The Demolishers

by Donald Hamilton

  “And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. The sonofabitch was trying to kill us, remember?”

  “Let me go!”

  She gave a sudden lunge that, when I hauled her back by the arm, swung her against me. I grabbed her by both shoulders, intending to shake a little sense into her. I’d underestimated the power of the Florence Nightingale syndrome. I hadn’t taken the precautions I’d have used instinctively struggling with a man, or a woman, I considered dangerous. She had a clear shot and she took it, kneeing me in the groin, not hard, but it doesn’t take much down there. The pain was as shocking as always. I was only vaguely aware of her pulling free. I was wondering dimly how the hell I’d ever managed to get mixed up with a screwball kid who’d castrate a man who’d saved her life in order to rescue a man who’d tried to murder her.

  When I managed to straighten up, she was wading out into the muddy pond, heedless of her nice white pants. I had my .38 in my hand by this time, but it was too late. She was in the line of fire and moving so erratically, as she fought her way through the muck and weeds, that I couldn’t take the risk of shooting past her. Otherwise I’d have riddled the van systematically to make sure the occupant was harmless before she reached him. Of course, I could have gone charging out there bravely to drag her back to safety, but if she was right about the poor helpless victim inside, I’d be getting wet for nothing, and if I was right about the murderous bastard, I’d be dead right along with her. Mac doesn’t run any suicidal agents.

  I picked up the purse she’d dropped at my feet. Apparently I’d been a little premature when I’d admired her fine sense of self-preservation: She hadn’t even taken her gun along on her idiot mission of mercy. After pocketing the automatic for extra firepower, and the spare clip she carried with it, I tossed the bag down the bank to join the high-heeled shoes she’d kicked off before entering the water. I took cover behind a tree from which I could rake the van from rear to front whenever I got a clear field of fire. Sandra was getting close, almost hip-deep now, working hard against the drag of the mud and the resistance of the water. I resisted the impulse to yell at her to come back; why waste the breath? She’d already made it painfully clear what her response would be.

  Reaching the van, she paused a moment to catch her breath. Then she tried the handle of the big rear doors, but they were locked or stuck. After straining at the handle for a minute or two, she gave it up, and moved over a bit, and bent down to peer through the smoky glass of the right rear window. The left one was pretty well submerged.

  I saw her suddenly throw herself sideways. Apparently she’d seen something hostile inside. The sound of the shot was muffled, but her gasp was not, as she clapped her hand to her left arm. She tried to run, but the gluey mud betrayed her and she fell headlong—her only sensible move since she’d put her knee into my testicles. There were two more muffled shots from inside the van, but both missed her. One made a starry hole in the black glass of the door, the other punched through the black-painted metal a foot away, near the exit hole of the first shot, the one that had winged Sandra.

  I’d switched guns, since pinpoint accuracy wasn’t needed here; I had no real target to shoot at. The .38 was the best weapon I had and I wanted to save it for a final showdown, if any. I used Sandra’s automatic, therefore, and emptied half a clip of .380s into the van’s rear doors, crouching low to send the bullets almost parallel to the water and angling them to search the interior thoroughly. This was a better gun than the last one I’d borrowed from Sonny Varek’s little girl; at least it shot pretty much where it looked. It wasn’t very powerful, but I had a square shot at the van doors and even a .22 will perforate car metal at that angle.

  Of course our mystery murderer had a bulletproof hideout in there. All he had to do was duck under the water that partially filled his vehicle and no slug could reach him, but unless he had finny ancestors he couldn’t stay under very long. For the moment, however, he wasn’t shooting, as Sandra surfaced, dripping and spitting.

  “Keep down!” I shouted. “Head over to your left. Work your way clear, but stay low.”

  There was another muffled report inside the van, and a bullet came screaming out through the already riddled doors; a hope shot that hit nothing but made a very nasty sound as it passed overhead. I gave him the rest of the .380’s first clip to cover Sandra’s clumsy withdrawal, spacing my shots deliberately to make it last longer.

