Fifteen minutes later the shabby little old man came running into the kitchen, saying he had heard feet on the roof. His faded brown eyes were dull as an ox’s with fright, and his withered lips writhed under his straggly yellow-white mustache.
Flora profanely called him a this-and-that kind of old one-thing-and-another and chased him upstairs again. She got up from the table and pulled the green kimono tight around her big body.
“You’re here,” she told me, “and you’ll put in with us. There’s no other way. Got a rod?”
I admitted I had a gun but shook my head at the rest of it.
“This is not my wake—yet,” I said. “It’ll take one hundred and fifty thousand berries, spot cash, paid in the hand, to buy Percy in on it.”
I wanted to know if the loot was on the premises.
Nancy Regan’s tearful voice came from the stairs:
“No, no, darling! Please, please, go back to bed! You’ll kill yourself, Reddy, dear!”
Red O’Leary strode into the kitchen. He was naked except for a pair of gray pants and his bandage. His eyes were feverish and happy. His dry lips were stretched in a grin. He had a gun in his left hand. His right arm hung useless. Behind him trotted Nancy. She stopped pleading and shrank behind him when she saw Big Flora.
“Ring the gong, and let’s go,” the half-naked redhead laughed. “Vance is in our street.”