The Threateners (11 page)

Mark had to be dead; his head was cocked at a crazy angle to his body. Later, I might miss the guy; at the moment it was merely another loss on top of the losses I hadn’t begun to assimilate, and I just thought grimly,
Stupid bastard asks for help and then won’t stay where he’s told!
So much for Mr. Marcus Steiner, whatever his real patronymic might have been in German, Latin, Spanish, or English. He’d got brave instead of obeying orders, and somebody was richer by a million bucks.

Not that I called time out to think all this, it simply went through my head as I took stock of the live ones—first the girl in jeans and a dark jersey reaching into a big woven shoulder bag. Over the fence behind her, parked in the neighbors’ driveway, I could see the roof of a brown truck, the one I’d so carelessly assumed to be UPS. Well, the neighborhood dogs had also been fooled, and whoever said I was smarter than a dog? In addition to the girl, there was a black-clad man in the patio, just rising from Mark’s body with another scarf in his hand. He leaped toward the fence, which made him no immediate threat.

I gave my attention, instead, to the giii, who was smallish, with long black hair and mad brown eyes. A big white dressing, not quite clean, was taped to one side of her face. Except for the crazy eyes, which had not been mentioned, she fit a description I’d heard: she was undoubtedly the girl Madeleine had caught in a Denver alley and pistol-whipped. Her hand came out of the bag with a grenade. Her other hand fumbled for the pin. The fact that we’d both die in the explosion, in this confined space—she must have tossed the first one from behind the shelter of the fence—obviously didn’t concern her a bit. I didn’t trust my left-handed pistol marksmanship for the job. The heavy fighting knife, thrown hard, drove through her like a spear and nailed her to the fence. She dropped the grenade. It rolled toward me. I fielded it and checked it; the pin was still in place. I won’t say it wasn’t a relief. The second strangler had vanished. I heard the phony UPS truck pull away with a roar.

Like a butterfly on a pin, the girl was still hanging there, both hands clutching the hilt of the enormous bowie that transfixed her. To hell with her. Mark was dead. Madeleine was either unconscious or dead; at least she wasn’t hurting at the moment. I went to my dog, who was.

Happy was still trying to get to me, but his rear legs weren’t working. He was badly cut up and his thick yellow coat was bloody. His soft brown eyes were asking me why anybody would do this to a good hunting dog who’d never hurt anybody, not even a duck. He’d stopped whimpering; he was licking my hand instead. His back was obviously broken. I started to reach for the. 381’d put away, but I found I couldn’t do it that loud and brutal way. I patted his head and went into my shattered house and managed to find the little kit we carry on duty. I loaded the spring-operated hypo with the red capsule that kills men instantly, hoping it would work as well on a dog. I went back and let him lick my hand some more and scratched his ears gently and talked to him a little. Never mind what I said; that’s between the two of us. The red capsule worked just fine.

Then it was very quiet in the blasted patio. When the rough tongue had stopped licking my hand, I rose and made certain that Madeleine wasn’t breathing. It should have meant something to me, it should have meant a great deal, but it didn’t. In this business you lose people; it goes with the territory. This wasn’t the first loss I’d ever sustained; and I knew there was only one way to deal with it: don’t. Pull down the riot shutters and seal it off. Don’t think about what could have been. Don’t think about the fact that if you hadn’t been too stubborn or proud or stupid to go to her when you learned she was free, the two of you might have had at least a couple of good years together, and maybe . . .

The girl with the knife through her suddenly tumbled to the ground, but the blade had merely pulled out of the wood of the fence; she was dead, too. Everybody was dead but me. Maybes were a waste of time, I told myself firmly. Sirens were beginning to scream in the distance. Suddenly, guiltily, I remembered something: they wouldn’t have come for Mark at last if they hadn’t worked out a plan for dealing with his notes and tapes. I hurried into the house and found that the phone still worked. I called the same number I’d called earlier in the day and drew a long breath when the same young-girl voice answered.

“Andrea? Do you recognize my voice? I talked to you earlier.”

“Yes, I recognize you. You’re Mr. Helm, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Your daddy has a message for you. Take your little sister and get out of the house and run away. A couple of blocks away, at least. If you have a place you like to hide away from home, go there.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Helm. Why would we have a place to hide?"’