  As I was reloading, a movement in the trees made me swing around quickly. A sandy-haired young man in jeans, T-shirt, and windbreaker was heading towards the water, stripping off his jacket as he ran. Well, it was about time Trask’s agent joined the battle even though his current duties were technically confined to merely following us so he could keep the Porsche from being sabotaged or boobytrapped whenever we left it. He dropped the jacket on the bank and waded out towards the floundering girl. I gave him covering fire, putting the metal-jacketed .380 slugs where I felt they would do most good, varying my aim and timing to keep the van’s occupant ducking. Trask’s boy helped Sandra ashore. He half led, half carried her into cover, and knelt beside her to examine her wounded arm.

  That situation seemed to be under control. It was time to put an end to this nonsense, before the neighborhood got ass-deep in cops. I moved cautiously along the shore to the right and waded out until I had a clear view of the underside of the van, exposed as it lay on its side. The gas tank was an obvious and easy target. I used Sandra’s last two bullets to perforate it neatly low down, and saw the volatile fuel come spurting out of the holes. The water of the pond had already acquired a limited rainbow sheen around the wreck; now it started to spread rapidly.

  “Hey, in the van,” I shouted. “Come out fast before I burn you out.”

  There was no answer, but he could smell the stuff as well as I could—better, since he was closer. I saw the vehicle shake as he moved around in there. Then he was at the rear, working at the double doors. He had to lift one a little—the right-hand one when the van was upright—in order to open the other. It flopped down with a sudden crash, like a station-wagon tailgate. A dark object came flying out to make a splash in the pond: a large automatic pistol. Great, but who’d guarantee he didn’t have another, large or small?

  I was ready with the Smith and Wesson as he came rolling out of there, picked himself up painfully, and waded ashore, a husky dark man in jeans and a gray work shirt. I hadn’t wasted all the lead I’d thrown at him. He was limping and one arm hung loose. Attaining dry land, he went to his knees, first, and then fell on his face and rolled over on his back, lying there with his arms spread wide in an attitude of total helplessness. He wasn’t much better as an actor than he’d been as a driver. I sloshed ashore, avoiding the spreading film of gasoline, and moved over cautiously to cover him as he lay there.

  At first glance, his face was totally unfamiliar, and I wondered who this angry stranger was and why he’d been so eager to murder me. Then I realized that I had, after all, seen this dark Latin face before, twice: once in a fuzzy photograph supplied by Trask, and before that… I remembered a boy named Antonio Morelos bleeding to death from a bullet hole in the leg. He’d had the same face fifteen years younger.

  “Senor Dominic Morelos,” I said. “El Martillo, The Hammer.”

  He licked his lips, but it took him a moment to work up strength enough to speak. I could see the deformed fingers of the left hand, where the Gobernador torturers had done a job on the nails. Sometimes it’s hard to know who the bad guys are. And the good guys. I don’t qualify, that’s for certain.

  “You murdered my little brother, señor,” he whispered. “The woman was present also…”

  Hatred was in his eyes; then it was replaced by a look of shocked surprise. He coughed twice, rackingly, and a thick dark stream of blood poured from his mouth, while his eyes went blank and his body went slack. After a moment I bent down and found the hideout weapon he’d been trying to conceal from me when he rolled over on his back like that: a businesslike
knife sheathed at the nape of his neck. I found that he’d actually been hit or nicked five times. The one in the lungs had done the job. Another asterisk for Dana Delgado.

  When I got over to where Sandra lay, I found a situation I hadn’t expected. Instead of one man watching over her, there were two.

  One was the sandy-haired fellow who’d pulled her out of the pond. Wet and muddy now, he was standing against a tree with his hands in the air, peering through big hornrimmed glasses at the other man. Fortunately, I recognized that one, or there could have been an awkward misunderstanding. I’d seen him in Savannah, one of Trask’s lean young men, tanned and tough, wearing khakis and holding a .38 revolver.

  “Gregertsen, sir,” he said. “The recognition code is…”

  “Never mind that crap, I recognize you,” I said. “What goes on? Who’s this character?”

