The Frighteners (35 page)

“Tunk, dammit, the bastards got Willie! Another knife job, but I think the dame did it this time; Willie had a couple of long black hairs in his fist. Radio gone, guns and ammo gone. Christ, even if they didn’t bring any of their own, they’ve got a goddamn arsenal by this time. Anybody who walks up on them careless is going to get blasted back into yesterday. . . . Hold the phone; I hear something!”

The radio was silent. Waiting in the brush where we’d stopped to listen, with the girl crouched beside me, I watched a battered green Jeep come into sight from the valley below. It was the ugly old honest-to-Pete Willys article, topless, made before they fed it hormones and rounded off the corners and plastered it with chrome and racing stripes. It didn’t even sport a rollbar, and the windshield lay flat on the hood. I studied the tall man behind the wheel, bushy black hair sticking out from under a khaki cap, dark glasses. Gamma. Even at the distance, I recognized him. I’d last seen him in El Paso, in a Safeway parking lot, manhandling Horace Cody into position for his runty partner to apply the handcuffs—but apparently he could manage his own bracelets if he had to. The woman beside him was wearing them.

I caught the glint of metal when she raised her hands to push back a lock of her short brown hair, windblown in the open vehicle. Jo Beckman. I didn’t want to look at her, she was just a pawn in this high-powered chess game, and it was something I had to keep clearly in mind. I looked anyway, watching the old jeep turn left and disappear among the blocks of black stone.

Antonia had been peering through the little pocket telescope I’d lent her. She hadn’t bothered to confiscate the binoculars of the man she’d killed, even though the larger glasses would have provided her with better optical assistance; perhaps she’d been unwilling to burden herself with the additional weight. Without comment, she lowered the glass as the jeep, with Gamma and his prisoner, drove out of sight among the rocks below.

I said, “Let’s keep moving. I want to be in position to take out that marksman before the
mierda
hits the v
entilador
. We can listen as we go.”

As we continued down the gully, Rutherford’s voice spoke urgently from the radio: “Delta Four, Delta Four, where the hell have you got to? Alpha calling Delta Four. Over.”

After a moment, he got an answer, “Keep your shirt on, I\ink. Four here. It turned out to be just Lupe I heard coming, but I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“What does Delta Two have to say?”

“According to the tracks—this stony ground makes for mean tracking, Lupe says—they made a big loop behind his station and slipped up on Willy, the girl sneaking in for the kill this time while the man covered her. They seem to have quite an act going, those two, like a pair of hunters taking alternating shots, real polite and sportsmanlike. There’s something screwy about it, Hink.”

“What bothers you, besides the fact that they seem to be pretty good?”

“They’re too damn good; hell, they act like a team of high-priced hit men. Sam was a pretty sharp guy for a longhair, and Willy was no dope either. And this bald old coot who’s spent most of his life counting his money and has a bullet in him, and this crazy young squaw who, according to the description you passed around, doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet with a full belly . . . this weird pair of killers is supposed to be loping around this vertical damn scenery like a couple of mountain goats taking out our trained and experienced men like kids popping pigeons off the roof of papa’s bam. I don’t believe it. The girt, maybe, if there’s a tribe of half-pint Amazon warriors hiding somewhere in this lousy country, maybe with those legendary headhunters down in the Barranca del Cobre. Maybe she’s a natural they dug out of the bush somewhere. Maybe. But the man, like I say, I don’t believe it! Sick or well, that’s no millionaire senior citizen we’re up against. He didn’t learn his killing moves drilling any oil wells.”

The man—Delta Four, Hank Cramer—was too smart; maybe we should have ambushed him as Antonia suggested. Or maybe it was better this way. I have no real objection, in a tricky situation, to having people laboring under the delusion that I’m Superman; it tends to soften them up nicely.

Rutherford was getting impatient. “Get to the point, Four, or get off the air!”

Cramer spoke with equal impatience: “Wake up, this character is no goddamned oilman, and he didn’t come here to Piedras Negras for any information. I don’t say that isn’t why he was in the neighborhood or that he’d turn down a line on those missing weapons if somebody gave it to him on a platter, but once he got the idea we’d set a trap here—Arturo must have let something slip—he came for us instead of avoiding us. That should tell you something. The son of a bitch is fucking hunting us! And Mrs. Cramer’s little boy Henry wants out, Buster. Tell Sigma to blow his fucking bugle and get us to hell away from here, and I don’t mean next Saturday.”

