The hat was a little small, but he could pull it down far enough.

She nodded. "You look like anybody and ever'body. Camera a-hangin' round your neck, you'd be invisible any place in Florida entire. No need of scrunching."

"Aren't you going to ask if taking me there is going to implicate you in anything?"

"Implicate? That mean messed up in? I love a somebody, Kirby, I do like he asks me."

He took the gla.s.ses and hat off and stared at her. "Love?"

"You weren't listening in the bed, sugar?"

"Well, yes, I was, but I thought it, was sort of a manner of speaking."

"h.e.l.l yes it was, and I'm speaking it again. You got something against it?"

"No. I just mean that, well, I mean you seem to accept the fact I'll go off in a boat, and you don't know if we'll see each other again, and you don't seem to, well, to really care very much, and I thought, "

"You know, you could be, like they say, over-educated."

She wiped her lipstick onto the paper napkin, came smiling around the table and bent over him, put her hand on the nape of his neck and began to kiss him with considerable skill and energy. He groped for her and turned her and brought her into his lap. Within minutes they were trembling and gasping and giddy. She pushed his hands away from her and sat bolt upright, her hands on his shoulders, head tilted, smiling. Her eyes looked drowsy.

"I love you good, Kirby. And love is a pretty thing. See how fast all worked up we gettin'? That's the good of it, sugar. Going to bed is happy and it's fun. It's the way you get the good of it with none of the bad. It's like everybody has forgot that's all it is and all it was ever meant to be. People got to mess it up, it seems. Cryin', moanin', clingin' onto one another, all jealous and selfish and hateful. We love each other on account of we give each other a lot of happy fun, and if it comes round again, we'll take some more, and if it doesn't, we got this much already anyhow. But no vows and pledges and c.r.a.p like that, hear? That's what people do because they got the funny idea it's the right thing to do. And before they know it, the fun part is gone, gotten itself strangled on the fine print, like it was a deed to some land. I live free and simple, Kirby, and I look on myself in the mirror and say h.e.l.lo to a friend I like. The day I stop liking her, I change my ways. So this is who loves you, and that's what the word means, and I got friends would die for me and me for them. What I say, you run onto a h.e.l.l of a girl." "I did," he said. "I did indeed."

"Any man using me," she said intently, "he gets a kick turns him soprano. I'm eager, but I'm no gawdd.a.m.n free lunch counter for any ba.s.sar prowling for kicks, hear?" "I'm not."

"Don't ever get to be. Hey! That's the news starting." They went inside and sat on a couch. After the national news, Kirby was the first item on the local news.

"State, Federal and local authorities have joined in the hunt for mystery man Kirby Winter and his accomplice, Wilma Farnham. Last night Arturo Vara, room service waiter at a Miami Beach hotel, swore out an a.s.sault warrant against Winter. As the police reconstruct it, Winter, hemmed in by reporters in the corridor outside his hotel room yesterday, broke into an adjoining room, placed a call for room service, then, when Vara arrived, slugged him, donned his uniform and made his way through the reporters to the elevators and escaped from the hotel. He has not yet been apprehended."

Bonny Lee turned and stared at Kirby and raised one eyebrow in question. He nodded, guiltily.

"Dr. Roger Farnham, a.s.sociate Professor at Florida Eastern, elder brother of Wilma Farnham, disclosed that after a brief unfruitful interview with the press yesterday, Miss Farnham left the apartment where she lived alone, taking a few personal possessions, and has not been seen since. Police have established that Miss Farnham and Winter held clandestine meetings at a Miami hotel during his infrequent returns to this area from various foreign countries.

"The question which is on everyone's lips is what could have happened to the missing twenty-seven million dollars turned over to O. K. Devices by Krepps Enterprises at the direct order of Omar Krepps, international financier, who died suddenly last week. It is believed that Winter and the Farnham woman carefully planned the huge embezzlement over a period of time, including the destruction of the files and records and, according to police theory, including plans to leave the country, plans they may have consummated last night.

"In addition to the a.s.sault charge, Winter and the Farnham woman face embezzlement charges lodged by Krepps Enterprises. At midnight last night K.E. posted a reward of ten thousand dollars for any information leading to the apprehension of either or both of the fugitives. They are also bringing civil suit against both Winter and the Farnham woman. Both the tax and immigration authorities are anxious to serve summonses on both Winter and the woman.

