“God, we look like one of the meatwagons hauling away the stiffs during the Great Plague,” said the man I knew only as Theta. “Never mind Peterson, I heard he’s being picked up.”
“Damn good thing; we’d have had to lay him across the hood,” said the driver. “But I have a hunch Mr. Saturday is going to cure this particular plague pretty damn quick. I mean Sigma. He’s okay, I guess, and goddamn it, somebody’s got to get these fucking greasers to straighten up and fly right, but I wish he’d stop playing these crummy Greek word games. Who the shit wants to go around being called Omicron, for Christ’s sake?”
Finding the headquarters place was no problem, but the driver was no gentle chauffeur like little Lieutenant Ernesto Barraga of Ramón’s Fuerza Especial. This hotshot Yankee wheelman had 4WD Grand Prix aspirations, and he sent his vehicle bounding across the roadless basin like a jackrabbit, perhaps figuring that two of the passengers in the rear were in no condition to mind the discomfort and the third had it coming. Then we slowed down to negotiate a narrow cleft between the great stone blocks that brought us into a small, open space, nothing like the wide amphitheater in which I’d seen a few hopeful vultures investigating old bones.
“Here, I’ll get him.” I recognized the voice. It belonged to the big boy, Marion Rutherford, otherwise known as Tunk or Alpha.
Theta and the driver, Mr. Omicron, had been trying to pull my more-or-less live body out from between the two totally dead ones, but we’d got packed into the limited space pretty tightly, like sardines, during the rough ride, and they were having a hard time prying me loose. The fact that their efforts were fairly painful to me was, of course, irrelevant, so I didn’t bother to mention it. Then Rutherford was lifting me out of there like a baby.
“Where do you want him, sir?” he called to somebody.
The shout came back: “Lay him over there beside the woman.”
Okay, I’d made it. This was the voice I’d been wanting to hear at close range, without benefit of electronics. Of course, it wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned the meeting; I had handcuffs on my wrists and a leg that might not support me if I needed to stand on it, although the toes seemed to be wiggleable, and I might even be dying of internal injuries; but I was here with the man I’d been sent to find and dispose of. The finding, at least, was done. Only the disposing remained. Of course, I also had to live long enough to pass the word about where the arms were located.
I lay for a while with my eyes closed after Rutherford had put me down, waiting for the flames to subside. At last I became aware that Tunk had departed and my man was standing there instead, the man I’d expected to see, the only man he could be, under the circumstances. In El Paso he’d dressed the part of a hip young executive with a smart three-day beard; here, still fashionably whiskery, he was costumed as an outdoors type in a tan poplin Great White Hunter suit, the jacket equipped with enough bellows-type pockets to carry sandwiches for a week. Something held him stiffly erect, still a fine, lean—well, almost—figure of a man. I decided that he was wearing either a corset or a bullet-proof vest or both. There was a Browning Hi-Power belted over the jacket. The belt and pistol holster were of handsome russet leather, and there was a russet leather pouch holding two spare magazines, putting something like forty-two rounds at his disposal, if I remembered the magazine capacity correctly. Fuzzy desert boots at one end and rakish safari hat at the other. Big dark glasses. Sigma, Sábado, Saturday. Well, I had my orders, and if he didn’t like his own name I’d be happy to kill him under any name he chose, but it was amateurish of him to stick so stubbornly to the same initial letter.
Seeing my eyes open, he said, “Well, Helm?”
There was nothing I had to say to him; having seen enough, I just closed my eyes again. He kicked me in the side, fortunately the right side.
“You crazy assassin, did you really think you could kill us all with only a kid to help you?” He kicked me again. “Come on, speak up!”
Jo Beckman’s voice, from the other side of me, protested: “Stop it, can’t you see he’s in shock? Are you just going to let him lie there and bleed to death? If you really want to interrogate him, if you have some sensible questions you want to ask him, you’d better stop the hemorrhaging fast or you won’t have anybody to interrogate.”
“All right, Doctor, I’ll have a man bring you a first aid kit and some water. Do what you can for him.”
