Mac asked mildly, “Isn’t that slightly beside the point?” “I think it’s very much to the point,” Bennett said. “It establishes, or otherwise, the credibility of the information.” He gave me a hard look. “And of the informant.”
It was time for the old whipsaw act again, and I got up and said wearily to Eleanor, “Here we go again.” I looked at the three Bennett men sitting together in a corner of the room. “Anybody want to play Horatius At The Bridge today? No? Come on, Elly, let’s blow.”
“Matt.”
I turned sharply on Mac. “I said it wasn’t any use letting the OFS in on it, didn’t I? To hell with interdepartmental cooperation; we can handle it. The dame called us, not him. Tell him I was there to get our monthly cut of the Florida heroin business and let’s go out and do some work. We’re wasting time. I’ve got to get up to New York and pick up our take in the numbers racket there, remember? And then there’s all that prostitution money out on the Coast. I’ve got a busy collection schedule and all this horsing around isn’t doing it any good.”
“Matt, Mr. Bennett wasn’t suggesting—”
“Well, he’s got a damned funny way of not-suggesting it. I suppose in his refined line of work he associates with nobody but presidents and popes.”
Bennett stirred and started to speak, but Warren Peterson, sitting near him, spoke up abruptly, “You’ll notice that this agent who claims to have Miss Brand’s welfare so much at heart is going to drag her along now as he sticks his head into a nest of dangerous terrorists.”
He was kind of pitiful, and I never forget or really forgive anybody who’s pointed a gun at me—in our real world, unlike his movie-and-TV dream-world, somebody who points a gun at you is somebody who’s demonstrating his perfect willingness to kill you—but I had to admit that his criticism was valid.
Eleanor said quickly, “I’d like to see him try to leave me behind! This is my story, remember?”
We didn’t need this argument, and I said a bit sharply, “It may be your story to write with a typewriter, but that doesn’t mean you get to shoot it with a gun. The man’s right.”
Hurt and angry, she started to protest further, but Mac broke in, “Please sit down, Matt. Have you a theory to explain why your anonymous caller chose to get in touch with you at Velo’s apartment?”
I made a show of hesitating, shrugged, and seated myself once more. “Maybe she wanted to let me know that Big Sister, whoever she is, had her eye on me—me, and presumably Miss Brand. That she could reach us anywhere, even at Seppi Velo’s unlisted number. A threat and a brag at the same time.”
Bennett asked, “Did you recognize the voice?”
I shook my head. “Feminine but muffled, maybe by a handkerchief.” To hell with him, let him chase sopranos while we were tracking down contraltos. “I’d never heard it before in my life,” I said. Well, that much was true.
Mac, who’d had my full report, did not set the record straight; nor did he help us speculate about who the mystery woman might be. Instead, he changed the subject by introducing Brent as the local boy who’d just been checking on the address I’d been given. Bennett had a sour look on his face as he listened. He obviously felt that with his agency’s greater resources he could have done a better job of casing the joint, or having it cased; he disliked having to rely on this freckle-faced young errand boy of Mac’s. But Mac, while informing him of the gist of the message I’d received, had carefully refrained from giving him the essential details. Interdepartmental cooperation.
“It’s a beatup old houseboat on a canal south of town,” Brent said. “A bunch of hippies, or whatever they call them nowadays, who pay some token rent to the guy who owns the rickety dock. A kind of run-down industrial area. The canal’s pretty well silted in so you can’t get anything big in there any longer; they probably couldn’t get the old bucket out even if they could fire up the stem drives, but judging by the weeds on the props they haven’t been turned for several years. Probably rusted solid by now. They get power for the lights and air conditioner, the refrigerator, maybe the stove, through an extension cord to an outlet on the dock. Right now there are three living on board, two men and a girl. The girl seems to have a small income, enough to keep the menage operating. She’s a pale, down-trodden-looking little blonde who might be pretty if she’d take a bath and wash her hair. I caught a glimpse of her, driving by. The younger man was with her. He’s a cheerful-looking butterball type who, I’m told, does a bit of boat-repair work around the marinas to help out. The older one, who didn’t seem to be around today—at least he didn’t show—is supposed to be thin, dark, bearded, and intense-looking. He is supposed to have been involved in a marijuana run a while back, maybe more, but you can say that of fifty percent of the waterfront population of Florida. The court turned him loose on some technicality. There’s speculation locally about who does what with what to whom on board, if you know what I mean.”
