However, the hand that gripped the coagulator was steady as a rock.
The little old man peered fiercely at him with rheumy, bloodshot little eyes. He cackled harshly, exposing a gaping maw wherein the worn stumps of two or three greenish teeth wobbled insecurely.
"That's it, me lad! Not a quiver o' yer eyelid, or I'll curdle yer red stuff to blood puddin'," he wheezed. Hautley complied with unruffled demeanor.
Hufferd, if indeed it were he, and Hautley suspected such was the case, looked him up and down curiously.
"Never saw ye before in all me days, so I'll be askin' yer name, me lad, before I clot ye. Speak up! Who th' divil be ye, heh?”
Quicksilver's mind raced at flashing speed, weighing psycho-semantico-emotional factors, and spoke in a curt clipped voice of steely sternness.
"Captain Rex Dangerfield!" he snapped.
His verbal blockbuster had the desired effect. At the unexpected and shocking news that he held the most feared crime-fighter in the entire galaxy at gun point, Hufferd gaped, gasped, and gagged. His gun hand flinched and wavered, no longer pointing straight at Hautley's heart.
Quicksilver's right leg flashed out in a neo-karate stroke. The coagulator went flying, clattering into a corner amidst broken crockery and noisome garbage. Hautley dove on his paralyzed prey, and it took him only 1.04 seconds to secure his aged opponent in a hammerlock.
"C-captain D-dangerf-field!" Shpern Hufferd spluttered, writhing feebly in Quicksilver's iron grip. "B-but wh-what the d-divil 'ud ye be wantin' wif an ol' duffer th' loikes o' me? I haven't tipped me fumbly ol' mitt in twenny-foive year or more, I b-been livin' the peaceable loife o' a retoired, lawr-abidin' citizen an' tax-payer, I have! Thar wuz I, takin' a li'l nap in t'other room, when I heard ye unlock me door—wot was I to think, I asks ye!—so natcherly I gits me gun and comes t' see what scut be pussyfootin' aroun' me quarters. What c'd the loikes o' yez, Cap'n, be wantin' from the loikes o' me ..."
"Just one thing, Hufferd. The present whereabouts of your former partner-in-crime, the notorious Dugan Motley. Quick! Speak up, and I'll not run you in," Quicksilver deadpanned in a level voice.
Hufferd goggled incredulously.
"Th' boss? Why, Cap'n, it's been many th' long year since I—"
His quavering voice broke of on a querulous note, and the fat little bandit sagged limply in Quicksilver's steely arms. Had he fainted from the unaccustomed shock of this encounter? Hastily, Hautley stretched him out on the dusty floor and tried to arouse him from his swoon. Then his hands grew still, and his bright mirror-eyes narrowed to glinting icy alits ...
Shpern Hufferd would never awaken from this swoon.
A tiny poison needle bristled from behind one sagging jowl. The little old man's eyes were glazed in sudden death.
Hautley recalled the faintly audible hiss of compressed air his sensitive ears had noted a split second before the little gnome had slumped lifeless in his embrace. A needle gun! Fired from somewhere beyond the window, perhaps in the street outside ...
He sprang lithely to the rectangle of grease-smeared plastic set in the street wall of the hovel. Sure enough, a minute hole punctured the pane.
Mind flashing into high gear, Quicksilver calculated the angle of fire from a swift mental reconstruction of the position of Shpern Hufferd's body at the moment it was struck, and the angle of the needle when it entered his flesh. The shot had come from a second-floor window of the building directly across the street. Keeping well out of the line of fire, Quicksilver peered at the structure opposite. As he had already noticed, prior to entering the flat, the first floor was a bar, the second floor seemed to be of a residential nature. The upper windows were unlit, seemingly unoccupied. But the murder shot could have come from no other position.
