Azrael (15 page)

“How very E. Phillips Oppenheim,” Trotter said.

“Who?”

“Never mind.” Trotter untied the tape and opened the folder. “Did you look at this?”

“No. I had no instructions.”

“Okay, instructions. Anything that comes through Rines, you should read. If I trust you with the questions, Rines can damn well trust you with the answers. Anything that’s too delicate for you to hear will come to me by a different route.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s not only the way I want it, it’s the way we’ve got to do it. I could wind up disagreeing with something that eats me in this thing, and you’ll have to brief whoever comes next.”

Trotter had been reading all the time he’d been talking, a skill Albright would like to develop. Trotter handed him the first page; Albright took it and read.

It was a report on suspected Russian and Eastern Bloc infiltrations of the area within a two-hundred-mile radius of Kirkester.

“Five of them,” Albright said.

“That’s just the number they suspect,” Trotter told him. “Figure seven or ten.”

“How the hell do you know this?”

Trotter smiled. “This your first counterespionage assignment?”

“Until you opened your mouth just now, I wasn’t even sure
this
was a counterespionage assignment. But yes, I’m usually working drug-related stuff. The West Coast is lousy with Mexican drugs, lately.”

“You use informants, don’t you?” Albright nodded. “Us too,” Trotter said.

“I have been trained, you know. I
know
you get told by somebody. I was wondering what
kind
of somebody.”

“Lovers of freedom.” Albright wanted to laugh, but Trotter cut him off. “I’m not joking. These people sit in the middle of it and smuggle these things out at the risk of death, ‘mental care,’ or life imprisonment. What happens when the Bureau catches a spy? He gets a couple of years in jail, then the Russians trade him for some poor innocent schmuck they pull off the street.”

“And that’s why you don’t tell us about these foreign guys sneaking in.”

“That, and for what we can learn from them.”

This, Albright reflected, was one weird conversation. The words were about stuff so basic, it was almost embarrassing. Yet once he’d started the conversation off, he got the feeling that Trotter really wanted to go on with it. Not so much for content or anything, but to sublimate some kind of strong emotion he was embarrassed to say out loud.

Trotter went on talking. “If you pull them in, we don’t learn anything.”

“Whoever
we
are.”

“Albright, you don’t want to know.”

“No, I certainly do not. Even now, I get an occasional twinge I’m finding out too much. Still, you do seem to have a flexibility about what you want to do to get things done. The rules fit a little tight around the collar sometimes.”

“Don’t complain about the rules. One of the miracles of this country is that we can have things as good as they are with ninety-nine point nine percent of the government sticking to the rules.”

“That much?”

“Make it seventy-five percent, and we’re still doing better than anyplace else I can think of.”

Trotter finished looking at the report. “Four Russians, one Czech,” he said.

“So?”

“No Bulgarians. Bulgarians are the Russians’ favorite killers. They specialize in it. They like it.”

“You say there’s two to five guys they didn’t hear about.”

“True. But I doubt there’s any Bulgarians there, either. They don’t need any journeyman killers on this trip. They’ve got an ace.

“I’ll say. And what are we gonna do with him when we catch him? There’s not a damn bit of evidence that these even were murders.”

Trotter smiled at him, something halfway between sad and cynical. “Keep playing by the rules, Joe,” he said.

Trotter thanked him for the hospitality, asked him to try to hurry Rines up on those background reports he was supposed to be getting.

Albright was tempted to ask him if there were any in particular he was interested in, but he fought it down. He already felt childish and unsophisticated. He didn’t want to see that damn smile again.

They shook hands; Trotter left. Albright sat and thought about what he could do for his country. The only thing he could come up with was to get closer to Tina Bloyd, a pleasant assignment if there ever was one.

He was working on ways and means when he heard the shots.

I
F IT HAD BEEN
August instead of October, Trotter would already be dead. In the summer, people stay out later, television sets blare through open windows. Insects and the birds that eat them fill the air with their cries. The soft click of the hammer of a .38 being cocked would get lost against all the other sound.

