sugar dispensers, the ones that weigh about two tons. Splat, right across the side of the head. All of a sudden, it’s John Wayne time. Truck drivers and midgets, all kickin’ the shit out of each other and, incidentally, wasting the Soperton, Georgia, Waffle House while they’re at it.
‘Right then I figured Soperton, Georgia, was no place to be if you’re a six-fingered Jewish piano player hustling fourteen midgets who are at that moment inciting a riot. So! just walked away from it, down to the Trailways bus station, where I stood around for about an hour, listening to the police cars and ambulance, until the bus came and I headed south and got off when we ran out of road in Key West.’
He stopped and smiled rather grandly and added, ‘And that’s the point.’
‘What’s the point?’ Eliza asked.
‘The point is, this is no place for us to be right now.’
‘Amen,’ said O’Hara.
‘But Lavander could still be alive. If the police had a description of Lavander and Hinge...’
‘They wouldn’t do doodly-shit,’ said the Magician.
‘Lavander’s had it,’ O’Hara said. ‘By now Hinge is probably on his way back to Tucson or wherever he’s from, and all we’ve got is Lavander’s little black book of gibberish.’
Outside, Hinge huddled close to the cottage to escape the driving rain. He was grateful for the storm, since it provided excellent sound cover. The raindrops, battering palm leaves and ferns, sounded like drums accompanied by the timpani of thunder. He had moved as close to the window as possible, standing just outside its orbit of light but close enough to hear their conversation through the open window.
My God, he thought, they know my name and they know about Lavander! And what’s this about Lavander’s book?
Who the hell are these people, anyway?
It made no difference. Hinge decided very quickly that he had to kill all three of them. The question was when and how. He concluded that each of them had a cottage, accounting for the lights in the last three cottages. He would wait until they were each in their rooms and take them one at a time.
Piece a cake.
He continued his eavesdropping.
‘I think the book’s going to give up something,’ said the Magician.
‘All we gotta do is break Lavander’s code.’
‘All,’ Eliza said.
‘He carries the book with him. Obviously he makes entries in it all the time, so he must have memorized his own code. And if he memorized it, I can break it. And if I can’t, Izzy certainly can.’ He got up to leave. ‘What time did the pilot say he’d meet us at the airport?’
‘Five-thirty,’ O’Hara said.
‘I’ll wake everybody up,’ he said and left, scampering through the rain to his cottage, the last one in the row.
O’Hara hunched deep in one of the yellow-and-green chairs and said, ‘I’ll sleep here in the chair.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ Eliza said.
‘We’ve already underestimated Hinge once tonight. I’d feel better being here.’
Thunder rumbled outside the window and lightning snapped close by.
‘Better be careful, O’Hara, I’m liable to get the wrong impression, think you have a heart after all.’
‘Now, what does that mean?’
‘Up until now, you’ve been a robot.’
‘A robot!’
‘That’s right, a robot.’
‘Well, I don’t feel like a robot,’ he said, looking at her through half-closed eyes.
O’Hara had already dismissed the Lavander affair from his mind. They had botched it. Enough said. Now he concentrated on his competitor across the room, for that was how he still thought of her. Five feet tall, proficient and dangerously naive.
That was the professional view. Personally, other things about her crowded his mind. She was prettier than he remembered from their brief meeting in Japan, and he had been too startled when she showed up in St. Lucifer to really pay any attention to her. Now he realized what a stunning woman she was. Her tininess simply added to her allure. Shaggy jet-black hair, cut short with curled strands peeking around her neck; wide, almost startled eyes, appearing even more vulnerable because of her size; a wondrously perfect nose and a tentative, pouty mouth that could, in an instant, become the most dazzling smile he had ever seen.
Beautiful, smart and tempting.
Very dangerous.
She was momentarily flustered and avoided contact with his green eyes. She Sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the floor. O’Hara intimidated her and 1ad since before she met him. The biographical material she had read had commended him for many things, including his investigative ability. But it was his apparent mastery of the Japanese philosophy that both fascinated and unsettled her. He moved with oiled grace, which she attributed to his martial-arts training in Japan. She remembered the speed with which he accepted and defeated his attacker in Japan. Unruffled. Even with a stab wound, he was simply unruffled. In fact, he was uncomfortably calm. And now he seemed able to accept the inevitability of Lavander’s death without guilt or remorse. And yet, what she read to be
