I said, “Killing is not my primary job at the moment. My job is the arms. But I have a hunch I’ll have no trouble finding those men when the time comes. They’ll find me. They’ll be watching me search, hoping I’ll lead them to the hidden weapons cache, hoping to move in when I locate it. You’re sure you don’t know where your boyfriend hid the stuff?”
“Ha, I am woman, I cook the food and keep clean the house and make the love. My Jorge no tell woman about weapons, that is man business. I know nothing of the hiding.”
I wasn’t sure she was telling the truth. She had a very good little poker face, but it did not seem advisable to pursue the subject until I’d investigated the room next door.
I said, “Okay, I’ll take your word for it, but before we proceed, maybe you’d like to give me that pistola under your shirt. It looks like a big one. If it slides down your pants leg, it could give your toes an awful whack… Careful, now!”
She had some difficulty getting the weapon out from under her jersey and the tight waistband of her jeans, worn without a belt. Well, snug as they were, there wasn’t much chance of her losing them, even without support. She gave me the gun reluctantly.
“It is mine. I take. It is very good gun, very expensive.”
It was nice to find someone with a sound respect for guns as property. You meet a lot of characters, many with badges, who wouldn’t dream of stealing a hundred bucks from your wallet but think nothing of casually depriving you of personal property in the form of firearms worth many times that; and you’re supposed to accept this kind of larceny calmly. It was refreshing to find someone who didn’t.
Her second weapon was, as she’d said, a good one, around six hundred bucks retail: a big new 9mm Beretta automatic, the one with the fat grip and the magazine holding fifteen rounds and the self-cocking trigger mechanism that saves you from having to jack the slide back, or even cock the hammer, to fire the first round. It was fully loaded with a cartridge in the chamber. As I looked at it, something stirred in my memory, as if I’d seen this gun not too long ago; but the picture wasn’t clear.
“From whom did you take?” I asked. She shrugged and didn’t speak. I said, “Why don’t we ask your friend in the next room to join the party?”
She laughed. She had a pretty laugh. “But they cannot join,” she said. “I tie good.”
I looked at her for a moment, still wondering about her. I mean, now that I’d survived the initial encounter, I could say that it was lucky she’d come to Hermosillo to meet me, saving me from having to hunt her up in Guaymas. Or was it? And what about the Mexican spitfire act and the heavily accented English? Well, things do break your way sometimes in the business, and Hispanic ladies are notoriously temperamental, and a lot of people aren’t fluent in languages not their own. Nevertheless, she wasn’t a kid I intended to turn my back on until I knew considerably more about her.
She’d tied very good, however, just as she said. They lay together on the big honeymoon bed in the rather ornate bedroom, a man and a woman, thoroughly trussed with strong rawhide that reminded me of the stuff the little Yaqui lieutenant had produced to tie my wrists. I wondered how much Indian blood Antonia Sisneros carried. The woman lay facing me very uncomfortably, with a gag in her mouth and her wrists and ankles lashed and then drawn together behind her with more rawhide so that there was no possibility of her walking, hopping, or even crawling anywhere. She was a woman I didn’t know, but she had good sense. She’d presumably tested her gag and bonds earlier and decided that there was nothing to be gained by thrashing around fighting them. She just lay there watching us with cold blue eyes that said she’d endure any indignities she had to endure, but she didn’t have to like them—or forgive them.
The man beside her was one of the you-can’t-do-this-to-me kids. He’d already mussed the bed badly with his fruitless struggles; now he had to flop around some more to show us how mad he was, and how he was going to tear somebody limb from limb when he got free. He made some angry gaa-gaa noises through his gag. I knew him. I’d met him in a certain men’s john two days earlier. He was the young man who belonged to the pistol I’d just taken from Antonia.
The last time I’d seen him I hadn’t got a look at the gun, because it had been poked into the back of my supposed bride, but afterwards I’d figured out what kind of a weapon it had to be from Gloria’s inexpert description. He was young Mason Charles, the one man I’d fooled with my disguise so far, the dedicated avenger who thought I’d arranged to have his mother killed along with Will Pierce on the Mazatlán-Durango highway.
