“Penny, are you sure this not Mr. Bierstone’s appointment?”

“Uh, sir, Mr. Bierstone had me leave a message for you. He wanted you to talk to her.”

“I didn’t get any message,” I said, and just as the last word was out of my mouth my eyes came to rest on a small pink phone message tear-out sheet underneath the heel of my shoe on my desk top.

“Wait, think I found it.”

Sure enough.

“Okay, Penny. Give me a minute, then send her in.” I hung up.

I quickly started clearing my desk. Where does all the paper come from? I have a theory about paperwork: I’m certain it mates and reproduces during the night.

I swept the stack of bills and the large index card box on top of it (my client file system-I don’t trust computers, or at least not with that kind of information) under my arm, toted it over to the file cabinet, opened a drawer, dropped it in and slammed the drawer shut.

By the time I was back standing in front of my desk and surveying the room, the door opened.

And, of course, it was her.

The roadster girl, bitch-glasses and all.

The moment of recognition was priceless.

Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped slightly open. She tried to remove her sunglasses but only managed to drop them. I took three long steps toward her, bent quickly and picked them up just as she was beginning to stoop down.

I smiled, meeting her eyes.

“Hi,” I told her, pressing her sunglasses back into her delicate hand. She looked down at them as if I’d given her a little present of some sort, realized what they were and tucked them into her purse.

“Uh, hi.”

“Miss Simmons?” I asked.

“Um, yes. Listen, Mr. Travis, I have to say I’m sorry for cutting you off like that.”

“What are the odds, huh? Don’t mention it. It’s forgotten. Come on and have a seat. Would you like some coffee?”

I took her by the elbow, guided her, effortlessly.

She was beautiful. I caught the scent of something. An exotic fragrance. Couldn’t name it if I tried. I successfully resisted the urge to ask her what it was.

She took the proffered chair. I sat down at my desk, facing her.

She just sat looking at me. Not smiling. There was a tiny wrinkle in her otherwise perfect forehead, the beginning knit of a frown.

“How can I help you?”

“Mr. Travis. I’m not sure you can. I’m not sure anybody can.”

I’d heard this before. A few times it’s been true. It’s a marvel to me the whole spectrum of trouble that human beings can get themselves into. I suppose I’ve seen most everything.

“I know it must really appear that way,” I told her, trying not to smile. I suppose I was a little amused, and at her expense. “Just about anything can be untangled, if you know which string to pull.”

“Which string,” she said. Not a question. She was no longer looking at me but at the shelf behind me. Actually I’d say she was peering into some dark space in the universe of her mind.

“Right,” I said. “Why don’t you just start-”

”At the beginning?”

“Well… Okay. You can start there if you want to.”

Her face reddened. Cheeks puffed up just a bit. There was moisture stealing into the inside corners of her exotic, slightly feline eyes. My stomach did a little gymnastics, a little back flip that it was out of practice on. If she started crying, I thought I might fall in love.

Please don’t cry, Bitch Lady!I pleaded with her silently.

Damn but she was gorgeous. Those green eyes the color of a field of clover. Shiny auburn blond hair down to her delicate shoulders. A smallish bone structure with a perfect thin neck and oh so perfect little wrists.

“Mr. Travis,” she began, and sniffed once, delicately.

“Call me Bill.”

“Bill. Have you ever been afraid?”

There are some people that you just don’t cross. Julie Simmons had made it a point to cross the exactly wrong person, a North Texas liquor baron named Archie Carpin, distant relative to the Carpins of Signal Hill and Stinnett up in the Texas Panhandle.

I’d read up on the Carpin Gang and some of the 1930s depression desperadoes before, back in the days when I actually did my assigned college research. I’d even gone once and kicked around up in Hutchinson County in North Texas, poked my nose into the abandoned, decaying buildings and rust-encrusted oil derricks of that ghost town. It was private property and I didn’t exactly have permission, but when you’re young you tend to think you’ve got license to look where you want, do what you want. Also, you tend to think and act like you’re immortal-at least I did, which at that time, was pretty close to the truth. What was amazing to me was that anybody else knew about Signal Hill and those old-time gangsters, but here was this pretty girl who had cut me off in traffic giving me chapter and verse.

Back during the early 1920s the Carpin brothers ran the small slapped-together oil boomtown a few miles east of Stinnett in what was little more than a den of bootleggers, gamblers and other criminals of low order. During those days of big bands and prohibition, men on the far side of the law either rose to the top of the heap or got stomped under. For a brief time the Carpins were on the top of that heap. When Signal Hill was cleaned out by the Texas Rangers in 1927, the former boomtown imploded and the Carpins, who had managed to avoid arrest and capture, had dispersed. When I went up there to look around back in the mid 1980s there was little left. So when the girl with the bitch sunglasses and the too-cute frown mentioned Carpin’s name, I naturally questioned her on it, and she not only admitted that the man who was after her was one of thoseCarpins, but that he was proud of his heritage.

There was one question though, once I put it to her, that she didn’t want to answer, and therefore, it was the one thing that I had to keep putting back in her court each time she attempted to bat it away. The question was, of course: “What did you do?”

When she finally told me, I had to contain myself from bursting into laughter.

She finished the story. I could tell that she’d left out quite a bit.

“I’m not sure I can help you,” I said. She frowned. There was bit of shocked expression on her face.

“Look,” I said. “Miss Simmons, my clients are…”

“What?”

“Well. I have to walk a very… I just can’t-No one could just walk in and ask someone to… Look, if we so much as took one step outside of the bounds of-”

She kept turning her head slowly, cocking it, waiting for me to finish. I found I didn’t have the words.

“Mr. Travis,” she said. “It’s two million dollars.”

I’m not normally impressed with money, of any denomination. But two million?

“So you’re not exactly here to turn yourself in,” I said.

“Getting arrested wouldn’t be half bad. I’d stand a better chance of surviving, I think,” she said. “But if I don’t get some help anddon’t get arrested, or get somewhere safe, then I’ll be dead.”

She must have caught the quizzical look on my face.

“I don’t have the money onme!” she said.

I looked closely at her, searched for some hint, some shred of evidence in her eyes that something of what she told me wasn’t true. I didn’t find it.

She unzipped her small, tan clutch purse and pulled forth three pathetic-looking, wadded-up hundred dollar bills. She was about to give them to me.

A tear slipped down her cheek.

Very suddenly the room felt warm, like someone had cranked up the heat. Possibly my ears were turning red again. I couldn’t let her give me the money, no matter what else was going to happen.

“Miss Simmons-”

”Julie,” she said, her voice just above a whimper. Her face was flushed and the muscles around her mouth were tight.

There, across from me over the dark gulf of my rosewood desk, was a girl who was used to helping herself. A girl who took her chances, to be sure, but who normally won out in the end. And here she was at the end of her rope. I at least knew enough to know that I had to know more, and that if it were possible, I would help. And it wasn’t as though I had any choice in the matter. No woman I had ever known had thus far been able to penetrate my armor with the simple expedient of tears. But it was not only this that drew me to her so inevitably and completely-it was also the simplest and yet most profound of feelings. And it was actually herfeelings. It was her sense of utter embarrassment that she had to ask for help to begin with.