A Gathering of Widowmakers (The Widowmaker #4) by Mike Resnick Page B

felt Nighthawk's hand over his mouth.
    "Quiet!" whispered the older man.
    Kinoshita blinked his eyes very rapidly, trying to figure out what had happened. When Nighthawk was sure the smaller man was awake, he took his hand away.
    "Someone's out there," he whispered.
    "The janitor, maybe?" suggested Kinoshita softly.
    "Could be," agreed Nighthawk, screecher in hand. "But he's got a prosthetic leg, and a man with a prosthetic leg followed me to Horatio's."
    "How long has he been out there in the corridor?" asked Kinoshita.
    "Maybe ten minutes."
    Kinoshita checked his timepiece. It wouldn't be dawn for another two hours. "Don't you ever sleep?"
    "I slept for a century," replied Nighthawk. "It hasn't got much to recommend it." He paused, listening intently. "There are three of them now, maybe four. It doesn't take that many men to clean a dump like this."
    Kinoshita pulled out his pulse gun and positioned himself where he could see the door.
    "Why don't they come in?" he whispered nervously.
    "They don't know for sure that we're here. My guess is that one of them was stationed outside, and since he didn't see us leave the building they finally figured out that we're holed up here. It took them four hours, so it's safe to say we're not dealing with the brightest men on the planet."
    Kinoshita half-expected Nighthawk to step through the doorway and open fire, but the older man stayed where he was, seated on the wood floor, his back propped up against a wall. He was so relaxed that if Kinoshita didn't know better he'd have sworn he was asleep.
    Finally Nighthawk turned to his companion. "They've left," he announced. "They're probably searching the rest of the building."
    "When they don't find you they'll be back," predicted Kinoshita.
    "No they won't," replied Nighthawk. "They don't want to face me. They're just following someone's orders." Kinoshita looked unconvinced, so Nighthawk continued: "We have all the advantages. It's dark, we've had time to take up defensive positions, we know where they are when they enter and they have no idea where we are. They'd be dead meat and they know it. If they were serious about wanting to find us, they'd have opened the door and searched the room."
    "So what do we do now?"
    "I don't know about you," said Nighthawk, "but I'm going back to sleep."
    "But they're still in the building!" protested Kinoshita.
    "Not for long. In another five or ten minutes they'll convince themselves that One-Leg was asleep on the job and we walked right out past him. He'll protest like all hell, but the last thing they want to do is learn that he's right, so they'll go back to their boss, put the blame on him, and live to fight—or run away—another day."
    "Why didn't you take them out?" asked Kinoshita.
    "We're not here to collect all the bad guys," answered Nighthawk. "We're here to make a handful of kills that will draw Jeff to the planet, and killing a bunch of flunkies won't do any good."
    "They'd kill you if they could."
    "Probably," agreed Nighthawk. "But they can't."
    Nighthawk lay back down and was sleeping peacefully in less than a minute, while Kinoshita spent the rest of a very nervous night listening for footsteps that never came. He fell asleep just before dawn.
    He'd been asleep less than two hours when Nighthawk shook him awake, gave him a few minutes to gather his wits about him, then went to the airlift. Then took it down to Horatio's, then back up to the main floor.
    "What was that about?" asked Kinoshita as they stepped into the building's foyer.
    "If anyone's watching, let them think we found some place to hide down in Horatio's," explained Nighthawk. "Why encourage them to look upstairs tonight?"
    "Now I'm confused. I thought you said they didn't want to find you."
    "Last night's crew didn't. I don't know who's going to come looking for me tonight."
    "And in the meantime, who are you looking for?"
    "There are a few possibilities," said Nighthawk. "But the first thing I'm looking for is