He shrugged. He still heard no jets. False alarms kept you on your toes and made you wait until the last possible moment when the real thing came. False alarms? The spotters called them air-raid drills.
"I doubt it," Hardesty said truthfully. The bomb crater would make a fairly good shelter, anyway. The worst of the shock waves would pass over it. Hardesty hoped shelter-seeking pedestrians wouldn't find the bomb crater. He might be able to deal with the woman alone, but he'd lose whatever booty was left in the dead man's pockets if a few dozen scavengers came down into the hole.
"Give me the wallet."
Hardesty handed it over. "Who are you?" he said. "A friend of that blonde girl who—"
"Did you take anything else? I'm the widow."
A head was silhouetted briefly against the pale sky above the rim of the crater. The widow fired a warning shot from one barrel of her shotgun, then quickly reloaded it. The head vanished.
"You have no right to your husband's belongings," Hardesty said. "You ought to know that."
"You have a right?"
"Sure. Why don't I?"
"Because I saw what happened. You were in cahoots with that blonde girl, weren't you?" The widow went through her dead husband's pockets as she talked, stuffing what she found into the pockets of her mackinaw. Hardesty stared hungrily at the silver gleam of coins, the dull green of paper money.