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halfway between "pretty good" and "lousy."
    She was inside, reaching for her bikini halter, when the phone chimed. It was probably that militarily correct Englishman. Alec Wardrop, calling to cancel their tennis date. No doubt he'd heard of her prowess and did not relish losing his veddy British aplomb. He was hell on horseback, she knew; a steeplechasing, Indian pigsticking fool from a long line of English career officers. Well, if she couldn't test him on a clay court, he would never test her in bed.
    "Hello, Alec," she called to the phone. It recognized her voiceprint, but not her bored resignation.
    The caller was not Lieutenant Alec Wardrop. Somewhere, on the other end of that connection, someone was holding a cheap commercial language tutor to the speaker. "Marianne Placidas la linda, par favor ," the voice said.
    She almost forgot the correct response, but: "She is out, and she is in," Marianne replied in a rush.
    "Stand by to record," the voice said after a moment.
    She lunged at the nearest speaker terminal. "Recording."
    A long series of phone beeps ensued. They meant nothing specific to her yet, but they came in groups of five, and that meant a great deal in itself. She coded the doors locked, opened her jewel case, extracted a small dispenser with its stack of hormone pills. She swallowed the first pill—it was candy—and sucked furiously on the second, which was something else.
    Before the last beep died away, she had dried her saliva from the little information lozenge and was inserting it into her own, very special tutorial voder. Sometimes it taught her French, sometimes the updated slangs of jazz buffs and soccer jocks. This morning it had already taught her that she, and not Alec Wardrop, would have to cancel that tennis date.
    She remembered to cancel calls from outside, then placed her voder near the recorder speaker and encoded instructions. She scribbled the letters out in full caps as the voder, functioning as a very fast version of a one-time cipher code, began to recite the message, one letter at a time. There were faster ways to decode a message, but no way quite so innocent in its hardware, given the possibility that some very hard dudes might show up one day with a search warrant.
    She smiled grimly as the first two words were assembled. Her father might have heard them in testimony; probably had, in fact. He could have no earthly idea that they referred to his darling, his pampered, his celebrated little girl.
    The first two words were a greeting. CIELITA LINDA… No, she was not Judge Placidas's daughter for nothing. She was whatever she was, for all the sorrel-golden gratification she received.

Chapter Nine
    Quantrill handed over his bounty late Sunday night in Junction and slept on a cot in the courthouse annex. It was far from the sleeping arrangements he had intended, and he awoke, Monday morning, with something less than joy. Before drawing his check for hazardous duty he had several things to do.
    The most pleasant of those items was breakfast. Then, in descending order, turning in the cycle; filling out forms; and debriefing. In his perverse mood he did them in reverse order—always a mistake.
    Marv Stearns eyed the smaller man standing before his desk for debriefing and waved him to a cane-bottomed chair. Stearns had the imposing physique of a defensive end, but these days it was running to meat instead of muscle. His face was more florid than tan. As he spoke, Quantrill listened to the careful diction and wondered, for the umpteenth time, if Steams had spent his college days as an actor instead of an athlete. "If you're going to slouch, Quantrill, I'd rather you sat." He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee, not offering to share it; lined up the notes on his desk with geometric precision; studied the younger man's face with growing satisfaction. Rumbling it in false good humor: "Hung over?"
    "Nope; just lack of sleep."
    Stearns glanced at his desk terminal. "Maintenance found several