I said, “I told you, that’s just the point. Cody was counting on it in Juárez, the fact that nobody’d expect him to make any violent evasive maneuvers as long as you were both in your chapel clothes. Well, I’m hoping it’ll work here, too. But if we’d suddenly turned up in jeans and hiking boots, they’d be ready for us to do something drastic, and we’d never shake them.”
“Shake who? I didn’t see anybody at that kilometer marker, and you said you didn’t either.”
“That was their mistake. They should have had somebody waiting to greet us at the rendezvous with a big smile and an outstretched hand, but I guess nobody wanted the job. The guy would have been taking a certain risk, and sacrificial goats are hard to come by these days. So, seeing nobody, we were supposed to pull up into that little road behind that decoy van and get out to investigate it, at which point they’d spring their little trap. Probably they pulled some stunt just like that, arranged some kind of a secret boondocks meeting, to get your daddy and his lady friend off the highway where they wanted them.”
“You’re just guessing. You can’t know…”
I said, “I know that when I get that funny itch between my shoulder blades it’s time to get the fuck out of there. That’s how I’ve stayed alive longer than most in this business.”
She threw a glance over her shoulder. “You haven’t said who you think it is. It can’t be Uncle Buffy himself; we saw him arrested in El Paso.”
“I don’t know who he’s got doing his dirty work for him here, but I’m looking forward to finding out.” I checked back to see how high we’d come. “That’s far enough, I think. Let me get up there with you and take a look… Swell, now lie down behind that bush, please.”
We were on the side of a little knob that lifted us above the level of the brush and low trees on the far side of the ravine out of which we had climbed. There was a good view of the road. We could even see over the ridge on the other side of it into the open space where we’d left the white Allante, looking very expensive and deserted among all the litter. There were no other vehicles in sight until a bus roared by on the highway, going west.
“You can’t be serious!” Gloria said.
Kneeling, I looked up at her, still standing there in her white suit like the Eddystone Light. She might have been a little more conspicuous with strobe lights in her hair, but not much. I was fed up with her; besides, there was action below. A brown van was just coming into sight from the east. Gloria was saying something about how I couldn’t possibly expect her to lie down on the ground, dressed as she was. I reached out and yanked her feet out from under her. She sat down hard, and the pitch of the hillside brought her sliding down to me with another interesting display of nylon pantyhose and lacy lingerie. I told myself this was no time to be admiring a lady’s intimate apparel, and I grabbed one arm and twisted it around so she was glad to roll over onto her stomach and flatten out behind the bush I’d indicated. I took off my conspicuous white Buff Cody hat, tucked it under the bush out of sight, and lay down beside her and showed her the gun again.
I said, “Now lie perfectly still and stop all this nonsense. Jesus Christ! You have a trained man assigned to you. You’re told one of his jobs is to keep you alive. And by God, when he tries to do that job, you’re so dumb you fight him every step of the way. Think about this: if your idiotic chatter and moronic behavior cost me my life here, I’ll be damned sure I take you with me. Now be quiet and watch!”
Down on the highway, they were taking their time, leaving no stones unturned and no side roads unexplored. I knew the Cadillac wasn’t visible from the highway, but they investigated the little track as a matter of routine. Thorough.
I spoke softly to the sullen girl beside me: “We can figure a two-way radio and some kind of roadblock prepared for us ahead, which was why I didn’t dare drive too far past the contact point. You always have to assume the other guy has a few brains, in this case enough to provide himself with a backup in case Plan One misfired. So the boys at kilometer ninety-five called ahead to say we must have smelled a trap because we’d driven past them without stopping. Then the boys waiting to take us if we got past ninety-five reported back that no fancy Yankee convertibles had reached them. Obviously we’d stopped somewhere in between, and our friends in the van down there have been coming up the highway slowly, checking both sides to find out where we disappeared to… Aha, they’ve found us!”
