“The little Indian girl,” she said. “Or whatever she is. Sisneros. While you and Junior were bleeding all over the rug, and the big boy and I were trying to determine the extent of the damage, she got hold of that gun you’d been after, the one belonging to the so-called maid who’d brought the towels.”
“Why would Antonia need it? I remember seeing her own in her hand.”
“Hers was empty. Apparently Junior had recognized the big fellow when he came in through the French doors as one of the agents he’d met in El Paso. His name is Rutherford, incidentally, Marion Rutherford. Can you imagine a two-ton character like that going around calling himself Marion? Actually, he doesn’t; he’s known as Tunk Rutherford, probably derived from tank, like in Sherman tank. Or maybe that was the noise he made hitting the opposing football team in his college days. Anyway, Junior decided to change sides I guess, assuming he’d ever been on yours. He grabbed Sisneros from behind so Rutherford could disarm her. Then they emptied her gun but let her keep it because you’d have become suspicious if she’d been without it. With Junior covering her from behind, she pretty well had to cooperate while they pretended to march Rutherford in to you as a prisoner… Well, you know how it went from there.”
“So afterwards, being mad at the way she’d been treated, the little girl got a loaded gun and, I suppose, got the drop on the big guy and opened the front door to let Greer join the party; and everybody lived happily ever after.” I glanced at her. “And what were you doing while all this was going on? Whose side are you on, Mrs. Beckman?”
She said grimly, “I’m looking for one I can bear to associate with. I haven’t found it yet. Now you’d better rest and let me concentrate on my driving.”
I said, “They say you should never drive Mexican roads at night. The cattle think they have the right of way.”
“Go to sleep. If I hit a cow, you’ll know it.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the murmur of the engine and the rumble of the tires on the lousy Mexican pavement and the occasional rush of a passing car and the throbbing of my head. Greer seemed to be handling things okay, and apparently he’d got in touch with Ramón, who’d help him clean up the mess…
When I awoke again, I was in a real, stationary bed, not a reclining, jiggling car seat, and there was sunlight at the windows. Vision: normal. Tingling: none. Headache: agonizing, but not much worse than a serious hangover. Sitting up, I found that my right arm didn’t like to push very hard; it was functional but rather tired. I swung my legs out of bed and stood up cautiously; the project turned out to be quite feasible, but my right leg felt equally weary. However, I found that I could manage a few steps without falling on my face.
It was a bare room furnished with a double bed consisting of a mattress, a spring, and a wooden frame that looked homemade. There was a bureau and a small wooden table by the window, flanked by a couple of slat-seat wooden armchairs that looked like porch furniture and aroused in me no desire to curl up in one and continue my perusal of War and Peace which I’d started in college and never finished. There were no pictures on the white-plastered walls. A couple of small, well-worn rag rugs, one on each side of the bed, protected the feet of the occupants from the shock of morning contact with the colorful but cold Mexican-tile floor.
The top drawer of the bureau was empty; the next one down held some female-type bathing suits and underwear, not very sexy; even the pantyhose seemed to have been selected chiefly for durability. Size Q for Queen; a sizeable lady apparently. Equivalent male garments filled the bottom drawer. Shorts size 34. T-shirts size 38. No pygmy, but the queen-size wife would have him outnumbered. A similar division of space was apparent in the closet, where room had also been left on the rod for the use of a visitor. My own canvas bag, unopened, was on the floor.
I started to pick it up, but bending over that far turned out to be not such a good idea, so I left it there. A visit to the bathroom was essential, however. It was apparently a communal facility; entering, I was confronted by another door that presumably led into another bedroom. I didn’t feel strong enough to investigate; but I did have a look around the small, tiled cubicle that housed the plumbing. The shelf above the washbasin held a toothbrush and a small tube of American toothpaste—Crest, if it matters. The toothbrush, wet, had obviously seen recent employment. There was also a comb with a few light brown hairs in it, not very long. The medicine cabinet held some male shaving gear and some female cosmetics on the upper shelves, the lower one again having been vacated for the use of visitors.
