The By-Pass Control (23 page)

Charlie Corbinet sat back in his chair, crossed his arms with that old familiar gesture and looked at me across the shadows. “Randolph kept the pressure on Doug Hamilton’s secretary. She began remembering things. Some fast footwork dug out a few facts that may or may not have a bearing on the case.”

“Like what?”

“Like he was efficient but not clean all the way. It looks like he had a sideline of blackmail going for him. Not too big, but not too little either. In checking out the backgrounds of potential employees he ran into some odd arrangements involving people in the upper brackets who scorned our capitalistic system and took up with ultra-liberal types for lack of something better to do. He put it to his own use. Most of them were the student types with sneakers and beards who should have known better, but you know this younger generation. Anything for a kick, anything to show their own self-importance and to break loose in an orgy of self-indulgence.”

“Little bastards. They need a hitch in the Army and some time laying face down in the mud while the ones they admire try to take their hides off. All the guts they’ve got is to wave placards and wear hair like the girls. Their grandfathers fought Indians and built this country out of the bare dirt and the only kind they ever see is under their fingernails.”

“So be it.”

“They don’t inherit over
my
dead body, Charlie.”

“Nor mine. Like you said, there are still some of us left. Doug made money out of it.”

“But how does it stand here?”

“I don’t know. It may not mean a thing.”

“Maybe it does.”

“Then figure it out.” His eyes came to meet mine, half closed in an attitude of study. He was trying to read me again and annoyed with himself because he couldn’t do it. Lightning swept through the night again, a bright swelling light with a strange tremor to it, lasting a few seconds before fading out. We both waited until the thunder came on, slowly at first, then with a dramatic crash of sound that burst directly overhead.

“I’ll be waiting,” he told me at last.

“You’ll know when,” I said. He nodded and turned back to the TV set deliberately ignoring me the way he used to do when he was finished explaining. I opened the door, backed out after checking around me and walked to the car. The rain laughed and rumbled deep in its throat, slackening long enough for me to get in before clawing at the windows again.

When I reached the highway there was a casual roadblock at the intersection, four patrolmen inspecting licenses of passing vehicles and going through the backs of trucks. I saw it in time, swerved into an empty driveway, waited a while, then backed up and took a route that led me around them. At a diner a mile north I had coffee and a sandwich beside a pair of truckers who bitched about being stopped and having to shift cargo in the middle of the night and rain for no apparent reason at all. When I finished I picked up my change, told the counterman good night and left.

But you could feel the
thing
in the air. Impending action. Coffeyville waiting for the Dalton gang to pull the raid. Too many cars cruising. Too many people where there shouldn’t have been any. Too many cars parked where the sweep of headlights could pick up the outlines of men sitting waiting for a call. The sky was cooperating and a dead man on the floor a short drive away said it all.

The
thing
was there.

It was coming.

Or was it here already?

A family of tourists was disgorging itself from an overloaded station wagon at the motel when I got there, two small children squalling in protest at being disturbed, two others dragging themselves behind their father who had driven too far and wasn’t in a mood for arguing. A woman stood at the door of the wagon, holding it open until a white poodle jumped out, cringing at the rain before making a dash for the shelter of the roof of the building. Down further a white Jaguar and a pickup truck were nestled in their ports, lights on in the rooms.

I switched the lights off and drove to my own complex and cut the engine. Behind the drawn curtains of Camille’s room a pale yellow line of light showed through the break in the drapes. I tried the door and it swung open easily.

Camille was lying in bed, the night light on beside her, the covers rising and falling with her breathing. I watched her a minute until she coughed in her sleep, turned on the pillow and rubbed at her nose with the back of her hand. She sneezed once, almost awakened, then squirmed back to her original position and relaxed. I adjusted the catch on the knob and pulled the door shut, then went next door to my own room.

Automatically, I felt for the thread I had left caught in the door. Nothing was there. I had the .45 in my hand without realizing it, knowing it was too late to back off without alerting the one who was waiting inside. Two windows led off the room, one to the back, the other to the side, and if I didn’t make an entrance he could be gone if he had planned it right.

I put the key in the lock, turned it and shoved the door open as I stepped aside waiting for the muzzle blast that would locate my target.

Captain Hardecker laughed in the darkness and said, “Don’t be touchy, Mr. Mann. It’s only me.”

“Show a light.”

A lamp clicked and illuminated the room with an unreal reddish cast. Hardecker was propped up in a wooden chair tilted back against the wall, his feet on the side of the bed.

“That’s a good way to get yourself killed,” I said.

“We all take chances in this business.”

“How did you locate me?”

“No sweat. I’m local, remember. A few diligent calls, a few out of my jurisdiction like here, and we got complete cooperation. I further instructed my friend at the desk not to inform anyone else of your whereabouts.”

“Why?”

“I told you. I like you. You scare me. I want to know what’s happening in my own back yard. The city is full of Feds and I’m out in the cold. Nobody seems to want our services and I’m getting curiouser by the minute.”

“About what?”

“Let’s say a guy shot with a .22 Magnum nobody bothered to report.”

“Somebody did apparently.”

“A good citizen thought something funny was going on in a darkened house when three people cam out, got in their automobiles, and drove away. A phone call brought a prowl car, then me. The dead man was a narcotic, addict. There were no prints on the door knobs, walls, light switches and any other normal places. Tracks on the floor had been wiped clean.”

“Who made the call?”

“Unidentified male who didn’t want to get involved. Most calls are like that when they mean anything.”

“Nice. Now what?”

“You’re not thinking fast, Mr. Mann. I said I was out of my jurisdiction. I’m just curious.”

“I didn’t see any cars outside.”

“My driver dropped me off. He’ll stop by later to pick me up. I don’t want to interfere with your program.”