Antonia looked down at her two prisoners rather fondly, as if they were property of which she was proud, and at the moment you could say they were.
“No problem,” she said. “I wait for Cody. I hear them come and I hide. I do not know if friend or enemy of Cody. If friend, I want no interfere. If enemy, they cannot have, he is mine. So I take gun away and tie good, hey?”
16
I was relieved to find that my fifth of Scotch (750ml by local measurement) had survived intact in the canvas bag in spite of making a crash landing after flying a dangerous mission under fire. I placed it securely on the bar but reminded myself that there were a couple of small chores I should perform before I could relax.
First I found and pocketed the empty .22 cartridge case. Then I located the bullet hole under the windowsill. It was fairly inconspicuous but unmistakable, so I worked on it a bit to make it look like an irregular chip knocked out of the plaster rather than a neat, round hole. I used the little, all-stainless Russell knife I’d already employed to release Antonia’s captives. It was a replacement for a favorite Gerber I’d lost on a previous assignment—destroyed, along with the lethal lady who’d taken it from me, when a certain terrorist headquarters blew up, never mind how.
The ex-prisoners were still pulling themselves together, ignoring the Mexican girl who was watching them with malicious pleasure, getting all the mileage she could out of their humiliation. An interesting little girl, a striking little girl in her offbeat way, but not necessarily a nice little girl. I found ice and beer in the diminutive kitchenette refrigerator. The glasses provided were flimsy plastic wrapped in even flimsier plastic. I peeled them and asked for orders. Antonia voted for beer; the other two admitted, grudgingly in the case of the man, that a spot of J&B wouldn’t be unwelcome. Mason Charles went on to explain to me how unfairly he’d been tricked and disarmed by that little Chicana tramp…
The as-yet unidentified woman looked at him sharply, silencing him. “Cool it, Junior,” she said. “Apologize.”
I remembered that he’d originally introduced himself as Mason Charles, Junior. He said quickly, “The hell I’ll…!” Then, surprisingly, he shrugged, drew a long breath, and turned to Antonia. He made her a ceremonious bow, and spoke elaborately: “My humble apologies, Señorita. Please allow me to withdraw that unfortunate remark.”
It wasn’t the most sincere apology I’d ever heard, but the Mexican girl accepted it with a mocking little curtsy that went oddly with her faded jeans; but at least it showed she knew how.
“It is forgotten, Señor,” she said.
The nameless woman was rubbing her rawhide-chafed wrists. She took the glass I offered her with a curt nod of thanks. Lean and moderately tall, she was one of the short-haired girls who look a bit like boys, except that the boys mostly wear it to their shoulders nowadays. The light brown hair was trimmed closely enough to her head to display her ears and the nape of her neck. She was wearing white jeans tucked into high brown boots with moderate heels. A man’s blue shirt hung outside her pants, cinched in at her waist by a concha belt that must have weighed several pounds and cost several hundred bucks, maybe several thousand. The prices of that silver stuff are getting stratospheric. There was also a very good squash-blossom necklace.
She was handsome in a severe way, but she didn’t do anything for me. I guess I prefer soft, skirted females to hard, panted and booted ones. This one was in her late twenti
es, I judged, and she looked tough—well, call it competent—with a square jaw, a firm mouth with long, thin lips on which she wore no makeup, a thin, straight nose, and a good tan. Looking at her, I realized that I was being stupid. She not only looked a bit like a boy, I knew the boy she looked like. He was standing right beside her. Well, at least she wasn’t the susceptible land of dame, past her girlhood and aware of it, who’d deliberately pick that kind of handsome, immature young stud to travel with. Who gets to pick their siblings?
Still watching the lady, I shoved a glass down the bar toward Mason Charles. “Brother and sister?” I asked.
The woman nodded, but it was Charles who responded dryly: “After I told her over the phone about our… well, encounter, Jo decided she’d better come down to keep her baby brother out of trouble.”
