“Able, Able, this is Baker.”
Mr. Somerset reached for the microphone. “Able here.”
“One man tailing bridal couple. We’ve taken him out of circulation.”
“Nobody else interested?”
“No. The Caddy’s clean now.”
“Very well. You may send in the arrest team.”
“Acknowledged. Baker out.”
Waiting there, we saw two men, one long and one short, both in neat, three-piece suits, appear from somewhere among the parked cars and cross the lot briskly. They were marching in step, which, considering the disparity in leg lengths, took some doing. Horace Hosmer Cody, having got rid of his car’s noisy decorations, straightened up and turned to face them as they approached. He looked as if he was wondering, in a normal way, who they were and what they were up to; I could detect no other reaction. He studied the IDs he was shown, started to protest, and was quickly and expertly spun around with his wrists yanked behind him, instantly handcuffed. For a man with a moderately violent background, he’d been easy to take, I reflected; but the Mutt-and-Jeff team had known its business, and I guess a man isn’t at his most alert on his wedding day. The girl in the white suit stood looking after her husband of less than an hour as he was marched away. I couldn’t read her expression.
“Come on, Helm,” said Mr. Somerset. “I mean, Mr. Horace Cody. Let me introduce you to Mrs. Cody.”
3
The girl was breathtaking in the way a work of art can be breathtaking. She would, of course, have been even more spectacular in a long satin gown, a jeweled tiara, and a veil; but she was still a vision in her smart silk wedding suit with her blond hair piled onto her head in golden swirls. Some kind of retaining spray had obviously been used to insure that not a single rebellious strand would escape. She was a moderately tall girl, nicely constructed, slender but by no means ethereal. The jacket of her suit, worn without a ‘blouse, was cut low enough above to reveal the graceful throat and, discreetly, the upper curves of the breasts; it flared a bit below to emphasize the narrow waist and rounded hips. The skirt was slim and straight.
The elaborate wedding gown customarily worn, and the endless yards of veiling, tend to overpower the human being inside the bridal glamour, giving the impression that the face is a beautiful blank. Even in her less formal costume this young woman was, to some extent, victim of the same effect. It was hard to analyze the girl-face behind the meticulous lipstick and dramatic eye makeup, all framed by the intricately sculptured hairdo. I had to concentrate on it, feature by feature, to determine that the eyes were blue, the cheekbones were good, the nose was straight, but the mouth could probably pout given an excuse—well, many rich kids tend toward that spoiled and dissatisfied look.
Gloria Pierce, now Gloria Cody, merely nodded in response to Mr. Somerset’s introduction. She had something more important on her mind.
“You did make the legal arrangements, I hope,” she said. “I would hate to think that I was really married to… to that man!”
Somerset said soothingly, “Have no fear; we took all steps necessary to insure that the ceremony would not be valid.”
“Well, it wasn’t a very nice experience anyway! I found it very hard to keep smiling at him in proper bridal fashion.” She condescended to look my way at last. “What’s this one’s name?”
“You don’t need to know his name, Miss… Mrs. Cody.”
She sighed unhappily. “Yes, I suppose I’ll have to call myself that for a while, won’t I? Until this man gets your job done, whatever it is… The resemblance isn’t really very great.”
“He isn’t supposed to fool anybody who really knows Mr. Cody; we aren’t playing The Prisoner of Zenda here.”
“Has it been explained to him that if he takes this pseudo-marriage too seriously the whole deal is off?”
“It has been explained to him.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” She spoke directly to me for the first time: “Horace always did the driving, so you’d better.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I helped her into the car and went around to get behind the wheel. Since Cody was as tall as I was, the seat was already set right for my legs, and the steering-wheel adjustment was comfortable. I started the engine and studied the dials for a moment, not so much to see what they read as to learn where they were. Well, at least the bridal barge did have instruments.
“Well?” said my companion impatiently.
