Robbie laughed softly, delightedly, let her arm fall to her side, the pink brassiere dangling from her fingers. Sunlight silvered the tops of her full, bare breasts, shimmered on them as they swayed and trembled.
On the cliff, the men awkwardly moved a step or two forward, onto the very edge, seemed to float above the emptiness at their feet.
Robbie spread her legs and leaned back, away from me, shoulders rocking slowly, then faster, faster. The film mechanism stopped. She straightened again. I wound the camera quickly as she twirled the brassiere around her head, threw it to the sand. I put the camera to my eye again, let film click past the lens. She stood in one spot for seconds, posing. Body straight, head back, hands gliding slowly up her sides and past her face, brushing her thick, red-brown hair with the backs of her hands and letting it fall, tangled, against her shoulders.
The taller man gave the other a shove. He went over the cliff’s edge, fell, turning. Robbie’s hands were fumbling at the side of her narrow bikini trunks. The falling man hit a projecting ledge of earth, skidded, went spinning over the side, arms and legs flailing crazily. There was another forty feet of space between him and the rocky beach below.
It was sudden, quick. I knew what was happening, but dimly, vaguely. It was occupying more of my mind. Not quite enough yet.
Robbie said something to me but I didn’t understand her bubbling words. The bikini briefs were untied now, held up only by the light touch of her fingers, hands at the curve of her hips. She leaned forward slightly, breasts swaying, slid the bikini briefs down. It seemed to me that she moved very slowly — and that the tumbling man fell very slowly, too. The pink cloth slid downward, her hands brushing the white flare of her hips. Then I heard the thud.
He hit the beach almost two hundred yards away, but I heard the dull, deadly sound clearly. Before, it had been like a silent movie, shadow without substance; but that ugly sound suddenly made it real. I jerked my head. The other man was scrambling down the path.
From the corner of my eye I saw Robbie bend forward, raise one leg, reach and grab something pink before she straightened up. Only now the impressions were reversed. Robbie was on the periphery, and in the center of my consciousness was — murder.
It sent a chill over my skin. I glanced at Robbie. One vivid glimpse of her standing a few feet away in sun-limned nakedness, splash of pinkness in one hand, standing straight, back slightly arched. Just a glimpse of her, half a second — and then I was running. That taller man was still scrambling down the path. He’d probably thrown the other man over the cliff alive but unconscious, and was going down to make sure he was dead.
When I was halfway to the body, the man saw me. He froze on the steeply slanting path, jerked his head toward me. Then he turned, started back up in a hurry, feet sliding. There wasn’t a chance I could catch him. He’d be gone in seconds — and I didn’t have any idea who he was, what he looked like.
The camera was still in my hand; I’d forgotten it, been unaware of it while running. I slid to a stop, raised the camera, and centered it on the man, shoved the Zoomar lever forward as I started the film unwinding. His body grew larger in the view finder. I shouted as loudly as I could, and he turned. He stared — and I had him.
Then I lowered the camera, ran forward again. Twenty yards away now lay the sprawled body. As my eyes fell on it, there was a sudden sharp sound. A spurt of sand leaped close on my left. That sound I knew well — a gunshot.
I dug one foot into the sand, skidded, slowed, and then jumped forward, jerking my head up. He was below the top of the cliff, facing me, right arm extended. The gun cracked again, but the bullet hit yards from me. All I could think of for a moment was that if I got a film of him shooting at me his goose would be cooked to a crisp. It didn’t occur to me that I might get a film of the ape killing me; that the .38 Colt Special I usually carry was now two hundred yards down the beach; that I was standing out here in bright sunlight shooting a camera at a guy who was shooting a real gun at me. I just swung the camera up, held it on him for two or three seconds, getting a stupendous shot — through the telescopic lens I could even see the faint flash of fire from the gun’s muzzle. It was an astounding, a remarkable shot, a real murderer, real bullets...
That was the one that filtered. That brought me to my few senses. Real... bullets?
I let out a great blast of sound and jumped six feet through the air. That gun cracked again. I felt the impact, the sudden shock. It jarred me, turned me. The camera flew from my hands. I slammed down on one knee. I rolled, got to my feet again, squatting low, looked up. The man was scrambling upward again and as I watched he went over the cliff’s edge and out of sight.
Slowly I straightened up, heart pounding. I looked down over my bare skin, felt over my back and swim trunks. No blood. No holes. Then I saw the Bell-and-Kowell on the sand. He hadn’t hit me; he’d hit the camera. It was twisted, case sprung open, and film half out of the sprockets, sunlight glaring on it all.
I clambered up the face of the cliff, but he was long gone. A haze of dust hung over the dirt road leading to Coast Boulevard a quarter of a mile away. From the cliff’s edge I looked down the beach. The sun was getting low, and the hellish glare that at certain hours bounces from the sea almost blinded me. I couldn’t see Robbie unless I squinted and looked carefully — which explained why the guy hadn’t seen us down there.
On the beach again, I picked up the camera, forced the gate closed over the ruined film, walked to the body on the beach. The man was quite dead. But he was still warm, limp, not dead long. Almost surely he’d been alive when pushed over the cliff’s edge. It would probably have passed as an accidental death, instead of the murder it was. He was a short man, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, bald, his skull caved in above his left eye. His face was deeply pimpled where it had hit the sand.
I left him, walked back down the beach.
Robbie was in her bikini again, still a gorgeous sight, but somehow not quite the same now. The difference between my one brief but marvelously vivid glimpse of Robbie unadorned, unashamed, compared to Robbie adorned — even in a brief pink bikini — was the difference between prime ribs and hamburger, between wine and sour grapes. And in me started growing a cold, concentrated, surging desire to get my hands on that slob who’d just gotten away and slowly pull off his head.
As I stopped near her, Robbie said, with a chill as of early winter in her voice: “You can take me home now, Scott.”
Scott. Not Shell any more. That probably meant she wanted to hit me over the skull with something large and heavy. What was the matter with her? Didn’t she realize I’d had no choice?
I said: “Simmer down. Didn’t you hear those shots?”
“Shots? Is that what they were? I heard some noises.” She tossed her head. “All I know is, there I was all... well... and off you went. Actually running. Running away.”
Nobody will deny that women have a different approach to logic than do men. They sort of sneak up on it from behind, like an Indian skulking through the grass. But this was too much.
“Robbie, my dear little imbecile,” I said with some heat, “I have just been eyeballing a most unpleasant corpse, not to mention the fact that I just got shot at several dozen times — three or four times, anyway — and the stupendous damned movie I took of the killer is all shot to hell — get it through your head a guy has just been murdered.”