Again, Skip thought, the opportunity presented itself. Say now to her that you’re calling it off, go out and build a rock-solid alibi, take the ten per cent from Big Tom and keep your lip buttoned. But again perversity, or perhaps the memory of the gun in Big Tom’s fist, kept him from speaking. He was even beginning to enjoy himself, the opportunities offered and shrugged off because, as Uncle Willy would say, he was just a punk and didn’t know better.

“I’m just a damned punk,” he said aloud, amused with it.

“No, you’re not. I love you.”

Abruptly he shook her arms free. “Now what the hell kind of talk is that?”

“Well, it slipped out. But I do.”

“Listen, Karen. You cut it out. There’s not going to be any crap like that here, not between us.”

“Sure, Skip.”

“Come out this way when class is over. I’ll be waiting for you.”

She turned away. The wind brushed at her short dark hair, tumbling it; she held it off her face, glancing back at Skip. At the door she blew him a small, light kiss from her fingers.

What a sap she was, Skip thought.

At eleven o’clock Big Tom went into the bath of Uncle Willy’s room above the garage, drew a glass of water, stepped to the open door to drink it. “He’s always here by eleven?”

“Has been, up to now. Even earlier sometimes.” Uncle Willy sat on his small bed with a garden-seed catalogue in his hands. Mr. Chilworth had expressed a fantastic but determined whim for snapdragons and phlox. He wanted them along the side of the house and along the front walks. It was crazy, an abominable amount of work for Uncle Willy. “Class runs to ten, seven o’clock to ten. He ought to of been here by now.”

“Why in hell doesn’t he go to school daytimes?”

“Well . . . Skip’s an adult. Adult classes are almost all at night. You know, most people work.”

Big Tom frowned. “He’s staying out later for some reason. I smell something funny.”

Uncle Willy said soothingly, “Oh, Skip wouldn’t try anything.”

“He’d better not. I don’t want any preliminary fooling around, a job I handle. There’s been too much already.” Big Tom put the glass back into its holder above the small basin, came back, sat down on Skip’s bed.

As if to get Big Tom’s attention off Skip, Uncle Willy asked, “You got somebody in Las Vegas already?”

“Benny Busick. He flew over, going to look around and see if Stolz has had a tax beef in the last few years.”

“If Stolz has—it’ll be tax dough?”

“Probably not. It’s the ones the tax bulls haven’t looked at who still feel like hanging onto their little nest eggs.”