“Do I know them?” she asked, too casually, as she turned the car into a narrower and rougher road.
“Let it alone, kid,” Reno said. “Better get as much out of the heap as it’s got.”
She prodded another fifteen miles an hour out of the Marmon. She had plenty to do now holding the car to the road, and Reno had plenty holding himself to the car. Neither of them made any more conversation until the road brought us into one that had more and better paving.
Then he asked:
“So you paid Whisper off?”
“Um-hmm.”
“They’re saying you turned rat on him.”
“They would. What do you think?”
“Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me.”
He looked at me while he said it. He was a man of thirty-four or -five, fairly tall, broad and heavy without fat. His eyes were large, brown, dull, and set far apart in a long, slightly sallow horse face. It was a humorless face, stolid, but somehow not unpleasant. I looked at him and said nothing.
The girl said: “If that’s the way you feel about it, you can—”
“Look out,” Reno grunted.
We had swung around a curve. A long black car was straight across the road ahead of us—a barricade.