Bennett said sourly, “A cautious reconnaissance was ordered, not an investigation in depth. If these are the people we want, they’ll be gone the minute they hear somebody’s been around asking a lot of questions about them.”
Brent shook his head. “I only drove past once, and watched a little from good cover; I wasn’t seen. As for the rest, well, I have a little boat of my own and I like poking around the backwater marinas of the city. There’s a small one a bit farther down where the canal is still maintained, that I’ve visited before. I just dropped in on the manager and bought him a beer while I arranged for dockage for my boat for next weekend. He’s a chatty old party; he thinks those immoral pot-freaks upstream give the neighborhood a bad name; and he’s happy to tell you all the bad things he knows about them and a few he doesn’t.”
I said, “Three dropouts on a broken-down houseboat doesn’t seem like quite the sinister pirate crew we’re looking for, capable of destroying half a dozen ocean-going ships in a way nobody’s quite figured out yet.” I glanced at Bennett. “Have you had any further instructions from the Sacred Earth people about how the money’s to be paid? And are you going to pay it?”
He said stiffly, “If we can apprehend them without payment, the question will not arise, will it? And you’re overlooking the fact that at least one of the trio has been involved in drug smuggling. That means . . .”
I didn’t listen to any more of that. I could have written the script for him. They’ve got this mastermind-of-crime routine they trot out whenever anybody pushes the drug button. The fact that the older hippie’s name had once been mentioned in connection with a drug offense meant, to Bennett, that the guy was Fu Manchu in disguise with a fleet of speedy smuggling craft at his disposal, all easily convertible to torpedo boats or mine layers or laser ships or death ray carriers. . . . The trouble was, I told myself grimly, that I didn’t like that houseboat at all. I was allergic to houseboats. I’d had very bad luck with houseboats. I’d barely made it alive out of one up in Canada— well, Mac had mentioned that incident at our previous conference—and it had been on another houseboat right here in Florida, over near the Everglades on the West Coast, that Martha Devine, Martha Borden as she then was, and I had escaped death by very little. Old Home Week. I smelled danger. I smelled death. Fuck all houseboats. This one was a trap, I could feel it. But whose trap, set for whom?
“Tonight,” Bennett was saying, speaking to Mac now. “We can, of course, handle it perfectly well by ourselves if you’ll give us the address; but I suppose you’ll want a representative along. . . .”
He stopped as a knock came on the door and a woman’s voice spoke my name. That brought me the attention of everyone in the room except Mac who, as I did, recognized the voice immediately. It was not the husky contralto voice of the mysterious, informative stranger; it was a voice we both knew very well. I glanced at Eleanor, who should have recognized it too. I realized that she had, but that she was studying my reaction to it for some reason.
I rose and went to the door, waving aside the Bennett contingent that h
ad automatically organized itself into a defensive formation to cover the opening. I turned the knob and looked out at the dark-haired girl standing in the hall. She smiled a little when she saw me. The remembered smile did funny things inside me. She was wearing a crisp white summer suit and her legs were bare but nicely tanned, and her white pumps had high slim heels that made her look taller and more lady-like than the image I’d been carrying in my mind, of a barefoot girl in a loose striped robe. I told myself I didn’t really believe in ESP; but it was odd, wasn’t it, that I should have been thinking of Martha Devine only moments before?
“Is Daddy here?” Martha asked. She’d always had a fine disregard of security and protocol; she might have been the self-assured daughter of the chairman of the board, any old board, or the president of the company, any old company. “I called Washington and they said I’d find you here, but they weren’t quite sure if you’d managed to catch him before he got on the plane back north.”
Then I saw her look past me and notice Eleanor Brand inside the room. Her lips tightened as she remembered the betrayal she’d endured at the other girl’s hands.
I said hastily, “Yes, he’s here. Come on in and meet all the nice people.”
