The woman was watching the stage with stiff fascination. I looked that way again. Sarah, Lila-or was it Mary Jane?-had made her circuit once. Coming back towards us, along the edge of the floor, with an undulating, rhythmic walk, she looked suddenly very young despite her height and the dyed hair and the sexy satin dress- tall and young and kind of scared-but she did not falter.

She swung a hip towards a table full of Mexicans and slipped past smoothly, laughing, before they could touch her. She reached out and rumpled the hair of an American tourist, retrieving her hand gracefully before he could seize it.

"All the way, Lila!" somebody shouted from the back of the room.

She smiled. The bloodhounds might be on her trail, but she was going to do her stuff regardless. The kid had guts. Well, I knew that. She'd tried to jump me, the time we'd got our identities confused in San Antonio. I'd been holding two guns at the time, like Wild Bill Hickok,

– but she'd jumped me anyway.

"All the way!" the M.C. yelled, and the loud-speakers threw his voice at us from the dark recesses of the room. "All the way, baybee!"

She made her corner and passed across the front of the stage, swinging away from us. Her back turned toward us, she reached up and did something feminine and provocative with her hair, teasing, before she reached for the zipper. As the yellow dress opened from top to bottom, baring her back, a knife, coming from nowhere, buried itself to the hilt just below her left shoulder blade.

I made no apologies for letting it happen. My job wasn't to protect her life, it was to get her out of an awkward situation alive or dead. I'd made sure that my instructions were quite clear on that point. If I'd been sent to preserve her from bodily harm, I'd have run the whole thing differently, and Mac would undoubtedly have worded his orders differently.

I heard two quick warning whistles, barely audible, from LeBaron, meaning watch at your right (three mean on your left and one means behind you), but I'd been in this business longer than he, and I'd already taken care of Dolores. Maybe she was just a nice friendly girl from Chihuahua City, but she'd been planted on us by the management and I wasn't taking any chances. She folded when I clipped her, and I laid her head gently on the table, tucked a five-dollar bill into the front of her dress by way of apology and looked around.

It was a nice hellish scene by this time. The long, dark room was in a turmoil as everybody tried to make it out the door before the police arrived. There were curses in Spanish, English and Texan. Meanwhile, on the brightly lighted stage at the other end, forgotten, the tall girl had gone to her knees in agony, feeling in back for the thing that hurt her. She couldn't quite reach it, and she fell forward onto her yellow-satin stripper's dress, spread out as if to receive her.

LeBaron had muffed it. Fat Elena knew judo, too, apparently, and she was giving him a hard time. I couldn't be bothered with them. I started for the stage, and somebody running past knocked me off balance. I caught a whiff of expensive perfume and felt soft fur brush against me.

"Janie!" a woman's voice gasped. "Oh, Janie…

I picked myself out of the chairs and tables, and made it up to the stage. The lady of the minks was ahead of me, but the M.C. was ahead of her, crouching over the fallen girl. She tried to pull him away so she could get in there, and he drove an elbow back and knocked her down. It was my turn, and I got him to his feet with a heave. He didn't weight much, just a little white-faced, black-moustached runt in a loose-fitting dinner jacket.

He spun to face me, snarling, and reached under his shiny lapel. I did something flashy with my hands, and as he prepared to duck or parry the blow, I kicked him hard in the groin. He doubled up and fell down, moaning. I heard the one-whistle signal for danger behind and dropped on top of him. Something went over me. I rolled aside to see the tall, scarred portero raising a blackjack for another blow, but LeBaron was in back of him now. LeBaron dropped him with a chop to the neck.

I glanced at mine while LeBaron made sure of his. Mine was nothing to worry about. They weren't going to straighten him out in less than half an hour with anything less than a block and tackle. LeBaron's was his business and I left it to him. I heard the thud of a kick as LeBaron made sure we weren't bothered for a reasonable length of time. I was already turning back to the girl on the floor.

The pretty lady of the furs was kneeling beside her. When I saw the two faces close together and the similarity of the bone structure, I knew, of course, what had caught my eye in the nightclub down the street. The girl opened her eyes.

"Gail!" she breathed.

The kneeling woman touched her cheek with a gloved hand, hesitantly, the way you touch the dying. "Don't talk, dear. I'm sorry for everything, Janie. We'll get you home where you belong…

The girl shook her head, almost imperceptibly. She licked her lips and spoke with difficulty: "Under my hair, in back… Here. Take it." Summoning all her strength, she reached for something at the nape of her neck, pulled it loose and passed it over. Her eyes looked up and found me. I thought I saw a sort of challenge through the film of pain. "Gail," she breathed, "bend closer, listen, it's important, the whole world… the whole world…"

Then she was whispering inaudibly, as far as I was concerned, in the older girl's ear. A moment later she was dead. Gail looked up at me quickly, shocked and unbelieving.

"She's dead!"

"Yes."

"But she's my sister. My little sister! When I heard she was working in this awful place, I came all the way from-"

"Sure," I said. "Come on."

"We can't leave her like this!"

"She'll be taken care of. Come on."

I glanced at LeBaron, standing guard. He jerked his head towards the rear. He was mopping his cheek with a bloodstained handkerchief. The portero hadn't touched him, but Elena bad got in at least one good lick with her fingernails. I looked around. The place was still bedlam, but our particular part of it wasn't popular. This was Juarez, where you didn't associate with dead bodies if you could possibly help it-you went elsewhere fast. LeBaron put his handkerchief away and looked down.

"What about it?" he asked. "The man in Washington said get her out."

I'd had a decision to make, but I'd already made it. It was a neat disciplinary point-there are certainly times when orders should be followed to the letter-but there are also times when a little judgment is advisable. I didn't think Mac really had any use for a dead girl, particularly when there was a live one handy.

"She's out," I said. "Whatever she had, she just passed it. Let's go… Come on, Gail."

Sarah's sister-or Lila's or Mary Jane's-was still kneeling there, numb and dazed. "But Sam, the man I was with-"

"The hell with Sam," I said. "Have you ever seen the inside of a Mexican jail, honey?"

Even in that moment, in that place, she didn't like being called honey. I was presuming on too short an acquaintance. I could see that we could spend all night there getting introduced properly, so I picked up her little white purse from the floor where she'd dropped it. I shoved it into my pocket and gestured to LeBaron. He got one arm and I got the other, and we set Gail on her pretty little blue high-heeled shoes and marched her towards the curtains at the rear of the stage.

"Left and out," LeBaron said. "Jesus had better have the cab waiting, damn his black Yaqui soul." After a moment, he said, "The portero threw the knife. I should have kicked him harder. I'm afraid he'll live."

"The M.C. was in it, too," I said. "He was searching the girl for something when we interrupted him."