The van had pulled up behind our Allante. The rear doors opened and half-a-dozen men got out—correct that, two of them were women, although it was hard to tell the difference. They were all dressed like farm workers, a few in the white pajama suits of Latin paisanos straight out of Central Casting, others in dark shirts and jeans or other work pants. There were big straw sombreros, and there were the kind of freebie caps that advertise feed or beer or machinery. Mostly the men and women were pretty dirty and ragged, but the weapons they carried gleamed cleanly in the low evening sunshine.
I whispered to the unresponsive girl: “Quite an assortment of firepower. Ammunition supply must be a problem. I see everything from a .45 Colt Auto to a 9mm Uzi to a specimen of the gutless old .30-caliber carbine that must be one of the most useless firearms ever invented but for some reason everybody loves it… And there’s El Jefe in nice clean khakis; and just look at the tool he’s carrying, in addition to another .45 in a fancy holster on his left hip. We’ve got us a southpaw villain, it seems.”
A moderately tall man, wearing a long-billed khaki cap to match his sharply pressed shirt and pants, had emerged from the van’s right front door. Even in the most romantic Mexican movies, most Latin leading men are fairly substantial; but this hero wasn’t carrying too much extra weight. I’d brought out the little telescope that had been provided for me. It was sharper than you’d expect for as small as it was. It showed the khaki-clad gent to me clearly as he stepped forward to take the keys out of the Caddy’s ignition. He went back and opened the trunk, clearly not well enough acquainted with fancy automobiles to know that you don’t need a key for that operation nowadays; all you have to do is push a button on the dashboard. He stood there studying the closely packed luggage.
“He’s trying to figure out if there’s anything missing,” I said. “He wants to know if we—particularly you, since women aren’t supposed to be able to get very far in high heels and nylons—if we grabbed any practical clothes when we lit out of there so fast we didn’t even pause to lock the car behind us. But that’s a neat packing job and it looks undisturbed. You and Cody really had your honeymoon chariot loaded.”
She was watching the distant scene. “What in the world is he doing?” she asked.
The man in the khakis was hauling some of the bags out of the trunk, perhaps to see if anything was hidden beneath them. He didn’t set them down, he simply tossed them aside and watched them hit the ground as if hoping they’d burst open, but they were good pieces and remained closed. One set was tan with brown piping; the other was dusty rose. His and hers. At last the khaki-clad gent picked up a medium-sized, rose-colored suitcase right-handed, tossed it high into the air and, with a powerful swing of the machete in his left hand, sliced it open as it came down. I remembered being told that the luggage of Will Pierce and his lady had also been demolished. Gloria gave a gasp at the sight of her intimate honeymoon garments spilling out and fluttering away across the trashy clearing. Distant whoops of laughter reached us as the whole crew, except the driver, who remained in his seat, surged forward to join the party.
“Note the weapon our friend is using,” I said softly. “We may not have found who ordered your daddy and Mrs. Charles killed, but maybe we’ve spotted the gent who did the actual killing.”
“But they’re destroying…!”
The head man had stepped back to watch the show in a tolerant, boys-will-be-boys manner. I studied the dark, clean-shaven face, rather handsome in the Latin manner, until I knew I’d recognize it if I saw it at close range without optical equipment and passe
d the glass to Gloria.
“The jefe,” I said. “Anybody you recognize? No? Well, make sure you’ll know him the next time you see him. And as many of the others as you can.”
“Matt, they’re just… just vandalizing…!”
“There’s not much we can do about it.”
“But why? What’s the point?”
“Just be glad it isn’t you,” I said. “Think how they vandalized your pop and his girlfriend.”
Gloria gave me a shocked look; apparently I should have been more respectful of the dead. Down across the highway, they were trashing the Cadillac thoroughly. Other machetes had come into play, slicing up the soft top, smashing the lights, carving up the upholstery, chopping up the tires—that took a little doing, but they made it—and even hacking up the body metal. They were also, of course, looting the luggage and demolishing everything that couldn’t be pocketed or carried away. Soon the car was a total wreck, and the area looked as if the trunk had exploded, blowing fragmented suitcases and rags of clothing, male and female, in all directions.
