Planetary Agent X by Mack Reynolds (best fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

giggle in her voice now, only the weariness of a middle-aged woman who wouldn’t, who couldn’t, quite give up as yet.

He looked up at her, quickly looked down again. “I don’t know,” he said. Then, slowly, “You’re a lot of fun.”

“No, I’m not,” she said.

“Sure you are. Why don’t we just hang around here today? It’s my day off. We’ll hang around and have a lot of laughs.”

“And tonight you’d spend here again, eh?”

“Well, sure.”

“I’m afraid not, Billy.”

His eyes were blue ice. “The name’s Jimmy.”

“Kids named Jimmy don’t carry guns with the front sight filed away and the forepart of the trigger guard, so as not to get in the way of a quick draw.”

His voice was as level and cold as his eyes. “You seem to know a lot about guns, lady.”

She shrugged, wearily. “I read a lot and watch the Tri-D shows a lot. A single woman my age has got lots of time to watch the shows. I woke earlier than you and watched this morning for awhile. The drawing they show of you isn’t very good, but good enough, Billy Antrim.”

He looked at her, poker-faced, but his mind was racing.

She shook her head. “If you had to be worried about me telling them, I could have done it hours ago. All I had to do was pick up the phone while you were still asleep, after I had checked your clothes and found the gun. I suppose I should have…”

“I don’t like that kinda talk, Betty Ann.”

“… But I didn’t. I don’t know why. You’d better go now, though.”

He looked at her for a long moment. He couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t called the police, either. She certainly wasn’t in love with him; he wasn’t the type to inspire love in a woman. Besides, she hadn’t had time to fall in love with him. And be in love with a seven-time killer on the lam? Not even a woman as desperate as Betty Ann.

His best bet would be to add her to his list. She would have a better description of him than was evidently available thus far. She’d said the drawing they were showing over the air wasn’t so good. She’d be able to improve it for them.

She chose that moment to reach for the coffee pot, wearily. He had seen Ruth Antrim in that exact pose a thousand times.

A thousand times back in those days when there had been only the two of them. And when all the world had been only the two of them. When no one else had counted. Tired she might have been, exhausted from twice the number of shows a performer should have been expected to give—but never so tired that she couldn’t discuss the dream with him.

The dream of their settling down somewhere and of Ruth finding some other manner of supporting them—it had never been quite clear what that might be, since she had known nothing else but show business. And he would go to school, and soon, very soon, such would be his efforts, he would be able to find a grand position of his own, and then Ruth Antrim would need work no longer. And then, indeed, the goal would have been reached. A home of their own, with Ruth to keep it and with Billy faring forth each morning to his labors, and she there to greet him at day’s end.

He more or less knew it now for a boy’s dream and that of a tired woman in her early middle years. Deep within, he knew it had lacked reality. That at best there had been no room in it for his own marriage and eventual children. There had been no room in it for anything or anyone except Ruth and Billy Antrim. But still it was a dream that came back to him.

Billy Antrim didn’t have many dreams.

He shook his head and came to his feet.

“Goodbye, Billy,” Betty Ann said after him.

Ronny Bronston was saying into his portable communicator, “It was him, all right. The description tallied. He’s evidently got Gutenberg’s credit card, but is too smart to use it unless it’s an emergency. He went into a Sauna-Turkish Bath in Norfolk and spent nearly four hours there. Sleeping, of course. Then he told the attendant he’d forgotten his credit card and left a star sapphire ring as a pledge.”

Sid Jakes interrupted him quickly: “You think he’ll go back to redeem it?”

Ronny snorted. “Of course not. I think he’s cunning enough never to go back to where he’s been before. Besides, he’d be in the same position as before. The moment he used the credit card, to redeem his ring, we’d be onto him. At any rate, the Sauna-Turkish Bath attendant had second thoughts about the ring, wondering if it was stolen. It seemed too valuable to have been left in lieu of such a minor amount. He reported it, and the police relayed the story to me. They relay anything that involves somebody getting or trying to get something, or some service, without having a credit card.”

“You don’t seem to be making much progress,” Jakes chuckled, as though that was amusing. “Ross is beginning to have second thoughts about assigning you to the job.”

Ronny grunted. “At least I know I was right, before. He’s in the Norfolk area. And now, with his face all over town, he’ll be doubly hard put to hide himself. He’ll show. Within twenty-four hours I wager he’ll show. His luck can’t hold forever.”

XXI

However, it was holding thus far.

Billy Antrim had to stay out of the light, and that was exactly what he was doing. In the cheapest part of the Norfolk section of Greater Washington, he was sitting, half sprawling, at a table in the darkest bar cum nightclub he could locate, the Pleasure Palace.

Had he dared, he would have put his face in his arms, as though in drunken sleep, but he was afraid that the one caustic faced usher who