"Pay me?"
Ferret's cold tone was intense with hate. He shoved his body close to the lawyer's form and snarled a terse message into Daniel Antrim's ear. A look of complete stupefaction spread over the lawyer's face. Ferret stepped back, leering.
"You get it now?"
"You— you—" gasped Antrim.
"Yes," grinned Ferret. "You didn't figure I would be around, did you? Well, you'll never know how I got here!"
He stepped across the room and waited, covering Antrim from the farther door.
"All I'm going to do is plug you once," he said, still grinning. "Then I'll leave you for Solly. You and the papers on the desk."
"That back door of yours is going to make a nice way out for me, Antrim. I unlatched the front when I came in. Solly won't have any trouble. None at all. None at all!" The two men were motionless now. Antrim, slumped, was breathing heavily. Ferret, leering, wore a fixed expression on his crafty face. It was a strange scene — especially when viewed from the transom of the apartment door.
For there a man was peering, with one foot poised on the radiator, his opposite hand clinging to the side of the doorway. This man, looking from the hallway, had silently witnessed each move in Ferret's trapping of Daniel Antrim.
The peering man, serious-faced and broad-shouldered, dropped from his perch with the lightness of a cat, and stood an instant in the hallway. He turned and crossed to the half-opened door on the other side. He hastened into a dark apartment, and closed the door. A few moments later he was at a telephone. A quiet voice answered him. It spoke only a single word. That word was a name: