Operation Breakthrough (12 page)

Washington’s main post office is just down the street from Union Station. I carried the laundry box there and filled out a label that fit into the metal frame riveted to the cover. I addressed the label to Hazel Andrews, Rancho Dolorosa, Ely, Nevada. I made out the return address the same way. Then I stepped up to the air parcel post window and paid $7.35 to mail the case.

Back in Union Station I purchased a Senator Claghorn, Virginia plantation hat and pulled it down firmly around my ears. Hair piece wearers are told not to wear hats, but this was an exception. I took a cab to National Airport, which seemed well on its way to becoming my semipermanent residence in this merry-go-round I found myself on.

I couldn’t get to Salt Lake City in time to catch the once-a-day United flight to Ely which would have put me on the ground there shortly after noon.

I settled for the 10:30
A.M
. United flight to Reno via Chicago. Then I called Hazel when I had myself ticketed. “I’m getting into Reno on the 3:35
P.M
. flight from Washington, Big Stuff,” I said to her. “How about picking me up?”

“Sure thing, Horseman,” she responded cheerfully. “How did it go?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

“That doesn’t sound as though it went very well.” Her voice was concerned.

“I’ll tell you when I see you,” I repeated and hung up.

Nobody bothered me or — so far as I could tell — even noticed me when I boarded the Reno plane.

I slept better on the westbound flight than I had the previous night. It’s a 320 mile drive between Ely and Reno, and even the way Hazel drives, it takes seven hours. I had time for a meal before she showed up at the airport. She had on her usual ranch costume of sleeveless buckskin vest, levis, and silver-conched cowboy boots. “Hi, lover,” she said and kissed me.

I waited till we were in the parking lot in her Corvette before I told her what had happened. She listened intently, her capable hands gripping the motionless steering wheel. “You mean Erikson is stuck there?” she interrupted me at one point. “Won’t his agency brass hats get him out?”

“I believe they will in time,” I answered. “But right now I’m the only one who knows where he is, and I can’t break through to let anyone know.”

“It’s the craziest thing I ever heard.” Hazel started up the Corvette and eased out of the parking lot into traffic.

I told her about the syndicate involvement and the possibility they knew where to look for Erikson. And about the laundry case I’d mailed to the ranch. The only thing I didn’t tell her was the tragedy of the scar-faced veteran in Washington. I didn’t want her upset about the syndicate’s fast reaction time.

Hazel rocketed the Corvette along Highway 80 east and turned off on Alternate 95 to Fallon. She hadn’t eaten, so we stopped for a sandwich at the casino in the center of town. Back on the road she really used that automobile. Every time I glanced across the front seat at her profile her flaming red hair was standing straight out in the breeze of our ninety-mph passage along Route 50.

At one point she passed a truck on a hill. I unclenched my hands forcibly after we got back into our own lane at a point that seemed like ten yards from the top. “Do you think Karl Erikson is in physical danger?” Hazel asked, breaking a silence that had lasted for fifty miles and seemingly not at all concerned that a lot of hardworking horsepower could have been coming from the other direction and challenged us severely.

I found I’d been avoiding her question in my own mind.

Hazel removed her eyes from the road to look at me. “Watch what the hell you’re doing, woman!” I growled, but I was aware that my irritation was more with myself than with her.

Another mile of highway buzzed past us in a blur of telephone poles that looked like a picket fence. “Not really,” I finally said in answer to her question. “Not in Nassau with British-style justice involved …”

My voice trailed off. What did I know about British-style justice? Candy Kane had already indicated to me some of the crackerbox aspects of Bahamian security. And were Bahamian officials any more immune to the payoff than their US counterparts?

The conversation lapsed again. We stopped for gas in Austin, and Hazel switched on the headlights when we started up the curving ascent leading through the first of the seven-thousand-foot passes between us and Ely. Night driving in Nevada makes me nervous. Cattle graze freely along the roadsides, and every so often one ambles into a car. Hazel drove with the blithe unconcern of a native.

It was 9:30 when we passed through Eureka with another seventy-five miles to go. We made it in a whole lot less than seventy-five minutes, Hazel slowing down just slightly on the five-mile stretch between Ruth and Ely with the Kennecott Copper Company’s open-pit mines off to the right.

