That last punch must have made me slug-happy, I thought, or maybe it was the beating I had taken on top of my head.
“This guy’s dangerous, ma’m,” MacGraw said in a gentle, little-boy-caught-in-the-pantry voice. “He was resisting arrest.”
“Don’t you dare lie to me!” It was a woman’s voice all right. “I saw what happened through the window.”
I wasn’t going to miss this, even if it killed me. Very carefully I raised my head. All the veins, arteries and nerves in it yelled murder, pulsed, expanded and became generally hysterical, but I managed to sit up. The light dug arrows into my eyes, and for a moment or so I held my head in my hands. Then I peeped through my fingers.
MacGraw and Hartsell were standing by the door looking as if their feet were resting on a red-hot stove. MacGraw had a cringing this-has-really-nothing-to-do-with-me smile on his face. Hartsell looked as if a mouse had run up his trousers leg.
I turned, keeping my head still, and looked towards the french windows.
A girl stood between the half-drawn curtains; a girl in a white strapless evening-gown that showed off her deeply-tanned shoulders and the snug little hollow between her breasts. Her raven-black hair lay about her shoulders in a page-boy bob. I had a little trouble in focussing, and her beauty came to me slowly like a picture thrown on the screen by an amateur projectionist. The blurred outlines of her face slowly became sharp-etched. The misty hollows that were her eyes filled in and came alive. An oval, small-featured, very lovely face with a small, perfectly-moulded nose, red sensual lips and wide, big eyes as dark and as hard as nuggets of coal.
Even with the blood pounding in my head and my throat aching and my body feeling as if it had been fed through a wringer, I felt the impact of this girl’s allurement the way I had felt the impact of MacGraw’s fist. She not only had the looks, but she also had that thing: you could see it there in her eyes, the way she stood, in the curves of her body, in the tanned column of her throat: shouting at you like the twenty-foot letters on an advertising hoarding.
“How dare you beat this man!” she said in a voice which carried across the room with the heat and the force of a flame-thrower. “Is this Brandon’s idea?”
“Now look, Miss Crosby,” MacGraw said pleadingly. “This guy’s been sticking his snout into your affairs. The Captain thought maybe we should discourage him. Honest, that’s all there’s to it.”