and when I looked at the lock I could see that it had been jimmied. Not a good sign, but no less than I had expected.
The door opened into a narrow hallway, with a steep wooden stairway at the end. On the wall to the right were three mailboxes, two of them labeled with company names. The third mailbox, for what I assumed was a loft on the top floor, had no nameplate or company logo. That looked to be where I wanted to go.
I cautiously made my way up the ancient stairway, staying near the inside wall so as to avoid making the stairs creak, and peering around every corner before proceeding upward. As I made my ascent, I found myself growing increasingly depressed and anxious at the thought of what I was likely to find at the top-namely, the corpses of two women with neat, bloodless little bullet holes at the base of their skulls.
At the top of the stairway, beyond a short, narrow landing, there was a sliding steel door that was open perhaps an inch. Gripping the neck of the beer bottle even tighter, I stepped up on the landing, hooked the fingertips of my left hand around the edge of the steel door, sucked in a deep breath, and gave a little tug. The door made only a slight scraping sound as it slid open wider. I peered around the edge of the door and found myself looking across an expanse of raw, open, unfinished loft space. A maze of beams, wires, and pipes crisscrossed the ceiling. There were only two hanging bare lightbulbs to light the place, and the atmosphere was decidedly dim and gloomy. Near the opposite wall were two mattresses covered with sheets and blankets, one chair, and a small coffee table, all of which looked like they had been scavenged off the street. There was a telephone on the floor, and its receiver was off the hook.
When I cautiously poked my head in and glanced to the right, I found myself looking into the startled faces of two women-one a leggy blonde with green eyes, the other a very thin young woman with long black hair and the largest, most expressive eyes I had ever seen. Both were bound by the wrists and ankles with rope, and they had duct tape strapped over their mouths.
I put a finger to my lips, then gestured to indicate that I needed to know where their captors were. The psychiatrist motioned with her head and leaned over slightly to indicate that I should look the other way. I turned to my left, where there was a sink and toilet stall, and when I moved a few more inches into the loft, I could see that beyond the toilet stall there was an open doorway leading into a section of the loft that had been partitioned off. Through the doorway I could see kitchen cabinets and part of another sink. I nodded reassuringly to the women, then removed my shoes, straightened up, and, clutching my glass Colt.45 firmly in my right hand, shuffled past the sink and toilet stall to the entranceway. I could smell the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee, and I heard Punch and Judy talking; from the direction of their voices, I could tell that they were sitting, probably at a table, right around the corner, against the partition.
'Shazam,' I said as I stepped through the doorway.
Judy was sitting closest to me, so she was the one who would need more, and extensive, plastic surgery after I gave her the beer bottle full in the face. As Punch knocked over his coffee mug clawing for the gun in his shoulder holster, I upended the table on him, sending him toppling backward in his chair. I pushed the table aside with my foot, then crouched down and cracked him in the jaw with the heel of my hand, a blow carefully calculated to knock him unconscious and perhaps remove a few teeth, but not break his jaw so that he wouldn't be able to talk.
The initial reunion festivities over, I went back into the loft proper, put my shoes back on. I walked over to the women, removed the duct tape from their mouths, then began to untie the ropes from their wrists and ankles.
'My God,' Sharon Stephens gasped in a high-pitched, breathy voice. 'Who are you?'
'Well, Doctor, you know I'm not from the CIA, so I must be your fairy godmother.' Without waiting for a reply from the psychiatrist, I turned to the frail woman with terror still swimming in her eyes, said, 'Emily, my name's Mongo. I'm not going to hurt you, and neither is anyone else. You're safe now. Okay?'
I watched as the fear in her incredibly expressive eyes was replaced by trust and relief, and she nodded tentatively.
Sharon Stephens said, 'Mongo? I think I've heard of you. Aren't you-?'
'I've heard of you too, lady. To you, I'm Dr. Frederickson, or Mr. Frederickson, or just Frederickson.'
She smiled thinly as I finished removing the rope from her ankles, then started on her wrists. 'I take it what you've heard isn't so good.'
'I'm trying not to be judgmental. Anybody who helped a dozen people escape from Rivercliff can't be all bad. Look, I don't want to spend a lot of time up here; our friends resting in the kitchen might have backup, and I don't know how long it may be before their friends show up. Why aren't the two of you dead?'
The blond woman swallowed hard, replied, 'They want Emily, and Emily doesn't function well without me. How did you know. .?'
'Let me ask the questions for now,' I said, removing the last length of rope. There looked to be enough of it for my purposes. 'Why do they want Emily?'
The woman rubbed her wrists and ankles to restore circulation, got to her feet, then helped the younger woman, whom I had freed first, get to hers. They stood for a few moments staring at me, their arms around each other. They looked at one another, then back at me. 'She's an empath,' Sharon Stephens replied at last.
'An empath?'
'Emily is extremely sensitive to what other people are feeling.'
'You mean she's like a mind reader, a telepath?'
'No. Simply what I said.'
'Just what the CIA needs, somebody who's sensitive to other people's feelings,' I replied curtly. 'You can tell me all about it later. Right now, you can both give me a hand dragging those two hotshots in here. I want them under that low-hanging beam over there by your beds. Let's move fast.'
The women did as they were asked, each of them taking one of the bleeding, unconscious Judy's ankles and dragging her out of the kitchen, while I performed the same service for Punch. I tied their wrists separately with the ropes they had used to truss the psychiatrist and Emily. Then I tossed the ends of the ropes over the low-hanging beam above my head, pulled both assassins up until only their toes were touching the floor, tying off the ends of the ropes to an exposed pipe in the wall. Then I went back into the kitchen, retrieved Punch's.22 pistol, brought it back, and handed it to the blond woman.
'Did your former employers teach you how to use a gun?'
'No.'
'Well, it isn't rocket science. It's loaded. Just point it at the chest of anybody who comes through that door who doesn't look like me, and then pull the trigger. Don't hesitate, don't ask questions, and don't threaten. Just aim and shoot. Use both hands.'
'I'm not sure I can do that.'
'Then the chances are pretty good that both of you will be gone if friends of this couple show up before I get back. They'll be professional killers.'
'Where are you going?'
'Not far. The electronics store downstairs. I need a tape recorder.'
'I have a small one in my purse.'
'Ah. That should save me a trip.'
Sharon Stephens retrieved her purse from the space between the mattresses. She took out a small, voice- activated tape recorder and handed it to me, along with the gun. I stuck the gun in my waistband, pointed to the small spool of tape inside the recorder, continued, 'What's on here?'
'Just conversations I had with various drug company executives. There's nothing on the tape worth keeping.'
'You've got that right,' I said as I punched the rewind button. 'Lorminix, the last place you visited, is the company that manufactured your little wonder drug.'
Her jaw dropped slightly, and she put a hand to her mouth. 'How did you find that out?'
'Not now, Doctor,' I said, striding over to the steel door, which I closed and locked. 'I don't know how much time we've got before somebody tries to contact these two, or comes looking for them, and I don't want to be interrupted. You two might want to excuse yourselves into the kitchen for a few minutes, maybe turn on the water if it gets too noisy in here. You're not going to like what I'm about to do.'
The women stayed where they were. Both Punch and Judy had regained consciousness, and were beginning
