Hard Rain Read Free Page B

holiday?"
    The heavyset adjutant, looking even more portly in his three-piece dark blue suit, bought a size too large to accommodate his not-too-well-distributed bulk, lumbered on.
    "Hello?" de Gier asked. "Remember me? Your assistant of the last ten years or more?"
    "Bah," Adjutant Grijpstra said. He turned, walked back to the door, and pushed the latch shut. He walked over to de Gier's desk and turned on his heel.
    "No," de Gier said. "Please. The last time that door was replaced, I had to pay half the cost. No, Adjutant."
    "Ha!" Adjutant Grijpstra shouted. His hand slid under his jacket and was back at once. A silver line linked his hand and the door. A stiletto trembled in the door's plywood.
    "One day you'll be sorry," de Gier said. "Your knife's point penetrates the wood by three inches. Someone might get seriously hurt."
    Someone was rattling the door's handle.
    "Just a minute," Grijpstra shouted. He walked back to the door and pulled back the latch.
    A young man, dressed in a rumpled corduroy suit, his small face topped by unruly wavy hair, stumbled into the room, holding his chest with both hands. He moaned and doubled up before his legs gave way.
    "See?" de Gier said. "In Cardozo's case there's no big loss—he can easily be replaced—but you might hit Jane, the loveliest member of our force, or Miss Antoinette, the commissaris's new secretary. I haven't had time to convince her yet."
    "Stop spoiling my practice," Grijpstra said, dropping his weight heavily into a swivel chair. "Besides, I usually aim high."
    "Convince Miss Antoinette of what?" Cardozo asked, picking himself up.
    "Of my harmlessness," Sergeant de Gier said, smiling. "She thinks I want a permanent relationship, but I'll never interfere with her freedom, of course. All I'm hoping for is just a few hours of shared warmth."
    "After she pays for the meal," Grijpstra rumbled. "No."
    "No what?" de Gier asked. "If I pay for the meal I have a hold on her. She'll feel she owes me. I don't mind owing her. I'm prepared to be as humble as she likes a man to be."
    "No, I didn't have a good holiday," Grijpstra said. "Campgrounds are too noisy, and we were washed out in the end. Nellie lost her tent. First it was pressed down by all the water and then it blew away. Best thing that happened. I went home and rested for a week."
    "Did you take Nellie to your house?" Cardozo asked.
    "Of course not," Grijpstra said.
    "Really," de Gier said, stretching. As his arms reached up, the butt of his oversize pistol was visible under his stylish jacket. "You mean Nellie still doesn't know your wife is gone? Why are you keeping up that farce?"
    "Suppose my wife comes back?" Grijpstra asked. "Two women in my small, comfortable, empty, whitewashed home?"
    "I thought your divorce went through," Cardozo said from behind the wobbly little table that served him as a desk.
    "She might just come back," Grijpstra said. "You never know. And if I took Nellie home for a week, she might just stay. Nellie has her own hotel. My wife lives in a huge villa with her sister in the country. I don't move in with them, do I?" He frowned furiously. "And what is it to you?"
    "Why do you feel threatened, Adjutant?" De Gier asked. "Your wife left you because she doesn't like you. Nellie loves her freedom above all. All women do, these days. Why couldn't you extend a normal courtesy to a fellow human being, regardless of sex? A lonely woman who just lost her tent and who has only one week of her hard-earned holiday left before she has to return to the daily grind of running an overcrowded hotel singlehanded?"
    Grijpstra rummaged in the drawer of his desk. He found a cigar, bit off the tip, and spat it into the waste-paper basket. "So what else is new? You two been busy? Any business? Can we get out of my private life?"
    Cardozo watched the adjutant's slender knife. "You're getting better, Adjutant—you're hitting the door now."
    "I hit what I intend to hit," Grijpstra said.
    "How come you never tell us