About noon by the sun, with a look compounded of the irascible and the hangdog, Mitch uncoiled his length and went inside, leaving her alone. She didn’t stir. In a little while he returned with an army-style mess kit of cold food out of cans, handed it to her without a word and went back to his post.

Floyd, the dark evil one, came out and stood on the porch and stretched like a cat. When he glanced at her she felt mesmerized by his cold eyes. Floyd had a driving, brutal, elemental thrust of granite personality. His magnetism, in spite of it, was uncanny—repellent and fascinating at once: the charismatic impact of raw unshielded masculinity, erotic and frightening.

The pulse throbbed at Terry’s throat. She addressed herself to her meal, keenly aware that Floyd was watching her with cynical vicious amusement.

The girl, Billie Jean, appeared behind Floyd, filling the caved-in doorway with her body, all meaty thighs and bovine lactic breasts which bobbed and surged with her movements. She studied Floyd’s back for a while before she stepped out and passed Floyd with a slow flirt of the shoulder, grinning. Floyd casually reached out and rubbed her breast. “You’re a fire hazard, Billie Jean.” It made her laugh.

“How about a jab in the fun hole, Floyd?”

“Later—later.”

Disappointed, Billie Jean moved away, dropping off the porch into the sunshine and wandering aimlessly up the street. Floyd said, “Stay close.”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” she said petulantly.

“If you hear an airplane or a car duck inside a building and stay out of sight.”

“I know,” she pouted, and ambled away.

Floyd turned toward Mitch and spoke as if Terry weren’t there: “I’m going to make a phone call, arrange for the drop. Keep things under control.”

“What if I can’t?”

“That’s up to you,” Floyd said. “If you fall you break, Mitch. Law of gravity.” His unrevealing eyes touched Terry briefly; his mouth smiled frighteningly and then, according to his bewildering intricacy of thought, it was time to go: he jumped catlike from the porch and trotted across the street into the barn. Shortly he came out, driving the dusty Oldsmobile, and put it into the central powder of the street, rumbling away.

In the stretching quiet that followed, an overwhelming anxiety slowly poisoned what was left of Terry’s willed patience. Unable to remain still any longer she got up. Her knees felt weak. She stepped hesitantly toward the edge of the porch, waiting to see how Mitch would respond. He didn’t get up; only his head turned to indicate his interest in her movements. She stepped down into the sunshine and walked very slowly along the street.

She had gone twenty or thirty paces when Mitch caught up with her. He didn’t touch her; he fell into step beside her and said, “I hope you don’t mind if I walk along with you.”

A sharp report rose to her lips but died stillborn. When she looked at him, his eyes were kind. She thought, I need any friends I can get. Yet in the back of her mind she couldn’t help thinking of stories she had heard about policemen and confidence men and spies—evil men working in teams, one partner softening you up with friendliness while the other stood ready to pounce. She couldn’t see what they stood to gain by that kind of tactic in her case but just the same she couldn’t begin to trust Mitch. He was, after all, one of them.

She searched his face with an odd intensity. “You hate him, don’t you?”

“He makes it easy.” Neither of them mentioned Floyd’s name; it wasn’t necessary. Mitch said, “For seven cents he’d hang his own mother on a meathook.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To keep you alive.” He laughed dispiritedly. “This wasn’t my idea, this kidnaping thing. I want you to know that. I tried to stop them from doing it. Well, maybe I didn’t try all that hard, but I didn’t want them to. I wanted to get away. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

The words tumbled out of him. She said afterward, “I’d like to believe you but you’re here. You haven’t run away. Nothing’s stopping you.”

“You are,” he said. “If I bug out who’s left to keep Theodore away from you?”

She held herself rigidly aloof from him. “You don’t know how much I want to believe you. But—”

She didn’t finish it, and Mitch said dryly, “Yeah.” They went on, twenty yards in silence. “Well,” Mitch said awkwardly, and trailed off again. Then suddenly he stopped and frowned at her. “You worry me. You’re not behaving according to Freud.”

“Having hysterics, you mean? I’m on the verge of it, believe me.” She stepped closer to him and glanced back toward the mercantile. No one was in sight. “He terrifies me, honest to God. The weight of his eyes can buckle you—that horrible cold look of his. Is there anything we can do?”

“It’s hard to talk to Floyd. He listens to his own little voices—the line’s always busy.”

“He’s filth,” she said furiously. When she tilted her face down her hair swung out languorously; she brushed it back and laughed dispiritedly. “I’m putting myself on, aren’t I? Clutching at straws.”

“What straws?”

“Hoping for a minute that you were on my side.”

“I am,” he said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“We could run for it. Both of us—right now.”

“Fat chance.” He was looking back the way they had come. When she followed the direction of his glance she saw the two men standing on the porch—Georgie in his candy-striped shirt; Theodore, tugging at a thick black hair in his nostril. They were watching with fully focused attention. Mitch said, “We’d better get back before Theodore decides to start something. Like find out how much of a beating I can take.”

“Would he?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. He gets uptight easy. Sometimes he doesn’t remember things from one hour to the next but when it comes to grudges and sex he’s got a one-track mind like an elephant. Only he doesn’t think with it. He thinks with his fists.”

“Has he got a grudge against you?”

“More than one. For one thing he thinks he’d like to—well, wrestle you a little, you know?”

Rape me is what you mean. She folded her arms and hugged herself, flashing a quick furtive scrutiny at Theodore on the porch, trying to catch some hint of expression on his asymmetrical crippled face.

Mitch was still talking:

“He could use a few inhibitions. I don’t think he’s got any at all. The only thing that’s slowing him down is I’ve got this crummy kitchen knife in my belt and he’s not too sure how good I am with it. He knows he can take me regardless but he doesn’t want to get carved up in the process.”

“How good are you with it?”

“Probably lousy. The only thing I’ve ever used a knife for was peeling potatoes. Fortunately he doesn’t know that. But he keeps gnashing his teeth and sooner or later he’ll boil over and try something. He hates everybody—it’s only a matter of degree, it doesn’t take much—if your face isn’t all mangled and scarred up like his that’s enough to make him hate you, by itself.”

Terry shuddered involuntarily. They were walking very slowly back toward the store. On the porch Georgie Rymer said something to Theodore and turned back inside with a quick over-the-shoulder look, like the hasty bright-eyed glance of a heister peddling hot wristwatches near a traffic cop. Theodore watched him disappear, then pulled his head around toward Mitch and Terry. He had large greasy pores on his nose. His one good eye was bold and fierce. She glanced at Mitch and saw sweat burst out in beads on his upper lip.

When they reached the porch Mitch took the initiative, throwing Theodore off balance: “You let him go inside by himself—he’s probably rooting around trying to find the dope where Floyd hid it. You know Floyd told you not to let him alone in there.”

Taken aback, Theodore canceled whatever it was he had intended to say. He rolled his tongue around his misshapen lips; she saw spittle run from his mouth. He said, “Shit,” and wheeled inside, ducking to clear the fallen beam.