The Poisoners (12 page)

Taking my gun, I made my way down into the crack. The breeze off the sea was chilly enough to remind me that it was too damn early in the spring for any sensible person to get wet all over in anything but a nice warm bath—well, a hot shower, maybe, but I’m a tub man myself, when I can find a tub long enough. I hid the gun among the rocks down there and approached the launching pad. A wave broke into the entrance and washed about my ankles, letting me know that the water was even colder than the air, but there was nothing to do but go into it, so I went. The shock was breathtaking. I stroked clumsily off to the left, hoping the exercise would warm me. It didn’t.

I found her huddled in a shallow cave, little more than a niche washed out by the waves, at the bottom of the rocky point on which I’d been standing when I heard her voice. The sea sloshed right into the little hollow, drenching her with metronome regularity where she clung to a stone outcropping. I got an impression of a dead-white face, tangled hair, and torn clothing that streamed like seaweed from a small, half-naked body, but at least she was alive enough to watch me hopefully as I came in for a landing.

She tried to say something; but the roar of the surf blotted it out. I was too busy keeping myself from being washed back out to sea to listen, anyway. It was a tougher rescue operation than the previous one in which we’d participated, I reflected grimly. I pried her loose, between waves, shoved her out of there, and dove after her. She started swimming, but feebly and ineffectually. I got hold of some cloth that ripped when the strain of the next wave came on it; then I got a fistful that didn’t Kicking desperately, paddling one-handed, I managed to tow her clear of the rocks. Some time later, I boosted her onto the shelf from which I’d come—with, I was glad to note, some token help from her. At least she was still present and voting.

Climbing up beside her, with no help from her, was harder than it should have been for a healthy man in good condition. I dragged her out of the reach of the waves and crouched there, panting and dripping and trying to keep my teeth from chattering. After a little while, I remembered the gun and found it. If Willy was lying in wait for us above, I was once more in a position to shoot back, even if my chances of hitting anything were slight, the way I was shivering.

Beverly rolled over weakly to look at me through the hair that veiled her face. I reached out and parted the wet strands with a forefinger, so that I could look in as well as she could look out. Her lips moved stiffly.

“Mr. Helm!” she whispered. “I d-didn’t really recog… recognize…” She couldn’t finish. She just curled up into a ball and hugged herself, shaking with cold.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

It was a stupid question. What I’d meant to ask, I guess, was if she was too badly hurt to proceed under her own power.

“Sure I’m hurt… I hurt all over,” she breathed. Her voice was stronger and steadier. “Or I did before I f-froze to d-death.” She made an effort to sit up, succeeded with my help, and went on: “But I don’t seem to have b-broken anything ess-ess-essential.” The shakes hit her again, so violently that she could hardly get the last word out.

“Can you make that?” I asked, after the spasm had passed. I indicated the cleft up which we still had to climb.

“I… I think so, Mr. Helm. Matt…”

“What?”

Her greenish-hazel eyes regarded me with disconcerting steadiness out of her pale, wet face. “You’re b-beautiful,” she said softly. “You’re the p-prettiest man I ever saw, even if your knees are b-b-bony. I’d given up, I guess. I’d have d-d-died there if you hadn’t come after me. Th-thanks.”

“Go to hell,” I said. “If you’re strong enough to make speeches you’re strong enough to start climbing.”

I still had the uneasy sensation that someone was watching and, at the top, I checked the surroundings carefully, gun in hand, but there was no Willy in sight. That was fine with me. I reached down to help Beverly over the last rocks, left her catching her breath, and went over to get her purse and shoes. I brought them back and dropped them beside her.

Then I went to my own clothes, mopped myself off a bit with my undershirt, and tossed the damp garment to her for similar employment. I got dressed except for my jacket. Its warmth tempted me strongly, but there are times when a man has to prove, to himself and to others, that he really is a gentleman at heart, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Besides, I needed a way to show—call it a symbol—that I really was very glad to have found her alive. It was a weight off my conscience, or a stain off my soul, or something.

