Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14

by The Intriguers (v1. 1)

  "If there's any kind of a road leading into that clump of trees to the left, take it," I said.

  "Right there. . . . What's the matter?"

  She had slammed on the brakes an instant after turning into the trees, throwing me off balance. "There's a car hidden in there already! What do I do, Matt?"

  "Sit tight. I'll go take a look."

  I was dropping out of the sedan on the off side as I spoke. I slipped around the rear with my revolver ready, and made my approach cautiously, working from tree to tree. The vehicle had been backed into a clump of brush to hide it. To call it a car was an exaggeration. It was a Ford panel delivery truck, and not much of a truck at that.

  It was well over ten years old, and it had led a hard life. Black paint had been sloshed over it when the original pigment expired. The battered Kentucky license plate was held in place with rusty baling wire. However, the headlights were clean and intact and the tires were new.

  There was nobody inside.

  I made sure of this, and frowned at the interior. The upholstery of the front seat had worn out and the owner had arranged a folded blanket to sit on, driving. There were other blankets, and some pots and pans, in the rear. Apparently he'd been sleeping in the truck and doing his own cooking. The doors were locked and I let them stay that way. I opened the hood instead, and looked at the large and fairly new V8 motor inside. The original mill had probably been a six and considerably less powerful.

  I stood there for a moment, considering. Maybe my gamble was paying off. An automotive relic with new tires, good lights, and a muscular replacement power plant in good condition could easily be Carl's idea of camouflage. With that license, the vehicle certainly didn't belong to a local squirrel hunter, even if the Oklahoma squirrel season was open this time of year, which I doubted. I waved to Martha to drive up.

  "What is it?" she asked through the open window of the sedan. "I mean, whose is it? Carl's?"

  "Maybe," I said. "I certainly hope so. It would save us a lot of time and cleverness-assuming I can sneak up on him up there on the ridge without getting shot. You stay here. If somebody comes, particularly somebody with a uniform, you're sound asleep. When they wake you, you say you got tired of driving and turned off the highway to find a quiet place to take a nap. You don't know anything about the truck. It was here when you got here. You thought it was just an abandoned wreck. While you're resting, you can figure out a plausible story to explain why you rented a car in Texas and drove it into Oklahoma. Good luck."

  As I started to turn away, she said, "Matt."

  "Yes?" I said over my shoulder.

  "No, come back here a minute. This is important."

  I turned back. "Shoot. But make it snappy, please."

  Her face was very serious, looking up at me from the car window. The heavy, dark eyebrows made a startling, but somehow not unbelievable, contrast with the long shining hair.

  "I've helped you," she said. "Haven't I? I put on this masquerade for you, and drove the car for you. Didn't I?"

  "You helped," I said.

  "Then you've got to tell me something."

  "What?"

  She licked her lips. "You've got to tell me that you're going to stop it. You're not going to let him kill him. Otherwise . . . Otherwise I'm going to have to go to him and warn him."

  There were some confused pronouns in that, but the meaning was clear enough. I studied her face for a moment longer. "Just what is this thing you have for cops, anyway, Borden?" I asked.

  "I don't have a thing for cops! I just have a thing for for human beings!"

  "Only sheriff-type human beings. Not Carl-type human beings."

  She said sharply, "That's just the point! Your friend Carl is not a human being any longer. He's a machine, a ruthless vengeance-machine. You've got to promise to stop him."

  I drew a long breath. "Sure. I'll do my best to stop him. Hell, that's what I'm here for. Keep your fingers crossed."

  I turned away, wishing I was leaving behind me a good, reliable agent like Lorna-if I had to have somebody along. At the moment, operating alone, with nobody's temperament to consider but my own, seemed very desirable. Maybe I could talk Mae into giving me an assignment all by myself next time out, if there was a next time out.

  It wasn't bad stalking country. The brush was pretty thick, but it wasn't dry and crackly; and the ground was reasonably soft. There was plenty of cover. Moving quietly and staying out of sight was no problem at all. Picking the easiest and most silent route, I kept finding tracks in the ground ahead of me: heavy work shoes, considerably worn. Well, Carl was pretty good about detail. Footgear like that would match the truck below. He'd been brought up on a farm, I remembered, and was pretty good outdoors, unlike some of our city-bred agents who are hell in streets and alleys but tend to get lost in a forty-acre pasture.

