“Like where?” Rance said, dubious again. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

Penny shook her head. “No, I really mean it. How’s Tahiti sound? About as far away from Kansas as you can get, this side of Oz, anyway.”

Rance grunted thoughtfully. The outfit calling itself Free France still ran Tahiti and the neighboring islands. Neither the USA nor Japan had bothered gobbling them up, partly because that would have set the two at loggerheads, partly because the Free French made themselves very useful: they did business with everybody, people and Lizards alike, and didn’t ask questions of anybody.

“How would you like that?” Penny asked. “You could lay on the beach all day, suck up rum like it was going out of style, and smile at the native girls when they go by without their shirts on. And if you do anything more than smile at ’em, I’ll kick you right in the nuts.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” Auerbach said, and Penny laughed. Before he could say anything else, somebody knocked on the door. “Who the hell’s that?” he muttered, and made his slow way toward it. “It’s not like I get a whole lot of company.”

When he opened the door, he found two men standing in the hallway. One of them, a broad-shouldered, meaty fellow, put a big hand in the center of his chest and pushed, hard. With one bad leg under him, he went over backwards as if he’d been shot. As he fell, the muscular guy’s skinny pal said, “Don’t fuck with us, gimpy, and you’ll keep breathing. We’ve got some business to finish up with your lady friend. I bet you even know what we’re talking about, don’t you?”

Both bruisers started past him, certain Penny was there and also certain he was no danger to them. They’d likely been casing the joint, so their first certainty was accurate. Their second certainty, however, had some flaws. Rance had got used to wearing that.45 in the waistband of his trousers, and the reflexes he’d honed in the Army still worked. Even though both his leg and his shoulder bellowed at him when he hit, he had the heavy pistol in his hand less than a heartbeat later.

He fired without a word of warning. The.45 bucked in his grip. A hole appeared in the back of the heavy man’s jacket. Gore and guts blew out a much bigger hole in the front of his belly-the sort of hole, Auerbach knew from experience, you could throw a dog through.

The bruiser let out a hoarse scream and crumpled. His friend whirled, hand darting for a trouser pocket. He had commendably quick reflexes, but not quick enough to let him outdraw a gun already aimed at him. Auerbach’s first bullet caught him in the chest. He looked very surprised as he stood there swaying. Auerbach shot him again, this time in the face, and the back of his head exploded. He fell on top of the other thug, who was still writhing and shrieking. Auerbach smelled blood and shit and smokeless powder.

Penny came around the corner from the bedroom, pistol in her hand. She didn’t scream or puke or faint. She aimed the pistol at the head of the heavyset ruffian, the one Auerbach had shot from behind, plainly intending to finish him off.

“Don’t,” Rance told her. “Put your piece away. Go back into the bedroom and call the cops. If half a dozen people haven’t done it already, I’m a Chinaman. These two bastards broke in here intending to rob us or whatever the hell, and I plugged ’em. We don’t have to say a word about ginger.”

“Okay, Rance.” She nodded. The broad-shouldered goon had stopped moaning, anyhow; with a wound like that, he wouldn’t last long. “Keep an eye on ’em anyhow, just in case.”

“I will.” With his usual slow, painful movements, Auerbach levered himself up into a chair. He took a look at the carnage, then shook his head. “What do you want to bet the goddamn landlord tries to stick me with the bill for cleaning this up?”

Penny didn’t answer; she’d already gone back into the bedroom to use the telephone. One of Rance’s neighbors stuck her head into his apartment through the open doorway. She saw him before noticing anything else, and started to talk: “Howdy, Rance. Lucille said there was gunshots somewheres, but I told her it wasn’t nothin’ but firecra-” That was when she noticed the two blood-drenched corpses at the back of the living room. She turned white. “Oh, sweet, suffering Jesus!” she blurted, and got the hell out of there.

Auerbach laughed, but he sounded shaky even to himself. He felt shaky, too, as he had after combat against the Lizards. Reaction setting in, he thought. He was shaky; the.45 trembled in his hand. Deciding neither of the thugs was going to give him any more trouble, he put the safety back on.

From the bedroom, Penny called, “Cops are on the way. You were right-I wasn’t the first one who got through to them.” A minute or so later, Rance heard sirens coming closer. The police cars stopped in front of the apartment building.

Four cops in blue uniforms came running up the stairs, all of them carrying pistols. The first policeman into the apartment looked, whistled, and said over his shoulder, “We ain’t gonna need the ambulance, Eddie, just the coroner’s meat wagon.” He turned to Auerbach. “All right, buddy, what the hell happened here?”

Rance told him what had happened, though he made it sound as if he thought the dead men in his living room were a couple of ordinary robbers, not hired muscle for the ginger smugglers. Another policeman-Eddie? — stepped around the bodies and went to talk with Penny in the bedroom. After a while, he and the cop who’d been talking with Auerbach (his name was Charlie McMillan) put their heads together.

McMillan said, “You and your lady friend tell the same story. I don’t reckon we’ve got any reason to charge you with anything, not when those boys came busting into your place.”

One of the other Fort Worth policemen had stooped beside the bodies. He said, “They’re both packing, Charlie.”

“Okay.” McMillan eyed Rance in a speculative way. “Mighty fine shooting for somebody who’d just got knocked on his ass. Where’d you learn to handle a weapon like that?”

“West Point,” Auerbach answered, which made the policeman’s eyes widen. “I was in the Army till the Lizards shot me up a few months before the fighting stopped. I can’t get around very fast any more-hell, I can’t hardly get around at all any more-but I still know what to do with a.45 in my hand.”

“He sure as hell does,” the cop by the body said. “These boys are history. I don’t make either one of them. You recognize ’em, Charlie?”

McMillan sauntered over and looked at the corpses. As he lit a cigarette, he shook his head. “Sure don’t. They’ve got to be from out of town. I’d know any strongarm boys of our own who were trying to pull jobs like this.” He turned back toward Auerbach. “They picked the wrong guy to start on, that’s for sure.”

“That’s a fact,” the other cop agreed. “You’re not going to charge these folks?”

“Charge ’em? Hell, no.” McMillan shook his head almost hard enough to make his hat fall off. “Ought to be a bounty on sons of bitches like these. All I’m going to do is take Mr. Auerbach’s formal statement, and his lady friend’s, and then wait for the coroner to come take his pictures and haul the bodies away.”

“Okay. Sounds good to me,” the cop by the corpses said. It sounded good to Auerbach, too. Off the hook, he thought.

McMillan took out a notebook and a pen. Before he started taking the statement, he remarked, “Maybe their prints’ll tell us who they are. Little Rock may know, even if we don’t.” He stubbed out his cigarette, then said, “All right, Mr. Auerbach, tell it to me again, only slow and easy this time, so I can get it down on paper.”

Auerbach was less than halfway through his statement when a rangy fellow the policemen all called Doc ambled into his apartment. He had a physician’s black bag in one hand and a camera with a flash in the other. After looking at the bodies, he sadly shook his head and said, “That rug’s never gonna be the same.”