Dog in the Manger: An Eli Paxton Mystery

by Mike Resnick

  The suburb petered out for a while, then sprang back to life once the terrain leveled off, and at last we turned off the main drag and headed onto an unpaved side street. We passed seven or eight modest little homes, then pulled up to one that looked no different than any of the others. My friend with the gun told me to get out of the car, then joined me and walked me to the front door as the limousine peeled away.

  He knocked twice, a swarthy little Mexican in a white suit opened up, and I was led through a tiny foyer and poorly furnished living room into an alcove that been turned into a study.

  “Sit down, Mr. Paxton,” said the American, gesturing to a wooden chair next to a window. As I did so, he pulled the shade down.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Now we wait,” he said, sitting down on a torn sofa opposite me.

  The little Mexican had vanished, and a moment later a well-dressed, deeply tanned man with rimless glasses and an almost comic widow’s peak entered the alcove.

  “Good evening, Mr. Paxton,” he said in perfect English. “How nice of you to pay us a visit.”

  “Well,” I said, “I thought as long as I was in the neighborhood . . .”

  He laughed uproariously. “Ah, but I do love a sense of humor! And how fortunate,” he added, suddenly serious, “that you have one to comfort you in this time of need.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what this is all about?” I said.

  “I rather thought you might tell us,” he replied.

  “It’s your party,” I said. “You ask the questions and I’ll answer the ones I can.”

  “A reasonable man,” he said with a smile. “Better and better.”

  “I’m always reasonable when the other guy has a gun,” I replied, gesturing toward the American.

  “Let us proceed, then,” said my host. “What are you doing here?”

  “Answering questions,” I said.

  The blond guy reached out and slapped me hard on the mouth. I could feel my teeth rip into the insides of my lips, and a little trickle of blood started running down to my chin.

  “Shall we try again? What are you doing in Monterrey?”

  “Looking for a dog.”

  Another slap.

  “Why make this unnecessarily difficult on yourself, Mr. Paxton? We are both reasonable men who eschew violence. Surely you can come up with a better answer than that.”

  “I’m a private investigator in the employ of Hubert Lantz of Cincinnati”—I saw no reason to get Nettles involved if I could avoid it—“and I’ve been hired to find a dog named Champion Baroness von Tannelwald.”

  “Then why did you call Captain Juan Vallero shortly after you arrived?”

  “Who did you expect me to call for help?” I shot back. “A tour guide?”

  This time I got a fist for my trouble rather than an open hand.

  “You went to the San Benedicto Hospital this morning. Why?”

  It was a damned good question. I didn’t answer it fast enough, and got a fist in the belly.

  “I repeat: Why did you go to the hospital?”

  “It was just a hunch.”

  Another blow to the face.

  “I am losing my patience with you, Mr. Paxton. I am going to ask you one more time. If your answer is not satisfactory, then I will most certainly have my associate kill you. What were you doing at the San Benedicto Hospital?”

  “I know the dog was on Federated Flight 308,” I said, speaking as quickly as my mangled lips would allow. “I know it didn’t get off anywhere along the route in the States. When I couldn’t get a lead on it down here, I decided to track down the cargo that did land here to see if there was a connection.”

  He paused for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to accept my answer or tell the American to shoot me. Finally he reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.

  “What were you doing at Riccardo Fuentes’s apartment?”

  “Trying to find out if he knew anything about the dog.”

  “And did he?”

  “He said he never saw it.”

  “Why did you kill Fuentes?”

  “He attacked me,” I said.

  “I think, Mr. Paxton, that I should not believe anything you tell me. We both know that the man you killed was not Riccardo Fuentes. We both know that you did not expect to find a dog at the hospital. You are not being forthright with me, Mr. Paxton. You are manufacturing those answers that you think I wish to hear.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “You show me the dog or tell me what happened to it, and I’ll be back in the States so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  “I very much doubt that you will ever see your homeland again, Mr. Paxton. You have answered me with evasions and half-truths. This constitutes a breach of faith in our initial agreement.”

  He nodded to the blond gunman, who stepped in front of me and began working me over in earnest. I tried to get up to defend myself, but every time I did he knocked me back onto the chair. I caught most of his blows with my forearms and shoulders, but soon they got so sore that I couldn’t hold them up and he began teeing off on my face.

  I don’t know how long it lasted—maybe three minutes, maybe seven, maybe ten. It felt like a month.

  “That’s enough, Carl,” said the calm, unruffled voice of my host just as I was starting to slide off the chair, half-conscious.

  Carl backed off, looking thoroughly disappointed, and his boss knelt down next to me.

  “Who are you really working for, Mr. Paxton?” he asked softly.

  “I told you.”

  “I know you did. Now I want the truth. “

  “Who do you want me to say—CIA, FBI, Interpol?” I mumbled, swallowing a mouthful of blood. “You name it and I’ll swear to it. Just stop asking stupid questions. You guys have had me followed for the past week. You know damned well who I’m working for. “

  “It makes an excellent cover story,” he said, “but we both know that no dog was ever placed aboard that flight. Why have you come here, Mr. Paxton, and what do you know?”

