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“Are you suggesting the five of us can’t handle one seventeen-year-old girl?” Floyd aimed a slow wink at Theodore, who uttered a penetrating rasp of a laugh.
Mitch looked at the others, suppressing a sense of panic. He saw no help anywhere. Georgie’s eyes weren’t tracking quite right but even so he was pointedly avoiding Mitch’s gaze. Theodore and Billie Jean moved forward and fixed themselves to Floyd. Dark sweat-circles stained the armpits of Theodore’s T-shirt. Mitch felt his face color under Theodore’s ugly one-eyed stare.
Floyd smiled and reached out suddenly, gripping Mitch’s arm. The steel fingers bit into Mitch’s flesh, the thumb casually working cartilage against bone. Mitch burst out in a gray sweat. Floyd said softly, “I need you to make it work, Mitch.”
“I—”
“You’ll do it. You didn’t like grinding your life away in school, did you? You don’t want to starve on the beer circuit, do you? It’s the best opportunity anybody ever offered you.”
“I never did anything like that in my life,” Mitch said weakly. “I never even thought about it before.”
“It’s a me-first world, Mitch. You take what you can grab.”
Theodore said, “If Floyd says we need you then you do like he says. Or we turn out your lights, see?”
Floyd turned his arm loose. Mitch rubbed the pain abstractedly. He wasn’t looking at anybody. He could hear the ragged sawing of Theodore’s breathing.
He said, “All right—all right. Hell, why not?”
Floyd smiled. “That’s the way.” Then, turning away, he stopped to look at Mitch once more, and asked merrily, “Am I not a son of a bitch, Mitch?” He laughed.
Mitch nodded with little jerks of his head. He knew what he was going to do anyway. He was going to get loose of them the first chance he saw and make a run for it.
C H A P T E R Four
Earle Co
Twenty-three years ago Oakley, the young GI-Bill lawyer, had met Earle Co
Oakley had met him in a poker game. By 1949 he had won two lawsuits for Co
Since the end of the war in Korea Earle Co
Oakley had traveled the whole route with him. His personal fortunes had massed, the result of abundant salary and generous bonuses; if remaining a mere salaried employee disturbed him he gave no indication of it. Co
Today Oakley had come down from Phoenix in two hours, been met by Co
The house was cooled by a seven-ton air-conditioning plant concealed in oleander bushes beyond the swimming pool; the corridor was noiselessly cool in spite of the hundred-degree heat outside. Oakley’s moccasins flipflopped along the carpeted hundred feet of hallway to the huge front room, where Louise stood petulantly arranging flowers in a vase. Either she hadn’t seen him or she was pretending to be unaware of his approach. She moved around the vase, inspecting it from various angles, moving slowly because it was more graceful; almost everything Louise did was studied. She was only twenty-eight. Co
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