Free The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald Page A

and pasturelands. Good luck, Meyer. No bleeding inside the head, please. It is too valuable and kindly a head.
    So I got into my white Buick with the black plastic leather upholstery and the stereo FM radio, and the power brakes, power windows, power steering, air, and super-something transmission, and took half again as long getting back to town as Lennie had taken coming out.
    Smile, McGee. Show your teeth. Honk at the lassies, because here it is nearly one o'clock Saturday afternoon and you don't know where they keep the action. Not the kind you've had so far. The other kind.
    Seven
    THE WHITE Ibis Motor Inn had a little symbol on the signs and the registration card indicating it was one of the creatures of a subsection of one of the more ubiquitous conglomerates. So they could afford to operate it at a percentage of occupancy that would hustle an independent owner into bankruptcy.
    Some precise fellow in some distant city had used the standard software program for site location, and fed into the program the regional data for population movement and growth, planned and probable highway construction, land cost, advalorem tax rates, pay scales, and the IBM 360 had said to build one on Alternate 112 west of Cypress City and operate it at a loss until the increased dernand for the transient beds would put it into the black.
    Teletype network for instant reservations, approved cards for instant credit, a woman at the desk with instant, trained, formal politeness, who assigned me to Unit 114 and made a little x on a map of the layout, and drew a little line to show me where to drive so that I would end up in front of the X, in the proper diagonal parking slot. She looked slightly distressed when I said I had no idea how long I would be staying. People should know, so they can keep the records neat.
    I closed myself into the silence of Unit 114, unpacked, and took a better shower. Stretched out on the bed. Things to do, but no will to do them. A listlessness. A desire to disassociate, to be uninvolved. The fashion is to call it an identity crisis. I was not doing things very well lately. A juvenile, big-mouth performance for the sheriff, windy threats signifying nothing.
    Somebody had made a very cute try to get the two of us involved in a private and violent nastiness, but Lennie's gifts of persuasion and the thoroughness of Norman Hyzer had collapsed the improvised structure.
    All cages are frightening. And sometimes a little time spent in a small cage merely gives you the feeling that you have been let out into a bigger cage, the one you have built for yourself over the years. The delusion of total freedom of will is the worst cage of all. And it gets cold in there. As cold, perhaps, as inside Miss Agnes under ten feet of canal water, if Meyer hadn't clumsied me out of there. Or cold as the grave would be had Frank Baither hit me in the face with that first shot.
    With enormous effort I forced myself to reach the phone book look up the Sheriff's Department, and phone in my temporary address to the dispatcher. I got dressed and got into the white car and went looking for Johnny's Main Street Service. I found it down by the produce sheds and the truck depots.
    There was diesel fuel, and a half dozen big stalls for truck repair work. There was a paint shop and a body shop, and a side lot piled with cars which had quite evidently slain their masters in a crunch of blood, tin, and glass. I saw the big blue-and-white tow truck There was no shop work going on, the whole area somnolent in the perfect April afternoon. An old man sat in the small office, reading a true-crime magazine. A scrawny girl in jeans and a halter was slowly spreading Page 28

    paste wax on a metallic green MG.
    Among a line of cars against a side fence Miss Agnes stood out like a dowager among teenagers.
    I got out of the Buick and walked over to her. A large young man about nineteen came angling across the hardpan from the shop area. Low-slung jeans and a torn