The Poisoners

by Donald Hamilton

  I checked the loads in the revolver I’d retrieved from her, but it was not at the moment my primary weapon. Trying to shoot somebody out of the seat of a fast-moving vehicle with a snub-nosed .38 Special is not recommended as sure-fire homicide. Even if you solve the problems of lead and timing correctly, there’s always something to deflect the bullet. I had to get him out of his car… I got back into the station wagon and sent it slowly up the road, watching the rearview mirror.

  It was the usual twisty, unpaved mountain road carved into the side of the slope; not exactly the ideal spot for a two-ton family vehicle almost six feet wide, even though it did have all the power anybody could want who didn’t have drag racing ambitions. I cruised along deliberately, waiting for my man to catch up with me. When he burst into sight behind me in the bouncing and swaying jeep, I hit the gas pedal as if I hadn’t really expected pursuit; as if I’d been panicked by his sudden appearance.

  It was quite a race for a while, up into the pass and down the other side. In sports cars, it might have been fun, but neither of our vehicles had been designed for competitive mountain driving. I could see him, behind me, sweating over the wheel of the sturdy four-wheel-drive job that wanted to plow right off the road in the curves. I had the opposite problem. The heavy rear end of the wagon had a tendency to whip around whenever I got gay with the power.

  He was a good driver. I remembered being told that he’d been a motorcycle racer once. He may have been better than I was, although I’d done a bit of sports car racing in my time, but it didn’t really matter. The road was too narrow and my car was too wide and had too much power for him to get up alongside, and a little ahead, where he’d have to be to nudge me over the edge. At last, desperate at being blocked every time he tried it, he stuck his big revolver out the jeep’s window, left-handed, and fired a couple of shots. However, there are very few men who can shoot well from a moving car, particularly if they have to steer the car, and neither of the bullets hit the station wagon.

  Finally, as we roared down the curves and switchbacks, he was reduced to trying to ram my rear bumper to send me, he hoped, out of control and off the road. Just how a straight push down the road was supposed to accomplish this desirable purpose wasn’t readily apparent, but it’s something they’re always doing in the movies, and I guess he figured he’d better try it and see if they knew something he didn’t.

  It was, of course, what I’d been waiting for. It was why I’d held my speed down in the straights where the big Ford engine could easily have given me a good lead. Now I let him nudge me once, lightly, and did some frantic jockeying through the next set of curves to make him think I’d been terrified by the contact.

  Another straightaway showed ahead. I jacked up the speed to tease him along. In the rearview mirror I saw him coming in beautifully, straight as any bullfighter could wish, to ram me again. I slammed my brakes on hard and slid down in the seat to support my head and neck since the headrests provided didn’t look as if they’d take a lot of strain.

  Under the influence of the brakes, the nose of the station wagon went down, of course, and the rear went up. I heard him skidding in the gravel behind me as, too late, his brakes locked up; that would put his nose down, the way I wanted it, to run his bumper under mine. Then he hit. It was quite a crash. Metal bent and tore; but I’d already determined that my gas tank was located in one of the fenders; there wasn’t much except bodywork that he could hurt back there.

  We slid to a stop, locked together. Before he could do any shooting, while he was still standing on his brakes, I hit the gas pedal hard, praying that he hadn’t wedged me so high in the air that my rear wheels had lost traction. They did spin a bit; then they grabbed hold, and the station wagon tore free with more tortured-metal sounds. Looking into the mirror as I pulled away, I saw that Charlotte Devlin’s big trailer hitch had done a fine job. It had driven through Willy’s grill, fan, and radiator like a spear. A lot of steaming brown water was pouring out onto the road.

  The jeep was still running, however. Willy came after me recklessly, knowing that he had only a little driving time left, but I stayed ahead of him without too much trouble. Behind me, the four-wheel-drive job began to steam like a tea kettle; finally something got too hot and seized, and it slid to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road. I stopped the station wagon a hundred yards farther on, out of easy pistol range, and took out my little Smith & Wesson. I had him on foot. It was time to complete the assignment.