Tucking my gun back under my waistband, I carried the coat over to where she was standing, a little unsteadily, vaguely rubbing at her hair with my undershirt. It wasn’t very nice of me, under the circumstances, but I couldn’t help pausing to get the full effect. It was pretty spectacular. I’d encountered a lot of beat-up characters in my undercover career, but I’d seldom met a lady who was so literally in rags.

Her neat little wool pantsuit, never designed for hardship, had disintegrated into a scarecrow collection of flaps and, loops and pennants of torn green cloth, sodden and dark with seawater. One arm and leg were almost totally bare, and sizeable anatomical areas were raggedly exposed elsewhere. Apparently, the dive from the doomed convertible had scraped most of the clothing, and a good deal of skin, from her right side. The hasty scramble down the slope, and the ocean swim, had completed the job of demolition all around. She was so tattered it was almost funny.

She stopped drying her hair and glanced at me in a puzzled way, as if wondering why I was staring. Then she looked down at herself, becoming suddenly aware of, and aghast at, her shipwrecked appearance.

“God, I’m a clown!” she gasped. “I’m a… a disaster area! I didn’t realize… Matt, what am I going to do? I can’t show myself anywhere like this!”

“We’ll get you some clothes,” I said. “Meanwhile, here’s something to keep you warm—”

“No, wait a minute, please.”

She tossed aside the undershirt she’d been using as a towel, struggled out of the clinging remains of the jacket, and untangled herself from the trailing remnants of the pants. Rolling the garments into a ball, she walked gingerly, barefooted, to the edge of the rocks, and pitched them into the sea.

She came back to me, no longer a comic figure in flapping rags, just a pretty girl who’d got herself kind of wet and scratched and dirty, in a costume that now consisted of a sleeveless white turtleneck jersey and a pair of brief white nylon pants—little more than she’d been wearing in our abortive seduction scene of the previous evening. The scanty outfit wasn’t clean, dry, or even wholly intact, but it wasn’t a cruel joke.

“I’ll take that coat now, thanks,” she said.

I hesitated, frowning at the blood-caked lacerations that seemed to reach almost from shoulder to elbow, and from hip to knee, although it was a little hard to tell how much was injury and how much was just clotted gore.

“First you’d better let me have a look at that arm—”

“There’s nothing you can do about it here, so why make like Dr. Kildare?” she said a bit sharply. “I’ll live, if you don’t keep me standing in this wind all day.”

“Sure,” I said, wrapping the coat around her. “Put on your shoes and let’s go. Here’s your purse.”

As an afterthought, I went back and picked up the wet undershirt she’d thrown aside. It might come in handy for bandages or something; besides, if I left it there, the Mexican authorities might think it was a clue. When I caught up with her, she’d paused by the wrecked convertible. She reached in to take the keys, still in the lock, and dropped them into her Mexican-leather purse.

I grinned, regarding the battered hulk. “What’s the matter, are you afraid somebody’s going to stick the wheels back on and drive off with it?”

She didn’t smile. “Besides the car keys, there’s also my apartment key, and the key to a safe-deposit box, if I ever dare go back to get what’s in them. Like a nice mink coat and some jewelry…” She grimaced, and frowned at what was left of her car. “Do you know, that damn thing almost
killed
me?” she said in a wondering voice. “Wouldn’t you think they’d make them so you could get
out
of them in a pinch?”

“Exactly what happened?”

She shook her head quickly. “Not here, Matt. Wait till we’re safe in your car with the heater going.”

We made it up to the highway without any further trouble. As I unlocked the door of the sedan, the first traffic of the day came by, but it was no Jeepster, just a Chevy pickup truck with the cab crammed full of assorted Mexicans, adults and children, who stared at us so curiously that I was afraid they’d spotted the wreck below. Then I saw that they were looking at Beverly’s wet hair and abbreviated costume, which apparently they took for a bathing suit.

They drove past, laughing at the crazy
gringos
who couldn’t wait till summer for an early-morning swim.

“You warned me,” Beverly said at last, breaking the comfortable, silence that had settled over us as the warmth of the car’s heater began to take effect. “I suppose it was my fault for not listening to you.”

