You Never Know With Women

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Book: Read You Never Know With Women for Free Online
Authors: James Hadley Chase
Tags: James, chase, Hadley
graceful and she didn’t look back. I watched her until she had disappeared into the house, then I sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. My hands were as steady as an aspen leaf.
    For the rest of the afternoon I stayed right there by the lily pond. Nothing happened. No one came near me. No one peeped at me from the windows. I had all the time in the world to think out what I was going to do that night, how I was going to evade the guards and the dog, how I was going to climb that wall without being seen, and how I was going to open the safe. But I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I thought about Veda Rux. I was still thinking about her when the sun dropped behind the tall pine trees and the shadows lengthened on the lawn. I was still thinking about her when Parker came out of the house and down to the pond.
    I looked at him blankly because he had gone right out of my mind. It was as if he had never existed. That was the effect she had on me.
    “You’d better come in now,” he said abruptly. “We’ll run through the final arrangements before we have supper. We want to get off about nine o’clock when the moon’s right.”
    We went back into the house. There was no sign of her in the hall or the lounge where Gorman was waiting. I kept listening for sounds of her, but the house was as still and as quiet as a morgue.
    “Dominic will carry the dagger,” Gorman said. “When you’re up on the wall he’ll hand it to you. Be careful with it. I don’t want the case scratched.”
    Parker gave me a key which he said unlocked the back door. We went over the architect’s plan once more.
    “I have another two hundred bucks coming to me before I go in there,” I reminded Gorman. “You can give it to me now if that’s okay with you.”
    “Dominic will give it to you at the same time as he gives you the dagger,” Gorman said. “You’ve had too much of my money without working for it, Mr. Jackson. I want some action from you before I part with any more.”
    I grinned.
    “Right; only I don’t go over the wall without it.”
    I expected to see her at supper, but she wasn’t there. Halfway through the meal found I just had to know where she was. I said casually I’d seen a girl in the garden and was that Miss Rux and wasn’t she coming in for a bite of food?
    Parker turned a greenish white. His fists clenched until the knuckles seemed to be bursting out of his skin. He started to say something in a voice that was drowned in rage, but Gorman put in quickly, “Don’t excite yourself, Dominic.”
    I didn’t like the look of Parker, and I pushed back my chair. He looked mad enough to take a sock at me. I don’t like a guy to sock me when I’m sitting down: Even a pixey like Parker.
    “You’re hired to do a job, Jackson,” Parker said, leaning across the table and glaring at me. “Keep your damned nose out of what doesn’t concern you! Miss Rux doesn’t want anything to do with a cheap crook like you, and I’ll see her wishes are carried out. Don’t bring her name into this conversation!”
    Because of what had happened out there by the pond I didn’t play it the way I should.
    “Don’t tell me that number I saw in the fancy pants could fall for a pixey like you,” I said and laughed at him. I had my heel against the rung of the chair and I was about to kick it away and land him a poke in his snout when I found myself looking down the barrel of a .38 police special that had jumped into his hand. Max had said he carried a gun as if he could use it. That draw was the quickest thing outside the movies I’d ever seen.
    “Dominic!” Gorman said quietly.
    I didn’t move. There was a blank, sightless look in Parker’s washed-out blue eyes that told me he was going to shoot. It was a nasty moment. The gun barrel looked as big as the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and twice as steady. I could see the thin finger taking in the slack on the trigger.
    “Dominic!” Gorman shouted and brought his great fist crashing

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