Donald Hamilton: The Shadowers

It was suddenly very quiet in the concrete room. They were all watching me. Olivia started to protest as I pushed myself up, but she thought better of it. She helped me rise. I had a sore leg, but it carried my weight after a fashion. I looked around. The place was getting pretty crowded, I decided. A couple more bodies, dead or alive, and we'd have to start turning away applicants.

Olivia said quietly, "I think you'd better say exactly what you mean, Paul. What are you hinting at?"

I studied her face for a moment. I looked at the other two. Olivia looked as if she was considering being angry. Braithwaite looked bewildered. Dottie looked scared. I didn't really blame her. It was quite a situation for an innocent young girl to find herself in, knee-deep in dead bodies-if she was an innocent young girl. At the moment I would have put no trust in a white-robed angel from heaven complete with security clearance for Final Secret.

I limped over to the corner where Mooney lay. It wasn't really difficult. Getting down on my knees was the hard part. It had to be somewhere. I found it in the neck, at the edge of the hair.

"No wound, eh?" I said to Olivia, pointing to the tiny spot of blood.

She knelt beside me quickly, heedless of her nylons. Tending to the wounded had already given them enough of a beating on the concrete, I noticed, and another run wasn't going to make a great deal of difference. It was easier to look at her ruined stockings than to watch her pale face and wonder what was going on behind it.

She said, "Why… why, it looks like a hypodermic puncture!"

"Not really!" I murmured. "Doc, you astonish me!"

She looked at me. "Paul, what-"

"I gave you a message to give to young Braithwaite. In that message I said I might use the needle and a certain injection. Did you pass the word to Jack when you got in the apartment?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, of course."

"Never mind that. The fact is that everybody here- everybody alive-knew there was a hypodermic available. Obviously somebody who's acquainted with the kind of kit we carry took advantage of that knowledge to silence Mooney in the confusion after all the shooting."

Olivia watched my face and didn't speak. Nobody spoke. It was getting very tight in there, very close. I could feel something or somebody getting ready to break or make a break. Mooney had been killed to keep him from betraying one of three people. The person who'd done the job was waiting for me to put the finger on him

– or her. I checked Mooney's clothes quickly. What I was looking for wasn't there. Toni was next. It wasn't nice, but I had to do it. She didn't have it either.

I struggled to my feet and limped over to Kroch where he lay face down in a pool of blood. He'd been thoroughly shot up and he'd done a messy job of dying. I felt in his coat pocket and my little drug case was still there. However, when I opened it, the hypo was missing as I'd expected. Having run the risk of picking the dead man's pocket for it, the murderer wouldn't be likely to run the risk of being caught returning it.

Something else was missing, too: half an ampoule, if that's the correct term, of the stuff we use when we don't want them to wake up. As I'd figured, under cover of the confusion, while the others were tending to the wounded and dying, the murderer had cleared my needle of the sleepy-stuff I'd been planning to use on Kroch and loaded up with a lethal dose of something permanent. Well, our techniques and equipment are fairly well known to the opposition, just as theirs are to us.

They were all watching me closely. I made a production of inspecting the case and Kroch's body. He didn't have it, either. That established the elements of the problem clearly: four concrete walls and a concrete floor, three people, one hypodermic syringe. I reached out and grabbed Kroch's fallen pistol out of the pool of blood. I aimed it at Braithwaite.

"You said you had a gun, Navy. I want it."

"But-"

"You have five seconds. At five, you're dead."

That was pure bluff, of course. I wasn't killing anybody. I'd lost one potential informant to death; I wasn't about to give away another.

Braithwaite swallowed. "Yes, sir." He reached gingerly into his pocket and brought out a revolver resembling the one I'd lent Olivia. I don't know what makes Washington so partial to the sawed-off little monsters, but they pass them around like chewing-gum samples.

"Lay it down and back away from it," I said. "You, Doc, on your feet. Get over there with him."

Olivia hesitated. Her eyes were wide and questioning, maybe hurt, but she didn't speak. After a moment, she rose and stood beside the boy. I looked at her bleakly. She could be very sweet and we'd had some fun, but I didn't know. I didn't know and I wasn't taking any chances.

"You've got a knife somewhere," I said. "I know because I gave it to you. It's no good for throwing, the balance is all wrong, so don't try. The gun I gave you, you shot empty. As for you, Miss Darden, stand right there with them. I don't know what you've got, weapon-wise, so don't scratch yourself anywhere, not even if it itches real bad."

I managed to get back to my feet. I switched hands on the pistol, wiped my right hand on my pants, and switched back. I didn't really know whether Kroch's sticky little popgun would fire or not-it might even be empty-but neither did they. I gestured. They backed up. I moved forward and managed to get Braithwaite's weapon off the floor without falling on my face. A quick check told me it was fully loaded. I dropped the Spanish.22 into my coat pocket. I was in business as long as I could remain vertical.

Olivia said, "Paul, you're not doing your leg a bit of good. And you're acting like a madman. That blow on the head-"

"Let's postpone the diagnosis, ma'am," I said. "The treatment, too. I'm doing fine. I don't need medical attention. All I need is a hypodermic syringe. Just one little hypo, folks, and we can all go home."

"I don't understand," said Dottie Darden plaintively. "I don't understand-"

"You will," I said. "We might as well start with you. Take your clothes off."

It went over big. Olivia gasped and looked at me incredulously. Braithwaite stared at me with shocked indignation. The little blonde nurse thought I was pretty terrible, too.

"What?" she demanded.

"You heard me," I said. "And don't tell me I should pass you up because you're just an innocent bystander. You may be innocent, in one way if not another, but you're certainly no bystander. You worked for Dr. Mooney, you may or may not have slept with him-"

"I most certainly did not! Anybody who says so is a dirty liar! And if you think I'm going to undress in front of all these people-"

Olivia gave a sharp little laugh. "Don't be a hypocrite, dear. You know you'll just love undressing in front of us; you just wish we were all men!"

I said, "That'll be enough out of you, Doc." I looked back to the blonde girl. "Come on, Dottie. Don't make me get rough."

"Sir," Braithwaite said. "Sir, I don't think-"

"That's fine," I said nastily. "Let's keep it that way. Dottie?"

She hesitated; then she gave a defiant little youthful toss of the head that reminded me painfully of Antoinette Vail alive-another kid who'd got mixed up in things bigger than she was. Dottie threw an accusing glance at Braithwaite, apparently blaming him for this humiliation rather than me. She unbuttoned her uniform rapidly down the front, slipped out of it like a coat, and passed it over. A pink nylon slip came off over her head and followed the uniform into my hand. There was nothing significant in either garment. What remained wasn't worth taking off, except perhaps the sturdy white nurse's shoes.

She started to unfasten her brassiere, more deliberately now, even provocatively. She was beginning to enjoy herself, I saw, in a wicked, perverse, abandoned way; she was getting a charge out of standing there almost naked with everybody watching her or trying not to watch. The brassiere wasn't very substantial, and it obviously contained nothing but Dottie. I cleared my throat.