“In these manacles?”
Sigma laughed. Mr. Saturday laughed. Señor Sábado laughed. “Nice try, but it won’t work, my dear. It isn’t as if your hands were shackled behind you. If you can’t manage handcuffed, you’re not much of a doctor… Yes, yes, what is it?” Somebody had come running up; I couldn’t hear what he said. Sigma said irritably, “Well, what are you waiting for, go fetch him in one of the jeeps and bring him here, fast!”
I could hear footsteps moving away; then fingers were tugging at my bloody shirt and performing some mildly painful explorations. Jo’s voice said, “He’s gone. Don’t take my gloomy diagnosis too seriously, darling; I just wanted to impress the peasants. You’re not bleeding enough externally to worry about. Internally is probably another matter, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Somebody who knows how and has the proper instruments is going to have to go in and clean out the wound channel and stitch together whatever needs sewing. For the moment, I’ll just make a bandage of your shirt since this little kit they brought me is kind of limited, and wrap it around you tightly to keep you from leaking too much.” She laughed shortly. “I seem to recall that we’ve been here before, darling. You seem to attract lead the way a magnet attracts iron.”
I opened my eyes to look at her. There was an angry-looking round burn on her cheek and another on her hand; I couldn’t see the rest of her the way I was lying. I licked my dry lips.
“‘Darling’ is a word I didn’t expect to hear,” I whispered.
She said, “So you can talk, good. Did you think I was going to hate you because you behaved like the callous bastard I always knew you were? Female people who poke around where they’re not invited can expect to get clobbered. What they shouldn’t expect, what they shouldn’t even want, is for male people to drop all business on the spot and stop the world just so the ittle bittle girlie won’t get her footsies fried… Ha, I won’t even need your shirt. I’d forgotten that big, phony bandage I put on you last night. I’ll just move it down about a foot.”
“Jo.”
“Yes?”
I whispered, “There’s a little gun in my right boot, inside.” It served them right. If they’d lifted me carefully and carried me the normal way by the arms and legs when they loaded me into the jeep, they couldn’t have missed it, but they’d been too happy dragging and bumping me around, trying to make me hurt. Of course, they’d also found enough firearms on me elsewhere, not to mention my little knife, to keep them from searching further. I went on with an effort: “If nobody’s looking, and if you think you can bring yourself to use it when the time comes, slip it out and hide it on you somewhere, please.” When she didn’t speak, I added: “Incidentally, if you do decide to shoot the bastard, go for the head. I think he’s wearing some kind of body armor.”
I heard her breath catch. She made no answer but continued dismantling the bulky bandage around my chest.
At last she asked, “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“Yes.” I’d debated whether or not to put the responsibility on her, but I had a hunch Sigma was leaving us alone deliberately to let us talk. When he returned, he’d simply assume I’d shared any information I carried and go to work on us both, so keeping her in ignorance would give her no protection. I whispered, “If I don’t make it and you do, find a man with the Fuerza Especial of the Mexican Army named Ramón Solana-Ruiz. They call him El Cacique. Tell him that the place he wants is the Rincon de la Aguila. Got it?”
“Rincon de la Aguila. Solana-Ruiz.” She’d unfastened my trousers; now she was fussing with the boots
as if to pull them off first since the pants wouldn’t come off over them. I gave a yelp of pain. She said, “Sorry. I guess I can just leave everything on. Let me just slip your trousers down a bit so I can see what I’m doing here.” She lowered her voice. “Incidentally, I got the pistol. It’s in my boot now.”
“Left or right? In case I have to get it off your dead body in a hurry.”
“Left, you creep. They took the other one off so they could roast me, remember? Or maybe you didn’t hear…”
“I heard. How bad is it?”
Jo laughed shortly. “Just a little blister the size of a dinner plate,” she said bravely. “Well, would you believe a silver dollar? As for you, my friend, you have a couple of very neat perforations, back and front. I thought bullets were supposed to expand and make dreadful exit wounds.”
