The Demolishers

by Donald Hamilton

  “There he is up ahead… Matt!”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard of a self-healing grocery bag?”

  I glanced at her sharply. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure that the paper bag he was carrying, one of those heavy ones with cord handles stapled to it…”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “It had a noticeable rip near one of the handles. He had to carry it carefully by the bottom to keep it from splitting open; but I’m almost certain it isn’t torn now. I got a good look at it when he set it down to get into that big backpack he got off the carousel… Now he’s going around the corner. Going. Gone.”

  I was busily studying a gaudy tourist map of the island, as if deciding how we should get where we wanted to go. “Modesto?” I asked.

  Dana shook her head. “I can’t be absolutely sure, of course; the place is full of short, dark, middle-aged, Hispano-type men; but if he were here he’d have spotted us by this time; he’d be trying to attract our attention inconspicuously.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to do without him,” I said. “Blondie’s either got somebody watching me, or he’s sneaked back to keep an eye on me himself; he can’t afford to lose me. I’m going into that john down the way. That’ll give him a chance, if he wants it, to corner me without the whole airport watching. You stand guard over our luggage, right here. I think you’ll be safe alone since it’s me they want. Keep your eyes open. Somebody might come by carrying a torn paper bag. Of course the guy who brought the undamaged one could already have jettisoned the ripped one he got in exchange; it probably contained nothing but Blondie’s dirty laundry. But maybe not. I’d kind of like to know what their local contact looks like.”

  Dana frowned. “Matt, be careful. You said you needed a gun to handle him.”

  “Let’s have a little accuracy here. I said I wanted a gun to handle him. I want a gun, period. With Modesto missing, I’ll have to get one elsewhere. Wish me luck.”

  “Luck, darling.”

  I was aware of her watching me in a concerned way as I headed for the men’s room. Well, it’s always nice to have somebody who cares. I found the place empty for the moment. It was fairly new and quite clean. The plumbing seemed to be in good shape. I picked the urinal farthest to the right, taking my time about my business. If I stood back a little, peeing at maximum range, I could see the door out of the corner of my eye, the door through which Blondie had to come.

  It was a gamble, of course. He presumably had a gun now or the paper-bag switch made no sense. It was a gun I intended to have since my own source of supply seemed to have dried up, but first I had to keep it from shooting me. It wasn’t going to be easy, in this shiny tiled room without any cover but the booths, which weren’t bulletproof, and the slab of marble beside me separating the urinals from the lavatories, which might be if it was real stone. They can do some very deceptive things with petroleum nowadays. In my favor, of course, was the fact that he was not a pro. He’d hate me for saying so, protesting what a tough mercenary soldier he was, but this wasn’t soldier business. I was betting that, like any amateur, he’d shuffle his feet a little before he got to work, instead of simply stepping inside, firing three aimed shots, and stepping out again.

  The door opened, but the man who entered was small and dark. He came over to stand beside me. Then the one I was expecting came in and paused by the door. He saw me, but he didn’t have a clear shot because of the marble divider, and he wasn’t ready to take it, anyway, with a witness standing beside me. He just came forward slowly, waiting for the one beside me to finish and go off to the lavatories. There was a nervous moment as Blondie passed behind me, but he wanted us alone, and he just stepped up beside me to claim the vacated urinal.

  He was stripped for action, I noted. The backpack and paper bag had been left somewhere, along with the denim jacket. The T-shirt, which had been tucked in all around, now hung loose over his jeans. Standing there beside me, he was slow about opening his pants, presumably for the same reason I was fast about closing mine: it’s embarrassing to go into battle hanging out. The little dark man with the well-washed hands went out, never to know the excitement he was missing.