Mr. Bennett of the OFS thought it was a hell of a sloppy way to run a top-secret conference, with young ladies dropping in casually to ask for their daddies.
Chapter 22
There were four of us in the car; and even though it was a large sedan of the old-fashioned kind America used to love but can’t afford to feed any longer, you could hardly see the men for the guns. I wouldn’t have been surprised to bruise my shin on a bazooka or bust an elbow on a trench mortar. Certainly there were submachine guns —machine pistols if you prefer—coming out of our ears, complete with spare magazines galore. It seemed a pity, while we were in the mood and had the equipment, that we couldn’t take over the Kremlin and remodel it more to our liking, or at least pay a visit to Havana and persuade Castro to straighten up and fly right. . . .
Earlier, Mac had taken off for the airport with Martha, leaving us to thrash out the details. The plan that had been decided upon after much technical discussion was very simple, as all great plans are. Since I was the gent with the most experience, and a fire-breathing gladiator to boot, I could have the honor of being the guy who marched up to the front door—actually it’s aft on a houseboat—and told the terrorist miscreants to come out with their hands up, while Bennett’s three men covered all possible exits. Bennett didn’t put it quite that way, he kept pointing out that his boys were quite capable of handling this minor chore unaided, but if I insisted on coming along they might as well, he said, make use of my well-advertised talents. Unless I preferred to play a less risky role, of course. And, of course, he didn’t really expect any resistance, but he made a point of planning for all eventualities.
After the battle plans had been made, I spoke briefly with Brent while the others were dealing out arms and ammunition.
“Here you are,” he said, and I took the small flat automatic pistol he handed me and slipped it into my left sock. Those .25s aren’t good for much; but as somebody once said, nobody really wants to be shot with anything, even a .25, and sometimes that can be a deciding factor if things go critical unexpectedly and you’ve lost your main battery or shot it empty. I was wearing rubber-soled shoes, dark pants, and a black turtleneck that would have been too hot for the climate if we were going to operate in sunshine, but we weren’t. Evening was already well; advanced by this time. Brent said, “There’s a car for you in the marina parking lot, in case you should need transportation of your own. Small white Toyota pickup. Nobody notices an extra little truck in a place like that. Here’s the key. Anything else you’d like to know?”
“Cover?” I said.
“Plenty. It was an industrial park that never got off the ground, so to speak. Empty lots with weeds and brush and trash. Some empty buildings; some that were never finished.”
“The canal?”
“A jungle along the banks.”
“Actual depth?”
“It was supposed to be dredged to twelve feet for barge traffic; I doubt they ever made it. Less than half that now, only a couple-three feet in spots I’d guess; and it’s full of junk, blocks of concrete, old cars, you name it.”
“Your job is Eleanor Brand,” I said. “I know you haven’t been trained for the bodyguard bit, but do the best you can. It’s probably better than I could do at the moment. I’m in the doghouse there but good; I suppose because of the way I slapped her down when she wanted to come along.”
“At least Bennett had sense enough to agree with you on that, publicity hound though he is. Well, take care. . . ."
I had said something appropriate, and joined Task Force Sacred Earth, or however Bennett had it down for the record; and now we were approaching the target area, in a rather dismal part of the city I’d never seen before—but then, I’m hardly an expert on Miami. I thought of Eleanor Brand and her hostile attitude and hoped she’d get over it and, at least, not give Brent too hard a time, watching over her. I thought of Martha Devine and the nice way she’d smiled at me when I opened the door; but then she smiled nicely at lots of people. To hell with Martha Devine. I’d exorcised Martha Devine, I told myself, by sleeping with another, handsomer lady, now dead by her own hand; and somebody would pay for that eventually, but not tonight. Tonight we were chasing dangerous political activists and sinister drug fiends in whom I had no faith whatsoever.
“Drive by the boat once,” Lawson said, sitting beside me. “Don’t slow down. Eyes front, I’ll do the looking.”
