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at the door, a shifty little runt who looked as if he might not have seen the sunlight in twenty years. “I brought you a customer,” she said. “Remember to tell the boss.”
    “Sure, sure,” the runt told her.
    Then she turned to me. “No poker tonight. Only dice—okay?”
    “Okay,” I nodded.
    She led me back further into the bowels of the building, to a wide arena where an intent circle of customers crouched on the concrete.
    “You’re faded.”
    “Eight’s the point.”
    I sneaked in between a bald middle-aged man and a younger fellow with a thin mustache watching the shake and roll of the dice with almost hypnotic fascination. But the man who was rolling, a huge monster with a wicked, terrible face, stopped dead and stared at me. “Who let that guy in?” he said. “Does anybody know him?”
    “I brought him,” the girl said quietly but firmly. “He wanted action.”
    “Damn! Well, you can just take him somewhere else. This is a closed game. Take him somewhere else.”
    “Take him where?”
    “To bed with you for all I care!” And a ripple of brief laughter passed over the circle of men.
    “Come on,” she told him. “Let’s blow this lousy joint.”
    “Okay,” I nodded, following her once more into the outer dampness.
    “Men!” she snorted. “I hate every damned one of them. I hate ’em!”
    “That’s an odd statement for a girl like you to make,” I observed, falling into step beside her.
    “Why, because of what I do?”
    “Well, yes,” I admitted.
    “What am I supposed to say? That I love ’em all?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Let me tell you sumthin’, Bud. Let me tell you the story of my life in one short chapter. My father got drunk one mighty night and beat my mother’s head in with an axe. Then he did the same thing to my older sister. I was twelve at the time. I ran out of the house and hid behind the garage and prayed and cried all night, waiting for him to find me there. In the morning I crept back to the house and found him hanging from a beam in the basement.”
    “It must have been horrible.”
    “At first it was, but I got used to taking care of myself after that.” She turned up her coat collar against the suddenly heavy rain. “Hell of a night, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Sure you won’t come up to my place?”
    “What for?”
    “You gotta have a reason?”
    “I’m working,” I confessed. “I’m a reporter on the Times-Chronicle, after a story for the evening paper. Something big, the editor told me.”
    “Something big,” she mused. “We could blow up city hall.”
    “Oh, I don’t think….”
    “You take everything serious, don’t you, kid?”
    “Don’t you?”
    “Sometimes. Sometimes not. I take life as it comes. That’s the only way.”
    “I suppose so.” The rain was heavier now, and I steered her into a handy doorway.
    “What time is it, anyway?” she asked.
    “Must be close to four o’clock.”
    “What a stinkin’ night.”
    “Why don’t you go home and go to bed?”
    “Just one more. I need just one more tonight. It’s so damned cold in my room.”
    I was silent for a time, not knowing how to answer her. Then, finally, I mumbled, “I’ll come up, just for a few minutes.”
    “Thanks, kid,” she said, very quietly, and led the way through the rain once again….
    It was, I suppose, the kind of room I should have expected. Dim and damp and dingy, with a single naked light bulb swinging from the ceiling. With a couple of chairs and a table and a rumpled bed.
    “Got anything to drink?” I asked her.
    “Maybe. A bit of rum.”
    “Anything.”
    “Look, kid, you don’t have to….”
    “Get me the rum, will you?”
    “Sure, kid.” And she poured me a stiff shot. “What’s your story, kid? What are you running away from?”
    “Got no story. If I did, I’d be a writer instead of a newspaper reporter.”
    “Everybody’s got a story.”
    “Sure.” I thought about it. “College for a couple of years, the