He rushed to the canal, sobbing, and, with a prayer, uttered as
much to the Lady in Black as to God Himself, threw himself into
the water. Happily, in his despair, the poor child had forgotten that
he knew how to swim.
He poured himself a drink and counted the money. It came to ten
thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives.
I'm not much on that sex stuff, nor the lithe slenderness and gracefulness of women. Still, there was a suppleness to her body
that made her seem to creep in and out of my arms without actually
every doing it. Get what I mean? The best way I can describe it
is, that she clung to me like a wet sock.
That's when he jammed my left eye so far back in my head that
it went to work with the brains department.
"Private Detective Rocky Steele," the cat at the reception desk
meowed at me. She sounded like a cat on a back fence at three
in the morning, and looked like the same cat twenty-four hours
later. Her mug would have soured cream at twenty paces.
She was beautifully undressed in a transparent blue thing she
called a negligee, and brother, was it negligent went it came to
hiding what she had! From the top of her spun-gold head to the
tips of her ruby-red toenails, was pure gold - twenty-four carat
gold. I knew she could be a twenty-four carat bitch, too, when she
wanted to be, and so did everybody else that knew her, but right
then, I loved every one of her carats, gold or bitch.
His freshest laurel wreath was his recent interpretation of such tough
aces like Stravinsky and Shostakovich; rendering their works on
violin strings was like pushing peanuts up Mount Everest with your
nose.
A moon, from which some heavenly force had taken a huge bite,
and to which a faraway coyote was paying wailing tribute, hung
over Horsethief.
"Just a moment," said he and frowned like a man trying to find the
lady's nose in a jig-saw puzzle.
"Let me be boiled in linseed oil if I ever saw such a perishing
fool!" he declared passionately. "Let me tell you this, you stale
suet-pudding; you're coming down to my cottage on Dartmoor if
I have to carry you there. Isn't it just the place for a sick man?
Isn't it so lonely that no one could possibly find you, even granted
that they were mugs enough to be still looking for you? And supposing this blight or blighters, as the case may be, should
happen to strike the right bridle-path, am I such a useless hulk that
I couldn't put forward a blow for St. George and the Right? Strike
me a greenish-yellow heliotrope, if ever I saw such an ass as
you!"
All in the same motion, he snap-kicked the man in the right
armpit! The knife clattered to the floor as Mace finished the slob off
with a mule-kick to his scrotum. Looking like a goof who had just
discovered that ice-cream cones are hollow, the man sagged to
the floor.
Twice I heard the swish of that sap and one of those times it cracked
my shoulder. The arm appended thereto, as they say in court,
because as useless as a sarong in Siberia ... A purple comet
with a fiery, lashing tail zoomed around the periphery of my skull
and I seemed to fall from a great height ... a floating downward into
a tar pit that had been excavated to a depth just short of Hell
itself.
I sat beside her in the Traxton's Parisian Room and let the edges
of my eyes siphon up the pleasure of her tall, slender figure in a blue
evening gown which made a low-bridged criss-cross right above
where the meat on a chicken is the whitest.
"Don't tell me you carry a heater in your girdle, madam!"
She was as lovely as a girl could be without bludgeoning your
endocrines.
