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walked through the splash of sparse bushes into a small clearing, then looked around. It was a dark night, but that white-shirted man should have stood out like a lighthouse. Agron looked all around him, but saw no one.
"Shit," he cursed softly to himself.
"Looking for someone?" came a soft voice. It seemed to come from behind Agron's right shoulder. He turned, but saw nothing, just another silhouette of just another bush. He turned in the other direction, straining his eyes to see into the darkness.
He never had a chance to press the switch on his knife. He felt something metallic pressing against both sides of his head, then he heard a voice say, "So long, sucker," and then there was a flash of pain.
And then nothing.
Elmo Wimpler was pleased. He wiped off the skull-crusher and replaced it into the waistband he had designed to carry his equipment. Since leaving his house, he had been giving a lot of thought to the problem of his invisibility. He was invisible in total darkness, but in anything less than that, he was visible as a silhouette, without features, almost a
shadow, but still the silhouette of a man. He had He realized now how fooMl he had been on
realized that his protection would be much greater if
he had fashioned a folding screen, shaped roughly into the outline of a bush. He had painted it with his invisible, black paint also. In a dark park setting, he could just open the screen and anyone glancing in that direction would see nothing but the dark sil-
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houette of just another bush, instead of the outline of a man.
He had wondered if it would work. The body of Bats Agron, lying at his feet, his skull in pieces, had just given him his successful road test. It worked.
Whistling lightly under his breath, Wimpler folded the screen under an arm and began strolling off toward the Sheep Meadow to meet the people who wanted him to kill the Emir of Bislami.
He knew little about the Emir, except what he had seen on the television newscasts. But politics didn't matter to him. What had mattered was that the people he had called were willing to pay a million dollars each for the Emir's death.
Wimpler still hadn't made up his mind. Should he kill the Emir and admit it to the world, challenging them to catch him? Or should he do it silently, as a professional, an anonymous hit man?
Why not? He could do both. He could take the credit for the Emir's death. People would be lining up to hire him. Contract magazine was filled with ads from people looking for killers. He could pick and choose.
But first, his two-million-dollar job.
Brooklyn dock to have asked for so little to kill that
. ij u u- -lu a * c t federal witness. But that was then. The person who
he could change his silhouette, and out of a few , ƒ* 7T Vv**i t • a *u +
« a¿ a a i *u ¦ i j asked for that little amount was a wimp, and that pieces of cardboard, hinged along their long edges,
wimp was dead. Alive now, in his place, was Elmo Wimpler, Elmo the Invisible Killer, Elmo the Scourge of the World.
He laughed aloud with happiness. From sheer joy, he took the light oscillating device from his pocket and aimed it at one of the streetlamps that
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'tlA«
lined the roadway through the park. He pressed the I there was no longer any weakness about Elmo Wim-
switch. The light sputtered and died.
He remembered "The Shadow" radio show. That's what he was, a modern-day Shadow, striking fear into the heart of men.
The first meeting was scheduled to be held in the southwest corner of the Sheep Meadow. Wimpler was there a few minutes before midnight and when he saw that the area was empty, he found himself a dark spot near some bushes, opened up his screen and propped it onto the ground. Then he sat behind it, his head out, able to see around the entire clearing. He had his compressor on the grass next to him.
His thoughts went back to the evening with his unwilling neighbor, Phyllis. She had not been all that he had thought she would be. Maybe being gagged and bound had inhibited her. But that was in the past too.
He had no need to rape. The women would come willingly, once he had the money. That's the way women were. All women. He thought of his mother who had cheated on his father for years, accusing the senior Wimpler of not being able to provide for her in any decent way.
Often she would come home wearing gifts other men had provided for her and so great was her contempt for her husband that she never even tried to explain the gifts away. Elmo never understood why his father had tolerated it and stayed with her, and when she was dying, he sat at her bedside, holding her hand, the devoted husband to the end.
As he, himself, grew up, Elmo was never treated kindly by women, because he was smaller and
pier. The invisibility paint had changed all that. Women would flock to him and he would use them and humiliate them and then dump them.
He quickly checked his wristwatch, sliding it out from under his long black sleeve. Two minutes till midnight.
Soon.
He saw someone enter the edge of the meadow. Two men. The taller one was thin, dressed in black shirt and chinos. He had dark hair and his eyes were deepset. The man with him was an Oriental, dressed in some kind of yellow kimono. He had seen the two men before. As they stepped into the light, he remembered. He had seen them outside his old house in Brooklyn. They had gone in to question Phyllis. He remembered that the taller one had asked him a lot of questions.
Police? He hadn't asked and the man hadn't volunteered the answer. But what kind of cops wore kimonos? At any rate, they might be dangerous and he'd have to get rid of them before the person he was waiting to meet arrived. That these two men were here, after they had been nosing into Curt's death, meant that they knew more about Elmo Wimpler than was good for them.
He aimed his electronic light oscillator at the nearest of the overhead lights and it sizzled out. Quickly, he zapped another nine lights and the Sheep Meadow was in blackness.
Holding his bush-shaped screen in front of him, he moved through the darkness toward the tv/o men, feeling secure and safe, beyond their reach, beyond
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weaker than most men. He might still be smaller but I the reach of the law.
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He heard the tall one say, "Dark," as he sat on a bench.
"Especially for a pale piece of pig's ear who looks only with his eyes and not with his other senses." That made no sense to Wimpler. Stealthily, he moved around behind the two men. He would handle the taller one first.
He removed the compressor from his belt.
"I wonder if our friend is responsible for the doused lights."
"No," said the Oriental. "All the bulbs decided to burn out at the same time."