by Jerry eBooks
“Tough guy,” she said, and made it sound ironical.
“It’s just something you do before you go to bed and again when you wake up in the morning,” he said.
He put the gun down near the top of his blanket and took off his jacket and folded it for a pillow and put it on top of the gun.
Hope Graham opened the envelope purse she carried and took out a flat automatic pistol. She pulled the slide back far enough to make sure there was a cartridge in the chamber. Then she put the pistol down on her blanket and took off her jacket and folded it for a pillow and put it on top of the gun.
Jim had to smile at this performance, so close an imitation of his own.
“Good night, Meestair ’Ovard,” she said, when she had rolled up in her blanket.
“Good night,” he said.
He wished, lying there and listening to the hiss of the waves running up the beach, that he knew what she was taking to Fitz Jordan and whether she was his accomplice as well as his private secretary. He felt sure she had never heard anything about Jim Howard from Fitz. But she couldn’t be so innocent as she pretended to be.
HE was waked up by a pull on his blanket, and for a second he thought he was in a sleeping car and the porter was routing him out. He sat up quickly and saw the girl.
He gave himself a minute to come fully awake. She had built a little fire of driftwood. It was still night. The moon, pale now, was way out over the ocean. The girl had got the folding wire grid and the two-quart aluminum pail from his camp stuff. He smelled coffee.
“It’s time to get up,” she said. “It’s near daylight.”
“Where did you get water for coffee?”
“From the creek. The tide’s running out, so it isn’t salty. And it’s been boiled. You needn’t worry.”
She went over to the fire and took the pail off. He thought, as he watched her, that she was one of the few girls he’d ever known who could afford to wear slacks. And that head of blond curls was as perfect as ever. She didn’t have to do much about it. Perhaps she had run her hands through it when she woke up.
She came back with a tin cup of coffee in each hand. She gave him one and sat down cross-legged on her blanket with the other. For five minutes they sat silent, sipping hot coffee.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Last night at dinner you were Mr. Johnson, of the United States Secret Service, a man Colonel Ortega could not refuse permission to go south. An hour later you became Meestair ‘Ovard and a person Colonel Ortega’s soldiers had orders to send back to Ensenada.”
“I’ve been thinking too,” Jim said. “Last night at dinner you came up to my table and asked me to pretend that we were old friends. You were private secretary to a respectable Los Angeles businessman. You were taking mysteriously important papers to him in the remote Sierra of Baja for which you had a secret map. What are you this morning?”
“So you didn’t believe me.”
“I did last night. I’d had a couple of drinks and the dinner was good and you were a hell of a pretty girl. Now that I see you in this light, without your make-up, wearing clothes you’ve slept in, with your hair uncombed, I have more sales resistance.”
“You should see yourself,” she said. “At least I’ve washed my face. You need a shave. You look like a tramp.”
She put down her coffee cup and reached for her purse. He smiled to himself when she took out a mirror and a lipstick and a comb.
“You know what you can do if you don’t like the idea of spending another couple of days with me,” he said.
“You know what I told you last night was true,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t be here if I had any choice.”
“Neither would I,” he said.
He picked up his gun and checked it as he had the night before, and put it back in its holster. He got a canvas bucket out of the car and walked up the beach to the creek. It was light enough now so he didn’t need the flash. When he got back to the car, Hope Graham had folded up the blankets and put the two tin cups in the little aluminum pail. She kicked the grid off the fire so it would cool.
“It’s light enough to start,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he rummaged in the luggage compartment for his suitcase. He found it and took out a small rectangular box of leather.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting ready to shave,” he said.
“Don’t be a fool. We haven’t time. Ortega will be sending his soldiers after us.”
“I cannot go unshaven after what you have said.”
“Oh,” she said, “forget it.”
“I am not accustomed to being high-hatted by the girls I camp out with,” he said.
He put a small mirror on the running board of the car and sat on his heels in front of it and shaved while she watched him. When he had washed the lather off his face, he combed his hair and tied his necktie carefully.
“Now,” he said, “I’ll have a look for the best way to get out of here.”
He climbed the bank. But as far as he could see, it was too steep for a car to climb. He went back to the tules. It was only a little after dawn, but the morning mist had given way to the hot bright sun of the desert. Sweat ran down his face. He took off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. As he reached to part the reeds, a pair of long-legged birds flew up. He stood for a moment staring up at them. They wheeled overhead, their blue bodies catching the sun, their long legs straight out behind them.
He waded into the tules. The mosquitoes sang around his head and the deer flies struck happily at the back of his neck. He walked on in, testing the ground. The reeds closed over him. From some place above him the birds cried angrily. He went on, his heels leaving little puddles. He thought the ground was fairly solid. He could make it by pushing the tules down and using them as a mat. But there was no way of crossing the stream. He went to work on the tules along the bank. In a few minutes his shirt was wet with sweat. Hope Graham joined him, working as fast and hard as he did.
“We’ve got a chance,” he said after an hour.