  “Helm!” That was Willy, shouting. “Helm, drop your gun and walk this way with your hands up!”

  I looked that way and sighed. It was too bad. His dossier said he’d been a good agent once, and maybe he still was, except where I was concerned. You can’t afford to hate—any more than you can afford to love—in this business. It clouds the judgement.

  He’d dragged Bobbie Prince out of the Jeepster, and had pushed her down the road ahead of him until they were clear of the clouds of steam and other fumes billowing from the crippled vehicle. Now he was standing there with a gun—presumably his big .44 Magnum although I couldn’t see it—thrust into her back. Well, from that position he’d find it rather difficult to shoot me. I started walking. I figured it would be best to get within twenty-five yards, and twenty would be better.

  “Drop it, Helm! Drop it or I’ll shoot her!”

  It was the same old tired routine. They will keep on trying it. One day I’ll have to sit down and count how many times it’s been tried on me.

  I suppose he knew we’d been to bed together. He knew she had thought enough of me to turn me loose; he presumably figured I’d feel myself under a certain obligation, even if I wasn’t passionately in love with her. In any case, I came from a nation noted for slushy sentimentality about children, dogs, and women.

  It was too bad. Of course, he was hampered by the fact that he didn’t just want me dead; he wanted me dead on his terms. He hated me too much to simply kill me painlessly; he wanted to have his fun first. And, like so many of his kind, he was under the delusion that he had a monopoly on cold-blooded ruthlessness. He was banking on the fond belief that nobody could possibly be as mean as he was…

  “Stop right there, or I’ll blow her spine right out through her belly!”

  I lifted my gun and shot him in the right eye.

  28

  When I awoke in the hospital, that was what I remembered immediately: the narrow mountain road, the steaming jeep with the smashed grill, and the stocky man hiding behind the tall, slim, blond girl who watched me steadily. She knew what I was about to do—what I had to do—and what it might do to her. I hoped she realized I had no choice. If I was fool enough to throw down my gun as ordered, Willy would simply kill both of us after he’d amused himself sufficiently. This way there was a good chance for me and a small chance for her, depending somewhat on my marksmanship.

  I remembered the shot. I remembered the good, pistol-man’s feeling of knowing it was right, even before the bullet hit. I’d done the best I could. The rest was up to luck or fate or God. There was a moment when it looked as if I might be allowed to get away with it. Then a dying nerve sent a final message to the dying muscles of Willy’s hand, and I heard the muffled roar of the big revolver still pressed against Bobbie’s back…

  After a little, I walked up to the two bodies in the road. I checked first on the man. Willy was quite dead. I kicked the .44 Magnum into the roadside ditch nevertheless, before kneeling beside the girl. She was still alive, just barely. Her blue eyes looked up at me, wide with shock and pain. I started to say something stupid about being sorry for the way things had worked out, but it was no time for such foolishness. Being sorry has never yet put a bullet back into the gun that fired it.

  “I wish…” Bobbie whispered. “I wish…”

  They always wish for something. They never tell me what it is. Her voice just kind of stopped. I remembered kneeling there in the road with my gun still in my hand containing one empty cartridge and four loaded ones,
but there was nobody left to shoot… Now I was lying in a hospital bed with a bandaged head and a pounding headache, trying to remember where I was and why I’d been brought there.

  Somebody knocked on the door. Mac came in before I could clear my throat and issue the invitation. I watched him approach, vaguely flattered that he’d come to see me on my bed of pain, wherever it might be. He doesn’t get out of Washington much, and I didn’t really think I’d been transported that far while unconscious from causes I still couldn’t recall.

  Mac was, as always, conservatively dressed in a gray suit, like a banker, but his eyes were not a banker’s eyes beneath the black eyebrows that contrasted strikingly with the steely gray of his hair. They were the eyes of a man who dealt, not in money, but in human lives.

