The Threateners (27 page)

Then we were at the hut that, apparently, was to be our home away from home. Patricia Weatherford knocked on the door and a man opened cautiously. She gave him the plastic grocery bag.

“Around this place they pass out firearms like lollipops,” she told him. “You’d better load one, if you know how. It seems that we’re drafted for jailer duty.”

"But that wasn’t in the bargain!"

Patricia Weatherford said grimly, “There’s been a stupid foul-up; Palomino kidnapped the wrong female and blames us. Now let us in, Charles. We can discuss the bargain later. And do load that gun! This man is supposed to be dangerous.”

Charles was the blond boy I’d seen her having lunch with once. He wanted to ask questions, but restrained himself and backed into the room to let us enter. O’Connor, pistol drawn, escorted Belinda and me inside and waited, covering us, while Charles passed weapons to the other two in the room and opened a box of ammunition and put it on the table. It was a useful demonstration of competence and otherwise. Charles, and a tall, thin, black girl with dramatic features and a big Afro, at least knew what buttons to push in order to open the weapons for loading, but a roly-poly little middle-aged gent, with thinning dark hair plastered to his scalp in a fore-and-aft direction, had to be shown. Miss Weatherford waved away the piece that was offered her, with a grimace of distaste.

“Very well, senhoritas, senhores,” O’Connor said. “As you say in your country, they are all yours. Take good care of them. Do not permit them to cause me any difficulties if you wish to preserve them alive."

He went out, closing the door behind him. Patricia Weatherford was looking at the revolver that remained on the table. After a moment she shrugged and picked it up, released the cylinder the way she’d seen it done, and stuffed cartridges awkwardly into the six chambers. I could read the printing on the box:
.38 Special, 158 grain Lead RN
, meaning round nose. Standard police ammo.

“All right,” she said, closing the weapon and tucking it into the waistband of her shorts. “I suppose I’m obliged to join you in this primitive firearms ritual. Now let’s put them in the other room and make sure they’re secure. Jerry, bring that roll of tape, please.”

“Miss Weatherford,” I said.

She turned to look at me coldly. ‘ ‘Oh, you know my name, too. You seem to know everybody’s names.”

“Not everybody, but we try,” I said. “Do you mind telling me what this is all about? Who are you people? I gathered from what Palomino said that you’re not part of his—well, Gregorio Vasquez’s—semireligious gang of stranglers.”

The girl showed me a small smile. “No, we do not worship at the shrine of the leaf; we’re not
Compañeros de la Hoja
, thank you very much.”

“Then who the hell are you?” I asked. “And what did you all have against Mark Steiner that made you hound him and his family across two continents?”

Patricia Weatherford looked startled. “Oh, you’re wrong, we had nothing to do with whatever happened to him in Peru! None of us had ever even heard of him until he escaped to the U.S., and published his book, and Mr. Vasquez made a certain pronouncement. . . . My dear man, we had nothing against poor Mr. Steiner. He was simply worth a million dollars to us.”

The shack was divided into three parts. We’d already made the acquaintance of the all-purpose front room, a kind of dormitory boasting four rickety cots, a battered table with four beat-up chairs, and back in one comer, some rudimentary kitchen facilities. A partition cut off the rear of the building to make—we learned when we were herded back there—a small bedroom, or maybe cell would be a better word, containing two more cots and not much else. It was a dark little hole because boards had been nailed across the single window to take the place of bars. Another partition, with a door, cut off one side of that space. The door was open, giving us a tantalizing glimpse of some white plumbing. It had been a long plane ride.

“If that’s a bathroom, you’d better let me at it, unless you want me to pee-pee all over your floor,” Belinda said.

The handsome ebony female who’d elected to guard her asked, “Why should we care if you piss your pants, white girl?”

“Well, you’d have to live with the stink, black girl,” Belinda answered.

Patricia Weatherford said, “Fight your racial battles on your own time, Lenore. Take her in there. Be careful, Palomino said she had a gun when he grabbed her, so it’s likely she knows how to use one.”

“Blondie’s not going to get to use
my
gun, don’t worry your pointy little head about that!” Lenore said. She nudged Belinda with the barrel of the weapon in question. “You heard the lady, go unload it before you lose it.”

