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“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Presumably you’re speaking of identification documents.”

“Not exclusively. What did you have in mind?”

“Next question?”

“I heard this Sergeant Colbert killed three guys . . .”

“Is that so?”

“. . . with a snub-nosed .38 she carries in her brassiere. True?”

“Who the hell told you that?”

“I have friends in the MPs.”

“Interview over.”

“Consider this. A woman blowing away three guys trying to rape her and her girlfriend is a real man-bites-dog yarn. It’s not going to go away. I’m going to write it with what I have. If for some reason there’s some aspects of the story you don’t want me to write, you’re going to have to tell me what they are, and why I shouldn’t write them.”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“Your call.”

“I can’t talk about this in here.”

“Are you trying to get me into your room?”

“My office. To talk about this. Yeah.”

“And for that purpose only?”

“Boy Scout’s honor, cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Pity,” she said. “Okay, let’s go.”

—

“I’m a little disappointed,” Janice Johansen said, when they were in 507. “This is really an office.”

“Take a look at this, please, Miss Johansen,” Cronley said, and handed her his credentials.

She read them.

“I’ll be damned! If you wanted to dazzle a girl who has evil intentions, you succeeded. And you can call me Janice.”

“I frankly don’t know what to do with you, Miss Johansen. So, what I’m going to do is tell you the truth and then appeal to . . . Jesus . . . your patriotism.”

“The last refuge of a scoundrel, they say.”

“If after I tell you this story and what I don’t want to see in the papers appears in the papers, and any of my people get hurt, I’ll kill you.”

“This just stopped being fun. Still exciting, but not fun.”

“I’m not trying to be clever.”

“You’ve succeeded. What you are is menacing. So let’s have the story.”