I was again driving at the legal speed of a hundred and ten kilometers per hour, seventy m.p.h. to you—well, I suppose I should actually have held it at sixty-eight and four-tenths, but nobody’s got a speedometer that accurate, not even, I hoped, the Mexican police. I took my eyes off the road to glance at my companion, finding her bare legs only mildly distracting. I guess I still hadn’t thawed out completely.

She’d gotten a comb from her scarred purse, and a mirror that had miraculously survived the crash intact except for a broken corner. She was fighting the snarls out of the darkened red-gold hair that, as it dried, was lightening once more and reverting to its former glorious, if artificial, color. The dead-white pallor had left her face, and she’d treated herself to a touch of lipstick. Even beat-up and waterlogged—or at least not thoroughly dried out yet—she was quite an attractive little person.

“What did I warn you about?” I asked.

“Don’t you remember what you said when you were calling a taxi from that motel room, about cars that might be gimmicked so the brakes wouldn’t brake and the steering wouldn’t steer? But you were talking about that rental car, the one I was supposed to have borrowed from your girl agent, and by the time I got around to picking up my own convertible, I’d forgotten all about it. It never occurred to me… They must have sabotaged it while it was standing at the airport. Of course they had all the time in the world.”

We were still driving along the edge of the Pacific. Baja California was beginning to wake up, and there were a few cars on the four-lane toll road, although there weren’t many signs of habitation around to indicate where they might have come from, just the rugged coastal hills up to the left, and the rocky shoreline, and the ocean, down to the right.

I said, “So your steering went out, or was it the brakes?”

“Both,” she said. “It was… it was like a bad dream. There was a man right behind me all the way from the border. I’d spotted him earlier, he wasn’t even trying to be inconspicuous. He was practically riding my rear bumper. I kept jacking up the speed, thinking I ought to be able to outrun a lousy little jeep…”

“Did you know the driver?”

“Sure. I got a glimpse of him under the lights, going through Tijuana: a rock-faced character named Willy Hansen. Among other things, he drives for Frankie, although I don’t know why. The few times Frankie had him chauffeur me around—while I was still the golden girl around the place—he scared me stiff. He acted like he’d never even seen a horseless carriage before.”

I said, “I know. I rode with him a couple of times myself.”

Beverly shrugged her small shoulders under the sports coat she was still wearing like a cape. “Maybe he’s better on the open road than in city traffic. Anyway, I couldn’t seem to gain on him much, and that glamor-buggy of mine is… was supposed to be fast, a real bomb. That’s what Frankie-boy said when he presented it to me, and don’t think I didn’t have to pay for it like all his presents. Ugh.” She was silent briefly, her face bleak with memory. “The wages of sin,” she murmured. “So now I’m sitting here practically naked, with less than fifty bucks in my purse, and no safe way of getting at all that lovely loot back in L.A. for which I sold my innocent body. Well, almost innocent. That should be an object lesson to little girls who think… Ah, hell!”

“Sure,” I said. “We left the heroine pouring the high-test fuel to her high-powered convertible with the villain in hot pursuit. The suspense is terrific.”

Beverly laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to moralize,” she said. “Anyway, I tried to shake him, and I did gain a little, maybe half a mile. I really had those tires smoking in the curves. I guess that’s what he wanted. They must have fixed everything to fail when I put a lot of strain on it. Up above the border, in the fog, I’d been taking it pretty easy. I guess that’s why I got as far as I did without anything happening.” She looked around and sighed. “It certainly is nice to see blue sky for a change. That damn smog gets me down.”

I made a face at her. “As a storyteller, sweetheart, you make a swell movie star. Along with the morality lectures, let’s just skip the atmospheric conditions and their psychological effects, huh?”

She laughed again. “All right. I hit that sharp curve going into the bay where you found me, and I really had to lean on the wheel to pull her around. As I came out of the turn, I felt things let go, power steering and all. There just wasn’t anything left in that department. So of course I stood on the brakes as hard as I dared, and they went out, too. The pedal held up for a moment and then went clear to the floor. The car was still holding the road with nobody steering it, but that long curve was coming up, the one at the head of the bay where you had your car parked. I knew I had to jump and take a chance of being smeared all over the pavement—”

I said, “So you went out the right-hand door. Why?”

She glanced at me. “Matt, what—”