Read Online The Green Eagle Score by Richard Stark - Free Book Online

of weeks had put the kibosh on that. You’d think psychoanalysis would have made her more sensible.
    Stan was brooding about this so much he forgot to look at the clock, and the next thing he knew Lieutenant Wormley was coming by his desk, rolled-up magazine in his hand, grinning and saying, “Stan, you’re becoming a positive company man. If the Major could only see you now.”
    “Yes, sir,” Stan said. “I’m bucking for civilian.” There was a time when it would have grated on him to call a little punk like Wormley “sir”, but by now the word was automatic. It was one of the painless little things you did to get by, you called the Wormleys “sir”. And if “sir” had one definition for the Wormleys and another definition for Stan, a private definition all his own, that was Stan’s business.
    Wormley had to lock up. He stood waiting at the door while Stan and Sergeant Novato got ready. Stan put the camera and the envelope full of photos into a brown paper bag and headed for the door.
    Wormley nodded at the bag. “Taking home samples, Stan?”
    “You bet, sir.” You bet, you simple son of a bitch.

3
    Stan took pictures of the office,” Ellen said.
    “Oh?” Dr Godden’s voice expressed polite interest. “Why did he do that?”
    “I don’t know. That man Parker wanted him to. All kinds of pictures, not just of the office.”
    “What else?”
    “Oh, the gate, and the outside of the building where he works, and some trucks and buses and things.”
    “Well, well” said Dr Godden. “It does sound as though they’re serious, doesn’t it?”
    “I knew they were.”
    “It seems you were right,” said Dr Godden. “Are they hiding their plans from you?”
    “No, How could they, they’re using my house! As though I wanted to know what they were doing.”
    “Don’t you?”
    “I do not,” she told the carpet. “When they start talking, I leave the room right away.”
    “Why is that?”
    “I hate it!” she burst out, glaring at the patterns in the carpet. “I hate the thought of it, I hate everything they’re doing.”
    “Is it only because you’re afraid they’ll be caught, or that Stan will want to keep doing it until he does get caught?”
    “I don’t know. How do I know?” She knew she was getting agitated, but she couldn’t help it. “I just hate them being here, doing all that—all that.”
    “Well, let’s think about it,” he said. “You say you hate them being there, making their preparations in your house. Is that the point? That it’s your house?”
    “I don’t know. I suppose it could be.”
    “Do you feel they are violating your hospitality? Or that Stan is betraying you somehow, entering into a plan with your ex-husband?”
    “I don’t think so,” she said, frowning at the carpet, trying to think, trying to see if anything Dr Godden was saying found a response inside her. He did that sometimes, offered one reason for a thing after another until they found the one she responded to, and that was usually it. Even if the response was strongly negative. In fact, if she were to say definitely no to something, nine times out of ten that would turn out to be what the reason was after all.
    “Do you object,” he asked her now, “to your husband using your home? Or is this planning just reminiscent of the times when you were married to him, particularly the time when he did get caught?”
    “Yes,” she said. She looked briefly directly at him, at those intelligent sympathetic eyes, and then away again.
    “That’s it,” she said, knowing it was. “It makes me nervous, them all in the living-room, just the way it used to be. I feel, I feel trapped, as though nothing was changed, I’m not really free of Marty after all.”
    “Of course,” he agreed. “The reminiscence is there, the similarity with the past. But there are differences, you know.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “You are free of your ex-husband. He is there only on your sufferance. That’s a big