illness, an operation, something like that. Not to let you bet heavily on a horse race because you've got a hot tip, or to let you pay off a gambling debt if you run in the hole." Well, she'd warned him.

But he'd given in, and had given her money to keep up the premiums for a while, ten or eleven monthly premiums. Then he'd run into a streak of bad luck instead of good and had told her he couldn't give her the money; he just didn't have it.

She'd taken it calmly. "All right, Ray. But I'm not going to cash in that policy. I'll take a job, part time anyway, and make enough to pay the premiums myself. More than that, I hope."

And she had taken a job, and had worked ever since. He hadn't objected. Why should he? If the damn policy meant that much to her, why shouldn't she earn the money to keep it up? And, for that matter, to kick in on household expenses or at least to buy her own clothes? Why should he have to earn everything for both of them and let her do nothing?

She'd held several jobs. Checker at a supermarket, ticket seller at a movie. Currently, and for the past eight or nine months, she was working an evening shift as a waitress in a Greek restaurant. Thirty hours a week, from five-thirty to eleven-thirty five nights a week. Usually when he was home at this time he drove her to work—and sometimes when he was doing nothing important around eleven-thirty, picked her up after her work. But this afternoon he'd had to leave his car at a garage to have some work done on it (that would be another damn bill on top of everything else) so the question hadn't arisen. Just as well, since they'd quarreled so bitterly. They'd probably have kept on quarreling in the car, and it would have done him no good. He recognized by now that he'd lost the argument; she was adamant and she'd stay that way. She hadn't believed him when he'd told her he was in physical danger.

Well, he didn't really believe that himself. Joe Amico was tough but he wasn't a gangster, and he wasn't going to risk having anybody killed for four hundred and eighty bucks.

True, he might go to the length of having someone beat up a little if he thought the guy was welshing on him, didn't even intend to pay off. But Joe knew him better than that. He'd owed Joe before and had always paid off—although never anything like almost five hundred bucks; how had it ever run that high? Joe knew he had a good job and was good for the money eventually.

All he needed was a lucky streak, and he was due for 

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