Carey nodded his head without turning it, and, when we had gone another quarter-mile, said: “Right here.”
We rode a little slower now, and Carey turned off his lights. In the road that was half moon-silver, half shadow-gray, the machine barely crept along for perhaps a mile. We stopped in the shade of tall shrubs that darkened a spot of the road.
“All ashore that’s going ashore,” Tom-Tom Carey said, and got out of the car.
Jack and I followed him. Carey took off his overcoat and threw it into the machine.
“The place is just around the bend, back from the road,” he told us. “Damn this moon! I was counting on fog.”
I said nothing, nor did Jack. The boy’s face was white and excited.
“We’ll beeline it,” Carey said, leading the way across the road to a high wire fence.
He went over the fence first, then Jack, then—the sound of someone coming along the road from ahead stopped me. Signalling silence to the two men on the other side of the fence, I made myself small beside a bush. The coming steps were light, quick, feminine.
A girl came into the moonlight just ahead. She was a girl of twenty-something, neither tall nor short, thin nor plump. She was short-skirted, bare-haired, sweatered. Terror was in her white face, in the carriage of her hurrying figure—but something else was there too—more beauty than a middle-aged sleuth was used to seeing.
When she saw Carey’s automobile bulking in the shadow, she stopped abruptly, with a gasp that was almost a cry.