Assignment — Angelina (11 page)

"Get up, mister," Fleming said. His voice, in his boyish face, seemed harsh. His gun was a Colt .38. "Get up, quick."

Durell stood. His mind raced, assessing the situation. Corbin shouted to Slago; the blonde girl was already in the car. They were pulling out. He suddenly knew they would take Angelina witn them as a hostage, if they could. Corbin was throwing a suitcase into the car. Angelina's safety took precedence over other factors at the moment. In other circumstances he might have sacrificed her, as he had been trained and conditioned to do. But not now; the issue was not that desperate.

He went for Fleming's gun. Fleming was careful, but not careful enough, and Durell almost made it.

He chopped the gun from Fleming's fingers. His foot caught Fleming's knee and the man screamed and spun about and went down. At the same moment, Angelina broke loose and ran, twisting out of Slago's reach. She was heading back to the bar, where the other customers stood frozen in fear. Corbin yelled to Slago to forget the girl and the chunky man hesitated, then ran toward the Cadillac. Fleming got to his feet. Durell hit him across the bridge of his nose, hit him again in the stomach, and Fleming reeled back, arms flailing, and smashed into the car. Durell was almost there when the blonde jumped out. He didn't see what she had in her hand. There was no time. For an instant, he allowed his glance to be diverted toward Angelina, running for the oar. She was almost there.

Something struck the side of his head. At the same time, the Cadillac started with a lurch, backing out between the cabins. The rear tires spun savagely and spit gravel over him in a stinging spray. He jumped aside, his head still ringing from whatever the girl had hit him with. She had slipped between the cabins and as Durell jumped, he felt the sleek fender of the car rip at his leg. It felt as if something had grabbed him and flung him bodily against the cabin wall. The scene reeled away into a misty darkness. He was on his hands and knees in the dust, shaking his head, dimly aware that the Cadillac had stopped, that the girl and Slago were helping Fleming into the back seat.

Durell tried to get up. His gun, and Fleming's, still glittered in the gravel, twenty feet away. He heard the roar of the car's motor and felt gritty dust between his teeth, and then the roaring car swung toward the road.

Durell got slowly to his feet. He felt bruised and shaken, but this did not trouble him as much as the fact that he had allowed his quarry to escape. A shouted question came from the bar. Jake Moon had stepped cautiously out into the dust left by the Cadillac's wild flight, Angelina behind him. She came running to him. "Are you all right, Sam?"

"Not exactly. He picked up his gun and then the Colt he had knocked out of Mark Fleming's hand. He pocketed them both. He smiled thinly. "My pride is bruised. Did you call MacCreedy before Slago got to you?"

She shook her head. "I didn't have a chance. He knew that Joe and I had followed him from town. He sneaked up on me in the bar. He... he touched me... like an animal... Her dark eyes were very wide, remembering. "What about Joe? Have you seen him?"

"Ill look." He turned her back toward the bar. "Go ahead, call MacCreedy. And have Moon call the local sheriff. Well need to close off the roads."

"All right."

He watched her turn back toward the excited men in the bar entrance, and then he swung about and walked into Corbins cabin.

The air conditioner still hummed quietly in the back window. Clothing was scattered on the beds, and two suitcases had been left behind, partially packed, abandoned in their sudden flight. Durell didn't touch anything. He rolled up the front window shades and heard a muffled sound from the bathroom, and went there and found Joe Tibault. The fisherman was bound and gagged, and he had bitten the inside of his mouth in his effort to scream. He had needed to scream, Durell thought bitterly. One arm had been dislocated, and there were knife wounds on his hands. Two fingers had been sliced off. He had been questioned expertly, without mercy. Slago obviously had wanted to know more about Joe Tibault and why Joe and Angelina had followed them back to the fishing camp. The gag had kept the shrimp fisherman from making noise during his moments of horror.

'It's all right, Joe." Durell knelt beside the chunky, gray-haired fisherman and untied the gag. A gush of blood ran over the man's lip and down his chin. He coughed weakly, his hand on Durell's arm. "Can you hear me? You'll be all right now."

"Crazy..." Tibault whispered. "The one with the knife. Laughing, saying he was going to carve me up... butchering me..." He looked at his bloody hand, where the two fingers were missing. Under his olive tan, his face was pale and moistly shining. His mouth worked for a moment and he coughed again, and spit out more blood. "Angelina?"

