The Hate Genius by Kenneth Robeson

Author:Kenneth Robeson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-05-13T22:13:28+00:00

VIII

IT did not take Doc many blocks of driving to realize that he still had uneasiness about Pat. It was a sullen, vague un sureness, and he finally decided it was spawned by a doubt that Pat had been taken in by Mr. Dilling’s bald-faced lying. He put the uneasiness away, stopped letting it plague him. What if Pat did discover Mr. Dilling had been telling whoppers? There was nothing she could do about it. Or was there?

“You have,” said Barni Cuadrado, “the expression of a man about to eat a grasshopper.”

“That,” Doc admitted, “paints a good word picture.”

“You were thinking of Patricia?”

“Yes.”

“She will be safe now.

“That wasn’t the point What was bothering me was whether I could depend on being safe from her.”

Barni glanced at him pleasantly and said, “You shouldn’t abuse Pat. She thinks you’re wonderful”

“I think she’s wonderful, too,” Doc said. “She can get my plans balled up worse in five minutes than most people can in a week. Frequently she makes things come out all right, which is bad. If she were dumb, and nothing she did worked, it wouldn’t be so disconcerting. Anyway, she is safer out of this thing. This is a very big thing. Somebody will probably get hart before it is over. It is nothing for a woman. Which brings me around to the fact that we are going to put you someplace where it is safe as soon as I talk to Berkshire.”

‘You expect me to object to that, don’t you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say, because I don’t know you very well.”

“I’m going to surprise you. I won’t object. I’m scared stiff, and I don’t like it. The sooner I’m out of it, the better.”

“Where do we turn?”

“Several blocks on,” she said.

He drove rapidly enough to give the appearance of being in a hurry, but doing some unnecessary gear shifting and getting caught in traffic jams wherever he could, in order to give Monk and Ham an easier time of following him. There was a gray car trailing him. He hoped it carried Monk and Ham.

She was pretty. Barni Cuadrado — she didn’t look Spanish or Italian, but the name was one or the other. Swiss, of German stock, she was supposed to be. The red hair looked amply Nordic, and so did her features. Her features were very fine, her eyes a cerulean blue that made him think of the Gulf Stream off Bimini.

She was wearing, he realized with surprise, no makeup that he could detect He had never seen a girl quite so plain darned pretty without makeup.

Boy, she looked like a million in shining pennies.

And boy, he’d better get his mind on something else. He’d better turn his little cart around and hike.

“I wish you weren’t as pretty as Christmas morning,” he said.

She laughed. “I’ll try not to live up to it But you’re not exactly something to scare babies, yourself.”

He grinned. He felt foolish — which meant, he suspected,that he was a damned fool, because this was a time for dignity.

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