The Bitch Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiles, and their gleaming shoes, their padded shoulders. They were something.
    I had to do it with them. That was the bad thing.
    It wouldn’t have been so bad alone.
    I lifted my head and it was aching.
    At midnight I was supposed to relieve the man Sam hired. Then Gunnison would come along and open the safe, and he would smack me on the head, and I could phone in the alarm in due time.
    It was very neat and unquestionable. It would be nothing against Sam—not really. It would just finish him, because he would have slipped. He would have used his brother at a time when he should have known better. Because all the fine little things about me would come to light. It could happen to anybody, only it would have happened to Sam.
    I stood there for quite a while, my head aching, thinking about everything.

CHAPTER 4
    It had ceased raining. I left Al Gunnison in the car two blocks from the Halquist soft drink plant, and started back along the sidewalk. Rain sheened on the smooth cement, picking up lights where no lights existed, vagrant flashes and flares of yellow and red, the wavering reflection of a windy palm. Before I reached the first curb, two cars passed me, tires purring liquidly, and there was the faint odor of perfume and cigar smoke trailing through the clean midnight air. High above the city, pink-tinged clouds formed an enormous tent, beneath which strands of dark factory smoke scudded, trapped. A horn cried distantly, and from someplace came the faint and faraway ring of deeply satisfied feminine laughter. The city was lonely and sad tonight, and the air was nervous with my own fear. Every damned step was a step I didn’t want to take.
    On the Halquist block, I walked slowly along the high steel fence that circled the entire plant Beyond the wire mesh, tonsured grass flourished verdantly among cared-for palms and bushes. It had obviously been mowed earlier today, the thick, pungent scent of hashed greenings clouded the block.
    All I had to do was relieve the nightwatchman. I was next on duty. I had even called Sam and talked with him around eight-thirty, assured him I’d be on time. There had been no need of that, but I knew he expected it—and somehow it helped satisfy some of the anxiousness in me, too.
    I had not gone home. I hadn’t been able to.
    I had walked until it was time to meet Gunnison. I’d called Janet and told her I’d see her in the morning. That was for sure.
    “Honey,” she’d said. “You didn’t tell me you had to work.”
    “I clean forgot.”
    “Oh.”
    I was familiar with that expression, maybe a lot of men are. Just “Oh.” Nothing more, like Poe’s rapping on the door. Yet so damned meaningful. And I couldn’t explain to her—tell her what this would mean to both of us.
    Maybe I would never be able to tell her that.
    I had walked past the gate. I turned and went back and stood there a moment.
    In other parts of the city tonight, money lay as neatly un-secret as this, right here. Guarded flimsily, placed in safes that might, in the trade, be referred to as cigar boxes. Yet they wouldn’t be touched. There was no need of a guard, really. If a safe was a mark, nothing like six guards could stop the action.
    It would be the other guard’s, Sam’s operative’s, fault It had to be. I didn’t even like that—but that’s the way it was. We both had keys for the lock on this gate, and when he left, he would recall locking the gate. Only he would never be able to prove that. He
would
lock it. Only I would unlock it—just as I did now.
    The key fitted smoothly and as I turned it in the large padlock on the chain, I knew it was the last step. I didn’t hesitate after that.
    • • •
    His name was Hornell. He stood just inside the door, in the anteroom, a member of the pudge family, his round face bloated with sleepiness, eyes and mouth grinning in tired, forced slits. He wore khaki trousers and shirt, a light blue sweater, a holstered gun. As I rapped on the door and