At last the man in khaki called them to order and gave them their instructions, finishing with a wide sweep of his machete that encompassed all of northern Mexico. I couldn’t hear the words, and I might not have understood them if I had heard them, but the meaning was obvious: You’ve had your fun, now find me the lousy gringos, pronto.
“But I don’t understand!” Gloria whispered plaintively. All the sulky resentment had gone out of her as she watched the scene across the way. “I just don’t understand! Our rendezvous… Why would anybody send us into a… a deathtrap?”
I said, “Isn’t it obvious? I wasn’t really selected for this bridegroom spot because I was such a bright and competent fellow. I was selected because I’d make a swell dead body that, after a little judicious machete work by our friend over there, could be buried as Horace Hosmer Cody, another unfortunate victim of those murdering Mexican bandidos who specialize in Texas millionaires and their dames.”
9
Strangely they had only one tracker worth a damn. You’d think that among a bunch of mountain ruffians there’d be hardly anybody who didn’t know how to work out a simple trail; but they obviously weren’t hunters, they’d had no training as military scouts, and they didn’t think in those terms at all. Anyway, by the time they’d finished doing a job on the car and luggage and got themselves organized, they’d milled around so much that there were no clear footprints except theirs left near the vehicles. The khaki-clad leader never even looked at the ground; he just sent them off to hunt for us in every direction, apparently figuring that, dressed as unpractically as we were, we couldn’t have got far.
They might never have found our tracks, the tracks I’d been careful to leave for them, if it hadn’t been for one man, the one who’d driven the van, who’d finally got out where I could see him clearly. Another Little Boy Blue, in jeans, blue work shirt, and a short blue denim jacket, except that he wasn’t Big Boy Blue. He must have been close to my six-four in height, and in width he had shoulders that just had to give him trouble going through small doors. He was the kind of specimen that, when you meet him in my line of work, you toss aside the .38 and reach for the .44 Magnum if there isn’t an elephant rifle handy. He wore no hat and his light hair was cut quite short, giving him a bullet-headed look. Some kind of a revolver was stuck into the front of his pants, but it was obvious that he didn’t take it very seriously. With those shoulders, and hands to match, he didn’t need to.
He exhibited no signs of Latin blood that I could see at that distance. As far as we were concerned at the moment, he was the one to watch, even though I got the impression that finding us wasn’t really his job; he served the headman as driver and bodyguard and hadn’t been included in the search-em-out orders. But there were apparently brains inside all the beef; and after a while he got bored watching his compadres thrashing around mindlessly in the sparse, spiny brush, so he got out of the van and wandered down the dirt road toward the highway, finally spotting the mark of one of Gloria’s spike heels. Then he found another. Reaching the paved highway, he made a cast along the shoulder to the east and then, returning, to the west, discovering no more of those distinctive feminine shoe signatures. He was looking across the road thoughtfully, obviously considering an examination of the other side, when the man in khakis called to him, remonstrating with him. It was hard to tell through the little scope, but I guessed that the bossman was the typical kind of paranoid big shot who isn’t comfortable without at least one gun at his side in addition to his own. With a couple of hostiles on the loose, El Jefe wanted his protection sticking close and paying attention to his job instead of wandering around looking at the ground.
“Shouldn’t we be running?” Gloria whispered.
I shook my head. “How fast can you run, dressed like that? And how far? How fast can I run in these damn boots? We’d just leave them a clear trail to follow. Those guys look pretty durable; I don’t think either of us is in good enough shape to outdistance them. We may as well just keep an eye on them from here and see if they fall for the phony trail we laid for them. If they don’t, if they spread their search pattern wide enough to find us here, well, it’s a better spot for a fight than some I’ve seen.” I grimaced. “Hell, I’ve got five in the gun and a couple of five-shot refills. There are only eight of them. No sweat.”
