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reunion with a slightly inebriated gentleman he’d seen no longer than ten days before; he was forced to listen to two off-color stories; he went through a mild flirting routine with a simpering dowager who came charging out of ambush.
    And all the time he moved steadily toward the door that led down to the kitchen.
    Finally he arrived.
    He stepped through the doorway and went casually down the stairs.
    The place was empty, a cold, metallic place with the gleam of chrome and the shine of high utility. A clock with a sweep second hand hung upon one wall and its whirring sound hung heavy in the room.
    Blaine placed his glass, still half full of Scotch, on the nearest table, and there, six strides away, across the gleaming floor, was the outside door.
    He took the first two steps and as he started on the third a silent shout of warning sounded in his brain and he spun around.
    Freddy Bates stood beside the huge refrigerator, one hand jammed deep into a jacket pocket.
    â€œShep,” said Freddy Bates, “if I were you, I wouldn’t try it. Fishhook has the place tied up. You haven’t got a chance.”

SIX
    Blaine stood frozen for a second while wonder hammered at him. And it was surprise and bafflement, rather than either fear or anger, that held him frozen there. Surprise that, of all people, it should be Freddy Bates. Freddy, no longer the aimless man-about-town, the inconsequential mystery man in a town that was full of such as he, but an agent of Fishhook and, apparently, a very able one.
    And another thing—that Kirby Rand had known and had allowed him to walk out of the office and go down the elevator. But grabbing for a phone as soon as he had reached the corridor to put Freddy on the job.
    It had been clever, Blaine admitted to himself—much more clever than he himself had been. There had never been a moment that he had suspected Rand felt anything was wrong, and Freddy, when he picked him up, had been his normal, ineffectual self.
    Anger soaked slowly into him, to replace the wonder. Anger that he had been taken in, that he had been trapped by such a jerk as Freddy.
    â€œWe’ll just walk outside,” said Freddy, “like the friends we are, and I’ll take you back to have a talk with Rand. No fuss, no fight, but very gentlemanly. We would not want to do anything—either one of us—to cause Charline embarrassment.”
    â€œNo,” said Blaine. “No, of course, we wouldn’t.”
    His mind was racing, seeking for a way, looking for an out, anything at all that would get him out of this. For he was not going back. No matter what might happen, he wasn’t going back with Freddy.
    He felt the Pinkness stir as if it were coming out.
    â€œNo!” yelled Blaine. “No!”
    But it was too late. The Pinkness had crawled out and it filled his brain, and he was still himself but someone else as well. He was two things at once and it was most confusing and something strange had happened.
    The room became as still as death except for the groaning of the clock upon the wall. And that was strange, as well, for until this very moment, the clock had done no groaning; it had whirred but never groaned.
    Blaine took a swift step forward, and Freddy didn’t move. He stayed standing there, with the hand thrust in the pocket.
    And another step and still Freddy barely stirred. His eyes stayed stiff and staring and he didn’t blink. But his face began to twist, a slow and tortured twist, and the hand in the pocket moved, but so deliberately that one only was aware of a sort of stirring, as if the arm and hand and the thing the hand clutched in the pocket were waking from deep sleep.
    And yet another step and Blaine was almost on him, with his fist moving like a piston. Freddy’s mouth dropped slowly open, as if the jaw hinge might be rusty, and his eyelids came creeping down in the caricature of a blink.
    Then the fist exploded on his jaw. Blaine hit where