"Work great? How do you know?"

"Well, you wouldn't want me to use an untested gun on a real hit and mess it up, would you? I'm a craftsman. I really lay into my work."

With acid sarcasm, I said, "Well, I hope it tested all right."

"Sure did," he said. "I come up to Harlem after it got dark. There's this alley, see, right next to a joint that's got the world's loudest band. So I waited until a black girl passed and drilled her. Almost blew her spine out. Then I dragged her into the basement and ripped the clothes off the corpse and had her. She sure was juicy. Just laid there staring at me with those sightless eyes, staring at me. I must have done it six times. She cooled down, though, and got too stiff, so I thought I'd better phone in."

"You are being paid to do a job!" I railed at him.

"Of course, of course! I was just practicing. Also, I didn't want to go out on a real job. Up to an hour ago, my hands were still shaking from the shots."

"They ought to shoot you," I said bitterly.

"Oh, hell, yes," he said. "They have to. You see, this prison psychologist had syphilis and he gave it to me in the (bleep) and mouth and told me to spread it around. So I have to have arsenic shots to keep the sores from run­ning. But it was a waste of time on his part because a corpse don't care if you give it syphilis: it just lies there stiff and stares at you and don't say a word."

"SHUT UP!" I screamed at him. "Get on the job!"

"Oh, you bet. I hardly took the edge off at all with that black girl. I know exactly where the target is now. I'll grab a car, go right up, shoot her dead, lay it into the corpse and when it gets too cold to (bleep) I'll phone in again and report. I hope you're having a good time, too!" He hung up.

I tried to get some pleasure out of knowing now that the Countess Krak would shortly be a defiled corpse.

But suddenly I got to worrying. That girl the night before, Butter. She had said that she had had coitus with a goat.

I had read somewhere that the Spaniards, when they came to America, had picked up syphilis and taken it back to the Old World. And modern research had found that the disease had been generated by an American beast known as the llama that was a sort of long-legged goat.

Had that goat given her syphilis?

Did I now have the disease?

I tore into the tattered books on the library shelf. I found a medical text. It said the onset was very mild and the first sign occurred in from ten to thirty days, at which time a small bump appeared and then went away. But skin eruptions then occurred; one went totally to pieces internally and usually went crazy. I searched further in horrified frenzy. Nothing like this existed on Vol-tar. There probably wasn't a doctor around who could touch it. I had to know all I could about it, realizing that I had ten days at least to wait before I would know. I calmed myself with an effort. I had no real evidence I was in trouble.

Then my eye chanced to light upon a fatal para­graph. The disease was named from a character in a

poem: Syphilus! The man was a SHEPHERD!

And shepherds tend GOATS!

Oh, believe me, I spent an awful and restless night! I knew I was doomed to break out in sores and go crazy.

The pale horror of dawn spread its contaminating fingers through the window. The phone rang!

I jumped like I was shot.

Maybe it was good news, I told myself, to still the small screams that tried to rise from my diseased body. Maybe Krak was dead.

"Torpedo here," he said. "Look, I got bad news for you. That land yacht wasn't there. I found a lot of package wrappings in the litter bin close by: Newark stores and quite fresh. And one had marked on it 'Land yacht steaks, put in freezer at once' and another with the license number you gave me and 'cook uniform' scribbled on it. So they were there all right just hours ago. They must have been the convoy of a huge motor home followed by a smaller one that I saw waiting at the westbound toll line to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson. That's only a mile or so south of Hairytown. I remember saying to myself, 'Jesus, look at that huge motor home and all the chrome,' when I exited off from the New York State Thruway onto U. S. 9 to enter Hairytown. So I know what it looks like all right. But that ain't the bad news."

Oh, Gods, what now?

"You know that envelope you gave me with the money in it? Well, a few hours ago the message and paper simply evaporated. That wouldn't be so bad because I remembered your phone number. But the money that had been in it evaporated, too! There's nothing left of it but some green powder."

Oh, (bleep)! The timed disintegrator spray had gotten on the money in the envelope!

"So I'm broke."

Oh, that idiot! He had had the land yacht right in view and missed it! I knew at once what I would have to do. He was too dumb to do anything but kill.

Impetuously, I said, "Drive down to Eleventh Avenue and 50th Street. Start now. I will meet you on the northwest corner!"

He said that he would be there.

I stole out into the front room. I found Miss Pinch's purse. It had two thousand dollars in it! I took it.

I wrote a note. I told her I was haggard with worry that I hadn't pleased them last night. I was going to go find a mountaintop and sit on it and work out what was wrong but in a week or less I would be back, ready to go again.

I took my Federal credentials. If I was apprehended with a hit man I could say I was on a government project and had hired him to execute a government contract, "in the national interest," like they had executed on Martin Luther King and President Kennedy and Lincoln and lots more that had gotten in the government's road.

I armed myself.

I took my viewers and some clothes.

I stole out of the flat.

I would make sure, personally, that Torpedo found the right target and that the Countess Krak would die!

With rifle ready and my hit man's finger itchy on the trigger, I spent the next three days combing the highways for the Countess Krak.

There were only a limited number of routes she could take south, and working back and forth, crosscountry, asking service stations and toll bridge people, we patrolled every one of them.

On the very first day, about noon, I caught a glimpse on my viewer. She was standing on what seemed to be a hill crest, gazing at mountains that were shrouded in blue mist. She looked at no signs and shortly afterwards interference came on again. But the clue was unmistakable: she was somewhere inland where the Atlantic coastal plain rises into the Appalachians. That eliminated any roads nearer the coast. I felt we were zeroing in.

I was personally having a very poor time of it and was held to my search only by my sense of duty as an Apparatus officer. I couldn't stand to be near Torpedo Fiaccola.

Not only did the filthy beast stink, he kept whining that I wasn't being fast enough. He wanted to get on his kill and he twisted and agonized about how frustrated he was and how he had to have it. He kept stroking his rifle barrel and unloading the gun and spitting on the cartridges and reloading it, crooning to the slugs to get him his next orgy. My disgust rose like vomit in my throat just to hear him.

On the second day, beside a road we were alertly watching, I took a moment out to get a look at Heller.

He was still in Florida, totally oblivious of the gruesome fate that was stalking his darling.

He was walking toward a ramshackle hotel that stood amongst palms on a sand-spit. A high wind bent and threshed the trees. An alligator scuttled across the road ahead of him.

A contractor, in khaki that was stained black under the armpits with sweat, was saying to him, "Mr. Floyd, how in HELL do you lay out those foundation corners so accurate? Most engineers use a transit. Never seen anybody do it with a watch."