the back of the joint. Carey and I will take the front. We’ll make the play. You see that nobody leaks out on us. Forward march!”
The swarthy man and I headed for the front porch—a wide porch, grown over with vines on the side, yellowly illuminated now by the light that came through four curtained French windows.
We hadn’t taken our first steps across the porch when one of these tall windows moved—opened.
The first thing I saw was Jack Counihan’s back.
He was pushing the casement open with a hand and foot, not turning his head.
Beyond the boy—facing him across the brightly lighted room—stood a man and a woman. The man was old, small, scrawny, wrinkled, pitifully frightened—Papadopoulos. I saw he had shaved off his straggly white mustache. The woman was tall, full-bodied, pink-fleshed and yellow-haired—a she-athlete of forty with clear gray eyes set deep in a handsome brutal face—Big Flora Brace. They stood very still, side by side, watching the muzzle of Jack Counihan’s gun.
While I stood in front of the window looking at this scene, Tom-Tom Carey, his two guns up, stepped past me, going through the tall window to the boy’s side. I did not follow him into the room.
Papadopoulos’ scary brown eyes darted to the swarthy man’s face. Flora’s gray ones moved there deliberately, and then looked past him to me.
“Hold it, everybody!” I ordered, and moved away from the window, to the side of the porch where the vines were thinnest.
Leaning out between the vines, so my face was clear in the moonlight, I looked down the side of the building. A shadow in the shadow of the