  “How are you, Eric?” he asked.

  “It’s too early to tell from this end,” I said. My voice came-out kind of creaking and rusty. “What’s the medical opinion? My head hurts like hell. Where am I?”

  He raised his eyebrows slightly, but said, “I believe this is the Hidalgo County General Hospital, twenty-five beds, at 13th and Animas Streets, Lordsburg, New Mexico. You don’t remember?”

  “I remember dealing with Willy,” I said. “The film ends there. Incidentally, you can get out your red pencil and scratch one Nicholas. He was Nicholas.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good, Eric,” Mac said. “In that case, I commend you for a satisfactory job.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “However,” he went on deliberately, “I would like to point out that your assignment ended with Nicholas. We do not encourage suicide missions beyond the call of duty, Eric. Trained men are hard to replace.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “What suicide mission?”

  He did not answer directly. Instead he said, “Furthermore, certain people in Washington feel that the total destruction of the Sorenson Generator was not necessary. They would have liked to examine the machine more or less intact.”

  I grinned. “No matter what we do, or how we do it, they never like it, do they, sir? There’s always something much better we could have done, by much more satisfactory means. Just how did I destroy the damn thing, anyway?”

  “You rammed the truck carrying it, as it was coming down the mountain. The rig went off into the canyon, caught fire, and exploded. Apparently you jumped from your station wagon before the collision, but hit your head on a rock and knocked yourself out. I think a visit to the ranch is indicated, Eric. An operative should be able to unload from a moving car without sustaining even a mild concussion of the brain. You’d better do a little practicing under controlled conditions.”

  The ranch is the grim and business-like place in Arizona where he sends us for rest and rehabilitation between jobs if we can’t manage to talk him out of it, but this didn’t seem like the right moment to try. Nor did it seem diplomatic to point out that he could logically chide me for embarking on a suicide mission, or for being clumsy in surviving it, but not both.

  “What about Mr. Soo?” I asked.

  Mac’s eyes narrowed slightly. “So it was Soo. Not having heard from you, we had no way of knowing, although certain evidence indicated the Chinaman might be involved.”

  “I gather he wasn’t caught.”

  “No. When the police arrived at the scene, they found the truck burning down in the canyon. They also found that your station wagon—”

  “I don’t suppose it matters, but the heap wasn’t exactly mine,” I interrupted.

  He said, “The station wagon you were driving, having been knocked crosswise to block the road, had then been struck by a patrol car for which the police were searching, which had apparently been following the truck too closely to avoid becoming involved. The officer assigned to the car was found in the rear, dead from a bullet wound. You were lying unconscious at the side of the road. Later, the half-consumed bodies of two men were removed from the cab of the burned-out truck. However, the man who was driving the police car at the time of impact, and his passengers if any, have not been found.”

  “Well, Mr. Soo was probably the passenger,” I said. “The driver was most likely a lean gent who looked as if he might know this country: a tanned, outdoors type called Jason, who seems to be a sign painter by vocation or avocation. Mr. Soo isn’t really built for hiking, but Jason could have led him to safety somehow.”

  “There are indications that the Chinaman either reached a telephone or was in position to give some orders in person,” Mac said. “A mysterious explosion, thought by one of our associated agencies to be connected with the case, has been reported back in the wild country of the Jornada del Muerte, if I’ve got my pronunciation correct—”

  “Actually, it’s pronounced Hornada, sir.”

  “To be sure. Perhaps you can throw some light on this subject. Our associates are highly interested in any information you can supply.”

  I said, “Well, Mr. Soo had a cache of the catalyst and fuel for his generator—”

  “Oh, don’t tell me about it, Eric.” Mac’s voice was dry. “This demolition project upon which you embarked without orders is no concern of mine. There will be some people in to question you about it, doubtless, at great length. Save your strength for them.” He frowned. “Eric?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One thing puzzles me. This is the third time you have encountered the Chinaman, is it not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Each time you’ve got the best of him, if I remember correctly. Yet, finding you unconscious and helpless by the roadside—according to the police, he couldn’t possibly have missed you—he walked off and left you alive, the man responsible, once more, for wrecking all his elaborate plans. Doesn’t that seem a trifle odd to you?”

