Surely, she told herself, that was not a sane question. What possible good would it do him to frighten her if he didn't mean to kill her? If the bulge was made by his hand alone did he think that fear alone would bind her to silence? Could he possibly be counting on that?
No, no—it was too wild a hope, too slim a threat to cling to. No man who had killed once would ever show that much restraint, would bother to resort to such trickery. It was not the way of a killer. He would make sure. He could never be certain of her silence otherwise.
She suddenly realized that he was no longer standing. He had sat down opposite her and was speaking to her. His lips moved, but for a moment the words themselves seem to blur and run together.
Then she heard him distinctly. "Miss Prentiss, I don't know just how to say this—how to begin even. I'm afraid you'll think me an impulsive young fool with more nerve than talent...."
He paused an instant to moisten his lips and then went on almost breathlessly, the words coming in a torrent. "You're listed as an associate editor in the two Eaton-Lathrup magazines which use the most interior art work—as a rule, anyway—and the girl at the desk told me you can recommend art work sometimes, even though you don't do any actual buying. I know even assistant editors can do that—put in a strong plug for a drawing. What I'm really trying to say is—you look at most of the work when it first comes in, and when you need a particular kind of illustration for a story you've been editing your recommendation almost always means that the drawing will be bought. It's the same as if you'd made the final decision."
He smiled suddenly—a boyish, not unattractive smile, "I've tried my best to get in to see Miss Lathrup, but they keep telling me she's out for lunch, or in conference or taken the afternoon off or gone away for the week-end. I suppose if I'd been very persistent and made a nuisance of myself she might have consented to see me for a minute or two. But what good would that have done me? What good, really? I could never have persuaded her to spend a half hour looking at my drawings—or even fifteen or twenty minutes. It would have been better than not seeing her at all, but I wasn't counting on it to do me much good."
The smile widened a little. "So I suddenly asked myself—why not? Why not wait until you were through for the day and introduce myself and have a talk with someone with just a little more time, and trust to luck that you wouldn't be offended and that if I showed you some of my work and you liked it you might become interested enough to give me a chance to do at least one illustration on speculation."
Lynn Prentiss sat rigid, her mouth dry, staring at him with such an appalled look in her eyes that he suddenly fell silent, his boyish grin vanishing.
She could not yet fully grasp what he said, could only wait, shocked, paralyzed, for something to happen that would widen her understanding quickly enough for all of the terror to be dispelled. For an awful moment the youth who sat facing her remained what he had been—a sinister and dangerous killer who had no intention of permitting her to leave the restaurant alive. The gun....
She saw his right hand then, the hand she'd imagined firmly clasping a gun, one finger on the trigger ... the gun that would explode in his pocket with a terrible roar, ripping the cloth to shreds and killing her.