The Infiltrators (16 page)

“Nice man,” she murmured at last, and fell asleep in my arms.

In the morning, looking out the door, I saw a foot and a half of snow on the ground, and the drifts were enormous. The skies were still gray, but only a few flakes drifted down; the real storm had passed on to the east. The visibility had improved, and I could see the freeway, somewhat higher than we were, several hundred yards away across the gently up-sloping white plain. The big plows had apparently cleared one lane on each side; traffic was moving single file in both directions. A boy in jeans and anorak was shoveling snow off the motel walks.

“I think we’d better take our time with breakfast and wait until they get things sorted out a bit more,” I said, closing the door again.

“What did you say, Matt?”

Madeleine appeared in the bathroom doorway with a comb in her hand. In deference to the weather, she was wearing a plaid wool skirt and stiff new jeans that didn’t do much to flatter her; but even so she was a very different person from the one I’d helped into my car in the penitentiary parking lot. That sad slumped figure was only a distant memory. There was a nice glow to her this morning. Her back was straight, and her shoulders square.

When I repeated what I’d said, she laughed. “I’m in no hurry to get to Santa Fe, darling, you know that. All that’s there for me is a lot of humiliation and a little money. I’ll be through here in a moment if you want to shave.”

But she gave me time to pull on most of my clothes and tuck the gun away under my belt where it belonged. When she came out at last, I went into the bathroom in my undershirt and plugged in the shaver. After a little I heard her say something to me, unclear because of the buzzing of the machine. A moment later I heard a sound I couldn’t identify immediately. Then I realized that I’d heard a door closing; and that what she’d said was that she needed a cup of coffee right away and she’d see me over in the cafe. I knew a moment of sharp anger at her stupidity, or at my own stupidity in not making it absolutely clear to her that she should move nowhere without me…

At the same moment, I
knew.
This was the killing moment. Of course you get those sickening premonitions a hundred times, in my line of work, and ninety-nine times nothing at all happens; but it only takes once. I was racing through the motel room as these thoughts went through my mind unbidden. I threw open the door and saw her walking away along the shoveled path through the snow, a sturdy figure in her heavy clothes.

I looked for the threat I sensed was there and could see nothing. For the moment nothing moved in the snow anywhere around the motel or restaurant buildings, except for water dripping off the roofs. Starting after Madeleine, I looked farther afield. Traffic was still proceeding along the highway. There was only a stalled car in a snowdrift on the near side; but there would be lots of those this morning.

But there was none of the snow on the roof you’d expect to see on a deserted vehicle after a blizzard; and I remembered that there had been no car there when I looked out earlier. I knew what I had then, being an old long-range sniper myself. I started to run. It was a mistake; she heard my pounding footsteps on the path behind her and, curious, stopped to look back, giving the distant rifleman a perfect standing shot. I threw myself at her in a desperate flying tackle and felt a blow on the shoulder that paralyzed my whole right side as we went down in the snow together.

I awoke in a hospital bed more or less straitjacketed. That is, they’d immobilized one arm completely, and when I tried to move it my heavily bandaged shoulder caught fire; but I could work the fingers if I tried hard, although they seemed very far away. The other arm was hooked up to some plumbing—they were dripping stuff into me from a bottle—and when I tried to move it a plump little white-clad nurse threatened me with instant annihilation; but those fingers responded also. I could move my legs and wiggle my toes.

“You must lie still, please,” the nurse said. Her soft Spanish accent reminded me that we’d actually made it as far as New Mexico, although a few hundred miles short of Santa Fe. The nurse said, “You have lost much blood, but you will be fine now if you lie still.”

I tried to tell her that it was just that a man liked to take inventory occasionally—like after being shot—but they’d given me something and the words didn’t come out right. There was a question I wanted to ask, had to ask, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I went back to sleep. When I awoke again the nurse was gone and Jackson was standing over the bed with a concerned look on his long farmer-face. I noted that he was wearing a sheepskin coat and heavy boots; apparently things were still pretty wintery outside. Otherwise I had no idea of how much time had passed.

“How are you feeling?” Jackson asked.

I wasn’t going to waste my limited strength on that kind of a nonsense-question. If he couldn’t see for himself that I couldn’t be feeling any way but lousy, he could ask the doctors. They knew more about my condition than I did, anyway. There were more important things to talk about.

“Subject?” I whispered.

“Subject okay.”

