"Shut your face before I shut it for you!"
* * * * *
Malone couldn't tell who was yelling what at who after a minute. They
all seemed unhappy about being on the run from the police, and they were
all tired of being cooped up in a warehouse under Mike's orders. Mike
was the only person they could take it out on--and Mike was under heavy
attack.
Two of the boys, surprisingly, seemed to side with him. The other five
were trying to outshout them. Malone wondered if it would become a
fight, and then realized that these kids could hardly fight each other
when the one who was losing could always fade out.
He leaned over and whispered to Dorothea and Boyd: "Let's sneak up there
while the argument's going on."
"But--" Boyd began.
"Less chance of their noticing us," Malone explained, and started
forward.
They tiptoed up the stairs and got behind a pile of crates in the
shadows, while invectives roared around them. This floor was lit by a
single small bulb hanging from a socket in the ceiling. The windows were
hung with heavy blankets to keep the light from shining out.
The kids didn't notice anything except each other. Malone took a couple
of deep breaths and began to look around.
All things considered, he thought, the kids had fixed the place up
pretty nicely. The unused warehouse had practically been made over into
an apartment. There were chairs, beds, tables and everything else in the
line of furnishings for which the kids could conceivably have any use.
There were even some floor lamps scattered around, but they weren't
plugged in. Malone guessed that a job would have to be done on the
warehouse wiring to get the floor lamps in operation, and the kids just
hadn't got around to it yet.
By now, the boys were practically standing toe to toe, ripping
air-bluing epithets out at each other. Not a single hand was lifted.
Malone stared at them for a second, then turned to Dorothea. "We'll wait
till they calm down a little," he whispered. "Then you go out and talk
to them. Tell them we won't hurt them or lock them up or anything. All
we want to do is talk to them for a while."
"All right," she whispered back.
"They can vanish any time they want to," Malone said, "so there's no
reason for them not to listen to--"
He stopped suddenly, listening. Over the shouting, screaming and cursing
of the kids, he heard motion on the floor below.
Cops?
It couldn't be, he told himself. But when he took out his radiophone,
his hands were shaking a little.
Lynch's voice was already coming over it when Malone thumbed it on.
"... So hang on, Malone! I repeat: we heard the ruckus, and we're coming
in! We're on our way! Hang on, Malone!"
The voice stopped. There was a click.
Malone stared at the handset, fascinated and horrified. He swallowed.
"No, Lynch!" he whispered, afraid to talk any louder for fear the kids
would hear him. "No! Don't come up! Go away! Repeat: go away! Stay away!
Lynch--"
It was no use. The radiophone was dead.
Lynch, apparently thinking Malone's set had been smashed in the fight,
or else that Malone was unconscious, had shut his own receiver off.
There was absolutely nothing that Malone could do.
* * * * *
The kids were still yelling at the top of their voices, but the
thundering of heavy, flat feet galumphing up from the lower depths
couldn't be ignored for long. All the boys noticed it at about the same
time. They jerked their heads round to face the stairway. Malone and his
campatriots crouched lower behind the boxes.
Mike Fueyo was the first to speak. "Don't vanish yet!" he snapped.
"Let's see who it is."
The internal dissent among the Silent Spooks disappeared as if it had
never been, as they faced a common foe. Once again, they fell naturally
under Fueyo's leadership. "If it's cops," he said, "we'll give 'em the
Grasshopper Play we worked out. We'll show 'em."
"They can't fool with us," another boy said. "Sure. The Grasshopper
Play."
It was cops, all right. Lieutenant Lynch ran up the stairs waving his
billy in a heroic fashion, followed by a horde of blue-clad officers.
"Where's Malone?" Lynch shouted as he came through the doorway.
"Where's your what?" Mike yelled back, and the fight was on.
Later, Malone thought that he should have been surprised, but he wasn't.
There wasn't any time to be surprised. The kids didn't disappear. They
spread out over the floor of the room easily and lightly, and the cops
charged them in a great blundering mass.
Naturally, the kids winked out one by one--and reformed in the center of
the cops' muddle. Malone saw one cop raise his billy and swing it at
Mike. Mike watched it come down and vanish at the last instant. The
cop's billy descended on the head of another cop, standing just behind
where Mike had been.