I waved a friendly hand at Somerset, although his friendship wasn’t something in which I had much faith, and took us out of there. When the Safeway and its parking lot had vanished behind us, I said, “Helm. Matthew Helm.”
She glanced at me sharply. “Your name?”
I nodded. “That need-to-know nonsense is a pain in the butt. Those bureaucrats get all tangled up in their own security.”
She was looking around, frowning. “Where are we going? You should have kept straight at that last intersection, for Juárez.”
I said, “We’re not going to Juárez.”
“But we have reservations—”
“Buff Cody never had any intention of picking up that hotel reservation in Juárez. He was planning to make contact with someone at dinnertime in a small Mexican town called Cananea some two hundred miles to the west, Mr. Green’s Restaurant, if you’ll believe it. Fine old Spanish name. We’re going to keep Mr. Cody’s appointment. Afterwards, he was planning on spending his wedding night with you in the Hotel Gandara in Hermosillo, about a hundred and fifty miles farther on. With luck we’ll make that, too, without too much night driving, which is not recommended in Mexico.”
She said, “That’s around three hundred and fifty miles. I thought we’d just be ducking across the Rio Grande to our honeymoon hotel.” She glanced down at her shining costume. “I’m not exactly dressed for long-distance touring.”
I said, “Cody was probably counting on that, figuring that nobody’d expect him to take any vigorous evasive action with both of you still in your wedding clothes.”
She said, “Now we seem to be heading north. That’s hardly the way to get to Mexico.”
Well, at least the girl knew her compass directions. I said, “We’ve lost our tail, at least temporarily. Buff Cody’s tail. He was taken into custody just before Cody himself, to clear the scene for the substitution. Presumably Cody had figured out some other way of escaping surveillance. We don’t know what route he planned to take to Cananea, but we’re taking the interstate west, I-10. We’ll run it as far as Lordsburg, New Mexico. Even though it takes us a little out of the way, we can make better time up there on the U.S. freeways than we could on the little Mexican roads south of the border. From Lordsburg—well, a few miles beyond Lordsburg—we’ll cut back down across a corner of Arizona to Douglas, which is on the border. From there we’ll cross over into Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, and continue west on their Highway 2. Okay?”
She asked, “How do you know what… what Horace was planning?”
I grinned. “Don’t ask. I didn’t. I think there was a snitch involved, an informer. Actually, I understand you met him; he’s the guy who told you some unpalatable truths about your elderly fiancé that made you decide to cooperate with Mr. Somerset.”
Gloria made a wry face. “Yes, a nasty little man, but would he know all of… all of Horace’s plans in such detail?”
I said, “Perhaps not, but Cody’s activities had already attracted attention, and I’m sure Somerset had him under close surveillance. I don’t think our federal friend is a man who bothers with official authorization for every wiretap he uses; and then there are gadgets like parabolic mikes… Unfortunately you see before you an obsolete secret agent. I don’t know much about that newfangled stuff. My main qualification for the job is that I learned to shoot pretty good as a kid.”
“I hate guns,” she said.
I managed to stifle a groan, I hoped. I was heading into a foreign country pretending to be a man I didn’t look much l
ike and messing with a potential revolution in a way that could make me a target for both sides. All I needed to make it a real suicide mission was to be stuck with one of the beautiful, nonviolent, gun-hating people as my partner.
I said, “It’s going to be a long drive. Why don’t you recline that fancy seat and take a nap?”
She turned on me fiercely, “Don’t you dare change the subject in that condescending way! I think guns are terrible and I think men who use them are terrible. That’s one reason why I had to do that to Horace! Regardless of everything else, he was my father’s partner, and I’ve known him a very long time. I couldn’t have deceived him like that, smiling at him in the chapel in front of all those people and giving him his wedding kiss like a female Judas if…” She drew a long breath. “But Mr. Somerset said he was going to import all kinds of dreadful weapons for people who planned to overthrow the Mexican government by force, as if we didn’t have enough violence and enough stupid, bloody revolutions in this world already. If there was a chance of stopping it by helping Mr. Somerset, I had to do it, didn’t I?”
