“I was scared.”

  He kissed her again. Her mouth was not so cold this time. He said, “We were both scared.”

  “What was it about?”

  “I’m damned if I know.”

  He bent his head to kiss her a third time, and was pleased to find a reasonable amount of fire in her response. Everything was going to be all right.

  “I thought you were going to hit him. You were so mad.”

  “I intended to hit him. I changed my mind when I turned around and saw rat-face. He had a gun.”

  “Whit!” Kitty jerked her head up from his shoulder.

  “He sure did. It was staring me right in the belly-button, too. I damn near fainted.”

  Kitty said shakily. “Oh, my. What a wedding night. Let's get out of here, quick.”

  Whit released her and started the car. “They’re not after us. You don’t need to worry now.”

  “I’m not worried. I want to get back to Reno.”

  “Sleepy?”

  “I’ll never be able to sleep again. I just want to go to some place where I can see people – a lot of nice, plain, ordinary people.”

  Walter Gates gave Pop Foster a bad few minutes after the visitors had gone, but although he hammered questions at him mercilessly he could not shake Pop’s story that the old man had not seen Whit nor heard from him for two or three years. Pop was wrung out like a rag when Gates finally dismissed him and sent him to bed. Gates himself stayed downstairs. He had to think.

  Sammy Kohler did not know how to think, but he had ideas and he liked to talk. Gates gave him no encouragement. He answered Sammy either in monosyllables or not at all. Sammy eventually gave up, wrapped himself in his blankets, and went to sleep on the red plush settee.

  Gates sat for a while looking at the flicker of flames in the isinglass peephole of the stove. When Sammy had begun to breathe noisily through his mouth, Gates went to the back of the hallway, where there was a telephone in a cubby-hole under the stairs.

  The bell rang several times at the far end, after he put in his call. Finally a man’s sleepy voice said, “Hello.”

  “This is Walter Gates, Jess. I want to talk to you.”

  The man at the other end of the line woke up quickly. “What’s happened?”

  “Not on the phone. I’m coming into town right away. Wait up for me.”

  Gates hung up, without waiting for an answer, and went to get his clothes.

  There was a Ford delivery truck in the garage at the back of the yard, behind the cottage. The dog chained near the house lifted his head and growled as Gates came out of the back door, but Gates spoke to him sharply and the dog was quiet. Gates got the delivery truck out of the garage and drove away in the direction of Reno. '

  The light truck made good time on the empty highway. Twenty minutes after he left Verdi, Gates parked near an apartment house on the heights overlooking downtown Reno from the south side of the river. The neighborhood was much too swank for a shabby delivery truck. Gates did not stop directly in front of the apartment house, but left the truck around the^ corner, where it would be in the shadow. He walked back to the apartment house and looked around carefully before he pressed one of the buttons under the bank of mail boxes in the doorway. The electrically controlled door-latch clicked open immediately.

  An automatic elevator took him to the apartment on the top floor of the building. The man who waited for him there in pajamas and a dressing-gown was the man who had been with Gates and Sammy Kohler when they watched the chubby stranger die on the packing cases six days earlier.

  There were no greetings exchanged. Gates said, “I think we’re going to have trouble.”

  “What happened?”

  “A young fellow came to Foster’s house with a girl, about an hour ago. They said they wanted to get married. He knew Foster, and Foster swears he’s known him all his life, but when it came to the ceremony they didn’t have a license. It looked to me as if they might have come to see what information they could get from Foster, not expecting to find anyone else there, and thought up an excuse on the spur of the moment when they saw what they were up against.”

  “They’re clever enough not to send anyone without a more Convincing story than that.”

  “They’re clever enough so that we can’t take chances. I want you to pick up this fellow – his name’s Whitney – and see what you can learn.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Here in Reno. He and the girl left Foster’s house an hour ago.”

  The other man’s face showed his surprise. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “I’m not going to stop anything or start anything until I have more to go on. They said they were coming into town to kill time until the county clerk’s office opens, and if they do you’ll be able to find them somewhere on Virginia Street. I want to know if they get married.”

