It was two hours later when he opened his eyes, instantly and completely awake, with every nerve alive and singing. He lay motionless save for the silent closing of his fingers on the gun at his side, every sense toned to razor keenness, straining to receive consciously whatever it was that had alerted him. From the next bed Hoppy’s snoring rose and fell in majestic rhythm, its pipe-organ vibrato accompanied by a piccolo phrase with every exhalation...
Then he heard it — a faint scratching of metal — and recognised it instantly.
A skeleton key was probing the front door lock.
He was out of bed and on his feet in one smooth soundless motion, and laying a hand on Hoppy’s mouth. The snoring ceased abruptly; Simon swiftly spoke in his ear, and Hoppy’s groggy eruption died aborning. He relaxed, and the Saint removed his hand.
“Listen.”
The faint scratching of metal was barely audible.
Hoppy nodded, one hand scratching for the gun under his pillow, his anticipatory grin almost as luminous as the moonlight that poured into the window.
“De zombies!” he hissed in a resounding whisper that brought Simon’s hand back upon his mouth again.
“Quiet!” the Saint breathed savagely.
There was a brief silence, and it seemed for a moment as if the man working on the door had indeed heard him. Then it came again — a scrape of metal — and suddenly the metallic click of tumblers falling into alignment, and the snick of an opening bolt.
“He’s coming in,” Simon whispered in Hoppy’s ear. “Don’t make a sound or I’ll brain you with this gun butt.”
He took his hand off Hoppy’s mouth and moved with the effortless ease of a cat through the living-room. He could hear the creak of the bed as Hoppy got out and padded after him. They paused by the archway to the entrance hall, staring into the almost darkness, intent on the pale rectangle of the front door.
As they waited there, the Saint couldn’t help feeling that somehow, despite his conviction that this visit rose from his recent conflict with Spangler, it didn’t quite add up. For he thought he knew Spangler’s character pretty thoroughly, and so primitive a motive as simple revenge simply didn’t agree with his knowledge of the man. Revenge for revenge’s sake was a luxury too expensive — and dangerous — to be compatible with Doc Spangler’s conservative nature. The worthy doctor might have better reason later on, but so far the Saint couldn’t imagine him going to so much trouble merely to assuage a sore belly.
There was another moment of silence... Then, without hearing it, but almost as if he sensed a momentary and fractional change in the air pressure, the Saint knew that the front door was starting to open.
Hoppy edged past Simon, as though straining on a leash.
Simultaneously, several things happened in such swift succession that they had the effect of happening almost all at once: a sizzling shower of golden sparks flamed from the door-knob, a wild howl split the silence, there was a mad scramble of slipping feet, the thud of a falling body, the blast of a gunshot, and the rattle of plaster cascading to the floor.
The Saint and Hoppy leaped forward almost on top of the gunman’s yell, with Hoppy ahead of Simon by virtue of his head start.
Simon’s warning cry came too late.
Hoppy’s joyous battle bellow leaped to a yell of consternation as he grabbed the door-knob amid another constellation of sparks bursting about his hand. He leaped backwards, skidding on a rug, and sat down with a cosmic crash in front of the doorway.
The Saint ripped the cord from the electric outlet with one hand, reached over with the other and tried to pull open the door against Hoppy’s obstructing weight.
“Okay, boss, okay!” Hoppy grunted protestingly as Simon rolled him over with a yank at the door.
He scrambled to his feet as the Saint disappeared into the hallway. But even as he snatched open the front door, Simon knew that the quarry had escaped. The “In Use” signal light of the automatic elevator gleamed at him in yellow derision. Hoppy charged past him and skidded to a halt. “Where’d he go, huh? Where’d he go?” he demanded feverishly.
Then he caught the glow of the elevator signal light and whirled for the stairs. The Saint grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Come back, Pluto,” he said disgustedly. “That elevator will be at the bottom before you’ve gone down three flights.”
He dragged Hoppy back into the apartment as a murmur of alarmed voices, with a few doors opening and closing, drifted faintly up the stairwell. Muttering to himself, Hoppy joined the Saint in the darkness before the living-room window and stared down at the moon-silvered street before the building entrance far below. Suddenly, as the realisation that the would-be raider would probably be leaving by that exit dawned upon him, a vast feral grin spread over his face. He raised his gun.
The Saint noted the car parked before the building, a little distance behind his — a dark sedan that hadn’t been there when he’d arrived there that night. He caught a glimpse of hands in the moonlight — hands that carried an odd sparkle — resting on the visible portion of the steering wheel.
