“This is all I could find,” I said.
“Yes, I know. With an oiled feather.”
“I’ll go dig up a chicken.”
“Don’t bother. Just help me get my clothes dry.”
The black half-slip, bra and bikini pants hung across the slats of the ladderback chair were barely damp, but the wool skirt and suitcoat were heavy with moisture, dripping on the floor while tufts of steam rose lazily upward. The room was beginning to have the feel of a Turkish bath.
“Those things’ll shrink,” I told her.
“And I’ll charge it all off to Martin Grady. Tomorrow, a new suit and you can pay for it.”
She had been smoothing the skirt out on the seat of the chair and stood up suddenly, turning around with a smile, close... too close, and my hands went around her waist. There was a startling warmth to her and under my fingers I felt her body tighten, tiny muscles responding to the unexpected touch. Her smile dissolved into a half-helpless look and the rich, ripe mouth that was about to say something parted wetly and her breath was like a stifled sob.
Camille Hunt had spent too many years being objective. She had been the watcher, not the doer — her reflexes were geared to the other person’s reactions and someplace she had forgotten about her own. She came to me with an instinctive gesture that had been inborn in women thousands of generations ago, yet conscious of the bewildering fact that she was capable of it and moved to its demands with a volition she couldn’t and didn’t want to control. Her eyes were sleepy things, knowing, yet pleading for it to happen quickly before the trained consciousness could reject the animal impulse that was activating her.
Her body began to press against me in a rolling motion, coming to me in a slow arc, her thighs touching first, then her belly in a timorous touch that changed to a powerful thrust as she ran her hands up my back and pulled me against her breasts that had stiffened into hard probing mounds of pure desire and when our mouths met it was with a fierce, driving contact like being sucked into a hungry vortex of violent passion. Her lips and tongue were lively things that worked to drain away the last reserve and with a mewing little cry her fingers tore open the shirt so that the buttons fell to the floor like raindrops and she crumpled slowly, pulling me down on top of her.
The reflected warmth of the heater was lost in the glow we created ourselves. Her hands were wild things working at me to expose flesh to flesh, her desire for satisfaction beyond belief, her imagination transcending that of any woman I had known before. Time after time we fulfilled ourselves until sheer physical limitations put an end to it and we lay there amidst scattered clothes in the exhaustion only pleasure can bring.
We would have stayed like that if I didn’t hear the muffled call of a phone from my room next door. I snaked myself loose from her arms, hearing a small, disappointed protest, and picked up the receiver from beside her bed and told the switchboard in the office to transfer the call there.
Dave Elroy caught the change in circuits and coded himself properly, then waited for my own proper ID before he said, “Tiger... what the hell’s going on? Trouble?”
“Everything’s fine,” I told him and he knew by my choice of simple words we were clear to speak. “What’s up?”
“This town’s crawling with Federal men. C.I.A., F.B.I. and I.A.T.S. are stationed all over the place. I spotted those who would know me and stayed out of sight. Charlie Corbinet’s in with them and they’ve shaken your other hotel room down, so they want you.”
“Where’s Corbinet at?”
“He checked into your old digs and is waiting around. As far as I can tell he’s the only one there.”
“Good. I’ll make the contact then.”
“Let it wait. I need you, old boy.”
“Why?”
“I found the guy you wanted found. Get over here now... and I mean now. I’m at 124 Pino Lane... and expedite.” That was all he said. He hung up on me.
“You have to leave?” Camille was looking at me through eyes half closed in sleep. Stretched out there naked with the reddish heat from the wall unit lighting her body, she looked like a big, lovely doll, languid in repose, the tiny smile showing the pleasant satisfaction of a woman who had enjoyed the completeness of her womanhood.
“I have to.”
“Don’t leave me here, Tiger.”
“Business, kid.”
“I don’t care. I just want to be with you for a little while longer.”
“Okay, get dressed,” I said, then finished buttoning my shirt. Camille wrinkled her nose at me, rolled into a ball for a second, then pushed onto her knees and stretched, holding a statuesque pose for a moment before getting to her feet.
“Turn around,” she told me.
“Now you get modest,” I said, laughing at her. “Great.” I checked the clip in the .45, jacked one in the chamber, put the hammer on half cock and slid it in the holster. By the time I had finished knotting my tie and getting into my coat she was almost finished. I looked at her, wondering why it was some women could come out of a rainstorm and a flurry of passion in a matter of minutes with nothing more than that look in their eyes and others couldn’t be budged for hours.
Evidently she knew what I was thinking because she smiled with those sleepy eyes and said, “Treat it like enthusiastic applause, my Tiger. The desire of a woman who has found her desire and wants to keep it as long as possible.” Her hands made a pass at her skirt and blouse for those small adjustments that build clothes onto a woman. “Neat but not gaudy. Can you stand me a little bit wrinkled?”
“As long as it isn’t deception.”
“Oh?” She glanced at me, eyebrows raised.
I said, “Isn’t it at this point the spider takes her victim? The male performs, the male satisfies, the male dies from a lethal bite.”
“Ah, but that’s only between spiders. You’re the wasp, the mud dauber. There seems to be something indecent about the relationship and we’ll probably breed a hybrid. However, this is one spider who knows when she’s well off despite the basic biological premises. I like you.”
“You’re weaving a web again.”
She laughed at me, a low, throaty chuckle, and said, “Well, let me try, anyway.”
The storm had taken on a new tone. Thunder rolled out over the ocean, lightning flashes illuminating the terrain briefly with a startlingly white brilliance. Rain drifted in front of the wind, angling sharply as the gusts increased momentarily, then came straight down to flatten out the ripples that disturbed the great puddles that ran from curb to curb.
Pino Lane was a dead-end street in a section that had started as a new development, then was discarded when progress stretched the city in another direction. Number 124 was the last house in the row, a small boxlike affair, never completed. Paint had weathered the siding and the path to the door was a line of two-by-eights laid from the curb to the house through the mud and weeds once intended for a lawn.
No lights were on behind the windows, but Dave’s car was parked fifty feet away in a turning area, nosed back for a quick move if he had to get away fast. I drove by slowly, looking for any sign of movement or fresh tracks laid in the muck, and seeing none, turned beside Dave’s car and drove back to the front of the house.
I didn’t like it at all. There were too many places for a quick gun to be crouched in the shadows, waiting. The thunder could cover the sound of a shot and a getaway would be an easy thing through the brush to a car parked on the next street. I sat there with the .45 in my hand and let the lightning brighten the area twice, scanning the spaces between the houses during the momentary daylight.