"Yes?" Carol called. "Who is it, please?"

"The maid, ma'am. I brought you some towels."

Doc glanced into the bathroom, and slowly shook his head. He pointed at Carol's dress, mouthed a silent speech.

"Could you just leave them on the step, please? I'm undressed."

There was silence for a long moment, a whispering so faint that it might have been anything but a whisper. But that was the tip-off. There was someone with this maid, if it was a maid. Someone who was giving her instructions.

Doc looked around swiftly. He squeezed Carol's arm again and pointed toward the bathroom, and his lips formed the word "Window." Carol shook her head violently and tried to hang onto him; then winced and nodded whitely as he gave her arm another painful squeeze.

He raised the window silently. He heard the maid say, "I can't leave 'em outside, ma'am. Maybe your husband can come and get 'em."

"Just a moment, please," Carol called back. "He's in the bathroom right now."

Doc dropped through the window. He tiptoed along the rear of the house and around the side, and peered carefully around the corner.

Rudy! The gun in his hand jerked involuntarily. How in the hell!

He put it out of his mind; the wonderment, the sense of being unbearably put upon. Facts were facts, something to be accepted and dealt with, and the fact was that Rudy was here.

There was a woman with him-it was Fran Clinton- but she didn't appear to be armed. Gun in hand, Rudy stood to one side of her, his head turned away from Doc.

He didn't want to use the gun, of course. He could no more afford a racket than Doc and Carol could. His objective and Doc's would be exactly the same-to settle their score silently and unseen in the privacy of the cabin.

Doc hefted his gun, raised the barrel level with his shoulder. He edged silently around the corner of the building.

Rudy first-with one skull-crushing blow from the gun. Then, before the woman could move or yell, a hard left hook with his free hand.

Eyes fixed on them, Doc slowly raised and lowered his foot. It came down on an up-cornered brick, one of several that had once formed the border of a flower bed. And he fell headlong.

Falling, he triggered the gun; it was all he could do now.

Instantly Rudy whirled, gun blazing, whirling the woman in front of him. But his bullets passed above Doc, and Doc's drilled through the woman and into him.

And in seconds they lay dead on the ground, one of Rudy's hands still holding her arm behind her back.

From a couple of blocks away, the cabdriver heard the racket. But he did not place it as coming from Golie's, and certainly he did not connect it with his recent fares. Then he saw Doc and Carol running down the street toward him-_and, hey! look at that old gal run, would you?_-and puzzled he stopped the cab and got out.

"Somethin' wrong, folks? Somebody givin' you some trouble?"

"Yes," Doc told him. "I'll explain it while you're driving us into the city."

"Into Diego? But what about your grub? What…"

Doc jabbed a gun into his stomach, gave him a shove toward the cab. "Do you want to go on living? Do you? Then do what I tell you!"

The driver obeyed, but sullenly. With the dragging deliberation of the very stubborn. As they reached the highway and turned toward town, he gave Doc a self-righteous glare.

"This won't get you nothin', Mac," he said. "I don't know what you're after, but this won't get you a thing."

Doc looked at him, tight-lipped. In the back seat, Carol leaned forward anxiously. "Doc-I think he's right. There's probably an alert out for us already. Golie'll spill everything now. How far can we get in this circus wagon?"

Doc asked her curtly how far they would get without it. With an alert on the air, what chance did they have of grabbing another car? "The cops won't know what we're traveling in. Or whether we're traveling in anything. Maybe we can make it to the border before they find out."

"To the border! But what…"

"You'll never do it, Mac," the driver cut in doggedly. "The best thing you can do is give yourselves up. Now-oof!"

"Like it?" Doc gave him another prod with the gun. "Want some more?"

Teeth gritted, the man shook his head.

"All right, then," Doc said mildly. "Make a left here, and head straight up Mission Valley until I tell you to turn."

The cab swung left. They sped down the curving, cliff-shadowed road, and after a time Doc spoke over his shoulder to Carol. They couldn't get through the border gates, he said. That, obviously, would be impossible. But they might be able to slip across the line at some unguarded point.

"People do it all the time," he went on. "It's not the best bet in the world, and we'll still have problems if and when we get across, but…"

"You won't make it," the driver broke in, dogged again. "Not anywhere near the gates where you'll be tryin'. I know that border, mister, and I'm telling you…"

His sentence ended in a scream. The cab swerved, and he turned pain-crazed eyes on Doc. "You t-try that again!" he gasped. "You do that again and see what happens!"

Doc promised that he wouldn't do it again. "Next time I'll shoot you. Now go right at this next turn. We're hitting crosstown to the Tijuana highway."

The cab made the turn with an angry skidding of tires. They raced up the steep road into Mission Hills, then down the long arterial street which skirts San Diego's business district. The traffic began to thicken. There was the wail of a siren-fading eerily into the distance.

Above the windshield the blurred murmuring of the radio squawk box became a crisp voice:

"Cab Seventy-nine! Cab Seventy-nine! Come in, Seventy-nine…"

The driver was elaborately disinterested. Doc glanced at the identification plate on the instrument panel, and spoke to him sharply. "That's you. Answer it!"

"What d'you want me to say?"

"Tell her you've got a couple of people on a sightseeing tour. You'll be tied up for about an hour."

"Sightseeing tour?" The driver squirmed in the seat, leaned slightly over the wheel. "She won't never go for that, mister. She'll know I got a couple of crooks headin' for Tijuana."

"Wh-at?" Doc frowned. "How will she know?"

"She just will. She'll even know where we are right now. Just making the turnoff for National City."

Doc got it then. He linked the driver's seemingly senseless speech with the breathless silence of the squawk box. And savagely, his nerves worn raw, he smashed the gun barrel into the man's stubborn, doughish face.

He smashed it; he smashed it again. The driver groaned and flung himself against the door of the car. It shot open, and he went tumbling and bouncing into the street.

The door swung shut again. Doc fought the wheel of the cab, swinging it out of the path of an oncoming vehicle. There was a frozen silence from Carol; a wondering silence. Then, answering her unspoken question, the voice of the squawk-box:

"Seventy-nine? Seventy-nine-I read you, Seventy-nine…"

Doc found the switch and closed it.

He turned off the highway, sped along roughly parallel to it on a gravel county road.

He asked, "Is there a radio back there?" And Carol said there was none.

It didn't matter, of course. They both knew what would be happening now.

The county road got them around National City. Then, implacably, it veered back toward the highway.

Doc tried to get away from it. Lights turned off, he weaved the cab through a network of outlying side streets. That got them only a little farther south, and in the end they were led back to the highway. Doc stopped just short of it, his mind racing desperately to the lazy throb of the cab's motor.

Take to the fields-run for it on foot? No, no, it was too late. As impractical and impossible as trying to hook another car.