The woman murmured, “Charging around a foreign country with an illegal gun, shooting the wrong people.”
Mason Charles protested: “He calls himself Cody, how could I know he wasn’t? You didn’t really know it yourself until this girl told us just now. And anyway, I didn’t shoot him, did I?”
Disregarding him, I spoke to the sister, “Jo for Josephine?”
“Jo for Joanna,” she said. “Joanna Beckman, but Beckman doesn’t live here any more, thank God.”
I studied her for a moment. “You objected to your brother’s shooting the wrong people. Are you in favor of his shooting the right people?”
“Like the people who killed our mother?” She shrugged. “It’s not a big thing with me, Mr. Cody or whoever you are. I don’t have the burning yearning for retribution that Mason does. Maybe the mother-daughter bond isn’t quite as strong as the mother-son bond, if you know what I mean. But my brother feels he has to do it, and I guess I’ve kind of got into the habit of looking after him. Little Mother Jo.”
“Ain’t that the everlasting truth,” Mason Charles said ruefully. He grinned. “Well, I suppose somebody had to, after Pop rolled his pickup on a county road in the rain. I was all of four years old at the time. Jo was ten. She kind of took over the house, and me, while Millie went to work to support us—she liked us to call her Millie; we only called her Mom or Mother to tease her.” His mouth tightened. “God, she was so… she was such a wonderful person; and after all those years she had to spend slaving in those lousy oil company offices, just when it looked as if things were finally going to break right for her, that slimy, gun-smuggling sonofabitch set her up for murder! Just because he was afraid of what his partner might have learned poking around down there in Mexico and thought some of it might have rubbed off on her!” He made a wry face. “But it seems I’ve been practicing my Mad Avenger act on the wrong Cody!”
Jo Beckman said, “I knew there had to be something funny going on. That’s why I came down here to see for myself… According to Junior, you behaved in such a reasonable and civilized way in that rest room that I couldn’t help wondering if he wasn’t making a horrible mistake. I thought I’d better come down and see this paragon of courage and self-control with my own eyes before… before something irrevocable happened.”
“You mean, before your brother took another crack at me and killed me?”
She shook her heard. “No, before he took another crack at you and you killed him.” She was watching me steadily. “Of course, I didn’t want him to have it on his conscience, shooting the wrong man; but I was more afraid… He’s pretty good at targets, and he’s done quite a bit of hunting, but it’s not the same thing, is it? Making neat little bullet holes in paper and shooting deer and antelope, and maybe an elk or two, doesn’t really qualify an amateur to go up against a professional, does it?”
I frowned. “What makes you think I’m a pro?”
She laughed shortly. “What else can you call a man who’ll calmly size up a tense situation involving firearms—and it had to be very tense from what Junior said—and then trust his judgment to the extent of putting away his gun and turning his back on a loaded weapon in the hands of… I guess I really knew, the minute I heard it, that you couldn’t be Cody, although it took me a while to accept it because it seemed so very far out. But no macho, self-made Texas millionaire would ever walk away from a scene like that, even with his wife’s life at stake. What, run from a wet-nosed kid with a toy pistol when he had a gun of his own? Sorry, Junior, but what I’m trying to say is that it would never happen, no matter who got killed!”
I said, “So you told your brother over the phone that I couldn’t be the man he wanted. And I suppose he told you you were nuts.”
She laughed ruefully. “Well, you can hardly blame him. He’d seen a tall, bald, gray-bearded man all dressed in white go into a church in Texas and come out with a beautiful bride. A few hours later he saw a tall, bald, gray-bearded man in white go into a restaurant in Mexico with the same beautiful bride, a girl Junior recognized although we don’t move in the same social circles as the former Miss Pierce, and she’d made a point of not getting to know us in spite of the fact that her father and our mother were… Well, never mind that!”
I glanced at Antonia, who’d stirred uneasily. “Did you wish to say something, Señorita?”
She shook her head. “No. No, I have nothing to say. It has already been said: You are not Cody. But I would like another cerveza, please.”
