Free The By-Pass Control by Mickey Spillane Page B

every scientist hoped to achieve.
    He came out of the darkroom with copies of Louis Agrounsky’s pictures and handed me several. “I’ll mail copies to Newark and the other centers,” he said. “I may even have a few leads myself. A character like this one isn’t going after nominal employment with a background like his.”
    “For instance?”
    “Some of the places that deal with subminiaturization components. It’s been fairly well developed for the practical purposes of rocketry, but there’s no end to the field in sight. Eventually they’ll wind up with power units as big as the head of a pin. I know a few people who have put out papers on the subject and there might have been correspondence between them.”
    “There’s only one catch, Ernie ... Agrounsky deliberately left his field and disappeared. He hasn’t shown up.”
    Ernie shook his head in disagreement. “He still won’t take anything small. His mind won’t work that way. No matter what he does, he’ll have to emerge.”
    “That first breakdown he had could have been just that—the first,” I reminded him.
    “Possibly. In that case, all his knowledge, his training would come out in a hobby. He couldn’t cover it up.”
    “Like hell. If he broke completely everything could be shattered.”
    Ernie gave me a little shrug, not really caring one way or another. That one motion said it was up to those in the field, not to him, to locate the guy and solve the problem. His was more immediate. He shoved his glasses back on his head and said, “Have you contacted Don Lavois yet?”
    “No.”
    “Then you’d better,” he told me. “He picked up something about a big buy in the narcotics market.”
    “Damn,” I said and rea had for one. I dialed his hotel, asked for his room, and ’et it ring a dozen times before I hung up. “Not there. Look, E nie, I’m goin k to my place and change. If Don calls, have him hop on over, otherwise I’ll call him from there.”
    “Will do, buddy. Take care of yourself.”
    I stuck the photos he had given me in my pocket and took the stairs down to the street, picked up th fi t cab and had him take me over to the Salem. It took te nmues to shower and change and when I was ready I tried another call to Don. The desk said he still hadn’t come in and th message I left was to have him call on Mr. Martin as soon as possible.
    While I made the call I fin e edteployee list Doug Hamilton had checked out, tried to think it through without getting anywhere, then threw the papers back in my suitcase in disgust.
    It was time again, all-important time. What was the next step? Which direction? You’d think that there were enough men in the field to come up with som thing, but so far there was nothing but blanks. Vito Salvi had a good reason for killing those Washington boys, but why Hamilton? Why him?
    I kept remembering the bodies the way I had seen them last, remembering something I had almost forgotten. Of all the three, Hamilton had shown the signs of ben there the longest. Salvi would never have involved himself ith him if he hadn’t been important. Hamilton hadn’t walked in cold ... he had been directly involved somehow. If he had stumbled on the deal accidentally he simply would have been killed and his body disposed of. But no ... he did hav that address book. He knew about Salvi and where he was. For some reason he had waded into the situation head first and had gotten trapped in something way over his head.
    Doug Hamilton might have been stupid, but not that stupid. He wasn’t exactly new in inve ticative work and would have covered himself somehow. I looked at my watch, the time twenty minutes to ten, then slapped my hat on and went back downstairs. At the desk I left a not for Don to wait for me, told the clerk to let him have my key to get in and slipped him a buck for his trouble. I took the first cab in line outside the door and gave him the number of Hamilton’s apartment, sweated through the