Workus growled. “I still don’t see why you didn’t just leave them there that long.”
“You see nothing. The bodies, of course. I want to keep on living here, even if an agent comes nosing around later. You are giving up your shop to go south, but I stay here. Nor would we want those bodies found dead anywhere else, dead of the gas.”
I opened my eyes in time to see Workus nod assent. He said, “We shoot them, then? Sure, we’ve got their car. The bodies can be found in it, on the road miles from here.”
“Yes,” said the monotonous voice, and I turned my head to look toward the man who’d spoken.
I’d never seen him before, but he was worth looking at. He was tall and almost ridiculously thin, but his face was what drew my eyes. The skin was stretched so tightly over the bones that his head looked almost like a skull.
Pasty-white skin, and across the forehead was a vivid red scar that looked like a saber wound. It ran down into one empty eye socket uncovered by any patch or effort at concealment. The other eye turned upon me piercingly. “Our friend has come back,” he said. “Peter, you take care of them.”
The automatic was in Workus’ hand. He said, “Here? But—”
“Here, yes,” said the man with one eye. “They escaped once. We’ll take no chances again.” He grinned mirthlessly at me. “And if you hadn’t escaped, you would have been freed—probably. But now, no.”
I was able, for the first time since I’d seen him, to wrench my gaze away from his face enough to notice other things about him. First, that there was a gas mask slung about his neck, a type of mask which, when worn, covered all of the face except the eyes—which were huge circles of glass. He, then, had been the “faceless” man we’d seen on the path. He’d worn the mask, then.
Out of a corner of my eye, I saw Ellen sitting on a chair against the wall. The little gray cat was still in her arms, and her head was bent down over it, gently rubbing its fur with her chin. She smiled at me, a tremulous little smile that took real courage to produce. She said, “Well, Phil, we did find my cat.”
Workus said, “Stand up, if you want, Evans. If you’d rather not take it lying down.”
And I found, surprisingly, that I didn’t want to take it lying down. Sounds funny that you’d feel that way when you’re going to be shot, anyway. You’d think it doesn’t matter how, but, somehow, it does.
I got up slowly, first to one knee, trying to take in as much of the room as I could in a quick glance around. Not that I expected to find a weapon in reach, or to see the United States marines coming through the doorway, or anything like that. But just in case.
If there was any way out of death for Ellen and myself, it would have to be tried within the next dozen seconds, and it wasn’t going to cost anything to try. Maybe if I lunged for Workus before I got completely to my feet—
But it wouldn’t have worked. He was six feet away; he’d be able to fire twice at point-blank range before I could get there. And he was ready for it.
There didn’t seem to be anything that offered a chance of succeeding. There wasn’t any furniture within reach. There were several chairs; the nearest was the one Ellen was sitting on. A kitchen table and a cupboard, but on the other side of the room. The back door was closed, and the one-eyed man stood beside it, as though ready to leave as soon as Workus had obeyed his orders.
The light was from an electric bulb in the center of the ceiling, out of reach overhead. And there was a telephone—somehow it gave the impression of being newly installed—on the table. Also out of reach. Two windows, the bottom sash of one of them was raised.
Nothing within reach. Not a chance that I could see. Nothing remotely resembling a weapon. Except—
I started talking before I’d quite reached my feet. Workus had no reason to be in a hurry to shoot us; he’d probably let me finish whatever I started to say, as long as I didn’t move closer to him.
“O.K., Workus,” I said. “But we shouldn’t have to die in vain, should we? After we went to all this trouble to get Miss Weyburn’s cat, does it have to die, too?”
He was staring at me as though he thought I was crazy—and maybe I was crazy to think I could get away with this, but I figured that as long as I had him puzzled, he’d hold the trigger. I didn’t, of course, wait for him to answer. I kept right on: “Look, if I’m giving up my life for a cat, you ought to be sport enough to let the cat go. And anyway, you can’t shoot Miss Weyburn while she’s holding—” She wasn’t holding the cat any more, though, because I’d just turned around and taken it from her, and I was turning with it in my hands toward the open window.
As though I were going to drop the cat out the window; but I didn’t. I’d timed my turn and synchronized the motion of my arms for the throw, and even before the man with one eye yelled, “Hey!” and the automatic in Workus’ hands went off, the cat was sailing through the air at Workus’ face.
He pulled the trigger all right, but he ducked while he was doing it, and the bullet missed me by inches. It’s not easy to shoot straight when there’s a cat hurtling at one’s face, its claws out ready to grab the first available object to stop its flight.
And I was going in toward Workus behind the cat, and almost as fast. Swinging a roundhouse right as I went; aiming at his stomach as the biggest and hardest to miss target for a blow I couldn’t take time to aim carefully.
The cat caught its claws in the shoulder of his coat and then jumped on down to the floor just as my fist made connections. The blow had all my weight and the force of my run behind it. He didn’t pull the trigger a second time, and I heard the automatic clatter to the floor as he started to fall.
I didn’t take time to go after that gun; I whirled toward the man standing by the door and I was starting toward him almost before I’d finished my blow at Workus.
The one-eyed man was bringing a pistol—which had been, apparently, in his hip pocket—around and up. But things had happened too fast, and he hadn’t reached for it soon enough. Or maybe he’d fumbled in getting it out of his pocket. Anyway, I got there before he could lift and aim it. I didn’t take time to swing at him; I simply ran smack into him with a straight arm that caught him full in the face and smacked his head against the door behind him so hard that I thought, from the sound of it, that I’d killed him.
I whirled back to see if Workus was going for the gun he’d dropped, but he was sitting on the floor, doubled up and groaning in pain, and Ellen had the gun.
I said, “Atta girl,” and then picked up the other gun and put it in my pocket and went for the phone. I called Hank Granville’s home number and got a sleepily grunted “hello” after a minute or two.
“Hank,” I said, “this is Phil. Say, about that Dean-laboratory burglary and murder. Was the secrecy because they’d been working on an odorless lethal gas? Something in solid form that you drop in water like carbide, and it—”
“Hey!” Hank sounded suddenly very wide awake. “Phil, for God’s sake where’d you find that out? It’s supposed to be—”
“Yeah,” I cut in. “Secret. But a guy by the name of Workus who had a front as a pet-shop owner, and another guy, got it. Dunno whether they got it to peddle to a foreign power, or what, but they weren’t sure they had the right stuff and they wanted to test just how good it was. That’s what they wanted cats for; to see how far a given quantity of it would spread.”
“The hell! Phil, this is big! If you’re right— Where the devil are you?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Somewhere in the country. But I got both guys here, and everything’s under control. I’ll leave this receiver off the hook and you can get the call traced and come out with the Maria. So long.”