  “I know I’m raising my rates,” I said, squinting to see if that would get the spots to go away from my field of vision. “No goddamned dog is worth what I’m going through. “

  “We know you spoke to your friend Pratt this evening,” he persisted. “What did you tell him?”

  That, at least, explained why I was still alive, and it gave me a little ray of hope that if I played my cards right I might still be alive twenty or thirty minutes up the road. They had tried to kill me with the Mercedes; that had been legit. But that was before I had called Pratt. Now I could count on staying alive until they found out what Pratt knew. You kill a private eye, nobody gives a damn; but you kill a cop and you’ve got real troubles. Oh, they’d kill him if they had to, but first they wanted to find out whether or not it was really necessary.

  “I’m still waiting for your answer, Mr. Paxton. What did you say to Michael Pratt?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Carl’s foot came up hard in my belly, and I groaned and rolled onto my back, trying not to vomit all over myself.

  “I repeat: What did you tell Pratt?”

  “That I hadn’t turned up any sign of the dog,” I gasped.

  “I am tired of hearing of this fictitious dog, Mr. Paxton,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’m going to give you five minutes to consider your position. When I return I will ask you once more about your conversation with Michael Pratt. If you lie, if you are evasive, if you refuse to answer completely and truthfully, you will die. Is that quite clear?”

  I croaked that it was, and he walked off through the darkened living room. I painfully pulled myself up to my knees and tried to take a quick inventory. I knew my nose was broken; I had heard it crack—and my right eye was totally closed. But, despite the constant stream of blood trickling down from my lips, I still had all my teeth, and despite the pain I figured my jaw wasn’t broken or I wouldn’t
have been able to speak. My arms ached and my stomach still felt like it was being kicked, but everything seemed intact. I was breathing normally—as normally as I could through my messed-up face, anyway—and I didn’t think any ribs were broken.

  “Don’t try anything funny, Mr. Paxton,” said the blond gunman. “I can kill you now just as easily as later. It makes no difference to me.”

  Somehow I knew he wasn’t kidding. They would beat the crap out of me, take all night if need be, trying to find out what I had told Pratt. But in the end, whether they got their answer or not, they probably couldn’t risk letting me go. I would live as long as I kept them in the dark—up to a point. Past that point, I simply wasn’t worth the trouble.

  That meant I wasn’t going to leave that house by avoiding their questions, or even by telling them everything I knew. And that meant that if I was still in the study when my inquisitor returned, I was a dead man.

  I remember hoping that Mike Pratt could put two and two together, because I suddenly realized that I was going to have to attack the gunman in the next minute or two, and even Billy Fourth Street, longshot lover that he is, wouldn’t have put two cents on my chances. In truth, neither would I—but the alternative was even worse.

  “Do you mind if I try to stand up?” I mumbled.

  “Do you think you can?” Carl laughed.

  I made the effort. He was standing about four feet away from me, the gun pointed right at my chest. I got my feet under me and slowly straightened up. I staggered as I reached my full height, and he chuckled again.

  “I’m dizzy,” I slurred. “I think I’m going to—”

  I lurched and fell in his direction. He reached out his free hand to steady me, and using every last bit of strength remaining to me, I slapped his gun out of his other hand. The force of my momentum carried me against him, and I drove a fist into his groin.

  He screamed and hit the deck. I wanted to hunt for the gun, which was somewhere on the other side of the room, but I knew he’d be on his feet again before I could find it, and I was in no condition to defend myself, let alone attack him when he was ready for me.

  There was a small window about three feet above the floor on the back wall of the study, and I staggered over and tried to open it. It was locked, and I couldn’t manipulate my fingers well enough to unlock it. I knew his scream would bring help, so I stepped back and, covering my face with my forearms, hurled myself through it.

  It looks easy when they go through windows in the movies; let me tell you, it isn’t. I felt glass ripping into my arms and sides, tearing the flesh and muscle, and I began to think I was going to wind up impaled on a couple of jagged spikes sticking up from the sill, but finally I was through and rolling on the ground outside the house.

  A couple of neighbors yelled out in Spanish, but no one came to see what had happened, and I limped out of the circumference of light that the house threw onto the yard. I spotted the street, went the other way, and found that the back yard went up the base of a heavily wooded hill. I knew that would be the first place they’d hunt for me, so, keeping in the shadows, I went along the row of back yards for about five hundred feet until I found one with an empty dog house. It looked a lot shoddier than the home it belonged to, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time, and I crawled into the circular doorway. It had been built for a middle-sized dog, like a collie or setter or, yes, a Weimaraner, and I had to lay in a fetal position to fit, but that was the least of my problems. I was bleeding profusely from my sides and forearms, and I had no way of applying any tourniquets or even cleaning the wounds. And since there was probably a search party after me already, I didn’t dare try to seek help from any of the neighbors.

  The night air was cold, like it always is a couple of hours after sunset in Monterrey, and, miserable and exhausted and pained, I brought my knees up to my head, clutched my belly with my arms, and hoped I wouldn’t bleed to death before I woke up. And, suddenly, sleeping became even more important to me than living, and I slept.

