Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

      Robinson Miller looked down at his glass for a fairly long time. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

      “Excuse me, sir, I just want to check on something in here.” While Brandreth was waiting for his man to get drunk and/or talk some more spontaneously, he thought he might as well do the job that he had come here for in the first place. Switching on more lights as he went, he walked off into the white tunnel and through it to the laboratory area just off the museum. Here a white panel in the wall came loose, just as Gliddon had said it would, and the small safe hidden behind it opened properly for Brandreth when he used the combination Gliddon had provided. He closed up the safe again and started to walk back to the lounge. All the valuable art had already been taken out, of course, and everything looked—

      What was that wrecking bar doing, lying beside the inner laboratory door? Brandreth detoured a few steps and stood looking down at the tool. He thought he recognized it as one that was customarily kept in a shed near the caretaker’s lodging.

      He had broken into houses himself in his time, and he had a feel for when something was going on along that line. The lab door was locked, but it took Brandreth only a moment to find the right key in his bunch. With gun in hand he opened the locked door, to behold ruin—a big wall safe, one Gliddon hadn’t even mentioned, yawning open. The door of it had somehow been cracked, with parts dangling from their steel roots in the concrete-reinforced wall.

      Someone was behind him, and Brandreth spun, brandishing the gun. Miller had doubtless been approaching innocently, for he was carrying his drink in hand. At the sight of Brandreth’s face and weapon he recoiled, and seemed to come fully awake for the first time.

      Miller started to say: “You’ve got to be in on—” before he caught himself. Then he tried again, lamely: “There’s been a robbery.”

      “Brilliant, cocksucker,” said Brandreth, and raised the gun. He had been surprised and upset at a moment when he thought himself in control of the situation, and when that happened he sometimes tended to lose his head. Miller turned, cowering away, trying to protect his head. Brandreth brought the gunbarrel down, cracking on a forearm, bringing a yelp of pain. Then he laid the second blow alongside Miller’s hairy head, not too hard. Miller pitched forward on his face, and lay there groaning, trying to move.

      “Now, son of a bitch,” said Brandreth. “You’re gonna tell me—”

      He reached down, meaning to yank the smaller man to his feet. But something that felt like a gorilla’s paw closed on Brandreth’s own left shoulder. His reaching arm was stopped. Then his whole body was yanked into the air, as it hadn’t been since he was pint-sized and in the orphanage. Now he was being thrown. The room spun round him with his flight, and smashed him with its far wall, almost hard enough to knock him out.

      He wasn’t that easy to take out, though. Gun still in his right hand, he got himself up on one knee, ready to use it on—

      —on one thin man in dark, burned-looking clothes. A man with a pale, half-familiar face, calm now as an utter lunatic. Thorn, God yes, it was Thorn. Brandreth, when playing butler, had one day answered the front door of this very house to let him in. He must be a black belt in judo, to throw a man of Brandreth’s weight like that … but Brandreth held the top card in his own hand now. As his head cleared, he smiled, even though his left shoulder still wasn’t working, and was going to begin to hurt like a bastard in a minute.

      The situation, and Thorn’s burned clothes, made Brandreth smile again. “Holy shit,” he remarked. “You must have been standing right beside the car.” Then he made a preemptory motion with his gun. “Who else is in here?”

      “No one,” the singed man said calmly. “We three are quite alone.”

      “You blew that safe? I guess you’re pretty good in the trade yourself.” Brandreth could see, in the far corner of the room, Robinson Miller getting slowly up to his hands and knees. A drop of blood dripped from Miller’s head to the carpet. But this time it wasn’t going to be Brandreth’s job to clean up anything.

      Thorn inquired: “In the trade?”

      “You know. Making things go bang. I’m pretty good at that myself.”

      At last there came a change in Thorn’s madly cool expression—a relief for Brandreth, it had begun to make him nervous to have someone look back at him like that from the wrong end of a gun.

      “Then it was you,” said Thorn, “who planted the bomb…?” He had no need to finish. He could read his answer in Brandreth’s face. “How fortunate,” he added in a softer tone, and came walking forward.

      “You’re better off dead, you lunatic,” said Brandreth, and fired. Twice. And somehow missed. both times. How could he have missed? And fired again, and—

      The grip this time came on the arm that held the gun. Brandreth screamed, feeling the bones go.

* * *

      When he came out of it, or at least out of it enough to know where he was, he wished he hadn’t. He was sitting propped up in one of the chairs inside the laboratory, which was almost dark. In front of him a projection screen had been rolled open, and Thorn stood nearby, fussing with a projector. Beyond Thorn the door was open to the small room with the cot, and Brandreth could see that Robinson Miller was lying in there. Miller’s face looked pale in the dim light but he was only sleeping, for his chest rose and fell.

      Thorn lifted his head from what he was doing, enough to glance at Brandreth from the