The mirror on the cabinet door showed me a long, thin gent with a bloodstained brown towel wrapped around his cranium and dried blood on his face. Those scalp wounds do tend to pour it out in large quantities. I was in my underwear—apparently my high-powered medical attendant had balked at inserting me into pajamas—and it was pretty gory, too. Not an attractive figure, but alive. I hadn’t earned it, but I wasn’t about to turn it down.
I performed the obligatory function and made my way back into the bedroom. The bed looked very good to me, but I still had no idea where the house was located, so I moved to the nearest window and adjusted the slats of the Venetian blind so I could see between them. It was a rather bleak, sand-and-cactus landscape out there, with some scattered, small residences that didn’t employ the mud-brick architecture used in most Mexican villages in this part of the country and weren’t as old. There were some arid-looking hills on the horizon. I was at the rear of the house, which seemed to be at the edge of this desert community with few habitations beyond it. I moved to the other window, at the side, and peeked out; in this direction was a solid row of little houses, and between them I caught glimpses of blue water glinting in the sunshine. It looked like a not too high-class California beach development, but even if we’d driven all night it seemed unlikely that we’d made it up into the U.S. and clear over to the Pacific Ocean.
“Get right back into that bed!”
She was standing in the doorway holding a glass of water and a small bottle of Tylenol. Her expression puzzled me: equal parts of indignation and apprehension, although what she had to be apprehensive about, I couldn’t understand. She was wearing a blue tank top upon which she made no unreasonable demands and white shorts in the flaring, floppy style that makes any but the skinniest woman look fat. She was built narrowly enough to get by with them, but it seemed to me she was rushing the season a bit; the morning seemed chilly for shorts and bare shoulders. On the other hand, her temperature was her own business; and the shoulders weren’t as bony as I’d expected, and the long, lean legs weren’t totally unattractive either.
“Please get into bed and stay there, Mr. Helm,” she said.
“Let’s stick with Cody,” I said, as I obeyed her orders. “I haven’t got much out of this impersonation so far, just a cracked skull, but there’s always tomorrow.”
“Don’t count on tomorrow if you’re going to start running around before we know how badly you’re hurt… Here, take these.”
“Okay, but it’s like spitting at a forest fire. A couple of lousy little pills aren’t going to touch it.”
“It’s really bad, is it? Do you have any other symptoms beside the headache?”
It didn’t make sense. I mean, I was the man who’d shot her brother, perhaps killed him, and here she was full of tender concern about my health.
She went on, “I know you probably feel messy and uncomfortable, but please don’t dream of taking a bath. As soon as I’ve changed your bandage I’ll bring some warm water and…”
I said, “Beckman.”
She said, “A sponge bath and a pair of clean pajamas—I saw some in your bag—will make you feel much better. Then I’ll fix you something to eat…”
I had it at last. I said, “Beckman, you have a very guilty conscience. Why?” Standing over me, she looked away and didn’t answer. I said, studying her handsome, averted face, “That was a lot of crap you handed Greer and me last night, wasn’t it? I’ve had a little t
ime to think, and I’ve been hit on the head before, and my impression is that there isn’t a doctor in the would who can take a quick look at a bloody groove in a man’s scalp and know anything except that the bullet bounced instead of penetrating. I could have had a cracked skull and a brain full of blood and bone splinters, and the best surgeon in the world couldn’t have told the difference without an X-ray. Certainly a lousy pediatric wigpicker couldn’t. You lied to Greer to get his cooperation. You weren’t the least bit sure I was going to be okay, but you were willing to take a chance on my going into convulsions, or a coma, or dying on you, just so your back-shooting brother got the attention he needed. Beckman, I’m ashamed of you. Hippocrates is ashamed of you. You should be ashamed of yourself. Now get this crummy turban off me, and let’s see what the damage really is.”
