Chapter VII.
Walking on Air.
They lurched off with a suddenness that threw Dick against him, off balance. Marty didn’t bother seeking the rear seat, stayed crouched on his knees directly behind the driver’s shoulder.
“Can you still see them?” he kept asking at intervals. “Can you still see them?”
“Plain as day,” the driver assured him each time.
The strain was much worse than it had been while he was still afoot; then he’d had his own senses to depend on, now he had to get it secondhand through someone else’s.
“How many in it, can you make out?”
“Just one guy, at the wheel.”
“Has he looked around? D’you think he’s caught on? Try not to let him if you can help it.”
“He hasn’t turned around once, but then I’m no mind reader; he has. a rear-view mirror.” Then presently, “He’s stepping it up now. And before Marty could make the suggestion, the cab began to increase speed itself.”
“That’s it; don’t let him get away from you.”
“Gee, you sure must want him bad, whoever he is,” the driver remarked cufiously.
“Can you still see him?”
“Like he was on the seat next to me.”
Dick rocked there on the floor of the cab, with the difficulty any animal always has traveling in a fast vehicle, but he didn’t let out a whimper. Marty fumbled with the dog’s leg once, as if to see that it was properly adjusted.
“What’re you slowing for?” he asked abruptly.
“ ’Cause he is, too. Looks like he’s got where he’s going.”
“Where is it? What’s it like? I’ve got to know!”
“You’ll know in a minute,” promised the driver. He braked the car, got out, came around and opened the rear door. His voice turned raspy like a file. “Get out, stoolie,” he said. “This is as far as we go.” Something cold and round, with a hole bored through it, dug into Marty’s side.
The man holding it gave a whistle, a door opened, and footsteps came hurrying over.
“Who you got there?” a new voice asked.
“A police spotter,” answered the erstwhile cab driver. “This guy I been using to make deliveries in the park turns out to be an undercover cop or something. But get this: I noticed him coming after me, on my way back to the car. So I get in and pretend to start off. Then I kill my engine, coast around the other way, and come back to him from where I was, and he takes me for a taxi! He hops in and tells me to follow myself!”
“Bring him in and let’s hear what Angie has to say about it.”
“Watch that dog.”
Dick was already growling at the sight of the gun impinging on Marty’s ribs. He wouldn’t have a chance against a bullet at such close quarters, Marty knew, and they were probably both armed.
“Quiet, Dick!” he said hastily, and put a restraining hand on the dog’s collar.
One order from Marty was always enough for Dick. He subsided.
“Be a shame to have to shoot him. I’d like to show that leg to Angie. Maybe we could use him some more in our business, with one of our own guys, after we get rid of this mug. Get out, you!”
Marty fumbled his way through the door, was gripped roughly by the arm, swung forward.
“Look out,” he warned. “I’m not resisting, but I can’t control the dog if he sees you handle me.”
“Well, we can,” was the savage answer.
He was flung violently across some kind of open space, too broad to be just a sidewalk. The cement ended abruptly and it turned to sod or turf underfoot. He was swinging back and forth like a weather vane at the end of the brawny arm that held him, but Dick’s simmering resentment never had a chance to explode into the retribution it craved. Marty quelled it each time with a “Quiet, Dick!” for the dog’s own sake.
Marty was hustled in some kind of building entrance. Dick’s muzzle pressed anxiously at his calf as he followed close behind, and the tap-tap of his leg sounded as the flooring changed to concrete. There was a downward slope to it, too, like a ramp, so it was some kind of garage or warehouse. Marty was led onto a platform elevator and it started to go up under the four of them. Then they got off again and knocked at a door. It opened, he was shoved through, and could sense he was in the presence of three or four people. But only one voice spoke, an authoritative one. It was highly nasal.
“Company? Well, well.”
“He backfired on us, Angie,” said the one who had acted the part of cab driver.
Someone else said in surprised discovery, “He’s blind!”
“He can see stars, though,” said the nasal voice.
A swivel chair scraped back, someone stepped up close, and there was the shattering impact of a fist against Marty’s jaw. But even as he staggered from the blow, he had presence of mind enough to cry out hoarsely, “Down, Dick!” His dog’s safety was all that concerned him.
There was a skitter of suddenly arrested claws as Dick held back from launching himself into midair.
“I don’t care what happens to me,” Marty panted, still dizzy from the blow, “but I don’t want him to get hurt.”
“We could use him, Angie,” the phony cab driver pointed out. “One of our own guys could get behind the blinkers and go around passing it out.”
Marty spoke up as though anxious to impress his dog’s good points on them, even if it meant having him drafted for criminal activities. “He’s almost human,” he said: “he understands pretty near everything you say. Watch. I’ll show you what he can do.”
He wet the point of his finger, held it up like a becalmed mariner trying to find out if there was any wind. Then he advanced unerringly holding it before him.
“Watch out for that window,” he heard someone whisper warningly.
“It’s barred,” Angie answered. “What good’ll it do him?”
Marty turned to face them as though he hadn’t overheard. There was an iron bar against his shoulder blade, and its mate was about ten inches over.
“I just want to show you what he can do,” he said disarmingly. “I won’t even raise my voice, just talk like I would to you.”
There was an interested silence all around him.
“Get my hat, Dick,” he said quietly.
The dog reared up before him on its hind paws. Marty suddenly snatched it off his head himself, out of the dog’s jaws, shied it through the opening between the two bars. Dick dropped down for a second, sprang, there was the sound of his heavy breathing as he squirmed between the bars to the outside.
“Hey!” a voice cried out alarmedly.
There was a rush of footsteps from all over the room — too late. The barred window was empty.
“He made it, wooden leg and all!” someone gasped incredulously. “See him down there. He’s wagging his tail, he’s got the hat in his teeth!”
Marty turned his sightless face toward the opening, yelled as he had never yelled before. “Take it home, Dick; take it to Celia!”
Again a fist crashed into his jaw, but not quickly enough to silence the order. He went down smiling.
“Stop that dog!” Angie was raging. “Get him!”
A shot boomed out, a second one followed. Marty, a thread of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, was still smiling.
Angie was swearing like a maniac. “Gimme that gun, you cockeyed— You couldn’t hit the side of a barn!”
A third shot jolted, and this time there was a thin yelp from outside in the open somewhere.
“You got him, Angie! He’s down! I can see him floundering over there!”
“Well, go down there and finish him off! Give him one close to the ear!”
Marty wasn’t smiling any more. His head slowly drooped forward until it hung down over his chest. Dimly, through his grief, he was aware of footsteps returning to the room sometime afterward, a winded voice reporting: