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sash. Before I washed my hands I reached over and took hold of the latch and unlocked it.

4
    W HY NOT? IN THIS WORLD you took what you wanted; you didn’t stand around and wait for somebody to bring it to you. I sat on the side of the bed stark naked in the sweltering night, listening to Umlaut beget Frammis in an age-cracked voice on the other side of the wall, and thought how easy it would be. There’d be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up. And you could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it’s always afternoon.
    Why kid myself? I wasn’t a salesman. And I couldn’t go back to sea, if I wanted to. I wasn’t getting any younger, and another whole year was down the drain. I’d quit two jobs and got fired from three, and I’d had to get out of Houston in a hurry after a brawl with a longshoreman over some turning-basin chippy. We tore up a lot of the fixtures in a cheap beer joint by the time the thing became general, and somewhere in the confusion the longshoreman had his jaw broken with a bottle of Bacardi rum. It wasn’t just an isolated incident, either; life was just a succession of jams over floozies of one kind or another.
    It had been a little over a year now since the night I’d got back to the States after eleven months of that monotonous tanker shuttle between the Persian Gulf and Japan, with a four-hundred-a-month allotment to Jerilee, to find she’d shoved off with the bank account and some boy friend she’d forgotten to tell me about. I tore my second mate’s ticket into strips and flushed it down the can in a Port Arthur ginmill and for a while I seemed to have some purpose in life, but after I’d had time to think it over a little I quit looking for them and threw away the gun. It wasn’t worth it. She was just another bum in a succession of them, the only difference being that I’d been married to her.
    On the other side of the wall they were piping Noah over the rail and getting ready for the rain. Sweat ran down my face and I thought about the bank to keep from thinking of that Harshaw woman. Keep her weight down! She could quit leaning it against me. But what about the bank?
    It wasn’t so simple, if you stopped to think about it. When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time. Who ever won all the time? Yeah, but the thing which always trips ’em is association with other criminals, and I don’t know any, talkative or otherwise. An amateur’s got a better chance than the pro because nobody knows him and he hasn’t got any clippings in the files. I lay there for hours, thinking about it.
    The next day was Saturday. Harshaw was across the street at his desk in the loan office all morning and at noon when they closed it, he came over and said he was going fishing for three days down at Aransas Pass.
    “I’ll be back on Monday night,” he told Gulick. “If you run into any snag making out papers for sale, you can always get hold of Miss Harper.”
    We didn’t sell anything. The town was jammed with the usual Saturday-afternoon crowd, but nobody was looking for a car. I prowled morosely around the lot and wondered what Gloria Harper did when she wasn’t working. Just before we closed, the telephone rang. I answered it.
    “Mr. Madox?”
    I recognized the voice. So she didn’t go with him, I thought. “Yes. Madox speaking.”
    “This is Mrs. Harshaw. I know you’ll think I’m an awful pest, but I wonder if I could ask another favour?”
    “Sure. What is it?”
    “Mr. Harshaw has gone fishing, and he promised me a car off the lot while he was gone with ours, but he forgot to bring it home. I wonder if you’d drive it out for me when you close up?”
    “Sure.