The Vanishers Read Online Free PDF

at her legs and flung the coat at her head and dived aside, pulling my own gun to shoot her dead.
    Dealing with a man, I would probably have done one or the other, gambling that, although I might incur some damage in the hassle, it wouldn’t be fatal. However, the fact that there was a woman behind me made it, I decided, unnecessary to take the risk. A man, particularly a novice, holding a gun on another man, expects to have the situation under control. If his control is challenged, his pride is hurt, and anything can happen. The Wild Bill Hickok syndrome. With a woman, you don’t have that kind of macho pride to contend with. Maybe.
    All this went through my mind almost instantaneously as I crouched there. After all, the mental computer was programmed for situations like this, we’d been here before. The girl behind me—at least she sounded young as well as scared—started to speak again; but she had nothing more to say that I needed to hear. I released the handle of the suitcase and straightened up very slowly.
    “I told you not to move!”
    The voice was shrill; I hoped the trigger finger was less nervous. I reached out deliberately and grasped the knob of the door, which had closed automatically. I opened the door.
    “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
    Moving with infinite care so as not to startle her, feeling very vulnerable in the spinal area, I stepped away from her, one deliberate step at a time, out into the Maryland spring night—it had got quite dark outside by this time. No bullets followed me. The door sighed closed behind me.
    I drew a shuddering breath and told myself angrily that a stupid young bitch who’d never learned not to brandish a firearm she wasn’t going to shoot ought to be turned over somebody’s knee and spanked; and if nobody else would correct the serious flaws in her upbringing, I might even take her in hand myself, as a public service. It occurred to me that, dumb as she seemed to be, she might actually be foolish enough, now that the ambush had failed, to flee the joint heedlessly, weeping bitter tears of frustration. I moved to the side and waited by the door, holding Astrid Watrous’ nice brown spring coat in both hands like a bullfighter’s cape.
    I’d judged the idiot female correctly. I didn’t even have to wait very long. Soon the door opened cautiously. Seeing the coast apparently clear, a smallish, white-clad blonde girl sidled out, or started to. I noted that her hands were empty, but the right was steadying a large white shoulder-strap bag. I didn’t waste time carrying the inventory further; I simply stepped out in front of her and wrapped the coat, and my arms, about her head. I marched her, blinded and stifled, backwards into the room, and hooked a heel behind her ankle, and slammed her to the rug, letting my two hundred pounds—well, I might have picked up a little additional weight on that Mexican food—land heavily on top of her. I heard the door close automatically, and the latch click.
    It took me a tense moment or two to get a grip on the purse. I yanked it free and slung it across the room. The girl was getting back some of the breath driven out of her by the fall. She’d liberated herself from the smothering coat, and she was starting to fight me, but although she was strong enough to cause me trouble, she didn’t really know how. I clamped a grip on her neck, knuckles digging into a certain pain center under the ear in a certain way. I heard her gasp in agony. Her resistance ceased. I rose to one knee and, shifting my grasp to take her by the scruff of the neck like a puppy, hauled her across the other knee, facedown. Pinning her there left-handed, I raised my right hand to warm her bottom as she deserved. Then I dropped my hand again.
    I mean, it was getting through to me at last that this was a very female little body with which I, a male, was wrestling. The rump was particularly delicious in snug white slacks. Even though I don’t go for dames in pants as