Page 112
I’d hit a nerve in a man who didn’t seem to have nerves.
“Okay,” I acceded. “Let’s go.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“How’m I doin’?”
A friendlier smile with the same nod.
“Got cold stone instead of a brain and a hornets’ nest in place of a heart.”
“Then we’re ready to begin.”
On the other side of the unbreakable glass wall stood a tall man in a light tan three-piece suit. On the floor next to him lay a metal folding chair that Melquarth had set in the otherwise bare white cell. I figured that the man was William James Marmot and that he had used the chair to test the unbreakability of the opaque glass wall. Now he was pacing nervously, looking everywhere for a way out.
The blood from Porker’s torture had been cleaned away.
“How’d it go?” I asked my self-assigned friend.
“I used a partner, nobody you have to worry about. William James had two bodyguards, so I needed a hand. He came along peacefully when they went down.”
“Anybody see your face?” I asked.
“Naw.”
“How should we do this?”
“You say that Antrobus knows you,” Mel offered. “That means if we let this guy live that he shouldn’t see your face, or your skin color for that matter.”
“Why didn’t you grab Antrobus?”
“I asked around about him. He’s a dangerous man, a very dangerous man. I wouldn’t mind going up against him, but first I figured we could play with Jimmy here.”
Mel was wearing blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, and the white mask of a Greek god. In his left hand he carried a long-barreled .22 pistol.
Prisoner was on the other side of the cell when the bad man walked in. Marmot was a shade taller than Mel. He listed forward before Mel raised the pistol. This gesture set the security expert back a step and a half.
“What do you want?” Marmot asked Frost.
“I need for you to tell me where Chrissie Braun is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“An eye for an eye,” Mel explained.
Marmot’s lips parted.
“I told you that I don’t know—”
Mel lowered the pistol and shot the upright man in the left foot. Marmot yelled, fell, and at the same time threw himself at Mel. For a moment I feared for my cohort, but Mel sidestepped the attack, pistol-whipping Marmot on the side of his head as he passed by.
On the ground the man turned into a child crying as he held his bloody and shod left foot.
Mel reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a cloth bandage roll and two thick wads of cotton. These he threw at his victim.
“Take off your shoe and sock and wrap yourself up before you get blood all over my floor.”
Marmot did as he was told, blubbering the whole time.