In my day every kid had a favorite cave or bush or tree or old shack in the neighborhood that was his own place that nobody knew, but I suppose they don’t wander so freely around the countryside, or cityside, these civilized days.

“Never mind,” I said. “Just get out of there. Some bad people are coming, Andrea. Take your sister and get out. Pretty soon you’ll hear sirens and see police cars. Then you can go up to a policeman and tell him who you are. Okay?”

“I don’t understand. . . . Oh, okay, if that’s what Popsy wants.”

"That’s what he wants.”

I stood there for a moment, not wanting to go out back again. I’m pretty hardened to dead people, even dead people I’ve loved, but dead dogs kind of get to me. I waited for anger, but it didn’t come. What was there to be angry about? The girl who’d thrown the grenade was dead; there was no point in getting mad at her. The man who’d killed Mark Steiner had got away, but Mark hadn’t been a good enough friend that I felt obliged to work up a rage at his murderer. There was, of course, work to be done, but cursing and beating the wall with my fists wouldn’t get it done any fester or better, so I stood in my living room smelling dust and explosives, realizing that I was in the wrong place.
What am I doing here?
I asked myself.
What the hell am I doing here?

What was I doing there, a guy like me, in my line of work; what was I doing with a rose garden, and a pretty little house with a burglar alarm, for God’s sake, and Sunday-morning target games with a .22, and a dog who loved everybody but the UPS man . . . ? Who the hell did I think I was, Joe Average Citizen?

I realized that I’d been sneaking up on it again, the normal life that I’d tried once before, years ago, until it blew up in my face. Nobody I loved had been badly hurt that time; my wife had simply done the smart thing and left me, taking the kids with her. She’d realized then, as I had, that I was simply the wrong man trying to live the wrong life.

But I seemed to have forgotten the lesson I’d learned back then, so many years ago. I’d made myself a pleasant and peaceful little nest here; I’d even begun to give serious consideration to sharing it with a certain woman, a woman I’d asked once before. Now she was lying out in the patio, shrapnel-torn and dead, and my dog was dead with a broken back, and my cozy refuge had been blown wide open. It was very unfair to Madeleine and Happy, but it served me right for trying to be something I wasn’t and could never become.

The sirens were closing in. I went out to open the gate for the police.

We hung out over Dallas, Texas, for a while, or maybe it was Fort Worth, or maybe both, waiting for a thunderstorm to pass so we could land at the airport they share, called DFW. Meanwhile I tried to digest my American Airlines lunch, with some difficulty—those rocket-propelled flying coffins are bad enough when they’re traveling in straight lines in clear weather; when they start wandering in circles through a sky full of dirty absorbent cotton, they don’t do my gastric processes a bit of good. Besides, the lunch had consisted mainly of a salad of some kind of cold pasta that looked like curly white maggots. There had also been a chunk of wooden brownie for dessert, mahogany by the color. Fortunately, I’d managed to promote, for three bucks, a miniature of J&B to help it all down.

Landing on a wet runway, with the storm still black in the distance, we taxied halfway across Texas to the gate, and then hiked, it seemed, the rest of the way over into Louisiana to pick up our connecting AA flight to Miami. I’d assumed that continuing on the same airline would make the plane-change easy; there was also a time when I believed in Santa Claus. Airborne again, we were treated to a snack consisting of a tough little breadroll surrounding some sliced ham. I helped it down with another three-buck dose of J&B.

Having done some flying over water, presumably the Gulf of Mexico, we found land again and started losing altitude over jungly-looking terrain that I guessed to be the Everglades. We swung out over more water, presumably the Florida straits, curved back over the land, settled down onto another runway—dry this time—and taxied another fifty miles, more or less, to find a gate. Those jets seem to cover almost as much distance on the ground these days as they do in the air. Not to mention the mileage the passengers have to rack up on foot inside the interminable terminals.

Reaching the baggage-claim area in Miami involved a typical airport exercise in pedestrian endurance, aggravated by the fact that we were both lugging the sizable carry-on bags that had been issued to us, baby blue with black lettering: WESTON WORLD TOURS. They were fairly heavily loaded, mine mostly with tourist camouflage in the form of camera gear and film. I had no idea what was in my companion’s. She’d refused to let me help her with her burden, telling me to restrain my condescending male chivalry; she was quite capable of managing her own belongings, thank you.

