There it was. Bell caught it instantly. The sudden shift in the eyes. He swung into a crouch and, in the blink of an eye, aimed and fired a shot into the forehead of the man who was creeping up behind him from where he’d been, hidden by a curtain.

The report reverberated out the open door and throughout the atrium of the hotel.

Kelly glanced at the body of his henchman with all the interest of a horse that had stepped on a prairie dog. Then he smiled at Bell. “Your reputation is well founded.

You must have eyes in the back of your head.”

“You came to kill me,” said Bell evenly. “Why?”

“It’s a job, nothing more.”

“Who paid you?”

“Not necessary for you to know.” Kelly laid aside the paper and slowly got to his feet.

“Don’t try for the gun in the belt behind your back,” Bell said, the derringer as steady as a branch on an oak tree.

Kelly flashed his gold teeth again. “I don’t need a gun.”

He sprang forward, his powerful legs propelling across the room as if he had been shot from a cannon.

What saved Bell in those two seconds was the span between them, a good eight feet. Any less distance and Kelly would have been all over him like an avalanche. As it was, Kelly struck him like a battering ram, a glancing blow that knocked Bell sideways over a chair and onto the grass green carpet. But not before he pulled the trigger of the derringer and sent a bullet into Kelly’s right shoulder.

The brute was stopped in his tracks but did not fall. He was too powerful, too muscular, to fold with a bullet that did not penetrate his heart or brain. He contemplated the spreading of crimson on his shirt with the detached look of a surgeon. Then he grinned fiendishly. “Your little popgun only holds two bullets, pretty boy. Now it’s empty.”

“I wish you would stop calling me pretty boy,” said Bell, leaping to his feet.

Now it was Kelly’s turn to reach behind his back and retrieve his Colt revolver. He was just bringing it level to pull the trigger when Bell hurled his derringer like a baseball pitcher receiving the signal from the catcher to throw a fastball. At four feet away, he couldn’t miss. The little gun, solid as a piece of quartz, thudded off Kelly’s face just above the nose and between the eyes.

Blood gushed from the gash and quickly covered the lower half of Kelly’s face. The blow staggered him more than the slug in his shoulder. There was no gasp of pain, no bloodcurdling cry. He made no sound other than a great sigh. The gun was still in his hand, but he did not lift it to aim. He couldn’t. Bell put his head down and charged the strong man like a porpoise into a great white shark, accelerating with every step, thrusting his head into Kelly’s stomach with all his strength. The ex-boxer merely grunted and brushed Bell away, throwing him halfway across the room with a strength nothing less than phenomenal.