Dean Ing - Soft Targets

by Soft Targets(lit)

  "Can't just be dead, huh? It has to putrify."

  She saw something shatter behind his eyes before he squeezed them shut. He shook off the outward display, turning to stare into the fire. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "That was stupid of me."

  Everett told her, inflections low and halting, of the youth who almost certainly lay under swirl-ing rapids in his expensive metal coffin several kilometers away. "I keep hearing him yelling. He was scared out of his sphincter, Gina. I don't think he knew what was happening."

  "My synopsis said he had an automatic weapon. He knew."

  "That was the third guy, the one in the back seat; the one I-I aimed at."

  "Then you didn't actually pull the plug on the kid driving?"

  "Not intentionally." He swallowed with an effort. "I'm not like you, Gina. I don't have the killer instinct very well honed." He saw her start to protest and held up a restraining hand. "I've seen you move in when you didn't have to, lady. And I'm grateful, I admire you for it. Wouldn't want you any other way. Okay?" She gnawed her lip and gave silent assent. "But I think, I honestly think I wouldn't've pulled that trigger if I hadn't found myself within spitting distance of that Czech automatic. I was going to round the bastards up. I think."

  She began to tear small shreds of celery leaf, placing them atop corn chips like hors d'oeuvres. "And I think we simply have differ-ent views of what constitutes self-defense," she mused, voice low and calm. "You defend only against immediate threat to your life. I have another view: when something has demon-strated that it is ready and willing to screw me good-and I'm wearing my Freudian half-slip there-I'm likely to defend against the possibil-ity; one demonstration is all I need."

  "Screw me twice, shame on me," Everett quoted.

  "Absolutely. I got screwed twice, 'way back when, and it left me with a sense of shame I don't want to feel again. Ever." the last word intense.

  A thin piercing tone stuttered from the Oracle detector. Gina flashed to it, flicked off the audio alarm and checked the tiny lamp glowing on the detector face. "In back," she whispered. "Leave the lights alone but get down." He followed in-structions, watched her check the Beretta before she closed the bathroom door. A musical laugh, barely audible from the bathroom: "Come here a minute, Maury. This, you have to see."

  He found her peering through the back win-dow, the scene outside a dazzling blue-white against black. Twenty meters away, a sleek four-point buck stood quartering toward them, the long neck arched up, antlers stark against the sky. "Testing our scent," Everett breathed, lips brushing her hair. They watched in silence for a long moment. "He doesn't want to get screwed, either."

  "Is he in season?"

  "Not for me. Always, for a camera. Maybe we can track him tomorrow."

  "You're out of your mind," she chuckled. The buck, startled perhaps by some faint transmis-sion of her voice, swung gracefully around, sprang away into the trees with vast heart-stopping leaps.

  "Nijinsky," Everett said. "They used to say his leaps were magic. Maybe he was just part deer."

  Moving back toward their catastrophic array of foods on the table, Gina paused to reset the detector audio. Everett found his wine, wrenched the cork out, found two coffee cups and poured, yawning as she sat down again.

  "Did I understand you right?" She was smiling quizzically. "You only hunt with a camera?"

  "Don't let it get around. Some of my friends wouldn't understand."

  "Or maybe they would, which'd be worse."

  He swigged the wine, crooning happily. "Much worse," he agreed. "Don't get me wrong: I shot an elk once, to get his hide for a pair of trousers. Could've just bought the goddam hide but if I really needed a set of elkhides I figured it was only right to get 'em the hard way."

  "How did you feel afterward?"

  "Pretty good, to tell the truth. I packed a hindquarter down with the green hide. God, I was a bloody mess. The trousers turned out to be heavy as guilt, but I still have 'em. And if I ever need another pair, I'll go after another elk. It's all the shit we go after that we don't need; that's what puts my hackles up."

  She tasted the wine. "Sherry? Wow."

  "Harvey's Bristol Cream," he nodded. "The dirty old men with their Madeira just haven't discovered this stuff."