  I had the chilly feeling you get when you’ve taken things for granted. I’d assumed without checking that the sandy-haired boy was one of ours running to my assistance, when he could just as easily have been racing to help Morelos. Well, it was a good antidote to the cocky superagent syndrome that often hits in the wake of a victorious firefight.

  Gregertsen said, “My orders were to follow you and just keep an eye on the Porsche so nobody’d tamper with it; but I saw this guy tail you from Newport. Then the van picked you up at the bridge. You were handling that okay, nice driving, but when you and the lady headed down here, and the fireworks started, and I saw this punk sneaking after you, I figured I’d better forget about watching the sports car and see if you needed a hand. Incidentally, he’s clean. No weapon.”

  Sandra stirred weakly. “Matt, it’s a big mistake. Let him go! I don’t know who he is, but he helped me in spite of all the shooting. See, he even used his handkerchief to bandage my arm.”

  I looked down at her for a moment as she lay there, even wetter and muddier than the young man who’d rescued her, with a bloodstained cloth around her left arm.

  I said, “Nobody’d know you were a respectable widow lady, the way you keep making a mess of yourself.”

  She seemed to take that as a statement of forgiveness, and maybe it was. “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” she whispered. “But I had to do it; I couldn’t let you stop me, even if it went wrong. But tell your man to put that gun away, please.”

  “Sure.” I made a sign to Gregertsen and he holstered his piece. I turned to the other. “We’re grateful for your help,” I said. “But who the hell are you and why have you been following us?”

  He licked his lips. “I’m Lester,” he said. “Lester Leonard. I read about you in the newspaper. I wanted to talk with you.”

  He was having a hard time finding a piece of dry shirt on which to wipe his spectacles. Without the glasses, his eyes looked wide and innocent. They were an indefinite gray-green color; a cowlick of the damp sandy hair fell down his forehead. His face seemed unformed, as if his mother hadn’t quite got around to finishing him, before giving him birth. Pale and a little pudgy, he was clearly not a trained outdoor type like Gregertsen; I should have seen at a glance that he couldn’t be one of ours.

  “Who’s Lester Leonard?” I asked.

  “I am… was a friend of Linda Anson’s.” He put his glasses back on. I guess they helped him recognize my doubtful expression; he wasn’t exactly what I’d judged to be Linda’s type. “Well, not really a friend,” he corrected himself hastily. “She hardly knew I existed, although we went to high school together. But I… I admired her, I admired her tremendously for years. When she was killed like that…” He stopped and cleared his throat. I saw that his weak eyes were wet behind the big glasses. He said hoarsely, “I understand from the newspaper story that you’re hunting the people responsible. I want to help you. I want to help you kill them!”

  Well, I’d been hoping for that kind of a break, hadn’t I? That was why I’d come all the way to Newport to investigate the Silver Conch bombing, wasn’t it? The fact that what I’d got was a nearsighted kid nutty enough to spend years worshiping a tramp like Linda Anson from afar was beside the point. I reminded myself that the boy might be helpless-looking but he wasn’t gutless. He’d waded after Sandra when guns were firing and bullets flying, when a lot of Herculean heroes would have been lying flat in good cover and keeping their heads down. He was an odd avenging angel, but he’d do.

  The swans came in at the far end of the pond and swam around for a few minutes, but then the police sirens flushed them out again.

  22

  We walked through the hotel parking lot and made a dash across Newport’s busy main drag, proving that we were braver than a lot of visiting small-boat sailors who’ve merely crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

  “It’s up that street,” Dana Delgado said, pointing, as we reached the other shore in safety against all odds. “The White Horse Tavern. I made reservations. You could say I’m celebrating. I was wondering how to get rid of the brat. Since she’s a relative of yours, even if only by marriage, I thought you might object to strangulation.”

  It was a beautiful evening. The evening of any day in which someone has tried to kill you and failed is always beautiful, simply because you’re still alive to see it; but this was really a pretty good specimen for damp and misty New England. As we climbed the steep side street, the setting sun spotlighted a large, carefully restored, old hip-roofed frame house ahead of us. I couldn’t read the discreet signs at the distance, but I had a hunch they marked our destination. Delgado wouldn’t have chosen to walk to the restaurant, in her high heels, if it had been much farther away.

