I didn’t know what the correct answer to that would be, so I just grinned. But the grin didn’t come from my heart. I had, I realized, made a mistake—one that might cost me something before we were done. This bird wasn’t hunting for Cudner as a friend, as I had carelessly assumed, but was on the war path.
I saw those three dead men falling out of the closet in room 906!
My gun was inside the waistband of my trousers, where I could get it quickly, but his was in his hand. So I was careful to keep my own hands motionless on the edge of the table, while I widened my grin.
His eyes were changing now, and the more I looked at them the less I liked them. The grey in them had darkened and grown duller, and the pupils were larger, and white crescents were showing beneath the gray. Twice before I had looked into eyes such as these—and I hadn’t forgotten what they meant—the eyes of the congenital killer!
“Suppose you speak your piece,” I suggested after a while.
But he wasn’t to be beguiled into conversation. He shook his head a mere fraction of an inch and the corners of his compressed mouth dropped down a trifle. The white crescents of eyeballs were growing broader, pushing the grey circles up under the upper lids.
It was coming! And there was no use waiting for it!
I drove a foot at his shins under the table, and at the same time pushed the table into his lap and threw myself across it. The bullet from his gun went off to one side. Another bullet—not from his gun—thudded into the table that was upended between us.
I had him by the shoulders when the second shot from behind took him in the left arm, just below my hand. I let go then and fell away, rolling over against the wall and twisting around to face the direction from which the bullets were coming.
I twisted around just in time to see—jerking out of sight behind a corner of the passage that gave to a small dining room—Guy Cudner’s scarred face. And as it disappeared a bullet from Orrett’s gun splattered the plaster from the wall where it had been.
I grinned at the thought of what must be going on in Orrett’s head as he lay sprawled out on the floor confronted by two Cudners. But he took a shot at me just then and I stopped grinning. Luckily, he had to twist around to fire at me, putting his weight on his wounded arm, and the pain made him wince, spoiling his aim.
Before he had adjusted himself more comfortably I had scrambled on hands and knees to Pigaitti’s kitchen door—only a few feet away—and had myself safely tucked out of range around an angle in the wall; all but my eyes and the top of my head, which I risked so that I might see what went on.
Orrett was now ten or twelve feet from me, lying flat on the floor, facing Cudner, with a gun in his hand and another on the floor beside him.
Across the room, perhaps thirty feet away, Cudner was showing himself around his protecting corner at brief intervals to exchange shots with the man on the floor, occasionally sending one my way. We had the place to ourselves. There were four exits, and the rest of Pigatti’s customers had used them all.
I had my gun out, but I was playing a waiting game. Cudner, I figured, had been tipped off to Orrett’s search for him and had arrived on the scene with no mistaken idea of the other’s attitude. Just what there was between them and what bearing it had on the Montgomery murders was a mystery to me, but I didn’t try to solve it now. I kept away from the bullets that were flying around as best I could and waited.
They were firing in unison. Cudner would show around his corner, both men’s weapons would spit, and he would duck out of sight again. Orrett was bleeding about the head now and one of his legs sprawled crookedly behind him. I couldn’t determine whether Cudner had been hit or not.
Each had fired eight, or perhaps nine, shots when Cudner suddenly jumped out into full view, pumping the gun in his left hand as fast as its mechanism would go, the gun in his right hand hanging at his side. Orrett had changed guns, and was on his knees now, his fresh weapon keeping pace with his enemy’s.
That couldn’t last!
Cudner dropped his left-hand gun, and, as he raised the other, he sagged forward and went down on one knee. Orrett stopped firing abruptly and fell over on his back—spread out full-length. Cudner fired once more—wildly, into the ceiling—and pitched down on his face.
I sprang to Orrett’s side and kicked both of his guns away. He was lying still but his eyes were open.
“Are you Cudner, or was he?”
“He.”
“Good!” he said, and closed his eyes.
I crossed to where Cudner lay and turned him over on his back. His chest was literally shot to pieces.
His thick lips worked, and I put my ear down to them.
“I get him?”
“Yes,” I lied, “he’s already cold.”
His dying face twisted into a triumphant grin.
“Sorry … three in hotel …” he gasped hoarsely. “Mistake … wrong room … got one … had to … other two … protect myself … I …”
He shuddered and died.
A week later the hospital people let me talk to Orrett. I told him what Cudner had said before he died.
“That’s the way I doped it out,” Orrett said from out of the depths of the bandages in which he was swathed. “That’s why I moved and changed my name the next day.”
“I suppose you’ve got it nearly figured out by now,” he said after a while.
“No,” I confessed, “I haven’t. I’ve an idea what it was all about but I could stand having a few details cleared up.”
“I’m sorry I can’t clear them up for you, but I’ve got