He put the car in low, went into the tules and turned left along the course he had laid out. The motor labored, the wheels spun, but the car went ahead. They came to a little marsh where the stream had once been wide and had silted itself in. The car bumped over it a little faster. But at the uphill edge he had to stop. The smooth reedy delta of the stream was behind them. Ahead were rocks and bare gravel and uprooted trees, litter of a winter flood.
Jim got out and walked ahead to pick a path for the car. He used the broken branch of a tree to pry up rocks and fill two or three of the worst holes. He cut his hand enough so he had to wrap his handkerchief around it to stop the bleeding. He made a path for twenty yards and went back to the car.
He drove in, made the twenty yards and kept on. The limbs of fallen trees scraped the sides of the car, threatened to take the top off. But he went on, making quick decisions as to whether he’d straddle a rock or put it under a wheel, and presently they were in a brush country of greasewood and sage that the car broke off with ease. He shifted into second and was making ten miles an hour when they saw the single wire of the telephone line and knew that they had reached the road south. It was eight o’clock and he guessed that they were six or seven miles south of Ensenada.
The two ruts in the brush turned abruptly into a new highway, two cars wide, with iron pegs carrying bite of red cloth to mark the sides. He guessed this was the road the rubio and his friends had been working on.
They hit the town of Santo Tomás toward eleven o’clock. Here the road branched. One trail struck back toward the sea, the other turned inland.
“There’s a grocery store,” Jim said. “Let’s eat.”
A fat Indian woman sat behind the counter. She smiled when she saw them. “How do you do?” she said. “Iss nice day, no?”
“A lovely day on which to go south,” Jim said in Spanish. “Which road?”
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sp; “The left,” she said.
“And can one here purchase food?”
The Indian woman replied in what she must have thought was English.
“For surely, so, yes. Of the beans, are good.”
“We will have of the beans,” Jim said.
The Indian woman waddled through a bead curtain to the back of the store and came back with two bowls of beans. She set the crockery down in front of them and leaned comfortably on her Bide of the counter, resting her weight on her glistening arms, to watch the gringos eat her frijoles.
The beans were so hot with chile that Jim’s mouth felt as if it were on fire. He saw that Hope wasn’t any happier than he was.
“I bring you two good damn beers,” the Indian woman said.
She fished the bottles out of an olla hanging in the doorway, sweat beading their sides, and ripped off the soft Mexican caps. Jim took a quick drink, to put out the fire in his mouth.
“The mister has had trouble from out the car, no?” the Indian woman said. She pointed at Jim’s gashed hand and his muddy clothes.
“Flat tire,” Jim said.
“So. You want to buy this?” She produced a kit for mending tubes from under the counter.
“Sure,” Jim said.
“Señorita,” Hope said, “have you a first-aid kit for men?”
“That I do not comprehend.”
“The Red Cross,” Jim said.
“Sí, señor.”
She brought out a tin first-aid kit with the familiar red cross. Jim looked at Hope. They both smiled.
Jim finished his beer and his beans, and took out his wallet. He pretended to hunt tor small bills, and put a twenty on the counter.
“Can you change that, Señora?”
“Sí, sí.”
The Indian woman took a chamois pouch from the bodice of her black dress. She emptied the pouch on the counter, spilling Mexican and United States coins. She poked among them until she had set aside the right change from a dollar. Then she probed in the pouch and brought out a roll of worn United States one-dollar bills of the old, large size. “I make the change Americano very good,” she said, putting three ones beside the silver, and then a worn old five-dollar bill.
She reached into the pouch again and brought out a crisp new ten-dollar bill and laid it on top of the pile. “So isshokay,” she said. “You count. You find all right.”
Jim took the change. He had hopes of that new ten. But there was no way to he sure with the naked eye. He looked at it as if doubtful.
“Iss hokay?” the woman asked.
“Sure,” Jim said. “But where did you get one so new?”
“Since four days,” the woman said.
“From a gringo?”
“Sí, sí.” the woman said.
Hope turned to the Indian woman and asked for water and pointed to Jim’s hand.
“Sí, sí, Señora,” the woman said and disappeared through the bead curtain.
She came back with a bowl of water. Hope washed the dried blood off Jim’s hand and got a bandage with a backing of adhesive tape out of the first-aid tin she’d asked for, and put it over the cut.
“There,” she said.
They got into the car and went south, passing the winery on their left. A quarter of a mile out of town Jim stopped the car. He took a magnifying glass out of his pocket and went over the ten-dollar bill the Indian woman had given him. The counterfeit was so good that bank tellers would take it without question. But it had a flaw. The two branches of a conventionalized olive tree met in the original Treasury engraving. There was a gap, too small to be seen with the naked eye, in the counterfeit. He found the telltale gap. Fitz Jordan had passed that way and he had been so hard up that he’d run the risk of using one of his counterfeit tens.
“What are you doing?” Hope asked.
“Proving to myself that I’m on the right trail,” he said. He put the bill back in his wallet.
“You mean that’s a counterfeit?”
He nodded, and started the car again.
“Are you trying to make me think you really are somebody official?”
“No,” he said. “Just playing games.”
He saw that she wasn’t worried about his discovery of the counterfeit. That probably meant she didn’t know the real reason Fitz Jordan was down here. He hoped she didn’t. They drove downhill, following the road toward a clump of trees that looked like live oaks.