  The thought made me careful. I remembered the ultimatum Carl was supposed to have delivered, to the effect that anybody Mac sent after him wouldn't come hack. It sounded like Carl. He hadn't actually been speaking to Mac when he said it, of course, but he didn't know that. He did know me, however. If his mood was still the same, he'd undoubtedly jump to the wrong conclusion and try to blow my head off the instant he saw me, unless I arranged to prevent it somehow.

  I made the last hundred yards on my belly, an inch at a time, and there he was. At least there was somebody in the brush to my left. I could make out the vague shape of a man. He was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes; it was the slight movement he'd made to focus that had drawn my attention. Lying beside him was some kind of a rifle I couldn't make out clearly.

  Very cautiously, I worked my way up to where I could see the blacktop highway half a mile away, and the ticky-tacky urban blight off to the left, and the farm dead ahead just as Martha had described it except that a blue Volkswagen and a white official sedan with a buggy-whip antenna were standing in the yard along with the Cadillac sedan she'd mentioned. A short, heavy man was just getting out of the radio-equipped car. He wore a big white hat and an ivory-handled revolver-well, at that distance, it could have been white plastic or adhesive tape. A thin, tall woman in jeans and a short-sleeved white blouse was speaking to him as he got out.

  I lost the rest of the scene. The man just down the ridge had caught my attention once more, raising his head from the glasses, perhaps to rest his eyes. He wasn't Carl.

  Chapter XV

  He was, it turned out, a slight and skinny older man, somewhere in his sixties, with a gaunt country face-a mountain face, rather-stubbled with gray beard. His hair was also gray, rather thin and wispy beneath the ancient felt hat that fell off when I jumped him from behind. He was stronger than I'd expected, all wire and whipcord, and it was a good thing I hadn't missed my grip or he'd have given me real trouble despite the difference in our ages. As it was, he managed to get me once on the shin with the heel of his heavy shoe, before I could apply pressure properly and put him out.

  I laid him down, rubbed my shin, and took inventory. First I checked that the brief flurry of action on the ridge had attracted no attention at the house half a mile away. Then I massaged my shin some more, and looked down at the man who had kicked it. In addition to the lethal, high-laced shoes and the now-misplaced hat, he was dressed in overall pants, a gray work shirt, and the dark coat of an old suit, frayed at wrists and elbows. The 'rifle beside him was a .300 Savage Model 99, perhaps the best of the old lever actions, although the Winchester was the one that got all the glory. This specimen was so old that the bluing had worn off all the metal parts, leaving them silvery, and no finish remained on the stock, but the bore was clean and seemed to be in good condition. His optical equipment was an ancient pair of field glasses that could have gone to war with Robert E. Lee or maybe Ulysses S. Grant.

  I found some keys on him, a pair of rimless glasses in a hard case, a small plastic container of unidentified pills, a blue bandana handkerchief, some loose change, and a two-bladed pocket knife with the stag handle worn quite smo
oth. There was also a wallet containing a driver's license made out to Harvey Bascomb Hollingshead, 72, of Bascomb, Kentucky. I sighed, looking down at the thin, stubborn old face. I'd missed the age by a few years. I rubbed my shin once more. For a septuagenarian, he kicked hard.

  I tied his wrists with his belt and his ankles with mine, used his handkerchief to gag him, and slung him over my back. Well, I'd like to be able to say it was as easy as that. Actually, slight as he was, he made a heavy and unwieldy load, and I was out of practice and maybe a little out of condition. Swimming and fishing in Mexico with attractive blonde company isn't the best preparation for heavy backpacking.

  It took me three tries to get him up; and then I thought I'd end up in the coronary ward before I managed to transport him through the brush to the grove of trees in which Martha was waiting. I didn't take him all the way to the car, however. I didn't dare leave him alone with the girl. Her unpredictable humanitarian impulses might well cause her to revive him and turn him loose. Having labored hard over this warm body, I had no intention of losing it.