  The door closed automatically behind him. As if it had been a signal from the range master in charge of the combat course, we moved simultaneously. Blondie reached up under the concealing T-shirt and went for the gun tucked into the front of his jeans. I already held concealed in my right hand, open, the little Gerber knife I’d once more got past the airport sensors, although at Kennedy they’d had me sweating. I reached out with my left hand…

  My intended tactics were practically flawless. Grab the long convenient hair behind and yank hard; that would throw him off balance and keep him from pivoting towards me and bringing his weapon into action. I’d determined earlier that he was right-handed; and I’d carefully placed myself so he’d have to attack from my left. The hair-pull would also tip his head back and expose his throat to the blade. The mark of the true professional is this kind of meticulous planning. There was only one catch. The hair I grabbed wasn’t his.

  It came off in my hand. The lack of the resistance I’d expected threw me off balance instead of him. I was saved only by my position on his right. I had a moment to pull myself together while, catching the gleam of the knife, he was swinging his left arm over to cover his throat and at the same time attempting to turn the pistol barrel towards me—the weapon was a silenced .22 automatic that had a familiar look. It was a relatively feeble assassination weapon, but one that would certainly do the job if I let it.

  For a moment, the situation bordered on the ridiculous: Two armed men trying to kill each other with weapons that were both pointing the wrong way. I was crowding him so he couldn’t bring the gun around to bear; but I’d been holding my knife for an upstroke at his now protected throat and I knew I didn’t have time to reverse it for a downstroke at his gun wrist. I struck anyway; to hell with the blade. I drove a hammer blow with my fist down at his gunhand. The hilt of the knife gave it authority and knocked the weapon from his grasp.

  He knew about guns. He knew too much about guns for this situation. He couldn’t help an instinctive little pause, waiting to learn if the falling weapon was going to discharge when it hit. I had a moment in which to strike again—we’re trained to ignore things we can do nothing about, like bouncing firearms—and I went for the chest as the best target available to me, although three inches of steel there, although it may kill eventually, isn’t likely to disable anybody promptly except the kind of person who faints at the thought of being cut anywhere. I managed to miss the breastbone and, with luck, the ribs. The blade went in all the way, but I almost lost it when, undisturbed by the fact that he now had a perforated lung, Blondie, who wasn’t blond any longer, dove for the gun that had clattered away across the tiles without going off.

  I managed to give him a helpful shove with my left hand and stick out my right foot to trip him, so he went down harder than he’d planned. Too bad for Blondie, who’d been taught to take firearms too seriously. If he’d stood fast to slug it out, he’d have had a chance, even with a hole in his chest. Flat on the floor, reaching desperately for the pistol, he had none. I landed on top of him hard, slammed his face into the tiles, and drove the point of the pear-shaped blade into the neck between the proper vertebrae. There was a kind of general convulsion under me; then he was limp and still.

  There’s supposed to be a moment of regret or something afterwards, but that’s for the amateurs. When they come to kill me I have no regrets when they die. Sometimes I’ve known a sense of accomplishment when the task has been a difficult one and I’ve executed it well, and a certain pleasure at being alive afterwards; but there was nothing like that here. All I felt was disgust at my own immense stupidity. My subconscious mind had been telling me right along that there was something wrong with all that hair; my God, this was one of Bultman’s commandos! When, since the age of the Vikings, had men been
sent into battle with shoulder-length locks?

  Lying there now, he looked the way he should, considering where he’d come from: a tough man with crew-cut brown hair. There wasn’t much blood from the chest wound and hardly any from the neck wound. I hauled him into the nearest booth and sat him on the pot and hurried out to retrieve the gun and the wig. The door to the concourse was opening and I couldn’t take time to clean up the small gory smears on the tiles; but somebody’s always bleeding in rest rooms.

  I ducked back into the booth. I hoped that nobody’d count the number of feet showing under the partitions; but I didn’t want to leave him alone in case he’d fall over. A man came into the place, and then another; for a while the traffic was brisk, but it was all urinal business and soon completed. When the room was empty again, I braced him in place as well as I could. I started to put the wig on his head but left it in his lap instead. He was a warrior who’d tried hard to play a deadly game with which he was unfamiliar; and he’d lost. Why make him look ridiculous?