  She slouched in her chair, feeling for the rungs beneath his own, and he moved his legs compan-ionably aside. "You don't need a whole lot, do you," she asked shrewdly. "I mean, you don't chase after much. Women, trophies over your mantel, man-of-the-year nominations-"

  "Mark of the year, maybe," he snorted.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Marks," she said; "I noticed that. But you're avoiding my interview, Commissioner."

  "Ah, yes." Pompous clearing of his throat. "I chase what I need, Gina. Well, hell, sometimes I don't even do that. When my wife left me a lo-o-ong time back, I needed her. It wasn't pride that kept me from chasing her. It was knowing she'd just leave again. I didn't have what she needed, you see. Someone who'd stay down off the timberline and build furniture, mix drinks, mow lawns, lust after a silk tie or a smoking jacket."

  That throaty laugh again. "David Engels was right, then. You're solitary as a bear. No wasted effort, no chasing all the lady bears out of raunch season. And definitely, no learning to ride a bicycle just to be a circus bear."

  He sipped, took a bit of cheese. "Yeah, Dave's probably right. I'd like to think of me as being like Nijinsky out there," he nodded toward the back of the cabin, yawned. "But deer are gregari-ous critters, full of grace and helium. And they don't hibernate, and I do." He stretched until his joints cracked. "You must've figured out some sensible sleeping arrangement."

  "The best. You under a sheet, me above 'em. Best-kept secret of the New England bundlers, or so Conklin tells me. But you go ahead. I'll stoke the fire later and set the detector up close."

  He undressed, wondering that he felt no par-ticular unease in her presence. Once she glanced toward him and smiled, raising her cup in a silent toast, then faced the fire again. He doused the lights and, scissoring his legs briskly be-tween the sheets to warm them, heard her low chuckle. "Now what," he asked.

  "That's what I do," she said. "Go to sleep." He rolled onto his side, faced the wall. Just parts in a machine, he insisted to the image of Dave Engels. You don't know everything, buddy. Yet the last image he recalled that night was the halo of yellow made by lambent firelight on the mane of Gina Vercours.

  SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER, 1980:

  He awoke to the odors of omelet and coffee, sat up quickly, noting that Gina evidently slept in a loose culotte arrangement. "Whoo," he rubbed hands briskly over his face as she turned; "for a second there, I forgot all this. Mind-bending."

  "Your friends in Denver wouldn't let me forget," Gina replied. "You had a call a few minutes ago. Agent Fulton; I promised to have you coherent when he calls again. Did I lie?"

  "Nope, unless you promised I'd be decisive, too." She gestured with a plate and he nodded, waving it to him with both hands. He took the steaming plate and settled it into his lap.

  "Don't expect this kind of service every morn-ing," Gina teased, going back for the coffee. "I'm feeling sorry for you today, is all."

  Between mouthfuls of omelet: "Why?"

  " `Cause you're indecisive."

  "Did I talk in my sleep?" He had stopped chewing, the cup poised halfway to his mouth.

  "No-oo," she said, a full-octave drop within that one word managing to convey mild irritation, bewilderment, and desire to drop what had begun as banter. "Or if you did, I didn't listen. What's got into you-or should I ask?"

  He destroyed the rest of the omelet before replying; and when he did, it was with reluctance. "I know what Fulton wants. And it isn't an easy decision. When I didn't respond to his hints yesterday, he finally laid it on the line. The FBI thinks I should drop out of sight, with a faked media release about my going into the river with those two men in the BMW."

  "You mean take a new identity? Pretty dras-tic," she said, the hazel eyes unblinking over her
cup.

  "You have a real gift for understatement. But I've been thinking it out, and there may be an alternative," he said, as the telephone rang.

  The scrambler was not perfect, requiring him to speak slowly for clarity. "Thanks, Fulton, I'm fine," he said, grateful that Gina had chosen to take her shower during the call. "Yeah, I've thought about it. God knows how you'd get total silence from that little cook, uh, Bohlen? And I couldn't very well continue to perform my Commission duties from the grave, so to speak."

