Chapter 3

Sergeant Cowder looked the room over and took a drag from his cigarette. “Well, that’s that. Now--what happened?” He looked from Mike the Angel to Harry MacDougal and back again. Both of them appeared to be thinking.

“All right,” he said quietly, “let me guess, then.”

Old Harry waved a hand. “Oh no, Sergeant; ‘twon’t be necessary. I think Mr. Gabriel was just waiting for me to start, because he wasn’t here when the two rapscallions came in, and I was just tryin’ to figure out where to begin. We’re not bein’ unco-operative. Let’s see now--” He gazed at the ceiling as though trying to collect his thoughts. He knew perfectly well that the police sergeant was recording everything he said.

The sergeant sighed. “Look, Harry, you’re not on trial. I know perfectly well that you’ve got this place bugged to a fare-thee-well. So does every shop operator on Radio Row. If you didn’t, the JD gangs would have cleaned you all out long ago.”

Harry kept looking at the ceiling, and Mike the Angel smiled quietly at his fingernails.

The detective sergeant sighed again. “Sure, we’d like to have some of the gadgets that you and the other operators on the Row have worked out, Harry. But I’m in no position to take ‘em away from you. Besides, we have some stuff that you’d like to have, too, so that makes us pretty much even. If we started confiscating illegal equipment from you, the JD’s would swoop in here, take your legitimate equipment, bug it up, and they’d be driving us all nuts within a week. So long as you don’t use illegal equipment illegally, the department will leave you alone.”

Old Harry grinned. “Well, now, that’s very nice of you, Sergeant. But I don’t have anything illegal--no robotics stuff or anything like that. Oh, I’ll admit I’ve a couple of eyes here and there to watch my shop, but eyes aren’t illegal.”

The detective glanced around the room with a practiced eye and then looked blandly back at the little Scotsman. Harry MacDougal was lying, and the sergeant knew it. And Harry knew the sergeant knew it.

Sergeant Cowder sighed for a third time and looked at the Scot. “Okay. So what happened?”

Harry’s face became serious. “They came in about six-thirty. First I knew of it, one of the kids--the boy--stepped out of that closet over there and put a vibroblade at my back. I’d come back here to get a small resistor, and all of a sudden there he was.”

Mike the Angel frowned, but he didn’t say anything.

“None of your equipment registered anything?” asked the detective.

“Not a thing, Sergeant,” said Harry. “They’ve got something new, all right. The kid must ha’ come in through the back door, there. And I’d ha’ been willin’ to bet ma life that no human bein’ could ha’ walked in here without ma knowin’ it before he got within ten feet o’ that door. Look.”

He got up, walked over to the back door, and opened it. It opened into what looked at first to be a totally dark room. Then the sergeant saw that there was a dead-black wall a few feet from the open door.

“That’s a light trap,” said Harry. “Same as they have in photographic darkrooms. To get from this door to the outer door that leads into the alley, you got to turn two corners and walk about thirty feet. Even I, masel’, couldn’t walk through it without settin’ off half a dozen alarms. Any kind of light would set off the bugs; so would the heat radiation from the human body.”

“How about the front?” Sergeant Cowder asked. “Anyone could get in from the front.”

Harry’s grin became grim. “Not unless I go with ‘em. And not even then if I don’t want ‘em to.”

“It was kind of you to let us in,” said the detective mildly.

“A pleasure,” said Harry. “But I wish I knew how that kid got in.”

“Well, he did--somehow,” Cowder said. “What happened after he came out of the closet?”

“He made me let the girl in. They were goin’ to open up the rear completely and take my stuff out that way. They’d ha’ done it, too, if Mr. Gabriel hadn’t come along.”

Detective Sergeant Cowder looked at Mike the Angel. “About what time was that, Mr. Gabriel?”

“About six thirty-five,” Mike told him. “The kids probably hadn’t been here more than a few minutes.”

Harry MacDougal nodded in silent corroboration.

“Then what happened?” asked the detective.

Mike told him a carefully edited version of what had occurred, leaving out the existence of the little gadget he was carrying in his pocket. The sergeant listened patiently and unbelievingly through the whole recital. Mike the Angel grinned to himself; he knew what part of the story seemed queer to the cop.

He was right. Cowder said: “Now, wait a minute. What caused those vibroblades to burn up that way?”

“Must have been faulty,” Mike the Angel said innocently.

“Both of them?” Sergeant Cowder asked skeptically. “At the same time?”

“Oh no. Thirty seconds apart, I’d guess.”

“Very interesting. Very.” He started to say something else, but a uniformed officer stuck his head in through the doorway that led to the front of the shop.

“We combed the whole area, Sergeant. Not a soul around. But from the looks of the alley, there must have been a small truck parked in there not too long ago.”

Cowder nodded. “Makes sense. Those JD’s wouldn’t have tried this unless they intended to take everything they could put their hands on, and they certainly couldn’t have put all this in their pockets.” He rubbed one big finger over the tip of his nose. “Okay, Barton, that’s all. Take those two kids to the hospital and book ‘em in the detention ward. I want to talk to them when they wake up.”