  There was no way of locking the cubicle from outside, but I rolled up the handkerchief I found in his pocket and jammed it in the crack to hold the door closed. I made sure the pistol I’d inherited was secure inside the waistband of my slacks, and buttoned my jacket over it, and got out of there.

  27

  Dana was leaning against the wall beside our luggage. Obviously tense and worried, she was trying hard to look like a bored lady traveler just wondering what the hell was delaying her gentleman companion in the john, Montezuma’s revenge? When she saw me she straightened up abruptly and took a couple of quick steps to meet me.

  “Matt!” she breathed. “It took so long… I saw him go in there after you! I thought I’d die waiting to see who… Are you all right?”

  “Never mind all that,” I said. “Did any damaged paper bags go by?”

  “Yes, she went around the corner over there, where he came from.”

  “A woman?”

  “A girl, not much over twenty. Spanish or Latino or Chicano, whatever it is they want to be called today, I don’t bother to keep track. They’ll change it tomorrow anyway. Not Pachuco, that’s derogatory. Hispano? Matt…”

  “Description?”

  Dana showed some resentment at my persistent questioning, but shrugged and said, “She was rather pretty. Olive skin, good complexion. Considerable makeup, but pretty well done. Black hair, careful hairdo, rather short, blow-dried. Not as tall as I am, but not tiny.” I’d asked for a description and she was by God going to give me one, every detail. “Good figure but just a little too female, if you know what I mean; or maybe it was the jeans she was wearing. Fashionably faded. Fashionably threadbare. Fashionable holes at knee and rump. And tight, my God; you wonder how they get into them and why they don’t split when they do! But clean, and she was wearing a clean white fiesta blouse, you know the fancy ruffled ones, cut down to hither, or maybe yonder. Décolletage, they used to call it; mucho décolletage. High-heeled white shoes. She was definitely holding the bag, if you’ll excuse it. The right bag with the rip in it. Is that descriptive enough for you?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Now…”

  “Matt, what happened in there?”

  I said impatiently, “This is no time for an instant replay, sweetheart. You’re the liaison girl. Find a phone and get some gravediggers here fast. Tell them he’s sitting on the potty, last cubicle to the left, up against the wall. The door isn’t latched, just jammed shut; a hard push will do it. Tell them to take him out and bury him deep. If they’re too late, if he’s already been discovered when they arrive, they’ll have to get somebody heavy to lean on the authorities for us. When you’ve finished briefing them, call Washington and report that Bultman has intervened, so I guess I’m going to have to take care of him before I’m through. That should warm the cockles of Mac’s heart, if any. He said the Kraut wouldn’t leave me alone to do this job and he was right as usual, damn him. Give him all the details. Then hie yourself over to Avis and collect our car. Where can you pick me up around here?”

  “So you killed him.” Dana’s voice was flat.

  It had been a pretty close thing in that tiled rest room; and I found that I didn’t have much tolerance for bleeding hearts and girls who couldn’t make up their cotton-picking little minds. First there had been Sandra who’d bounced like a tennis ball between her humanitarian impulses and her thirst for vengeance; and now I had this handsome lady who couldn’t seem to decide whether she loved me for staying alive or hated me for making the other guy dead.

  “Better I should have let him kill me?” I asked sourly.

  Dana grimaced. “I know. I’m sorry, I guess I’m just not used to it, Matt. I guess I’m just an office girl at heart; but I’m really very glad you didn’t let him kill you.” She smiled crookedly. “I’ll pick you up over there at the loading zone behind the car-rental booths. Don’t get impatient. They keep their cars on a lot half a mile away. I’ll have to use their bus to get out there, whenever it decides to come along, unless I can bribe a taxi driver to make that short a run.” She hesitated. “What are you going to do?”

  I said, “I’m going to see if I can find Blondie’s girlfriend. I want to ask her how she managed to get hold of one of our special toys to give him.” I patted my jacket at waist level. “Device, termination, sound-suppressed, twenty-two-caliber. I think that’s the current Washington jargon. They’re great on ‘devices’ these days; they wouldn’t dream of using a nasty word like ‘weapon’ or ‘gun’ in one of their spec sheets. Actually it’s a Ruger, not to be confused with a Luger. It’s what Blondie was packing. Almost certainly one of ours.”