Gloria gave me a glance of annoyance; apparently she didn’t appreciate gallows humor, if that’s what it was.
She licked her lips. “If they catch us, they… they’ll kill us like they did Papa and Millie Charles, won’t they? Both of us?”
“I would judge that to be the object of the exercise, yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, God, they’re coming across the highway now!”
She sounded as if it was the end of the world; actually I was happy that Big Boy had talked his southpaw boss into letting him continue his researches. They crossed the highway together. After a little, they discovered the tracks I’d had Gloria make by the edge of the pavement. The big man was suspicious of the dainty footprints and started to look farther, but he was called back impatiently. El Jefe had decided to buy the scenario I’d sketched out for him: the beautiful young gringa and her elderly husband, after leaving their fancy car in a breathless hurry, not even stopping to lock it, had stood by the roadside and flagged down a bus or other vehicle and ridden it back east the way they’d come, crouching down so they wouldn’t be seen from the brown van that soon passed them from the other direction. It was too bad, que lástima, but they were obviously miles back down the highway by this time. Further search was clearly futile; and with a lot of illegal arms showing and the demolished Cadillac sitting there to incriminate him, the man in khaki was suddenly hot to evacuate the premises and gave sharp orders to that effect.
Big Boy Blue was obviously not so certain that the answer they’d found was the right one. Heading for the vehicles, he paused at the far side of the highway. Somehow I knew what was coming next, and even though I was lying in the shade and facing north, so there could hardly be any reflections, I lowered the little telescope hastily and checked to make sure that Gloria and my big white hat were out of sight. Then he’d turned to look straight at me. The distance was about a quarter of a mile and without the scope I had no chance of reading his expression, but I knew that he knew I was there, not from footprints or other evidence, just because that’s where he’d have been if our situations had been reversed.
He stood there for a moment, obviously debating whether or not to make a final attempt to persuade his nervous chieftain to delay long enough to throw a few men across the ravine and have them scout the ridge. Then he shrugged resignedly, swung away, and hiked up to the van parked in the clearing behind the wrecked Cadillac. A few minutes later, all aboard, they were driving away, back toward Cananea and points east.
I heard Gloria’s breath go out in a long sigh as the van disappeared from sight. She lay beside me for quite a while with
her face buried in her arms.
“Are you okay?” I asked at last.
She raised her head to look at me, dry-eyed, clearly hating herself for having been scared and me for having been a witness to her fear. She didn’t answer my question but sat up behind our bush and started to give a modest pull to her skirt. She stopped, aghast at its soiled condition. She made as if to scramble to her feet to determine the full extent of the catastrophe, but I put my hand on her sleeve.
“Easy. The men at the roadblock up the way may have got radio instructions to come by and see if they can catch us doing a victory dance to celebrate our escape, or just standing by the roadside trying to pick up a lift. Let’s give them another few minutes… Down! There they are.”
It was a small white Japanese station wagon, not new, with a badly bent rear bumper and plenty of dents and scratches. There were two men in front and two in the rear. They turned up the little road across the way and pulled up behind the Cadillac as if they’d been told where to find it, as they undoubtedly had. The driver got out and walked up to the convertible and kicked one of the wheels, and I saw that I’d been wrong again, this was a woman, Mexican, short and stocky, with stringy black hair, but that means nothing nowadays. Some of the most glamorous fashion-magazine models look as if they’d been shampooed with crankcase oil. Her sturdy figure strained, in the obvious places, the faded cloth of the green coverall she was wearing. She carried a small machine pistol, make unknown, slung from one shoulder.
Returning to the station wagon, she paused to pick up something, and held it against her substantial figure, modeling it for the benefit of the men in the car: a lacy, black garment designed for minimum female coverage and maximum male stimulation. Everybody laughed. I heard Gloria give a sniff of indignation at this display of her underwear. The sturdy lady in the coveralls tossed away the lingerie and climbed into the beat-up wagon. It drove off eastward, as the van had done.
The Frighteners Page 8