  I hid the old man in a ditch, therefore, and went back up the hill for the rifle and glasses I hadn't been able to manage on my first trip. I also remembered to pick up the fallen hat. Martha wasn't very good about obeying orders. When she heard me coming, instead of playing possum as instructed, she jumped out of the rental car and ran to meet me.

  "Mart, what have you been doing all this time? I've been going out of my mind worrying....What's that'?"

  "Spoils of war," I said, moving past her to lay the stuff on the hood of the car.

  "So you got him." Her voice was suddenly flat. "Did you.. . did you have to hurt him?"

  I glanced at her sharply, but she was quite sincere, and quite oblivious to the fact that the man whose health she was now worrying about was a man whom she'd recently been denouncing as totally non-human.

  "I got something," I said. I fished out the ring of keys I'd confiscated and handed them to her. "Find the right one and open up the back door of this ancient hearse, will you, while I bring it in."

  She had the doors open by the time I came staggering up with my bound prisoner. I dumped him into the rear of his vehicle, not too gently. I was getting tired of lugging him around, and my shin still hurt. Martha stared at him.

  "But that old man isn't. . . That can't be the Carl you've been telling me about!"

  "You're so right," I said. "He can't be. Get that gear from the hood and toss it in here, will you? Don't be seared of the gun. I've got the cartridges in my pocket." While she was gone, I checked the bandana gag to make sure it wasn't too tight. To hell with his wrists and ankles. I didn't want to strangle him, but gangrene didn't worry me. He could do a lot of talking before he died of gangrene. As I've said, I was a little tired of the old gent, and he was a complication I didn't appreciate. "Okay, you drive the Chevy; I'll handle this wreck," I said as Martha put the rifle, hat, and glasses beside the old man. "Follow me, but stay well back so it won't look too much as if we're together. Hold it!"

  We stood motionless, listening, as a car drove by on the dirt road, but it went on without slowing or stopping. Martha was looking down at the unconscious captive.

  "But.. . but who is he?"

  "Miss Borden," I said, "allow me to present Mr. Hollingshead, of Bascomb, Kentucky."

  "Hollingshead?" She frowned briefly. "Hollingshead! That was the name of one of the students who . . . Dubuque, Hollingshead, and Janssen."

  "Right," I said. "Apparently, Mr. Hollingshead is another of those perverted oddball characters you object to so strongly, who resent having their kids shot. At least I can't think of any other motive that would bring him clear from Kentucky and put him on the ridge above the sheriff's house with a loaded rifle."

  She didn't respond to my sarcasm. She just said: "But haven't you got him tied awfully tightly, Matt? Those straps look as if they're cutting off the circulation."

  I stared at her, a little awed. She was so consistently inconsistent it approached true genius.

  I said, "Sweetheart, what in the world are you worrying about? By your own definition, that's not a human being lying there. That's just another vengeance-machine. Who cares about its lousy circulation?"

  "Damn you, Matthew Helm.. . ."

  She glared at me, swung away, and marched over to the white sedan, her long, phony hair and the brief, crisp pleats of her skirt bouncing indignantly in unison. The car door slammed, and the engine started with a roar. I got the old truck going without any trouble. Half an hour later we were a safe distance, I hoped, from Fort Adams and its burly sheriff. We were parked beside a dim wheel-track across the open prairie, in a kind of fold of land that hid us from the highway a few hundred yards away. I went back, opened the rear of the truck, and saw that my passenger's eyes were open. I turned to Martha, who'd come over, and drew her aside to where the old man couldn't see or hear us.

  "There are two ways of doing this," I said. "I can trick him into talking, maybe, or I can try to force him to talk. It's up to you."

  "What do you mean?"

  I said, "If you don't play along with the lies I'm going to tell, I'll have to get rough. The choice is yours. Cooperate, or watch me go into my Inquisition routine. I'm real good at twisting arms and pulling fingernails, if I do say so myself."

  She hesitated. "All right," she said reluctantly, after a moment. "All right, Matt. I'll play along as well as I can."

