Chapter 25
THEY MADE quite a crowd in Jessup’s office. There were Emil Kahn and Brannigan, linked wrist to wrist by Brannigan’s own handcuffs, a rather distrait Saint Bernard and a battered but still pugnacious bulldog. Kahn had gone all to pieces, as overly fat men sometimes do. Brannigan kept nagging at him, and was himself nagged by McCloud’s gun and his inability to jump it. Kahn, liking it or not, was Brannigan’s anchor.
Jessup sat gnome-like before his desk. His close-cropped iron gray hair and mustache bristled belligerently, and he was biting his words off so short they seemed to jump. The myriad tiny veins in his nose and cheeks were now magenta.
Sheila Mayo stood at the windows, her back to the room, very straight and slim in her tweeds, waiting with a calm born of utter resig