In the chilly nights of autumn, people stay indoors with their windows closed. The bugs are dead or sleeping, and the birds have migrated to warmer places. A man who’s heard the gun noise before will hear it now and recognize it. He’ll drop to the macadam of the road and let the bullet spiderweb the window of the door he’d been about to open.

Times like this sometimes made Trotter want to reconsider his policy about carrying a weapon. Generally, when he carried a gun, he found himself constantly
thinking
about it, as if it were a boil that had come to a head, and that he was tempted to squeeze for the explosion. He would catch himself not listening to people because he was thinking about the gun. He had decided long ago that he would only arm himself when he thought there was a definite possibility he’d have to kill someone before he got back home.

It was a decision he’d been happy with, but it had the flaw of making no allowance for times when bullets came at you out of the dark.

Trotter was off the ground again in a second, scrambling around the front of the car. He wanted to get the mass of it between him and whoever that was behind the tree across the street. He couldn’t really see anything—it was a big tree, and the street lighting in this part of town was nonexistent.

Trotter didn’t mind the dark. It was the one thing he had working for him. He crouched behind the left front tire and took big, silent breaths while he sized things up.

He heard no footsteps, which made sense. His playmate across the road had no way of knowing Trotter was unarmed. It would, unfortunately, occur to him eventually, and he would gather his courage and come look, and shoot Trotter dead.

It would do no good to try to get into the car from the passenger side. No matter how quickly he got in and started the motor, he couldn’t keep the dome light from giving him away, and he couldn’t drive off in less time than it would take a man to get close and kill him.

So he had to run. The idea was to do it in the way that gave him the best chance for survival. The destination was easy—back toward Albright Salvage/Reclamation. Better to be running toward help than away from it. The whole neighborhood would have heard the shot, but, Trotter knew, they’d chalk it up to a car’s backfire or something. To most Americans a gunshot was that dynamite-bomb-in-an-echo-chamber effect they dubbed in for movies or television shows. Joe Albright, though, would recognize the sound for what it was, and he’d come to investigate.

Trotter had about eight yards to go before he could reach the corner of Wilvoys Road, and for the whole distance he’d be naked to gunfire. There wasn’t much he could do to hide, either. The light was bad, but it wasn’t
that
bad.

In front of him was the car, and in front of that was a man with a gun. To either side was bare sidewalk. He might dive for it and scramble behind the next tree, but behind the tree, he’d have all the same problems he had now.

Behind him was a privet hedge. It was a tall privet hedge, as tall as Trotter himself. He could get over it, but he couldn’t do it without letting the man with the gun know what he was up to. It
might
not matter. Even if it did, it was the only chance he had.

Still in his crouch, Trotter turned quietly until he had his back to the car. He planted his left foot against the tire and brought his right knee up to his chest in a classic sprinter’s stance. He was sizing up distances and guessing the effort required when he heard footsteps crossing the road. That was enough; no starting gun was needed. Trotter exploded toward the hedge. About five feet away from it, he launched himself into the air at a forty-five-degree angle, exactly as if he thought he was Superman and could simply fly away from his troubles.

He was in the air before he thought of Cyclone fences. People often grew privet hedges around Cyclone fences—the fence for security, the hedge for looks. There hadn’t been enough light to inspect this particular hedge, but if there was a metal fence in the middle of it, Trotter was in big trouble.

Because to get to the other side of a privet hedge, it is not necessary to jump clean
over
it. All you’ve got to do is jump high enough to hit it with your body below your rib cage, let your weight and momentum bend the hedge under you, and lower you softly to the ground on the other side.

If there is a Cyclone fence, or anything unyielding in the middle, you will rupture your liver.

Trotter was in luck. Not only did he encounter nothing unyielding, he also missed the ancient Sears Roebuck J. C. Higgins Flightliner bicycle someone had left to rust away in the front yard of the boarded-up house the hedge had been guarding the privacy of.

