Nerving himself, he approached the motionless pair. "Excuse me," he said with difficulty, "but did you see a cat come in here?"
The words got no more response than the throat clearing. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but really I must find out," and he barely touched the elbow of the man in black.
The response was instantaneous, though from another quarter. Phil was grabbed by his jacket front and jerked back by Cookie, whose infantile features were now tensed into a hard mask.
"What you did!" The voice was shrilly scandalized. "Interrupting the kingman at his recreation! Shoving the kingman around! That brings punishment, that brings pain!"
Phil felt sick with fear. He knew if only Lucky were there, if only he could recapture his earlier mood of golden confidence, he wouldn't be so shamelessly terrified of this little bully who was holding him at arm's length.
He wet his lips. "I was only trying to find my cat," he quavered, "and I didn't shove him."
"You did too! I saw you! A great big rude shove! And as for cats, Swish Jack Jones, the Lady Killer, is the top cat around here, the only cat." The hand holding him twisted his lapels tighter around his throat. "You can't weasel out of what's coming to you. Well, Jackie, what are you going to do to him?"
And now, at long last, the man in black moved. He slowly turned his head in its ruff of black wool and fixed on Phil the sad, weary smile of a king who knows it is his boring but inescapable fate to inflict doom and punishment. He slowly reached out his hand until it grasped Phil's elbow.
"Please don't," Phil whispered, but just then a thumb dug into a nerve between his bones and he couldn't keep back a squeal of pain. The baby-faced man grinned with mincing approval, as if at last the proprieties were being satisfied.
Swish Jack Jones frowned, as if he felt the squeal hadn't been loud enough, and lifted his other hand. "This is a stun-gun," he said in a voice patchily varnished with intellectualism. "Ultrasonic. I might spray your spine with it to get you ready for being worked over. It's set for mouse power now, but I'll step it up if necessary."