The Ravagers Read Online Free PDF

character.”
    I half expected her to be angry, but she just grinned. Then she stopped grinning and said, “It’s a lousy business, darling. I suppose you know what I’ll do the minute you’re out of the room. I’ll take the glass you drank out of and send it in to have the fingerprints checked.”
    I laughed. “Well, I’m glad you said that. I was just trying to work up a plausible excuse for walking off with that bottle of Scotch you were pouring out of, so I could see what I could develop on it with my do-it-yourself detective kit. My boss has a few Washington connections that might be able to run down your prints for us.”
    “Not unless I wanted them run down,” she said, smiling. “But help yourself. I think Mike Green already got a set, much more subtly, but I don’t mind if you take one, too. Just don’t let the liquor go to waste. That would be a crime.” She watched me as I found a narrow paper bag in the nearby wastebasket, smoothed it out, and slipped the bottle inside. “Dave.”
    “Yes.”
    She was serious again. “What happens in bed never makes any difference. Not in my line of work. I hope you understand that.”
    “What are you trying to say?”
    “Whether I like you or not has nothing to do with anything. If you’re not a private detective from Denver, darling, please get in your little car and start driving very fast, any direction. Otherwise there’ll be nothing but a small wet spot on the pavement, marked Clevenger.”
    I said, “It isn’t nice of you to keep trying to scare me to death.”
    She shook her head quickly. “No, don’t joke about it. This is big, darling, very big. If you’re playing any tricks, you’ll be squashed, and I’ll help squash you. That’s what I’m trying to say. And even if you are a private detective from Denver, and even if you have a very respectable principle and an excellent reason for hanging around, I’d still advise you to go home and work on some nice lucrative divorce case. Because if you get in the way we’ll run over you like a steamroller. This woman has got hold of something that... well, it’s terribly important. We have to get it back before it’s compromised further. There’s really no room for any private interests here.”
    She was very grave and, with her tousled black hair and abbreviated shirt, very cute. I said, “You sound practically subversive, doll. Big government has taken over, and there’s no room for the lousy little private dick to make a few lousy little private bucks. Hell, that’s dictatorship, that’s communism. I’ll speak to my senator.” I reached out and tipped her face up and bent over to kiss her lightly on the mouth, saying: “See you in Brandon.”
    It was meant to be just a debonair parting gesture from a somewhat older man to a somewhat younger girl—let’s not go into the exact age difference involved—but it went wrong. I don’t mean that it developed into a passionate, clinging clinch, with breathless declarations of undying love. We weren’t the breathless, clinging type. Watching us, you probably wouldn’t have known anything had happened at all. And maybe it didn’t happen then; maybe it had already happened while we made love and slept for a couple hours close together in the big hotel bed. Maybe we were just becoming aware of it now. But there was no mistaking it.
    As a kiss, however, it lasted only a fraction of a second longer than the easy goodbye peck it had been intended to be. Separating, we looked at each other for a moment. I reached up and touched her mop of black hair.
    “Elaine the fair,” I said. “Elaine the lily maid of Astolat. Tennyson?”
    “I think so,” she said. “It isn’t nice to make fun of me.”
    “You were kind of casual about letting me in here,” I said. “Better start being careful with doors, lily maid, like Mike wasn’t.”
    She grinned. “What can acid do to me that hasn’t already been done?”
    “At least you’ve still got a face,