  “A wedding wouldn’t prove anything. They’d go through with it to keep up the bluff, if they thought they had to.”

  “They might. But if there isn’t a wedding, I’ll know what to do about it. We could get some useful information from Whitney if he’s what I think he is.”

  “Have you talked to Renzo? He gets most of the luxury trade in town when it’s this late.”

  “I’ll call him while you’re getting dressed. Hurry it up.”

  Gates went to the telephone across the room. The other man hesitated, as if he were going to protest against being dragged out in the middle of the night. Then, as Gates made an impatient gesture, he went into the bedroom.

  Gates had to give his name when his call was answered, and wait a few minutes until his man came to the phone. He said, “This is Walter Gates. I want you to watch for a man and a girl who may turn up there this morning. He’s big – six feet or better, heavy, dark hair, clean shaven, about thirty-five. He’s wearing a brown sports coat and slacks. The girl is a brunette, pretty, looks like money and class. Fur coat and black dress.” The man at the other end of the line said, “I’ll look for them. But I’ve got a girl of my own here who might develop into something entertaining, Walter. I don’t want to—”

  Gates cut him off. “Forget about your floozies and do what you’re told. If you see these people, keep them entertained until Jess gets there to take over. This is important.”

  “All right, all right. What’s up?”

  “Trouble.”

  Gates put the phone back in its cradle and went into the bedroom.

  CHAPTER 4

  THERE were not very many towns where Kitty could have found a lot of nice plain ordinary people to mingle with at the shank-end of the morning. Reno was one of the few.

  The joints lining Virginia and Centre streets had adopted twenty-four-hour-seven-day operations long before other and more essential industries had got around to it as a result of the war effort. Most of the loot that flowed across the gambling tables into the hands of the local operators came from the transient trade, and the transient trade often didn’t have much time to waste losing its money. Since all of the games were reasonably honest, only time and the house percentage worked against the customers, and every hour that a gambling joint shut down was money out of pocket. As a result, there were no shut-downs.

  Whit and Kitty picked the dive nearest to the spot where they parked the car upon their return to Reno. They headed first for the bar. Kitty was not a drinking woman ordinarily – not at such an uncivilized hour, anyway – but her nerves were still twanging from her experience with the mysterious Walter Gates and company, and she needed something to tune them down. Whit would drink anything, any time, and particularly after strange weasels had just finished poking guns at him, so they sat on a couple of nice plain ordinary stools at the nice plain ordinary bar and ordered a couple of double highballs from a bartender who looked like a nice plain ordinary cutthroat. The bar was not very well patronized at that hour, but there were plenty of people nearby at the dice-tables and the blackjack layouts. It was just like being home again.

  Neither of them had anything to say until the first drink began to get in its foul work on their stomach linings. Then Kitty looked around the smoky room and said contentedly, “Oh, my, this is lovely.”

  “It’s an improvement.” Whit motioned to the bartender. “Do it again, will you? Put some liquor in them this time.”

  It hurt the bartender’s feelings. He took the empty glasses away, filled them with whisky, sprayed the whisky with a thin film of seltzer water, and brought the glasses back. Whit tasted the drink and nodded.

  “That’s better. Here’s to your bonny blue eyes, Mrs. Whitney-to-be.”

  “I’ll drink to my bonny blue eyes. But I’m not going to be Mrs. Whitney if we have to go back to that place to be married. I’d rather live in sin.”

  “We won’t go back.”

  “Have you any idea what it was all about?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did that nasty little man really have a gun?”

  “Yep. He wanted to use it, too. He was waiting for the other guy to give him the word:”

  Kitty shuddered. She drank half of her second drink in a gulp, without tasting it.

  Whit said, “I sure wish I could figure it out. The whole setup was funny; those lights, and the dog, and the way what’s-his-name – Gates – watched us all the time. And Pop was scared silly. He’s changed a lot since I saw him last, Kitty. Something has been going on for a long time, to make him look so bad.”