Hoppy crouched beside him, his big black automatic clutched in a hairy fist resting on the window-sill, and stared lynx-eyed at the canopied building entrance eighteen floors below. Presently he rasped in an awful tide of anxiety, “Boss, maybe he goes out de back—”
He broke off as a man darted out from under the canopy — a figure reduced to miniature, scurrying towards the parked sedan. Mr Uniatz raised his gun and was aiming carefully when Simon’s hand clamped on his wrist in a grip of iron.
“No!” he ordered. “We’ll only have Fernack back — and next time he won’t be so easy to get rid of.”
“Chees, boss!” Hoppy complained mournfully, staring at the sedan roaring down the street. “I had a bead on him.”
“In the dark? Shooting downward at that distance?” Simon snapped. He turned away, crossing the living-room. “Don’t be a goddam fool. Besides” — he stepped out of the darkness of the living-room into the hallway — “there’s been enough noise for one night.”
Hoppy shuffled after him, muttering indignantly, “Nobody can gimme de business an’ get away wit’ it.”
The Saint looked at him resignedly.
“Don’t blame him! Grabbing that door-knob after I’d wired it was your own damn fault.”
“I wouldn’a done it if it wasn’t for him,” Hoppy insisted sullenly. “Besides, how do I know he can run like dat? All de zombies I ever see in pitchers move slower dan Bilinski. Dis musta bin a new kind, boss. Maybe somebody gives him a hypo.”
“Maybe somebody does,” Simon agreed. “And the doc’s name could be Spangler.”
He switched the lights on at the entrance and looked around. The loose rug that had been involved in Hoppy’s downfall was a tousled heap in the middle of the floor, and as he lifted one corner to straighten it he saw the gun underneath it.
He picked it up gingerly — a heavy “banker’s-model” revolver with a two-inch barrel.
“Chees,” Hoppy said. “De lug forgets his equaliser. Now all we gotta do is find out who it belongs to, an’ we know who he is.”
“That peace of logic,” said the Saint, “has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. However—”
He broke off as he became aware that the elevator doors were opening in front of him. For one instant he was tense, with his forefinger curling instinctively on the trigger of the weapon in his hand. Then he saw the passenger clearly.
He was a rabbity little man draped in a flowered bathrobe, with pince-nez supporting a long black ribbon.
“I,” he enunciated pompously, “am your neighbour downstairs, Mr Swafford. Has there been any trouble?”
He stepped back suddenly, with his eyes popping, as Hoppy moved into full view from behind the Saint.
“Trouble?” Simon inquired politely. “What sort of trouble?”
Mr Swafford seemed hypnotised by the baleful apparition glaring at him over the Saint’s shoulder.
“I,” he swallowed. “I... Please forgive me,” he said hastily, “but there was some rumour — about a shot, I think it was. Some people in the building seem to think it came from up here.”
Simon turned to Hoppy.
“Did you hear a shot?”
Mr Uniatz fixed Mr Swafford with a basilisk glare. He growled, “Boss, dis guy must be nuts!”
Mr Swafford gulped and amended hastily, “Of course I don’t say it came from your apartment. It was just what some of the tenants thought. They seem to have jumped to the conclusion that someone was being shot, but I assure you—”
“I’m sure,” the Saint broke in pleasantly, “that there must be a more productive form of exercise than jumping to conclusions, don’t you think, comrade?”
Mr Swafford retreated another step, his eyes bulging wider as they confirmed their impression of the gun in the Saint’s hand and the fallen shower of plaster from the ceiling.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said weakly. “I never—”
“I’m sorry you were disturbed.” said the Saint benevolently. “My friend here is just in from Montana, where men are men and have notches in their guns to prove it. When they’re having fun, they just blaze away at the ceiling. I’ve just taken his six-shooter away and tried to explain to him—”
“Scram before I step on ya like a roach!” Hoppy bellowed, squeezing past the Saint.
Mr Swafford stumbled backwards, his pince-nez dropping from his long nose and dangling by their ribbon; he turned and scurried precipitately back into the elevator.
“Good night, Mr Swafford,” Simon called breezily, as the closing elevator doors blotted out the little man’s pallid stare.
He turned back into the apartment, shutting the door behind him.
“Boss,” Hoppy said, following him. “Dis is getting’ monogamous. Just one t’ing after anudder.”
“That sounds almost bovine to me,” said the Saint. “But it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.”
He was sure that he had recognised the squat silhouette of Spangler’s henchman, Max, fleeing from the building toward the waiting sedan. But he was still wondering, as he fell asleep, just why Doc Spangler had sent him.