19
The healing process took a while, particularly since the tall lady doctor really did have a bad attack of the guilts and insisted on making amends for gambling with my life once by taking no more chances with my health. She kept me bed-bound long after the headache subsided and the right-side weaknesses departed. I submitted to her ministrations in a docile manner, feeling strangely remote and unconcerned. So there was a load of arms to be found and a gent called Saturday to be dealt with, and maybe, if it could be discreetly arranged, a guy named Mondragon, and so what? They’d keep. According to Jo, there wasn’t a phone in the house, but who cared? There wasn’t anybody I wanted to talk with anyway.
I wasn’t even greatly interested in the lady who was taking such meticulous care of me. I mean, she was pleasant enough company when I wasn’t reading—the owners of the house kept stacks of well-thumbed paperbacks around—and she wasn’t physically repulsive by any means, but I had no real urge to grab her and pull her down to join me in the big bed. I wasn’t even seriously concerned about where we were. There had been the initial stirring of curiosity that had led me to peek out the windows, but our exact geographical location seemed a matter of minor importance. Gradually I learned from Jo that we hadn’t made California after all that first night out of Hermosillo, although we had reached an arm of the Pacific. We’d driven a mere sixty-five miles west to Kino Bay, on the body of salt water known to the Mexicans as the Sea of Cortez. The Gulf of California, to you.
There had long been a Mexican village here, now called Old Kino; then gringos had discovered the lovely white beach and the fine fishing. A transient settlement of trailers and campers and motorhomes had grown up, but gradually it had been replaced by more permanent vacation homes, strung out for a mile or two along the beach road, starting above the old native village to the south and ending at the bluff that terminated the beach and halted further development to the north. From Jo’s conversation, as the days passed, I got the impression, although I wasn’t interested enough to ask, that the relatively new community of Kino Bay supported a motel or two and a few restaurants as well as extensive facilities for recreational vehicles.
On the fifth or sixth or seventh day—I hadn’t kept very good track of the time—she came back from one of her daily shopping expeditions with her bag a little heavier with loot than usual. I sensed an air of excitement about her, but I wasn’t curious enough to ask. After checking on me, she headed into the kitchen to start her dinner preparations a little earlier than usual; then she came back into the master bedroom and threw some clothes onto the bed.
“Get dressed,” she said. “I’m tired of looking at you horizontal. Let’s see what you look like vertical.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“First take a bath and trim that beard a bit, or at least scrape the fuzz along the edges.”
“Wow, are you sure my heart can stand the excitement, Doctor?”
“Never mind your heart. Your head is my concern; cardiology isn’t my field. I haven’t a bit of worry about your heart anyway; I know it’s made of stone. So it probably won’t make you jump up and down with joy to hear that Junior’s going to make it. I just got through to the hospital in Hermosillo again. It’s been close, but he’s going to be all right.”
I said, “I’m glad for your sake, Jo.”
She said coolly, “Do I gather that it isn’t a great load off your mind? When you shoot people you’d just as soon they’d stay shot, is that right?” When I didn’t speak, because she was quite correct, and I didn’t owe her brother a damn thing except a headache, she shrugged. “Like I said, solid granite. Get yourself cleaned up and dressed while I see to the chicken. I thought we could use a change from all the fish we’ve been eating, even though it’s very good and fresh here.”
It felt strange to be moving around pretending to be a more-or-less normal human being for a change instead of an invalid. Taking care to keep my head bandage dry, I showered and then scraped my face a bit with the Schick razor, complete with blades, that had been left in the medicine chest by my unknown host, the man with the size 38 undershirt. The tall, gray-bearded character confronting me in the mirror looked like a dull and tired fellow, hardly the type to get into the kind of bullet trouble indicated by the rakish bandage on his head. If the truth were known, he’d probably just cracked his head on a low door.
