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“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not. You quit fretting me like this. You’ve got a talent for dropping an awful burden on a man’s back with no warning.”
“How’s it feel?” Hackberry said.
“THERE’S A WAY,” Ruby said later in the morning, when he walked her to a café. His hand was cupped on her elbow as they crossed the streetcar tracks.
“To catch one of Beckman’s men if they come after you?”
“I think that’s what we should try.”
“That’s like starting a fire to put out a fire. Sometimes you end up with two fires.”
“Desperate situations, desperate measures,” she replied.
“Here’s another one: A bad idea is a bad idea.”
“You think women are weak? That we have to be protected?”
“A group that pours acid in mailboxes isn’t in need of protection.” He felt her eyes on the side of his face. He was afraid to look at her.
“Don’t tell what I’m going to do and what I’m not,” she said.
“I’m not about to. I learned my lesson,” he said.
“Are you patronizing me?”
“No.”
“Then why the remark about suffragettes?”
“I once got kicked in the head by a bull named Original Sin. That’s a fact.”
“So don’t say anything.”
They stood on the curb, waiting for the traffic light to change. He forced himself to look her in the face.
“Got you,” she said.
They sat at an outdoor café under a colonnade and ordered coffee and pie.
“We have to do something. We can’t let events control us,” she said.
He watched a streetcar pass, the wheels clicking on the tracks. “It’s a fine day. Most days are. If a person can keep that in mind, every option is his.”
His statement struck him as banal, and he thought he had lost her attention. The waiter brought their order.
“There’s a man watching us,” Ruby said. “Across the street. By the gazebo.”
“Why do you think he’s looking at us?”
“He was on the corner by the hotel when we walked out. I know a rounder when I see one.”
Hackberry picked up his coffee cup and looked out the side of his eye at the park. “I don’t see him.”
“He’s gone. He was unshaved and had on a floppy hat and was wearing tight pants tucked inside his boots.”
Hackberry removed his billfold from his breast pocket and took three hundred-dollar bills from it and passed them under the table to Ruby.
