Shea peered toward a lumpish dark mass that had a shape vaguely resembling Pete Brodsky.
«Shea?» came a call, and without waiting for a reply the lump started toward them. As it did so, the downpour lessened and the light brightened.
«Curse it, Shea!» said Brodsky, as he approached. «What kind of a box is this? If I couldn’t work my own racket better, I’d turn myself in for mopery. Where the hell are we?»
«Ohio, I hope,» said Shea. «And look, shamus, we’re better off than we were, ain’t we? I’m sorry about this rain, but I didn’t order it.»
«All I got to say is you better be right,» said Brodsky gloomily. «You can get it all for putting the snatch on an officer, and I ain’t sure I can square the rap even now. Where’s the other guy?»
Shea looked around. «Walter may be here, but it looks as though he didn’t come through to the same place. And if you ask me, the question is not where we are but when we are. It wouldn’t do us much good to be back in Ohio in 700 A. D., which is about the time we left. If this rain would only let up.»
With surprising abruptness the rain did, walking away in a wall of small but intense downpours. Spots and bars of sky appeared among the clouds wafted along by a brisk steady current of air that penetrated Shea’s wet shirt chillingly, and the sun shot an occasional beam through the clouds to touch up the landscape.
It was a good landscape. Shea and his companions were standing in deep grass, on one of the higher spots of an extent of rolling ground. This stretch in turn appeared to be the top of a plateau, falling away to the right. Mossy boulders shouldered up through the grass, which here and there gave way to patches of purple-flowered heather, while daisies nodded in the steady breeze. Here and there was a single tree, but down in the valley beyond their plateau the low land was covered with what appeared at this distance to be birch and oak. In the distance, as they turned to contemplate the scene, rose the heads of farblue mountains.
The cloud-cover thinned rapidly and broke some more. The air had cleared enough so they could now see two other little storms sweeping across the middle distance, trailing their veils of rain. As the patches of sunlight whisked past, the landscape blazed with a singularly vivid green, quite unlike that of Ohio.
Brodsky was the first to speak. «If this is Ohio, I’m a peterman,» he said. «Listen, Shea, do I got to tell you again you ain’t got much time? If those yaps from the D.A.’s office get started on this, you might just as well hit yourself on the head and save them the trouble. He’s coming up for election this fall and needs a nice fat case. And there’s the F.B.I. Rover boys — they just love snatch cases, and you can’t put no fix in with them that will stick. So you better get me back before people start asking questions.»