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You’d do better to sit back and wait for life to come to you. It’ll come along and it’ll probably be pretty good. Not that I really expect you or my girl to believe me and do just that. Have you got a way home?”
    “Thank you,” she said softly. “My father wouldn’t have put it that way. And thanks for the ride, but Mr. James is going to run me out. He lives in my direction.”
    Clapp quirked the corners of his mouth at the slight man and stood up, patting the sides of his gray-suited stomach wearily. “I’ll see you two tomorrow. God, I’m gonna hate to get up.”
    Laura Gilbert smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt and joined Walter James in the aisle. Little half-moons were beginning to show beneath her eyes. “I feel a hundred years old,” she murmured.
    “Would it help any to say that you don’t look it?” Walter James asked her. She smiled at him. He took her arm as they went up the aisle and into the lobby.
    A black sedan and a black and white prowl car were double-parked on Market Street. Clapp moved toward the sedan where Felix was a dark shadow at the wheel.
    Walter James took a firmer grip on the girl’s tweed elbow. “My car’s up this way.”
    Across Market Street, from between two looming store fronts came a low “poom” and a brief blur of flame. Behind Walter James and the girl, the glass covering a full-length display of Shasta Lynn’s charms tinkled merrily to the sidewalk.
    Walter James yanked the redhead to shelter behind a parked Chevrolet with one hand and clawed under his left lapel with the other. “Get down!” he yelled.
    Clapp was shouting, “Get that block covered in a hurry!” Felix rocketed the sedan straight ahead for Fifth Avenue. The prowl car spun to the opposite curb. Gun first, a black-shirted cop leaped for the plateglass store front and edged along it toward the darkness between the two buildings. Reaching the dark slot, he waved his hand at the prowl car and plunged in. The driver of the black and white car watched the opening for an anxious second, then roared his vehicle around the Sixth Avenue corner.
    Clapp appeared suddenly beside Walter James and the girl. “Hit you?”
    Walter James took his handkerchief away from the girl’s head. The blood on it was brighter than her hair.
    “Tipped her ear.”
    “I’m all right,” Laura Gilbert said shakily. “I’m all right. It doesn’t even hurt.”
    Clapp stated heavily, “One of you has plenty to tell me. And we’d better go down to headquarters and talk it over.”
    He looked up at the full-length picture of the undraped Shasta Lynn. Where her navel had been was a small round hole.
    “Got
her
dead center,” he said.

5
. Sunday, September 24, 1:10 A.M.
    C LAPP TOOK three cans of beer out of a small icebox. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s too darn late to consider this on duty time. Besides, we all need it.”
    “I can’t think of anything I’d like more right now,” said the girl. She sat by Walter James in front of Clapp’s desk with her mirror propped against her purse; she was diligently combing her coppery-red hair over her left ear to hide the bright white bandage.
    Clapp broke into the beer cans with a little grunting. “You like beer?” he asked. “So does my Sheila — but she always says she has to watch her figure.” He lowered himself into a creaky swivel chair and lifted his beer can in a toast. “What’ll it be?”
    Walter James’s hand shook a little. “Confusion to our enemies,” he said soberly. Clapp glanced quickly at him; the spare little office was silent for a space as three people drank deeply. The room came to life again with Clapp’s satisfied “Ah!” Laura Gilbert peered into her mirror, inspecting her mouth. She turned her head from side to side, trying to decide about her hair.
    “I’ve always had trouble with my ears,” she explained when she felt the four male eyes on her, “trying to make them look smaller than they really are. The bandage is