In the pause, Mitzie’s eyes grew bright. She looked at her companions. “Why don’t we take him up on it?” she said lightly but not casually. “I mean, about Fun Incorporated. It sounds exciting.
“Why don’t we?” Mitzie repeated after a moment.
Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck sat there as coolly and as contemptuous of any challenge as when Phil had first seen them. Yet there was a difference.
“Of course, it’s risky,” Phil cut in. “Moe Brimstine’s boys have orthos.”
“What do you know about orthos?” Carstairs demanded hungrily.
Phil shrugged. “They’re blue and they sizzle,” he said. “I got shot at with one earlier tonight.”
“Why don’t we, I’m asking?” Mitzie pressed.
“I asked Juno and Jack Jones to help me,” Phil put in. “You know, the wrestlers. But they decided not to.”
Still no one answered Mitzie’s question. “Well, I guess that’s it,” she said with a triumphant smile, turning away from the table. “Come on, Phil.”
They had taken three steps when Carstairs began to chuckle quietly. Phil might have kept going, but Mitzie turned back with a carefully repressed eagerness that Phil resented.
“Don’t kill yourselves running,” Carstairs said. “Llewellyn and Buck and I are signing up for this little expedition, providing the clown can give the right answers to a few questions when we get outside.” He smiled as he got up. “Just one thing, Mitz. This time there better be no cops.”
Mitzie laughed. Phil accepted the situation with a “Glad to have your help, boys,” and started to take Mitzie’s arm, but she linked hers with those of Carstairs and Llewellyn, not sparing Phil another look.
The sequined singer had shifted to a snappier rhythm.
Slap me silly, honey,
Beat me till I break.
Love is very funny,
Laugh until I ache…
To solace his injured feelings, Phil veered over to Phoebe Filmer’s booth, where the green-blonde was being rather pointedly annoyed by two bearded young men while her escort looked on agitatedly.
Phil tapped the nearest ruffian on the shoulder. “Lay off, boys,” he commanded, with a meaningful nod toward his own party. Buck at least looked his way and Otie growled. The bearded ruffians slunk off. Phil made Phoebe a tiny bow.
“Thank you,” she said weakly and astoundedly.
He gestured that it was a mere nothing and walked off.
“Say,” she asked, hurrying after him and dragging her escort with her, “did you ever find that green cat of yours?”
He smiled at her. “No,” he said, “but I’m going to.”
X
“AND how did you plan to get inside when the place is closed for the night?” Carstairs prodded sardonically.
For answer Phil cocked his eyebrows defiantly and gave the restaurant door a smart shove. It swung silently inward. He led them in haughtily, vaguely aware that Llewellyn was examining the lock.
The long room was very dark. It smelled stalely of people and liquor and seared meat; Phil even thought he could distinguish Juno’s burned rabbit chops. Otie snuffed eagerly and tugged Buck forward by his leash. Phil steered their course confidently between the counter and the booths. He was feeling particularly pleased with himself because Mitzie had found opportunity to ask him for his address on the way over.
“All right, all right,” he heard Carstairs whisper behind him to Llewellyn, “so the lock was burned. Somebody’s ahead of us. We’ll be watching out.”
Phil pushed open the door to the stairs, and hesitated. Inside it was now completely black.
Something hissed softly beside him and a luminescent cone puffed out. A couple of seconds later, the half dozen treads of the stairway glowed milkily.
Buck chuckled inches from Phil’s ear. “Lum’niscint mist,” he explained with professional casualness. “You get going. I’ll spray.”
Phil started up, the milky surface light keeping two or three treads ahead of him in blobby advances. The mist got on Otie, so that he glowed like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Some of it even got on Phil’s trouser bottoms and sockasins.
“We’re certainly marked if we have to run away and hide,” Phil commented dubiously as he reached the corridor he and Juno had come through and then took the unknown way upward.
“Uh-uh,” Buck chuckled wisely, “’cause I’m spraying a neutralizer behind us.” He directed at Phil’s feet a dark, faintly hissing canister and Phil’s feet blacked out, along with a blob of surrounding treads. Looking back, Phil saw that the glow on the stairs vanished abruptly. He could not see Mitzie. Carstairs, and Llewellyn.
He asked Buck, “How do you manage two canisters and Otie all at the same time?”
“Hell, I could aim a squirrel rifle and run a still in addition,” Buck assured him.
Phil became aware of a dim radiance above him, beyond the range of Buck’s mist. Buck hurriedly neutralized all the luminescence, including that on Otie and Phil. Phil cautiously went up the last ten treads, the upper radiance increasing all the while, and found himself in a shadowy, curving corridor. His steps got shorter and shorter, then stopped.
A couple yards ahead lay three swollen furry shapes, each with a half dozen slim black things stuck into them, like feathered darts.
He recognized at least two of the dead cats. Although grotesquely puffed up, their markings told him they were a Siamese and a short hair he had seen at the Akeleys’.
“Watch it!” he heard Carstairs whisper, but at the same instant Otie jerked away from Buck and moved swiftly forward, his leash trailing, to snuff at the nearest swollen shape. The tail of the dart next to Otie’s nose began to revolve with a faint, feathery rustle. Otie became tensely still, disregarding his master’s anxious, “Back Otie!” The rustle became a whirr. Otie suddenly snapped sidewise at the dart, but at the same instant the dart withdrew quickly from the dead cat. Otie’s teeth clashed emptily. The dart hovered a few feet in the air, just like a huge black wasp. ’don’t anybody go closer.” Carstairs ordered hoarsely. Buck grabbed for the end of the leash, but it was flirted away from his hand when Otie abruptly changed position, watching the dart with deadly intentness.
The whirr became a loud sinister buzz. There were two quickzings and the hovering dart trembled like a blown candle flame. Half turning, Phil saw that Carstairs was shooting at it with some sort of airgun. The dart began to waltz in little loops. Otie leaped straight up, and snapped at it as a dog might at a bee, but the dart curtsied away.
Buck’s “Back, Otie,” was desperate. Otie stayed on his feet and batted at the dart with his paws. There were more futilezings from Carstairs’ airgun. The dart looped back and hovered in front of Otie’s muzzle. As he opened his jaws for a snap, it shot down his throat.
Otie, his eyes and jaws open wide, beat the air with his paws. Then he dropped to all fours and hurled himself off at top speed. He slammed against a wall, got up with difficulty, trembled over to Buck, and fell down and didn’t move. It seemed to Phil that the gaunt creature was taking a deep breath, and then Phil suddenly felt sick, for the coyote was beginning to swell.
“Don’t touch him!” Carstairs shouted, but Buck was keeping his distance. Carstairs came up beside Buck and leaned prudently forward, his bangs swinging out from his forehead. “Always did want to see one of those things in action,” he said softly.
“They’re what they call singular missiles, aren’t they?” Llewellyn asked fascinatedly, coming up. “Anti-individual, I mean.”
Carstairs nodded. “Used them in the last cold war, though hardly any rumors got out. They were for assassinations. The FBL and the Russkies could tell tales. They’re supposed to be driven by a tiny, ion-emitting radioactive fan. I wish I had a counter so I could know. And of course, they home on the radiant heat of flesh and then inject a poison.”