  “He was certainly frightened, poor man.”

  Whit contemplatively twirled his glass. “I ought to try to find out what’s bothering him.”

  “Whit, if you go back to that place again, I’ll leave you.”

  “You can’t leave me legally until you marry me. And I didn’t say I was going back. I just thought I ought to try to help Pop out of whatever spot he’s in, if I can. He and my old man were pretty good friends.”

  “Don’t talk about it tonight,” Kitty said. “I’m just now getting over the jitters. Let’s go play roulette for a while, until it’s time to get the license. We can think about Pop afterward. Please.”

  “O.K.”

  They had another drink and left the bar, mildly cockeyed. They both felt much better for it.

  The roulette wheel took twenty dollars of Whit’s money and paid it over to Kitty with a little extra to boot. Whit was disgusted. He played roulette with an accountant’s eye on the percentages, while Kitty chunked her money in on any number that struck her fancy, and the longer the odds the better. Whit finally came to the conclusion that the wheel hadn’t heard of the law of probabilities. He left Kitty optimistically stacking chips on the double zero, and wandered away to the nearest crap table.

  The dice hadn’t heard of the law of probabilities either. After another twenty dollars’ worth of bad luck, Whit went back to gather up Kitty and her winnings. She was ahead considerably more than he had lost, and he spent a futile few minutes trying to convince her that since they were practically married, the money was community property under Nevada law and therefore half his. She wouldn’t fall for it. They moved down the street to the next place.

  It was the same story there, only it didn’t take so long for Whit to lose his money with the dice, or for Kitty to hit a preposterous seventeen-to-one shot at the wheel. She baulked at being dragged away while she was winning, but Whit was determined to find a pair of hot dice somewhere. As a C.P.A. and a mathematician, he knew he would lose his shirt sooner or later if he bucked the house percentage, but as a confirmed gambler he was sure that he could find the right combination if he kept trying. Also, the place they were in didn’t have a bar attached, and he was getting dry.

  The sky was beginning to turn grey in the east when they got out in the street. Their next stop was at an ultra-ultra dive flaunting the name LORENZO’S CLUB. The management went in for thick carpets, evening clothes on the bouncers, a dance floor for those customers who wanted more exercise than they could get pulling the handle of a slot machine – there were none at that late hour – and a hat-check girl in very short skirts. The skirts were justified by the most elegant legs that Whit had seen in years of research. He whinnied gently under his breath when the girl gave him a check and a smile and went away with the coats.

  Kitty said, “Stop it.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Stop acting like a goat every time you see something female.”

  “I wasn’t acting like a goat. I was just thinking.”

  “Well, stop thinking.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Kitty headed for the roulette table, over his protests, and the vicious circle began again. Whit’s money moved from his hands into the croupier’s bank and back to Kitty. It didn’t make him feel better because she won more than he lost. She wasn’t scientific but she was hot. Whit finally gave up his scientific betting and put his chips where Kitty put hers, just to see if he could capitalize on her streak. They both lost. She chased him away.

  He made a detour to the change booth for more working capital and arrived at the dice games with a pocketful of silver dollars. Two tables were open to crap shooters. One of them was run by a henna-haired female with a hard face who was getting a play from three or four night-owls when Whit arrived. The other was unpatronized, possibly because the houseman was a house-man and not a woman. The red-head was no glamour girl, but Whit didn’t want to take a chance that Kitty would accuse him of acting like a goat again. He picked the unpopular table.

  The house-man without customers was a slim young fellow with slick blond hair, a pool-room pallor, and a short apron. He was killing time by flipping a pair of dice along the side of the boxed-in table so that they spun like tops on the green felt. He looked up as Whit approached.

  “Morning.” The dice danced across the table and spun to a stop in front of Whit. “Crowd right in, mister. It’s your turn.”

  “Heavy business tonight?”