  I went to the truck and untied and ungagged Mr. Hollingshead. I put my belt back where it belonged, and moved my short-barreled revolver from a pocket to its home in front of my left hip, now that there was something to hold it there once more. It took a little while for speech and circulation to return to the old gent, but it took him no time at all, after he'd managed to sit up, to spot the location of his lever-action rifle.

  I saw his eyes flick that way and back to me. I reached into my pocket and brought out a handful of .300 Savage cartridges and showed them to him. He nodded slightly and paid no more attention to the rifle. I saw perspiration appear on his forehead as the blood started working its way back into the constricted areas. At last he licked his lips and spoke.

  "Help me stand up, Sonny." A look of faint amusement came into his faded blue eyes as I hesitated. "What's the matter, you afraid of a feeble old man teetering on the edge of the eternal grave?"

  "Feeble old man, hell," I said. "You forget, Gramps we wrestled a little. I've got a big bruise to show for it. I don't want any more."

  "You slipped up on me real nice there," Hollingshead said. "And that was some kind of a fancy wrestling lock you put on me. What's your name, Sonny?"

  "Janssen," I said. "Anders Janssen."

  Martha did fine. Maybe she gave a slight start, but I didn't think it was enough for the old man to notice, particularly since his attention was all on me.

  "Janssen, eh?" Hollingshead worked his dry lips together and spat. "Well, that figures, I guess. You live in Washington, don't you? I was thinking of getting in touch with you, but Indiana was more on my way, heading west. Indiana, and a man named Roger Dubuque, if you want to call that a man."

  "What's wrong with Roger Dubuque?" I asked.

  "What's wrong with a white-faced city feller that's real embarrassed-shamed and embarrassed-because his boy's been killed by the police? Not heartbroken, mind you, not angry, just embarrassed and afraid of what all his city neighbors might be thinking. He had no idea of taking any action, not he. I told him that down our way, if the constable can't handle a kid with a rock without shooting him to death, we kick him the hell out and get a new constable who knows his business. It made no difference to that city man. He had half a mind to curry favor with the police by giving them my name, he did, but I talked him out of that."

  I grinned. "Just how did you talk him out of it, Mr. Hollingshead?"

  The old gent smiled thinly. It wasn't a very nice smile. "Why, I told him that no matter how long they put me in prison for, I'd manage to live long en
ough to come back and shoot hell out of him. He scared easy."

  "I'll bet," I said.

  "It made me leery of you, Sonny, being as you lived in the city, too. Maybe I misjudged you. When I got here, I soon found somebody else was working along the lines I had in mind. That you?"

  "That's me," I lied.

  Hollingshead nodded slowly. "Well, I can't say I hold with them foreign methods using slip-nooses and all. A gun's always been good enough for us Hollingsheads and Bascombs, but maybe I'm being finicky. Anyway, it seems to me you've had your fun, Sonny. Why not go home now and leave that child-murdering bastard of a sheriff to me? I'll take care of him for both of us."

  "How?" I said. "You're not going to make a .300 Savage shoot half a mile no matter how hot you load it; and that old gun of yours hasn't even got a scope on it."

  "The day I clutter up a good rifle with a lot of glass will be the day they bury me. Give me a hand, will you? The old legs aren't what they used to be, and you didn't do them a damn bit of good. . . . Ahhh." He stood for a moment, stamping his feet cautiously. Then he spoke as if there had been no interruption: "Wasn't going to take him from that ridge, Sonny. There's other places. . . . The boy didn't come home from school. You know anything about that?"

  "I might," I said, and it wasn't entirely a lie, this time.

  "The older girl's married and moved away. The younger one drives that little blue foreign car to her high school. Sheriff, he made some money selling land to that development next door, and seems like first thing he did with it was buy new cars for everybody. The boy's about ten. He rides the school bus. Generally he's home by four o'clock. Today he didn't get off with the other youngsters, at the corner. The woman, she flagged the bus down and talked to the driver. Then she ran into the house. Ten minutes later, sheriff comes driving up with his tires on fire, and that's when you jumped me. I don't know as I care for the idea of using a man's younguns against him, Janssen, if that's what's in your mind." I didn't say anything. After a moment, Hollingshead shrugged his thin shoulders, dismissing the subject. He looked towards Martha. "Who's she?"