She pulled into Ashworth’s Chevron Station in the center of Ely. “I want to talk to Bud about the pickup,” she explained.

“Okay,” I said, easing out of the Corvette. “I’m going to wet my whistle at Greg’s.”

Greg’s Club was a few doors up the street. I planked my butt on a bar stool and ordered Jim Beam on the rocks. Greg’s was one of the few places in town that didn’t have even a slot machine on the premises. Greg sold booze, period. He’d been selling it at the same location since 1929, having antedated Repeal by a bit. He told me once he used to sell wine from hogsheads stacked along one wall and even in that sparsely settled area he sold eight thousand gallons. When the sun beats down on Nevada valleys with nothing growing more than waist high, people develop a thirst.

Hazel came in and sat down beside me, and I ordered a grasshopper for her. “I forgot to tell you I took delivery on the plane while you were away,” she said. “I still say you shouldn’t have done it.”

“That’s me, kid,” I said. “Not even a box of chocolates in three years, then an airplane.”

Hazel had been taking flying lessons. I’d come back from New York after my last job with Erikson with a bundle of cash he hadn’t known about, and without saying anything to Hazel I’d ordered ninety-six-thousand-dollar’s worth of airplane for her, a Cessna 301 with special navigational equipment. It was a twin-engine job. Single engines make me as nervous as night driving on Nevada highways.

“You’ll have to speed up your flying lessons now, to say nothing of getting checked out in the Cessna,” I said. “How long will it take?”

“A month if there’s good flying weather every day.”

“Did you pay for it?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “Your bankroll didn’t stretch quite that far, so I pitched in the last chunk.”

She was qualified to do it. Her ranch might not have been too much by Texas standards, but it was a fair piece of property. Most of it was given over to grazing land for beef cattle. After the death of her mother Hazel had been left the original small homestead acreage, her birthplace, by her stepfather.

She’d added to it from funds acquired as the widow of Blue Shirt Charlie Andrews, the gambler who bet ‘em higher than a duck could fly, and her second husband, a saturnine man of mystery who left her the Dixie Pig, a tavern on the west coast of Florida where I’d first met her, plus stocks, bonds, and cash till she needed a money manager to keep track of things.

In other words Hazel wasn’t hurting and wasn’t about to be. When we’d first hit it off together, it had taken me a while to break her of the playful habit of leaving hundred dollar bills under my plate for walking-around money. She hated to see me broke because she was afraid I’d go back to my former pastime of robbing banks, which for years had been both vocation and avocation with me. She liked to have me with her at the ranch.

But that had been before Karl Erikson muscled his way into my life. Hazel liked Erikson and had even abetted his recruitment of me. She had managed at times to include herself in Erikson-generated situations. Her roles were intended to be peripheral, but at least once it had turned out to be a good deal more than that. I knew I was going to hear more from Hazel about Karl Erikson’s present predicament.

“Another drink?” I asked her.

She declined. We said good night to Greg and went back to the car. Hazel headed north toward her ranch situated in the higher country between Ely and McGill, the copper-smelting town that processed Kennecott’s ore.

We turned in from the highway on the dirt road, which was straight as a string for a mile and a half until we left the valley for the hills. I got out and opened the gate when we reached the fenced-in portion, closing and looping it shut again after Hazel drove the Corvette inside.

The headlights wandered along the curving road to the ranchhouse. To pick me up in Reno, Hazel had been on the road for fifteen hours, another reason I had bought her the plane. Except that the aircraft manufacturer now had my cash for a plane she was probably two months away from flying, and my bankroll consisted of what was in my pocket, not a stimulating amount.

“Let’s move it upstairs, Earl,” Hazel said when we were in the kitchen. I knew she’d had a hard day, and I was ready for bed myself. I followed her upstairs. She was standing in the middle of the floor in our bedroom when I entered. Her boots were already off, and her vest, levis, and underwear floated onto a chair. She came over to me and put her arms around my waist.

“I thought you’d be too tired,” I said.

