Donald Westlake - Smoke

"Uh-huh."

"Skin cancer," Freddie added.

"Uh-huh."

Peg said, "He's got this special medicine that takes the color out of your skin and your whole body, and that's why you can't see him."

"That would explain it," Geoff agreed.

Peg now looked more sincere than ever. "But," she said, "there are some very bad guys trying to steal the formula."

"Uh-huh."

Simultaneously, Freddie said, "A chemical company," and Peg said, "Foreign agents."

"Uh-huh," Geoff said.

"A foreign chemical company," Freddie explained.

"Their agents," Peg footnoted. "They're Swiss, I think." Turning desperately to the chair behind the desk, she said, "Is that right, Freddie?"

"Yeah, I think so. Swiss, I think."

"So Freddie had to get away and hide," Peg explained, turning back to Geoff.

"Should be easy for him to do, considering," Geoff agreed.

Sounding bitter, Peg said, "You'd think so."

"I experimented on myself," Freddie said. "To test my formula, because I didn't want to put anybody else at risk."

"I've seen that in the movies," Geoff said.

"Sure. Happens all the time. But now I got to hide out until my experiment's done, and these guys are after me. They're very powerful guys, with these like tentacles into the very highest level of government, and all that stuff."

Peg explained, "It's like a Robert Ludlum novel."

"I was going to suggest that myself," Geoff told her.

"So we ran away," Peg went on, "but Freddie wanted to know if maybe they had some of their powerful friends get the police to look for us—"

"Corrupt city police," Freddie said, in a blatant appeal to Geoff's prejudices — dang!

"So we stopped here," Peg said.

"Of all places," Freddie said.

"And Freddie came in here to see if his name was on any wanted lists."

Geoff lifted an interested eyebrow toward the chair. "Was it?"

"I don't know yet. I mean, not so far."

Geoff pointed the gun at the clipboard on the right side of the desk. "Did you look on that clipboard?"

"No. What's that?"

"If they were looking for you, how long would it be?"

"Just a few days."

"Then it'll be on that clipboard," Geoff told him. "Any wanted flyers they fax me, I put them on that clipboard. Anything in the last two, three weeks'll be there."

"Okay if I look?"

Geoff couldn't help a sardonic chuckle. "You break-and-enter my house, and then ask my permission to look at that clipboard?"

"I apologize for breaking and entering."

"Go ahead and look," Geoff said.

That was a strange moment, when the clipboard lifted up into the air all by itself, and then started riffling its own pages. While the clipboard animated itself like that, Geoff took time to consider the baloney sandwich they'd just fed him. He suspected that, here and there in the mix, like flecks of gold in a sandy streambed, there were particles of truth stirred into the baloney. Not a lot of particles, but some.

A sigh of relief from the desk. Peg turned, hopeful, ready to be happy. "Is it okay?"

"We're not there!" Freddie sounded relieved, elated, even astonished. "Peg, by golly, I'm not a wanted man!"

"Well, that isn't exactly true," Geoff said. "Here in Dudley you're wanted, in fact you're being arrested, for breaking and entering."

"Aw, come on, Chief," Freddie said. "I didn't take anything, I wasn't gonna take anything, you know that's true. And I didn't hurt any of your locks or anything else, no damage at all. I'll even oil this damn chair before I go, if you want."

"Go? You aren't going anywhere."

"Chief?" Freddie asked. "Won't you give us a break?"

"No."

"Peg?"

All at once, Peg was slinking seductively toward him, smiling, blocking his view of the desk, saying, "Chief? Am I arrested, too? I didn't break into anywhere."

"Move over!" Geoff cried, but it was too late. Squeak! When Geoff jumped to his right, to see his chair, it was turning in a lazy circle, bobbing slightly, definitely empty.

"Damn it!" Geoff yelled, and pointed the gun at Peg. "Don't you move!"

"I just don't believe you'll shoot me," Peg said, and backed toward the open doorway.

"I'll shoot your leg!"

" This leg?" She leered at him. "Chief, what kind of man are you?"

"Now, stop ! Right there!" Geoff shouted, and his fire-chief helmet came flying out of the air and bounced off his wrist, so that he almost dropped the gun, but held on to it. Peg was now through the doorway, fleet of foot, and before he could get to the hall the front door slammed shut. Geoff spun around, trying to fill the doorway, to at least keep Freddie bottled up in here, and his police-chief hat took him square on the nose.

The son of a gun was throwing his hats at him! Geoff dodged his fedora, waving the useless gun this way and that, and here came his choir-singing cap, tassel streaming out behind it like a kite's tail. Geoff was actually ducking away from that cap when he realized it was moving in too straight a line, and not turning; it wasn't being thrown, it was being carried!

But the trick had worked, doggone it, that cap had made him duck out of the doorway just at the wrong second. Geoff flailed with his free hand, and found a wrist, and clenched on tight to that invisible wrist until he felt invisible teeth crunch hard onto his fingers. "Yow!" he cried, and let go, and so did the teeth, and a few seconds later slam went the front door again.

By the time Geoff got out to the porch, the van was picking up speed westward down Market Street; not a chance in the world he could get to either his pickup, two blocks to the left, or his police car, two blocks to the right, before those people were long gone.

Geoff hurried back into his office, sat down at his communications center, and was on the very brink of calling the state police when his second thoughts caught up with him. Report this? Report what? No evidence of a burglary, nothing taken. He knew Freddie was invisible, because he'd spent time in this room talking to the guy, but what would the fellas at the state-police barracks think if he called and asked them to pick up an invisible man in a gray minivan?

He had no idea who those two people really were, except not scientists. He had no idea where they were headed or what their true story was or why Freddie had thought he might be on some wanted list. All he knew for sure about Freddie, in fact, was that he was not on any wanted list, which seemed improper, somehow.

Well, he did know a couple things more about those two, when he thought it over. He knew Freddie had enough burglar skills to be a first-rate burglar, so probably was. He knew their first names, Freddie and Peg. And he knew their minivan's license number.

It took about two minutes to radio in and get the registration information, and learn that the owner of the van was one Margaret Briscoe — Peg, check — with an address in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York.

So he'd been right about one thing today, anyway.

30

"That was too close a call," Freddie said. He was staying in the back of the van, clothes off, just in case they got stopped by some law sicced on them by the chief. It hadn't happened so far, which meant it was increasingly unlikely to happen, but nevertheless. Freddie's wrist still burned where the chief had grabbed it, and his mouth still remembered the bad taste of the chief's work-roughened fingers.

Up front, Peg concentrated on her driving. "What got me about that guy," she said, "was how easy he took it. Like he talked to invisible people all the time."

"I don't like a cop that doesn't get rattled," Freddie agreed. He was sitting on his rolled-up clothing, trousers on the outside of the roll, but the country road still jounced him pretty solidly against the hard floor of the van. And AstroTurf, as any professional ballplayer can tell you, is no fun to bounce on.