The cop glared into the air. "I wish I could see your face," he said.
"So do I, pal."
The cop made his decision. Lowering the knife, stepping back one pace, he pushed Peg forward and said, "Go start the van."
"Put the knife away," Freddie said, as Peg ran out of the house. "You don't need it."
The chief said, "What's going on here?"
"In a minute, Chief," Freddie said, while the cop, still suspicious, closed up his knife and put it away. Freddie said to him, "You know I'm a thief, right?"
"It's what I like about you," the cop said. "So far, the only thing I do like about you."
"Well, there's another thing about me you oughta know," Freddie said.
"What's that?"
"I'm also a liar," Freddie said, and punched him in the face.
55
It was the damnedest thing Geoff Wheedabyx had ever seen. For about three minutes, the fat bad guy called Barney apparently beat himself severely with parts of Geoff's house, throwing himself on the floor, dragging himself backwards into the hall, flinging himself madly against the walls, knocking himself down repeatedly and repeatedly jerking himself back upright again, while making a lot of sounds like oof! and uh! and aak! Then, after having done a final tattoo of the back of his head against the office-door frame, Barney collapsed on the floor without a sound and stopped moving, a marionette when the show's over.
Geoff was still staring at this battered unconscious man when the voice of Freddie sounded over by the open front door, yelling, "Peg! Go home!" Then the door slammed itself.
As if that weren't enough, something grasped Geoff's elbow and propelled him back into his office, while Freddie's voice, now very close to him, said, "Chief, we gotta talk."
"What I've got to do," Geoff said, "is let my crew out of that basement, doggone it. They've got toilets to install."
"In a minute, Chief. Do you know what happened here today?"
"I'll be damned if I do," Geoff said. "But after a couple weeks' intense interrogation, I believe I'll begin to get some idea of it."
"That bunch of guys came to this town to rob the bank."
Geoff wished he could give this fellow Freddie the look of scornful disbelief that remark deserved; it wasn't anywhere near as satisfactory to give the opposite wall a look of scornful disbelief. "They never did," he said.
"And there's no invisible man here," the invisible man said.
"I'm talking to myself, I guess." But Geoff was too straightforward a guy to make sarcasm really work.
"No, you're not talking at all, you're listening. And I'm telling you those guys came here to rob the bank, and they figured to neutralize the local law first, which is you, so they came over here and captured you and your construction crew—"
"And my deputy, he's down there, too."
"Your deputy, that's good. But then you turned the tables on them, all by yourself."
"I can't say a thing like that," Geoff said, "even if there was a reason for it, and what's the reason?"
"I probably saved your life, Chief, how's that for a start?"
"I was thinking about that," Geoff admitted, "while I was handcuffed to the chair there, and they sure didn't act like they planned on leaving any witnesses."
"I just found out I'm gonna be invisible the rest of my life," Freddie said. "Found out from the doctors who did it to me. So I could stick around here with you and tell the invisible man story and be a freak in a cage the rest of my life, doctors poking at me. Or I can take off and really disappear, you'll never hear from me again, and Peg and me'll have a quiet life somewhere."
"I sympathize with you," Geoff admitted, and added, "Freddie, I do. But I can't claim I beat up and knocked out and captured four tough guys all by myself."
Freddie, or the air around him, sighed. He said, "You don't lie, is that right?"
"That's right, that's the problem, I'm just no good at it."
"Chief, did you ever lie to your mom, when you were a kid?"
Geoff felt his face turning red. He stammered, "Well . . . I suppose . . . you know . . . kids . . ."
"With the construction company, ever lie to a customer?"
"Well, you know, there's things people don't entirely understand, in a business like, you got your scheduling and your parts delivery, and, uh . . ."
"Ever lie to a woman?"
Two days ago, most recently. Geoff shook his head. "You want me to lie," he said.
"You bet I do."
Geoff thought about it. "I just can't see it," he said, "that I can look one of the state boys in the eye and tell him I did all this by myself."
"Just keep telling the same story, you'll be all right."
"And what about the story these fellas tell?"
"You mean, how they came up here to kidnap an invisible man? You think they're gonna say that?"
"They gotta say something," Geoff pointed out.
"They'll claim misunderstanding, innocent victims, and they won't get away with it. Chief, I bet you not one of them says a word about any invisible man. And if they do, they'll be talking to nothing but psychiatrists the next twenty years."
"All right," Geoff said, having thought it over. "I tell you what maybe I could do. I'll explain things — I'll explain some of the things — to the fellas in the basement. And then I can say I managed to unlock the door and free them, and that's three, plus one, plus me, the five of us overpowered these fellas."
"Will they keep their mouths shut for you?"
"We pretty much take care of one another," Geoff said.
"Fine." The voice trailing away toward the door, Freddie said, "I'll get out of the way now."
Geoff went out to the hall, where the fat man was stirring, half sitting up. "Barney's coming around," he commented.
Whap! "No, he isn't. So long, Chief. And thanks."
The front door opened and closed. Geoff went back into his office to get handcuffs for Barney before talking to the guys in the basement, but then he heard a sudden shout from outside. So he went back to the hall, and the front door opened, and Freddie's pained voice said, "Could I borrow a broom, Chief? I forgot about those damn tacks."
"Better let me do the sweeping," Geoff said. "I wouldn't want the neighbors to think I'm doing The Sorcerer's Apprentice over here."
Geoff was just bringing the broom back into the house, where the tough guys were now conscious and rolling around on the floor, helpless because their hands were cuffed behind their backs, and here came Cliff and the construction crew, boiling in from the kitchen. "Where are they? Geoff, what's happening? What's the story here?"
Geoff said, "You got out! That's great!"
The crew looked a little sheepish. One of them said, "We kinda had to go through the wall beside the door. Kinda demolition, you know."
Another one said, "We did it as neat as we could."
The third one said, "We can patch it up, Geoff, no problem."
"Well," Geoff said, "this makes it a lot easier. Come on in the parlor and sit down, guys, let me tell you a little story before I call the state boys."
56
When Mordon awoke, he watched the oval spot of sunlight rise slowly to the teak cabin wall, then sink slowly to touch the mounds of his feet beneath the creamy blanket, then rise again; and so did Mordon, shaking, pale, staggering as he went into the bathroom.
It wasn't the gentle slow roll of the yacht that had so unmanned him, nor drink (though last night he had taken onboard much drink), but fear. His fear of the floating ax, when yesterday he had run pell-mell from Chief Wheedabyx's house and all the way out of the town of Dudley, had soon been replaced by the even stronger fears of exposure, ruin, and prison. His fears had been so powerful that his flight took place in a terrified daze, so that he barely remembered the pickup truck that had given him the lift, the diner in which he'd made the phone call to the car service in New York, the hours spent quivering over undrunk coffee in a rear booth of that diner, the hours spent quivering in the back of the town car that returned him to New York, the hours spent quivering in his office while he waited for Merrill Fullerton to respond to his call.