protected yourself better than you did. What you did was
dumb . . . but just dumb enough to ring true.”
“Gee, thanks, Captain. I . . .”
“No thanks necessary. Just doing my job. Now get outta
here . . . and Mister Skeeve?”
“I know,” I smiled, “don’t change hotels or leave the
dimension without …”
“Actually,” the captain said drily without a trace of
warmth in his voice. “I was going to suggest the exact
opposite . . . that you leave the dimension . . . say, by
tomorrow morning?”
190 Robert Asprin
“What?”
“I still think you smell of trouble, and these reports con-
firm it. The smuggling thing just seems like too much small
potatoes for you to bother with. I’d rather see you gone
than put you in jail on a piddling charge like that . . . but
it’s going to be one or the other, get me?”
I couldn’t believe it! Perv was the nastiest, roughest di-
mension around and / was being thrown off as an undesir-
able!!
Chapter Twenty:
“Were you looking for me?”
—DR. LIVINGSTONE
I WAS SURPRISED to find Pookie waiting for me when I got
back to the hotel. The police had been nice enough to wait
until I had given her her check before hauling me off, so I
had thought I’d never see her again.
“Hello, Pookie. What brings you here?”
“I wanted to talk a little business with you,” she said.
“It didn’t seem the right time before, so I waited.”
“I.see.”
After my last experience, I wasn’t wild about the idea of
doing business with Pervects . . . especially ones who didn’t
want to talk in front of the police. Still, Pookie had given
me no reason to distrust her.