Mason helped her into her coat. “Naturally,” he said, “it’s important as the devil no one knows where we’re going nor why we’re going. We’ll charter a special plane at the airport. Now, there’s just a chance Sergeant Holcomb may start looking for me, find me gone, put two and two together, and take a chance on calling the airport. So you ring up and engage the plane under your name.”
“Why not use an assumed name?”
“Because,” he told her, “I don’t want to do anything which would show a guilty intent. This is plenty warm right now. Before we get done with it, it’s going to be hot. I don’t want you to get your fingers burnt.”
“Never mind my fingers,” she told him, “but you keep in the clear, Chief. Remember, you’re going to take a cruise around the world.”
He nodded and said, “It’ll be fun, Della, but I’ll miss the action of a rough-and-tumble law business, at that.”
“Don’t worry,” she told him, “you’ll have plenty of action — dances on the deck in the moonlight, the beach at Waikiki, Japan in Cherry Blossom Time, across the Yellow Sea, up the Whang Poo to Shanghai, the Paris of the Orient, with—”
“You,” he charged, leveling an accusing forefinger at her, “have been reading steamship literature.”
“And how!” she admitted. “In case you want to know, Chief, I took all the papers out of your top drawer and loaded it up with pamphlets on Bali, the Orient, Honolulu, India, and—”
He circled her waist with his arm, swept her off her feet and around in a circle toward the door. “Come on, baggage,” he told her, “there’s work to be done.”