“Oh, may I? Hey, hey, I was kidding! Put that down you idiot, there must be alarms in the glass.”

“Look, nobody’sgoing to be wearing any of that stuff between now and morning. Why shouldn’t we get some good out of it?”

“We’d be caught!”

“Well, you said you wanted to window shop…”

“I don’t want to spend my last hour in a cell. If you’d brought the car we’d have some chance—”

“—Of getting away. Right. I wanted to bring the car—” But at that point we both cracked up entirely, and had to stagger away holding onto each other for balance.

There were a good half dozen jewelry stores on Rodeo, But there was more. Toys, books, shirts and ties in odd and advanced styling. In Francis Orr, a huge plastic cube full of new pennies. A couple of damn strange clocks further on. There was an extra kick in window shopping, knowing that we could break a window and take anything we wanted badly enough.

We walked hand in hand, swinging our arms. The sidewalks were ours alone; all others had fled the mad weather. The clouds still churned overhead.

“I wish I’d known it was coming,” Leslie said suddenly. “I spent the whole day fixing a mistake in a program. Now we’1l never run it.”

“What would you have done with the time? A baseball game?”

“Maybe. No. The standings don’t matter now.” She frowned at dresses in a store window. “What would you have done?”

“Gone to the Blue Sphere for cocktails,” I said promptly. “It’s a topless place. I used to go there all the time. I hear they’ve gone full nude now.”

“I’ve never been to one of those. How late are they open?”

“Forget it. It’s almost two-thirty.”

Leslie mused, looking at giant stuffed animals in a toy store window. “Isn’t there someone you would have murdered, if you’d had the time?”

“Now, you know my agent lives in New York.”