“You don’t suppose that sound behind us could be a plane, do you?” Hope asked.
“Look,” he said, and stepped on the gas to make the shelter of the trees.
Hope Graham turned and looked back. “It is,” she said.
He pulled up under a tree and they got out of the car. The plane was coming very low. As it got nearer, Jim saw that it was a Mexican army ship. He guessed it wasn’t more than a thousand feet up. The foliage was so thick that they couldn’t see the plane when it passed, chuttering, overhead.
“They didn’t see us,” Hope said.
“I don’t believe they could have,” Jim said. “But if they’re looking for us, they’ll be back. We’d better wait and see.”
THEY’D been sitting in the shade for five minutes when they heard a car coming from the south. There was no way to hide from a car. Jim stood up and looked down the road. He could see only a hundred yards, to the top of a small rise.
A truck came over the hill with two men in the front seat. As it came nearer, he saw that the man beside the driver was a Chinaman. The driver blew his horn as he caught sight of Jim and waved his sombrero in greeting. He pulled up his truck in the shade and hopped out, a plump, middle-aged, smiting man who looked as if he might be an American.
“You want some beer?” he asked.
“Sure. We could use some,” Jim said.
The truck driver called to his Chinese helper, “Hola, chino! Three beers! . . . I am the peddler,” he said to Jim. “This is my last trip of the year. I sold my flour, my cloth and my shoes at San Quintin. At Carmichael’s I sold my oil and my gasoline. I am sold out. I start for home. And then I find this dumb Chink has three bottles of beer he forgot. Now everything is fine. You buy two bottles. I drink the third. My stock is all gone.”
The Chinaman, in blue denim levis and a cowboy hat, waddled over with the three bottles of beer. The peddler uncapped a bottle, keeping an expert thumb over the mouth to prevent the warm beer from foaming out, and handed it to Hope, He did the same thing for Jim, and finally for himself.
“I would treat you,” he said, “but I am a businessman. That will be forty cents American.”
“Fair enough,” Jim said, and gave him the money.
“Here’s to your good health,” the peddler said.
The Chinaman had gone back to the truck. He must have cached a bottle for himself. At any rate, he had one.
“You talk like an American,” Hope said.
The peddler grinned. “A businessman must talk everything in this country. I talk Swedish with the old man at Johnson’s. I talk English with the Americans who stay at Carmichael’s. I talk Mexican, Indian and a little Chinese.”
Jim wanted to keep him talking, so his questions would seem casual.
“Are you Mexican?”
“My mother was French and my father was Armenian. I was born in Port Said, grew up in Fall River and came to Baja to look for gold when finders was keepers. What does that make me?” He laughed at his own humor and finished his beer. “You folks going to Carmichael’s for the hunting?”
“Yes,” Jim said.
“Take my advice and don’t stay too long. You won’t be driving your car back after it starts to rain. This dobe soil makes a mud you can hardly get through with a horse. And the planes no longer go to Carmichael’s.”
“We saw a plane go over a little while ago,” Jim said.
“That was a Mexican army plane on patrol,” the peddler said. “The army doesn’t take passengers.”
The peddler picked up the three empty b
eer bottles. “I gotta shove off,” he said. “I want to make Ensenada tonight, and you know what the road is like.”
“Wait a minute,” Jim said. “Can you change a twenty-dollar bill?”
The peddler looked at him shrewdly. “I can if it’s good.”
Jim took a twenty out of his wallet and handed it over. The peddler studied the bill and took a leather bag with a drawstring out of his back pocket. He untied the string and brought out a roll of bills with a rubber band around them. He counted out ten ones and two fives. They were all worn old bills.
“You haven’t got a brand-new ten-dollar bill, have you?” Jim asked.
“Yes,” the peddler said, “just one.” He riffled through the roll and drew out a crisp ten. “That’s the first one I’ve seen in a long time. I got that from the boss at Carmichael’s when I sold my gas this morning.”
Jim took the two old fives and the new ten and put them in his wallet. The peddler got aboard his truck, tooted his horn and waved his hand as he drove off. Jim got out his magnifying glass and the new ten. He found the telltale gap where one olive branch failed to join the other. “Well?” Hope Graham said.
“The trail is hot,” Jim said.
“Are you really looking for a man who has been passing bad ten-dollar bills?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“The Indian woman at Santo Tomás remembered the man she got her ten-dollar bill from. She could have told you what he looked like. But you didn’t ask her.”
“Why should I?”
“So you’d know what he looks like.”
“I know what he looks like,” Jim said.
“Oh,” she said, “one of your own gang.”
“Let’s get going. I want to get to Carmichael’s before midnight.”
He wondered, as he drove on, how far behind him Johnson was. Knowing Johnson, he was afraid it wasn’t more than a day or two. It might be less. Johnson never traveled fast. But then, he never stopped.
IT got hotter, minute by minute, and Jim could not drive fast enough to make a breeze. His hands were sweaty on the jerking wheel, his eyes were nearly shut against the glare of the sun, and he could think of nothing but water—water to drink, water to swim in—cool, wet water.