We got out and I paid the taxi. All four of us carefully watched it out of sight. Then Sunset said: «My place is upstairs. There’s a schoolteacher lives down below. She ain’t home. Let’s go up and gargle.»
We crossed the lawn to the porch and Sunset threw a door open, pointed up narrow steps.
«Ladies first. Lead on, beautiful. Nobody locks a door in this town.»
The girl gave him a cool glance and passed him to go up the stairs. I went next, then Madder, Sunset last.
The single room that made up most of the second floor was dark from the trees, had a dormer window, a wide daybed pushed back under the slope of the roof, a table, some wicker chairs, a small radio and a round black stove in the middle of the floor.
Sunset drifted into a kitchenette and came back with a square bottle and some glasses. He poured drinks, lifted one and left the others on the table.
We helped ourselves and sat down.
Sunset put his drink down in a lump, leaned over to put his glass on the floor and came up with his Colt out.
I heard Madder’s gulp in the sudden cold silence. The girl’s mouth twitched as if she were going to laugh. Then she leaned forward, holding her glass on top of her bag with her left hand.
Sunset slowly drew his lips into a thin straight line. He said slowly and carefully: «Feet-burners, huh?»
Madder choked, started to spread his fat hands. The Colt flicked at him. He put his hands on his knees and clutched his kneecaps.
«And suckers at that,» Sunset went on tiredly. «Burn a guy’s feet to make him sing and then walk right into the parlor of one of his pals. You couldn’t tie that with Christmas ribbon.»
Madder said jerkily: «All r-right. W-what’s the p-pay-off?» The girl smiled slightly but she didn’t say anything.
Sunset grinned. «Rope,» he said softly. «A lot of rope tied in hard knots, with water on it. Then me and my pal trundle off to catch fire-flies — pearls to you — and when we come back —» he stopped, drew his left hand across the front of his throat. «Like the idea?» he glanced at me.
«Yeah, but don’t make a song about it,» I said. «Where’s the rope?»
«Bureau,» Sunset answered, and pointed with one ear at the corner.
I started in that direction, by way of the walls. Madder made a sudden thin whimpering noise and his eyes turned up in his head and he fell straight forward off the chair on his face, in a dead faint.
That jarred Sunset. He hadn’t expected anything so foolish. His right hand jerked around until the Colt was pointing down at Madder’s back.
The girl slipped her hand under her bag. The bag lifted an inch. The gun that was caught there in a trick clip — the gun that Sunset thought was inside the bag — spat and flamed briefly.
Sunset coughed. His Colt boomed and a piece of wood detached itself from the back of the chair Madder had been sitting in. Sunset dropped the Colt and put his chin down on his chest and tried to look at the ceiling. His long legs slid out in front of him and his heels made a rasping sound on the floor. He sat like that limp, his chin on his chest, his eyes looking upward. Dead as a pickled walnut.
I kicked Miss Donovan’s chair out from under her and she banged down on her side in a swirl of silken legs. Her hat went crooked on her head. She yelped. I stood on her hand and then shifted suddenly and kicked her gun clear across the attic.
«Get up.»
She got up slowly, backed away from me biting her lip, savage-eyed, suddenly a nasty-faced little brat at bay. She kept on backing until the wall stopped her. Her eyes glittered in a ghastly face.
I glanced down at Madder, went over to a closed door. A bathroom was behind it. 1 reversed a key and gestured at the girl.
«In.»
She walked stiff-legged across the floor and passed in front of me, almost touching me.
«Listen a minute, shamus —»
I pushed her through the door and slammed it and turned the key. It was all right with me if she wanted to jump out of the window. I had seen the windows from below.
I went across to Sunset, felt him, felt the small hard lump of keys on a ring in his pocket, and got them out without quite knocking him off his chair. I didn’t look for anything else.
There were car keys on the ring.
I looked at Madder again, noticed that his fingers were as white as snow. I went down the narrow dark stairs to the porch, around to the side of the house and got into the old touring car under the shed. One of the keys on the ring fitted its ignition lock.
The car took a beating before it started up and let me back it down the dirt driveway to the curb. Nothing moved in the house that I saw or heard. The tall pines behind and beside the house stirred their upper branches listlessly and a cold heartless sunlight sneaked through them intermittently as they moved.
I drove back to Capitol Way and downtown again as fast as I dared, past the square and the Snoqualmie Hotel and over the bridge towards the Pacific Ocean and Westport.
NINE
An hour’s fast driving through thinned-out timberland, interrupted by three stops for water and punctuated by the cough of a head gasket leak, brought me within sound of surf. The broad white road, striped with yellow down the center, swept around the flank of a hill, a distant cluster of buildings loomed up in front of the shine of the ocean, and the road forked. The left fork was signposted: «Westport — 9 Miles,» and didn’t go towards the buildings. It crossed a rusty cantilever bridge and plunged into a region of wind-distorted apple orchards.
Twenty minutes more and I chugged into Westport, a sandy spit of land with scattered frame houses dotted over rising ground behind it. The end of the spit a long narrow pier, and the end of the pier a cluster of sailing boats with half-lowered sails flapping against their single masts. And beyond them a buoyed channel and a long irregular line where the water creamed on a hidden sandbar.
Beyond the sandbar the Pacific rolled over to Japan. This was the last outpost of the coast, the farthest west a man could go and still be on the mainland of the United States. A swell place for an ex-convict to hide out with a couple of somebody else’s pearls the size of new potatoes — if he didn’t have any enemies.
I pulled up in front of a cottage that had a sign in the front yard: «Luncheons, Teas, Dinners.» A small rabbit-faced man with freckles was waving a garden rake at two black chickens. The chickens appeared to be sassing him back. He turned when the engine of Sunset’s car coughed itself still.
I got out, went through a wicket gate, pointed to the sign.
«Luncheon ready?»
He threw the rake at the chickens, wiped his hands on his trousers and leered. «The wife put that up,» he confided to me in a thin, impish voice. «Ham and eggs is what it means.»
«Ham and eggs get along with me,» I said.
We went into the house. There were three tables covered with patterned oilcloth, some chromos on the walls, a fullrigged ship in a bottle on the mantel. I sat down. The host went away through a swing door and somebody yelled at him and a sizzling noise was heard from the kitchen. He came back and leaned over my shoulder, put some cutlery and a paper napkin on the oilcloth.
«Too early for apple brandy, ain’t it?» he whispered.
I told him how wrong he was. He went away again and came back with glasses and a quart of clear amber fluid. He sat down with me and poured. A rich baritone voice in the kitchen was singing «Chloe,» over the sizzling.
We clinked glasses and drank and waited for the heat to crawl up our spines.
«Stranger, ain’t you?» the little man asked.
I said I was.
«From Seattle maybe? That’s a nice piece of goods you got on.»