"She's phoning the cops. Stay here, Joe. I'll get a doctor."

"Never mind the doctor. Get them."

"Well do our best, Joe."

Three hours later Durell parked in the courthouse square of Bayou Peche Rouge and walked into the little park. He chose a bench under a live oak facing the courthouse, lit a cigarette, and waited for MacCreedy to come out of the bank nearby. The town, the square, the bench itself was as familiar to him as the palm of his hand. He remembered a night many years ago when he had sat on this bench with Angelina. He remembered the warm taste of her young lips, the amazing softness of her mouth as she kissed him. Babes in the wood, he thought. It was all over and done with. They were grown up now. Her father, who had resented him, had loomed in those days as an ogre, a spying, evil-tempered old man who had viewed him with suspicion — justifiably, Durell thought, grinning — and had cursed his daughter as a loose woman. The old man was dead now. It was all dead.

MacCreedy came out of the bank and walked into the park. It was after five in the afternoon. Durell had decided not to appear publicly here as an arm of the law. It was MacCreedy's business, anyway.

The FBI man had a newspaper under his arm, and he sat down on the bench with Durell and pretended to read it. "No luck, Sam."

"They got through the roadblocks?"

"We found the Cad ditched ten miles up the river. They didn't stay in it long. A couple of lads in a beat-up Ford were hauled out of their car and slugged to a pulp. They're in a hospital. The Ford was used to get to Fremont, thirty miles from here. They got through all the roadblocks, all right You know how?"

"Tell me," Durell said.

They ditched the Ford near a swamper's shack and forced the old Cajun in it to take them by pirogue through the bayous. There are enough fingers of water in there for an army to slip through unseen from the roads."

"I know," Durell said.

"The sheriff did his best. My office is sending out a six-state alarm. The whole district has been alerted. The swamper told us where he was finally released. On the main highway, so they're either in New Orleans this minute, or on their way out of the state altogether."

"They might have split up," Durell suggested.

"That won't make the job any easier.' MacCreedy paused. "The swamper is in the hospital, too. They beat him up as a token of thanks for his help. Tibault is in the hospital, too. Those boys have a taste for violence all their own."

"It's Slago," Durell said. "I had a good look at him. Did you talk to the bank people about the robbery?"

"I've got nothing you don't know already. Everybody inside just keeled over with no warning. No smell, no taste, no trace of the gas. No ill effects afterward, luckily. We've issued bulletins to all banks in the area to discontinue their air conditioning until further notice, and to take immediate steps to protect the inlet air ducts one way or another."

Durell nodded. He heard thunder rumbling in the distance, and knew that a Gulf squall was coming across the delta toward the town. The air felt oppressive. Sweat ran down his chest under his shirt.

He went back to his grandfather's steamboat to pack; there was nothing more he could do here. He had had them in his hands, and they had slipped away. Because of Angelina, he reminded himself. McFee would have his hide if he knew he had gone soft back there at Moon's and chose Angelina's safety over hailing these people. You don't risk success because of human weakness. You're not supposed to remember the sweet taste of a girl's lips or the wild exaltations of first love.

Slago would have taken Angelina in the car as a hostage, and afterward, Slago would have killed her. Was he supposed to have risked that for the chance of stopping them at Moon's? He had made his choice and diverted their attention to give Angelina a chance to break free. She was safe, but he had let them escape.

"Samuel?"

His grandfather stood on the wind bridge beside the pilothouse. His hair looked sharply white against the dark thunderheads in the sky. Durell went aboard and walked through the salon of the old side-wheeler, with its dusty plush draperies and Victorian elegance fading from gilt to peeling decay. Jonathan met him on the bridge.

"Are you all right, son? Angelina is here." His eyes were anxious. "She told me what happened at Moon's. You lost your throw, eh?"

"Yes, Grandpa."

"Because of her?"

"Yes."

"Is it bad?"

"Bad enough. I feel as if I've let a plague germ loose. That's what it's like, and I don't know where it will hit next. It wasn't my job to stop them — just to find out where they're going. But I've got a feeling it's going to be bad." Durell felt the warmth of his love for his grandfather. "I'm sorry, but I've got to cut this visit short. I'm going back to Washington."