I opened one and gave it to her. I turned to the boy. “Unlike Miss Sisneros, you obviously didn’t know Cody by sight.”
“No, we never met any of the people Millie worked with,” he said. “Except Will Pierce, after… Well, when they started talking marriage, Millie brought him home to meet us, but the proud daughter stayed away. I only recognized her because I’d seen her picture in the paper.” He shook his head angrily. “Dammit, how could I guess somebody’d switched Codys on me? The man at the wedding had to be Cody; no phony could have fooled all his friends at the wedding reception. And hours later, in Cananea, there was Gloria still playing the loving bride; if she continued to accept you, why shouldn’t I?” He grimaced. “I told Jo she was out of her tree. I told her she was hallucinating, and she’d better stop smoking that strong stuff and settle for cancer and emphysema.”
“That was when I decided I’d better come down here,” the sister said to me. “It was all wrong! You were behaving all wrong and so was Gloria. The fact that she wouldn’t listen to a word against you and defended you hotly against Junior’s accusations… I mean, a young girl madly in love with a boy her own age might shut her mind to any hint that her beloved wasn’t perfect, but one who’d deliberately married a man so much older, well, you’d expect her to see him more clearly—clearly enough to be just a bit uneasy when she heard him accused of dreadful crimes, clearly enough to want to hear a bit more before launching into indignant denials. But young Mrs. Cody didn’t. Junior said she just lit into him the minute the door closed behind you.”
The boy laughed. “She surely did. Whew!”
Jo Beckman said, “It wasn’t natural, not for a girl like that.”
“A girl like what?” I asked, a bit sharply.
Even if it had only been a brief midnight incident initiated by her, you tend to feel protective—maybe the word is possessive—about a girl you’ve slept with; and I do hate to hear females running each other down. Not that males haven’t been known to do a bit of backbiting on occasion.
“All right, all right, I’ll admit I’m prejudiced,” Jo Beckman said. She was looking at me knowingly as if she’d just learned something about me; and perhaps she had. She went on: “All I really know about Gorgeous Gloria is what I’ve read on the society pages and what Millie used to tell us about Will Pierce’s snooty debutante daughter giving her a hard time.” Jo shrugged. “Well, to be fair, I suppose any girl, particularly an only child, is going to find it traumatic when her widower daddy starts fucking his secretary and talking about marrying her. But I really wouldn’t have expected Miss Gloria, brought up wealthy and spoiled the way she was, to put on such a touching demonstration of loyalty. Childlike
faith isn’t very big in society circles; but Junior said she showed no hesitation, no suspicion, no doubts at all, no uneasy curiosity about her daddy’s death, just total anger at the suggestion that her wonderful new husband could be involved in any way. It couldn’t be for real. It had to be an act.”
Mason Charles said defensively, “She was damn convincing. It never occurred to me she could be lying.”
His sister said, “But that’s just the point. She was damn convincing because she wasn’t lying. She insisted that this wonderful man hadn’t had her daddy killed. Well, this wonderful man hadn’t. Cody had, but this man wasn’t Cody and she knew it, so she could proclaim his innocence with perfect sincerity. Obviously she was doing her best to help him with his impersonation. It was the only answer that worked, loony though it seemed.” Jo frowned at me. “Which brings up the question, why would she help you pretend you’re her husband? It’s got to mean she’s working against him. Why? We know what we’ve got against him, Millie’s murder. We know what the Señorita has against him, the death of her man, what was his name, Medina?”
Antonia spoke: “His name was Jorge Miguel Medina de Campo.”
“Whatever,” the tall girl said. “But what was Glorious Gloria’s motive? And please don’t try to tell me she was charging around a foreign country with a strange man who was pretending to be her husband simply because she’d learned about her would-be bridegroom’s gunrunning project, and it was against her fine, nonviolent principles!”
I said, “Well, the guns were part of it; but she’d also learned that once she was safely married to him, Cody planned to kill her for her money. We can go into the details some other time.”
The Frighteners Page 15