She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself; and I thought better of her for feeling a touch of guilt—after all, whether or not he deserved it, she had deliberately used her feminine wiles to first lead a man to the altar, and then to the slaughter.
I said, “Horace. Is that what he liked to be called by you?”
She said, “Well, all my life I’ve called him Uncle Buffy, but I could hardly go on calling him that after we decided to get married; I’d have sounded like an idiot child playing at matrimony with her mama’s diamond on her pinkie. And I wasn’t going to call him Buffalo Bill like some of his roughneck friends, or even Buff; and in this day and age I wasn’t about to go all respectful and call him Mr. Cody even if he was somewhat older than I. So we settled on Horace for him, and he called me Glory.”
“Hi, Glory.”
She gave me a reluctant smile. “Hi, Horace,” she said. The smile faded. “And I do hate guns and violence. Do you think I’d have betrayed him like that otherwise? Even though he…” She stopped.
“Even though he what?”
She shook her head. “Not now. We’ll talk about it later. I think I will rest a bit now. It’s been… a lot of strain, playing Delilah.”
She used the tricky seat adjustments to allow her to lie back comfortably, first making sure that her skirt wasn’t tucked up so it would wrinkle or show me anything I wasn’t supposed to see. She closed her eyes. We were soon out of Texas; in that direction it terminates a few miles outside El Paso. As I followed the big four-lane highway across the arid New Mexico plains, with a steep, jagged mountain range off to the east, I saw that her breathing was soft and steady in sleep…
We had no trouble at the border. As a rule, driving south into Mexico, only two classes of people have trouble at the border: the cheapskates who can’t bear to part with a little cash and the highly moral folks who feel that it’s terribly, terribly wrong to present a foreign official with a small monetary reward for his services. I’m not particularly tightfisted at any time, certainly not when operating on a government expense account, and morality isn’t a big thing in our agency, so we went through in a breeze.
“You didn’t have to be quite so generous!” My lovely young bride, who’d been awake since we’d made our first pit stop in New Mexico, spoke tartly as we drove away. “You’re the great Mexico expert, of course; but even I could tell they’d have been happy with a buck or two apiece. A veritable blizzard of five-dollar bills was not indicated.”
“That’s my girl,” I said. “You’re doing fine. You sound just like an honest-to-God, genuine wife.”
She started to make some kind of a retort, but glanced around and said instead: “You’d better pay a little attention to your navigation, mister. That doesn’t look much like a main highway out of town up ahead. Unless their roads are even lousier than I remember.”
She was perfectly right. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere or, since I’d made no turns, failed to take the right one, forgetting that Mexican road signs tend to be inconspicuous when they aren’t totally nonexistent. Actually, I was far from being the great Mexico expert she’d called me. Although I’d spent my younger years in the border state of New Mexico and crossed into old Mexico frequently, my knowledge of the language is rudimentary; and I hadn’t been down here recently…Counting back, I was shocked to realize that it had been well over ten years since, also in the line of duty, I’d last made this crossing from Douglas to Agua Prieta. Dark Water, to you.
I saw that we’d reached the ragged and run-down edge of the town. The low buildings were adobe brick from which, in many cases, the plaster had flaked off if it had ever existed. The street could be called paved, but you had to dodge the numerous and sizeable potholes; beyond the next cross street it degenerated abruptly into a dirt track leading across a cow pasture. As my ersatz bride had pointed out, it was clearly not the highway we wanted.
I made a U-turn and started back the way we’d come only to have a loafer outside a shabby cantina wave a warning hand to let me know that I was proceeding the wrong way up a one-way street. They don’t mark them any more clearly than the highways; there’s only an occasional, casual little arrow painted on the comer of a building or tacked to a telephone pole. I U-turned again—fortunately there was very little traffic here—and pulled up beside the gent who’d warned me. I hit the switch to bring down the right-hand window. The honeymoon heap boasted every power convenience known to man, including some I hadn’t figured out yet.