  “It’s usually slack about this time. The night-hawks are folding up, and the morning crowd comes in after breakfast.”

  “I’ll give you a little trade for a while. How about fading a couple of bucks?”

  The house-man patted the rack of coins in front of him. It held two or three hundred dollars in silver. “I guess I can handle it. Roll them out.”

  Whit rolled them out.

  He had an entertaining few minutes for his pocketful of dollars, but the law of probabilities was still suspended. The dice did everything but bite his fingers. When he had lost his pocketful of coins and another pocketful he got in exchange for a bill, the house-man bought him a drink and joined him with a Coca-Cola.

  “That’s quite a streak you had there, mister,” he said. “I never saw anyone lay so many eggs in a row before. You must have done something real bad in your lifetime.”

  “I’m lucky at love,” Whit said drearily. “I can’t win.”

  “I thought that just cooled you off at cards.”

  “Cards, dice, matching pennies, mumbly-peg, it’s all the same.”

  “She must be a queen, to make you that salty.”

  “She is.” Whit jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Over by the roulette wheel, if you’re curious.”

  The house-man looked over by the roulette wheel. “The brunette in the black dress?”

  “That’s her.”

  “She’s worth losing money for. But if I were you I wouldn’t crowd my good luck too far, mister. Not around here. The guy she’s talking to is a wolf.”

  Whit turned around.

  He hadn’t been keeping an eye on Kitty while the dice were growling at him, and meanwhile things were going on behind his back. The roulette table had become very popular since he left it. Kitty had been joined by two men and a girl in evening clothes, and seemed to be on friendly terms with all of them. The dice-man’s critical comment had been directed at one of the men, a Latin menace in a white-tie and tail-coat.

  Whit wasn’t worried about anybody poaching on his territory – Kitty had pinned back wolf-ears before, without help -but he was mildly curious. He said, “Who’s the pretty boy?”

  “He owns the place. His name’s Lorenzo Colusa, and I wouldn’t trust him within twenty feet of my seventy-nine-year-old grandmother. If you know what I mean.”

  “Uh huh. Who are the others?”

  “The guy is one of the regulars. The girl I’ve seen around a couple of times. I don’t know their names.”

  “Your boss probably just came around to see what had gone wrong with his roulette wheel. My girl has been milking the house all night.”

  The dice-man shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on it. Lorenzo kind of likes the way he gets along with the ladies.”

  “I’m not worried. Look, I’ll show you.”

  Whit took the remaining coins from his pocket, dropped them on the line, and simultaneously threw the dice he held in his other hand. They came up six-six at the far end of the table. The dice-man raked in the money.

  “See what I mean?” Whit said. “Lucky at love, damn it. Fat chance your boss has against that.”

  He walked away. The dice-man watched him join the group around the roulette wheel.

  Kitty’s hot streak was still holding up, and she had forgotten all about her experiences earlier in the evening. Her eyes sparkled with the excitement of gambling. She pointed to her stack of counters and crowed as Whit came up.

  “Look at that, I’m breaking the bank.”

  “That’ll help. I just lost enough to start a new one.”

  The Latin menace flashed his teeth at Whit. “That’s what keeps us in business.”

  Kitty made the introductions.

  “This is Mr. Colusa, Whit. Lorenzo of Lorenzo’s Club. He groans every time I. win. Miss Warren, Mr. Caldwell. Mr. Whitney.”

  “I haven’t groaned yet, but I may get to it.” Lorenzo of Lorenzo’s Club flashed his gorgeous teeth again as he shook Whit’s hand. “I’m happy to meet you, Mr. Whitney.”

  Whit said something polite, shook hands with the second man, and bowed to the girl.

  His reaction to everyone but the Latin menace was favorable. Lorenzo was too handsome. In addition to the teeth, he had beautiful wavy black hair and a profile. The other man seemed like a fair kind of Joe Doakes; not handsome, not homely, not big, not little. The person who impressed Whit most was Miss Warren. He wondered what Kitty would do if he whinnied.