Hautley cursed briefly in three different languages. If only Hufferd had not switched on the room lights when he bad Quicksilver at gun point! If the room had remained in darkness, the unknown assassin across the way would have had to fire blindly, and the chances were that Shpern Hufferd would be alive this moment. But now he would never speak to reveal the hiding place of the Master Burglar of Capitan ...
Quicksilver exploded into a whirlwind of action. There was little if any time to be wasted. Valuable intelligence could be wrung from the unknown assassin, but Hautley must be swift to capture the villain before he eluded pursuit by mixing with the crowd.
The galaxy's ace criminal ground his weight upon one certain edge of his left bootheel, wherein a hollowed compartment contained a micronegagrav of his own exclusive design. The cunning device engaged, nullifying the gravitational forces about Hautley's body.
He hurtled into the air in a long spring of uncoiling power. The window of Shpem Hufferd's flat splintered into a cloud of gritty particles as Hautley's body zoomed projectile-like through the aperature—arched into mid-air above the foetid street—flipped head over heels—and came crashing through the window of the room above the bar.
Hautley landed in a fighting crouch, gun at the ready, amidst a litter of shattered plastic.
But the room was empty!
21
A BROKEN-DOWN BED slumped in one comer of the room, and against the further wall, the remains of a cheap pneumo sagged. Cheap garish 3D girlie prints hung on the walls. The floor was uncarpeted, sheathed in wear-resistant plastic, and liberally sprinkled with dust, aromatique butte, and even a used ovo-snave wrapper or two. It stank of mildew, of old meals, cheap booze, and smoke.
But it was empty. The assassin, or assassins, had fled. Hautley sprang to the door and tried it, but it was locked. The murderer of old Shpern Hufferd must have left only an instant or two before, for the chemical stench of a needle-gun still hung on the stale, vitiated air.
Hautley darted one hand into his "business suit," and withdrew a slim silvery tube which he pointed at the door. Time was of essence; he could easily pick the lock with his all purpose electronic key, but precious seconds were a-wasting. The silver tube flashed blindingly. The plastic door sagged, its center panel sprawling limply like wet tissue. The door frame around the lock dribbled down in rivulets of smoking, stenchful stuff that puddled the floor and left the metalic lock still fastened, hanging onto the wall's edge. Hautley sprang through the smoking gap into a dusty ill-lit hall. Empty.
At the end of the hall was a staircase which led down to the bar on the first floor. Quicksilver went down into a large room crowded with shabby loungers inbibing pungent fluids, smoking noisomely, filing the air with a concatenation of odors and gabble. He caught the eye of a huge red barkeep in a checkered apron, chewing on the stump of an aromatique. He beckoned the fellow over with a hick of his fingers.
"What's yers, bo?'' the oaf growled around the much-chewed stump of his smoke.
"Information," Quicksilver said crisply, showing him a bright iridium coin in the palm of his hand.
The fellow leered inquiringly, revealing an uneven row of muss-green molars.
"Ask ahead, sport," he invited.
"The rooms upstairs—any of them taken?"
"Mmph. Lessee now. Yer can take yer pick, bud. De Mozart Room, de John Philip Sousa Room. de Oiving Boilin Room, dey is all free. Oney one taken is de Meredith Wilsson Room, what is let to a party till 2:30."
Quicksilver smiled thinly. "Cultural, aren't we!"
"De ol' songs are de best, kid," the scarlet-visaged barkeep leered, chewing on his smoke.
Quicksilver cast a swift eye about the crowded noisy saloon. It was a motley horde, the spewings of the gutters of a hundred worlds. But nowhere amidst the seedy loungers did his keen orb perceive a grey-complexioned Orgotyr in fluorescent scarlet tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs, a kindly-faced Wollheimian in severely-tailored spray-on slacks with triple-gathered dockets down the cuff, a plum-skinned Schloim from Pazatar 9, or a white-furred and dual-headed entity from Wolverine 3. (May your historian point out that Hautley Quicksilver had known he was being followed all the time? I just wanted to call to your attention.)