After well over a week in Mexico, I’d finally heard somebody other than myself speak the word I’d been told to listen for, unprompted. Of course it had been spoken in English, not Spanish, and it could be a simple coincidence; but I tapped Antonia on the shoulder as a signal to stop. This I had to hear. Besides, the pace she was setting, I needed to catch my breath.

Rutherford’s voice asked sharply, “Are you scared of one man and a little girl?’’

“Were you bom a meathead or did you have to work at it? Do you think they’d be cruising in here so calmly, the two of them taking on the lot of us, if they didn’t have plenty of backup waiting to move in on signal, maybe even official backup? What’s our authority for being here on the wrong side of the border with guns, automatic weapons yet, just about as illegal as you can get? And I’ll bet those nice, friendly Mexicans we’ve got helping us—Lupe, and that slick Mondragon character who’s hiding in the rocks with his armed gofers and calling himself a general— aren’t real popular with the local government. I’ve seen a Mexican jail, thanks! What the hell good are we doing here anyway? So Mr. Saturday wants Cody, there’s no Cody here, there’s just a pro with a phony beard and a white suit playing homicidal games with us, while the real Horace Hosmer Cody’s lying in some hospital all bandaged up and full of antibiotics probably, with a private room and pretty nurses around the clock. .. . ."

He was a smart man, and he’d figured most of it out, particularly the impersonation; he’d realized that, the way I was operating in rough terrain, I couldn’t be badly wounded and couldn’t be elderly and therefore couldn’t be Cody. Of course, like all clever logicians, he’d followed his logic a little too far. He’d given us credit for too much common sense, deducing erroneously that we wouldn’t have tackled these odds unless we had reinforcements standing by, maybe even Mexican government reinforcements. Well, that last was a good thought for him to have and pass around. As a matter of fact, I’d been considering pulling a bluff along those lines if the situation became sticky. I only wished his theory were correct.

Suddenly another voice came over the air, curtly: “Delta Four, this is Sigma. You are ordered to report to headquarters immediately. Acknowledge! Over.”

It was a voice I hadn’t heard here before. Coming out of the tinny little speaker, with the volume turned to a whisper, it didn’t come through clearly enough for me to tell if I’d heard it elsewhere. I glanced around quickly.

“Is anybody close enough to hear if I make it a little louder?’’ I whispered.

“Is safe. No peoples close. Have you know this Sigma . . . ?”

“Shhh!”

Cramer’s voice, reproduced more loudly than it had been as I adjusted the control, spoke elaborately: “Yassuh, Boss Saturday, suh. To hear is to obey.”

“Delta Four, we do not indulge in these identification routines for your entertainment. If you absolutely must transmit again, which I do not recommend, please observe prescribed radio discipline.”

I thumbed the volume back down to its former whisper, having heard all I needed to.

Antonia watching my face, “You know this man. He is one you seek?”

I nodded. “Now get me over behind that damn sniper, quick.”

“How close you need?”

“I can do it from three hundred meters, but I’d prefer two hundred.”

She shouldered her M-16 again and took off. I left the choice of route to her; she was really very good at finding us gullies and arroyos and clumps of brush and stands of small trees that let us move silently in the right direction without being spotted. When you come across a real expert who wants to help you, don’t be proud, let him. Or her. Suddenly I heard the tiny speaker of the radio at my belt whisper my own name, my real name. I’d been Cody so long, off and on, if never very convincingly, that it came as a shock.

“Helm, Helm. This is Sigma calling Matthew Helm. Over. ”

Antonia glanced at me quickly over her shoulder. After all the horsing around, I’d almost lost track of who knew me as Cody, who as Helm, and who as both; but I did remember that, having seen Cody and me together in Kino Bay, she belonged in the last category.

I shook my head. “Don’t stop. Keep moving.”