  I said, without conviction, “Well, I did save his life after a fashion, the first time we met.”

  “Soo is a professional. I do not think gratitude figures largely among his motives.”

  “I know,” I said. As usual, Mac had put his finger on the sour spot in the performance; the thing that had been bothering me, also. “It’s puzzled me, too,” I admitted. “Willy wanted to kill me for old times’ sake—he still carried a grudge about that Mexican operation I loused up for him a year, or so back—but the Chinaman fought him off me like a she-bear defending her cub. I wonder—”

  “What, Eric?”

  I hesitated. It was a wild idea, but I had to ask the question, anyway. “Just how effective was the damn generator?” I asked. “Just how much damage did it actually do in Los Angeles?”

  “I don’t have the exact figures, but apparently it was quite a serious smog attack, serious enough to warrant a second alert.”

  “Second out of how many?”

  “The third is the one that calls for full emergency measures.”

  “Then the second wouldn’t indicate a major catastrophe?”

  “I would say not.”

  I drew a long breath. “Suppose the generator didn’t work nearly as well as Sorenson had claimed it would, sir. You know these scientists, they always oversell their discoveries. Suppose the damn thing was actually a great disappointment to Mr. Soo.”

  Mac frowned thoughtfully. “Go on, Eric.”

  “Suppose Mr. Soo and his people originally thought they’d got their hands on a hell of a murderous weapon, sure death on heavily populated targets; and then suppose they learned that all it could really produce for them was a few additional cases of asthma and a lousy second alert. Suppose Mr. Soo decided, after analyzing his Los Angeles figures, that the Albuquerque show just wasn’t worth putting on; that as a matter of fact it should definitely be aborted, because it might tip us off that the Sorenson generator wasn’t nearly as dangerous as had been thought.”

  “It is an interesting idea, Eric. Continue.”

  “He left me alive. He went to a lot of trouble to keep me alive, when it would have been much simpler to let Willy have me. Why
? Could it be that he planned to turn me loose eventually, to beat the drum for this terrible weapon I’d seen the Chinese testing? Testing! Who tips off the enemy by testing a weapon like that—a pilot model, he claimed—in the enemy’s own territory? I don’t think it was a pilot model. I think it was the real thing, and I think Mr. Soo was trying to stage a real, deadly, double attack, meant to throw us into a real panic. Only it fizzled. And then the Chinaman had to figure out some way of salvaging something from his investment, so he decided to fill me full of misleading and terrifying information. That would explain why everybody kept telling me stuff about that generator, making it sound like a real doomsday device, when there was no need to tell me anything at all.”

  “Go on,” Mac said, when I paused to catch up with my thoughts.

  I said, “I’m beginning to think, sir, that having misfired, the machine was slated for destruction anyway. I just obliged Mr. Soo by shoving it off the road for him, giving him a plausible excuse for calling off the Albuquerque ‘test’ and destroying his supplies. I’d also, previously, obliged him by escaping, with… with the help of Bobbie Prince, but he gave me some help, too. He kept Jason from shooting when we were making our getaway. I thought I was being smart, or lucky, but if I hadn’t managed to make my own escape arrangements, I bet he’d have made them for me. He wanted me loose, repeating all the scary information I’d been fed about the dreadful smog machine the Chinese had got hold of, that had run into a little bad luck on this test run, but would be back to threaten us as soon as they could slap together a real working unit. His hope was, I suppose, that to counter the threat, our country would institute a crash cleanup program that would totally disrupt our transportation system and our economy… Naturally, he couldn’t allow Willy to kill me. I was his only hope of salvaging something from this expensive fiasco.”