I leaned across the front seat and called, “Cananea, por favor.”
The man came forward, frowning. My pronunciation was apparently a little off; he hadn’t caught the name. When I repeated it, he grinned happily, showing big, white teeth in a dark, unshaved face.
“Ah, Cananea!”
He proceeded to let me know, with gestures and rapid-fire Spanish, exactly where I’d gone astray and in what manner I should now conduct myself in order to rectify my unfortunate error. How they choose to speak their language is their business, of course, but they’d make it easier for dumb gringos if they slowed it down a bit. The elaborate sign language helped, however. I got the general idea, thanked my informant profusely, and drove away.
My companion wasn’t impressed. “Terrific!” she said sourly. “People are trying to kill me, I’m coerced into doing crazy things like pretending to be the wife of a perfect stranger; and it turns out that the high-powered guide and protector they’ve married me to, more or less, can’t even find his way through the first Mexican town we hit without asking directions from a sidewalk bum!”
I glanced at her sharply. “What’s this about killing?”
She said, “I suppose I’ll have to tell you all about it, but let’s not overload your feeble intelligence until it’s got us on the right road.”
4
I found the main road and made the prescribed turn. The town of Agua Prieta fell behind us. The Mexican landscape was bleak and rugged. It was covered with low, spiny brush punctuated by prickly cactus and thorny mesquite. That southwestern vegetation takes its defenses seriously. The highway was a narrow, winding, patched strip of blacktop that was not designed for a freeway locomotive like our Allante; but the beast had fairly quick power steering, and its suspension wasn’t too soggy. I’d driven worse roads in less suitable automobiles.
The day was sunny, the sky was very blue, and the desert air was so clear that the hills on the distant horizon were as sharply defined as those nearby; there were no atmospheric gradations whatever. It was a good day on which to start on a honeymoon, but I would have preferred to pick my girl and have nothing on my mind but love. As it was, I was conscious of having been thrown into this job very low on information; and I couldn’t help wondering how much of what I’d been told in the rush was the truth. Mr. Somerset with his careful, three-day whiskers wasn’t a gent who inspired a great deal of confidence in me, althou
gh he seemed to have sold himself thoroughly to Gloria. But where business is concerned, there’s only one man I trust—and even Mac has been known to pull a swifty occasionally. Or two or three. He was doing it now, of course. He’d thrown me into this mess with the warning that things weren’t what they seemed, which is as much warning as he ever gives us; just enough, he hopes, to keep us from spoiling the operation by getting killed.
As I drove, I glanced at the girl who shared with me the fancy car belonging to the man whose name I’d appropriated along with his brand-new wife. Gloria sensed my attention and gave a pull to her skirt, brushed away an imaginary smudge, and grimaced.
“It’s not exactly the costume I’d have chosen for a Mexican tour, but at least I’m getting some wear out of it,” she said dryly. “At one point, I was about to stuff it all into the fireplace and pour charcoal lighter all over it and watch it burn.”
“Seems kind of drastic,” I said mildly. “An expensive bonfire, by the looks of it.”
Her voice was suddenly harsh: “How do you think a girl feels about the gorgeous wedding outfit she’s picked very carefully to please the man she’s about to marry… How do you think she feels after learning that this wonderful man is planning to murder her for her money afterwards?” Gloria shook her head quickly. “Oh, it wasn’t that my heart was broken or anything like that. Our marriage was more a practical arrangement than a passionate romance; after all, he was quite literally old enough to be my father. I’d known him all my life; he’d been Papa’s friend and partner since before I was born. Good old Uncle Buffy! And all those years I’d believed in that kindly, helpful, sympathetic… I didn’t love him, not in a romantic way, but he was an old, trusted friend, a solid rock… Oh, God, you can’t stand being so wrong about somebody, the sneaky old bastard!”
The Frighteners Page 3