They disappeared into the bathroom. Another gun-barrel poker, I reflected; the world was still full of them, in spite of the fact that I’ve had to deal with several and those aren’t poking any longer. Presently Belinda emerged from the john with her blouse hanging outside her pants; she’d apparently managed to zip and unzip, but tucking in had been beyond her, bound as she was. She was clowning relief; for an inexperienced operative she was holding up well. She could be forgiven for overdoing the funny business a bit trying to show how unscared she was. She was prodded over to one of the cots in the little room while I was allowed to take my turn at the facilities under the supervision of Charles, who at least knew enough to keep a discreet distance between me and the end of his gun barrel.

At first I’d assumed that the hut had been built as housing for the workers in this happiness factory, but on second thought I decided that it had probably been intended as quarters for the management, since in this part of the world it was unlikely that mere laborers were afforded such fancy plumbing. What I entered was an honest-to-Pete little prefab bathroom with running water—I wasn’t given time to determine if the hot-water faucet actually ran hot—a molded shower with a mildewed curtain, and a flushing john. I did note that the window was too small for escape purposes. The place wasn’t surgically clean, but it wasn’t outrageously filthy, either.

Emerging, I was ordered to sit on the cot beside Belinda, whose legs were already taped together. Patricia Weatherford strapped my ankles with the silvery stuff while Charles kept me covered in a reasonably intelligent fashion, although I was fairly sure that he’d never before pointed a gun at another human being. I noted that Lenore was waving her piece around in a careless manner that would have got her thrown off any respectable shooting range. On the other hand, the plump little man whom I called Baldy in my mind, since his name had not been revealed to us, was concentrating hard on not shooting anybody, or himself, with the terrifying implement that had been wished off on him. Amateur night in the jungle. After rechecking our bonds, Patricia Weatherford signaled to her troops and they withdrew to the other room, closing the door behind them.

Belinda drew a long breath. “All right, now tell me what in the world is going on here!” she said. “What’s all this about a million dollars?”

I’d had time to think it over and to realize, rather abashed, that we’d all managed to disregard one of the most significant factors in Mark Steiner’s recent history.

I said, “Baby, you have a short memory. You forget—we all seem to have forgotten—that some time ago the late Ayatollah Khomeini offered five million dollars for the author of
The Satanic Verses
. I gather that his successor hasn’t withdrawn the offer, quite the contrary. Then Gregorio Vasquez, the copycat, offered one million for the author of
The Evil Empire
. I don’t think anybody’s cashed in on Salman Rushdie yet, but it seems as if
El Viejo
may just possibly have paid off for Mark Steiner, although why this Spooky gang didn’t simply take their million and run remains to be determined.”

Belinda licked her lips. “But that’s crazy! I mean, the Weatherford has lots of money of her own, and I get the impression her friends aren’t exactly starving, judging by the one that got killed in Santa Fe. So why would they need—”

I said, “Us po’ folks do try to get along with what we have, ma’am; it’s the
ricos
who’re forever trying to pick up an extra million or two. . . . But we’re wasting time; they’ll be back to question us any minute. We’d better settle the ground rules for possible engagement while we have the chance.” I drew a long breath. “First of all, don’t jump the gun. In the movies they’re forever making monkeys of themselves trying to escape prematurely and getting themselves clobbered, just to keep the action moving on the screen. Forget it. We don’t give a damn about moving any action; if we have to sit here for a month waiting for the right moment, we sit. Or it may look good to me five minutes from now. I think I’ve been through this a few more times than you have, so let me call it. Wait for my signal. If you go without it, you’re on your own; and if you get yourself crippled up doing it, I won’t carry you when the time comes; I’ll just leave you. Understood?”

Belinda made a face at me. “Ain’t you the tough one? All right, I understand. What else?”

I said, “When we do make a break, if we make one here, remember that this is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill."

“And just what do you mean by that?”

It was time for the Speech, the one I find myself giving, in self-defense, to all die rookies and amateurs I seem to wind up with, before battle is joined. I always have to remind them that they’re in the real world now, not the bloodless TV dreamland they grew up in.

I said, “I mean that this is not a fun-fun game with paint-firing guns and rubber knives. This is for real, baby, and I don’t want to be shot in the back by somebody you forgot to finish off. I want to know for sure that once you leave somebody on the ground, he isn’t coming after us, ever. Or she. Take an extra moment if you have to, to do the job right, but do it. Okay?”

