“The bigger they come the harder they fall,” Skip pronounced. He was peering ahead to the corner where the side street entered the main boulevard from Pasadena. Suddenly he chucked Eddie in the ribs. “Hey, there’s the chick now!” His tone had taken on a certain confidential excitement.

A girl of around seventeen sat on the bench at the bus stop. She had a couple of books in her lap, one open between her hands, and her head was bent over it, the book slanted so that its pages caught the last thin light from the sky. Her hair was short and curly, a soft lustrous brown. “Look at that. A dish,” Skip was saying. As they went by Eddie gave her a single nervous glance and Skip an all-out stare, but she didn’t look up. She wore a plain blue coat that looked old for her, white sandals, and a small white handbag hung from her wrist. Her lashes and little winglike brows were dark against the creamy color of her skin.

“She’s on her way to night school now,” Skip explained. “Taking a secretarial course. The old lady tried to goose her into nursing school, but she wouldn’t bite. You want to meet her tonight? I could introduce you when typing class is out. Be in the hall.”

“Maybe one of us ought to kind of lay low,” Eddie said. “I mean——” He paused to watch what Skip was doing with the car. Skip had waited for a lull in the traffic on the boulevard, then cut sharply into a U-turn. “Hey, for the lova Pete!”

“Just going back for another look. We’ve got to have that layout down pat.”

“Oh, Lord.” Eddie hunkered down into the seat, trying to squirm out of sight of the bench. “You want her to know we’ve been out here?”

“Why not? It’s a free country.” Skip often pretended to be dense like this.

“Look, afterwards, when the thing happens, won’t they begin to ask about strangers hanging around, other people in the neighborhood——”

“Oh, relax, for Chrissakes.” Skip swung the car jauntily close to the bench on which the girl sat, then whistled his wolf call. She lifted her face at that, staring at the car; but Eddie sensed that she hadn’t recognized Skip. She wore a confused, foggy expression, as if her mind were on the book or as if her eyes, tired from reading, had trouble adjusting to the distance.

The old car puffed and rumbled as it started back up the grade. Skip nursed it with gas from the choke. Eddie said, “She didn’t seem to know you.”

“Getting dark,” Skip said. “Anyhow, we’ll meet her tonight at school.”