The second cop, hit and blinded by the blow on his head, swung back and
hit the first cop. Meanwhile, Mike was somewhere else.
Malone stayed crouched behind the boxes. Dorothea stood up and shouted:
"Mike! Mike! We just want to talk to you!"
Unfortunately, the police were making such a racket that this could not
be heard more than a foot or so from the speaker. Lynch himself charged
into the mass, swinging his billy and his free fist and laying others
out one after the other. Pretty soon the floor was littered with cops.
Lynch was doing yeoman duty, but it was hard to tell what side he was
on.
The vanishing trick Mike had worked out was being used by all of the
kids. Cops were hitting other cops, Lynch was hitting everybody, and the
kids were winking on and off all over the loft. It was a scene of
tremendous noise and carnage.
Malone suddenly sprang to his feet and charged into the melee, shouting
at the top of his lungs and swinging both fists. The first person he saw
was one of the teen-agers, and he charged him with abandon.
[Illustration]
He should, he reflected, have known better. The kid disappeared. Malone
caromed off the stomach of a policeman, received a blow on the shoulder
from his billy, and rebounded into the arms of a surprised police
officer at the edge of the battle.
"Who're you?" the officer gasped.
"Malone," Malone said.
"You on our side?"
"How about you?" Malone said.
"I'm a lieutenant here," the officer said. "In charge of warehouse
precinct. I--"
Malone and the lieutenant stepped nimbly aside as another cop careened
by them, waving his billy helplessly. They looked away as the crash
came. The cop had fallen over a table, and now lay with his legs in the
air, supported by the overturned table, blissfully unconscious.
"We seem," Malone said, "to be in an area of some activity. Let's move."
* * * * *
They shifted away a few feet. Malone looked into the foray and saw Boyd
at work roaring and going after the kids. One of them had established a
kind of game with him. He would appear just in front of Boyd, who rushed
at him, arms outstretched. As Boyd had almost reached him, the kid
disappeared and reappeared again just behind Boyd. He tapped the FBI
agent gently on the shoulder; Boyd turned and the process was repeated.
Boyd seemed to be getting winded.
The lieutenant suddenly dashed back into the fray. Malone looked around,
saw Mike Fueyo flickering in and out at the edges, and headed for him.
A cop swung at Mike, missed, and hit Malone on the arm. Malone swore.
The cop backed off, looking in a bewildered fashion for his victim, who
was nowhere in sight. Then Malone caught sight of him, at the other edge
of the fight. He started to work his way around.
He tried to avoid blows, but it wasn't always possible. A reeling cop
caught his lapel and tore it, and Lynch, indefatigable in battle,
managed to graze his chin with a blow meant for one of the disappearing
boys. Other cops were battling each other, going after the kids and
clutching empty air, cursing and screaming unheard orders in the fracas.
Malone ducked past Lynch, rubbed at his chin and looked for Mike. In the
tangle of bodies it was getting hard to see. There was the sound of
breaking ceramics as a floor lamp went over, and then a table followed
it, but Malone avoided both. He looked for Mike Fueyo--
A cop clutched him around the middle, out of nowhere, said: "Sorry,
buddy, who are you?" and dove back into the mass of bodies. Malone
caught his breath and forged onward.
There was Mike, at the edge of the fight, watching everything coolly. No
cop was near him. In the dim light the place looked like a scene from
Hell, a special Hell for policemen. Malone wove through battling hordes
to the edge and came out a few feet away from Mike Fueyo.
Fueyo didn't see him. He was looking at Boyd instead--still stumbling
back and forth as the teen-ager baiting him winked on and off in front
of him and behind him. He was laughing.
Malone came up silently from behind. The trip seemed to take hours. He
was being very quiet, although he was reasonably sure that even if he
yelled he wouldn't be heard. But he didn't want to take the slightest
chance.
He sprang on Mike and attached the handcuffs to his wrist, and to
Mike's wrist, within seconds.
"Ha!" he said involuntarily. "Now come with me!"
He gave his end of the handcuffs a tremendous yank.
He started to stagger, trailing an empty cuff behind him, flailing his
arms wildly. Ahead of him he could see a big cop with an upraised billy.