I heard her swallow beside me. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “I read you, Chief.”

I said, “There’s just one exception. The Weatherford girl. I’ve got a use for her.”

“What . . . Oh, never mind. I won’t ask. Obviously it’s love at first sight. . . . Oh, God, here they come again.”

They were marching back in, in a purposeful way, having presumably held a council of war in the other room to decide how to deal with us if we proved recalcitrant. Leading the parade was the tall black girl, Lenore. She walked past me briskly and stopped in front of Belinda, looking down at her in a speculative way, like a cat lazily appraising a cornered mouse. Patricia Weatherford, less eager, came up to me and hesitated a moment before she spoke.

“You heard what Mr. Palomino said before he left. We have to know who this woman is and what she was doing in your room with another man—”

“Two other men,” I said.

The freckled girl frowned. “Two? Nobody has said anything about—”

I said, “If whoever you had watching me had done a reasonably professional job of surveillance, instead of just loafing in the hotel lobby ogling the pretty Brazilian girls, he’d have seen them bust in on me; and he wouldn’t have been quite so quick to give Palomino the go-ahead signal for the kidnapping.”

Charles, standing behind the girl, asked sharply, “What was I supposed to do, lounge conspicuously for hours in the corridor outside your door?”

The girl said, “Never mind, Charles, he’s just trying to provoke us. Who was the second man, Mr. Helm?”

“Who the hell would he be?” I asked. “Belinda’s crazy husband, that’s who!”

“That would be Mr. Roger Ackerman?”

“No one but," I said grimly. "Apparently Mr. Ackerman has a few sexual problems due to aging that make him very sensitive about the fact that his young wife is attractive to men. . . . Hell, I’d never laid hands on the girl! But he’d seen her smile at me, I guess, she smiles at everybody, it’s no crime, but it gave him jealous ideas, and when his Number One Boy, who seemed to take surveillance a little more seriously than some people, saw her slipping into my room, he tipped off the boss and . . . Jesus, when I answered the door the old bastard came through it like gangbusters, foaming at the mouth and waving a gun. The guy was nuts. He was going to have his gofer kill us both and dump our bodies in the river, for Christ’s sake!”

Patricia Weatherford took a moment to digest this; then she asked, “If your relationship was really so innocent, Mr. Helm, what was Mrs. Ackerman doing in your hotel room?”

I was making it up as I went along, using the same phony straying-wife theme that Ackerman had employed as a distraction, for just about the same purpose. If they bought it, okay; if not, they’d believe the truth more readily for having been made to work for it. But I was a little slow in thinking up the next answer: just what had brought Belinda innocently to my room, in this version of the script? That’s the trouble with improvising; you can talk yourself into a comer before you know it. Before I could speak, Belinda intervened.

She laughed sharply. “Don’t ask him what I was doing there; he never got a chance to find out. Ask me!”

The Weatherford girl said, “Very well. What were you doing in Mr. Helm’s room, Mrs. Ackerman.”

Belinda said, “To hell with innocent relationships; I’d had too damn much innocence at home! I was trying to get fucked.”

A little silence followed Belinda’s pronouncement. I had to restrain a grin. Obviously the girl understood what I was doing, just putting out smoke, and she was playing along to the best of her ability, aware of the basic principle that a statement that makes you look bad is always believed a lot sooner than a statement that makes you look good.

Patricia Weatherford seemed to be startled by the frank response. “But you’d spoken to the man less than half a dozen times! We were watching and we’d never seen anything to indicate . . . Are you trying to say that you deliberately visited the room of a man who was practically a stranger, just a casual tour acquaintance, in order to . . . ?” She hesitated, too fastidious, perhaps, to repeat the vulgar term.

Belinda said, “Seduce is the genteel word you’re looking for, baby. . . . What the hell could I do? I had to get it somewhere, damn it; that old fart I was married to couldn’t get it up anymore. We’d just tried again. He didn’t even want to anymore, and he’d never thought much of morning sex anyway, but I made him try. Nothing! My God, I was ready to climb the walls, so I picked the only guy on the tour who wasn’t senile, and didn’t have a battle-ax wife sitting in the same hotel room, and looked like a reasonable character who might be willing to do the little girl a great big favor—”