"I expected that. Angelina
is
going with you."

"No," Durell said.

"Then you'd better talk fast to her. She's waiting in your cabin and she's made up her mind, and she's the kind of woman it isn't easy to argue with."

"I'll talk to her, Grandpa."

"She was never in love with Pete Labouisse, Samuel. She's always been in love with you. She tells me you saved her fife today. But that ain't what drives her. She's a strange woman, more like a man in some ways. She's tough and she's loyal; she won't forget what she owes a man, even to Pete, no matter what she really feels in her heart. She'll go with you. She's made it her business, now."

Durell went down the ladder to the cabin deck and walked down the corridor to the room he had used as a boy. The old steamboat was full of restless sounds. A wind had come up, thrashing and stumbling through the bayou like an uncertain drunk, lurching in from the Gulf. Even though the side-wheeler was secure in the mud, her ancient sides trembled under the irregular pressures of the wind.

Angelina was lying on his bed when he entered the cabin. Lightning flickered beyond the big square windows and touched everything with a blue light for a moment. The crash of thunder that followed shook the deck underfoot. He saw two new suitcases on the floor beside his own.

"Angelina?"

She opened her eyes and looked at him and sat up. She wore a light cotton traveling suit that hugged the full, womanly lines of her body. She looked exciting under the tight-fitting suit But he didn't like the look in her fine, dark eyes.

"Are you going back to Washington, Sam?"

"Yes. What do you think you're doing here?"

They got away, didn't they? I knew they would."

"Answer me."

"I guess your grandfather has already told you. I closed my store, Sam. I'm going with you and I'm going to find those men."

"Why?"

"Because of what they did to Pete. I can't forget it."

"You can't help me," he said flatly. "You'll only get in my way and make things tougher for me. Will you please stay here?"

"No, I won't. You'll see. Don't argue. Please, please. Nothing is going to change my mind." She lifted her skirt and he saw the smooth tan of her thigh. She took a long Bowie knife, an antique that was sharpened to the keen edge of a razor, and weighed it in her hand. The blade glittered strangely in the light from the coming thunderstorm. "I can use this, Sam. I'm going to. The same way it was used on Pete."

"So you'll do to Slago what was done to Pete?" he asked sharply. "To be like Slago? Is that what you want to become?"

"Maybe."

"But you can't help," he said. "And you're safe here. Those men won't come back to the bayous again. They're not worried about your identifying them, because they don't expect to operate around here again. I don't know where they are now, Angelina. They got away, probably heading north, but it's a big country and it's going to take a lot of men and teamwork to track them down again. What can you do? I've got my own job to take care of. You'd only be in my way."

She shook her head. "I'm going, with you or without you. I can find them."

"How?"

She stood up and put the Bowie knife away, held by elastic high inside her thigh. All her movements were lithe and graceful. She looked at his tall figure in the cabin doorway and then looked down again, her long lashes hiding her eyes. She was part of her environment, Durell thought, a huntress, with a primitive code and an earthy sense of justice. Her father had taught her the Bible since she could understand the spoken word. An eye for an eye...

"Listen to me, Sam," she said quietly. "Maybe you'll be angry for what I've done, but I can't help it. I think you'll get over it. We understand each other, don't we? Nobody knows me better than you. And I think I know you, too. We're not children now, and you haven't forgotten how it was. I can't lie to you, Sam. I don't feel any differently now than I did long ago, about you. I know it's different with you, but you don't have to worry about that part of it."

"I know their names." She ticked them off on her fingers. "Mark Fleming and Hugo Slago — he's the one with the knife — and a couple named Corbin. I got that much from Pete, when I found him in the pirogue. I'm sorry I lied to you and told you he hadn't been able to say anything. He told me a little bit, and I didn't know your part in this, so I kept it to myself. I'm not stupid, Sam. I know it all goes back to whatever Pete took when he was in Germany. It's something important, but I don't care about that, I just care what happened to Pete. It's something I've got to do myself, for his sake. He was going to marry me, and I was happy enough about it, I guess, even if I didn't love him the way I ought to. But I can't leave it to the sheriff's men, or that MacCreedy fellow, or to you and the people you work for. Not to strangers. It's my job, mine alone. And I've already asked some questions."