I knocked him on the noodle with my borrowed crutch.
The crutch splintered apart. Flippo’s knees bent. He stretched up to his full height. He fell on his face on the floor. He lay there, dead-still, except for a thin worm of blood that crawled out of his hair to the rug.
A step, a tumble, a foot or so of hand-and-knee scrambling put me within reach of Flippo’s gun.
The girl, jumping out of my path, was halfway to the door when I sat up with the gun in my hand.
“Stop!” I ordered.
“I shan’t,” she said, but she did, for the time at least. “I am going out.”
“You are going out when I take you.”
She laughed, a pleasant laugh, low and confident.
“I’m going out before that,” she insisted good-naturedly.
I shook my head.
“How do you purpose stopping me?” she asked.
“I don’t think I’ll have to,” I told her. “You’ve got too much sense to try to run while I’m holding a gun on you.”
She laughed again, an amused ripple.
“I’ve got too much sense to stay,” she corrected me. “Your crutch is broken, and you’re lame. You can’t catch me by running after me, then. You pretend you’ll shoot me, but I don’t believe you. You’d shoot me if I attacked you, of course, but I shan’t do that. I shall simply walk out, and you know you won’t shoot me for that. You’ll wish you could, but you won’t. You’ll see.”