“Oh, I’ve seen it often. I know he always carries one there. I didn’t see it last night, but I know he never wears an overcoat without it.”
“Why all the guns?”
“He lived by them. There was a story in Hong Kong that he had come out there, to the Orient, as bodyguard to a gambler who had had to leave the States, and that the gambler had since disappeared. They said Floyd knew about his disappearing. I don’t know. I do know that he always went heavily armed and that he never went to sleep without covering the floor around his bed with crumpled newspaper so nobody could come silently into his room.”
“You picked a nice sort of playmate.”
“Only that sort could have helped me,” she said simply, “if he had been loyal.”
“Yes, if.” Spade pinched his lower lip between finger and thumb and looked gloomily at her. The vertical creases over his nose deepened, drawing his brows together. “How bad a hole are you actually in?”
“As bad,” she said, “as could be.”
“Physical danger?”
“I’m not heroic. I don’t think there’s anything worse than death.”
“Then it’s that?”
“It’s that as surely as we’re sitting here”—she shivered—“unless you help me.”
He took his fingers away from his mouth and ran them through his hair. “I’m not Christ,” he said irritably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin air.”