My supernurse had washed the blood out of my clothes. I dressed myself in the blue denim shirt and pants provided by a grateful nation: The jogging shoes that had also been put into the Subaru were a little tight, and the socks were those lousy one-size-fits-all numbers that invariably cramp the toes of anyone with feet at the upper end of the size scale like mine. After fingering the small bullet-tear in the shoulder of the wind-breaker, I put that on, too. It was still early enough spring to be chilly in the evenings, even at sea level this far south. It was kind of like leaving the nest and learning to fly again. Properly clad for the first time in almost a week, if you want to call jeans proper, I ventured out of the room, savoring the reckless thrill of exploration.
Except for the master bedroom and the bath, I had up to now seen nothing of the house to remember—I hadn’t been very interested in houses when I arrived. I found myself in a living-dining room with a table set for two to my left and a sofa, a cocktail table, and a couple of big chairs grouped around a good-sized fireplace to my right. A fire burned in the fireplace, giving the whole place a cozy look although the furniture was cheap and rather shabby. The burning wood gave out occasional cracks and snaps. It seemed to be the hard, heavy, local stuff called ironwood that comes in such nice twisty shapes that it always seems a pity to burn them since a sculptor should be able to make something of them; and many local sculptors do. I noted a sideboard on which stood a small ice bucket, a couple of glasses, a bottle of soda, and another bottle I recognized; Greer must have tucked it into my bag before sending me off with the medical lady.
I could hear Jo Beckman working in the kitchen behind the closed door to my left. I poured myself a drink of J&B and stood sipping it, feeling light-headed and strangely dissociated from my surroundings. The room had glass doors looking out onto a patio that was protected from the street by a man-high wall. There was a small rock garden featuring local shrubs and cacti. Somebody’d been working in it recently, weeding and raking, and it pretty well had to be Jo since there had been nobody else around. For a child specialist the girl had unexpected talents. There was also a tiled terrace out there equipped with some black-iron furniture: a round table, and four chairs that looked more comfortable than the hard, wooden, veranda stuff in the bedroom.
“Oh, there you are!” Jo came in carrying a bottle of wine, which she set on the sideboard. “You can make yourself useful and open that. It’s supposed to breathe a little, isn’t it, or is that the red? I never can remember. Corkscrew in the top drawer. Then make me a drink, not too stiff. Let me get this fucking apron off; it makes me feel like a goddamn housewife, but I’m a slob in the kitchen and I didn’t want to spot my dress. Back in a minute.”
I wrestled the wine cork out and got her Scotch prepared, remembering that she’d taken it straight with just a c
ouple of ice cubes the last time I’d served her, in Hermosillo. She came out to accept the glass from my hand and sip the contents gratefully. She was actually wearing a dress, as she’d said, the first time I’d seen her in one. It was a simple, long-sleeved sheath of fluid black jersey that clung to her in interesting ways. It was held in at the waist by the heavy concha belt I’d seen before. The squash-blossom necklace was also very much in evidence. The gleaming silver looked very dramatic against the matte black dress.
I whistled softly. “May I call you Slinky, ma’am?”
“It does make me look a little like a femme fatale, within my limitations, doesn’t it?” She laughed. “But it’s very practical, unwrinkleable, totally washable, and packs like a dream. Let’s not let the fire go to waste, I’m very proud of it. One match. Generally I need a blowtorch to start the damn things.”
We took our drinks over to the two big chairs. When she was seated, I noted that she was wearing nylons and black pumps with moderate heels; like most tall girls, she didn’t go in for real stilts. Even so, they did nice things for her ankles, and I found myself thinking of her, for the first time since I’d been shot, as woman instead of doctor or nurse. Maybe that was the idea.
“Tell me about the little man with the big wife,” I said. “The people who own this place.”
“How did you…?”
“I’m a detective of sorts, remember?” I grinned. “Size 34 shorts, queen-size pantyhose.”
Jo laughed. “Hal isn’t really so small, just skinny. He’s a doctor at the clinic, a dermatologist. Harold Schonfeld. I’ll admit Ziggy is fairly substantial, a massive German hausfrau type, but nice.”
“The clinic, is that where you’ve got your office or whatever a child psychiatrist works out of?” I asked. When she nodded, I asked, “Where is it?”
The Frighteners Page 18