  Dana frowned. “Do you think… Modesto?”

  “He’s the most likely answer, yes. Either he sold out…”

  “Modesto wouldn’t betray us!”

  I looked at her curiously. “You know our contact that well, huh? Okay, say he didn’t sell out. Say they just grabbed him and took away from him the weapon he’d intended to bring here for me. That probably means he’s either lying dead somewhere or being held alive somewhere, and I’d better find out which and where. But first I’d better find this tight-pants chick you saw, if she hasn’t vanished completely by this time.”

  But the girl hadn’t disappeared. I spotted her at once over at the side of the concourse when I reentered the building at the far end after making a wide, fast detour outside, passing the loading area where Dana was to pick me up and the taxi stands and bus stops. It was obviously the vantage spot from which Blondie had watched me go into the john, a shallow alcove formed by a convenient jog in the wall. His backpack was there and she was sitting on it. She had both paper bags—one torn, one whole—on the floor beside her, along with his jacket.

  I studied her briefly from a distance before making my approach, wondering at the inconsistency of her getup. She was a classy young lady from the meticulous dark hair to the immaculate white heels—with the glaring exception of the jeans, faded and ripped and frayed, that made her look like a bum from waist to ankles. Well, I guess I simply don’t understand the modern denim mystique, having worn out too many pairs of Levi’s as a boy on my parents’ New Mexico ranch. They’ll always be just post-hole-digging, shit-shoveling pants to me.

  She didn’t notice me coming up behind her; she was too busy staring in the direction of the rest-room sign, willing Blondie to appear. It seemed likely that she’d seen me emerge alive and healthy; but she’d continued to wait there among the missing man’s belongings, clearly hoping that, although he’d obviously failed in his murderous mission, he’d at least managed to survive it.

  “He won’t be coming back, señorita,” I said softly. She started, and turned to look at me. I said, “No, sit still, please, and keep your hands off that purse.”

  She was staring at the gun I was pointing at her, concealed by my body from the passersby. “He is dead? He must be dead for you to have his weapon!”

  It was no place to go into the questi
on of whose weapon it really was. Presumably, they’d got it off Modesto, and presumably that meant they knew Modesto was working for us. But I didn’t want to gamble too much on presumably and ask the wrong questions, about the weapon or anything else. I didn’t want to betray to this girl any information she didn’t already have. She was glaring up at me angrily. She was quite pretty, with wide cheekbones, white teeth, and big brown eyes emphasized by the careful makeup noted by Dana. The black, curling eyelashes were as spectacular as those Lia Varek had sported when I’d first seen her. The eyes were luminous with hatred.

  “The man in there was something special to you?” I asked. “If so, I’m sorry. He gave me no choice.”

  Her mouth was ugly with the same emotion that made her eyes lovely. “They are all special to me, all our brave soldiers of liberation, you imperialist pig!”

  I didn’t know real people said things like that. I said, “Let me have your purse for a moment, please.”

  She started to refuse, but shrugged elaborately instead. I took the purse left-handed and checked it out: no weapon. If she was packing anything but herself inside those pants, she could never pry it out in a hurry. The loose, low-cut, white blouse didn’t even do a good job of concealing her unsupported and quite admirable breasts; I was fairly sure it concealed nothing else.

  I returned the purse and picked up the paper bag that wasn’t torn, still left-handed. It contained some clothes and, as I’d hoped, since I’d found nothing of the sort on Blondie, a couple of hard objects that turned out to be a spare ten-shot magazine for the Ruger, loaded, and a fifty-round box of .22 ammo, better than half full. Remington, if it matters. Fifty .45 cartridges will pretty well fill your pants pockets and make you walk bowlegged, but fifty .22s fit into a container hardly larger than a matchbox. I pocketed the gun items and put the bag of clothes down beside the girl.