Free Darker Than Amber by Travis McGee

remote."

I sat, fingered the knot on the top of my head. "I ran a ten-day clinical service."

"It wasn't that, because you were peaking very nicely when I came down to fish. Now suddenly this explosion of irritation."

"I got tired of talking about the bitch."

I was glowering at him. Suddenly the Meyer smile began and widened. You can't stay irritated with Meyer. He nodded and chuckled.

"I should have figured it out sooner," he said. "Tell me, O wise man."

"A dedicated archaeologist, at enormous risk to himself, descends into a cavern and comes up with a lovely figurine. He is an expert. He cherishes the form of ancient art. This one is rare and beautiful. His romantic heart bubbles over. Then he turns it over and looks at the base and there is the curious inscription: 'Made in Scranton, Pennsylvania." So it has no value. Cheap goods. But it is so damnably lovely the poor archaeologist sits and looks at it and broods over what might have been."

"Very funny."

"And a little sad, boy. You like women as people. You do not think of them as objects placed here by a benign providence for your use and pleasure, so in that sense you are not a womanizer. But you cherish the meaningful romantic charade. Friend, you have been sulking. You have had your nose flattened against the candy-store window, even though you knew all the candy in there was made of putty, and if you broke in and gobbled, it would make you deathly ill. Perhaps, five years ago, you would have made the ghastly mistake of trying to transform the bitch with the power of love, because she is decorative, spirited, shrewd in her fashion. You are wise enough to know she is ease-hardened beyond redemption, but it has still made you wistful and sulky and depressed."

I pondered the diagnosis. Then I threw my head back and laughed at myself. Valiant knight trapped on a merry-goround, scowling and trying for the brass ring with the tip of the rusty lance, knowing that if he got it, all he'd get would be another ride to noplace.

"Welcome back," Meyer said. "What's the program?"

"Wait and see if she comes back for help. If she does, we play it by ear, with the idea of conning her into giving us the whole package and letting us line up a lawyer who can drive a good bargain with the law so she takes the smallest beating possible. If she doesn't come back, then we go find the rest of the pieces ourselves and bust the operation wide open and let the law pick up the stragglers."

"We?"

"You're involved, Meyer. I can use that orderly Brain."

"All my effing celebration?"

"To balance the McGee habit of bulling my way in and breaking the dishes. And if we come out of it with a little meat, we share."

At five o'clock the following evening, I waited on a bench in the hallway of the Broward Beach police station for ten minutes until a Detective-Sergeant Kibber, a middle-aged man with a tenant-farmer face, wearing brown slacks and a shiny blue sports shirt hanging outside the slacks, came and sat down beside me and asked me my name, address and occupation. I showed him my Florida driver's license. In the blank for occupation is typed Salvage Consultant.

"Who do you think she is, Mr. McGee?"

"It's just a hunch. I had a date in Lauderdale last night with a girl named Marie Bowen. A first date. She didn't show. And... well, hell, Sergeant, I can't remember the last time anybody stood me up. I was going to meet her at a bar. She never showed up."

"Know her address?"

"I expected to find out what it was last night. We'd been in the same party one other time, and I remember her saying she had friends up here, or a family or something. So when the description of the hit-and-run, and how it was a girl maybe her age and hair color, came over the radio, and it said you didn't have an identification, I thought I could.. find out for sure."

"We still haven't made her, but we got the car about noon. Somebody stuck it in an empty lot, residential area. It was clouted off a shopping-center lot