  I said, “I thought you were looking forward to our little ménage à trois in Puerto Rico.”

  She laughed. “My dear man, no woman wants to share a male with another female, even in the line of business.” After a moment, she went on: “I don’t really wish young Mrs. Helm any harm, but I’m just as glad they’re keeping her in the hospital for a few days. She’ll be safe there, and it disposes of her temporarily… Reservation for Delgado,” she said to the somberly dressed gent who came forward to greet us as we entered the restaurant.

  “Yes, madam. This way, please.”

  The place had once been a comfortable residence. The big, high-ceilinged downstairs rooms were now filled with tables boasting white tablecloths and—those not yet occupied—intricately folded white napkins. Following Dana Delgado as she followed the headwaiter, I had the half-proud, half-jealous feeling that comes to a man in the company of a truly handsome woman who’s being favorably appraised by all the other men present, and also by the women—although perhaps not quite so favorably.

  She was wearing a dark red wool dress expensive enough to do nice things for her figure, not that it needed things done for it. The skirt was calf-length in response to the dictates of current fashion, a pleasant compromise, long enough to be dignified and graceful without concealing too much of the view. The dress had long sleeves and was quite severe in its simplicity. Well, she’d always been severe and businesslike in her dealings with me; the fact that she’d unbent enough to call my hotel room when I finally got back to Newport and invite me to dinner had been a pleasant surprise. I’d have expected her to adhere to traditional man-woman protocol and wait for the suggestion to come from me. Her dark hair was as smoothly arranged as always.

  “We’d like to see the wine list,” she said after we’d been seated. As the man went away, she smiled at me. “Are you thinking how terrible it is to be the guest of a managing woman? Should I let you choose the wine to make you feel masculine?”

  “I feel fine. Carry on.”

  We went through the formalities of ordering and it took a while. She held a rather lengthy consultation over the wine list, after which the relative freshness of the various fish on the menu came up for discussion. I’ve eaten too many questionable meals off my lap in too many oddball places, and accompanied them with too many strange libations, to be very critical of my food or drink; but it seems to be a popular indoor sport. Althou
gh she played it well and obviously enjoyed it, I had a hunch she was also getting a kick out of putting me in my place, hinting that I was just a clumsy peasant with a gun who had to be shown how civilized people live.

  Well, she was nice to look at, and I’ve been snooted by experts; she didn’t really bother me. But I must say I missed the kid, and worried about her a little. Although she was in good hands, the wound had been a nasty one. The bullet had apparently been deformed and upset by its passage through the van door, and it had ripped things up a bit rather than just drilling a neat round hole. The doctor had also had to prospect around in there for flakes of paint and scraps of bullet jacket; and he wasn’t quite sure he’d got them all, which was one reason he was keeping Sandra in the hospital for observation.

  “Wouldn’t you know?” she’d whispered, looking up at me from the hospital bed in New Haven, where she’d wound up after a twenty-mile ambulance ride that couldn’t have been much fun. Her face was pale against the short dark hair. She’d been given enough painkiller that her eyes had an unfocused look and her voice was a little slurred. “I just get one lousy sling off and now they’re going to put me in another!”

  I said, “That’s what you get for being a sentimental slob. Next time maybe you’ll have sense enough just to let the bastard drown.” I looked at the floral display on the dresser. “Who’s been sending flowers?”

  “Not you, that’s for sure.” She grinned weakly. “Lester sent them. Are you jealous?”

  “Lester? Oh, the boy with the glasses.”

  Her grin faded. “Are you still mad at me?”

  “Who’s mad? It isn’t my arm that’s got a hole in it. This way, I get to travel to Puerto Rico all alone with a dame who’s got all her hair, for a change.”

  “She won’t have it long if I get hold of her.” Sandra stared at me resentfully. “So you’re going to run off with your glamour agent and leave me lying here crippled and helpless to be blown up by any stray bomber who comes along!”