Phil leaned on the table, his hand next to a tall, slim pitcher. He said to Mitzie, "I'm surprised to find you at a tame place like this. I expected drugs, knife fights and naked women."
Mitzie whirled his way. "As for drugs, what do you think we're drinking?" she said furiously. "As for knife fights, wait. And as for naked women, you devotee of male-female wrestling, well, if Carstairs, Llewellyn, or Buck should happen to see a girl who took their fancy, I'd just walk up to her and rip off her clothes!"
She was looking past Phil when she finished. He swiveled his head and saw Miss Phoebe Filmer with a rather scared looking young man. But Phoebe, in a half off-the-bosom chartreuse evening gown, looked even more frightened, her face almost as green as her green-blonde hair. Perhaps she had heard Mitzie's last remark. Then she recognized Phil, and astonishment was added to her fright. Phil smiled at her with a somewhat forced reassuringness. At that moment Phoebe's escort called her attention to an empty booth back toward the door, and the two of them hurried toward its haven with the eagerness of skimmers who have overreached themselves.
Phil felt remarkably bucked up. He snared an empty chair from the next table and found himself an empty glass and filled it from the tall, slim pitcher. Llewellyn, who, like the others had a half-inch in the bottom of his glass, caught Buck's attention and rolled his eyes significantly toward the ceiling. The white made eerie half-moons under the irises.
"Just rip 'em off," Mitzie repeated with conviction.
Carstairs said, with a quietly scathing coldness, "Mitz, quit playing the solicitous little mother to Llewellyn, Buck and me." He carefully smoothed his bangs, as an ancient judge might have adjusted his wig before pronouncing sentence. "It's quite clear that you spilled our plans to this clown, and that he told the police so that they were waiting for us when we knocked over the first sales-robot."
"Quite," Llewellyn said, while Buck nodded.
"And if I hadn't insisted on putting a new charge in the rocket assist," Carstairs continued, "we'd have been nabbed."
"It was just a coincidence," Mitzie asserted sharply.
"First time we ever had a coincidence," Carstairs observed. "Personally, I don't believe there are such things."