“He was shooting at extreme range. The slug had lost a lot of its velocity and didn’t hit any bone.”
“It must be nice to command such a specialized field of knowledge. You and your guns. Not to mention your girls.” She was wrapping me up as she talked, lifting me frequently to slip the bandage under me, an operation that wasn’t totally painless. She continued to speak: “What happened to the little Indian girl in the blanket and the ridiculous red shoes? The last I saw of her, she was heading off to find you.”
I whispered, “She could be around somewhere, so let’s not talk about her, huh? And she carried a pair of moccasins for rough work, if it matters. What brought you here, Jo?”
“We had a little hassle back there in Kino Bay. That man, Greer, whom you left to protect Mr. Cody, he and his men caught a thug snooping around the house. They took him inside to question him. That was the moment the old man chose to come marching into the living room complaining that his everlasting bandage was leaking and a man could bleed to death around the place shouting himself hoarse for help—I guess we’d been too preoccupied with the intruder to hear him. And the prisoner took advantage of the distraction to dive through a window and run. One of Greer’s men was about to shoot, but Greer told him to hold his fire, we couldn’t afford to arouse the town with gunshots except in a real emergency.”
“He was right,” I said.
Jo went on: “But the spy definitely saw Mr. Cody with his pajama top off and a bandage around his torso with blood on it. That would let the man know he’d seen the real Cody, the one who had the bullet hole in the body, and that the fugitive his friends were chasing up here was the wrong one, the one with the hole in the head. After I’d patched up the old man again—it wasn’t a serious hemorrhage—I didn’t have anything else to do there. Actually, Greer’s been through a first aid course and can take care of him perfectly well. So I thought maybe it would be a good idea for me to take your car and try to find you and let you know your phony identity had been compromised. But I guess I’ve had better ideas in my life… Careful now. Mr. Sigma is coming back. Three men with him. The big one, Rutherford, is helping a couple who were just brought in by jeep. They seem to’ve been wounded, one in the leg and the other in the face.”
Footsteps stopped nearby. Sigma’s voice said, “Take care of this man first, Doctor, he was hit in the eye by some rock fragments… No, my dear, I will not take the cuffs off you, please stop trying to play me for a fool!” He spoke to someone else: “Sit down on that rock so she can take a look at you, Trautman. You can talk while she’s doing it. What happened?”
There was a pause, and I heard a man protest, “Señor Sábado, I bleed very bad!”
Sigma said, “The doctor will get to you shortly, just sit down and wait. What’s your name?”
“Hernando, Señor. That muchacha shoot me, shoot everybody, much angry.”
Sigma’s voice said, “Trautman, I asked you what happened.”
He got no answer, but a male voice I hadn’t heard before said, “Oh, Christ, it hurts. How does it look, Doctor? Is it bad?”
“I can’t tell yet. Hold still.”
“I’d like your report, Trautman!” Sigma’s voice was sharp.
After a moment, Trautman’s voice spoke again, stiffly resentful: “The General’s dead, sir, and I don’t know how many got out of the van, that bitch hosed it down with 5.56mm stuff like she was watering a lawn…”
“From the beginning, please.”
Trautman cleared his throat. “Well, after I reported that Mondragon was pulling out and got the word from you to stick with him, liaisonlike, I went back to driving the little pickup for him like I’d been doing. The rest of his strike team, or whatever he called it, that gang of big-hat bandits, was in the van, following behind. Our brave liberator was practically pissing his pants, and I won’t say I wasn’t kinda nervous myself. Hell, why shouldn’t I be, with four of the boys down already and no telling where those crazy killers were going to hit next? But then we were out of those lousy rocks and through the slot and heading down into the valley toward the main road, if you want to call that a main road. Everybody started breathing again. She was waiting in the brush to the right of the track. First thing I knew, Mondragon’s head came off, practically, blood and brains all over the pickup cab, the windshield going all starry, and I just took a dive out the door and let the heap go on without me. The van went past me, almost hitting me, trying to swerve away from her; she was already working it over with that fucking M-16. Men were trying to dive out the rear, and she was knocking them off like they were clay pigeons thrown from a trap house. A half-pint Indian kid in pants and a blanket, with long black hair, no wild Rambo hipshooting, just kneeling there in the brush with the gun to her shoulder firing careful little bursts and switching magazines and grinning like she was having the most fun ever. How the hell did we get mixed up with these crazies, anyway, sir?”