I drew a cautious breath of relief. That was the question to which I needed an answer. It had been a high-powered rifle, and I knew that the bullet had achieved total penetration as far as I was concerned. I hadn’t been certain that it hadn’t gone on to reach its intended target in spite of my attempt to knock her out of the line of fire.

I made a feeble left-handed gesture towards the view outside the window. “Where?”

“Santa Paula, New Mexico. Llano County Hospital.” Orientation accomplished, I turned back to business. “Sniper?”

“We got him.”

“Alive?”

He said, a bit stiffly, “Yes. Alive. Name: Ernest Maxwell Reis.”

I shook my head minutely. “Rings no bells.”

“One of Otto Rentner’s St. Louis boys, moonlighting. With a nice accurate Remington 7mm Magnum rifle.”

I frowned. “Syndicate?”

“We don’t think the corporation is really involved. In fact we suspect the tough boys aren’t very happy with Maxie Reis right now. They don’t like anybody who stirs up government agencies unnecessarily, particularly this government agency. But apparently he was offered plenty to take on an outside job, so much he couldn’t resist. Like I said, moonlighting.”

“Interrogation?”

“No real answers so far. The I-team is softening him up slowly. They’ll get the contact method and some kind of a name out of him eventually.” Jackson shrugged. “And probably the name will be Tolliver, like it usually is these days, so that won’t help us much. Sorry we weren’t in time to prevent—”

I used my limited headshake again. “My fault. Hadn’t briefed her properly. Took for granted she understood … Where is she now?”

Jackson hesitated. “Protective custody. Well, actually she was kneeling beside you holding your gun when the sheriff arrived. She was defending you, I guess, but at first nobody knew what had happened or where the shot had come from. Naturally, being literal-minded cops, they jumped to the obvious conclusion without even sniffing the damn revolver to see if it had been fired. Particularly when her papers showed she’d just been released from a maximum-security federal pen a few days ago, obviously a very dangerous female character. We straightened them out when we got there, of course, after turning Maxie over to the interrogation team that was standing by, but it seemed best to leave her locked up for her own safety.”

“No!” I tried to sit up and the nurse pushed me down. “No, goddamn you, I told you how she was to be treated—”

Jackson said defensively, “There could be a backup man waiting to do the job while we’re patting ourselves on the back and congratulating ourselves on nailing Reis. It’s a clean enough little jail. She’s safer in there, now that you’re out of circulation for a while, until we can make new arrangements for her close-in protection.”

I had a sickening vision of Madeleine, still so insecure in her newfound identity, once again being subjected to the indignity of handcuffs, once again being bullied by rude officials, once again suffering the humiliation of being locked up in a cell. I couldn’t bear to think of the warm and happy woman of last night being once again transformed into the slaty-eyed, stone-faced automaton I’d once known.

“Safer?” I said harshly. “Suppose you do keep her alive that way, what the hell good will it do her or anybody else if she freaks out completely, being stuck behind bars again? Or maybe they’ll just find her hanging from the light fixture; she’s tried it before. Get her out of there, damn it! Import some baby-sitters, keep her in your own pocket, but get her
out
!”

I heard my voice continue to speak angrily, and a nurse was coming forward and waving Jackson out of the room; and I went off somewhere leaving my voice still talking, which seemed a little odd, but not very. When I awoke, Madeleine was there. She was sitting on a straight chair near the door. She wasn’t reading, and the TV was off; she simply sat there with her hands in her lap in the patient way she’d learned, no doubt, from long and grim experience.

The low room lights told me it was night without my having to make the effort of looking at the window—it had been day when Jackson was there—and Madeleine’s attitude told me that she’d been waiting for quite a while; but it took her only a few seconds to realize that my eyes were open. She rose and approached the bed. I noticed that there were dark stains on the dark cloth of her jeans.

My blood. She’d exchanged the plaid wool shirt I remembered, perhaps too blood-soaked to wear, for her pink short-sleeved sweater, and it was getting a bit grubby. Her hair could have been smoother.

But this was all quite irrelevant, because she was not the totally defeated woman I’d seen once and had been very much afraid I would now see again, after the police ordeal she’d just been through. Although she was quite tired and a bit dirty, she was calm and in control; in fact she looked straighter and stronger than I remembered her.

“Hero!” she said softly, looking down at me. “Throws himself into the path of the speeding bullet! Do you need anything, Matt? Should I call a nurse?” When I shook my head minutely, she said, “I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Freak out. Hang myself from the chandelier. In there, where they just had me.”

