Smoke

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.

'Well, at least,' Peg said, slowing but not stopping for a stop sign, then making the right onto another small twisty bumpy county road, 'now we know for sure there isn't any paper out on you.'

'I told you Barney was working off the books,' Freddie said. 'So now we're safe and clear. All we have to do is stay away from Dudley.'

'There's not much there,' Peg said. 'We can do our shopping in the other direction.'

'Fi-hine!' Freddie said as hey went over one particularly brutal bump. 'How much longer till we get home, Peg?'

'Ten minutes, maybe less.'

'Good.'

'And then we can relax.'

'I keep thinking,' Freddie said, bracing himself with both hands on the AstroTurf, 'about that chief back there, and how he damn near got me.'

'Well, he didn't get you,' Peg said, braking not very much at a yield sign. 'So don't worry, Freddie, you'll never see that guy again.' She laughed. 'And Lord knows, he won't see you.'

31

Monday afternoon, three-thirty. Mordon Leethe watched Jack Fullerton the Fourth set flame to a cigarette from a Greek Revival lighter the size of a football. There was then a delay in the conversation for the ritual coughing, hacking, wheezing, gasping, spitting, eyeball-rolling, weeping, snorting, snot-spraying, drooling, and braying, Jack the Fourth being held and succored and rubbed down and wiped off all through it by his two silent dark-suited assistants. Then, once the storm had subsided and Jack was again capable of speech, the cigarette smoldering like some outlying district of hell in that huge ashtray on his desk, the oxygen tube once again in position beneath his nostrils, he turned his wet pale red-rimmed eyes on Mordon and said, 'Where is he? I want to see this fellow.'

'Well, that's the thing,' Mordon ventured, fingers pointing toward various nonexistent fireflies, 'you can't see this fellow. No one can. That's what makes him so hard to find.'

'And so useful, dammit.' Jack the Fourth thumped a meaty fist against his clean desktop, making the ashtray and Mordon jump, but not the stoic assistants. 'I want that fellow now! I need him! So why don't I have him?'

'Being a thief,' Mordon hazarded, fingers searching for a lost contact lens in a shag rug, 'makes him adept, I presume, at hiding out. But I'm sure we'll find him eventually.'

'I don't have eventually. What I have is an idea.'

Mordon's hands climbed the escape rope of his tie. 'Yes?'

'These mad medicos,' Jack the Fourth wheezed, 'they know now, don't they, if they put their two potions together, they make an invisible man?'

Surprised, his hands turning like sunflowers, Mordon said, 'Well, yes, I suppose they do.'

'Then let them make us one,' Jack the Fourth demanded. 'Keep looking for the original, but make us a copy.'

The sunflowers grew. 'They could, couldn't they?' But then the sunflowers died, and Mordon said, 'But who? Who would take such a risk, and wind up like, like that?'

'One thing I've learned about money,' Jack the Fourth wheezed. 'If you have enough of it, somebody's gonna volunteer. And I need an invisible man, dammit. I need him right away!'

'Congressional hearings?' Mordon suggested. 'Competitors' pricing plans?'

'All that, too, of course,' Jack the Fourth rumbled, with a massive shrug of shoulder. 'But that isn't the most important. I need him for something else, closer to home.'

Suspected infidelity? Jack the Fourth's fifth wife? Mordon looked alert. 'Yes?'

'The doctors!' Jack the Fourth cried, with sudden passion. 'The doctors are lying to me!'

'Which doctors?' Mordon asked.

'You're right,' Jack the Fourth told him. 'They're all witch doctors!'

'No, I meant, which doctors are lying to you?'

'My doctors! Who the hell other pill pusher do you think I'd talk to? Do you think I like to talk to doctors? Grubby little handwashers? Don't you know I quit two different country clubs in my life because they let the pill pushers in? Measly little body mechanics, they get two dimes to rub together, they think they're class! Effrontery!'

'Uh, Jack,' Mordon said. 'What have your doctors been lying to you about?'

'Me, of course! What the hell do I care what their opinions are on anything else? They're lying to me about me, and I damn well know it. You think I look any better today than the last time you saw me?'

If it were possible for Jack the Fourth to look worse, he would look worse. Since it was not, he looked the same. 'Uh—' Mordon said.

'Neither do I!' yelled Jack the Fourth, and paused to cough a lot of red foam into a handkerchief held by one of the assistants. When that attack was over, he resumed, telling Mordon, 'They tell me I'm improving, if you can