“I’m never too tired for that, Horseman,” she said in her deep voice. “Horseman” is her pet name for me. We both go way back in wagering on the comparative speed of thoroughbred horses.

She assisted with my undressing. The feel of her hundred-and-fifty-pound, naked female body in such close proximity to mine sent exciting messages to my nerve ends. I love big women, and Hazel is big everywhere it counts, besides being in better shape than the average pro football player.

We sat down upon the edge of the bed. Four hands played a brisk duet upon two bodies. Hazel pulled me over backward on the bed, and we wrestled exuberantly, each striving to be uppermost. I pinned her finally and climbed aboard the solid platform of her firm belly.

“Make it a good one!” she murmured huskily, widening to receive me.

I wrung myself out in the effort to make it a good one. Hazel’s shrill yips in my ear testified that I was doing something right. Some nights it’s not possible to ford a dry creekbed, and then at other times everything is a wide, free-flowing river. We had antepenultimate, penultimate, and final soft explosions.

Afterward Hazel extracted two cigarettes from a pack on the night table, lit them, and handed me one. We were side by side on the bed on our backs. “When are we going to Nassau to get Erikson out of that jail?” she said to me.

“When are we WHAT?” I said it so vehemently I blew a shower of sparks from my cigarette. We both batted at them furiously to keep the bed from catching fire. “What the hell did you say?”

“You know you can’t leave him there,” Hazel said calmly. “If you can’t get anyone in Washington to act, that leaves you.”

“The hell it does. I played it by the book. I lugged that damn briefcase all over Washington trying to put it into the right hands and my story into the right ears. I told you what happened.”

But Hazel has a one-track mind. In all respects. “If no one in Washington is going to help, what would it take to free him?”

“Why do you keep harping on this?” I demanded.

“Because I know you, Horseman. In a few days you’ll be sneaking up behind me and mumbling, ‘Look, dear, there’s this little bit of unfinished business in Nassau, and — well — see you later.’ ” Hazel bounded from her back to her knees and glared down at me. “And I won’t have you running out on me. We’re going together.”

“I’m not going anywhere, baby. I’ve been the route on that damned island, and there’s no future in it. Although if I could just think of something that promised to have a chance of — ”

“See?” she exclaimed triumphantly. “What did I tell you?”

“Forget it,” I said.

“What would it take to get him out? Really?”

“If Candy was leveling with me, not too much to spring him from the jail. But getting off New Providence would be another sack of spuds. Even a spook plane would have a hard time getting in and out of there again after the commotion I caused when I blew the scene.”

“You’d think the government would do something for him after all he’s done for them,” Hazel said in a resentful tone.

“Everyone in the damn government is in a conspiracy to keep me from letting the right people know. That’s the problem.”

“What about this man McLaren in New York?”

“I told you I’ve already tried that. His wife wouldn’t give me any information and neither would the Treasury Department.”

“Suppose I called Mrs. McLaren right now and said I was from Commander Erikson’s office?”

I hesitated. “I don’t think it would work.”

“Do you still have the McLaren phone number?”

“The part of the page I tore from the phone directory is still in my wallet.” Hazel slithered from the bed and padded to my pants on the floor. “Have you forgotten it’s well after midnight there?”

“All the better. It will sound like a real emergency.” She was going through my wallet. “What happened to your money?”

“I buried it at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Don’t be so damned nosy.”

Hazel sniffed. She came back to the bed, large as life and twice as nude, and picked up the phone. “Person-to-person to Mrs. Albert McLaren in Arlington, Virginia,” she said and gave the number.

There was a long silence. “It won’t work,” I said. “There must be some sort of code call-in used. There’d have to be.”

“That’s why hitting her fast this time of night before she gets her brain in gear might pay off,” Hazel said coolly. “If — ” She stopped speaking. From where I was on the bed I could hear the sleepy-sounding “Hello?” from the receiver. I scrambled up and shoved in alongside Hazel who canted the receiver so I could hear, too.

“Sorry to bother you this time of night, Mrs. McLaren,” Hazel’s rich, confident-sounding contralto rolled across the miles. “I’m calling from Commander Erikson’s office, and it’s urgent that we speak to your husband immediately.”