We were closing in on the sniper’s position now, moving cautiously down the ridge at the end of which he was stationed. The sharpshooter and Antonia and I didn’t have the area to ourselves by any means; as we made our approach very cautiously, Antonia pointed out to me three armed men stationed below us, one of whom, well ahead, I hadn’t spotted for myself. Almost a mob scene. Apparently, before Delta Four had made him realize my identity, while he still thought he was dealing with the real Cody who couldn’t get around very well, the man who called himself Sigma had expected us to use the direct, short, easy approach from the south and had stationed his men accordingly. The rough and circuitous route we’d actually taken had caught him with his troop dispositions skewed in the wrong direction.

The radio spoke: “Mr. Helm this is Sigma again. Please come in. We know you have two of our walkie-talkies and are undoubtedly listening. We can dispense with the impersonation nonsense now, can’t we? As you’ve heard, even men who’ve never seen you have realized at last that you’re a substitute. Where is the true Horace Cody? I suppose he is the patient who is being so carefully and conspicuously guarded under your name in that cottage in Kino Beach; well, we’ll deal with that problem later. Right now I want you, wherever you are, to step out into plain sight with your vicious little Indian friend, raise your hands, and wait until my men come to disarm you and bring you to me. You have one minute. We’re holding the handsome lady who recently took care of you, probably in more ways than one, after you were shot. Dr. Joanna Beckman. If you don’t respond, you will hear her suffer. Over.”

I tapped Antonia on the shoulder. “This is good enough,” I whispered.

“Is more than three hundred meters.”

“Not much more, and from here I’ve got a straight shot at him without too much brush and junk in the way. That rock will give me a good rest.”

Abruptly a woman’s voice that I recognized very well came out of the litde speaker, somewhat breathless: ‘‘This is Jo Beckman. This is Jo Beckman. I’m sorry . . ."

Sigma’s voice intruded sharply: “Never mind that, say what you were told to say!”

“I’m sorry, sorry, I was a damn fool to come here and get myself caught like this; you mustn’t endanger yourself for me. . . . Ahhh!” There was a brief pause after her involuntary cry of pain, then her voice came strongly again, not speaking to me: “You’ll have to do better than that, you sadistic bastard!”

Antonia, beside me, whispered, “Hey, brave lady.”

Sigma’s voice said, “Just a small bum on the hand with a cigarette, Mr. Helm. We can do better if we must. Or worse.”

It was a beautiful day for it, for just about anything except skiing, with a warm, bright sun shining down from a deep blue sky untouched by pollution. The breeze of the morning, that had been helpful to me above, could have created a problem here since I didn’t know how wind-sensitive the 100-grain .243 bullet might be; however, it was blowing from the south, and I’d be shooting north, so the effect shouldn’t be significant, not like a crosswind. I had good cover and a good rest. I was using Cody’s big hat, well mashed down, for a cushion under the rifle, since a gun fired off solid, unyielding rock generally won’t shoot where it’s sighted. It was better to concentrate on these technical details. As I’ve said before, we don’t play the hostage game, and he shouldn’t have tried it. He really shouldn’t.

I looked down the ridge, which curved slightly so that I could see my target across the curve. He was sitting on a rock behind a screen of brush that shielded him well from the front and sides, not so well from the rear. With the telescopic sight set to its maximum magnification, 9X, he came in sharply. One of the camouflage boys, at least to the extent of a hunting cap and shirt. I hadn’t seen him upright, so I couldn’t tell what he was wearing below the waist or how tall he was; but I thought he was a fairly small man. He was wearing some kind of big glasses, perhaps shooting glasses. As I’d expected, his rifle and scope looked just like mine. Maybe they’d bought them by the dozen and got a break on the price.

I checked around. There seemed to be nobody on the opposing ridge covering the entrance from the north, perhaps because it would be a very long shot from there to any area of possible action, too long for the small-caliber weapons this outfit seemed to like. From where I lay behind my rock, I couldn’t see two of the three men we’d spotted on the way down, but the one Antonia had pointed out to me was still in sight, leaning against a boulder below us thinking himself hidden by the spring foliage of a nearby cottonwood. Another of the blue denim boys, but wearing a tan cowboy hat. He was within range, if I stretched it a bit, and I debated taking him instead of the sniper, but he was carrying only an M-16, which made him the lesser threat. He could wait.

I nudged Antonia. “Time for you to go,
guapa
. Slip over this ridge, climb down the other side, the valley side, and put yourself in good cover near where the road comes out of the basin. Mondragon should be departing soon. You can take him as he comes out.”