Two hours in my new body, Jeanne-Marie thought, and I'm helping a murderer to elude the police. A murderer? Well, he says he's not. His word is the only word I have so I guess I can go through with it with something like a clean conscience. Clean conscience or not, she knew she'd act as Lucky's passport out to the street. Because Lucky, she could somehow sense, was the adventure that the new Jeanne-Marie, the peddler's Jeanne-Marie, had summoned. The bill paid, they got up from the table. Lucky slipped his arm through hers and, their flanks together, they walked toward the exit. The pianist was playing a rhythmic rendition of the September Song. The pre-theater crowds were out now, Jeanne-Marie knew, filling the _Black Flamingo_ and the other cocktail places, and the street as well. Once on the street, Lucky could probably make good his escape. They went by the hat-check booth now, and out across a carpeted hallway, to a French door which led, up a little flight of stairs, to the street. A doorman swung the French doors out. "Stop!" someone cried behind them. Acting on instinct, the doorman slammed the French doors. Lucky whirled and swung his right fist brutally at a man running up behind them. Jeanne-Marie screamed as the man fell heavily. Then, incredibly, Lucky did have a gun in his hand. He pointed it at the doorman and said something and magically the doors swung open. Still holding Jeanne-Marie's arm and all but dragging her, Lucky sprinted up the short flight of stairs to the street. Footsteps pounded up after them as Lucky waved down a cab. * * * * * Jeanne-Marie tried to pull herself away from him, but his fingers dug into her upper arm painfully. "I'm not playing now," he said, his voice brutal. "Maybe it was a more subtle line than you thought, baby, but I'm not playing now. You're still my passport and you're going on being my passport till I tell you different." He threw open the rear door of the cab and heaved Jeanne-Marie inside. She fell against the leather upholstery and heard the driver say: "Hey, what the hell is this?" Voices shouted outside the cab. Feet pounded across the sidewalk. "I don't want no part of this!" the driver shouted. It was almost a wail. Lucky waved the gun and said in a quiet voice which still must have thundered in the driver's ear. "Start driving and start driving fast." A moment later the cab leaped away from the curb. As they joined the heavy stream of pleasure-bound traffic, Jeanne-Marie felt an instant of intense panic. Lucky had admitted it: Lucky's smooth line inside the _Black Flamingo_, his suave man-of-the-world attitude had been the real decoy. And Jeanne-Marie had fallen for it. But smooth line and man-of-the-world attitude, she knew now, hid a desperate fugitive who would stop at nothing. Lucky wasn't watching her now. His eyes were glued to the rear window of the cab, watching the traffic behind them; looking for signs of pursuit.