I watched her face closely and asked, “Ernest Head?”
She nodded quickly. “Yes. Of course. Ernst Schwarzkopf. The question is how to approach him.”
“Approach,” I said. “You put it so delicately, doll. You mean catch him and sweat him, don’t you? Like you did me.”
She shook her head. “No, that is a last resource. If we try to make him talk and fail, we have lost everything. I think we should try to make him run. That is what I have been trying to accomplish.” She made an impatient gesture. “If it were just a matter of capture and torture, do you think I would have been wasting my time playing the phonograph? But I was hoping I could make him run so that Max and I could follow. Where else would he go? I still think he can be made to do it. A little more pressure should suffice. And with three to take turns watching— you two and Max—there should be no chance of his eluding us. We will let him lead us to von Sachs. Now what about that road? Can it be traveled in an ordinary car or will we need a jeep?”
“When I went down, years ago, we used a pickup truck,” I said. “But my information is that the road’s in good shape this year, and a passenger car should make it all right. Of course that applies only to the dirt road south from Antelope Wells. What kind of a track turns off it into the Nacimiento Mountains is anybody’s guess. However, von Sachs isn’t likely to pack his stuff in by mountain goat. If he’s got any kind of big operation going back in there, in the guise of an archaeological expedition, the access trail can’t be too difficult.”
Catherine Smith frowned. “I don’t think much of your contribution, Mr. Evans. A few questions at Antelope Wells would have given me as much. It seems to me this is going to be a very one-sided partnership, in which Max and I supply most of the information and run most of the risks.”
“Sure,” I said. “How well do you and your friend know this part of the North American continent, Miss Smith?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I was brought up in these parts. I know these mountains and deserts, honey. Give me half a lead and I can tell you where von Sachs has got to be. Give me four wheels and an engine and I can take you there. How much back-country driving have you done, either of you? You look like city operators to me. When I say that road’s in good shape, I don’t mean it’s a six-lane turnpike. It’s still a Mexican desert road. You’re going to need me. Don’t kid yourself you aren’t.”
“I see.” She smiled cynically. “So now that road is suddenly so terrible it takes an expert to drive it.” She shrugged. “Oh, very well. Max will keep an eye on Ernest Head tonight. You two will cover him tomorrow. I will see that he hears the record often enough to keep old memories fresh in his mind until he can stand it no longer.”
I grinned. “You’re such a sweet girl; you have such kind thoughts. All right, it’s a deal. We find von Sachs; after that we flip a coin, or something, to see who gets him.” I regarded her for a moment. “Of course, if anybody tries a doublecross, all bets are off.”
She smiled. “Of course.”
“Okay. We’ll take over from Max in the morning. Now, where are we and how do we get out of here?”
Presently I was driving the station wagon away from there with Sheila beside me. It took me a little while to get oriented, until I realized that we were only a few blocks from Catherine’s house, in an area of new construction.
“Where’s your car, Skinny?” I asked without turning my head. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t moving anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
“Turn right at the next corner... Eric.”
“What?”
“You don’t really trust that... that blonde praying mantis, do you?”
I made the effort to glance at her. “Trust her? A pretty, sweet, gentle little girl like that? Why shouldn’t I trust her?” I grimaced. “I trust her to doublecross us at the first glimmer of an opportunity. Do you think I’d have made a deal with her if I didn’t?”
14
When I reached the motel, I saw that the blue Volkswagen had beat me home. I hadn’t felt up to any fancy driving. Besides, I’d had to stop at a pay phone and put in a long-distance call to Washington asking for full reports on a woman who called herself Catherine Smith, a man who called himself Max, and a couple of married people locally known as Mr. And Mrs. Ernest Head, who’d in the past gone by other names, specified. I’d paid for all those names. I figured I might as well go through the motions of feeding them into the machinery, although I had doubts whether the information would get out to me in time to be of much use.
I saw Sheila get out of her little car as I turned in off the street. She came up beside me as I parked the station wagon.
“Are you all right?” she whispered. “When you didn’t arrive right behind me, I got worried. Come on. I’d better look after those burns.”
She opened the car door and started to help me out, but she remembered her neurosis about heterosexual contacts and checked herself short of touching me. Or perhaps she just realized that a two-hundred-pound man has to be in pretty bad shape before he takes kindly to being helped out of a car by a hundred-pound girl. She did take the motel key out of my hand and open that door for me and close it behind me.
I said, “What the hell are you bucking for, Skinny? The title of little mother of the year? Hell, I’ve singed myself worse than this lighting a cigarette.”
She looked startled and injured; then she laughed. “All right. Be brave. Be heroic. Do you want a drink?”
“Sure.”
“Ice?”
“If there’s any left.”
“It’s all melted,” she said, investigating. “I’ll get some more. I’ll be right back.”
I started to register a gentlemanly protest, but she’d already taken the cardboard bucket and slipped out of the room. I sat down on the bed and took off my shirt. After examining the battlefield, I came to the conclusion that regardless of how it felt, it wasn’t really the scene of a major catastrophe. The only burn that went deep was on the shoulder. Elsewhere I’d merely lost a little skin. The fact that it hurt like hell was, to a tough undercover operative of my courageous and stoical nature, irrelevant. At least it was supposed to be.
