Smoke

A heavy weight tackled him from behind. The ax went flying, and Freddie was driven face first into the carpet, very near the unconscious plug-ugly.

He'd forgotten the third one, dammit, and the guy had snuck up behind him, guided by the ax. Of course, he couldn't see Freddie, but now he could sure feel him, and had him in a bearhug on the floor.

The cop was still backing away into the parlor with Peg, and he called, 'Bring him in here! Hold on to him, and bring him in here! Alive!'

Freddie writhed and twisted, and got his left arm free, and swung it up and back, and his elbow connected with something or other. He did it again, and hit the same something, so he did it again. On the fourth whack, the weight above him shifted, and he managed to twist around, and now he was faceup, with this bulky monster straddling him, trying to hold on to him with both hands.

Freddie punched the guy in the face. The guy responded by taking a swing where Freddie's head should be, and getting it absolutely right. Freddie's head spun. He reached up, blindly, and his hand found the guy's necktie, and he grabbed it in his fist and turned his fist over, tucking the fist in under the guy's chin, then grabbing that fist with his other hand to make a bigger mass that he was pressing into the guy's Adam's apple while the necktie pinned him there, and now he was strangling the son of a bitch.

Who reached down, pawed his fingers over Freddie's face, found his neck, and now the son of a bitch was strangling Freddie. Neither would let go, and Freddie had no confidence that he would win this contest, but then all at once the son of a bitch said, 'Ah,' and fell facedown on top of Freddie, and over his unconscious shoulder Freddie saw the chief, with the nightstick.

'Ah-hah,' Freddie said. 'You are good for something. Get this guy off me, will you?'

The chief pulled, and Freddie crawled out from under, and looked over toward the parlor, and in the doorway were the cop and Peg, same as ever.

'I'll call the state boys,' the chief said, backing away toward his office.

'Wait!' Freddie said, staggering to his feet. 'Not yet.'

The cop gave a sour laugh. 'You don't want more law, Freddie,' he said, 'any more than I do.'

'Chief,' Freddie said, 'why don't you handcuff those guys, before they wake up. And the one in the office, too.'

'Good idea.'

Moving toward the cop and Peg, as the chief went into his office for handcuffs, Freddie said, low and fast, 'You're screwed here, cop, it isn't working. Let Peg go and I'll get you out of here. Otherwise it's a standoff until the state cops come, and then what? We're all screwed. I don't want law all over me and you don't want law all over you.'

The chief came back out to the hall and went to one knee, to handcuff the sleeping palookas. The cop stared at the chief while he tried to think out his alternatives, and of course, one of his alternatives was simply to use the knife on Peg, who'd caused all this trouble by bringing him here to the police chief; then maybe he could make a run for it in the confusion.

Freddie didn't want the cop to give serious consideration to that option, so he pressed a little, saying, 'You don't have weeks to make up your mind here. You let Peg go, she goes out and starts the van, and then we follow.'

The chief was done with the handcuffs. Getting to his feet, he said, 'I'll let the fellas out of the basement, then call the state boys.'

'Not yet, Chief, okay?'

The chief looked toward Freddie's voice, bewildered. 'Why not?'

'I'll explain,' Freddie promised. 'Just go along with me for a minute, will you do that?' To the cop, he said, 'I know you're just gonna keep after me, so when we get outta here we'll talk it over, we'll make a deal. Let her go, let's get out of this place.'

The cop glared into the air. 'I wish I could see your face,' he said.

'So do I, pal.'

The cop made his decision. Lowering the knife, stepping back one pace, he pushed Peg forward and said, 'Go start the van.'

'Put the knife away,' Freddie said, as Peg ran out of the house. 'You don't need it.'

The chief said, 'What's going on here?'

'In a minute, Chief,' Freddie said, while the cop, still suspicious, closed up his knife and put it away. Freddie said to him, 'You know I'm a thief, right?'

'It's what I like about you,' the cop said. 'So far, the only thing I do like about you.'

'Well, there's another thing about me you oughta know,' Freddie said.

'What's that?'

'I'm also a liar,' Freddie said, and punched him in the face.

55

It was the damnedest thing Geoff Wheedabyx had ever seen. For about three minutes, the fat bad guy called Barney apparently beat himself severely with parts of Geoff's house, throwing himself on the floor, dragging himself backwards into the hall, flinging himself madly against the walls, knocking himself down repeatedly and repeatedly jerking himself back upright again, while making a lot of sounds like oof! and uh! and aak! Then, after having done a final tattoo of the back of his head against the office-door frame, Barney collapsed on the floor without a sound and stopped moving, a marionette when the show's over.

Geoff was still staring at this battered unconscious man when the voice of Freddie sounded over by the open front door, yelling, 'Peg! Go home!' Then the door slammed itself.

As if that weren't enough, something grasped Geoff's elbow and propelled him back into his office, while Freddie's voice, now very close to him, said, 'Chief, we gotta talk.'

'What I've got to do,' Geoff said, 'is let my crew out of that basement, doggone it. They've got toilets to install.'

'In a minute, Chief. Do you know what happened here today?'

'I'll be damned if I do,' Geoff said. 'But after a couple weeks' intense interrogation, I believe I'll begin to get some idea of it.'

'That bunch of guys came to this town to rob the bank.'

Geoff wished he could give this fellow Freddie the look of scornful disbelief that remark deserved; it wasn't anywhere near as satisfactory to give the opposite wall a look of scornful disbelief. 'They never did,' he said.

'And there's no invisible man here,' the invisible man said.

'I'm talking to myself, I guess.' But Geoff was too straightforward a guy to make sarcasm really work.

'No, you're not talking at all, you're listening. And I'm telling you those guys came here to rob the bank, and they figured to neutralize the local law first, which is you, so they came over here and captured you and your construction crew—'

'And my deputy, he's down there, too.'

'Your deputy, that's good. But then you turned the tables on them, all by yourself.'

'I can't say a thing like that,' Geoff said, 'even if there was a reason for it, and what's the reason?'

'I probably saved your life, Chief, how's that for a start?'

'I was thinking about that,' Geoff admitted, 'while I was handcuffed to the chair there, and they sure didn't act like they planned on leaving any witnesses.'

'I just found out I'm gonna be invisible the rest of my life,' Freddie said. 'Found out from the doctors who did it to me. So I could stick around here with you and tell the invisible man story and be a freak in a cage the rest of my life, doctors poking at me. Or I can take off and really disappear, you'll never hear from me again, and Peg and me'll have a quiet life somewhere.'

'I sympathize with you,' Geoff admitted, and added, 'Freddie, I do. But I can't claim I beat up and knocked out and captured four tough guys all by myself.'

Freddie, or the air around him, sighed. He said, 'You don't lie, is that right?'

'That's right, that's the problem, I'm just no good at it.'