Malone tried to alter his course, but it was too late. He skidded
helplessly into the cop, who jerked round and swung the billy
automatically. Malone said: "Yi!" as he caught the blow on the
cheekbone, bounced off the cop and kept going.
He careened past a blur of figures, trying to avoid hard surfaces and
other human beings. But there was--
Oh, no, Malone thought.
Lynch.
Lynch was ready to swing. His fist was cocked, and he was heading for
one of the teen-agers with murder in his eye. Malone knew their paths
were going to intersect. "Watch out!" he yelled. "Watch out, it's me!
Stop me! Stop me! Somebody stop me!"
He went completely unheard.
Lynch swung and missed, hitting a cop who had been hiding behind the
teen-ager. The cop went down to join the wounded, and Lynch roared like
a bull and swung around, looking for more enemies.
That was when Malone hit him.
Long afterward, he remembered Lynch's hat sailing through the air, and
landing in the center of a struggling mass of policemen. He remembered
Lynch saying: "So there you are!" and swinging before he looked.
He remembered the blow on the chin.
And then, he remembered falling, and falling, and falling. Somewhere
there was a voice: "Where are they? They've disappeared for good."
And then, for long seconds, nothing.
* * * * *
He woke up with a headache, but it wasn't too bad. Surprisingly, not
much time had passed; he got up and dusted off his trousers, looking
around at the battlefield. Wounded and groaning cops were all over. The
room was a shambles; the walking wounded--which comprised the rest of
the force--were stumbling around in a slow, hopeless sort of fashion.
Lynch was standing next to him. "Malone," he said, "I'm sorry. I hit
you, didn't I?"
"Uh-huh," Malone said. "You seemed to be hitting everybody."
"I was _trying_ for the kids," Lynch said.
"So was I," Malone said. "I got the cuffs on one and yanked him
along--but he disappeared and left me with the cuffs."
"Great," Lynch said. "Hell of a raid."
"Very jolly," Malone agreed. "Fun and games were had by all."
A cop stumbled up, handed Lynch his cap and disappeared without a word.
Lynch stared mournfully at it. The emblem was crushed and the cap looked
rather worn and useless. He put it on his head, where it assumed the
rakish tilt of a hobo's favorite tam-o'-shanter, and said: "I hope
you're not thinking of blaming _me_ for this fiasco."
"Not at all," Malone said nobly. He hurt all over, but on reflection he
thought that he would probably live. "It was nobody's fault." Except, he
thought, his own. If he'd only told Lynch to come in when called
for--and under no other circumstances--this wouldn't have happened. He
looked around at the remains of New York's Finest, and felt guilty.
The lieutenant from the local precinct limped up, rubbing a well-kicked
shin and trying to disentangle pieces of floor lamp from his hair.
"Listen, Lynch," he said, "What's with these kids? What's going on here?
Look at my men."
"Some days," Lynch said, "it just doesn't pay to get up."
"Sure," the local man said, "but what do I do now?"
"Make your reports."
"But--"
"To the Commissioner," Lynch said, "and to nobody else. If this gets
into the papers, heads will roll."
"My head is rolling right now," the local man said. "Know what one of
those kids did? Stood in front of a floor lamp. I swung at him and he
vanished. Vanished. I hit the lamp, and then the lamp hit me."
"Just see that this doesn't get out," Lynch said.
"It can't," the local man said. "Anybody who mentioned this to a
reporter would just be laughed out of town. It's not possible." He
paused thoughtfully, and added: "We'd all be laughed out of town."
"And probably replaced with the FBI," Lynch said morosely. He looked at
Malone. "Nothing personal, you understand," he said.
"Of course," Malone said. "We can't do any more here, can we?"
"I don't think we can do any more anywhere," Lynch said. "Let's lock the
place up and leave and forget all about it."
"Fine," Malone said. "I've got work to do." He looked round, found
Dorothea and signaled to her. "Come on, Dorothea. Where's Boyd?"
"Here I am," Boyd said, walking slowly across the big room to Malone. He
had one hand held to his chin.
"What's the matter with you?" Malone asked.
Boyd took his hand away. There was a bald spot the size of a quarter on
the point of his chin. "One of those kids," he said sadly, "has a hell
of a strong grip. Come on, Miss Fueyo. Come on, Malone. Let's get out of
here."