It would probably take a few seconds before the man with the gun decided to follow him. Trotter decided to invest a little of the time moving the bicycle so that it rested right on the place the hedge had left him. Trotter took off around the house. The grass was tall and made for slow running, but at least it was quiet. Once he had the corner of the building between him and his pursuer, he’d be hard to catch.

As he reached the shelter of the side of the house, Trotter smiled as he heard the jangle of metal, and curses mingled with grunts of pain. That would teach the bastard to take the easy way over a hedge—from now on, let him bend his own bushes.

The hedge ran around the entire lot, so Trotter had to do his trick again. This time, though, he deposited himself neatly on top of a metal trash barrel filled with empty oil cans. Albright’s neighbor, the garage. He’d forgotten.

The noise was astounding.

And that will teach
me,
Trotter thought, not to be overconfident. He could hear his father’s voice—“Keep alert, son. It might take the other fellow a while to realize you’ve turned the tables on him.”

Trotter had smashed his foot against the rim of the barrel. He wasn’t doing much more running, at least on that foot. He’d have to stand and fight. Or crouch and fight, or crawl and fight. “Fight” was the operative word.

By now, the pursuer would know Trotter had no gun. He would also remember the bicycle trick.
All right,
Trotter told himself,
enough about your disadvantages. What have you got going for you?

Well, for one thing, he wouldn’t know about the sore foot. And he might not know about Joe Albright, who would be coming to the rescue any minute now.

Trotter hoped.

Another possible advantage Trotter could see was that while the man with the gun would know that among pieces of cars and scrap metal there’d be something Trotter could use as a weapon, he wouldn’t think there would be anything that could be effective long-distance.

Trotter knew better. He limped around to a few cars and armed himself. He was glad the owner of the garage did not keep a dog.

Trotter heard the rustling of the hedge before he was ready. He’d meant to get a lot more stuff, but he’d have to be content with two hubcaps and a car antenna. He dragged his foot to cover as quickly as he could.

And here I am again, he thought, crouched down behind an automobile, waiting for a man with a gun.

Who had, as Trotter guessed, wised up since last time. He was going through the hedge the hard way, walking his way through by main strength. Trotter had hoped that might be what he’d try.

The hedge stopped rustling; there was a dull clang as a piece of metal got kicked into the garbage can, then silence.

Trotter pulled the radio aerial out to about half its length, and held it in his left hand. With his right, he grabbed one of the hubcaps by the rim, concave side toward his body. He was all set, assuming his pursuer passed Trotter’s hiding place to the right.

It was a fifty-fifty chance, but Trotter had learned that the way to stay alive in this business was to figure out a way to adjust the odds. It frequently didn’t take much. In this case, it took a pebble. Trotter put the aerial down for a second, picked up a pebble, and threw it across his body, where it pinged against the door panel of another car.

Trotter backed a few feet away from his hiding place, to give himself room to move. The man with the gun smelled the kill, now. He let his footsteps crunch the gravel. He might as well have been yelling out coordinates.

The gun appeared first, followed by a black sleeve. If Trotter’d known that was how it was going to happen, he would have forgotten the hubcaps completely and held the antenna in his favored hand. Still, he’d made his plan, and was stuck with it.

But the pursuer wasn’t cooperating. He just stood there, gun and disembodied arm. The temptation to switch hands and lash at the wrist was enormous, but Trotter resisted it. He didn’t dare breathe, he didn’t dare
move
until he made
the
move, the one that would decide whether he was going to live or merely go down fighting.

The waiting went on forever—about twenty seconds of objective time. Trotter couldn’t take much more of it. Forget mental pressure. He was crouching on a painfully twisted ankle, and he was going to have to stand up soon or collapse altogether.

To hell with it, Trotter thought. He screamed, very loud.

The pursuer became a victim of his own professionalism. Since he knew Trotter had no gun, he wanted to make sure of a clear shot. He stepped around the front of the car, put both hands on the gun, bent his knees and fired. But by the time he pulled the trigger, Trotter had already Frisbeed the hubcap into his stomach, and the bullet plowed harmlessly into the gravel.