“You’re bugging me, Captain.”

“I had hoped to.”

“So tell me the real reason for the visit.”

His smile was a hard thing that started at the comer of his mouth and gradually drifted across his face. “I checked on you,” he said. “The report was extremely interesting. The available information on you was pretty livid. I’m surprised you’re still alive and operating out in the open.”

“Maybe I don’t give a damn any more.”

“It isn’t that,” Hardecker said. “It’s the necessity, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps.”

“It excited me. I don’t usually get excited.”

“Never pays.”

Hardecker paused, looked at me, and let the smile stretch wider. It was damn near impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“One of my men came up with something,” he said.

I waited.

“He has a photographic memory.”

“Good for him,” I said.

There was a dark depth behind his eyes watching for my reaction. “He remembered Helen Lewis. He had seen her twice with our piecemeal man named Henri Frank. Later he saw her with Louis Agrounsky. I thought you may find a connection.”

“I have.”

“So?”

“She’s a Soviet agent who rented a place in Sarasota and never used it except as a temporary address in case of a check.”

Hardecker let his smile drift away gradually. “They have a fine network, haven’t they?”

I didn’t say anything. He had put some of the pieces together himself and knew what he was talking about. He said, “You won’t find the Lewis woman. She’s one of the unidentifiables. Ordinary, medium, no outstanding characteristics, no record we know about. One in the crowd, the way they pick them. They can appear and disappear and nobody knows the difference. Just a person.”

“She’ll show,” I said. “They all do, eventually.”

“They’re smart.”

“Wrong, buddy. If they were, they wouldn’t be on that side.” He rubbed his hands along his legs and stretched, the deep yawn filling his chest to barrel size. “But if they have the edge somehow it will be worth it to them, won’t it?”

I shook my head. “Never.”

Captain Hardecker got up as if he were tired, but it was only a pose that could trap you if you weren’t careful. He hitched the gun up at his belt and looked at his watch. “Maybe for ... let’s say a day ... we’ll keep the killing of Beezo McCauley a local affair. After that, well ... we’ll see.”

He walked to the door and stood there beside me a few seconds. I said, “Why, Captain?”

“There are still some of us left,” he told me.

The words were very familiar.

I closed the door after him, switched out the light and watched him walk across the gravel to the street and stand there ignoring the rain until a car drove up, made a U turn on the road and stopped to let him get in. When the red of the taillights had disappeared in the distance I let the curtain fall back in place and went to the dresser.

Captain Hardecker hadn’t been that curious. Nothing there was out of place and I had left everything arranged to be able to discern any sign of a search. Hardecker had been playing it square. The only thing that bothered me was the quick way he ran me down. He was in the position to do it, but so was anybody else if they figured out the angles. Nobody is really hard to find if you wanted them badly enough and they were available.

I was available.

And Niger Hoppes was looking.

The faceless one was out there in the night with a .22 Magnum that had proved its point all over the world and now it was ready to do it again.

Thunder came in a slow drone that sounded tired and the lightning lost that quality of wild intensity it had had an hour ago. Even the rain seemed to have settled back into a period of waiting, knowing that what it came to see would be seen.

All it had to do was wait.

When you’ve been exposed enough you begin to sense things. Proximity with death makes you familiar with his aptitudes. Some conditions expedite his activities, like a spring thaw bringing out the snakes. It’s too early, but they respond to the stimuli of nature and poke a cautious head out of their lair, winter vicious, angry at the disturbance and ready to strike even if the time isn’t
the
time.

I could sense it. He was out there somewhere. It wouldn’t have been too hard at all. In the bad light at McCauley’s place he wouldn’t have chanced a long range shot, not with two of us there and the prize at stake. But he could have laid a tail on me with a set of cars operating by radio. I hadn’t been careless. The thought had always been there. I was a thorn that had to be plucked out, the one who wasn’t stymied by rules and regulations and could operate on a level with them, backed by an organization as coldly efficient and as deadly as any they ever possessed. I was letting myself stand in their sights and asking for it, hoping to get in just one return shot. Take out a key person and the structure would sway long enough to topple it from another direction.

I knew I was laughing without making any sound at all, enjoying the moment to the fullest, tasting the sense of that other one who was out there waiting, watching, planning how to eliminate me. I took the safety off the .45 and thumbed the hammer back, feeling the live weight of the piece in my hand. It was old and familiar, worn smooth by much handling, as much a part of me as my thumb and forefinger, a metallic monster that could say yes or no to life or death.

I went to the windows, parted the blinds enough to study the terrain outside and see what spot I would pick for an ambush if it were me out there. The area in front of the crescent shaped line of double rooms was too well lit with nothing to afford concealment, while the brush cover on the other side of the end room I occupied didn’t give a view of the front door. That left just one spot, a clump of palms diagonally off the corner where a killer could cover all exits of my room.

And damn it, I could feel him there. He was outside!

Now I had to make him show himself. I went to the bathroom, turned on the light and closed the door so none of it would seep in toward me, but out there he would know I was up, that I wouldn’t sleep because time couldn’t be lost to that factor. If they had kept a check on me they’d know I had spent time with Camille and might go back. They’d have seen Hardecker come and go, but not knowing what was said, would wait for my reaction to whatever had passed between us. Once I stepped out that door I’d have had it. They had to kill me alone and on their own terms so there wouldn’t be any sudden repercussions, giving them back the time advantage. Even hours counted.

But I had to go out that door.

If I didn’t they would come in and if there were more than one they could clean the job up even at the risk of losing some of their own. But one man could handle it. I’d done it myself. One gas bomb or a grenade could ax me fine.

The night laughed at me with a staccato drum roll of thunder and threw the rain at the windows like hands full of pebbles.