“What are you up to?” Tom-Tom Carey asked suspiciously when I rejoined Jack and him.
“Detective business.”
“I ought to have come down and turned the trick all by myself,” he grumbled. “You haven’t done a damned thing but waste time since we started.”
“I’m not the one that’s wasting it now.”
He snorted and set out across the field again, Jack and I following him. At the end of the field there was another fence to be climbed. Then we came over a little wooded ridge and the Newhall house lay before us—a large white house, glistening in the moonlight, with yellow rectangulars where blinds were down over the windows of lighted rooms. The lighted rooms were on the ground floor. The upper floor was dark. Everything was quiet.
“Damn the moonlight!” Tom-Tom Carey repeated, bringing another automatic out of his clothes, so that he now had one in each hand.
Jack started to take his gun out, looked at me, saw I was letting mine rest, let his slide back in his pocket.
Tom-Tom Carey’s face was a dark stone mask—slits for eyes, slit for mouth—the grim mask of a manhunter, a mankiller. He was breathing softly, his big chest moving gently. Beside him, Jack Counihan looked like an excited schoolboy. His face was ghastly, his eyes all stretched out of shape, and he was breathing like a tire-pump. But his grin was genuine, for all the nervousness in it.