The wait at the carousels was, as usual, considerable. When our patience was rewarded at last with two suitcases that matched the claim checks, I hired a gent with a uniform cap and a trolley, at an exorbitant price, to trundle our luggage to the centrally located airport hotel called MIA, not to sleep—the longest leg of the journey was still ahead of us— but just to kill time until we had to report for jet duty again, and to further indulge my alcoholic proclivities, in the rooftop restaurant and lounge that had been recommended to me by someone, I forget who. It seemed quite pleasant, but then, after a day in the air almost any place firmly attached to the earth would have.

“Do you really think you should?”

The woman on the far side of the cocktail table was watching me tackle my latest Scotch. I spread some cheese on a cracker and offered it to her.

“Have some Brie,” I said. “Keep your strength up. We’re supposed to take off again at nine p.m., but it’ll probably be close to midnight before they get around to feeding us dinner.”

Ruth Steiner accepted my offering, but said stiffly, “Thank you, Mr. Helm, but I’m quite familiar with the schedule. I’ve made this flight before, many times. My first husband was stationed in Rio for several years. He was in the Foreign Service. But you know that.”

"Yes, Mark told me.” I picked up my glass again and got the same pained expression as before. I said patiently, ‘ ‘Look, ma’am, what’s your problem? It’s not as if I’ll have to drive this DC-10 or whatever the hell it is we’ll be inhabiting next. Varig’s got a nice sober young chap in a natty uniform to operate it for us, I’m sure. If I want to go along for the ride slightly anesthetized, why not? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to travel by air. ”

Looking across the table, I decided that skinny, big-eyed blondes with ragged hairdos and big spectacles were not my favorite people. I gathered, from her expression, that she didn’t think much of me, either. If there had ever been a chance of our becoming soul mates, it had vanished when I whacked her with a shotgun butt. There was still a small scab at the top of her left ear. I could see no other evidence of the blow she’d taken, although there could be some fading cranial bruises covered by her hair. It was one way of getting acquainted with a lady, but it hardly made for a warm relationship.

“Well, you’ll just have to get along with her anyway, Eric,” Mac had said when I mentioned the problem.

He'd summoned me to Washington after using his clout to get things settled in Santa Fe. They’d taken quite a bit of settling. The fact that the man I’d almost decapitated with my king-size presentation bowie had been trying to crack my neck with a Thuggee scarf, and that the girl I’d skewered with the same giant blade—that Jo had given me as a joke and a wall decoration, never expecting a knife that size to be used in anger—had been about to blow herself and me to hell with a fragmentation grenade, had helped with the police, of course, but it had still been a considerable circus. The murder of a fairly well known author with a price on his head placed there by a kingpin of the drug trade would have been big news even without the gaudy trimmings.

“How far along with her do I have to get?” I’d asked.

Mac frowned. The bright window behind him that he likes to make us stare into made his expression a bit hard to read, but I’d had lots of practice; we’d faced each other across that desk more times than I cared to remember. His hair was no grayer than it had ever been, and his eyebrows were no less black. I couldn’t see that he’d aged significantly in the years that had passed since we’d first worked together. There were playful rumors around the place to the effect that he’d sold his soul in return for eternal life, but I didn’t believe a word of it. What soul?

He spoke carefully: “It seems that the lady knows where some needed information is located. It also seems that the South American contacts that will enable us to obtain that information cannot be made without her.”

I said, “Do I gather that contrary to what appeared on the evening news, Mark Steiner’s new book and all related materials did not perish when his house went up like a torch?”

Mac looked surprised. “Didn’t Mrs. Steiner tell you?”

I said, “After things quieted down a bit she called me on the phone and asked me how to get in touch with you—well, with the head of my agency. I gathered she was disenchanted with Dennis Morton and his bunch of undercover clowns. I didn’t try to find out what was on her mind. She still had a headache I’d given her, and her husband had died in my house. I figured I probably wasn’t one of her favorite people and I’d just antagonize her by asking questions; I’d better leave her to you.”