“I didn’t have time.”

She stared at him a moment and turned away.

“I got hung up with work,” Ryan said, following Nancy down to the lower level, to the activities room bar, then through the sliding screen doors out to the patio: Ryan watched her drop the purse on the umbrella table.

“Is it loaded?”

She was facing him now, her cool look gone and smiling a little. “Of course it’s loaded.”

“What kind is it?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You going to shoot something?”

“We could. Windows are good.”

“We’ve done windows.”

“Not with a gun.”

“Have you?”

“Not in a while. Hey, are you hungry?”

“I guess so. Were the windows around here?”

“Uh-huh, when I first came up. I knew there wouldn’t be anything to do.”

“So you brought a gun to shoot at windows.”

“And boats. Boats are fun.”

“I imagine they would be. How about cars?”

“I didn’t think about cars.” She seemed pleasantly surprised. “Isn’t that funny?”

“Yeah, that is funny.”

“I just wanted you to know we have it.”

“There’s a difference,” Ryan said, “between breaking and entering and armed robbery.”

“And there’s a difference between seventy-eight dollars and fifty thousand dollars,” Nancy said. “How badly do you want it?”

The telephone rang in the activities room. Nancy’s gaze held on Ryan; she was watching for his reaction. He showed nothing, keeping his eyes on hers, and she smiled a little and walked off.

When she was inside, Ryan took the long-barreled target pistol out of her purse. He knew the kind; he’d sold them at the sporting goods store. He extended his arm, aiming and putting the front sight on the lamppost. He pulled the clip out of the polished hickory grip; it was loaded, all right. Then he shoved it back in and returned the gun to her purse.

He walked out by the swimming pool with his hands in his pockets, past the swimming pool and across the lawn. He could still feel the polished grip in his hand and the balanced weight of the gun. He saw himself pulling the gun out of his raincoat as he walked up to the cashier’s window-not a bank, God no-a small loan company like the one Bud Long worked for, with two or three people behind the counter. As he pulled the gun Leon Woody would turn from where he was filling out a loan application and go over the counter and clean the place. They would have studied the place and timed it so that he’d walk in a few minutes before closing. Hit the place and then get out fast. They had talked about it once. Just once. Because it would be robbery, armed, and it could take all the nerve they had ever used during all the B& E’s put together and it still might not be enough to go in with a gun.

He walked to the edge of the lawn, to the bluff that dropped steeply to the beach, down to all the sand and water. The boat was gone; the guy from the club must have come and picked it up.

It was quiet and the grass felt good. He turned and started back. It was a funny thing, he had never in his life cut grass. The lawn had been cut recently and it was better than any infield he had ever played on. You would have to play the ball different on grass like this; it would skid and take low hops. You’d have to get used to playing it and then it wouldn’t be too bad.

Nancy was on the patio holding a tray, placing it on the umbrella table now and looking out toward him.

He felt all right but not completely at ease. It was a before-the-game feeling, or a walking-through-somebody’s-house feeling. He wouldn’t show it; he’d had enough practice not showing it; but he couldn’t do anything about the feeling being there. The girl and the swimming pool and the patio, but something was wrong. For some reason it wasn’t as good as sitting in the Pier Bar at six o’clock with an ice cold beer and not having to think about anything.

“Beer or Cold Duck?” Nancy was waiting for him with two bottles of beer on the tray, a bottle of mixed Cold Duck, and a pasteboard bucket of fried chicken. “I phoned for it,” Nancy said. “It isn’t very good chicken, but I didn’t imagine you’d be taking me out to dinner.”

Ryan opened a beer and sat down in a canvas chair. He lit a cigarette and now he waited. But she outwaited him and he said, “Who was it? Ray?”

“Ray called this afternoon. It was Bob Junior,” Nancy said. “He wants to come over.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’m tired and I’m going to bed early. He said something clever and I told him if I saw his truck drive up, I’d call his wife.”

“I don’t get that,” Ryan said, “going out with him.”

“It was something to do.” She was pouring a glass of Cold Duck at the table. “I guess to see if he had the nerve more than anything else.”

“You’ve got a thing about nerve.”

She turned with the glass in her hand. “What else is there? I mean, that you can count on.”

“What if your nerve gets you in trouble? What if Ray finds out?”

“About Bob Junior?”

“Of if somebody tells him they saw us together.”

Nancy shrugged, the little girl movement again. “I don’t know. I’d think of something.” She pulled a chair close to his and sat down. “Why all the questions? A little nervous, Charlie?”

“You said Ray called earlier.”

“He won’t be up until Saturday. He has to go to Cleveland.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’ll be in Cleveland and won’t be here Friday night. How does that grab you?”

“But the money will.”

“It has to be if they pay them Saturday.” Nancy waited. “That’s why I’ve decided we should sneak in the lodge tonight.”

Ryan shook his head. “Not till I look at it in the day.”

“You’ve seen it before.”

“Not with this in mind.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” Nancy said. “Sneaking in and going through it in the dark.”

“Tomorrow’s my day off,” Ryan said. “I can go over sometime tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’ll go with you. Then we’ll sneak in tomorrow night.”

He wished he could ruffle her, shake her up a little. “It might not work,” Ryan said. “You know there’s that possibility.”

“But we’ll never know unless we try,” Nancy said. “Will we?”

Ryan ate some of the chicken and with the second bottle of beer began to relax. But as he relaxed he became aware of something happening. Nancy sat next to him, facing him, a brown knee almost touching his chair. She would hold a piece of chicken in both hands and take little bites as she watched him. She would sip her wine and look at him over the rim of the glass. She would move her hair from her eye and let it fall back again. They ate in silence and he let it work on him. Sitting low in the chair and now lighting a cigarette, aware of the dark-haired girl close to him, giving him the business, and Ryan said to himself: You are being set up.

He was being offered the bait, shown what it would be like. He had been taken up on a high mountain by Ann-Margret and was being shown all the kingdoms of the world, all that could be his. While off from them, across clean tile, the underwater lights of the swimming pool glowed in the dusk.

How do you get that sure of yourself? Ryan thought.

And then he thought, She makes it look easy.

She’ll do it one time and get fifty grand and never know it’s hard.

He could break into a place and Leon Woody could break into a place and all kinds of other guys could break into places, most of the guys pretty dumb or strung out, but that didn’t mean she could do it. It wasn’t like throwing rocks and running, it wasn’t a game; it was real and maybe she could do it without clutching up, but how did she know until she had done it and found out what it was like? That’s what got him. If it was so easy, what did she need him for? Like he was some stiff she was hiring to do the heavy work. Like she could do it, but she didn’t want to strain herself and get a hernia.

Ryan said, “If you were going to break into a place, how would you do it?”