I took from my pocket the tube of ointment Catherine Smith had given me. I was sitting there reading the label and feeling sorry for myself when Sheila let herself back in quietly. She put the ice bucket on the dresser, came over to look, and snatched the tube from my hand.
“You’re not going to use that?”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t trust her to give me anything but syphilis!”
I said, “That’s probably the one thing she can’t give you, Skinny. At least I’m under the impression VD doesn’t work like that.”
“You know what I mean!”
“Sure,” I said. “She’s a terrible person. Okay? Now may I have that drink?”
Sheila tossed the ointment on the bed and marched off across the room. She was still wearing the summery print dress with a good deal of skirt and not much bodice, but she’d exchanged her high-heeled shoes for a pair of white sneakers more suitable for playing detective. They made her look like a high-school girl. I watched her fix my drink and wondered why looking at her gave me a funny tight feeling in the throat that the sexy Miss Smith in her black lingerie hadn’t elicited at all. Well, not much. I decided that I was getting old and paternal and protective—or real expert at kidding myself.
I spoke to her back. “I haven’t thanked you for the timely help.”
To my surprise, I saw her wince as if I’d said something harsh and cruel. She turned swiftly to look at me.
“Don’t!” she breathed. “Don’t make fun of me!”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know I made a fool of myself!” Her voice was low. “Don’t you think I know it? You’d have done better to pick a green kid to help you. He’d have remembered how to come through a door with a gun. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I d
on’t blame you! But you don’t have to be sarcastic!”
I said, “No sarcasm was intended. As it happened, everything turned out for the best. There are no shots to explain, no dead bodies to dispose of. And you did turn up right on the dot. I was wondering how the hell to talk myself out of there, when you barged in.” After a little pause, I said, “Of course, you’re not supposed to shadow me without instructions, doll.”
She came over with a glass and put it into my hand. “And you’re not supposed to send me to bed like a child because you think I look tired. If I’d been a man, husky and healthy, you’d have had me covering you tonight, wouldn’t you? It would have been routine. So I did.” After a moment, she picked up the ointment tube, punched a hole in the end, squeezed out a little of the salve, and smelled it suspiciously. “I suppose this stuff really is all right to use. How do you feel?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “You can’t hurt us seasoned veterans of the hush-hush service. We’re all made of rhinoceros hide and old iron... Ouch!”
She’d started to apply the stuff to the burn on my shoulder just as if she were an ordinary girl instead of a mental case with a thing about being touched by, or touching, men. A little startled, I couldn’t help stealing a look at her face. It looked kind of pink and white and determined. She was concentrating very hard on what she was doing and not meeting my eyes at all. The only trouble was, she wasn’t very gentle.
I said, “Hey, take it easy.”
“You!” she said softly. “You and that overdeveloped bitch in her little peekaboo foundation garment. Black! And stockings, sheer black nylon stockings, at this time of year! How obvious can you get?” She started on my chest. “Lean back a little.”
“Why, Skinny,” I said, “you’re a peeping Tom, that’s what you are.”
“The window was open. Did you have to kiss her?”
I said, “It says on the label a light application, doll. A vigorous massage is not indicated. This town seems to be just crawling with sadistic females.” The pressure eased somewhat. I glanced at her again. “What was I supposed to do, carry on an intellectual conversation with the dame in her underwear while I waited for her partner to fight his way out of the bedroom and clobber me? And what’s it to you, anyway?”
It was meant to be light and casual, but my casual touch didn’t seem to be functioning tonight. Her hand stopped moving abruptly. After a moment she stepped back and stared at me oddly. Her eyes were wide and yellow. She looked down at the sticky fingers of her right hand, and at the tube in her left hand, also sticky. She looked around for something to wipe them on and didn’t find anything. She dropped the tube, and whirled, and ran for the door.
I was on my feet by this time, but she’d have beat me out if the doorknob hadn’t been reluctant and her hands hadn’t been slippery; that gave me a chance to get across the room. I caught her by the bare shoulders and shoved the door shut with my foot. She became perfectly still.
“Don’t touch me!”
“Cut it out,” I said. “We’re all through with that don’t-touch-me routine, remember? It’s gone the way of the notalk bit.”
“Let me go,” she whispered. “Please!”
I let her go. She turned to face me, holding her sticky hands away from her dress.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I was... just being silly and melodramatic. I’m all right now.”
“Sure.”
“Dr. Stern explained it to me,” she said. “He called it a transference, I think. That’s all it is. Just a transference.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just a transference.”
“It’s perfectly natural,” she said. “I mean, it isn’t your fault. After all, you saved my life.”
“Me and twenty-three other people.”
“They didn’t all get blisters on their hands carrying me to safety. They didn’t... didn’t feed me milkshakes clear across the continent and talk to me as if I were a person and not a shattered wreck. They didn’t get me out of that place where those ghouls were going to take my mind apart like a broken clock and put in all kinds of bright new springs and wheels I didn’t want... Let me go to my room, Eric,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Sure,” I said.
