And this damn Erikson had backdoored me with Hazel who had aided and abetted the entire deception. "You said you were sick and tired of sitting around listening to the rust harden on yourself," she defended herself afterwards. "And I was afraid you'd take off on a bank job or something and get caught. This way I figured you were safe."
        Which was a hell of an argument when you consider that four of us went down into Cuba and only Karl Erikson and I made it back. And that the last time I'd seen him he'd been flat on his back in Bethesda Naval Hospital with machine-gun holes and wooden splinters as big as railroad spikes in him from the boat that had been shot out from under us by Cuban Migs.
        I walked across the yard to Erikson's car as he got out from under the wheel. He's a big, blond, rough-hewn type, possibly the strongest man I'd ever known. His movements were stiff, and I realized he hadn't fully recovered from his recent hospitalization. "I'm so glad you could