Naked, Dutch leaned over the bathroom sink to watch himself in the mirror as he scraped gingerly at his lathered face with a dull razor blade. It was early in the morning but already hot, and he’d opened the bathroom window, to let the warm breeze from the desert inside; Dutch grinned at his own reflection with insolent familiarity. The mirror was old—cloudy, discolored, cracked—but it did its job, and Dutch felt his usual surge of narcissistic pleasure as he examined his face in the glass, then looked down at his powerful body. He was a good-looking young stud and he was only too aware of the_fact. He could recite his vital statistics from memory ’ as promptly as any professional bodybuilder: height, six-two; weight, two hundred, give or take five pounds; neck, seventeen and three-quarter inches; thighs, twenty-five and calves sixteen and three-quarters. His big frame was packed with solid muscle, the product not so much of his occasional work-outs with weights as of budding highways for the state during his last hitch in prison for armed robbery.