  He listened, nodding as if into a videophone. "I'll take your word for that, but look: what if I were listed as seriously injured?" Pause. "I don't know; Walter Reade, San Diego Naval Hospital, Brook General maybe; whatever sounds con-vincing. You could say I'd been shot or whacked, and collapsed later. Internal hemorrhage, even a relapse from the licking I took at Pueblo. Hell, call a doctor and work it out; I'm open to sugges-tion, so long as it'd let me continue my work through a mail drop."

  He sipped the coffee through a longer pause, one corner of his mind occupied with the liquid slither of a nude blonde soaping herself a few paces away. A nude blonde butch, he reminded his libido; forget it.

  Then he heard Will Fulton's last suggestion, which made it easy to forget women. "Oh no, fella; that's out." Brief pause. "I can't tell you why, exactly, but the idea lacks appeal. I've been Maury Everett too long. And who'd foot the bills?"

  He barely noticed Gina's return, immersed in a debate he felt that he was losing. "Okay," he said at last. "I'll think about it, and you set up a scenario. I'll be around here somewhere until you can convince me this'll work. Remember, Fulton, in some ways I'm like any other working stiff." He watched Gina as she sat on the bed to slip from culottes to slacks, then forced himself to look away. "Sure; and I appreciate it, Will. 'Bye."

  Everett would not discuss his problem with Gina until he had thought it out in a more pleasant setting. Over her objections, they canvassed Empire, then Golden, for an extra set of snow-shoes. She objected again at the price, observing that they made the ugliest, most expensive pair of hand-chewed tennis racquets in her experi-ence. It was past noon on Saturday before they were properly shod for the trek, Gina quickly learning the widestance shuffle, carrying her shoulder bag easily for the first hundred meters.

  Maury Everett stopped frequently to let her rest, and laughed as she stumbled down a slope. "Lean back until you have the hang of it," he advised. "You're not on skis."

  Grumbling pleasantly, wiping snow from her goggles, she moved with him across the mounded blue-white wilderness, pausing now and then to inspect animal tracks. They had cov-ered more than a kilometer before Everett found a sunny overhang sheltered from the wind and, with his clasp knife, cut boughs for insulation. They took off the snowshoes and sat on them, leaning against the green boughs, silently shar-ing cheddar and crackers.

  The sunlight was warm on her face, distant peaks sharply visible in the thin clear air. It was no longer so difficult to see how a man of solitary habits might prefer winter in the Rockies, alone, to any other time, any other place. She said as much.

  "Only we're not alone; and neither is Nijinsky," he replied, and indicated a copse of trees in a ravine far below. Gradually she traced the patterns that revealed several deer among the mass of conifers, as Everett launched into a dis-course on the fleet animals.

  "My fanny's like a waffle from sitting on these snowshoes," she said, shifting, and provoked a lecture on the differences between her bobtailed `bearclaw' snowshoes and the long-tailed types used for less rugged country. Gina suddenly realized that the big man was temporizing, focusing on familiar topics, using her as a stimulus to deflect his thoughts. From what? "My face is frozen in a permanent squint," she said then, to change the subject. "Could we get moving again?"

  Single file, they followed the mountain's contours, Everett taking the lead. Eventually Gina admitted that her stamina was waning again in the high altitude and, after another quiet breath-er, they retraced their path. In another hour they stood in a grove of trees above the cabin.

  "Let me go first," she insisted. "I'll wave you in if it's okay."

  He hesitated, then shrugged. "I'll never get used to this," he said, motioning for her to go ahead.

  He watched her circle the cabin, aware that there were ways to locate and deactivate the Oracle sensors, ways to counter the most sophis-ticated passive system. Gina Vercours herself was the active system that must probe the site. She disappeared into the cabin then, finally emerging to scan the heights where he stood.