“Never mind that. Did the girl say anything?”
“Ow, that hurts, Doctor… A name,” Trautman said. “She called out a name, sir. ‘Medina,’ she shouted. ‘Remember Jorge Medina.’ Come to think of it, I guess she yelled it in Spanish first and then repeated it in English, maybe for my benefit. Who the hell’s Medina? Anyway, I took a shot at her with my .38, long range for a pistol, but I think it registered, but not hard enough. She turned that M-16 on me, and a slug hit the rock I was using for cover and sprayed stuff all over my face, I thought I was blind. When I could see a little out of my left eye, it was all over. The girl was gone. There was some moaning and groaning from the men still alive on the ground and inside the van—it was leaking red out all the doors—but if any of them had been left ambulatory, as we used to say in the Army, they’d ambulated. This one was sitting in the road watching his leg bleed. I got on the walkie-talkie and asked for a pickup… Doctor, what about my eye?”
Jo’s voice said, “Ophthalmology is not my field… All right, I can say that there’s probably some damage to the cornea, but I can’t tell you how serious it is. I’ve removed as much of the foreign matter as I dare; I don’t really know much about eyes, and I don’t want to make things worse. I’ve bandaged it and you should keep it covered until you get to a specialist, and for heaven’s sake don’t rub it…”
Sigma interrupted: “All right, all right, never mind the bedside manner. Take him along to the other casualties, Rutherford. Oh, just a minute… Trautman, you’re quite sure General Carlos Mondragon is dead?”
The wounded man snorted. “The Generalissimo wasn’t all that great with a whole head; I shouldn’t think he’d be much use with just half of one. Sir.”
“All right, take him away.” I heard the man leaving with Rutherford’s help. I heard Jo ask the wounded Mexican to pull up his pants leg. Then Sigma’s boot hit me in the side again; I was happy he wasn’t masquerading as a mountain climber or a lumberjack with footgear to match. The desert boots were bad enough. “Lying there with your eyes closed trying to make me believe you’re at death’s door! What do you think I am, a fool? Maybe you’ll die of peritonitis eventually, if you live that long, which seems unlikely, but in the meantime… Who is this homicidal Ind
ian girl, and who’s Medina?”
It was no state secret. I said, “Her name is Antonia Sisneros and Jorge Medina was her lover, the cautious gent working for Will Pierce who was supposed to bring four truckloads of weapons to a certain rendezvous but arrived with empty trucks since he didn’t trust friend Mondragon, I can’t imagine why not. Mondragon tried to get the location of the arms from him, but Medina died under interrogation.”
“Yes, yes, of course I heard all about that; I’d merely forgotten the name of the Mexican go-between, if I ever knew it. Naturally I held my contacts with Pierce to a minimum and asked him not to burden me with the operational details. And I certainly didn’t know this Medina had a girlfriend.”
I said, “Señorita Sisneros is slightly upset about his death; upset enough that she’s making a project of taking revenge on everyone responsible. She was terribly disappointed that you had Will Pierce killed before she could catch up with him; she was bound she was going to get Mondragon herself. She seems to come from good vendetta stock; she takes her blood feuds seriously.”
Sigma was looking down at me shrewdly. “If she was that close to Medina, she undoubtedly knows where he hid the arms. And since you seem to have got along very well with her, she probably told you. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you shared the information with the handsome lady doctor just now, giving me two people to interrogate instead of one. Meaning that if Rutherford, who likes that sort of thing, gets too rough with you, or you have the bad taste to die of your wound, we don’t lose the information irretrievably, since we still have the handsome lady doctor to work on.”
The Frighteners Page 30