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should not have been closed now. Nor should it have been locked, though it was. Quincannon muttered an imprecation. Lansing must have done the locking; he had access to a key. But why? What could he be up to back there?
    Quincannon listened at the door. No sounds came to him through the heavy wood. He bent at the waist to peer through the keyhole. All he could make out was an empty section of concrete floor, weakly lighted by electric bulbs and shadow-ridden. He straightened again, scowling, tugging at his beard. The loading-dock foreman, Jack Malloy, would have a key. Find him, then, and waste no time doing so.
    Just as he turned away, a muffled report sounded from somewhere behind the locked door. One he’d heard all too often to mistake for anything but what it was—a pistol shot.
    Hell and damn! Quincannon swung back to the door, coming up hard against it, rattling it in its frame. Reflex made him tug futilely at the handle. No second report came, but when he pressed an ear to the wood he heard several faint sounds. Movement, but what sort he couldn’t tell.
    The silence that followed crackled with tension.
    He pushed away again, ran back along the passage until he came upon a workman just emerging from the cellars. He sent the man after the loading-dock foreman, then took himself back to the storeroom door. He tested the latch to determine that it was still locked, though there was no way Lansing or anyone else could have come out and gotten past him.
    Malloy arrived on the run, two other men trailing behind him. “What’s the trouble here?” he demanded.
    â€œSomeone fired a pistol behind that locked door,” Quincannon told him, “not five minutes ago.”
    â€œA pistol?” Malloy said, astonished. “In the storerooms?”
    â€œI heard it plainly.”
    â€œBut … why? How? Mr. Willard has strict orders against firearms on the premises…”
    Quincannon made an impatient growling noise. “Button your lip, lad, and unlock the blasted door.”
    The foreman was used to the voice of authority; quickly he produced his ring of keys. The door opened inward and Quincannon crowded through first, his hand inside his coat and resting on the Navy’s walnut handle. Two large, chilly rooms opened off the passage, one filled with sacks of barley, the other with boxes of yeast and fifty-pound sacks of malt, hops, and sugar stacked on end. Both enclosures were empty. The boxes and sacks were so tightly packed together that no one could have hidden behind or among them without being seen at a glance.
    At the far end of the passage stood another closed door. “What’s beyond there?” he asked the foreman.
    â€œUtility room. Well pump and equipment storage.”
    Quincannon tried the door. It refused his hand on the latch. “You have a key, Malloy?”
    â€œThe lock’s the same as on the outer door.”
    â€œThen open it, man, open it.”
    Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank odors of mold and earth mingled with the acrid scent of gunpowder tickled Quincannon’s nostrils as the door creaked inward. Only one electric bulb burned here. Gloom lay thick beyond the threshold, enfolding the shapes of well pump, coiled hoses, hand trucks, and other equipment. Quincannon produced a lucifer from his pocket, scraped it alight on the rough brick wall.
    â€œLord save us!” Malloy said.
    Caleb Lansing lay sprawled on the dirt floor in front of the well pump. Blood glistened blackly on his shirt. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Loosely clenched in the other hand was the same type of brass key Malloy had used.
    Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing’s neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse. No blackened powder burns rimmed the bloody wound under the left armpit.
    â€œWhat are you men doing here? What’s going on?”
    The new voice belonged to Elias