Grogan rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“Get up on your feet,” the hyena-Satan said.

Grogan didn’t move.

“Get up.” The pistol aimed at Grogan again. “Get up or I’ll put one in your head.”

“No you won’t,” Grogan said.

“You don’t think so?”

“It figures,” Grogan said. “You do me in; you’ll be slopping up the job. If they wanted me bumped, you coulda shot through the window.”

“They?” the hyena-Satan was just a trifle on the defensive. “Whaddya mean? Who’s they?”

“Whoever sent you,” Grogan said. He leaned back in the chair. His tone was mild, conversational. “Tell me something, buddy boy. How much you getting paid?”

The hyena-Satan made a hissing sound, breathing hard through the mask. He moved a step closer to Grogan, raised the pistol a few inches so that it pointed at Grogan’s forehead, just below the hairline.

“Fifty?” Grogan murmured. “A hundred? Let’s say it’s a hundred and fifty. So what I’ll do, I’ll double that.”

There was another hissing sound from behind the hyena-Satan mask. This time there was a laugh in it.

“Tell you what,” Grogan said. He leaned back further in the chair, crossed his legs and folded his arms. “We’ll make it five hundred. Good enough?”

The hissing laughter came louder. Then abruptly the laugh was cut off and the mask-muffled voice said, “All right, now we’ll time it. I’m givin’ you the warning buzzer. You either get up from that chair and come with us or you go to the cemetery.”

“Seven hundred,” Grogan said. “Seven.”

“You like that number?”

“It always pays off,” Grogan said. “Well, whaddya say? Make it seven?”

“Sure,” the gunman said. “Seven seconds.”

He started to count. Grogan didn’t move. The count reached three and then the gunman stopped counting and said to his partner, “Lock the front one.”

The werewolf-masked man moved quickly to the front door leading to the taproom. Above the doorknob there was a slide lock and he set the lock into place. Then he moved sideways, parallel to the wall, his gun pointed in the general direction of the men sitting at the table. As he moved, he turned away from Corey, who remained leaning against the wall.

“We pick it up at three,” the hyena-Satan said. “And now it’s four seconds—five—”

“All right,” Grogan said. “All right. I’ll go with you.”

Grogan was getting up from the chair and just then Corey lunged at the gunman wearing the werewolf mask. It was a combination move, his left hand going for the gun while his right hand, hard clenched, hit the werewolf mask high on the neck behind the ear. As the gunman sagged, the other gunman fired twice, missed and then delayed for an instant to steady his aim. In that instant the gun was in Corey’s hand, spitting flame.