As senior officers, Lawson and I had the rear of the command car. The man whose name I’d once heard in Nassau, Burdette, was in the right front seat; and the driver was the youngest soldier in our army; a slight, darkhaired kid named Ellershaw. He had a bad case of nerves, I noticed. He was yawning a lot, as if sleepy, a dead giveaway; but he drove all right. Burdette; short, square, and sandy, looked like a good steady man who might actually know what he was doing; but he had things on his mind, too. Lawson, beside me, was jumpy as hell; almost jumpy enough to forget how much he hated me for how bad I’d made him look more than once. Almost, but not quite. Some task force, I reflected sourly. If they practically crapped in their pants going up against three unwashed hippies, one a girl, it would be sad to see them tackling something or somebody truly dangerous.
As we drove past, I was aware, without turning my head that way, of the lighted windows of the houseboat, a fairly large vessel of its kind, fiberglass construction, once white but badly streaked and weathered now, with a topside steering station sheltered by a tattered white awning— Bimini tops, I think they’re called. The dock against which the craft lay had been a massive affair designed for heavy commercial barges, but half of it had fallen into the canal, leaving stumps of pilings sticking out of the dark water like broken black teeth. There was a small Ford station wagon, badly battered, with the fancy phony-wood decoration halfpeeled off, parked above the dock on the gravel area between the street and the sea wall. I caught a snatch of music as we passed, something loud with a heavy beat.
“Turn left up ahead,” Lawson said. “Those warehouses or whatever they are. Find a place to park out of sight over there. Ready, Helm?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. “Are you sure this trip is necessary?”
Reluctance is always diplomatic at this point in the proceedings. Nobody loves an eager hero.
“You wanted to come. We didn’t ask you.”
So much for diplomacy. Young Ellershaw found a slot between two dark cinder-block structures, both with broken windows speaking of desertion; he slid the sedan into it. We piled out. The weapons of the three-man submachine gun squad gleamed wickedly in the dark. I hadn’t been offered one of the rat-a-tat machines, but I wasn’t brooding about it. As far as I’m concerned, they’re for people who can’t shoot, and figure they’ll let ten inaccurate bullets try to do the job of
one accurate one. Well, sometimes it works; but even so, it seems wasteful.
“Give us time to get set,” Lawson said.
‘Take ail the time you want,” I said. “Where I come from, the watchword is mañana.”
‘To hell with mañana. Give us fifteen minutes and move in.”
I peered at the luminous dial of my watch. “Fifteen minutes. Your wish is my command, Señor.”
He made a growling sound in his throat and moved off with his cohorts. I remembered, as I often do in such circumstances, the general who said he could deal with his enemies, but God would have to save him from his allies. I couldn’t remember his name. It was quiet in the alley once the soft footsteps died away; the distant rumble of the city barely reached this place. A car went by on the street or drive that followed the canal; I saw Lawson and Company duck back against the buildings and wait for it to get clear; then they were gone from sight.
I went the other way, around the rear of the warehouses. I swung wide across the vacant lot beyond, slipping from a clump of brush to an old car body to a dented white refrigerator somebody’d had no further use for. I reached the road well over a hundred yards downstream—well, toward the mouth of the canal, wherever it finally joined the Miami River or Biscayne Bay or the Straits of Florida or whatever, call it east to keep it simple. I moved a little farther east where the drive curved slightly, putting me out of sight of the houseboat and anybody near it as I slipped across the pavement and fought my way into the bushes bordering the canal. A jungle, Brent had said. I couldn’t tell you what the bushes were, maybe mangroves. A midnight botanist I’m not.
Then I was in the water wondering about snakes and alligators. It didn’t seem like a promising area for sharks, but barracuda came to mind; and I’d read a piece in the paper about pet-shop piranha that had been released somewhere in Florida and were finding the ecology very much to their liking. There had also been mention of a walking catfish; but I figured I was man enough to handle a catfish, ashore or afloat. This detour was not in the battle plan; and it was, of course, a stupid damned business. Probably I’d return from the wars soaked and dirty and ridiculous while the rest of the conquering army marched home dry and clean, laughing uproariously at my sorry state; but agents who worry about making fools of themselves don’t last very long. I’d be everlastingly damned, Bennett or no Bennett, if I walked up to' a door to which I’d been sent by an anonymous phone call without making at least a small attempt to find out something about the people behind that door.
The Revengers Page 21