  At Gina's wave, Everett lurched forward in a shambling lope, traversing the steep declivity in a series of shallow zigzags. Exhalations con-densed in his wake, wafting upward in the still air, and as he trotted in, she was grinning. "You leave a contrail like a 747," she marveled.

  "Just out of condition," he puffed, hypervent-ilating. "Can't afford to inhale fast, it'd shrivel all those poor little alveoli."

  "I'll take your word for it," she said quickly. "No more lectures, please; whatever's bothering you, suffer in silence!"

  He unstrapped the snowshoes, amused, then followed her into the cabin. "Am I all that transparent? Well, humor me, babe; I just need time to get used to new ideas."

  She was heating water for instant coffee. "Such as?"

  "Such as undergoing cosmetic surgery," he said, and was grimly pleased to see that the no-tion disturbed her. By tacit agreement they eased onto separate sides of the bed, sitting side-by--side, sipping coffee as they argued the problem out.

  At one point, Gina reached over to take the roll of fat at his waist between her thumb and forefinger. If he lost thirty pounds of suet, she joked, nobody would recognize him.

  "That's the crux of it," he objected. "I hate being forced to extremes because a half-dozen gangs of charlies want my hide on their walls."

  "Then repudiate your stand. You'd have all the media coverage you could want."

  He was damned if he would. The very fact of his being hunted, he said, implied that young Rhone Althouse had found an Achilles tendon in terrorism. But between repudiation and a new identity there was an alternative. He could con-tinue as always, but with tight security around him.

  That, Gina said flatly, was suicide. "And I won't be a party to it," she warned. "Get yourself another boy, fifteen of 'em. It might delay the inevitable but sooner or later-" she broke off, laid a hand on his arm, not looking at him. "You're not seriously considering that, are you?"

  Everett laid his big paw over her hand, turned to face her. "I considered it, yes. But General Patton was right: don't die for your country; make some other sonofabitch die for his. I'm no martyr, Gina." He withdrew his hand, powerfully conscious that she had made no move to retreat from this small evidence of a growing rapport.

  Gina levered herself up to sit cross-legged, facing him. The act somehow lent her a gamin charm; in other circumstances he would have worn a wide grin. "So you're damned if you'll repudiate, and you won't paint a bull's eye on your butt," she urged. "That leaves us with a new you. Any other alternatives?"

  "Only the choice between stories that I'm comatose, and stories that I'm dead. I like the coma; that, you can come back from. Only I'd have to come back with a different face."

  "Just thinking about it must be a downer, huh?"

  It was not so much a fear of surgery, he said; Fulton had hinted at temporary cosmetic techniques. The weight loss was a good idea in any event. He sighed, "I guess I'm just worried about the effects on the few people I care about."

  "Ah," she breathed; "relationships." They were silent for a time before she added, "You have a solid self-image, Maury. No matter who you see in the mirror, you'll still be you."

  He stared hard at her. "Tell me that when I have a new face."

  "I will-assuming you'll still need me." It was a clear request for clarification; even a bit wist-ful, he thought, his gaze softening as he sought the frank hazel eyes.

  To avoid making a fool of himself he swung from the bed. "Tha
t's your safest assumption of the day," he said. "I have a phone call to make."

  Will Fulton did not have every detail worked out, but Everett accepted the story they had con-cocted for the press. Severe head injury during a kidnap attempt, condition improved but still critical, under heavy guard at an undisclosed location. "We can take you to Beverly Hills, Tuc-son, or San Antonio for the plas-uh, cosmetic surgery," Fulton said.

  Everett glanced across the bed. "Tucson it is," he said, and exchanged slow smiles with Gina. "But why don't I just drive your Firebird down to Las Cruces and across?"

  He frowned at the answer. "Okay, then the lady can do the driving and I'll hide my wallet. That's the way I want to do it, Fulton... I'm not asking you to take the responsibility."

  There was more along this vein, the FBI loath to take chances on some accidental unmasking of Everett, and Everett determined to have his way. Everett finally terminated the call, met Gi-na's glance.