was the red
Cadillac.

And if the red Cadillac had anything to do with anything, Malone didn't
know about it.

Very slowly and carefully, he opened his eyes again, one at a time. He
discovered that the light was not coming from the gorgeous Hollywood
sunset he had dreamed up. As a matter of fact, sunset was several hours
in the past, and it never looked very pretty in New York anyhow. It was
the middle of the night, and Malone was lying under a convenient street
lamp.

He closed his eyes again and waited patiently for his head to go away.

A few minutes passed. It was obvious that his head had settled down for
a long stay, and no matter how bad it felt, Malone told himself, it
_was_ his head, after all. He felt a certain responsibility for it. And
he couldn't just leave it lying around somewhere with its eyes closed.

He opened the head's eyes once more, and this time he kept them open.
For a long time he stared at the post of the street lamp, considering
it, and he finally decided that it looked sturdy enough to support a
hundred and sixty-five pounds of FBI man, even with the head added in.
He grabbed for the post with both hands and started to pull himself
upright, noticing vaguely that his legs had somehow managed to get
underneath him.

As soon as he was standing, he wished he'd stayed on the nice horizontal
sidewalk. His head was spinning dizzily and his mind was being sucked
down into the whirlpool. He held on to the post grimly and tried to stay
conscious.

* * * * *

A long time, possibly two or three seconds, passed. Malone hadn't moved
at all when the two cops came along.

One of them was a big man with a brassy voice and a face that looked as
if it had been overbaked in a waffle-iron. He came up behind Malone and
tapped him on the shoulder, but Malone barely felt the touch. Then the
cop bellowed into Malone's ear.

"What's the matter, buddy?"

Malone appreciated the man's sympathy. It was good to know that you had
friends. But he wished, remotely, that the cop and his friend, a shorter
and thinner version of the beat patrolman, would go away and leave him
in peace. Maybe he could lie down on the sidewalk again and get a couple
of hundred years' rest.

Who could tell?

"Mallri," he said.

"You're all right?" the big cop said. "That's fine. That's great. So why
don't you go home and sleep it off?"

"Sleep?" Malone said. "Home?"

"Wherever you live, buddy,"