“Guess I’ll turn in.” But not to dream, he thought; not even to sleep. Kit Sloan.
Across the lawns, on the second floor of the Bailey house, Beau was daubing cotton soaked in ice water on his cuts and talking to his wife, who sat fully dressed, as if she expected a cocktail party to begin any minute, on the toilet seat, holding a basin.
“That’s what happened,” Beau repeated shakily. “I asked Jake for thirty days more and he told Toledo to ‘impress’ me with the situation.” He didn’t seem even aggrieved, merely resigned.
“I-I don’t understand, Beau.” She did—only too well.
“Look at me, then you will. Toledo slugged me. I tried to hold myself together, Netta, I really did. I told him nobody could assault an officer of the Sloan Bank and get away with it—”
“What’d he say?” Netta had to know every detail.
“He said he only wanted his five thousand. He said I wouldn’t be a bank officer—any day he wanted to lift a finger!”
“Don’t talk so loud, Beau! Kit might hear you.”
“I feel like going down and telling him—and be damned.”
“ Telling Kit!” The horror of that overpowered Netta for a moment. “Don’t you realize…?”