"Winter is described as being six feet, one-half inch tall, weight about one-ninety, sandy hair, dark blue eyes, age thirty-two, small crescent scar on left cheekbone, clean-shaven, polite, soft-spoken, highly intelligent, disarming."

Bonny Lee went over and turned off the radio. She came back to him, shaking her head. "You now a celebrity, man." She touched his cheek. "Where'd you get the scar?"

"A little girl hit me with a rock when I was about six years old." He grasped her hand, touched the scar he had seen. "How about this one?"

"I sw.a.n.g back-handed at a little old buck-tooth boy pinched me when I was about eleven."

"You need ten thousand dollars?"

"Hope to G.o.d I never do need it so bad, sugar. Can you think of anything at all they don't want you for?"

"Armed robbery."

"Keep trying. Maybe you'll get lucky. Sugar, I better get you onto that boat before anybody tracks you right to here."

"Or before I get too scared to walk out the door."

He put on the hat and the gla.s.ses and checked his pockets. He went and got the gold watch off the shelf near the phone. Thanks for everything, Uncle Omar, he thought.

"How far to that Marina?"

"Ten minutes, about."

Before they went out, he kissed her. They held each other tightly for a few moments. She looked up at him. "Fun?"

"More than I can say."

"I could get a little weepy over you, Kirby. Let's go."

The Sunbeam roadster was, he guessed, about three years old, dinged, dirty and beginning to rust out. But the engine roared immediately, and she yanked it around a corner like a toy on the end of a string. He clapped his hat back on just in time. It was almost nine o'clock. She drove with her brown hands high on the wheel, chin up, eyes slitted, cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She shifted up and shifted down, and danced in and out of the lines of morning traffic with what at first seemed like terrifying abandon, but he soon recognized as such skill that he felt entirely safe in the noisy little yellow car.

She cut through to the waterfront, turned north and went three blocks, and when she began to downshift he saw the big Marina sign and all the pleasure craft at the wide docks. Suddenly she gunned it and went on by, and he saw the prowl cars at the curb and saw the uniformed men on the dock. She turned the next corner, braked, and tucked the little car into a parking slot.

"That door there is shut and locked," she said. "I don't know what the h.e.l.l to do!" "Just sit tight and let Bonny Lee find out for sure. What's the boat?"

"The Glorianna."

She found a newspaper under the seat and handed it to him. "Hide behind this, sugar. Be right on back."

She was gone for a full fifteen unbearable minutes. Then she piled into the car and drove away from there. She headed west, found a shopping center, parked amid the other cars.

"It took me a time, Kirby, to single me out a cute cop and get him a-coming over to me to show off how big he is. That Glorianna, she took off twenty minutes ago and those cops got there ten minutes too late. Now as near as I can tell, what happened is they found out a lot of your stuff was moved out of some cruddy hotel, and it took time to track it down, and they found it got took to that Marina and put aboard the Glorianna. So they figure you're on it and they got you nailed good, because they got the Coast Guard looking already and they'll pick it up any time. It's a big old son of a gun the man there said. You know, they got the idea that twenty-seven million got put aboard, and they're all standing around so sweaty they can't hardly stand it. It wouldn't hurt me a bit to know what did get moved onto it, sugar."

"Personal junk. Total cash value, maybe two hundred tops. There's even a pair of ice skates."

Her eyes looked startled. "Shees marie.Ice skates!" "I've got no place to turn, Bonny Lee." "I should truly like to hear from the beginning. Should we go back to Bernie's?"

"I'd rather not go back there."

"All we need is a place to talk, for now. And the last place they'd look I'd say is a public beach. Okay?"

"Okay, Bonny Lee."

The noise of the little car eliminated any chance of conversation. She drove over to the beach and headed north. By ten o'clock they were on a cement bench in a small open pavilion, looking out across a wide beach toward the curl and thud of the blue Atlantic waves. Though it was a Tuesday morning in April, there were hundreds of people on the beach. He was beginning to feel depressed and helpless.

"You load it all onto me, sugar, and then you get a new opinion."

He told her. He droned a leaden parade of facts, without color or hope. And in the telling of them, he disheartened himself even more. He took it from the first legal conference after the funeral right up to the morning phone call from Joseph.

He stared woodenly at her. "Think I should go try to explain?"