  10.

  My first thought on awakening was that I was paralyzed. Then my left leg started tingling painfully, and I realized that all of my limbs were either asleep or scabbed over with dried blood, or both.

  I took a peek out of the dog house, couldn’t see anyone in the immediate vicinity, and slowly and painfully crawled out, trying not to groan as I scraped my left arm and then my side on the doorway. It took me almost three minutes before I could stand erect, and another couple of minutes before I felt I could walk without falling down.

  The sun was directly overhead, and I guessed that I had slept for fourteen or fifteen hours. In retrospect, if I had to walk through the neighborhood, noon wasn’t that bad a time to be doing it. Most of the men were at work, and those women who weren’t working were cooking or cleaning their houses.

  I still wasn’t thinking too clearly, and it took me a little while to realize that of course I wasn’t going to be able to walk through the neighborhood. There were no mirrors in the dog house, but I didn’t need one to know what my face looked like. I still couldn’t open my right eye or breathe through my nose, and my blood-soaked clothes weren’t exactly the most inconspicuous outfit one could wear in a quiet little suburban neighborhood.

  The one thing I knew I couldn’t do was stand there like a dummy, contemplating what to do next. I didn’t know which house I had escaped from, but it couldn’t have been more than two hundred yards away, and I had no reason to assume they weren’t still looking for me.

  I surveyed the houses near me with my good eye, chose the one that seemed the emptiest (though I still don’t know what criteria I used), and quickly limped over to its back door. The door wasn’t locked, and a moment later I was inside, searching through its five tiny rooms for signs of life.

  The occupants were all gone, and I rummaged through a couple of closets until I found a tan shirt and matching slacks that I could fit into. They were a little tight, but at least they weren’t covered with blood. Then I went into the bathroom, took one look at my face in the mirror, knew that there was no way I could hide or disguise it, and started searching through drawers and cabinets looking for some Bactine. There wasn’t any, so I settled for emptying a cardboard box of gauze and bandages, stuffing them in my pants packet, and hunting up a large brown paper bag in the kitchen. I put my old clothes into the bag—no sense letting the enemy know I had changed outfits—and walked out the front door as if I had every right to be where I was.

  I walked slowly to the street and turned left, hoping that I was going in the opposite direction from Carl and his boss. I got a couple of funny stares from housewives who peeked through their windows at me, but nobody said anything or made any attempt to stop me.

  After I had limped along for half a mile or so, I came to a house that had a pair of Oldsmobiles, each about ten years old, parked in front of it. I walked up to one of them, hot-wired it, and drove off before anyone realized that anything unusual had occurred.

  The tank was half-full, which I figured ought to get me to Vallero’s office unless I got hopelessly lost. I wasn’t worried about anyone reporting the theft of the car; I’d have welcomed the first cop who pulled me over and took me into custody.

  I drove for about five miles before I remembered that we had gone up a deserted mountain road the night before, so I slowed down and waited for someone to come up behind me. As it happened, the first vehicle I saw was a truck coming toward me in the opposite lane.

  I jumped out of the Olds, flagged him down, and finally got him to understand that I wanted to go back to Monterrey. He explained, more through sign language than broken English, that he was going into Monterrey himself and that I should follow him. I thanked him, made a quick U-turn, and fell into pace behind him as we started descending the mountain.

  We hit Monterrey about fifty minutes later and I veered off onto a side street, withdrew my wallet from the paper bag, and dumped my old clothes into a trash can on the corner. Then I started thin
king in earnest about my next move.

  My first inclination was to go to Vallero and tell him what had happened—but he hadn’t even been able to protect Bora’s corpse, and I had serious doubts about his ability to keep me alive once word got out that I was in protective custody. I couldn’t go back to my hotel, and I had a feeling that they were keeping an eye on the English-speaking local doctors as well, just in case I tried to get one of them to patch me up. I also had a problem with the Olds: surely it had been reported missing by now, and I wasn’t at all certain that my enemies didn’t have the wherewithal to track it down quicker than my friends.

  It was time to get the hell out of town while I still had the chance. And yet, I still didn’t have any hard evidence, not for Mike Pratt’s murders, not for Juan Vallero’s drug case, not even for Maurice Nettles’s missing dog. The answer had to be at the hospital, and I knew if I left Mexico I’d never get back down here again. Besides, they were probably going to keep trying to kill me, and if I was going to keep on playing target I wanted to know what it was they were after me for.

  I knew it was stupid. I looked and felt like I had just gone the distance against Mike Tyson, and here I was planning to sneak into a heavily guarded hospital that seemed so legitimate that if the bad guys didn’t shoot me down the good guys might think it was their duty to do so. Hell, I even looked like a junkie who was desperate enough to rob a hospital for a fix.

  Still, I couldn’t see any way around it. This organization was just too damned big not to have someone wired in to Vallero’s office. The second I got in touch with him they’d know what I planned to do. If he met me, they’d follow him. If he went ahead of me, they’d kill him. And if he was getting tired of American investigators complicating his life, he’d bring me in himself and what happened to a dead Bora would very likely happen to a half-dead Paxton.