IT TOOK him forty minutes to get out. There were two accidents on Death Strip, a woman with an armload of groceries from the supermarket and a car going sixty in a twenty-mile zone; another car ploughing into the rear of a sedan waiting behind three other cars for a light to change. Then Joe Cameron came out of the bank.
“Hi, I took your youngsters home. At their request. Miss Fairlie’s taking them on safari to the Elm Tree Field. To hunt a rabbit. A red rabbit.”
He boomed it out, laughing. O’Leary looked quickly around. There were only half a dozen of Mrs. Twohey’s friends in earshot, none of them deaf.
Then when he came off the highway around the bend in his own road where he’d braked to keep from running head-on into Harlan Sudley’s green truck, when Charlie Sudley was disking the fi