“That Jackson. Motormouth.” I looked up at her for a moment. “Gun girl. Calamity Jane Junior. Belle Starr returns. Crouching protectively over the bleeding body with a loaded six-shooter—well, five-shooter, to be precise.”

“Some protection, considering that I’ve never fired a handgun in my life,” she said. “And bleeding is right, all over my brand-new shirt and jeans. But I didn’t realize the shot had come from so far away. I thought he had to be somewhere close, using a silencer like on TV.”

“Suppressor,” I said.

“What?”

“Not polite to call them silencers anymore,” I whispered. “They’re sound suppressors, just like a dirty old man is a soiled senior citizen these days.”

“Funny!” She made a face at my attempt at humor, and went on: “What was I supposed to do, just sit there helplessly in the snow holding your head in my lap and waiting for him to stick his gun around the corner of a building and try again? Maybe if I couldn’t hit him with a bullet I could scare him to death with the noise. I… I’m just a little tired of being pushed around, darling. And having men I l-like abducted or shot right under my nose.” She swallowed hard. “Oh, God, I couldn’t stop the bleeding and I thought you’d die before those idiots got an ambulance there!”

“And the cops,” I said, watching her.

“Yes, the cops!” she said grimly. “Matt, what makes them that way? The same old muscle routine, so familiar I wanted to laugh. Are they bondage freaks? Do they have nice ejaculations in their pants every time they do that to a woman prisoner? The same damn handcuffs, the same loud mouths, the same total lack of any courtesy or consideration, the same pushy-shovy, the same smelly cell. Cheap thrills for the pigs? Do you want to know something? I could never be a lawyer again even if they’d let me. Not after this last experience. That’s twice I’ve been pushed around and yelled at for something I didn’t do; and how many apologies do you think the crummy broad got this time after it was proved she’d been grabbed by mistake? Hell, since they couldn’t hold me for attempted murder they wanted to get me for having a gun I wasn’t supposed to, being the lousy ex-convict I was! No, I really don’t have a great deal of respect for the law any longer!”

I licked my lips, watching her, beginning to understand the change I’d sensed in her, the newfound strength and confidence.

“You wanted to
laugh
?” I whispered.

She looked down at me for a long moment. “Yes, darling,” she said very softly. “Laugh! Isn’t that… weird? I thought, when I shouted for somebody to call the police, that I’d be scared to death of them when they got there. Remember how I wouldn’t let you drive fast because we might be picked up for speeding? And I think I told you how I felt, or thought I felt, about ever being locked up again. But it wasn’t that way at all! Really, it was rather funny, like watching a jerky old movie that frightened the hell out of you back when you were a kid. Matt, I was the… the old professional watching those country clowns trying to intimidate
me
! It was ridiculous! I wanted to tell them they were wasting their time, I knew all about it, I’d been through it in spades. I’d been harassed by experts—government experts—and it would take more than a bunch of small-town fuzzies in big hats to scare me. And then they put me into that cell and slammed the door,
clang
, and I waited for the panic to start, and a little voice said,
Listen, stupid, you did eight whole years in a cage like this, are you going to let a lousy day or two get you down?
”

“Good girl,” I whispered.

She smiled down at me. “God, I’ve been awful, haven’t I? It’s a wonder you could stand me. I’m so ashamed when I think of the mopy, self-pitying way I’ve behaved ever since I got out. I guess what I discovered just now is that, well, nobody can really hurt you when you’ve got nothing left to lose. The first time I was hauled away in handcuffs all those years ago and wound up in jail, I literally went into shock at the ghastly disgrace of it—well, I told you—but what’s left to disgrace? Back then I was sick at the thought of how it would affect my wonderful job, my spotless professional reputation, my lovely social standing, my bright and shining future… Well, I don’t have to be concerned about any of those things any longer, do I? I don’t even have to worry about my appearance; these days nobody expects me to emerge from a dirty
calabozo
looking smart and beautiful. And it’s a damn good thing, too, isn’t it?” She glanced down at herself ruefully. “Well, I’d better find the motel room they’ve got for me here so I can wash off the jail stink and try to soak the gore out of my shirt and pants. I suppose I’ll have to get used to that if I stick with you, Mr. Secret Agent. Gore, I mean.” She hesitated. “Matt.”