Ten minutes of careful stalking, fifteen, and then he saw me. His hand raced to his hip, there was a swish through the air, and then he went bye-bye, without a sound, the skin hardly bruised.
I stepped over him and took one of the back windows. The kitchen was deserted. A long hallway showed a faint light. A man sat with his back to the wall, a gun in either hand, nodding, breathing heavily, regularly. I stepped past him and paused before a door from which came the sound of voices.
Without knocking I opened the door and stepped into the room. It was furnished as an office, and a huge desk occupied the center of the floor. Upon this desk was a small, portable reading lamp, and the circle of its rays showed the white face of the woman with the mole, the thin, rat-like features of the man who had accompanied her, and whom I recognized as one of the most prominent of the criminal lawyers in the city, and showed, also, the huge bulk of the man who was sitting behind that desk.
It was that man in whom I was interested.
He was big, flabby, his skin dead white, his lips fat and spongy, and his face hung in folds about his chin, but there was a soft sheen to the skin, a smoothness of texture. His eyes caught the reflection of the reading lamp and seemed to shoot it forth in a glittering collection of icy rays. There was never so cold and remorseless an expression upon the face of any living mortal I had seen as was contained in the eyes of this heavy man behind the desk.
He was speaking, and he finished his talk before he shifted his glance toward the door. His voice was soft, gentle, and an even monotone, and there was no expression in it. It was his eyes which gave the expression, a cold, deadly intensity of purpose.
“Yet you delayed the signal. In some manner he escaped, and he left by neither the front nor the rear.”
The girl chose her words carefully, and there was a slight break in her voice, the faintest inkling of hysterical panic which she was fighting to control.
“Perhaps… perhaps he was… hiding on an upper floor.”
“Not unless he had been warned,” came the colorless tones of the man’s voice. “And if he was warned, who warned him?”
The slight noise I had made in opening the door had been overlooked. Temporarily it had slipped the mind of this man with the eyes of ice. So engrossed was he in probing the mind of the girl that he had forgotten to raise his eyes. Had he done so he would probably have taken me for one of his guards. The light threw a sharp glare on the desk, but the rest of the room was in gloom.
I advanced to the table.
The girl was weakening. I could see her head droop slightly. What her face told I knew not, but that sag of her head and neck told me much.
With an effort, scowling his impatience, the man with the eyes of ice tore his gaze from the girl and raised his glance.
“Well?” he said, and his tone was as colorless as ever, notwithstanding the impatience which gleamed from his eyes.
“Well,” I answered, “very well, thank you. In fact I am quite well, and I dropped in to say good evening.”
I was watching him like a hawk, looking for that tell-tale start, that swift tightening of his facial muscles which would show that I had jarred his self-control; but there was nothing. His face remained as passive as though it had been so much pink putty. His eyes were so hard and flinty one would have expected no change there. His voice remained well modulated.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Jenkins, himself. Come in and draw up a chair, Jenkins. We were discussing you.”
I walked on in, my eyes on his hands. The rat-faced criminal lawyer had plunged his hand into a side pocket of his coat, but I had no fear of him. He wouldn’t have the nerve to shoot until the last minute, and I didn’t intend to let them get the lead. I was going to play my own cards for a while.
“I dropped in to tell you that you’re all wrong. I waited outside this girl’s apartment for a second, just to see if there was to be any telephoning or signaling, and I heard the curtain roller go up and down three times. That meant a machine in front, and a machine in front probably meant a guard in the rear. That’s all there was to that.
“However, I wanted to get in touch with you, and when I saw you were going to have this girl down here so you could throw a scare into her, I decided to tail along and have a little conversation on my own hook.”
The big man at the desk brushed his hand slightly as though he was waving the girl with the mole entirely to one side, and his eyes never left my face.
“Jenkins, I offered you once before, and I offer you again, a place with me, a place where you can make much money, have men beneath you to do the dangerous work, and can really find some market for the brains you have.”
I nodded easily.
“Just after you made that offer before you double-crossed me by holding out some papers on me.”
This time there was just the faintest flicker of expression in the gray-blue eyes. It was a slight twinkle of appreciation. He had a sense of humor, this man with the dead-white skin and the ice-cold eyes.
“You should talk of a double-cross. You slipped something over on us that time that was so fast no one ever caught it. It happened that I made a price for certain things in that case, the opening of a safe, let us say. The rest of it was up to the others. How you slipped it over on them I don’t know. The lawyer swore he destroyed the will with his own hands and that he watched you to see there could be no substitution, and yet…”
I broke in.
“Never mind all that. You double-crossed me at the start by holding out two papers on me. What came afterward was my method of registering disapproval. Now I want those papers and I want them right now, or I’ll register a hell of a lot more disapproval, and you’ll find yourself sitting in the gutter.”
The eyes were cold and hard again.
“Jenkins, I deliver those papers when and how I choose. However, you will throw in with me before you leave this room or you’ll leave it feet first.”
I hitched my chair closer and let my own eyes bore into his.
“Either you give up those papers or else you will suffer some very great inconvenience.”
I could see his fingers gripping the edge of the desk, gripping until the nails were white, but, aside from that, there was no sign of emotion.
“Jenkins,” he said in his quiet, well-modulated voice, “you interfered a few days ago and cost me a rake-off on fifty thousand dollars. I can’t allow you to be in a position to do it again. I have given you your chance…”
I didn’t let him finish. I had played my cards, had given him warning, had let him know that I could find him, could walk into his den at will. The next trick would have been his and I would have lost my lead — my lead and my life.
I swung my wrist and the leather bag filled with packed, sandy loam crashed down upon the desk light. The bulb crashed and the room was in darkness.
I jumped back toward the door, but didn’t make the mistake of opening it. The hall was lighted, and I would have been filled with lead before I had got over the threshold. However, I’d counted on that sleepy gunfighter who was supposed to be on guard, and I’d counted on the lawyer.
I figured right both times.
The lawyer fired at the chair in which I had been sitting, fired three times. Then there was sudden silence.
“Fool!” exclaimed the man with the eyes of ice.
There came running steps, and the door crashed open. The man with the two guns had burst into the room ready to go into action, and encountered a wall of inky darkness. The momentum of his rush carried him well past the sill, and I was standing by the door, ready, waiting, planning on just such a move.
As the man plunged in I gave him a quick thrust from behind, pushed him farther into the room, and, shielded behind his stumbling body, I darted through the door and down the hall. The lawyer fired again. The mere fact that he might kill his own guard meant nothing to him. He was desperate. What the bullet struck I didn’t find out. I was on my way. It didn’t strike me. It would have taken sheer luck for that bullet to have stopped me as I darted around that doorway with the stumbling guard blocking the view.