She didn’t move. “Damn you,” she whispered, “you’re just an ordinary man, a little taller than average. You’re not really very nice. I mean, you aren’t even above arranging things so you can make a pass at a woman in the line of duty. Duty! I saw you! And you’re not very brave, you wiggle and groan like anybody else when it hurts. I heard you. I don’t know why I... I mean, there’s nothing special about you. I don’t know why any woman would want... Eric?”
“Yes.”
“Kick me out. Make me go. It’s just a transference. A simple psychological phenomenon. It isn’t fair to let me stand here making a spectacle of myself. It isn’t fair to laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” I said.
The room was suddenly very quiet. She shook her head minutely, looking up at me. Then she was coming forward, or I was, I forget how it happened. Then we stopped. There were the practical aspects to consider.
One of us laughed, maybe both, I forget; and Sheila turned quickly, presenting her back to me. “If you’re not going to kick me out,” she breathed, “if you’re not, then I think you’d better help me off with my dress before... before we get that stuff all over it.”
15
I woke up scared. I couldn’t at first remember what I’d done, only that it was unforgivable. Then I sat up quickly and looked around. I was alone in the room. There wasn’t a sign of Sheila. She’d gone during the night, leaving none of her belongings behind.
I pulled on my pants and crossed the room and looked at myself in the mirror. The only satisfactory part of the image was the pattern of burns and blisters, which were all right as far as they went, but they didn’t go half far enough. A heel like you, I told myself, should be trussed hand and foot and revolved slowly over a bed of glowing charcoal, like a roast pig. Any creep who’d take advantage of the irrational hero-worship and gratitude of a sick and confused little girl for whom he’d been made responsible...
A knock on the door made me jump. “Mr. Evans?”
It was Sheila’s voice. I got over there and pulled the door open. She was standing outside with a paper cup of coffee in each hand, looking remarkably healthy and unconfused in the shortsleeved white shirt and tan cotton pants in which she’d crossed the country with me some weeks earlier, now crisp and clean again. Despite the pants, which are my least favorite feminine garment, she looked more like a woman and less like a disturbed child than any time since I’d known her.
She stepped past me. I closed the door. She was looking at me hard when I turned. “What’s the matter, darling?” she asked. “You look awful. Are you having some kind of a shock reaction? Let me look at that shoulder.”
“The hell with the shoulder,” I said. “Are you all right?”
She frowned slightly. “Why shouldn’t I be all right... Oh.” She looked up at me and laughed. “Heavens, have you been having an attack of conscience, or something?”
“Or something,” I said grimly.
She said, “Here. Drink your coffee and try to be sensible.”
I said, “I’m sensible as hell, now. But Dr. Tommy would have me shot, and quite justifiably, if he knew—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Dr. Stern is an idiot if he thinks... What does he think?”
“Well, I’d say seduction is the last medicine in the world he’d prescribe for this particular patient.”
“That’s what I said,” she murmured, “he’s an idiot! I’ve been married, darling. I’ve been... Well, it’s not as if I were an innocent virgin, is it? On the record, that’s the one thing in the world I’m not. Why should it hurt me to go to bed with a man I like, for a change?” She laughed. “Anyway, who seduced whom?”
I looked down at her, reflecting that things and people never seemed to tur
n out quite the way you expected, particularly people.
“You’re a shameless wench, Skinny,” I said.
“Of course,” she said calmly. “What did you think I was? All you had to do was look at the file and you’d know that after all that I had to be a shameless wench, or dead.” A little hardness had come into her voice. “Don’t worry about hurting me, darling. It’s been tried by experts, and I don’t mean just the ones in Costa Verde. I’ll tell you about my marriage sometime. It was a dilly. I’m not really fragile, you know. Just because I’m not built like a... like a brick outhouse doesn’t mean...” She stopped.
I grinned. “Here we go again.”
She laughed and said, “Honest, I wasn’t really thinking of Catherine Smith when I said that. Well, maybe I was... Eric?”
“Yes.”
“Last night I... I said a lot of silly things, didn’t I? Don’t take them seriously, please.”
I regarded her for a moment. “Sure,” I said.
She went on quickly, “I mean, we’re not going to be silly and talk a lot of nonsense about love. After all those weeks of being an animal in a cage, I was ready to... to attach myself to the first person who treated me as a human being. You don’t have to feel, well, obligated. I’ll get over it.” She gulped her coffee and glanced at her watch. “Well, I’d better get going.”
“Where?”
She looked surprised. “Why, one of us has to get over to Saguaro Heights and relieve Max, remember?”
“That’s right, I’d almost forgotten.” I hesitated. “Okay. But watch yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re probably playing us for suckers,” I said. “Catherine and Max. That’s all right. That’s what we want. For one thing, it cancels the mutual-assistance pact, and I’d much rather have the other party pull the doublecross. It’s a matter of principle. I’m a very high-principled guy. Sometimes.”
The Ambushers Page 10