His tongue felt dry and bloated; he scraped a hand over his stubbled chin and blinked ferociously, cupped a big hand around the back of his neck and reared his head back until the bones creaked.

He crossed the hall, tired and rumpled, and found Orozco sitting on his bed with a fat paw across the telephone receiver and a slight frown on his face. Orozco’s chin lifted: “I came in here to take the calls. Didn’t want to wake you.”

“Thanks, Diego.” It had been an unexpected kindness. Orozco kept displaying new facets, each of which further eroded the slothful impassive image.

Orozco said, “Things are starting to break.”

“Good. Can it wait ten minutes? I’ve got to wash the sleep off.”

“Go ahead.”

He stripped to his underwear and closed himself into the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth. He felt stiff and sore, with a particularly insistent ache in the muscles of his neck and knees; Getting old, he thought, and realized the phrase was becoming an obsessive repetition in his lexicon. It didn’t help to look in the mirror; the haggard face was not reassuring. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had really looked at his face in a mirror. When he shaved or combed his hair he never looked at himself to the extent of appraising the whole. Now he saw the creases that bracketed his mouth, the beginnings of sag under the eyes, the crow’s feet, the spreading gray in the hair. It was still a photogenic visage, younger than his years, but the flesh beneath his chin was beginning to loosen and he thought with a harsh defensiveness which he immediately knew was designed to mask deep-rooted panic, I’m forty-six, after all.

He hurried out of the mirrored room, climbed into clean-pressed clothes and said, “I could use a cup of coffee.”

“So could I.” Orozco went to the kitchen with him and stood hip-shot against the counter while Oakley searched the unfamiliar cabinets for a coffeepot and finally settled for a covered cooking pan in which he set out water to boil. He glanced at the electric clock above the door—seven fifteen—and took down a jar of instant coffee and a pair of cups. “You take anything in it?”

“Just black.”

“Me too.” Black for my youth: I’m in mourning. He made a wry face at his own melodramatic sourness and turned, leaning against the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest. “Well?”

“They found Terry’s car in Nogales. Parked on a side street. Nothing much left in it but there were fingerprints all over it and we’re running them through for identification. One funny thing, though—somebody’d hot-wired it. So the prints we come up with may belong to some clown who stole it from the kidnapers.”

“Swell.”

“There’ll be a plane coming in sometime in the next half-hour with dossiers on the two dead guys and the people they associated with. One of them had a brother—they all three worked in the same nightclub combo. There was a fourth guy in it too. That may be our gang.”

“A band of musicians?”

“They lost their last job in Tucson a few weeks ago. The skinny one we found dead was an addict. I don’t know what else he was but a habit his size would take a hell of a lot of money. It was his brother that was the bandleader. It adds up for motive and opportunity, Carl. They needed money bad, they had no work.”

“And they’re as slippery as watermelon seeds. We’ve got to do better than this, Diego.”

“It’s coming along,” Orozco said mildly. “We’ll crack it. You remember that voice on the phone—too much conceit there. When you get an amateur who thinks he knows more about strategy than Clausewitz you got a character who’s going to make mistakes. When he does we’ll have him.”

Oakley took the lid off the boiling water and poured. “Maybe. But I can’t stand sitting around here waiting. Get a man in here to keep an eye on Adams and Louise. I’m going back to that ghost town with you. Maybe we’ll find something they missed yesterday.”

An hour later he was ready to go when the phone rang. He answered it and heard the words he had been waiting for: “Carl? You’ve got your uptick. The market opened with Conniston up.”

“Good. You’ve got your instructions.”

He had to make a dozen phone calls to put the machinery in motion; now that things had begun to stir he found that he had snapped out of his melancholy dirge. It was like the opening rounds of a courtroom battle. After the morose night of stage fright he was at last in the arena of action; it brought him up on his toes, settled his mind into a new clarity of focus, rekindled his confidence and decisiveness. Before, trying to keep control of the whole mess had been like trying to hold onto his hat in a gusty wind. The risks had appeared formidable, the juggling task a formidable one. But now he moved with sure firm steps. He phoned Earle’s doctor, and while they waited for the physician he held a curt briefing session in Earle’s office, instructing Louise and Frankie Adams—in Orozco’s absence—in what they were to tell the doctor. The doctor arrived at ten, acquisitive and tame; the mendacious ritual was attended to and Oakley walked the doctor out to his car: “You’ll receive the—fee—in cash, of course, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t deposit it in any bank accounts. Put it in a lock box and spend it where nobody knows you. It isn’t reported from our end and we won’t want you reporting it as coming from us. You never know when they’ll hit you with a spot-check out of the computer.”

“Of course.” The doctor was urbane, avuncular. “I’ll arrange everything with the funeral director. The embalming will be done here if that’s satisfactory. I presume you’ll want him buried here on the ranch?”

“I believe he wanted cremation. It’s in his will.”

“Excellent,” the doctor said, and added with a frank smile, “We wouldn’t want there to be any possibility of exhumation for autopsy, would we?”

When the doctor had left, Oakley called his office and told his secretary of Conniston’s death. There was a brief exchange of appropriate solicitudes and eulogized phrases after which Oakley gave instructions for the release to the press of the news of Conniston’s death. Then he left instructions with the ranch staff to admit no journalists through the gates or into the main house; he would, he said, issue a formal statement on behalf of the family tomorrow afternoon—in the meantime Conniston’s wife and daughter, he said, were too grieved to meet with the press. Three of Orozco’s men stood guard around the house to insure that no one disturbed the weeping widow and orphan.

By afternoon, he knew, the death of the tycoon would be known on Wall Street. The price of Conniston stock would dive through the floor. Oakley’s dummy-fronts would cover his short sales and use the money from that to buy up the stock again at its crippled price. He estimated it would take him about thirty-six hours to gain control. The key to his scheme was the fact that Earle had not owned a controlling interest in his own business—he had been expanding so fast he had to sell stock to raise capital; and he had made every effort to see that large blocks of stock never accumulated in the hands of possible rivals, even members of his own board of directors. Conniston had held about twenty-three percent of the outstanding common stock in Conniston Industries, the holding conglomerate which owned all the Conniston subsidiaries. That stock would go to Louise and to Terry if she were still alive. Thousands of stockholders owned the remaining seventy-seven percent—mutual funds, private investors, insurance portfolios. Oakley already owned eight percent; he needed forty-three percent of the rest—less than two thirds of the stock which would become available in the impending mini-panic. When the news of Conniston’s death hit the ticker the big funds would be the first to sell, trying to liquidate before the inevitable plunge. Their quick sales of large blocks would further depress the price. Even if the Exchange suspended trading in the stock Oakley’s brokers would pick it up over the counter. The beauty of it was that Oakley was not an officer of Conniston Industries—he had been Conniston’s personal attorney but held no official title—and he owned less than ten percent of the stock; thus, in legal terms, he was not an “insider” and was not required to divulge his activities to the SEC. He had broken no law except to conceal the facts in Conniston’s death; and it was hardly likely anyone would reveal his part in that. All of them had too much to lose.